by John L. Monk
Despite being a pain in the ass, Jack couldn’t help but admire the other boy for his natural suspicion. He also appreciated his regard for the girl, but thought it was misplaced. There were way too many orphans now for anyone to help. Winter hadn’t officially started yet. When it did, Jack’s parents had predicted millions of so-called “survivors” would die from exposure and starvation.
“All right,” he said, pushing those thoughts away. “We’ll hide between those houses across the street. When they come back, we’ll slip off to the next neighborhood and find a car. Then you’ll finish learning how to drive.”
“What?”
“You said it yourself: we can’t walk the whole way, and definitely not with Mandy. So we need to drive—without crashing into any trees.”
“I can keep up,” Mandy said.
Jack smirked at Pete’s sudden loss for words and started across with Mandy. A second later, Pete joined them.
“We’ll wait here,” Jack said, indicating the waist-high power transformer. “If they come, we’ll hide behind it.”
“If?” Pete said.
Jack sighed. “Just be ready to move if you see headlights. When you see headlights.”
Ten minutes went by with the three of them sitting there on the military green transformer, waiting in the deepening cold. To her credit, Mandy didn’t complain. Pete, when he wasn’t talking, punctuated the silence with huffs and resigned sighs. Very irritating, particularly because it ramped up the situation more than it needed to be. Suggesting the gang was coming back hadn’t been some divinely inspired prediction of a future event. It was a hedge against a dangerous possibility—that they might return and want to get even. Anyone who called himself Blaze had to have a huge ego, and that kid, Mitch, had said he was mad at Jack for escaping.
“It’s been like an hour,” Pete said at one point.
“Twenty minutes, tops,” Jack said. “If they don’t come, you’re really leaving on your own?”
“I might.”
Jack snorted. “Not with my stuff.”
“You can’t carry it all—that’s why you need me.”
True enough. Also true he’d make sure they left with half the food, for Mandy’s sake, but Jack kept that to himself.
More time passed, and Jack began to think he’d been wrong. Just as he decided they should find a car with a full tank, light flared at the end of the street and a car roared their way, rap music thumping through the rolled-up windows. Then came another car. Then another. Now four cars were parked outside the house where they’d found Mandy. The music stopped and a group of about fifteen boys and girls with guns jumped out from every door and took up lazy positions around the cars.
Jack looked back at Mandy and held a finger to his lips: shh.
She covered her mouth and nodded.
He pointed behind them and whispered to Pete, “Head out that way and keep walking until you reach those houses. Can you see the playground?”
“Yeah.”
“Hang out there until I come.”
“You come too.”
“In a minute,” he said. “I need to see this. Don’t worry, I’ll be along.”
Pete nodded, took Mandy by the hand, and slunk away. Jack watched them go, making sure they were headed toward the distant playground equipment, then turned to the food gang.
One of them was the girl from earlier today—the one with the can of gasoline. All of them were of the older variety. About twelve to maybe fifteen years old. The news had said the older someone was the more likely they were to die of the Sickness. Gathering this many must have taken a lot of searching and a good amount of organization.
Jack’s year had been spent worrying about his parents and watching them slowly die, so he hadn’t had much time to think about himself or his friends, Greg and Lisa. The scientists said siblings had a better chance of either both dying or both surviving. With everything in him, he hoped for the latter. He couldn’t imagine one twin without the other.
A minute later, another vehicle pulled up behind the others. A shiny, yellow Humvee. The door opened and Blaze got out. He made an impatient circling gesture with his hands, and his people fanned out in front of the house.
“Hey, kid,” Blaze shouted, “you in there?”
He said something to one of the girls, and she approached the house. Hesitantly, she looked back.
“Get in there!” Blaze shouted, and she went in. He pointed at two nearby boys. “You and you, check those houses.”
