The Ruin Nation

by Kolin Wood

  “You think Doyle is okay?” she asked as she reached over to pluck the cigarette from Tanner’s fingers.

  In the dark, she saw his shoulders move as he shrugged. For a few moments he said nothing as he considered the question. “After all the shit that happened to him back in that prison, and then the way they locked him up like a dog and drowned him in blood, I very much doubt it.”

  Unseen by Tanner, Juliana scowled. Tanner’s lack of compassion for her old jailer was no secret. Doyle had barely spoken on the journey north, not to either of them. He simply moved with his steady plod, eyes focused on the road directly in front of him but also a thousand miles into the distance, replying with nothing but a non-committal grunt if cornered into conversation. It was almost as if what they had recently seen in the aftermath of the prison had been the final bullet in his descent into some kind of personal breakdown. And who could blame him?

  She felt Tanner’s hand grope for hers in the dark and she took one last draw on the cigarette before handing it back. “Well, I am going to go and try to find him,” she said, leaving no room for negotiation; a tactic that she employed regularly. In truth, she did care about Tanner’s considerations, but not enough that she would ever be told what to do by anybody every again. That soft negotiating part of her was long gone.

  Tanner stubbed the cigarette on a small, chipped plate and set it on the floor. “I know,” he replied.

  ***

  Night had already fallen when Juliana and Tanner finally opened the front door to their modest accommodations and ventured down onto the street. The fireworks continued but with less frequency now, and the streets became increasingly busy as the pair moved around the edge of the square, a huge area considered to be the hub of nightlife for the Refuge. Nobody bothered them as they walked, save for the occasional outstretched hand containing some manner of offered good, and the ground remained hard and easy underfoot, making the journey more than bearable. Juliana carried a handgun, a high powered Glock 19, which she kept in a holster on her ribs, hidden under her thin, grey waterproof jacket. Tanner, with only one arm and unknowing of the customs in the Refuge, had decided to leave both of their two rifles back in the room.

  “This is crazy,” Tanner said as he stopped in an empty doorway to survey the scene.

  “This is amazing,” Juliana replied, awestruck by the atmosphere of the place.

  The huge square stretched away from them, every inch covered with tables and stalls selling all manner of wares. A web of fairy lights wove an intricate pattern above and the smell of cooking meat hung over the scene, creating deep hunger pangs in her stomach. But, unlike the Capital, the atmosphere felt light and non-aggressive. People could be heard joking and laughing, and music—if you could call it that—sounded out from various pockets dotted around the space.

  “When in Rome, I guess,” Tanner said, with a small smile and a glimmer of cheekiness in his eyes.

  Juliana rolled her own and smiled back. She knew what Tanner meant and could definitely use a drink herself.

  It took a while to find a seat, but eventually they found one around an old, upturned, whisky barrel, somewhere near the centre of the square. A sign overhead read ‘Paul’s Bar’ in scratchy, blue paint. Sat within an empty and heavily graffiti-covered fountain nearby, was a man with dark skin and yellow eyes who banged out a rhythm on some upturned buckets much to the amusement of the children crouched around the base and clapping along gleefully.

  A tall man with heavy sideburns and a protruding belly, who could have possibly been Paul himself, noticed them and wandered over. “What can I get for ya, folks?”

  Tanner looked at Juliana and then back at the man, shrugging to convey his confusion as to his choices.

  “Newbies, are ya?” the man asked, pulling a dirty rag from his back pocket and proceeding to wipe some spilled beverage from the sticky barrel top. “Where you from?”

  “The South,” Juliana said, offering nothing more.

  The bar man nodded, setting two dented metal cups down in front of them. “Bad as people say it is down there?”

  “Guess that depends on what your idea of bad is,” Juliana answered quickly, offering a smile as back up to the comment.

  “True that, missus,” the barman said, not pushing any further. He coughed and phlegm rattled in his chest. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of water. “Phwoar, scuse me. Been feeling a bit down in the dumps this past day. Few folks have. Must be somethin’ goin’ round. Well, your options are limited. We got home brew, of course, just like everyone else and their mother around here, although I can assure you that there’s a guarantee with my distillery methods. Now, I know that there’s been rumours going round, about people getting the blindness and stuff, but this is my livelihood, and I ain’t about to go riskin’ it all by putting out some rushed, cheap, toxic muck, now am I?”

