Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  “I like your arms,” Ceria said. “I already asked my dad. He said I can have both of them when you’re done.”

  With blind rage, Tetra wrenched his body and tried to kick Ceria, but his bonds were too tight and he couldn’t reach her. Ceria jumped to her feet and giggled like she would at the unexpected reaction of a goat in a petting zoo.

  “Calm down, son,” Gordun said. “I know you must be scared. That’s fine. Everybody’s scared. Even I’m scared, you know? And do you know what scares me the most? It’s people who have seen the apocalypse with their own eyes and pretend it didn’t happen. They have seen their beautiful, proud civilization swept away in a storm of fire and brimstone, and yet they want to continue as if nothing happened. Mankind is on its knees and they want to continue collecting taxes and controlling people’s lives as if the world would continue just like before. But it doesn’t. That world of theirs that they’re clinging to doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s not coming back. They know it, but they don’t want to admit it because they’re scared. They’re scared because they were brought up to live in the old world. In the new world they won’t last much longer than a few days. They’re scared because they know they don’t have what it takes to survive in the new world. They still want to go to the supermarket and buy their pints of milk and their tomatoes and their sausages. But that world is dead. Gone! Dead! There are no more supermarkets and sausages. What there is is starving people, and these idiots want to cling to their miserable humanity and bury tons of perfectly good, healthy, and nutritious meat in a hole in the ground so the worms can have a feast while on the surface humans are starving! That’s insane, don’t you think? Look, I said to them, I have a family. We’re hungry. We need to eat. I need to feed my family. You all need to feed your families, I said to them, but you would all rather starve because in your delusional, twisted little minds you think you need to protect the sanctity of the bodies of dead people who simply don’t give a shit anymore. That’s what I told them. And they looked at me as if I was raving mad! A lunatic! Apparently, in this new world you’re a lunatic if you want to feed your family, if you want to survive. Well, all right then, let the righteous feast on their self-righteousness, but I will survive!”

  All of a sudden, Gordun produced a kitchen knife, its long blade glistening in the flickering light of the flames. Licking his lips and grinning in anticipation, he slowly approached Tetra. The boy was kicking his legs and wrenching his slender body, his desperate screams muffled by the handkerchief in his mouth. When Gordun had almost reached Tetra, the knife raised over his head ready to cut Tetra’s throat, he suddenly stopped. With his eyes wide open, his expression turned from that of a deranged madman into a grimace of pain and surprise. Accompanied by the deafening, terrified screams of Edna and Ceria, he slumped forward like a felled tree. In a reflex, Tetra spread his legs, and a fraction of a second later, Gordun’s face hit the ground between Tetra’s thighs, an arrow stuck in his back.

  When Tetra looked up, hyperventilating through his nose, he saw the boy with the auburn hair standing twenty meters away between two trees, his crossbow already armed with another arrow and aimed at Edna. Still screaming hysterically, she turned and ran. The boy kept his crossbow trained on her until she disappeared from sight. Then he aimed at the last remaining target, Ceria, who was standing by the fire, frozen with fear. As he approached the girl, he shouted, “Run, or I’ll shoot you!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, the girl ran off into the night.

  As soon as the boy removed his shackles, Tetra pulled the handkerchief out of his mouth, got on his knees, bent over forward and started coughing and gagging. He felt like vomiting, he wanted to vomit, but his empty stomach produced nothing but gall and gastric acid that he spat on the floor, his trembling body rocked by violent spasms.

  Squatting next to Tetra, the boy put a warm hand on his back and asked, “All right?”

  Still panting heavily, Tetra couldn’t speak. Instead, he flung his arms around the boy’s body and broke into a long series of sobs and wails. Initially rigid and unresponsive, the boy eventually relaxed, put both his arms around Tetra, and stroked his head to comfort him. “It’s over,” he whispered in Tetra’s ear. “You’re safe now.”

  When his crying fit finally subsided and his natural sense of shame outweighed his fear again, Tetra ended their awkward embrace, sat on the floor, and hugged his knees to cover his private parts. The other boy rose to his feet and looked around.

