by Toby Weston
After more poking around inside the boy’s chest, there was a sudden rush of air, which made a farting sound as it passed through the pen tube and out through the severed finger of the rubber glove. Now, when the boy breathed in, the rubber tube sucked shut, serving as a crude, but effective, valve. Vikram packed the cloth around the pen to make a seal, and they watched as the valve and the boy’s own breathing siphoned off the remaining air. The rhythm of his breathing quickly improved and soon his lips regained colour.
The next half hour was less intense, but no less hectic, as Vikram's wife sewed up the gash. They smeared the wound with Vaseline and bandaged it with a damp cloth to make a seal and to prevent any more air from getting in. The kid woke up and passed out several more times before the job was finished. When they finally stepped back, Vikram said a little prayer of thanks, and then went to wash his hands and change out of his bloody clothes.
Humans seemed instinctively to understand the power politics of the new reality; after all, they evolved with it. Organisational units of more than a few dozen people were a recent graft onto a much older behavioural tree. The rules of kings and priests and governments must be taught, but all are born knowing the rules of clan altruism and the dance of tribal war.
With collapse, the emerging communes, with their roof gardens and self-sufficiency manifesto, fell into the role of settled, peaceful farmers. The mobs were the raiders. When a village stood up and fought back, repelling the attack, it was an existential moment for those whose instincts had assigned them the survival strategy of thievery and murder. Face would be lost, the crucial fear factor diminished, and bullying would become unprofitable.
What was an out of work thug turned security guard or an unemployed part-time football hooligan to do? Should the neo-Nazi plasterer plant potatoes on his mother’s front garden? There were no decisions or discussions. Civilisation was suspended; behaviour half a million years old reasserted itself.
The battle wasn’t over; the thugs were always going to come back and finish the job. Anosh and Vikram had known this, even if their wives hoped otherwise.
***
Two-week-old snow covered the streets of the old docks. It lay piled against walls or compacted down to grey ice by passing people and vehicles. The smell of wood smoke and the odd frozen lump of yellow horseshit gave the city a Dickensian aspect. This was only added to by the increasing number of refugees. Anosh and Ayşe were up on the roof wearing anoraks. He was watching the street as she finished making the last of the signs she had insisted they hang around their building.
Bewaffnet Verteidigung! Armed Response!
“I still think they will just see it as a challenge,” he criticised.
“If we are going to have to shoot people, I want it to be a last resort, and I want to warn them first,” said Ayşe.
They had eaten dinner, their own sun-dried tomatoes and pasta from the store rations. It was cold, but clear outside. Anosh had decided to sit for a while up on the roof, a thick blanket pulled up over his dressing gown. He listened to the sounds of the town, alert for signs of trouble.
He had planned to join Ayşe in bed, but must have fallen asleep while looking up at the stars, because he woke up with freezing, sweaty spit coating the side of his face. His entire body was icy cold. It was 11.30 pm, and he had been asleep for an hour. He grabbed the door handle to let himself back in; it was icy against his fingers.
In the stairwell, it was quiet with a faint snoring coming from somebody on the second floor. Some super-power sense made him look out of the stair window, and he made out half a dozen dark shapes, creeping along the street. As he watched, they huddled to the side. He had to lean forward, gently pressing his forehead against the glass to continue his spying. Smoke drifted from a clasped object. Flames flashed, sending shadows dancing onto the snow. One of the mob approached the building, a determined set to his stride. Anosh, still groggy, only belatedly realised what was happening. It was too late to wake the others. Now, in a panic, he dashed down the stairs two at a time. He reached the cabinet, in what had once been a broom cupboard, and unlocked it with the small key he always kept on him. He fumbled around inside. His fingers found the metal of the patiently waiting shotgun.
A dancing light was casting shadows towards him. He saw a dark shape holding the Molotov cocktail—for that was clearly what it was—stalking up the street towards their home. Upstairs and through the doors behind him, two dozen people slept helplessly. Anosh imagined the carnage and inferno that would follow if the shadow drew back his arm and threw the bottle.
He quietly unlocked the door and then slammed it open. The thug was barely six metres away. He froze in surprise, mid-throw, arm back, yellow flames and oily smoke twisting away from the cloth rammed into the bottle’s neck. The thug took in the raised shotgun. Eyes met. Time was frozen. Something passed between them, something very old.
Flash! Bang! A blade of flame sprang from the first barrel; it clipped the thug, erasing an ear and taking an apple-sized chunk out of the side of his head.
Flash! Bang! The second barrel took him in the neck and upper chest. The mangled body began a backflip, which was stopped short by the ground. The body collapsed into a rag doll heap, squirting blood onto the snow; arms and legs splayed at unnatural angles. Two seconds of frozen time later, the bottle exploded with a small whoosh, and the body was cloaked by flame and smoke.
