Faller

by Will McIntosh

  He heard a child crying; a moment later more children came around the corner led by more armed men.

  “No. Oh, no.” Clue put his hands on his knees and leaned over to throw up. Nothing came, though his stomach roiled violently. If he charged the men they would shoot him down, and that would be the end of it. He could commit suicide in that way, or he could watch, or he could run away. Those were his choices.

  He decided to run. If there was a way he could save even one child, he would stay and suffer through this horror, but why witness it if he couldn’t save even one?

  Clue froze. He straightened, eyed the advancing line of kids. Could he save one? Just one?

  He thought of the old man on that first day, showing the old woman the photo from his wallet. Clue pulled his photo from his pocket and marched toward the children. Three rifles spun to point at him.

  “She’s with me.” He waved the photo, pointed at the closest child, a young girl. “I found this photo of the two of us in my pocket.” He went right up to the girl, who had brown skin and came up to his armpit. “I found you. I finally found you.” He gripped her elbow and led her toward the crowd.

  “Get back,” a grey-haired, bearded man shouted, rifle raised to his cheek.

  “She’s mine, you idiot,” Clue shouted back, waving the photo. His heart was hammering, his eardrums throbbing. “If we’re in a photo together she must be my daughter, or something.” As he led the girl toward the crowd, the man with the rifle tensed. Clue grimaced, anticipating the gunshot.

  He reached the crowd. The Asian woman gripped the young girl’s other hand. “Let’s get her out of here before they change their minds.”

  “Wait.” The girl tugged to free her hand from Clue’s. “We have to get Violet.”

  “We can’t,” Clue said. “I’m sorry. It won’t work a second time.”

  The girl stood her ground, eyes defiant. “Violet’s my best friend.”

  Clue swept her up in his arms and took off.

  “What are they doing?” the girl asked, looking back, as the screaming began. “Why are they crying? Violet?”

  “Don’t look,” Clue said. “Close your eyes.”

  The Asian woman led the way, turning left and right, making it difficult for anyone to follow. Finally she led them through a smashed-out display window, into a large clothing store. She wound between display racks.

  When they were near the back she motioned them to sit among jackets scattered on the floor. Clue set the girl down, his legs rubbery.

  The screams still rang in his ears. His chest hitched as he took a deep, rattling breath, trying to get hold of himself.

  “What did they do to Violet?” the girl asked.

  “They’re terrible men,” Clue said.

  “I know that,” she said. “What did they do to her? Did they—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did they push her?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl nodded.

  “They’re going after anyone who can’t defend themselves,” the woman said. “They emptied out a retirement home on the other side.”

  “What is going on?” Clue asked. “There must be a reason this is happening.”

  “How do we find it, though? No one remembers.”

  He emptied his pocket, unfolded the food wrapper and handed it to the woman. “I drew this with my own blood right before—” He cast about for the right words. Before what? “Before. Can you make any sense of it?”

  While the woman examined the drawing, Clue showed the toy soldier to the girl. “Watch this.” He bunched the soldier’s parachute in his fist and underhanded it toward the store’s high ceiling. It floated placidly to the ground.

  It made the girl smile, so he held it out to her. “Want to try?”

  She tossed it in the air, then scampered to catch it. He wondered why he’d had a toy in his pocket. Did he have a child somewhere? Was he or she being pushed off the edge at this very moment?

  Or was it the parachute he was supposed to pay attention to?

  “Do you have something you call yourself?” Clue asked the girl. She’d called her friend Violet; maybe she had a name, too.

  “All the girls picked flower names,” she said. “I’m Daisy. The boys picked animals.”

  “Hello, Daisy. I call myself Clue.” He’d saved this girl, this one delightful little girl with a leaf tangled in her curly hair and the eyes of a fighter. It was enough; it had to be. He had to put the others out of his mind.

  The woman handed the drawing to him, shaking her head. “I don’t understand it, either.”

