Survivors

by Margaret Ball

  Mariya poked her head out from time to time and gave them updates on the scanty news being broadcast.

  “Food riot – they’ve called in a special squad of peace officers to calm it down,” was followed by, “Looting in the market. They’re not saying what the peace officers are doing. Probably joining in the looting!” and finally, “They’re moving on. Our market must have been stripped bare. Heading for the Hill.”

  The Hill! Ruven tapped his CodeX and requested a city map of neighborhoods. As he’d thought, Jillian’s apartment was between Glen Estates and the Hill.

  “You’ll be all right now,” he told Mariya and the kids. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Worried about your fine friends in the Hill?” Mariya cackled. “Don’t worry, they’re like roaches – plenty more where those came from. One thing Harmony City never has shortages of – politicians.”

  Ruven was halfway down the block before she’d finished that and several more caustic comments on the bureaucracy that governed Harmony.

  The transit system had become so unreliable that he was already in the habit of walking everywhere. Now he was fighting the urge to run. Not a good idea. Running attracted attention, and wouldn’t get him there any faster than his countryman’s long, relaxed stride would.

  For a block around the community market, the street was hazardous with spilled food and oil. And blood. Ruven averted his eyes from the corpses of people trampled in the riot. But the smell of burnt meat made him want to gag after he saw the blackened corpses strapped into the wreckage of a Security float that was still burning. So that was what had happened to the riot squad… No wonder the city was sending reinforcements to protect the Hill. But would they also protect Vista View?

  ***

  Jillian had turned around and headed back to the apartment building when she first heard the screams and shouting. Perhaps the mob would stop to loot the Vista View community market for the second time this month, or perhaps they had already done so and were coming this way in search of more places to loot. She wasn’t about to stick around and find out.

  She paused at a cross street, hearing noises to her left as well as behind her, and decided it might be prudent to take a slightly roundabout route towards home. Before she reached the turnoff, though, floats loaded with uniformed peace officers swept down the street, nearly deafening her with their broadcast speakers. “CITIZENS, STAY OFF THE STREETS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ANYONE REMAINING ON THE STREETS IS GUILTY OF TREASON.”

  “That’s just what I want to do, you idiots,” Jillian muttered, “-get off the streets. If you’ll just get out of my way!” She ducked into the syncrete entrance of an office block. The doors, set back in a shallow niche, were locked.

  “—THE STREETS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ANYONE – ”

  The relentlessly blasting speakers stopped with a deafening, ragged squeal. Jillian peeked out of her inadequate shelter and saw that the lead float was on fire. The mob that had stopped it boiled on down the street towards her, slowing oddly… oh. Tear gas? Something was being sprayed from the second and third floats, and the people on the street were coughing and crying.

  A warm body slammed into her from the back and Jillian felt the air squeezed out of her.

  “Idiot woman. I might have known you’d be out wandering around in the thick of the riot. Here, put this over your face.” Ruven was still pushing her into the locked doors of the office building, putting his body between her and the street, but now he shoved a dripping wet rag at her.

  “Over. Your face. Eyes too.”

  She followed his instructions and tried to breathe shallowly. Whatever they were using to put down the riot, she didn’t want any of it in her lungs or on her skin. The sounds of people choking and retching were a great incentive to stay right where she was and breathe as little as possible.

  ***

  Trisha practically fell through the apartment door onto her. “Jilli, Jilli, I’ve been so frightened! Did you see, they’re poison gassing people right on our street, it’s been on all the news.”

  “Inaccurate,” Ruven said while Trisha cried all over her sister-in-law. “Not poison. Merely – a slight – irritant - mucous membranes.” He coughed and tried to peel Trisha off Jillian. “She should shower. Get it off her skin.”

  “You too!” Jillian coughed through the remains of the wet rag she was still holding.