  “Or else?” Tanner said, throwing a concerned look over to Juliana.

  “Or else, I got the ‘under the counter stuff’, the stuff that don’t see the light of day very often, the real stuff. But not many folks be buying it on account of the rarity nowadays. Prices to reflect, if you catch my drift.”

  The barman winked and touched the side of his nose. Juliana noticed with some revulsion that the top of his finger was missing and that the remaining stump was a sickly, yellow colour.

  “Home brew is fine,” she interrupted. From the corner of her eye she saw Tanner turn to her but ignored him. “Tobacco is appropriate payment here, I assume?”

  “My most preferred type!” the barman replied, smiling to reveal nicotine stained, brown teeth. “You folks sit tight, get comfy. I’ll be right back.”

  And with that he flicked the filthy rag in his hand, wiped some blood from his mouth, and stuffed it back into his pocket before moving off at a slow pace towards the counter of his small, compact bar.

  Juliana could feel Tanner’s eyes on her and she turned to look at him. “What?” she asked, straight-faced.

  He continued to look at her without saying anything. Eventually he shook his head and laughed. “Nothing. Reminds me of what being married was like, that’s all,” he said.

  The comment caught Juliana off-guard. Tanner knew everything about her past: her situation, the death of her husband and boy, her house in the city. Much of it she had told him during his first interrogation of her, on that drunken evening back in the Capital. But she knew virtually nothing about him. He’d remained aloof and secretive, often sidestepping any questions thrown at him. She coughed and tried to hide the look of surprise on her face just as the barman returned, holding a bottle of something brown in his gnarled hand. The fluid looked remarkably like the hooch that was so rife within the bars of the South.

  Without waiting to be invited to, he sloshed some into the two cups, half-filling each. Juliana looked at Tanner who used his good arm to remove his cigarette case and open it, holding it up. There was a clear glint in the man’s eyes as he saw the nearly full case, but he reached out and only took one. Tanner nodded his agreement and shut the case.

  “You need anything else, you come by here, okay? Name’s Paul.”

  Juliana smiled and Paul the barman shuffled away, tucking the cigarette behind his ear and coughing loudly.

  “We are going to need more,” Tanner said, as he put the case back into the pocket of his jeans. “How many packs do we have left?”

  But Juliana would not allow herself to be distracted. Inadvertently or not, he’d offered her a window into his life and she intended to look through it.

  “Tell me about her,” she said, hoping that the small interruption had not caused Tanner to retreat back into his cagey self once again.

  When Tanner looked up at her, his eyes shone serious. He reached for the cup, sniffed it, and took a draw on the cloudy contents, nodding his agreement. “Not bad,” he said, looking down at hers.

  Juliana followed his lead, swigging heartily, but unable to suppress the wince from the alcoholic burn
. Tanner smiled in the very same way that he had done the first time that they met.

  “Her name was Zoe,” he said, suddenly and matter-of-factly. “We met in school, a long, long time ago.” He took another small swig, swilling the liquid in his mouth before swallowing it down.

  Juliana sat still, saying nothing, both hands holding onto the cup. There was a pause before Tanner continued.

  “She never really got the life,” he said, distantly. “Never really understood what it was all about. And I was too young and too hot-headed to know any better. The end.” He drained his cup and slammed it down on the scarred top with an Ahhh.

  The next swig burned less and Juliana welcomed the warm glow that started in her chest.

  “The life? You mean the army?”

  Tanner did not look up. He only scoffed and nodded unconvincingly. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess you’d call it that.”

  Juliana watched him, confused by the cryptic tone. All of a sudden he seemed distant and uncomfortable. “What happened to her?” she asked.

  The frown that followed creased dirty lines down Tanner’s heavily thatched face. He had not shaved since the Capital, and the result was a thick beard, flecked all the way through with grey. Juliana thought it suited him, removing the hard, angular edges, but said nothing.

  Tanner shrugged. “No idea,” he said, unconvincingly “She left me a long time ago, back before all of… this.”