  “Where are your clothes?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tetra replied, wiping the last tears from his eyes and the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. “In the fire, I guess.”

  “Right.” The boy took his backpack off his back, opened it, and produced a knitted sweater. He threw it at Tetra. “This is all I have,” he said. “It’ll have to do until we can get you something else.”

  “Thanks,” Tetra said in a low voice, finding some comfort in the boy’s use of the word ‘we’. He put on the sweater. It was much too large for him, which in this case was a good thing, because it went halfway down his naked thighs when he stood.

  “Go sit by the fire. We don’t want you to get hypothermia.”

  While Tetra did as he was told, the boy started collecting more firewood.

  “What’s your name?” Tetra asked.

  “Aeneas,” the boy replied curtly. Tetra waited a few moments to give him the chance to follow convention and ask the same question in return, but apparently he had no such intentions. Trying not to take it personally, Tetra finally said, “I’m Tetra.”

  “You’re what?”

  “My name is Tetra. Well, my real name is Oliver, but people call me Tetra.”

  “Tetra, eh?” Aeneas snorted. “That must be the silliest name I’ve ever heard.”

  Only mildly offended, Tetra hurried to explain, “It’s because of my dad. His name is Orson Orwell Osmond. When he was in school, people started calling him O3 at first, because of his initials, and then Ozone because, well, O3 is the formula for the oxygen isotope ozone.” He looked at Aeneas for any remote sign of interest, but without a word the boy kept collecting firewood. “So anyway,” Tetra continued, “when my parents had me, for some reason they thought it’d be a great idea to name me Oliver Orson Orwell Osmond. So that’s O4, and O4 is tetraoxygen, hence the nickname Tetra.”

  Aeneas dropped the twigs and branches he had collected on the ground next to Tetra and said, “You talk too much.” Then he sat down and started feeding twigs to the ailing fire.

  “Right,” Tetra said, disheartened. “Sorry.”

  After a few moments of silence, Aeneas murmured, “That was bloody stupid!”

  “Hm?” said Tetra.

  “I said it was blood stupid of you! I told you to stay out of the bloody forest, didn’t?”

  “But I did!” Tetra protested. “I was walking along the road down to Kettering when I met these … people and …”

  Aeneas scowled at him. “The road cuts through the forest. Just because you have a ten-meter-wide strip with no trees doesn’t mean you’re not in the forest anymore, stupid!”

  “You told me to use the road!” Tetra protested.

  “My point is, you’re not supposed to be out here on your own at all if you can’t take care of yourself. If I hadn’t followed you, you’d be dead now!”

  Tetra stared at him in surprise. “You followed me?”

  “Of course I followed you, stupid! How else do you think I managed to save you in time? Do you think I heard your miserable cries for help from five miles away and then came running in two minutes? Bloody stupid!”

  “Why?” Tetra asked. “I mean, why did you follow me?”

  “Why, excuse me, your highness. It certainly won’t happen again!”

  “No no, that’s not how I meant it. I do appreciate it, obviously. I’m just wondering why, though. You said you’re not a babysitter and …”

  “And I’m not!” Aeneas interrupted
him. “I knew you wouldn’t last a day on your own, and I was right. What was I supposed to do? Let you walk straight into your demise?”

  Unsure what to say, Tetra stared into the fire.

  “You said you had family in Kettering?” Aeneas said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you with them? I mean, how’d you get separated in the first place?”

  Tetra told him the whole story, from Olivia’s phone call and his father’s departure to how he had lived through the impact and its aftermath, leaving out no detail. When he ended, there was a long silence until Aeneas finally said, “Well, don’t get your hopes up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked Tetra in the eyes. “Your family is probably dead is what I mean.”

  “Don’t say that,” Tetra said despondently.

  Aeneas shrugged. “Or they’ve abandoned you.”