  “Oh, my goodness, yes, both of you stop talking and come on inside!” Trisha said as though it was their fault she’d plastered herself over Jillian and slowed them down. “Jilli, take everything off and – I’ll give you a plastiflimsy bag for your clothes – and, uh, Ruven…”

  “I’ll just put my head under your kitchen faucet, if I may.”

  “Oh yes – of course – ” Trisha fluttered, wrung her hands, blinked away tears, and started to fret all over again.

  “It’s all right, Trisha,” Jillian said. “No harm done.”

  Half an hour later, when she emerged from the shower, she found Ruven perched on a low stool in the kitchen with a towel around his neck. From the looks of it, he had stripped off his shirt to rinse his shoulders and torso, then tugged the shirt back on over his wet body. It clung to his back, delineating bone and muscles and two long puckered lines – scars? – in sharp relief.

  Trisha appeared to be attacking him with scissors and comb. “I can’t ever thank you enough for saving Jillian,” she was saying, “but one thing I can and will do, and that is fix that shambles you call a haircut!”

  “It was fine a couple of months ago,” Ruven objected mildly.

  “It was never ‘fine,’” Trisha said, “though it may have been less of a total disaster before you let it grow out. Hold still!” she shrieked as he started to rise to greet Jillian. “You are worse than Brena’s five-year-old, do you want to lose an ear?”

  Jillian apologized to Ruven. “I completely forgot you were coming today, and anyway I’m not exactly up to tutoring now.” Had they made plans for a session today? She couldn’t remember it, but they must have; why else would he have been on his way here?

  An imperfect memory was the least of her problems. Her throat was still raw from what he’d called a “minor irritant”, and she was worried. What if the damage never healed? She couldn’t be ‘Ditani Stavros’ with a voice like an old crow, and she wasn’t ready to go into the backwater of minor parts and non-speaking roles that she’d only escaped three years earlier.

  “Don’t talk,” Trisha said sharply, as though she’d read Jillian’s mind. “I’ll make you some herbal tea in a minute. With sugar,” she added as Jillian grimaced. Well, that wasn’t exactly mind-reading; she already knew that Jillian thought most of her collection of special infusions tasted like dead grass.

  Ruven rose to go as soon as Trisha finished snipping at his hair. He ran his fingers through the drastically shortened locks and released a small cloud of cut hairs all over the kitchen. Jillian and Trisha, for once on the same line of the same page, rolled their eyes at each other. Men!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They’d agreed on an early-evening time for the next tutoring session; after a few days, to give Jillian’s voice time to recover. But Ruven just happened to drop by the next day, with a jar of honey to soothe Jillian’s throat. Trisha’s eyebrows went up. “You can’t get honey! I haven’t seen any in months!”

  “A couple of women in the cooperative keep bees,” Ruven said.

  Trish thrust the jar back at him. “You should save this to bribe politicians.”

  “Work better than you talking to them,” Jillian croaked.

  Trisha elbowed her. “You, sit down and shut up!” She apologized to Ruven. “I’d ask you in, but you just tempt that one to talk. But really, we can’t accept something as valuable as this.”

  Ruven put his hands in his pockets. “Even if I assure you I’ve more than enough left for bribes?”

  “Oh… well…”

  ***

  When he returned, it was with a novel s
uggestion; instead of more tutoring, he wanted to take Jillian and Trisha out for a meal. “By way of thanks for the haircut. Deputy Assistant Ministers’ aides no longer roll their eyes when I enter an office.”

  “That was all Trisha,” Jillian demurred.

  “And it was a thank-you for extricating Jillian from the riot,” Trisha said.

  Ruven’s crooked smile exposed a tooth that had been chipped and never repaired. It was the sort of minor deformity that one just didn’t see in Jillian’s circles; for some reason it made him seem more real to her. Most of the people she spent time with were so highly polished they were in danger of disappearing into their own mirrors. She herself felt that she might disappear that way, after today’s news from the studio.

