Catching only a few of them was enough to color Tom intrigued. With his coffee can in his arms and the bag on his shoulder, he eased through the outer edge of the crowd, people already peeling away amid the sense of things wrapping up.
“It’s just something for you to consider, folks,” a man in his late fifties waved, smiling beatifically with the lamplight catching off his wire-framed glasses.
“We came together because we yearned for togetherness,” he called out.
The stranger delivered his words well. An experienced speaker. Tom recognized him from the afternoon of his own arrival, which seemed too far ago to say it was merely two days before.
“But togetherness doesn’t have to sacrifice freedom,” the man called out as more and more of the crowd started drifting away. “There can be another way. Maybe many other ways. Who knows? If we don’t explore them, we’ll never know.”
It looked as if he wanted to say more, but the crowd was rapidly dispersing and the performer – or orator, whoever he was – knew when to drop the mic.
“Remember if you’re flush and thirsty, The Dirty Vixen runs a tab!”
He shouted the last line at the top of his lungs and gave a shallow laugh, joined by several others, practically washing his hands of the business as he followed the rest quitting the corner. A couple of well-wishers stopped to make their own comments, and he shook their hands, accepted a book or something almost as tattered from one of them, then tucked the thing under his arm and strode Tom’s way. Two emaciated-looking Citizens in their twenties took his place, wrangling stools and guitars and a car battery-operated sound system as the looming Curfew turned Speakers Corner into just another empty swatch of asphalt in which to ply a trade.
Tom was the only one unmoving as the man headed his way. A slight smile played on Tom’s face, though there was no real reason for it. Something about the older man’s confident manner drew his curiosity, even in the absence of the speech Tom had clearly missed.
“The Dirty Vixen,” Tom said as the pale-bearded man went to pass. “They pay you a fee for that plug at the end?”
The speaker stopped, gracing Tom with a charming smile. Again, he had all his teeth.
“Why don’t you stop by?” the man said. “It’s actually my place. I’m Magnus.”
“Magnus? Tom. Vanicek.”
They shook hands. For whatever reason, the newcomer stood where he was and Tom took the conversational bait.
“I missed most of what you were saying back there,” he said.
“It’s becoming a bad habit of mine,” Magnus said. “As you rightly guessed, it started as a way to get a little free advertising. These days, it’s ninety per cent incoherent ramble and nowhere near enough self-promotion.”
“Maybe that’s just the right amount,” Tom said.
Magnus smiled, thoughtful and with the kind of tangible charisma Tom knew wasn’t common in the world before the Fall, let alone here among the dregs of humanity. In the pregnant pause, the two men slyly examined each other, Tom lifting his whiskered chin under the older man’s somewhat imperious scrutiny, only to meet his twinkling eyes instead.
“Drink?”
Tom smiled tightly.
“I’m not much of a drinker.”
“That’s a shame,” Magnus said. “I run a bar.”
“You haven’t managed to monetize the public speaking thing yet huh?”
“There’s not a lot of use for an out-of-work philosophy professor around these parts,” Magnus agreed. “But people still like a drink. You should stop by.”
“I didn’t really get what you were arguing before,” Tom said.
“All the more reason to drop by for a drink.”
Tom winced his apologies and thought again of his kids and lifted the wristwatch to check the time without even thinking of it and grimaced.
“It’s terrifying how quickly that becomes an instinct again, huh?”
The former professor eyed Tom’s watch and the blue tag alongside it.
“And you’re new to the City,” Magnus said. “If you find yourself wondering why the hell you even came here, The Dirty Vixen’s just off The Mile. Come by. First round’s on me.”
Magnus patted Tom’s shoulder and moved on, freeing Tom in turn to get about his business. Contemplating the philosopher-cum-barman’s astute offering, Tom clutched the can of eggs even more tightly and headed away past the Night Market and towards home.
*
THE FINAL STEPS before his apartment door brought a nervously hollow, sick-feeling clamor to Tom’s throat as he went to let himself in only to be oddly reassured by the lock. He rapped gently and whispered to identify himself.