  “What should I call you?” It felt good to have people to talk to. Clue had been too busy to realize how lonely he was.

  “I don’t know. Let’s see.” She looked at the ceiling. “If the girls are picking flower names, why don’t you call me Orchid?”

  “Orchid it is.”

  “I’m so hungry,” Daisy said.

  Clue looked at Orchid. “I have two cans of tuna left. That’s all. I’m willing to share.”

  Orchid nodded. “I have some. Come on.” Clue followed her out to the street, where she pointed at the building that towered over the rest. “We have to climb, though. I’m on the forty-first floor.”

  Clue nodded, gazing at the tower. It was grey, and came to a needle point at the top. “Smart move. Higher would be safer. Who would climb forty-one flights if they didn’t have to?”

  “I have about two dozen cans and packages. I’m willing to share it with a man who’d risk his life to save a child.” She raised her eyebrows, which were nothing but thin lines. “Why don’t we pick up your tuna and pool our resources?”

  The thought of having a companion, an ally, to navigate this hell sent a flood of gratitude through him. “Sounds good to me. I need to bring some other things, too. I’m collecting clues, to try to figure this out.”

  “Fair enough, Mister Clue,” Orchid said. “There’s plenty of room on the forty-first floor. It’s an office complex, not an apartment. No need to worry about noisy neighbors.”

  They did have to worry about what to do when their food ran out, though. Maybe there were vending machines higher up in Orchid’s tower. Whatever they did, though, the food was going to run out before long. Then things were going to get very bad. They were going to get terrible.

  3

  TRYING TO stay out of sight, Clue looked out through the shattered revolving doors, at the street. Eight people were standing around, or sitting on cars. At least three had guns, the rest carried pipes or knives.

  Night or day, there were always people on the street. Now was as good a time as any to go out. He turned to Orchid and Daisy.

  “Don’t look straight at anyone, but don’t let them think you’re afraid. Act like you know just where you’re going.”

  Clue wiped his palm on his shirt, got a better grip on the butcher knife. Orchid was clutching hers so hard her knuckles were white.

  “Here we go.”

  They stepped through the door frame and walked single file, Daisy in the middle. A tall, sunburned man noticed them, pointed them out. The group stopped talking. They turned to look at Clue, Daisy, and Orchid, who were all wearing tight-fitting clothes to make it obvious they had no food, and carried nothing except the knives. After conferring for a moment, the group turned away.

  The tightness in Clue’s shoulders relaxed. They weren’t worth the bullets. He didn’t think it would be much longer before everyone would be worth the bullets for the meat on their bones, but for now, if you could avoid being rounded up and thrown off the edge by Steel’s gang, you weren’t worth the bullets if you had no food.

  Just thinking the word food made Clue’s stomach clench, his mouth water. Hunger was nothing like he thought it would be. He expected to feel bad, but was unprepared for the terrible, maddening yearning. No matter how hard he tried to think of other things, his thoughts returned to savory gravy, hamburgers on soft buns, chocolate chip cookies, buttery crackers, chicken noodle soup.
His head pounded from hunger.

  He stepped over a body—a woman with red hair, her arms and shoulders covered in freckles. She had no visible wounds; she’d probably died of the diarrhea sickness. Orchid insisted they could avoid it if they boiled the water they got from the lake in the park. Clue didn’t see how she could know that, but then again he didn’t know how anyone knew anything. So they boiled their water.

  “This way.” Orchid pointed down a narrow street partially blocked by a delivery truck. In the distance, someone was screaming. It was one of the bad screams—not someone hungry or sick, but someone who was being hurt.

  They squeezed past the delivery truck. Beyond it thirty or forty bodies hung from light poles and power lines by lengths of white plastic-coated wire. Clue reached out to cover Daisy’s eyes, but she pushed his hand away. He led the way, his head down, passing through the shadows cast by the bodies.

  A flash of movement caught his eye: four people, men and women, coming out of a tenement building to their right. The grey-haired man in front was carrying a rifle. Clue froze as the man noticed him, half raised the rifle.