  “My dad would never abandon me!” Tetra stared into the fire again, his eyes welling up. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t considered the possibility. He had considered all the possibilities, and he had found that the only thing that kept him alive was hope. If he allowed himself to give in to the notion that he might never see his father again—for whatever reason—he might as well kill himself. Not because he didn’t have the skills to survive on his own in a post-apocalyptic world, but because he was lacking the motivation to do so. He knew he needed someone—anyone really—he could be there for and share things with. Didn’t everybody? How could anyone be happy to be a hermit?

  “So what about your parents then?”

  “I don’t have any parents,” Aeneas said.

  “Everyone has parents.”

  “Fine! My mother died in childbirth.”

  “And your father?”

  Aeneas shrugged. “Don’t know. Never met him. I’ve been living with my granddad until he died last year.”

  “And have you been on your own ever since?”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Nothing. I’m just asking.” Tetra shrugged. “Aren’t you going to school then?”

  “I’ve never been to school. My granddad taught me all I need to know.”

  “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can read!” Aeneas said. “What, do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No, not at all. It’s just, I’ve never met anyone who never went to school before.”

  “Well, now you have.”

  “So where do you live?”

  “In my granddad’s cottage in a patch of woods near Wansford.”

  “That’s quite a distance from here,” Tetra said.

  “So?”

  “So what are you doing out here?”

  “Hunting, what do you think?”Aeneas pointed at the rabbit that was still tied to his backpack. “You think I bought that at the supermarket?”

  “Are you going to eat that?”

  Aeneas rolled his eyes. “No, I’m going to stuff it and put in on the mantelpiece. Of course I’m going to eat it, stupid!”

  “No, I mean, are you going to eat it … now?”

  Aeneas looked at him with the shadow of a smile on his face. “You’re hungry, huh?”

  Tetra grinned sheepishly.

  “You know what? I’m hungry.” Aeneas pulled his knife out of the sheath that was strapped to his hip. “Have you ever skinned an animal?”

  Tetra hugged his knees a little tighter and shook his head anxiously.

  “Looks like today’s your lucky day then.”

  Tetra looked on nervously as Aeneas took the rabbit and cut a ring around each of its hind legs. Then he sliced the skin from the rings to the animal’s backside. He put the knife aside, and with his fingers he started pulling the poor creature’s skin off its legs until he reached the tail. He took the knife again and cut through the rabbit’s tailbone. “Careful when you cut the tailbone,” he said. “You don’t want to puncture the bladder and squirt rabbit pee all over yourself. Or over the meat, for that matter, because that would ruin it.”

  “Right.”

  “All right, now this is where you come in. Grab the legs.”

  Tetra stared at the dead animal, beginning to feel a little queasy.

  “Come on,” Aeneas said impatiently. “One hand around each leg. Hold them very firmly.”

  Reluctantly, Tetra grabbed the rabbit’s hind legs. He tried to touch only the furry paws, not the parts of the legs that had already had their skin removed, but Aeneas shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “You have five fingers on each hand, not just three. Grab the legs properly with both hands and hold them very tight.”

  When Tetra finally did as he was told, Aeneas pushed his fingers beneath the rabbit’s skin and clenched them around the already loosened flaps. “All right,” he said. “Now pull.”

  Tetra shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Of course you can do that. I’m holding the skin. All you have to do is pull. If you can peel a banana, you can do this. Come on, big boy.”

  Tetra sighed and started pulling very slowly. It took him less force than he’d expected, but he winced as he pulled the rabbit out of its skin. It wasn’t a pretty sight, so Tetra tried not to look too closely. He loved eating meat, but he had never put much thought into the steps—apart from cooking it—that were necessary to turn something that used to have a face and walk around into a meal. Out in the wild they were animals, in the supermarket freezer they were just meat. He had never consciously made the connection between the two.

  When he had pulled the rabbit out of its skin up to the neck, Aeneas said, “Hold on.”

  Tetra stopped pulling. Aeneas took the rabbit from him, placed one hand around the body, the other around the head, and with a quick twist he separated the two.

  “Here,” he said and dropped the head with the rabbit’s entire skin still attached in Tetra’s lap. “A dozen of these will make you a nice fur coat. Although …” He looked him up and down. “… eight will probably do. You’re tiny.”