Lilianna opened the door and Tom fell in on her, wrapping his free arm around his daughter’s shoulders and pulling her in for a hug a split second before she started to cry. At least the tears struck him as familiar, and the sight of Lucas bounding up from the living room dismissed any nascent alarm.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said in a low voice and closed the door behind them, mindful of drawing the attention of any neighbors out of sheer paranoia alone.
“You weren’t at the Night Market,” Tom said. “I came here as back-up, like we planned.”
“We didn’t expect you so late,” Lucas said.
Tom set the eggs and the sack on the kitchen bench, freeing himself to take his son and then again his daughter into his arms. The two of them seemed suddenly so little, reduced again to the figures of their younger selves in the disruption of fear still coming off them in waves. Tom was distraught to feel his son trembling, Lilianna only slightly more contained.
“It’s only just after eight,” Tom said and flashed his wrist. “Has something happened?”
“No,” Lila said. “It’s just . . . you weren’t there.”
“It’s been the longest day ever,” Luke said and sniffled.
“See? I traded for a watch,” their father said.
“What’d you go do that for?” Luke asked.
“Time’s important,” Lila said, trying to settle herself down. “All day in the Orphanage they use the clock to set jobs. I need to get me one of those too.”
Tom forgave his daughter’s hillbilly diction, able to wipe away her tears with the back of one hand now his arms were free. Lucas clutched his other wrist to examine the watch and it didn’t take much for Lilianna’s attention to switch to Tom’s haul.
“You brought stuff home?”
“Trade.”
“Wages?”
“No, something extra,” he said. “Thanks to your brother.”
Lucas dried his eyes on his soiled orange t-shirt, sun-faded block prints on it of teenage popstars now either long dead or grown men. His father’s comment made him look upright in surprise.
“Me?”
“Those bullets,” Tom said. “They’re gold.”
He put his hand on Lucas’ shoulder and dropped a notch to meet his eyes.
“Good, good job,” he said. “I met a hunter today who traded a generous half-side of venison for a single bullet. More than generous. Actual kindness. Fancy that, huh? I got this watch so I can do better and maybe be on time tomorrow. And then I sold some of the meat for fresh greens and a few other things. Eggs. Can you believe it? I don’t know what we’re cooking, but it’s gonna be grand.”
It felt like trying to force cheer into the children, but Tom reasoned it wasn’t good for anyone to bathe in fear when they’d all somehow survived their day. The thought killed his showman’s vibe almost at once.
“This stuff with the Foragers,” he said more slowly. “I think it’s going to run late, like tonight. A lot. Right at the moment, I’m not sure there’s a way around it.”
His children stared at him without giving much away. Tom chewed the inside of his cheek a moment.
“Those bullets have given us a headstart trying to set up base here,” he said. “Did you get into the apartment alright?”
“Yeah,” Lila said and motione
d to the ration book also on the bench. “I collected our first rations during a break, too. Mostly staple stuff. Some rice. Corn flour. Nothing to get excited about.”
“Coffee?” Tom asked.
“Like I said,” Lila said and smiled and walked into the joke Tom had offered. “Nothing to get excited about.”
“How was work?”
“I think you should ask Lucas about School.”
“It’s not School,” Lucas snapped, clearly surly. “School is for little kids. They call it classes. It’s a total crock, dad.”
“Yeah, I imagined.”
Something snapped in Luke’s gaze.
“You don’t give a shit,” his son said and looked either set to sigh or break into tears.
“That’s not what I meant by that.”
He wanted to ease off the emotion in the room, so he deliberately moved back into the kitchen and started unpacking his stuff. The kitchen had a narrow pantry, the refrigerator next to it, but obviously no longer working. He stuffed the remaining thirty pounds of smoked animal carcass into the dead freezer he’d scrubbed for hygiene’s sake the day before.
“Is it horrible?” Tom asked his son. “Classes? I still don’t know what you do in there and I’m hoping you’re gonna tell me, but there’s plenty of other kids doing stuff other than going to School.”