  For a few moments, the silence hung heavy between the pair as Juliana stared at him and Tanner stared at the barrel top. Behind them, a skinny fellow with straw-like hair that stuck out from under a low-brimmed hat, suddenly stood and began to belt out a gaudy rendition of an Irish folk song. People on tables around them, clearly inebriated on home brew, began to clap in time.

  Relieved at the sudden distraction, Tanner smiled and turned in the direction of the noise. Juliana continued to watch his back for a few moments. There was so much guarded about him, so much that she didn’t know, that sometimes he felt like a stranger to her. And she guessed that that was exactly what he was: a stranger, thrown together with her under shitty circumstances. But then again, she couldn’t help but wonder if it mattered anymore. Why dwell on the past when nothing about it could be changed anyway? The dead were dead, they were still alive, and, well, that was it.

  “I’m gonna go find a bathroom,” she said, draining her glass. “Maybe try and round us up some dinner too. Get us some more in, huh?”

  Tanner turned back to her and nodded. “You want me to come with you?”

  Looking around at the happy, clapping people, Juliana smiled. “No. I think I can handle this alone.”

  Chapter 4

  Tanner held onto the cup as Paul poured a few fingers of the cloudy libation into it. He noticed that the barman’s skin had taken on a slightly yellow hue and hung loosely at his eyes and around his mouth; he did not look well at all. Tanner nodded at Juliana’s cup and held up a second stick of tobacco as payment. Paul took the cigarette eagerly, smiling with gratitude before limping away to serve another man who had taken one of the free seats at the front of his small bar.

  The man with the hat and straw hair had stopped singing, but the square was still lively, bristling with energy and heavy with noise. Opposite him, a young girl, with the most piercing blue eyes, sucked on the earlobe of her thick-necked man while throwing Tanner ‘the look’. Tanner stared back only briefly and then smiled and looked away. He didn’t need the trouble, and he knew from personal experience that the sort of girl who will suck on one man’s ear while eying up another is nothing but keen to see some trouble.

  With his good hand, Tanner picked up the cup and swivelled on his chair until he was facing away from the bar and the girl. Every movement caused his shoulder to ache terribly, a grinding of bones deep inside the joint. Since his surgery to remove the bullet, his hand had to be constantly strapped to his body. He had never regained any sense of feeling in it bar a faint pins and needles sensation. As a result, he had lost all control of the arm from his elbow down; not ideal, given the circumstances. What scared him the most though was the idea that he may never be able to use it again. Juliana was a tough cookie, and he supposed that he could even consider Doyle as back up (even though he trusted him about as far as he could throw him), but the possible loss of the limb left him with a very dire sense of dread nonetheless.

  In the dry, fountain base, the dread-locked man was still banging some raggedy tune on his homemade drum kit. Several people clapped in time, smiles pasted on their dirty faces. Tanner smiled and nodded his head in time, trying to take his mind from his ailment.

  Just then, a flash of bright light lit up the sky and another bang sounded above. Not for the first time that evening, Tanner wondered what the cause for celebration might be, and he turned back towards the bar in an effort to catch Paul the barman’s eye and call him over. The ear-sucking girl with the she-devil eyes was still looking at him; only this time, it seemed that her brutish-looking boyfriend had caught the scent and joined in the spectatorship with a low brow and menacing, glaring eyes.

  “Yes, friend?” Paul the barman said as he hobbled over, dragging an out-turned foot behind him.

  “The fireworks,” Tanner said, careful to avoid eye contact with the brute and his girl. “What’s the occasion?”

  Paul wiped what looked like blood from his lower lip and shrugged. “Who needs one? Every night is the same here. Not much else to do but drink and dabble in a bit of the other, if you catch my drift.” He grabbed his crotch rudely and Tanner recoiled internally. “Not sure I can tell the difference between the fireworks and the gunshots, if I’m honest. Although, to be fair, there are far fewer shootings these days. People must be running out of ammo.”

  Tanner considered this for a few moments; it definitely stood to reason that people would be conserving their ammo. Even now, if he could get away with using a shank to save a bullet, he would.

  “So who keeps the peace then?” Tanner asked.