The boys nodded and grabbed tools from the back of one of the cars, then ran to the houses bracketing Jack’s hiding place. He listened carefully for sounds of splintering wood, but didn’t hear anything. Then he remembered the door to the house they’d gone in had been pried open.
The section between them was dark, and he was mostly hidden behind the transformer. Still, when Blaze swept the area with his gaze, Jack thought his attention lingered a fraction longer on his hiding spot, as if sensing his presence the way a dog might.
Several minutes later, the girl and the others came back and gave their reports.
Blaze raised his voice. “If you’re there, come on out. You’re smart, and a good shot from what I hear.” The redheaded boy paused, waiting—for Jack to come rushing out with open arms, apparently. When that didn’t happen, he added, “Maybe you ran again. Or maybe you’re hiding somewhere listening to everything I’m saying. If you are, come by the high school and check out our setup. If you can find stuff and bring in good people, you eat. But if you cut deals behind my back, well … I’ll show you.”
Blaze said something, and a bound and gagged figure was dragged from one of the cars. Jack was fairly certain the prisoner was Mitch, the skinny kid who’d offered to let Jack go if he hid food for him.
The gasoline girl pointed and laughed, but she was the only one.
It was dark out, so Jack hadn’t seen the weapon strapped to Blaze’s hip. When he reached for the sword and pulled it from its decorative scabbard, Jack could hardly believe his eyes. It was a rapier—long, sharp, and deadly. Jack’s rapier.
Blaze grabbed his prisoner by the shirt and shouted, “If you’re with us, you’re with us. If you’re not, you get to rot!”
Jack winced at the boy’s muffled scream as Blaze drove the blade into his back. After he fell down, Blaze kept at him, stabbing him again and again to the cheers of the crowd around him.
6
For his eleventh birthday, a week after learning he had to one-up a runaway founding father and juvenile entrepreneur, Jack got a gift certificate to Atlantic Knives & Swords, a box of old kitchen knives, and a ledger book.
“Can I buy a sword, Dad?” Jack said, looking at the certificate for two hundred dollars in store credit.
“You thinking of chopping someone up?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Is this about that business you wanted me to start?”
His dad nodded. “It sure is.”
“How am I going to start a business?” Jack said. “Who wants to buy anything from me?”
That’s when his mom chimed in. “I do, actually. I’ll pay you twenty dollars to sharpen all my kitchen knives.”
Jack shook his head. “How am I supposed to do that? I don’t have, um … the uh, what’s it called again?”
“A whetstone,” his dad said. “You can also use sharpeners, but they won’t last very long, and they don’t do a good enough job.”
“I don’t have a whetstone.”
“That’s why you have that gift certificate.”
That afternoon, father and son went to the same shopping mall they’d seen the bullies in the week before. And even though there were lots of Saturday delinquents to question Jack about, they went straight to the shop and asked the man working the counter about whetstones.
The man, whose name was Henry, said they had a number of great stones, both coarse and fine. Perfect for restoring a blade from “death by a thousand broccoli cuts to factory perfection.”
> Though his dad seemed fascinated by the whetstones, Jack had eyes only for the swords.
The swords! Big and small. Wavy or curved or straight. Double-bladed or hooked near the end. Some were fantastical, with cool glyphs embedded in the steel and sparkling jewels in the hilts. Others were simpler in design, like out of history books. One wall had a bunch of samurai swords and tanto knives with wavy lines running up and down the blades.
“Can we get a sword?” Jack said when his dad came over to drag him back to the boring whetstones. “Please?”
Frowning in thought, his father turned to Henry. “How much is that stone you were telling me about?”
“That one’s sixteen ninety-nine,” Henry said. “It’s double-sided. You’re gonna want to level it first, and I recommend buying two for that purpose.”
“You do have instructional books, am I right?”
Henry nodded. “Yep. Books are ten dollars each.”
His dad bit his lip as if trying not to smile. “How much is that gift certificate again?”
“Two hundred dollars,” Jack said.