“It’s not School and I’m not a kid.”
“OK, but you’re eleven.”
“I’m twelve in three months.”
“And I’ll be forty-three,” Tom said. “I’ll swap you.”
“No way,” Luke said and laughed despite himself.
Tom let it sit that way a moment. He checked out the rations, a miserable share of basic goods retrieved by efforts of the Foragers or someone similar. If the City was relying on hard supplies from before the apocalypse and hadn’t figured out a steady way to feed everyone with their own resources, the Council better pray there weren’t too many more far-flung survivors still headed their way. There were plenty of stalls trading rabbits and ducks and badgers and skunks and almost any kind of smaller prey you could imagine, keeping hunters in red-hot demand, but Tom also knew for the majority of people like Hugh and his family, meat with their main meal was a rarity.
But his son’s quiet sobs demanded attention.
Lila moved into the kitchen with him, wiping her own eyes for the last time, one gentle touch on her father’s arm before she started rearranging what he’d been arranging and digging out their inherited cooking utensils.
“Dkembe?”
“He hasn’t come back,” Lila said.
“The doctor?”
“Nope.”
Tom nodded and moved around the skinny island bench to where Lucas stood, hunched and dejected. It was cooler than before and he guided his son by the shoulder into the living room, picking up the boy’s flannel shirt and handing it to him.
“It was pretty awful, huh?”
Lucas glanced into the kitchen, beguiled by the illusion of privacy his sister strove to give them.
“I was so afraid.”
Tom nodded, said “Shit” because he had to say something and actual words wouldn’t help. He put emphasis on his breath, drawing a decent one and hoping Luke would do the same. Tom’s empathy slowly filled the space between them as he said nothing further to his son’s remark and the boy lifted ashamed eyes to him and they stayed in contact, Tom nodding slowly, grave in his own way. The seconds ticked past. Luke’s eyes dropped and the tears started for real.
“Can we sit down?”
Lucas nodded, hands over his face as he sat heavily on the sofa and Tom sat beside him. Slowly and deliberately, he placed one hand on his son’s knee.
“You’ve had a shit of a day, huh?”
“You must’ve had a pretty bad day too,” Lucas said, words muffled by his hands.
“My turn in a minute,” Tom said gently. “I’m still thinking about you. Can you tell me about it?”
“It’s just awful in there, dad,” Luke said and took his hands away, his shame not at the tears themselves, but the paroxysms and vulnerability coming with them.
Tom slowly removed his work shirt, still with the cotton vest beneath. Checking it over carefully, he found a non-disgusting section and offered the shirt for Lucas to wipe his eyes. The tears hadn’t stopped, but their admission made it easier. The boy released a breath, like almost everyone, a breath unaware he’d been holding, and the tension eased out of him and his shoulders sagged. Now Tom gently slid one protective arm around his shoulders.
“What was awful?”
“The actual people aren’t so bad,” Lucas said. “I mean the instructors. But the . . . students, the kids in with me? Jesus Christ, dad.”
“Pretty rough, huh?”
“There’s kids who’ve killed people.”
Just as quickly as the gravity of it hit Tom, he was surprised at Luke’s next words.
“I’ve never killed anyone!”
“No, son,” Tom said. “Thank God.”
But Lucas shot him a look. A stranger’s face, just for an instant.
*
New expert discredits Fury virus theory
By Odo Geirhart
A new arrival who is also an immunologist has argued in support of the non-virus Fury theory.
Australian-born scientist Dave Hamilton says he has personally studied Fury cadavers and failed to find evidence of “any directly-suspicious viral agent”.
Dr Hamilton reached the City last week after a month-long pilgrimage from Illinois.
He told the Herald he spent the first year of the Emergency bunkered at St Anne’s Memorial Hospital, Wichita.
“We went on lockdown and then things got so bad. A core group of personnel never left, including me,” Dr Hamilton said.
“A bunch of trapped scientists, there’s no way we weren’t going to give it a crack.
“Conditions were as sterile as we could make them. We had power,” he said.
