by Stacey Mac
My face turns a deep crimson, my throat constricts, and I snatch the gun from under his nose before I give myself the chance to break it. “Over my dead body,” I spit at him.
I hear him cackling softly to himself as I place my father’s treasured gun back into my pocket, marching away. And it isn’t pride that drives me away; it’s not strength either. It is cowardice. I know now that those poor women who made those putrid choices, those life-saving choices – they made them because they are braver than me.
So this is it. There is actually nothing else to be done. I haven’t got enough to give. No amount of begging will yield me mercy, I know no one else who can help me.
On the journey home I fantasise briefly about using Dad’s gun to frighten Dakota and Vesser, to force them to hand over my animals. I don’t entertain it for long. Even if Dakota gave in (which seems unlikely), I’d be arrested if the Council found out. I also just don’t have the guts to do something like that. I am a colossal chicken.
My hands come to my face and I hide behind them. Dejection swallows me as I come to realise how powerless I am to help myself.
So absorbed I am in my own desolation that I don’t notice the two men who stand before my home. As I approach, my whole body having turned to stone, I don’t yet hear their voices. I don’t feel the disturbance in my surroundings.
“Excuse me, G00136?”
I gasp in shock, clutching my chest. “Jesus,” I swear, breathing hard. It is then that I see them properly. I see their soured faces, the burn bags that they clasp between them.
The fronters look uncertainly at me. Some sleeping part of me acknowledges how young they are. Younger than me. They’re uniforms hang from their shoulders and flow over their boots to the ground.
Again, one of them asks, “Are you G00136?”
I close my eyes, pretending I don’t hear him, that they are not here.
“We are looking for the daughter of Stuart G00038 and Anne G00039. The Council got word this morning that they were…um, killed…in combat. I’m…I’m sorry.”
I barely hear his stupid stuttering. There is a ringing in my ears. I’m unsure of where it comes from, but I suspect the planet is dissolving. My whole body shakes uncontrollably and it comes from the earth. The world is collapsing around me, or is it just my world? I can’t tell, the ringing in my ears is too loud. I am clouded in darkness, too, or are my eyes still shut?
Somewhere, outside of myself, someone mutters, “Just leave them there.”
And then I am alone.
Chapter Twenty-four
Because the whole world has dissolved into fragmented pieces of civilisation, and people die more frequently in knife fights and explosions than they do of ill-health or old age, death rituals take on a different process. When there is no body to bury, the business of immortalising one’s memory is quicker, less fussy. For my mother and my father, there will be very little remembrance. The Council will eventually get around to giving a speech, once they tally up the full number of casualties for this campaign. They’ll preach about how my loved ones died for me. And then I will die for someone I love, and then they will die for someone they love, and no one will live long enough to question the point to all this living and fighting and dying. A perfect cycle.
Sometime after the child-fronters left, I opened my eyes to find myself kneeling on the ground. Two burn bags sat neatly on the threshold of my home. It took a surprising amount of strength to retrieve them and bring them inside.
Now, I have them opened before me; a singed mess of unrecognisable objects. I know very little of what my parents kept in their burn bags, other than their wedding rings. The blackened, misshapen circles lie sadly beside what is left of the ruined hessian. There isn’t a note or a photo to swoon over, but the sight of my parents’ pitiful, ruined left overs tells me enough about their ending, and it hurts enormously to know that it was not peaceful nor painless.
I stay sitting there in my darkening kitchen, the sole survivor of the Tyrell family. Several times I tell myself that this is how it will be from now on; just me, wholly responsible for myself and this farm, now my farm. I struggle to reconcile with it. I am remembering odd, disjointed pieces of my upbringing: Mum standing at the bench, Dad cleaning his rifle, the three of us playing cards, me, running through the wheat crops, chased by one or both of my parents. I remember all these things, one by one, and the responsibility of being the sole stakeholder in these memories is crushing. I am the only being left in this world who knows the history of this farm, and I grieve a separate loss for that history.
