Outside, in the deepening chill, the two boys pushed past each other enthusiastically.
“Again tomorrow?” Lucas asked.
“Tomorrow?” Kevin said and kind of grunted. “What about right now?”
*
LUCAS FOUND HIMSELF again trying to keep pace with his friend on his bike, though this time Lucas caught up almost angrily and forced the boy to stop if Kevin didn’t want to get pulled from his seat.
“Where are you going?” Luke asked him. “We can head home for lunch.”
Kevin grunted again. “Your home.”
“It’s your home too.”
Kevin said nothing, turning it into a study of his dirty t-shirt instead.
“Day’s still early,” he said. “Not till nightfall.”
“Talk in complete sentences, will you?”
Kevin glared at Luke despite the gentle ribbing.
“Didn’t have no dad like you.”
“But we’re friends now.”
“You unnerstand me,” the younger boy said and snorted, practically another grunt, and motioned into the passing crowds of The Mile. A woman stopped in front of them hauling caged chickens on her shoulder, readjusted her burden, and moved off again. After the woman left, shooting the boys a sour look, Kevin’s gesture took in the view towards the end of the bazaar and the informal public square before the First Gates.
“Scrounging?” Lucas asked.
“Opportunities outside,” Kevin answered in his clipped speech, though he said the big word carefully. “Or more weed?”
The smaller boy knew Luke’s feelings about that. Although Luke’s father was only going to dispose of the leftover crop anyway, Tom made it clear the boys were to keep away from the defunct agriculture project and the efforts to revive it for their household vegetables. He’d implied some sort of agreement with one of the newcomers who’d moved in, and that was enough for Lucas to know to keep out. Stealing stuff that wouldn’t be missed was one thing, but ignoring direct instructions was quite something else.
“Chicken,” Kevin tittered quietly, or as quietly as the people streaming around them allowed. “Not so tough.”
“You’re the one who’s scared of him,” Lucas shot back.
Kevin’s face flushed in an instant. He shouldered the BMX around and only stayed when Luke grabbed the handlebars.
“An’ you’re scared of everythin’ else,” the boy said.
“No I’m not.”
“Urchins’ll take more weed wet,” Kevin said. “You’re scared of them.”
“It’s not about that,” Luke replied. “You’ve gotta . . . it’s about safety.”
“You always sayin’ you never got to kill no one.”
Kevin muttered the remark. He had his eyes down, almost inaudible except that Luke hung on his every word, unexpectedly panicked to think his friend thought ill of him.
“I’m not afraid of the Urchins,” Lucas hissed.
“So?”
“I’m not afraid of Tom, either,” Luke replied. “If you were his son, you’d understand.”
He grabbed his friend’s arm to soften the words, wide-eyed to show he wasn’t taking a stab at him. Luke’s whole face was a plea, and Kevin still couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m not afraid of the Urchins and I’m not afraid of Tom,” Lucas said.
“Me neither.”
“Good,” Lucas said. “But I don’t want us taking risks, either.”
“‘Us’?”
“You know it’s you and me now, Kevin,” Lucas said more stiffly, because he meant it, and the confession seemed to weaken any hold he wished he had over his friend.
“You an’ me,” the boy repeated. Slowly his smile arose, though he kept his eyes pointed away down The Mile. “Days at edgelords, become edgelords, you an’ me with bikes, we’ll go anywhere. Take onna whole world.”
“Yes,” Lucas agreed. “Anywhere.”
At the end, past Speaker’s Corner, the First Gates started to clank apart.
“Good,” Kevin answered at once and glanced towards the people lined up waiting to enter the sanctuary zone. “We gonna Outside.”
*
ALTHOUGH HE SCREAMED at himself for following, Lucas refused to add any further evidence of cowardice to a day that wasn’t even quite half finished yet. That meant trailing Kevin as the boy forged ahead again, pushing his BMX this time through the crowds until The Mile spat them out near the Night Market and then into the milling gyre of people coming into the area from the east and west along the sanctuary zone walls. Kevin hurried ahead for fear the First Gates would shut on them before they could squeeze through the midday rush. Lately, despite their rulebooks, the sentries had fallen into the habit of opening the gates every few hours to manage the steady trickle of itinerants who made their living now in the City through private foraging missions outside. A few weeks back, they called it “scrounging”. Now it was a fact of City life. With the colder weather on the march, plenty of Citizens were trusting to luck that exploration in the great outdoors might provision them better for the winter than trade inside the City ever could. And the chaos of the recent Uprising meant many of the troopers had given up trying to rule with an iron hand, provided nobody was killing each other.
A bored-looking, gum-eyed man in blast fatigues skimmed his eyes over the two boys as they hurried past, Kevin pushing his bike.
“Feel free to get yourselves killed out there, boys,” the guard called with a drawl loud enough for his partner to hear. “One less house call for us.”