“Well, then, we have to spend the rest on something, don’t we?”
Jack’s delighted grin was easily the brightest thing in the store that day. When they returned home, they did so with a book titled “Techniques In Sharpening,” two double-sided stones, and a wickedly sharp rapier.
“What are you going to do with that sword?” his mom said when they got home.
Jack shrugged. “Hold it sometimes.”
“And?”
He sighed. “Hang it on the wall in my room. Dad already said.”
As neat as the sword was, Jack had to admit it wasn’t much use except as a curiosity.
The front of the book directed him to a website with a video on sharpening. Totally fascinating. By the end of it, he wanted to start on the box of dull knives his dad had picked up from a thrift shop, but he had to read the book first. It wasn’t long, and he skipped the section on serrated knives because he needed a file for those.
When he was ready, after soaking the stones in water the required amount of time, he set to work penciling a grid over each. Then he rubbed them together, just like the video had shown. Gently at first, and then with more force when he looked at the lines and saw uneven erasures in the pattern. It took about five minutes for the grid to vanish from each stone. It took longer to do the same for the fine stones because, being fine, they tended to remove less material.
Out of nowhere, his dad came up behind him and yelled, “Boooooo!”
Jack seized up, yelped, and nearly dropped a whetstone. “Jeez, Dad, what gives?”
His expression was serious. “What if you’d been holding a sharp knife just now?”
As irritated as Jack was at the childish prank, he had to concede the point. By concentrating so hard on grinding, he’d put himself in a position to be startled.
“It’s not fair,” Jack said. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”
“Of course not. I’m too sneaky. So what’s the lesson?”
Jack shrugged. “You want me to lock the door?”
“And what if you cut yourself and fainted from loss of blood? How would we know?”
Jack thought about that.
“Your back was to the door,” his dad said, relenting. “Turn your desk around and face it. Put your back to the wall, just like in the Old West. And try not to get so wrapped up in one thing you tune out the world. Very dangerous, not knowing what’s going on around you. Got it?”
Jack smiled. “Yep. Got it.”
The methods involved in knife sharpening were similar across the world, with a few subtle differences. All traditions required the knife be raised at a twenty-degree angle. But the Japanese preferred a perfectly straight, back-and-forward approach, whereas the Europeans held theirs at a slant to the stone. More surface area per pass meant more muscle, and Jack quickly decided the Japanese approach would work best for him.
For the next two hours, he practiced the first stage of sharpening the various knives in his thrift store collection. He found he could get the blades a lot sharper the more he practiced. It was all about turning his body into a kind of a machine. If he thought about it too much, he’d mess up and press too hard on the forward slide or throw his angle off. But by rocking forward and back—this side, then that side, every ten passes—his knife got so sharp he could easily cut notebook paper into strips.
When he applied the same methods to the finer stone, he could cut a tomato in half, lay it flat, and then slice off super thin pieces without holding it. That kind of perfection took three more hours of sharpening, and by the time he was done, his muscles ached and his hands were trembling from fatigue. But he’d done it—he’d sharpened all the knives in the box.
“So what do we do now?” Jack said. “Sell them?”
His dad shook his head. “They’re sharp, but they’re not pretty, and we don’t have a knife shop.”
“So how do we start a business?” A second later, when his dad didn’t answer, Jack’s eyes widened. “Oh, yeah, I see. Hey, that’s a cool idea.”
His dad smiled. “It’s what I did when I was your age. Pretty good money, too.”
When his parents were kids, the world had been a lot different. Back then, children could buy cigarettes and work in coal mines. These days, an eleven-year-old who showed up at someone’s door asking for knives to sharpen would warrant a frantic call to Child Protective Services. But nobody would object to a kid stuffing doors with flyers printed at an office supply store, so that’s what he did. Even his mom helped out, doing one side of the street while he did the other.