  “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, the way these social obligations switch back and forth until we can’t be rid of them? You’ll have grasped my secret plan; come with me to Romuela’s tonight, and you’ll owe me a home-cooked dinner.”

  Trish’s eyes narrowed. “Is the elevator working?”

  “No, but I’m used to that.”

  “I’m not!” She grasped Jillian’s shoulders and pushed her forward. “Go ahead, you. I’m not about to drag this heavy belly up ten flights of stairs to get back here – and after eating, too! I’ll just stay here and rest my feet, and you can keep tutoring the man over dinner.”

  “You might have known Trisha wouldn’t want to come,” Jillian said as they left the building. “She wasn’t a big fan of taking the stairs even before she started to get big.”

  “I might have thought of that,” Ruven agreed. He smiled down at her. “I might even have been counting on it.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I just wanted to have you to myself for a while.”

  “Trisha doesn’t interrupt when I’m tutoring.”

  “No, but she’s there. Makes it hard to talk about anything but politics and persuasion.”

  “What else did you want to talk about?”

  “Couple of things… Here’s Romuela’s. Let’s order first, then talk?”

  That sounded good to Jillian. She certainly didn’t want to talk about her problems; she would let Ruven ramble on about his.

  The restaurant was just barely in Vista View and looked as if it might have quietly transferred itself from the much poorer neighborhood of Peace and Prosperity, on the far side of the street. The interior had been given a splash of nanopaint at some time, but it looked as if the license had never been renewed; the original bright pink and turquoise could only be seen in a corner that was usually sheltered by stacks of plastic chairs. Time and vigorous scrubbing had decimated the nanos until the colors faded into a soft dusty pink and a cloudy blue. Delicious, unfamiliar smells wafted from the kitchen that was only separated from the dining area by a three-quarters wall.

  “What do you have for us today, Romuela?” Ruven called to a plump woman near the kitchen entrance.

  “Ai, it’s my Bad Boy!” She started for the table.

  “No menu,” Ruven explained to Jillian just before Romuela bent over his chair to engulf him in an embrace that nearly made her pillowy breasts fall out of her low-cut bodice. She gave him a smacking kiss on each cheek before she stood up and started to recite the menu of the day. At least Jillian supposed it was. She didn’t actually recognize anything. Ladera? Dolma? Chilbr?

  “Why don’t you order for both of us?” she suggested to Ruven.

  He reeled off a few more incomprehensible words; Romuela shook her head. “So sorry – no meat today. No manti, no sarma.”

  Jillian looked at the signs on the wall while Ruven and Romuela discussed the possibilities for their meal. Some were jokes so old they probably predated space flight, while others looked like flimsy prints of restaurant reviews. The largest was a hand-printed flimsy saying, “HELP WANTED.” And it certainly did seem to be wanted; nobody was looking after the other customers while Ruven monopolized the owner. She seemed to be apologizing for something; he was nodding and saying, “I understand.”

  After Romuela clattered off on improbably tiny black shoes, Ruven explained, “I eat here a lot; she feels bad because she doesn’t have any meat dishes today, and because the price of everything has gone up. That’s why she doesn’t use a printed menu any more: she just cooks whatever she can get, and charges according to what it cost her.”

  Jillian nodded her understanding. A restaurant that was still open almost had to be patronizing the black market. She certainly couldn’t see plump Romuela, with her tight little shoes, standing in a food line!

  “What did you want to talk about?” she asked Ruven. “Any progress with your politicians?”

  Ruven shook his head. “Nothing. It’s getting harder and harder to see anybody with any power; the offices are two-thirds empty.”

  Jilli thought about the mob that had been heading for the Hill before it was broken up. “Maybe they’re afraid to go to work.”

  “Maybe.” Ruven’s voice sounded as though he had another theory, but he didn’t share it with her. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Did you catch the news about that riot in your neighborhood?”

  Jillian nodded. “But they didn’t say much about that. Apparently it started down in Glen Estates, and that’s where the worst things happened.”