  “You.” The man lowered the rifle.

  Clue squinted, studying him. It was the old man he’d met at the edge on Day One. He laughed with relief, gave the man a little salute. “Good to see you again.”

  “Who is that?” Orchid asked.

  Clue explained as they met under the feet of some of the people who’d been hanged.

  “What a lovely day, eh?” Clue said after introductions were made.

  The old man, who called himself Poppy, smiled tightly at Clue’s attempt at humor. “You searching for food?”

  Clue nodded. “We’re down to two cans of beans.”

  Poppy folded his arms, looked up at the bodies hanging above the street. “The trouble is, you never know if somewhere has already been searched, until you see the door’s been kicked in. We’re all searching the same places over and over.”

  What scared Clue was the possibility that everywhere had been searched, and there was no more food.

  “The woman with you in the picture? Is she…?” Still alive, he meant to say, but he couldn’t.

  Poppy shook his head. “Disease. Ten days ago.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Orchid said. Clue nodded. At least she hadn’t been hung, or stabbed, or tossed off the edge. He wondered how Poppy had met up with these other people. One was young, somewhere between a man and a boy. The two women had some grey hair.

  “Will you excuse us for a second?” Poppy drew his comrades out of earshot, and a brief exchange ensued in low, urgent tones. Clue wondered what they were talking about.

  Poppy turned. “There are nine of us. We share what we find and we defend each other. Do you want to join us?”

  “Yes,” Clue said, before the last words were out of Poppy’s mouth. He looked to Orchid, raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes. Thank you so much. All of you.”

  “Don’t thank us, it’s mostly self-interest,” Poppy said. “No one bothers us if we move in bands and we’re armed.” He patted the shoulder of the young, pimple-faced man standing beside him. “There’s strength in numbers.”

  4

  EIGHT BIG, multicolored balls hung from the high museum ceiling. One was orange-red, one a mottled blue and white. One had a ring around it—like a halo, except around the middle.

  They meant something, these balls. They were important.

  Clue went back to working on his parachute. The seam was crooked, the stitches not as evenly spaced as on the toy soldier’s parachute.

  “There you are,” a voice behind Clue said. Poppy was standing in the doorway, hands on his hips. “I thought you were going on the foraging run.”

  The muscles in Clue’s neck tensed. “They had more than enough people. I decided to work on the chute instead.”

  Poppy eyed the chute. “Don’t waste too much time fooling around with that thing. We need to stay focused on not starving.”

  There was an awkward silence, during which Clue vacillated between anger and shame. He resented being chided; he didn’t need Poppy telling him what his priorities should be. At the same time, he wasn’t bringing in as much food as most of the others.

  “I’ve been thinking about the things in my pocket on Day One. Every man I speak to found a wallet in his pocket, with one of those laminated cards with their picture on it. I didn’t.”

  Poppy shrugged. “So?”

  “I think I got rid of mine on purpose. I think I wanted to make sure I only found three things in my pocket.” Clue picked up the toy soldier. “There’s a reason I put this in my pocket. I think it has to do with the parachute.”

  “What the hell are you going to do with a parachute?” Poppy threw his hands in the air. “Jump off a roof?”

  Clue looked at his hands. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Because we can’t eat it,” Poppy went on. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve got eighty-seven cans and packages of food in the lockup, and after that…” He folded his arms and huffed. “I vouched for you. Please don’t make me regret that.”

  It was true, he had. Clue would be dead by now if not for Poppy. So would Orchid and Daisy. Clue set down the parachute. “Fine. What can I do?”

  Poppy thought for a moment. “Boil some drinking water, then choose five cans out of the pantry for tonight’s meal and divide it up.”

  “Absolutely.” Clue rolled up the chute, tucked it under his arm.

  As he passed, Poppy clapped him on the arm. “Thank you.”

