by David Nell
John Paul stopped. Overhead, a poplar swayed. He turned to the stranger.
The stranger said, "Look, I'm trying to say I'm sorry...to apologize to you for any bad behavior and you just ain't listening to me. I don't get it. I've gone out of my way for you. Are you just a mean old person? Is that it? Here I am, trying to make friendly with you and you just keep on walking. What gives?"
John Paul watched him a moment. He too, had been without company for some time and his manners, which formerly were regarded as impeccable, had perhaps slipped by the wayside. He'd read up in books and websites and newspaper articles on rules and etiquette and faux pas, but that was then and, without those resources, found himself wanting. Ashamed, he looked away.
"Sorry," said John Paul. Not satisfied, he looked the stranger in the face and said, "I'm sorry."
The stranger nodded. "That's better," he said. "That's much better. Let's you and me head down to that river we saw yesterday and get ourselves cleaned. What do you say?"
John Paul hated bathing outdoors, but in order to keep his new companion in better spirits, led him down the ravine and toward the waterway slicing through the horizon.
The old mill sat near the river and, best they could tell, had gone unused for nearly two hundred years. Once it had been a bustling center of activity. Folks came from miles about to work or gather or find out the latest goings-on. The days of mills and their importance had come and gone, long before the next days had come and gone, but what remained were ruins. The mildewed, moss covered bricks closer to the foundation had been left alone and in place, but where the others disappeared to were anyone's guess. Long gone was the wheel, the millers, the everything. John Paul took a seat at the foundation while the stranger removed his coat.
"When I was a young one," the stranger said, "I used to like to swim in the river. I never took to snakes much, so I'd send my brother in first to splash around and such so maybe he'd scare them off. Every time, he'd go in first until one day he saw a moccasin just easing on down the creek toward him. After that, he'd scream and cry and say 'Please don't ask me to go in that water first, please,' and carrying on like a little baby. And every time, you know what would happen?"
John Paul looked at him, watched him slip out of his second coat.
The stranger continued: "I'd just throw him in. I'd tell him 'no, you don't have to go in first' and promise him and say 'Let's shake on it' and no sooner would I get up on him to shake on it than I'd chuck him in and he'd splash and cry and scream, scared to the dickens, and you know what? Weren't no snake worth his shit going to be nowhere near all that carrying on."
He laughed and laughed and John Paul fingered the laces on his boot.
"You going in?" asked the stranger.
"I don't think I will," said John Paul. "I'll dip my feet in from time to time, but I don't aim to get wet outdoors."
"What, are you scared to get wet? Like a kitty cat?"
John Paul sighed. "It ain't that," he said. "I just don't aim to get wet."
Content to leave it be, the stranger shimmied out of his britches until he had nary a stitch on him and goose-stepped down to the river. He leapt in the water and, no sooner had he gone under than he was back up again, howling and hollering about how cold was the water. He kicked and splashed around a bit and John Paul wondered how far down the road he'd get if he up and left.
Then the stranger got to calling, saying how John Paul had to come see and he hoisted himself up on the riverbank and flopped down on the ground like an otter and scooted away, still hollering for John Paul to come see. John Paul did, leaving behind the ruins. He stepped alongside the stranger and followed the direction in which he pointed. Down in the cloudy river, along the rocks, the stranger insisted something was down there and he should look, no, get a little closer, look, just over by that rock, a little closer – and pushed John Paul into the river.
When John Paul came up the man laughed hysterically, naked and rolling about in the muck. John Paul said nothing, stood there wet, his only clothes in the world soaked and dripping. He climbed out of the river and stalked up the hill toward the ruins.
"Oh, come on," said the stranger. "Can't you take a joke? How long's it been since you laughed?"
John Paul found a cold, mildewed brick from the old mill which had been worn thin by time and season, then stomped back down the hill.
Two and a half months earlier, while the others still had yet to go, John Paul found himself quick with a smile. The others spat forth little more than questions, doubt and despair, but John Paul forced himself to keep a sunny disposition. Not so much for himself, he figured, but for the others. Within six weeks, they all were gone. Suddenly, he was no longer compelled to think of anyone but himself.
