“You gotta 9mm?”
“Stashed, yeah.”
Tom checked around before removing a single bullet from his pants.
“Gnarly,” the hunter said. “Yeah, I’ll give you something for that.”
Off in the distance, Claypool whistled for Tom’s help.
“Come bring them muscles over here, Muscles.”
Tom looked at Jekyll, inclined his head slightly.
“That’s not a nickname I aim to keep.”
Then he strode off in the direction of the summons and got back to work.
*
TOM DECLINED THE ride back in the crowded APC, but there was still no way to smuggle the canvas sack onto the open-backed truck at the end of the day without the others seeing it. Tom suspected the Jackal was showing kindness in the half-side of smoked venison in the sack over his shoulder weighing at least forty pounds, bones and all. The other passengers eyed him and it, and for some nonsensical reason, Claypool also clambered up onto the back to join them.
He shot Tom a stupid grin and sat heavily opposite on the benches lining the sides of the back. There was practically no floor space, lashed stacks and crates of freshly-looted items filling the area between them. Perhaps it was just as well.
“What you got there, Muscles?”
“Don’t call me that again,” Tom said, then answered, “I traded for meat.”
“Huh, let’s see.”
“Nope.”
“What you trade him?” Claypool asked still grinning. “Suck his dick?”
The people either side of Tom were already inching away, not that room allowed it. Claypool’s boisterous laugh only hastened them. Tom considered his options, face betraying nothing as he scratched at his steel-flecked, lightly-bearded cheek.
“Is this one of those things where I just have to kick the shit out of you to get this over and done with?”
“Haw, you’re gonna kick the shit out of me?”
“Well, I don’t know, man,” Tom said, answering honestly. “You’re a decent size. You might get one over on me. I don’t know. But if you think I’m gonna put up with you talking like that and not take a shot, guess again.”
Claypool’s habit of maintaining his dimwitted grin continued. He seemed to revel in the tension, almost not even taking it personally. His eyes were lit on Tom, but also flicked over him, mouth still slightly ajar revealing his lack of personal hygiene.
“You know man, I keep thinkin’ I seen you before.”
The answer wasn’t what Tom expected. The tension dropped a couple of notches in the back of the truck and coincidentally the engine roared into life. Tom repositioned the canvas sack so it was between his knees.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Did you used to be on TV?”
Claypool eyed Tom even more closely, a readiness for mirth as ever on his features as he scrutinized Tom for any giveaway. Years of emotional closedness for once gave Tom the edge, coming into its own for precisely the reason it’d developed. His eyes betrayed nothing.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said and forced a faint laugh. “I’m not on actor or anything.”
“Man, I’m sure I seen you somewhere,” Claypool said. “Where you from?”
“Where are you from?” Tom asked.
“Naw, man, I asked you first, yeah?”
Tom shrugged. The lie came easy enough since he’d come to think of it as true.
“In the mountains,” he said like it was a confession. A false one. “Tennessee.”
“You ain’t got no Tennessee accent,” the other man said. “Could’ve sworn I knew you somehow from Philly.”
The Philadelphia reference left Tom cold and confirmed what he knew – and what Claypool perhaps suspected, at least unconsciously. But Tom said nothing and after a second or two, the former fat man’s expression shifted.
“I was callin’ you Muscles ‘cause I don’t remember your name, ha.”
“I just thought you thought I was pretty,” Tom said and allowed a slight smile.
“Vanicek.”
“They call me Claypool,” the other man grinned. “Derek.”
Tom nodded. Cool.
On the truck ride back they saw another of the risen dead, a middle-aged woman in survivor camouflage come to a grisly end, her head flopping along unevenly because of so much flesh missing from her throat. Tom relished the absence of conversation, listening to a couple of the skinny men close by returning to what seemed a perennial subject: the sentries Fitz and Hugh getting three stamps instead of two like the rest of them because of “danger money”. The woman with the short hair, Hanna, joined in with them, the three-way snipe-fest building in volume until Tom cocked an eye, then turned back to stare out over the railing ignoring them all.