A spasm of annoyance clasped Luke’s face, but he eased off the angry backwards look to turn to his friend’s guidance instead. The motorway outside the gates was muddy with the transit of dozens of people and vehicles each day, and the smell of horse shit clung to the air as a gentle breeze came up to make the hundreds of leaflets stuck to the nearby lampposts flutter like a celebration.
“We’re not meant to be Outside,” Luke said.
He kept his voice low, as intimate as if they were whispering at the dinner table, but the only people around were the travelers like themselves, already making a path towards the expressway off-ramp that led out across the Columbus cityscape. Kevin instead threw a leg over his ride and turned the small bicycle towards the ruined city blocks directly across the bridge-like roadway across from them, and a squirrel broke from hiding beneath a stack of nearby automobile wrecks and disappeared in through the slightest gap in the cladding of the external sanctuary zone wall. Lucas felt it was a sign this was a bad idea, but his pride was on the line.
“We’ll go this way,” Kevin said.
“I should have my bow with me,” Lucas said.
“Got no bow.”
“I know,” Lucas said and motioned to his wrist, bare now of the hated blue tag, and yet nonetheless still without the archery gear he still yearned to hold. “I’m just sayin’.”
“Get yer new bow.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. He looked around, still unmoved from the intersection. A City trooper peeked over the edge of the sentry tower to look down on them, dismissing the two lingering boys like they were only a bad smell. “Where are we going?”
“Afraid daddy finds out?”
“Hey,” Lucas scowled at his friend. Kevin offered a split grin. “Don’t start that shit again, OK?”
Kevin grunted, then started into motion.
Lucas half-jogged after him as Kevin rode across the overpass lined with zombie-proof fencing inherited from simpler times when people jumping to their deaths seemed the greatest threat. Filthy, gap-toothed office blocks crowded the view beyond the far side of the crossing, and old City efforts saw the hulks of dozens of rusting wrecks wedged into perilous walls blocking access to the abandoned city beyond. For two boys on foot, it was easy to find a way through, and Kevin pushed his precious BMX onto its side under a sagged utility, then continued on ahead without it, constraining his expression, unlike Lucas, who gazed at the decaying cityscape with all the wo
nder of a tourist in that strange land.
Anything of value was long gone from the blocks adjacent the sanctuary zone. The doors – and where windows remained, the dirty dark glass panes too – were etched with the orange paint of Forager patrols. Yet there was a curious beauty to the ransacked devastation, almost like the videos of yesteryear the boys enjoyed. It was weeks now Lucas had been in the sanctuary zone. And though this was far from his first time exploring the mausoleums of yesterday, the sense that the ruins still promised treasures arose within him. Kevin went slightly ahead, Lucas unsure if he was just imagining the other boy’s sense of shared wonder too. But they didn’t linger. The building fronts were battered and fire-damaged, security grilles cut through, glass windows gone, the mulch of half a decade cramming shopfronts and spilling as a thick crust up steps and down into sunken easements.
They progressed silently a half-dozen blocks before Luke realized he still had no idea where they were headed – and Kevin probably as well. He snagged his friend’s arm and gave him an insistent look, maintaining the silence of their readiness for danger at any moment despite Lucas consciously aware he didn’t have anything except a small knife with which to protect himself if there were Furies thereabouts. Insects chirruped harmlessly nearby and the sound of nesting birds came from one broken cavernous shopfront.
“It’s around here,” Kevin said quietly.
He led the way further up the street, and then they started cutting eastward. Luke couldn’t tell if he felt excited at the freedom or paralyzed by it, though he forced himself on, imagining Furies bursting from the nearby still-life tableaus of Columbus’ last days sullied by the looting ever since. A couple of people leading a donkey moved through a distant intersection, and Lucas, but not Kevin, flinched at a similarly distant crashing noise as it echoed through the empty streets. Pigeons and bigger, more dangerous-looking birds took off from their roosts among the guano-spattered seats and windshields of a three-way pile-up marring the next through-street, and when the uncanny silence finally returned, Lucas again wished for his bow – and also that his friend would slow down.
Instead, Kevin picked his way through the blown-out ground floor of an old department store, and as expected, found the whole place picked clean with just the remnants left as a carpet of clothes and discarded garbage that’d become a sodden mass through the intervening years. The brief stop was just a shortcut though, and again Kevin led them on through a back door kept ajar with a stack of broken house bricks, through into the back loading bay, a delivery truck sunk on its deflated tires, the side daubed with HASTUR in the hurried marks of an old paint pen.
The gate in the chain-link fence at the back of the enclosure was long-since jimmied wide, and the boys slipped through catching their clothes on errant wires, but the alleyway led to another cross-street and Kevin stopped there as if tasting the wind, an urban ranger, just as the clip-clopping of more hoofs sounded nearby.
A wizened and gray-bearded man encouraged an equally worn-out pony harnessed to an old racing wagon repurposed to hold several small cages. The man held up a hand as he closed in on the pair, shooting them an irascible grin.