Unstable with feeling, I think back to just weeks ago, when I had been considering my own bad luck. I hadn’t realised it at the time, but I had been whole then; a person who missed no one, who longed for nothing real, but who still had the nerve to sulk about my future. What a child I’d been.
So quickly, everything comes crumbling down. One minute I’m looking for flaws in my dimensions of space, and then I turn a corner, and my planet becomes fine grains of sand on the shore of a dying universe.
Aloneness, as it turns out, tastes a lot like fear.
Before I fall asleep, I take the two rings from the tabletop and bend them back into shape. They flex too easily, brittle and warred. I pull them onto my ring-finger carefully, and then clasp my hand to my chest. Soon after, my forehead finds the unforgiving wood of the table, and I sleep.
*
The sound of the cracks hurt my ears. One after another, the bullets hit the unyielding stone. I watch from afar, completely undeterred by the scenes of war unfolding around me. I am not a part of their fight, I’m only here to watch.
I watch the soldiers’ fire blindly into the distance, I watch the ground explode in random bursts of fire, and I see the men and women fall, like a strange game of wink-murder. I walk through the warfare, invincible. Or perhaps unsalvageable is more accurate. Either way, I move forward, recklessly, with the super power that comes to me only in sleep. The voices yell for me, the ground shakes violently, and I hear the bullets again: crack, crack, crack!
I jerk into wakefulness. Unbalanced and disoriented, I look around me and find myself still at the kitchen table. I’m dirty from the day before. A weird ache in my stomach is tugging my memory back into place. The sky outside the window confuses me. Too bright, way too bright. Afternoon, instead of morning.
Crack, crack, crack!
The front door shakes against the hinges and I jump again.
Just like that, the world balances again and I remember. Mum and Dad – dead. Me – alone. Contribution – not enough. The door. They’re here – knocking at my door.
Suddenly, horribly, a voice says: “kick it in.”
There is grunt of exertion and the door is bursting from its frame, first the bottom half - and then the whole thing – is kicked out of its hinges, and the two fronters who have come for me shove their way through.
It’s not Fredrich. It’s not anyone that I know. The fronters are burly, and they take up much of the space in our – my – living room.
“Ah, well, we’ve been looking for you, grazer,” one of them says, the smaller of the two, although not by much. His blonde hair is slicked back from his arrogant face. “Thought you’d have run away for sure.”
The other one, the bigger one, frowns at me in a confused manner, like he doesn’t understand the punchline. Classically stupid. “You’re two hours late on your contribution,” he says, and he sounds as dumb as he looks. “Where is it?”
Weird. I’d been counting down to the eleventh hour, and I’d slept through it. So here it was, my impending doom, come to find me, and instead of feeling scared, I feel… impatient.
“I don’t have it,” I say, and my voice is scathing. “So, what now?”
The fronters look at one another, amused. The blonde one even chuckles, “You got nothing?”
“Nope,” I say, no point bargaining at this stage. “Nothing.”
They both laugh now, the big one conf
used, the blonde one mirthless, and I wait, annoyed, for the penny to drop.
“Well, sweetheart, we got a problem, then,” says blondie. “You see, unless you got an extension, we got to take you back to the Commander. The last time I took a grazer to him, he blew their brains out…all over the square.”
They laugh again, literally hysterical to have found themselves with such an entertaining afternoon to look forward to.
I draw myself up to my fullest height, quite an achievement, all things considered. I have awoken today to find nothing left, so it might as well be my last. I jut my chin defiantly, look Blondie straight in his stupid face and say, very clearly, “Fuck you.”
The laughing stops. Dumbo gawks, shocked. But Blondie’s eyes turn to ice, and his thin lips quiver, “What did you say?”
“I said,” I enunciate every syllable. “Fuck. You.” Then, I nod to Dumbo, “And your dumb-ass friend.”
That did it. Blondie snaps, and throws a small cards table out of his way, crossing the room in three strides. He is upon me before I register him approaching, thrusting his thin hand around my neck, shoving me backwards over the kitchen table. The other fronter draws a gun and aims it at my face.