They never liked the woods. The four that ran off preferred the city and sought to live within its centers. John Paul and those that remained never heard anything from those city centers besides gunshots and screams and, eventually, those died away as well.
He stood over the stranger still warm. Something – who could guess what – brought this lot upon them all. Deed or decision, John Paul cared not. Some folks, in the earlier days, referred to it as Hell. He had thoughts that swayed a different way.
One day, he reckoned, he would have to answer. He'd have to answer for the stranger, for the man gone crazy all that time before, for not going into the city...He'd have plenty to answer for from before, long before all of mankind up and left. He'd imagined it so many ways. A god come down from the heavens, an angel in man's clothing, an angel in woman's clothing...He fancied himself sitting somewhere, anywhere, possibly even over the body of the stranger.
He picked up a stone and threw it down the ravine and waited, but never heard it splash in the river below. If that angel come, he thought, he'd not have to explain himself. For all he knew, he defended mankind. He kept his race alive. He reckoned if he should be congratulated for his efforts, he'd have but one request.
He'd ask to be left alone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eryk Pruitt is a filmmaker, author, and screenwriter living in Durham, NC. His short film "Foodie" has won numerous awards at film festivals across the country. His short fiction has appeared in Avalon Literary Review, The Speculative Edge, Mad Scientist Review, and Pantheon Magazine. His post-apocalyptic short story is being adapted by CinemaFuel Productions into a short film this year. He is currently shopping his first novel and his complete list of credits can be found at erykpruitt.com.
THE FORTY-SEVEN
Jesse Harlin
Word spread quickly that Gavin was back. Word always spread quickly. At Dinner Meet, forty-five of the Forty-Seven would gather in the lodge hall, eat, and then listen to Gavin's news. Only those on watch in the Crow's Nest would be missing, and Bette Thomson would take plates to them once everyone else had eaten. This month, it was the Byers' turn to cook. Everyone had learned by now, unfortunately, that Chas Byers had no sense of taste. It would be another two weeks of over-salted everything before Mrs. Dennings took over the galley. Before Dinner Meet, Gavin would be quarantined in the infirmary, resting and bleeding, poked and patched back together by Dr. Wood and her usual battery of tests.
These were the long nights, the bleary stretch of depressive cold where even daylight feared to show its face for long. Sundown was just after 1630. Like every night, its arrival was announced by the hammering and rehammering of the all-shut pinging across the network of pipes that snaked their way through each deck of Mother Qingdao's Promise. Four...Seven...Ten times the all-shut sounded each dusk and, as the last pangs of the message beat across Mother's skin, the generators rumbled to life. The universe groaned with the multi-timbral moaning of Pradeep's steel shutter system locking down. Before 1650, Mother was secure and the generators spun down for the long night.
The savory sweat of stew clung to the air of the lodge hall. At the far end was the makeshift galley and Chas Byers up to his elbows in forty-seven portions of dinner. The rhythmic clanking at his side
was his son, Ayden, as he bashed mashed potatoes into submission with a monkey wrench in one of the large metal pots. For her part, tiny Haley Byers was stacking the hodgepodge of salvaged plates on the long folding table. The two simple words "be careful" had become her whole world and Haley was treating each chipped and nicked plate as an heirloom so as not to let down her dad.
Ricardo Ortiz was their first in line. He was a solid chunk of humankind, six foot huge with an oil drum chest and brutally shorn hair. Haley handed him a plate directly, a red plastic orphan with a melted edge. Ricardo gave the little girl a head-nod hello that she returned simply by staring at him.
"Chas."
"Ricardo."
"What's on the menu tonight?"
The older man was ladling a spreading brown mix of vegetables and lumps onto the outstretched plate. "Stew."
Ricardo snorted. "You need meat to call it stew, compa."
Chas gave his huge customer a weak smile and a dinner roll. He looked tired. "Angela says she's been experimenting and figured out how to make tofu out of the sesame seeds Gavin brought back a few months ago." Ricardo cursed under his breath reflexively, but caught himself with a grimace and apologized to the two kids for his language before grabbing a fork and moving off towards a seat. He was halfway done with his meal when he was joined at the table by the current water treatment crew. Gary Keung looked too old for his age. They all did. His fatigued eyes offered Ricardo a half-hearted eyebrow salute as he sat down.