Through the fire, Anosh watched the backs of the other black shapes running away. His ears were ringing. He imagined the shots still echoing through the empty streets. Vikram had appeared. He grabbed Anosh by the arm and dragged him back into the house.
Anosh noticed they were both wearing pyjamas, socked feet melting the snow.
“You’ll get wet feet,” Anosh pointed out.
“Good grief, never mind that,” said Vikram. “We have got to get you off the street. Quick. And stop waving the gun around. Hopefully nobody has seen you yet.”
Back inside, Anosh leant the gun next to the radiator. Self had been disengaged, while autopilot had acted; but now, his mind was integrating the responsibility and repercussions of the autopilot's actions back into his own narrative. He began to shake and found he needed to sit down.
He looked up from the seated fetal position his body had chosen, to see the two older sons of the family from the second floor hurrying down the stairs. They were dressed in black; hoodies up over their heads, drawn in tight to hide their faces. They nodded at Vikram and Anosh and then left the kitchen through a side door.
Over the weeks since the first attack, the men had discussed various scenarios. They had kept things simple, but there were two strict principles: the shotgun would always be ready, and any bodies would be immediately dumped in the river. The old warehouse building backed onto a narrow canal, but they had decided it would be better to go another hundred metres to the end of the quay, where the canal met the river. There, the current should carry away any evidence.
The two boys left through a back door to slip around to the front of the house. They would wrap the body in a sheet and, if they had time, scoop the bloody snow into bin bags.
No words were spoken when the body was tossed into the oily black water. It sank and then, caught by the current, surfaced metres away, as just another indistinct shape floating towards the sea:
Dangling arms and legs are blindly grasping tentacles hanging below its bin-bag body. A necrotic jelly fish, kept afloat by a trapped last breath forced from dead lungs by the drop into the silent cold water.
Chapter 9 – Thinning the Herd
Geography was becoming irrelevant. Pieces of Third World embedded themselves in the First. Billionaires built enclaves, wherever whim dictated. The concept of country began to sound quaint. Old geopolitical maps, with their pinks and greens, began to writhe and flow obscenely; free trade zones and jurisdictional satellites thrust pseudopods and vesicles of experimental government into each other. Great gulps of ocean were squatted as quasi-national autonom
ous marine areas.
Stella woke to the sounds of the market. They had been learning about the new Caliph’s empire in school, and she had been dreaming of flying carpets and palaces with onion-shaped domes and evil scheming Grand Viziers. The pots and pans, fish and fruit in the market below would have been familiar to Aladdin. Other trinkets, Spex or Companions, would have been coveted as wondrous magical artefacts, able to invoke illusions or cast sight into the ocean below, even allowing the wielder to peer through the eyes of fabulous creatures.
The voices and cries were filtered and stretched as they resonated within the big feed drum. She lay for a few minutes, getting a feel for the mood, then she struggled into her jeans and did her best to brush the knots out of her jet-black hair. She pushed open the hanging door and confidently clambered down the netting to the pontoon.
After the blue glow of the drum, it took her eyes several minutes to recalibrate their white balance and bleach the orange stain from the world.
When she eventually found him, Marcel was furtively grilling a stack of squid on the small fire he had made at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading down to the water. He was careful to keep them turning fast to avoid burning the pale flesh. A bigger fire would be better, but that would draw too much attention. Marcel had already tried to scrounge a place at one of the regular spots, but having grown into a spotty youth, he wasn’t tolerated to the same extent he had been as a scruffy little boy. It was unlikely people would accept the intrusion and inevitable fishy smell.
“Hi Stella,” he said as she walked over.
“Hi, Manu.”
“You want to help me sell these?” he asked smiling, knowing the crew of the Reefer was much more likely to buy from a pretty girl and much less likely to haggle.
“Fifty cents each, okay? Seventy-five for the big one with the long legs,” he said.
“Okay, half for me?”
“Yeah, all right,” he reluctantly agreed, certain he was being blatantly exploited. “Tell them I've got some blue crabs, too.”
He gestured towards a net bag tied at the bottom of the steps, just under the water.
“There are loads of them in the weed, under the service skiff ramp.”
“Cool.”
Stella wrapped the crispy squid in some sheets of paper that Marcel must have snatched from the office shredder chute. Operational security was not a concept the kids were familiar with, but many skippers were just as interested in the titbits of industrial espionage printed on the wrapping as they were with the tasty grilled seafood inside.
Five squid and three blue crabs later, Stella was heading back from the Reefer, her pockets full of change. She was pleased with the morning’s entrepreneurial success. When she got back to Marcel, she saw he was not alone and was strangely reluctant to make eye contact. Standing with him was the Chief Administrator, a small but stocky Nipponese.
The official apparatus of the Farm rarely interacted with the kids, but when it did, the chubby Chief Administrator was its sharp pointy end. Both Marcel and Stella had spent a fair share of their evenings painting walls or scraping barnacles, in penance for acts of sabotage against the ‘communal wellbeing—or, more seriously, the profitability of the Farm.