“There’s no evidence of incubation, anything. No detectable agents.”
Dr Hamilton said his team made an allusion to the Terminator movies.
“You know when Arnie’s knocked down finally and you think he’s dead? And then the system reboots. Reroutes the power supply. Only with the Fury, it doesn’t need their brain,” Dr Hamilton said.
“The Furies still utilize the nervous system. The creatures breathe.
“I don’t think they’re interested in eating people, it’s just the blood that is their sustenance,” he said.
“We risked capturing several Furies to confirm what we believed.
“The Furies were technically dead people, but operating at some level of instinct we couldn’t explain.”
Council of Five president Dana Lowenstein said Dr Hamilton’s expertise was welcome, but confirmed no further developments in a working theory on the rise of the Furies.
“Everyone’s hoping that day’s going to come, including me,” Dr Lowenstein said.
“Maybe there’s someone out there who’s made better progress than us, but we don’t have any evidence of that so far.”
Administration sources said the City’s Science and Progress Committee “hasn’t met for weeks”.
“There’s a feeling around now that we might never know what caused the Emergency,” the source said.
“Believe it or not, no one can rule out that this wasn’t a mystical event.”
Dr Hamilton confirmed he would join the CS&P Committee.
*
THE FOLLOWING FEW days fell into a haphazard routine. Lucas knew they didn’t have the resources for him to “retire from school”, as Lila teased him, almost like a performance, conscious as she was of the genuine tension underlying her brother’s daily seven-hour ordeal.
They discussed the matter at length over a meal of rice, omelet, and stewed venison, not even salt among their supplies to give the meal much flavor and thus in the end a disappointing feast, though a feast nonetheless,
Lilianna guessing her way through a leek broth steeping the deer ribs their father extracted in an effort to max out every bit of value from their cache.
They didn’t have enough of anything yet to develop any sort of scheme like the type Hugh’s family did, settled long enough to start building a life despite the everyday challenges. Hugh’s example buoyed and also deflated Tom, who kept questioning the choice he’d made back when he first revealed the Columbus leaflet to his kids in a move all but guaranteed to see them clamor for their chance at a resurrected City life, and leaving Tom wondering – not for the first time – if he’d deliberately sabotaged himself yet again.
And nothing made him question those decisions more than the hangdog look on Luke’s face. If there was a way to be self-sufficient, they’d take it, Tom told him. In the meantime, even Tom felt more stuck than he’d like with the Foraging duties, though the overall enterprise – and his involvement in – raising the City from the dead seemed worthwhile. That sensation alone, of doing something valuable, dare he call it meaningful – after months and months and months of simply keeping alive, the most meaningful yet meaningless task of all – wasn’t something he’d factored into his own expectations and it left him with a deep disquiet, mistrustful of the lure of satisfaction in case it sowed the seeds of his own downfall.
But at least they had food on the table.
Back at the technology park, Jackal told him the countryside directly around Columbus was picked pretty clean of decent game, though the depopulation of North America had given some of the bigger animals a few years to regain numbers, while smaller creatures like the staples of the Night Market were more abundant. Day traders living rough in the countryside like Jackal brought in rabbits and waterfowl, though their numbers too couldn’t survive the City’s kitchens forever. Jackal survived through ability alone, but that included trekking anywhere up to five days from his home camp-of-the-moment to stock his larder.
Jekyll was nowhere to be found on the last of the four days it took to clear the tech park.
After that, the Foragers moved into the next sector, clearing two small pockets of housing going from home to home, with plenty of grunt work for Tom’s neglected strength as they recovered fabrics and abandoned clothing and unlooted goods from a row of stores. Chicago Jones and his colleagues diligently sprayed their orange tags. At night, Tom and his children assembled their meager wealth. Tom got the shower working. Balmy nights left them unconcerned about heating for now, and there was little prospect of running power. The trade in photovoltaics was astronomical, and only City projects, and – it was rumored – the Council elite enjoyed their own solar power access, though various traders had their own ways around the problem.
After the Apocalypse Book 1 Resurrection: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 15