I blink wildly and gasp for air. Black stars pop into my vision.
“Move, bitch, and the dumb-ass shoots.” His spit lands on my face. His breath is hot, too hot on my chin. The back of my head throbs badly, and his hands, his hands are suddenly everywhere. One holds my throat and my jaw in one; the other is searching, manically, clawing at my waist and then under my shirt.
I realise what is happening and I panic. Beyond me, beyond this, I hear the other one say, “Be quick.”
Blondie roars: “shut up!” His hand rips at my shirt buttons, and when he isn’t immediately successful, he begins fumbling aggressively with the zipper on my pants.
I struggle, trying stupidly to lift my head but his whole body weighs on top of me and I can’t budge him.
I can’t let this be the last thing that happens to me in this house. It can’t happen. My brain shouts instructions to me in a rush and I don’t understand them. And then a voice sounds clearly, blocking all other noise, and says, only to me: don’t think, just fight.
My left hand moves deftly and finds purchase on Blondie’s groin, and I squeeze with as much intensity as I can muster. My other hand, which was until now, scratching at the hand around my throat, grabs a hand full of his oily hair and holds on for dear life.
These next things happen all at once.
Blondie shouts and his body bucks on top of mine, enough to allow me to lift a leg and shove him away. I slip out from under him and pull his head back down as hard as I can to the lip of the table.
Dumbo’s raising his gun again, and I’m bolting.
I’m out the back door. I’m stumbling on the uneven ground, I’m running towards the bunker. Running, running, running. Shots ring out behind me, but nothing hits. I’m past the bunker, I’m in the last paddock, I’m cutting my hands on the fence as I scramble over it. I’m in no-man’s land, almost at the boundary line. I’m looking at the fronter who sits on the fallen tree trunk. I keep running towards him, because there isn’t another direction. But he’s raising his rifle and shouting. He’s going to kill me before I reach the line, and I’m going to lose. I’m still sprinting when I feel it, the 1911 clone, still in my pocket, hindering my speed, clunking against my thigh. I’m fumbling in my pocket, the fronter on the boundary line, the one who waved to me days ago, is still shouting, still aiming. And then I’m aiming back, and then I’m shooting. And the fronter – the fronter is falling.
Chapter Twenty-five
He falls slowly, like all the rest did. First, his body is shunted backwards with the force of the bullet, and his hands have enough time to reach for the wound before they become lifeless things, attached to a lifeless body, face-down in the dirt.
I hurdle the fallen tree trunk without ever slowing, without worrying about the dead fingers that crunch beneath my heel. Shots are still ringing out behind me and I can’t stop.
So I run. Sometimes I stumble, but I do a good job at moving forwards quickly. I remember to shoulder check every thirty seconds or so, like clockwork. I can’t see anyone following me. At some point my breath begins to catch and a voice in my head tells me to slow my breathing, control each breath. I don’t stop. I just run and it feels…natural.
I keep track of trees ahead that are wide enough to duck behind if I need to, but it seems that no one is chasing me. Still, I keep running. My head tells me that if I stop I’ll die, and to my surprise, it’s Trey’s voice I recognise, not my own. Trey’s instructions are what’s keeping me moving, reeling off a to-do list for survival. For the first time in my life I’m following those orders without reluctance, and it is only then – realising this – that I finally stop.
I breathe heavily, and each pant feels like blades tearing through me. I can’t get enough oxygen, and I feel my vision begin to fade. This is what the brain does when the body is overworked: it tries to force too much oxygen into the body at once, at a rate quicker than the lungs can work, and when your lungs tell your brain that it can’t work that fast the brain decides to shut down the entire factory. I give my head a small shake and try to slow the gasping. I tell myself that there is enough oxygen, and that I am getting enough. Slowly, my chest stops burning, and I find a tree trunk to slump against.
I bend over and brace my hands on my knees, and realise that I’m still holding it, been holding it all along: the 1911 clone, my father’s gun, my gun. The gun I used to gun down a fronter before he could gun down me.