  “People getting killed.”

  She shivered. “Yes. It wasn’t on purpose, I suppose, but – what a horrid way to die. Trampled underfoot by your own neighbors.” She hadn’t actually watched much of the news; it upset Trisha too much. For that matter, it upset her too.

  “Did the newsers say anything about the riot squads that were called out?”

  “No – just that they had been called, and that they ‘pacified’ the rioters when they reached Vista View.” Jillian’s voice shook just a little bit; if she closed her eyes, she could still see that burning float. “They didn’t say anything about the gas, or about that one float that got burned. I suppose those are things we’re better off not knowing. I sure wish I didn’t know about them.”

  “I went past the Glen Estates market just after the mob. There’d been a riot squad called out there too. Just one.” Ruven shook his head. “Madness. Four thousand people, and Security sent out twenty peace officers to try and stop them. Jilli, at least eight members of the riot squad were killed there; I saw the bodies.”

  “Tomas?” Her heart sank.

  “I… don’t think so, no. But Jilli, Security hasn’t released a statement about those eight men. Nor about the ones who died on the burning float in Vista View. There’s been no acknowledgement of their deaths. And… how long has it been since you heard from Tomas?”

  Jillian’s mouth had gone dry. “Five – no, almost six weeks now.” She swallowed convulsively. “You think something like that happened to Tomas. And they won’t tell us because – it’s being covered up? They don’t want anybody to know that they can’t really keep control any better than that?”

  “I think… You should try and prepare Trisha for that possibility.”

  “How? I’m not prepared for it!” Jillian snapped as their dinner arrived. A bitter taste flooded her mouth as she stared at a platter of unidentifiable vegetables, grilled and garnished with oil. She pushed it a couple of inches farther away from her. “Sorry… I don’t feel much like eating right now.”

  Ruven pushed the platter back, put a fork in her hand. “You’ll eat anyway. You’re much too thin. And you need to keep your strength up.”

  Jillian obediently stuck a piece of something yellow on the fork and lifted it to her mouth. An explosion of spice and flavor greeted her. She felt disloyal. How could she go from talking about the chances of Tomas’ death, to enjoying food?

  “Keep eating,” Ruven ordered her. He was so tall that he could loom over her, even seated.

  “But Tomas – ”

  “Would, no doubt, be just thrilled to see you honoring him by starving yourself to the point where you can’t take care of his w
ife and baby,” Ruven said brutally.

  Jillian managed to take another bite, and another. Ruven leaned back and talked about life on a dairy cooperative – not the crisis that had sent him to town, but the small daily things. The time the cows found a patch of wild garlic, and for three days the milk had been good for nothing except to feed to the neighboring farm cooperative’s pigs. The discovery of wild bees by a couple of overly curious boys who immediately regretted their decision, and the lengthy debate that was resolved by two brave women who wrapped themselves in sheets, smoked the bees into quiescence, and established them in hives made of sections from a hollow tree.

  Jillian’s fork scraped an empty plate before she knew it. “Why can’t you do this to the politicians?”

  “You think they’d care about bee stings and garlicked milk?”

  “Um, no, not exactly. But you’re a good storyteller. Perhaps if you turned your cooperative’s problems into a story they’d pay attention?”

  “Could be- ”

  A fusillade of sharp explosions erupted just outside the café, and Ruven threw himself on Jillian and bore her down to the floor. Around them she could hear the café’s other patrons also diving for the floor.

  “Projectile weapons,” she heard one of them say, unbelieving. “What did they do, rob a museum?”

  “Idiots are lucky one of them doesn’t jam and blow somebody’s hand off.”

  After there’d been no more loud noises for several minutes, Ruven stood and helped Jillian to her feet. All around her she could see people brushing themselves off and sitting down again. Unbelievably, most of them were paying attention to their CodeXes and not to their companions.

  “Why do you think they’ve all got their faces in their display screens?” Ruven wondered aloud.