  He noticed a sudden shift in Paul’s demeanour as the man pulled his shoulders in and glanced around the bar. Behind him, the brute let out a loud, bellowing laugh; hopefully he had been distracted enough to forget the bait.

  “No one,” Paul said. “Nobody is in control. We all take care of our own business. People here like the way it is and we’ll fight to keep it that way. There’s no written law, no police, no prisons… well, not unless you count the Church…”

  Confused, Tanner frowned. The mention of a religious establishment came as a shock to him.

  Paul looked bemused. “You mean you’ve never heard of the Church?”

  Already bored and never partial to religion, Tanner drained his glass and shook his head. “No. What church? Should I have?”

  Paul’s yellow eyes sparkled under heavy hoods as they dotted around the space before settling back onto his own again. This time when he spoke, he leaned in close until Tanner could smell the ripeness of him. “Tidus Church,” he said. “He has a building over on the West side of the city that he calls the Church of Ruin. It’s not really a church at all, mind, just some place all the nutters go. In fact, rumour has it that he hates all them religious folk. Dad used to be a minister or somethin’. Anyway, he takes ‘em in, feeds ‘em, shaves their heads, does all manner of who the fuck knows over there, but it keeps the streets clean. Since the Church started, things have been much better round here, that’s for sure.”

  Uncaring to continue with the line of the conversation, Tanner nodded his head and leaned back; he did not enjoy the invasion into his personal space and the man really was kicking up. “Right you are,” he said; his sarcasm plain.

  With a scoff, Paul took the hint and stood up straight. “Enjoy your drink, friend,” he said. Another cough and he reached behind for his rag, gave it the customary flick before making his way back over to the bar once again.

  Tanner looked down at his empty glass and sighed; he should have haggled for the bottle. He looked over at
Juliana’s half full tumbler and momentarily considered finishing it of before thinking better of it. Already, the lethal strength home brew had added a fuzzy feeling to his dehydrated brain. A few more of those and he would be well on his way to being in a state; probably not the wisest move, considering the circumstances. Pushing his glass away to signal to himself that he was indeed finished, he glanced around the bar and then farther out into the throng of lively people, wondering where Juliana might have got to and cursing himself for allowing her to go alone.

  A few chairs away, Tanner’s eyes locked with the brute from before, and he knew immediately that there would be no looking away.

  Here we go, he thought.

  Chapter 5

  This time, the street that Juliana turned down held promise. The sweet and savoury smell of cooking meat funnelled along it, carried on the modest breeze which freshened her face. About halfway down, fronted by a huge queue of clearly-drunken revellers, a large barbecue grill, complete with a protective tent, had been set up. As she approached the brick counter, the smell grew stronger, drawing a painful churning from the pit of her stomach.

  All around, the crowd pushed and jostled for position. Determined to get to the front, Juliana began to ease her way forward into the throng. Before her, a topless man with the hairiest back that she had ever seen attempted to step in her way. Annoyed, Juliana tried to side-step around him, but the crowd had other ideas and she was suddenly thrust sideways until her cheek was forced against his shoulder. With revulsion, she noticed that his skin was hot and clammy with sweat.

  The man turned on her, a glint to his cloudy eyes. Juliana felt a hand encircle her thin waist and come to rest on her rump; he clearly thought that it was his lucky day. A strong arm pulled her into his sweaty embrace.

  Without thinking, Juliana raised her boot and stamped down hard on the man’s toes. She felt a crunch and twisted to inflict maximum damage. After a delay, the man—suddenly realising the true extent of his pain—threw back his head and howled loudly. Once again acting on autopilot, Juliana swung her knee, connecting with a heavy blow that sent the man’s testicles on an upward trajectory into his stomach. Hateful eyes bulged with surprise as his body came forward in a subconscious, protective movement. In order to prevent further damage to his nether regions, he brought his hands down to cup himself just as her elbow came crunching in upon the bridge of his nose. Blood splattered her face and the faces of the few people who had noticed the commotion and turned to watch. The crowd parted like the red sea under the command of Moses as the bulk of the man tottered for a few moments on wobbly legs before falling back with a bang onto the hard concrete below. A collective groan rang out from the crowd. Somebody cheered from somewhere nearby.