The hand holding it shakes, but that could be attributed to a lot of things. I grunt angrily, incredulously at myself and switch the safety on, before dropping it onto the soft forest floor, and sliding down the tree to sit beside it.
My head tilts backwards and I look briefly towards the now darkened sky. I’ve been running all afternoon; the light is almost gone. I let my eyes close. I watch it again: the fronter dying. Again and again. Funny, the way bodies fall to their deaths in a sequence, instead of the all-at-once that you’d expect. I’ve wondered about it at every execution I’ve seen, and am somehow surprised that it would be as slow when I killed someone.
I killed someone.
Not someone. A fronter. A Galore fronter.
So I am officially a traitor.
“Jesus,” I mumble to the night. If my father were here with me now, I know what would happen. He’d pat my shoulder and tell me that it was okay, that I had to do it. But he’d look away as he said it. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, because he wouldn’t be able to bear seeing me, now changed. This person, once his daughter, now a killer, just like everyone else. Something that he’d shaped and moulded so carefully, now ruined, and he can’t see it as it was anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the sky, hoping it will reach him, “but it would have happened eventually.”
I’ve dreaded being this version of myself my whole life, detested the thought of ever having to use a gun on someone.
Funny, though. I feel… dispassionate. Not numb, just…resigned. Like I’d feared this day for a long time, and now I finally didn’t have to anymore.
Stupid, fucking guns.
I shiver. The air is bitter. I need to stop thinking. Again, it’s Trey’s voice that demands me, like a recording. Get up and survive.
I’m still wearing my clothes from the day before: jeans and a parka with only one shirt beneath. I’m thankful, however, that I have the compound’s thermal grade socks and combat boots on. Still, if I am to live in the woods for the rest of my life, a pair of socks won’t save me from hypothermia.
I place a hand to my chest and rub against my ribcage, convincing my lungs to be lungs. I squat down to where I let the gun drop and pick it up again. There’s one bullet left in the chamber. I can use the gun powder to ignite a fire for the night and I’ll live. If an armed soldier finds me, though, my best bet will be throw
ing an unloaded pistol at them.
I collect the last bullet from the chamber before I change my mind. Maintaining my body temperature is my priority right now, and though I shove the idea away, I feel quietly comforted knowing that without this bullet, I won’t be killing anyone else today.
I have to leave the cover of my tree to search, but after a while, a find what I need: a boulder, cracked along its belly. I need it to detach the slug from its case. Crudely, I wedge the bullet into the slim rock fissure by its’ case until I can’t move it. I find a decent sized rock at my feet and use it to slam the head of the bullet, once, twice, three times, before it detaches and falls to the ground. Still wedged into the boulder is the casing, and inside it, the gunpowder. Carefully, I wriggle the case into my cupped hand and pour out the grey dust.
I return to my tree and find a dry spot on the ground, using my boot to clear the forest floor. A few sticks lie around, but almost everything here is at least slightly dampened. I gather the best kindling I can find and try to recreate the perfect structure that I remember Vincent making. It feels like someone else’s memory.
I dump the powder onto the kindling, break some thicker branches from another tree and add them to the pile, and then squat down with a stone in each hand. I strike them together as deftly as I can against the powder-coated kindling, and eventually, it ignites.
Slumping backwards against my tree, I laugh, relieved. When the fire catches properly I kick off my boots and try to encourage some warmth back into my toes and fingers. They ache immensely at the sudden temperature change, and, somewhat manically, I laugh again.
And then I cry, and cry, and cry.
It is hours before I feel that I can sleep. I’m terrified that I’ll be found. The fire is small and the trees will cover the smoke, but still, I flinch at every rustle I hear. No one ever explained this part of wilderness survival to me: how crowded the forest becomes when it’s just you. There is little to nothing to find during daylight hours in terms of large wild animals. So many species were wiped out before the end of the world: bears, possums, raccoons, and most fish. Deer are bred in Galore, though our militia covets them greedily.