  Gingerly, making sure not to touch the head, Tetra picked up the fur and placed it on the ground. He felt uncomfortable about the casualness with which Aeneas seemed to be introducing him into the secrets of a life he was not seeking—the life of a hermit who lived off the land—and the way it implied that this new life was already a done deal.

  With the rabbit’s carcass in his hand, Aeneas moved to the other side of the fire where there was a large flat rock lying on the forest floor. He placed the carcass on the rock and told Tetra to hold it in place. Tetra complied, and Aeneas slit the animal’s belly open with his knife. When he broke the breastbone and cut through the rib cage, Tetra winced again and turned up his nose. “Ugh, that smell!”

  “It’s the inside of a dead animal,” Aeneas said as he kept cutting. “What did you think it’d smell like? Roses?”

  Still holding onto the rabbit with both hands, Tetra pressed his nose against his shoulder. “No, it’s just … it’s a bit disgusting, but never mind.”

  “You’ve never been hungry before, have you? I’m not talking about your regular five-hours-after-lunch kind of hungry where you might order a pizza or simply open the fridge. I’m talking about real hunger. Like when you haven’t eaten in two or three days.”

  “No,” Tetra said.

  Aeneas nodded. “I didn’t think so. You’ll be surprised how good this will smell to you when you’re really hungry. All right, now lift it up and hold it right above the rock.”

  Tetra held up the rabbit while Aeneas put down his knife. He inserted two fingers at the top end of the rabbit’s gaping rib cage and scooped out its entrails with a swift downward movement. Tetra didn’t dare look at the gory mess as the entrails splattered on the rock below.

  “Give me that,” Aeneas said and took the disemboweled rabbit from Tetra. “Now open your hands.”

  As Tetra reluctantly made his hands in the shape of a bowl, Aeneas went through the entrails. He picked up the rabbit’s heart, liver, an
d kidneys and dropped them in Tetra’s hands. “Appetizers,” he said and winked. “The rabbit will take a while to cook. We can roast these separately on a stick.”

  “Yay,” Tetra said with as much as enthusiasm as he could muster.

  * * *

  After dinner, which despite a lack of salt and spices had been surprisingly tasty, Aeneas stood up and walked away from the fire.

  “Where are you going?” Tetra asked.

  “I’m going to take a shit!” Aeneas shouted back. “You wanna help me with that?”

  Tetra didn’t reply. He was still trying to figure out how to deal with Aeneas’s ambivalent personality which could be quick-tempered one minute and gentle, almost affectionate, the next. Tetra didn’t want to alienate him. He was too grateful, not only because Aeneas had saved his life but also for his company. Until he had met him, Tetra hadn’t realized how lost and lonely he had felt in the last few days. Still determined to make it to Kettering and find his father, he was secretly hoping for Aeneas to stick around, both as a companion and for protection. Tetra just had to make sure that Aeneas didn’t feel like a babysitter.

  When Aeneas returned to the fire, he said, “I’ve found your shoes,” and dropped them in Tetra’s lap.

  “Thanks!” Tetra said and examined them. They were a bit damp on the inside but otherwise undamaged, so he placed them close to the fire to dry.

  “Who knows,” Aeneas said, “maybe they didn’t burn all your clothes after all and we can find them in the morning when the light’s back.”

  “You said you were following me. Didn’t you see what they’ve done with my clothes?”

  “Well excuse me, but I was busy keeping my eyes on you, not on your pants. Besides, I had to keep my distance so they wouldn’t see me, so forgive me if I didn’t catch every single detail of your little misadventure, your highness.”

  “Sorry I asked,” Tetra said. After a few long moments of awkward silence, he asked, “Is this where we’re going to spend the night then?”

  Aeneas nodded. “Fire’s gonna keep us warm and keep predators away. Not that there are many of them left, but you can never know. Anyway, no point wandering around in the dark trying to find a better place that probably doesn’t exist anyway. This is as good a place as any.”