For a mere twenty dollars, the wording promised “Ferris Knives” would sharpen up to eight knives to factory-milled perfection, smooth out notches, and drastically reduce the drudgery of food preparation.
By the end of the day, the Ferris family had handed out all three hundred flyers. By the middle of the next day, four people called the number on the flyer. Some of them wanted more than eight knives done. Some wanted serrated knives, and Jack’s dad—who took the calls—said they were working on adding that to their list of services.
“We don’t mind helping with your business,” his mom said at one point. “But you can’t pick up knives from people’s houses.”
Jack pulled a snarky grin. “Why not?”
“We’ll get them for you,” she said, ignoring him. “But that’s a lot of driving, and your dad and I don’t work for free. So you’ll pay us five percent of whatever you make. That should cover gas, wear and tear on the car, and compensate us for our time. Deal?”
Jack stroked his chin like a shrewd businessman. “Would you take four percent?”
“No.”
Jack rubbed his chin some more, then stuck his hand out. “Okay, deal.”
Solemnly, they shook hands.
For the next month, he didn’t remember a time when his fingers weren’t sore. The flyers worked well. Too well. Satisfied customers told neighbors, friends, and family members, and rather than a slump after the initial canvassing, business increased. Pretty soon the home phone was ringing ten times a day, prompting another dip into his earnings to pay for a separate phone line and voicemail system. Jack was seriously considering telling his dad he’d learned his lesson—whatever that lesson was—just so he could take a break.
A week later, the new phone rang and his dad answered. He glanced at Jack, turned around, and spoke quietly for several minutes.
Before hanging up, he raised his voice. “Sure, Henry. Great idea. You got a deal.”
Jack—sensing he was somehow the topic of conversation—said, “What was that about?”
“That was Henry, from the knife shop. Seems he got an anonymous flyer in the mail. One of yours. His shop has a sharpening service, mostly for chainsaw blades and tools. He wanted to know if you’d be interested in picking up a little piecework.”
“And you said yes?”
“Jack!” his mom
said, shocked at his tone.
Jack swallowed. “Sorry, it’s just … ugh. I mean, this is a lot of work. I was hoping I could take a break. My fingers hurt.”
His dad sat across from him with a perplexed look on his face. “Then why are you still doing everything by yourself?”
Jack opened his mouth to answer and then closed it again. It was a good question. A great question.
Greg and Lisa were fast learners, and just as enthusiastic about earning a few extra dollars as he had been. They split the commissions 25/25/50, in Jack’s favor. After all, he had to pay for his parents’ time, the phone line, advertising, new whetstones, and a set of sharpening files, apparently. To their credit, his friends didn’t seem to mind.
Eventually, his dad created a sole proprietorship to keep the business as legitimate as possible—child labor laws notwithstanding. Jack, for his part, hastily learned double-entry accounting and helped with the taxes.
For the next two years, up until the Sickness went from a vague concern in the news to a full-blown panic, the three friends grew and managed their burgeoning business.
7
Jack lay motionless in the darkness, paralyzed with fear and disgust at the cold-blooded murder he’d just witnessed.
“Come on, dudes,” Blaze shouted, waving Jack’s sword over his head. “Fun’s over.”
The mean-looking girl jumped up on one of the cars and howled like a dog, bringing disgusted looks from the various boys and girls.
Blaze barely glanced at her. “Alice, quit screwing around and let’s go,” was all he said.
Alice stuck her tongue out, hopped down, and joined him in the big Humvee. After they left, Jack stood up and stared silently at the body in the street, stabbed through with his own sword. Something made for looking at, not for killing.
He turned around and started walking.
As he made his way across the field in the direction of the rendezvous playground, he thought about what he’d seen. There was more to it than simply Blaze being a crazy murderer. The violence had been controlled, with a purpose: to keep everyone in line, to instill fear. Saying he was nuts was a shortcut to a satisfying conclusion. In the new reality, where every house was a mausoleum, labels like crazy became harder to apply to people.