  Clue paused. “I’m not loafing. We need to figure out what happened. Until we understand the problem, we won’t know where to look for a solution, and if we don’t find a solution most of us are going to die. No matter how hard we look, there’s only so much food out there. Once it’s gone, there aren’t enough rats, pigeons, and bugs to keep more than a hundred people alive, and you know the Steels are going to make damned sure those hundred people come from among their numbers.”

  Poppy rested a hand on Clue’s shoulder. “How does making a parachute bring us any closer to understanding what happened?”

  Clue squeezed his eyes closed. “I sliced my thumb open and made a drawing with my blood. I put it in my pocket, along with a parachute and a photo. I must have had a reason.” Without waiting for an answer, Clue headed for the pantry.

  * * *

  FIRST MAKING sure no strangers were watching through the enormous front window of the museum’s ground floor, Clue retrieved the stepladder from against the high marble wall. He set it up in front of the massive elephant, posed with its trunk raised in the air as if charging, and climbed to the elephant’s open mouth to retrieve the key to the pantry.

  Lighting a torch from a pile set on the floor, he passed through a corridor filled with smaller animals, into a cavernous space filled with dinosaur skeletons. Beyond was a staircase leading to the lockup.

  Clue unlocked the massive padlock, set it on a shelf, and slid the key into his back pocket. When the tribe moved into the museum, they’d found the padlock already on the huge steel door, and the key on a ring of keys in a desk. It had been the most imposing padlock Clue had ever seen.

  The cans and packages were spread along the shelves. Eighty-seven of them. It wasn’t much, but to people starving on the streets it was a treasure. He hated going outside, seeing the people lying in the streets, too weak to do anything but beg.

  With his arms full of cans, Clue went around the corner to set them down on the table that served as their makeshift kitchen so he could relock the pantry.

  Down the hall from the table, Clue noticed a painting he hadn’t before. Colored balls in the night sky, surrounded by a gorgeous swath of bright stars. They were the exact same colors as the balls hanging from the ceiling in the other room. Maybe these balls belonged in the sky? The thing was, he’d looked into the night sky a dozen times, and never seen anything but stars and the moon. Had they disappeared as part
of whatever had happened?

  And what about all these animals? He knew they were supposed to be alive, walking around. Why were there no elephants or tigers in the world?

  So many questions. Clue sat, picked up the can opener, and began preparing plates to bring down to the whale room, where they ate their meals. He hoped like hell they’d found more food.

  5

  ORCHID WENT to salvage more wood for the fire, which was down to crackling embers. The light in the museum’s cavernous room had grown so dim Clue could barely see the giant whale hanging over them.

  Daisy was curled against him, face buried in the crook of his elbow, crying softly.

  “I know,” he whispered. For some reason the hunger was worst just after they ate. There was something about getting just a taste that set off a terrible, terrible yearning for more.

  “What if we opened one more can?” Clue asked. “There’s a can of peaches in the pantry.”

  “Peaches!” Daisy cried, raising her head.

  Poppy gave him a withering look.

  “What’s one can?” Clue asked.

  “Why not?” Fish said. He looked far too young to have such a dark beard. “We had a good day. We killed four rats.”

  The other five members of the tribe chimed in.

  Shaking his head, Poppy said, “All right. If that’s what everyone wants. Who am I to argue?”

  They headed toward the pantry, led by Poppy, who’d pulled a board out of the fire to serve as a torch.

  Orchid fell into step beside Clue. “You know, I’ve been thinking about your drawing. What if it means nothing?”

  Clue gave her a puzzled look.

  “What if it was just a final offering to some gods you believed in back then? Or maybe we were all delirious.”

  Clue smiled. He wondered if Orchid’s words were directed at the photograph as much as the drawing. “Maybe the Believers are right, and there was nothing before Day One. Maybe the gods drew the picture and cut my finger, as a test of my faith.”

  Orchid huffed impatiently. “The thing is, we have no idea what was going on, so why worry about the drawing?”