*
IT WAS GETTING dark as they returned. In winter-time it would be worse, Tom considered, but everything was going to be worse come winter and he wasn’t ready to think on that. Instead, he concentrated on the task at hand, alighting from the trucks with his fellow crewmembers and waving off Claypool as he shouldered his precious sack.
Somehow, word of Tom’s winnings had already reached the lead vehicle, and amid instructions about the muster the following day, the taller sentry Hugh went against the flow, shouldering his rifle and cracking a pleasant smile as he strode right up to Tom.
“I heard you traded that mad hermit for something for your larder,” he said.
Hugh kept his chestnut hair and beard short, the bulk of his armor now in a parcel slung over one shoulder. He looked well-fed and slightly bullish, a good amount of muscle on him, too.
“You’re after meat?”
Tom wasn’t exactly sure. Back in the City, he’d like to think there were too many people for any exchange to turn into a shakedown.
“I could trade you,” Hugh said. “Walk my way? I have greens and eggs, if we’re lucky, some kind of . . . well, not exactly bread, but we call it cake.”
Tom considered it only a moment, but a trade of some sort sounded good.
They left the Depot together, Hugh with a couple of inches on him as they walked side by side. From the streetfront, they trekked due east three blocks to The Mile, and the low brick buildings and their ancient parking lots were almost equally dense with ramshackle homes, nearly every one fronted by some kind of business or desperate enterprise on the lead-up to the busy main street. With night coming on, the open-air market feel of the place returned, even to the side streets, one jerry-rigged stall revealing a working furnace, a Japanese guy working metal, his teenage son with protective gloves on holding giant tongs. The next was another repair shop, then a woman roasting chestnuts in a brazier, a half-marquee behind her subdued despite the brightness of different clothes hanging from hooks available for sale or barter. A kid’s magnet set marked out prices on a board. Another woman in a skinny booth next door used a chipped whiteboard to advertise her fees. She and another woman sat idle, waiting for customers at their pedal-powered sewing machines.
The old restaurant at the street’s intersection with The Mile was taken up by a fresh enterprise. Tom didn’t know what new cuisine was on offer, but the smell of spices and delectable flavors was enough to overpower him. He traded unabashed grins with the trooper by his side as Hugh waved at the invisible odors as well.
“I’ve got a wife cooking,” he said. “Better than the cost of eating there.”
Tom nodded as they entered the brightly nocturnal chaos of The Mile, slightly trailing him since Hugh now led the way.
“Some of the crew seemed a bit out of joint you get paid more than them, if paid’s what we’re still calling it, anyway,” Tom said.
Hugh glanced back unperturbed.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“See?”
Hugh forged his way against the crowds, cutting an intersection through the endless parade and leading Tom between a shoe repairer and a tear-faced girl clutching a
glass jar with a few pickles inside. Just as quickly, they were in the back of the alleyway, the night come alive with noise and people and activity, hundreds of workers like Tom now relieved of their duties and with precious few hours left to do business before Curfew kicked in. Behind the scenes of the arcade-fronting stalls, booths, and bothies, more people moved about their own business, a guy wheeling a water-filled barrel of dead fish, a mother and daughter skinning and gutting hares and squirrels, a one-eyed man with a back alley business of his own sharpening knives and selling machetes. Tom glanced into another half-curtained enclosure, taking in a man on a hospital bed held down by a black kid while an older man extracted a tooth amid stifled grunts.