“Out for a walk, lads?” the man called in a foreign accent.
Lucas nodded dumbly. Kevin only watched the trotting rig approach and the man flicked the reins to signal a pause which his animal tiredly embraced. The pony at once started gnawing at one of the many tufts of dry grass poking through cracks running through the macadam.
“Headed for Waymarket?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Kevin said.
Lucas was equally nonplussed when the driver offered them a ride on the back of his jalopy, introducing himself as Duce, again malformed by the man’s strong European accent. Kevin smiled as pleasantly as he could, nodding to his friend to head around the back of the small wagon and climb onboard, though Lucas halted a moment seeing two of the five cages held small hunting birds he couldn’t identify as northern goshawks. Another cage held the moldering remains of what Lucas took to be an actual vulture, though he wasn’t about to ask the reason why. Instead, he shifted up so he could sit astride one of several sealed buckets, then gave Kevin a hand to join him.
“What’s the Waymarket?” Luke asked.
“There soon,” Kevin replied.
Duce didn’t consider himself part of the conversation, getting them moving again, and Lucas was still adjusting to the small wagon’s jostling pace when he caught a surreptitious grin from the side and noticed Kevin drawing his attention to some sack matting under which sat an old metal toolkit he eased open to reveal a variety of screwdrivers, hooked blades, and knives. Kevin took one of the cruelest-looking weapons and stole it away under the back of his shirt, nodding at Lucas to do the same. Instead, the other boy shot a nervous glance at the narrow back of the old man perched just in front of them and shook his head, meeting Kevin’s casual but disapproving look as the boy silently closed the lid and covered it up again.
Duce’s wagon continued down the street. After a few blocks, Luke’s breathing eased, and he allowed himself to fall into a gentle reverie, better able to enjoy the ride and the ensuing tour through the Columbus ruins. Although the Foragers had likewise marked all the doors and remaining entry points to the commercial premises they passed, the hint of traveling through a fallen kingdom and its perhaps-overlooked treasure continued to enthrall his gaze, and Kevin was much the same. Chatty, by his standards, the smaller boy pointed out a pair of mud-encrusted police cars, a Coca Cola box truck on its side, the burnt-out wreck of an ambulance, a trail bike pinned beneath a school bus with its hard case panniers open yet still attached – all of them ripe, at one time, at least, for a more thorough examination.
But the wagon remained on the one true concourse for taking them to their as-yet unknown destination, and with Kevin seemingly unwilling or unable to explain where they were going, Lucas settled in for the ride, accepting they were now an increasingly long walk from home. But he pushed away thoughts of his father. Tom had his own adventures – broke plenty of the rules he set for others – and advancing through the decrepit cityscape, it was easy to be lulled by the strangely bucolic sense of safety offered by the picked-clean wreckage.
It was only by chance Lucas glanced ahead at one point. He’d almost convinced himself by that stage that he wasn’t morose at the thought of what his father might say about his defiance, but then thoughts of an angry Tom Vanicek gave way to surprise and then bafflement as Lucas saw at least a dozen people moving in and out of a barricade narrowing the street.
Another yellow school bus and several other abandoned vehicles were reinforced by military sandbags, looted from another position, to create a single lane into the Waymarket. Two hard-faced men toting Ak47s guarded the eastern entry, barely giving the trotting pony and its passengers a second look. Old Duce made a clucking noise to encourage his beast on, and then it briskly continued through the gap and into an open space that was mostly road surface, an old fresh market to one side torn open by some past atrocity, and now the open-air forecourt was home to several rough-awning’d stalls, a row of chest-high wooden benches, and some kind of big wooden cabinet in which another man sat behind a counter, a handgun on the table, bits and pieces including an old cash register beside him.
Only two of the four entries to the Waymarket were sandbagged and guarded. Once inside the compound, the dozen people glimpsed earlier turned out to be just a handful of the forty or fifty survivors moving through the place, either working in the stalls or visiting them, at least a dozen more travelers like old Duce pulled over to one side of the intersection and checking their animals or bicycles, a mother-daughter duo shooting the newcomers stern looks as they strapped parcels into place on a gutted quad bike they prepared to take with them, drawn by leather harnesses each wore.
The old cart driver jumped down from his perch like the spry old man he resembled, though he quickly adopted a just-shat-my-pants hobble common to anyone coming off a long ride. He glan
ced back at the boys sunnily enough though, and because Kevin seemed rapt in his detailed threat assessment of their new surrounds, Lucas moved close to Duce with his face already forming the question.
“What is this place?”
“It’s the Waymarket,” Duce replied.
“Yes, you said that.”
“Don’t you know where you were going, boy?”
Lucas resisted a sideways glance at Kevin and merely shrugged instead.
“But what is it?”
“It’s a informal meeting point,” the old man grinned. “A bit o’ local enterprise, you understand?”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 12