The Administrator wasn’t wearing his ‘not angry but disappointed’ face, the one Stella associated with rebukes and punitive mopping. Instead, he seemed pale and shy—no, not shy, rather embarrassed, or even guilty.
She was still a few paces away, when she realised something was wrong.
The Administrator started talking; her stomach went tight, squeezing into knots. Her cheeks and ears began to burn. She felt sick; she didn’t hear the words.
People are being nice. Yesterday, Marcel had told Stella she could keep all the money from the fish. Now, Guillermo's wife is tugging on the netting and calling up.
“You up there, Stella girl? You okay? I've got a plate of food for you. You're probably starving. Come on down and eat with us.”
Dead. Cheap Drugs.
Hanging from a rope hinge at one end of the horizontal drum, the container’s original black lid functions as a door. Stella pushes it open and pokes her head out.
“I'm okay, Maria. I'm not hungry really.” Then, without waiting for a response, she ducks back inside and lies down.
“Nonsense. Come on down here and have a bite to eat. You can't spend your days up in that little room crying.”
She pretends not to hear.
Brain blood. Fish food.
After a while, Maria gives up, muttering as she waddles away. Stella watches as she cuts through the alley between the Pussycat and the Admin Block, heading back to the mothballed pontoon, where she and Guillermo and a dozen other families have their huts. When the coast is clear, she climbs down to retrieve the plate of beans and onions. She is starving and wolfs down the food. It tastes delicious, but doesn’t fill the hollowness. She pulls the blanket over her legs and lets herself drift into a catatonic trance, which slowly turns into sleep.
She spends the following days in the same state, barely leaving the confines of her ‘room’ and timing her bathroom trips to minimise the chances of meeting other humans.
***
Choppy surf, driven by the squall, skips across the back of the huge waves beating at the Farm; behemoths sliding like glaciers across yesterday’s calm. Rain and spray drum on the thick plastic skin of her bin. Ropes creak and the wind wails. It’s the first big storm of the season. Stella lets the colossal sound of the wind and seas and the continuous musical vibration of the ropes pass through her body. She hopes the volume and intensity will crowd out emotions and thought.
Suddenly, the lid door is pulled open and a blast of warm wind and salty spray slams inside. She lunges forward to secure the door again, but this time it isn’t the wind that has breached her sanctuary. A drenched boy heaves himself inside and lies, panting and grinning, on the curving floor. Stella is so shocked by the dramatic entrance that her first thought isn’t to scream and kick him out. She just sits at the far end of the cylinder and watches.
Marcel takes the absence of hostility as an invitation to stay; his smile broadens and he reaches his hand into his coat. He takes out what looks like a pair of goggles with a thick elastic headband. Stella recognises them straight away. The contractors sometimes amuse the kids by letting them look through the lenses at strange worlds, far below the waves.
“You stole some Spex!”
“No! I found some. They're broken. Well, half-broken. They were floating inside the pen; they must have got washed in or something. They're for you.”
It’s been six months since her mother succumbed to the dirty poison meth. She is now resting in pieces throughout the South Pacific marine food chain. Stella is bored of grieving and exhausted by constantly worrying about the future. She smiles and accepts the glasses. They are light, not much heavier than shades. She looks at Marcel, who nods encouragingly. She puts them on, pushing the elasticated headband, studded with small metallic discs, over her hair to hold the Spex snuggly in place. Initially, the lenses are opaque; then the left one flickers with polygonal fractal static and comes to life.
It’s as if the left screen has become transparent. The image of her room is a bit brighter than normal and looks orange. The right lens remains resolutely blank. It gives an annoying flicker of colour every second or so, seemingly at random.
“Yeah, like I said, they are half-broken,” said Marcel. “We can tape that one up on the inside, so it doesn't bother you.”
After a few seconds, some blinking text superimposes itself over the view, stars appearing, one after another at five-second intervals. She waits impatiently.
CALIBRATING ************
*** ERROR — EEG Transducer Failure ***
*** WARNING — No Symbolic Transmission Possible ***
Look at the left blue sphere
Look at the right blue sphere
Concentrate on the left blue sphere
Concentra
te on the right blue sphere
Think yes
Think No
Look at the left red sphere
Then, the Spex are talking to her. They sound faint, high-pitched and tinny, until she finds the dangling buds and pushes them into her ears.
“Can you hear this? Think yes or no.”
*** ERROR—EEG Transducer Failure. Adjust Headband and try again. ***
“Can you hear this? Blink twice for yes.”
She follows the tutorials that suggest themselves, once the initial calibration has run its course. She half notices Marcel get up to leave and is aware, on some level, that time is passing. She does not notice that he is smiling. Later, when the rocking becomes severe, she wedges herself against the curving wall with a pillow and blanket.