The chaos of The Mile spilled across most of the block down the side alleyway, what was once an inner-city street now as congested as the markets of Mumbai. On the corner of Beck Street, the surroundings lost their claustrophobic feel and the low brick buildings gained room to breathe. The brick-paved street was in good repair, though the only vehicles were bikes and a few people pushing wheelbarrows with fresh goods, including a man straining with the effort of wheeling a mid-sized pig, the animal already dead, a second man with a shotgun walking alongside for added security. Hugh flicked a fingertip hello to a hard-faced woman in a Vietnamese straw hat struggling to see over the fronds of her armload of celery as she returned his greeting with his name, somewhat as Hugh had said it, “Hugh, Ander’s son”. The title puzzled Tom, but it wasn’t the time for further inquiry as Hugh and the woman stopped to trade gossip and Tom occupied himself eyeballing the nearby stalls.
A solemn, dirty-faced girl aged about twelve or thirteen sat on an old drum stool within a quadrant of space she’d somehow carved out from the masses, the canvas booth built around scraps of old carpet. Several easels and trestles showcased a range of yellowing photographs, professional once, and a chipped Ikea cupboard held numerous portfolios containing yet more snaps. Tom viewed them with an experienced eye, appreciating the composition, almost all of them in the black and white artists seemed determined to continue despite the advances of the digital age. The photographs were mostly serious portraits of other survivors, though some of the scrapbooks he thumbed through showed City shots, a careful cataloguing of the reconstruction efforts from the year before. The girl’s maudlin look and her misspelt, handmade sign asking for donations silenced any questions about what had become of the person behind the camera. The pathetic sign made it clear the girl was doing her best to wring an income from these legacy items, and Tom shouldered his own burden of guilt that he had nothing he was willing to give in return.
A flyer tacked to an old telephone pole next door advertised a meeting of “Deep Ecologists,” though only one of the pre-cut tabs along the bottom of the curled leaflet was taken. Whatever the group was promoting, Tom was distracted by an open cargo trailer opposite him in which an amiable, slightly crazed-looking older man with a yellow-stained beard tended a wheezing generator, chuckling to himself, his handmade shelves housing any number of working radio sets. The devices ranged from old transistors, right up to obsolete, but impressive-looking long-range military set-ups, and most had scuffed headphones attached. A work bench displayed the innards of a half-dozen other sets, repair tools in situ. For a basic trade, three Citizens sat at stations of their choice, working the dials to scan available channels, but a banner along the back of the metal shed made clear there was no promise there was anyone to answer back. The scene returned Tom’s thoughts along an old familiar track, wondering about the wider world and the City’s place within it.
He and Hugh walked the next block, the brick homes and then old garages now crammed with people, several fronted by communal cooking fires. A boy unstacked old timber flooring beside one of them and Tom was startled to see a happy-looking dog by his side. More distracting was the sheltered compartment they passed in which a half-dozen destitute women stood under a wooden sign simply branded with the word “WIVES”.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Tom said to his companion.
Now the street opened up, many of the homes and improvised dwellings laid bare for their inspection, the balmy summer night kind to the working neighborhood surviving on its proximity to The Mile. Citizens sat in the street on mismatched furniture, hunched, talking, eating, or reading – newspapers, comic books, old dime-store novels, an older woman with her leather-bound bible – though a solitary older man sullenly glared at them for no good reason as they passed.
“I didn’t answer because I’ll show you,” Hugh said.
“I need to get to my children,” Tom said and for a moment struggled to keep the impression of anxiety from his voice.
“It’s just around here,” Hugh said. “Relax.”
Four blocks from The Mile, they turned onto a mostly north-south street and cut across a crowd of about a hundred people watching two men and a woman perform calisthenic tricks, the woman juggling fire. Two toddlers followed a six-year-old girl slowly working the crowd seeking alms on the performers’ behalf, and the miracle of it was how most people looked on the children and smiled.
Tom felt his heart swell against the hope children and their young lives could be seen as precious once again, which only stirred his thoughts about his own children further.
Hugh beckoned him on.
*
HUGH SAID HIS place was shared with “only one other family,” and the way he spoke about his wife and daughter made it clear they weren’t originally his. Citizens had somehow fallen into the custom of calling it a McValue Deal, apparently – nothing to do with hamburgers anymore and everything about the sins of convenience and security committed by so many in the City. The recent hut filled with miserable women was fresh in Tom’s mind and he thought of Dr Swarovsky and her bold suggestion, again – and again thought over how hers was less an offer and more like some kind of challenge the unusual woman had set him, regardless of whether he took it up or not.