"'Sup, dude." Ricardo didn't offer an answer. Gary hadn't expected one anyway. Jim Hickston tried to pull a chair out for his dad, Ollie, but the elder Hickston waved away the help.
"I can get it," he groused. His son rolled his eyes and took the seat directly across from Gary. "Evening, Ricky. How's Chuck's mush tonight?"
Ricardo chuckled. "Evening, sir." Ollie Hickston was in his early sixties and both his teeth and voice were stained from years of smoking. He loved to regurgitate trivia from years past about long-dead people or half-remembered, half-imagined war chronicles from Kosovo. Sometimes Ollie told stories about his wife. Sometimes he simply retold episodes of whatever sitcoms he could remember. Ollie was their link to Before, the desiccated and fading remains of Wikipedia in the sun-spotted skin of an aging old man.
His son was tired of the stories, though. Depressed and medicated before the end of everything, Jim simply longed for it all to fade away. He could barely recall anything anymore out of the corners of his cardboard box brain – snatches of sunshine, a few lyrics from the national anthem, how his ex-wife looked in that yellow sundress at...someone's wedding – but it was all distant, all irised down to narrow points of sentiment that squirmed when he reached for them and blurred at the edges. Everything else was Mother Qingdao's Promise. Everything else was work and survival, Chas Byer's stew and the morning all-clear. His father's stories were an obnoxious intrusion, vacation slides of a family and a life and a world that no longer existed beyond Mother's walls, and he simply wanted to forget it all and shamble forward.
An explosive caterwaul meant that school had arrived. Mother's younger children ran for the galley where they greeted the Byers kids with excited smiles and late-day art projects that they had missed by helping their dad prep for Dinner Meet. Miss Oon trod the meeting lodge's scavenged boards with the older children, a small knot of teens and tweens not yet old enough to shoulder the full mantle of adulthood inside Mother's steel guts.
Behind them, President Keats crossed the room slowly. He grimaced. He rubbed his temples one-handed. He puffed out his cheeks and loosed a long, slow sigh as he made his way to the galley where he fell in line behind Nick White.
"Hey, Josh," Nick smiled over his shoulder.
"Hi, Nicolas." Keats attempted to smile back, but it just came off as a thin-lipped smirk.
"Y'okay?"
Keats sniffed and vigorously rubbed both hands through his thinned hair. When he looked up, he pulled off a true smile. "No, I'm fine, Nick. Thanks. I'm just...tired. How's Mother today?" Nick took the bait and launched into an account of the broken hatch on B Deck and the new catch that Hockstendt was welding for him. The aft pantry's lights had been fixed but replacement bulbs were running low. Ressman had found a shutter panel that had come off of its track and could have been pried open from the outside, but he and Serra had fixed it and so crisis had been adverted. All of it washed over Keats as unfocused noise. He didn't want to talk with Nick. He didn't want to talk to anyone. Keats just wanted to sit and eat and then get to Gavin's news, so when Nick offered to let Keats take a plate before him, the older man silently celebrated the opportunity to end the small talk and seclude himself with his evening meal. With dinner in one hand and a chipped mug of Doug Meyer's work-in-progress homebrew beer in the other, Keats seated himself a few seats down from Lyle Dell and at the edge of the lodge hall's makeshift stage. Lyle was busy trying to scrape food into the ancient and unresponsive mouth of Harold Johns.
"Four years in, Josh, and we still haven't settled the euthanasia debate," was all that Lyle offered as a greeting. Keats didn't respond.
More of the Forty-Seven dribbled into the evening congregation. For two hours, Mother would sit idle as her parasitic tenders murmured pleasantries to each other over Chas Byers' fauxfu stew. They would share stories about what had been fished out of the purification filters that morning or inform each other about the new door that was on the "permanently open" list due to the failure of another part that would never be manufactured again. They would distract each other. They would make due. They would continue. They would do whatever it took to myopically focus on the here and soon or the long distant, but not the recent. Never the recent. Focusing on the recent meant they would all clot into a blubbering and suicidal scab of madness only to pick each other apart and bleed out by morning.
After he had finished eating, President Keats sat silently listening to the sounds of Dinner Meet – the scrape of forks, the ripple of mindless table talk, the occasional bursts of laughter or the unruly squirming of the little kids. He closed his eyes. The room sounded simplenormal. There were odd patchwork memories that he held the sounds up against – the cafeteria at the California Academy of Sciences, the food court at Metreon – but they all seemed quaint and ancient like cartoons from two centuries ago. The mere concept of a mall was some kind of obscene joke, a grand middle finger stretching across from the have-everything past into the fuck-all now.
A chair squeak brought Keats back to Mother. Dr. Olive Wood sat down across from the President. Without a meal, without any pleasantries, she set about rolling one of Pak's cigarettes.
"How is he?"
Dr. Wood shrugged. "He'll survive. This time." Keats turned his head to the makeshift stage. "He was gone a long time, Joshua." Keats didn't respond. "I almost gave up on him."
"He came back." President Keats stared at nothing and idly picked at his fingernails with an arrhythmic pick-pick-click. "He always does." Wood ignored his fidgets as she lit the small cigarette with a salvaged lighter and took a drag.
"Did he tell you where he was?" Keats asked, quickly turning to face the woman across from him. She looked exhausted. Her shoulder length mud-blonde hair was stringy from a lack of enough motivation to shower. There were stains on the cuffs of her blouse. Some of it was blood. None of it was hers. Dr. Wood exhaled noisily out of the corner of her mouth.
"It's the worst idea you've had yet," she said and started to chew her upper lip. Keats didn't argue. He just looked back at the stage. Wood rapped her lighter twice on the tabletop. When Keats turned back to her, the doctor gave a sharp head nod in the direction of the lodge hall's main entry portal. President Keats pivoted in his seat to find Gavin emerging out of the steel shadows.
Gavin Marr had scars. He collected them like merit badges. Each run he made Outside meant more treasures, more stories, and more merit badges carved into the flesh beneath his makeshift armor. Dr. Wood patched him up as well as she could, but Gavin liked the scars. Each scra
ped knuckle or thorn-torn nick in his neck was the tally of another successful scouting run, so Gavin routinely ignored Wood's complaints and picked at his scabs to help them along. He hadn't originally been the only scout. He was simply the luckiest of the scouts, and outside of Mother's walls, luck meant everything.
In his left hand, Gavin carried two red canvas sacks with black handles. Two more identical bags were slung over his right shoulder. The bags were filthy, as was everything from Outside. Dirty scuffs and tears had ruined what were once a set of uniformly carnelian red duffle bags. Gavin seemed to struggle under their weight, but his wrapped right ankle masked the true source of his limp.
When he noticed Gavin enter the hall, little Booker sprang from both his chair and the controlling grasp of Miss Oon and dashed across the floorboards with the same banshee wail of Gavin's name that always made Jim Hickston plug his ears. Gavin smiled, though less than usual, and moved to set his canvas cargo down on the edge of the stage. He glanced at President Keats, but Keats was staring at his fingernails and Gavin looked away. Without care or consideration, Booker jumped at Gavin for a hug, but the scout wasn't ready for the assault and Booker clung awkwardly to Gavin's arms and slid down his front with the ritualistic cry of "Whatdidyoubringme!"
"Booker! Get off of him!" Dr. Wood barked through a mouthful of smoke. Gavin was wincing through the boy's hug and Wood hoped that he hadn't torn any of his bandages. Around the hall, Gavin's arrival marked the end of dinner. Colleen Dowden urged her husband Zach to hurry up and finish his potatoes. Big Sean wiped his mouth on his flannel cuff. Gio Cielo stole the last bite of his son Michael's dinner roll, prompting a disapproving smack on the arm from Gio's wife and resident laundry mistress, Paula. Forks scraped plates and last sips were downed amid the chatterbuzz that always accompanied Gavin's reappearance.