Before the Emergency, the side street was already a confusion of wooden garages evenly dispersed between front yards. Hugh’s house was a two-story flat-roofed brick place he said once even had a white picket fence, back before it was pilfered for firewood. The lawn was gone too, replaced with raised vegetable plots and a wire fence caging the yard in, with just a swing gate and a hand-painted sign at the entrance. It was night now, edging ever closer towards Curfew, but a candle in a glass jar illuminated the porch, and half-a-dozen people clustered around a weather-beaten captain’s desk out in the middle of the yard, behind which a hard-eyed girl aged about ten shrewdly managed the short queue of willing shoppers. Without the threat of rain, an old chalkboard on an artist’s trestle listed items sought for trade and a rough dollar value for each, but at Tom’s query, Hugh explained any suggestions of currency were theoretical rather than actual, reflected as a widespread custom in the local barter economy.
They found a spot on the porch and Tom hacked through half of the deer’s ribcage with the hand axe, exchanging it with Hugh at a value of fifty dollars – though the trooper’s daughter first had to give her approval to the trade.
“Three ration stamps a day means Daisy can work here rather than waste her time at classes,” Hugh said.
The young girl had the bearing of a thirty-year-old, not a trace of her “father” in her. She saw off the remaining customers, threw a watchful glance at a man with some old shopping bags inspecting a plot of spring onions and leeks, then turned herself back to Tom as if supervising him filling the remainder of the canvas bag with greens, a loaf of the aforementioned cake, a plastic bag with dried broad beans, and a thick wedge of crumbling moist cheese on-traded from another backyard provider – and finally, a big old coffee tin containing fifteen eggs he cradled in one arm. Daisy finished the transaction with a curt reminder for Tom to “bring your own damned bags next time”.
The bustling little market garden was just one of many, the other plots on the street doing a steady trade even as the hour grew later yet. Tom work
ed his winnings into manageable form, nodding to Hugh and his hardbitten daughter, then re-oriented himself to find his way home.
*
THE ONLY OTHER trade Tom made on his way home traversing The Mile was for a wristwatch, costing him his second-last bullet. It no longer seemed like good value, but he needed the watch.
He was overdue at home, at least by his standards, and concerns about his kids whispered to him like a nicotine itch. At the same time, their new life felt like an ever-evolving puzzle with an urgency to be solved, and logistics and their possible solutions tumbled through Tom’s thoughts even as distractions from the sundry passing spectacles of The Mile vied for his attention.
Questions about time and duty came hot on the heels of the press of humanity, and with the sun long gone, awakening within him was the wish to have some sort of firm understanding of the hour. The toothless woman who sold him the watch let him make sure it was freshly wound, but she couldn’t speak to the longevity of its power source. The various watch batteries in containers on her work desk cost more than the timepieces themselves, plus more faith in her honesty than he could afford.
As he moved on, another bedraggled old woman forced her way into his path, trying to push a bar of homemade soap into his hands amid a cloud of rotting breath. Another woman, in the opposite stall, seized the chance to pitch Tom for a haircut, indicating her century-old hand clippers. As good an idea as that might be, he squeezed past them both and on.
He emerged close to the pulsing Night Market, thrusting his way through ebbing crowds around what people had started calling Speakers Corner, a clear, lantern-lit area set aside before the First Gates and past which Tom would travel most nights. A gathering of more than three hundred people surrounded a man’s rich voice which carried easily on the still night air despite competition from numerous other conversations – laughter from the food stalls, a woman’s boisterous shouts, someone deliberately ringing a bicycle bell, badly amplified music playing somewhere in the distance, the susurrus of it all still not drowning out the speaker’s words.
After the Apocalypse Book 1 Resurrection: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 14
