by T. K. Malone
“Be another twelve years before they can ‘nap him. No, I ain’t worried. They’ll blow us all up before then.”
“All of us? Maybe. But they’re taking more and more kids to go fight the war. Something’s escalating.”
“Free World won’t tell you the truth,” Teah muttered. “They spin more lies than a spider spins webs.” She felt her stomach clench. Just the thought of the future was enough to get her riled.
“So, you don’t believe they defend us against the festering evil over the ocean?”
“No, Lester, I don’t believe in shit. It’s all irrelevant to me.”
“Spoken like a true gridder.”
Lester grunted and tipped his cattleman up. Teah wondered why she let the old man’s chatter get to her. Fair is fair, and right is right, and wrong is wrong, she thought, and thinking about stuff she couldn’t change, well, that wasn’t for her, not any more. One man’s right is another man’s wrong and there’s no use arguing about it because it wouldn’t fix anything. Clay was all that mattered now.
“They’re gonna kill us all,” she said, but had no heart in her words.
“Then you might just as well have stayed and had it ended. Either way, he’s got no future.”
Teah looked at her son, at Zac’s son. “He’s got a future all right.”
Lester pushed himself out of his chair, an old rocker that was long past threadbare, bent to pick the little boy up and came back and sat down. Bouncing him up and down on his knee, he smiled and laughed as the youngster gurgled and spluttered. “This ain’t no place to bring up a kid,” he said.
“They used to,” Teah pointed out.
“Did they? Or did they have villages, little communities? Hell, at least someone closer than a few miles off.” He smiled at the boy, the way Teah imagined a grandfather would have once done.
“It’s safer up here.”
“With an old man who just ain’t gonna stop getting older? Even Jake up and left. He’ll be back from time to time, though. He’s waiting for me to die so he can have the shack.”
“He’ll have to take it from me,” Teah muttered, then checked herself. “’Course, you aren’t going to die any time soon.”
Lester looked her up and down. “Why not? I’ve done all my livin’”
The old man had a way of cutting through the bullshit, Teah thought. In her mind, she knew she couldn’t hide out here forever. She was desperate to see Zac, to get word to him, to explain—or try to—why she’d left, but she understood it was out of the question. Even if she got word to him, there was no guarantee he would come. There was no guarantee he’d still be interested. She had only one person to thank for being able to think such thoughts, and he was holding Clay, as near to a father to the boy as he was going to get.
From that first day on, Lester had taught Teah to hunt with a knife, a bow or a trap. He hadn’t even waited for her arm to heal. Fair play to the old man, she’d thought. Once he’d decided she was to live, he’d put all his energy into it. He’d even let her use the gun once, but shot was too precious, at least it was if you lived away from everyone else. Now, though, his work was done, and Lester didn’t do too much, but he did like sitting on the stoop. She got him a mug of fresh water.
“Jake will come back,” he said again. It was his mantra; he recited it every hour. It was like his body was failing, so his advice needed retelling. “He will come back and kill you.”
“How do you know?” she said, taking little Clay from him.
“Because he thinks this place is his. Thinks he earned it looking after me.”
“Was he?”
“Was he what?”
“Looking after you. Sure looked the other way around, to me.”
“Mad eyes, girl; he has the mad eyes. He’d have done me in by now if it weren’t for you. No, he’s gone away, but he’ll be back.”
Teah pushed her hand through her black hair. It had grown long now. She only let it get about shoulder length before taking a knife to it. She’d shaven it clean off soon after Clay had been born, but Lester had hated it, so she’d let it grow back.
“I haven’t got anywhere to go, and if I had, I wouldn’t go anytime soon.”
“Best thing I ever did,” Lester muttered.
“What?”
“Letting you live so you could see me die.”
“Some favor that was.”
“It weren’t no favor, trust me.”
She looked at Clay. “Sure it was.”
“Promise me. Promise me you’ll be long gone. This place isn’t for you. There’s a prepper compound up the valley. Mad organized, so I’m told. Even the army don’t go up there. You should try that. It’s a decent community. Youngsters. Everything.”
“Preppers? What they prepping for? The end? Once it’s ended, it’s ended.”
He grunted. “Beats me; life I guess. I suppose they think they can survive,” and he coughed, the sort that tells you Satan’s knocking. “Promise me you’ll look into it.”
“You know I can’t do that. I’ve got your sorry ass to look after.”
“Should have killed you,” he muttered, pulling his cattleman off and putting it on the deck. “I like the sun on my face now.”
Teah put Clay down in his little cot. It wasn’t the best-crafted thing, being made from timber retrieved from the mine, but it served a purpose, and Lester had made it. He wasn’t the bastard he’d made himself out to be, at least not to her. Would Jake really be a problem? She couldn’t tell. He hadn’t stuck around more than a couple of weeks once he’d realized Lester was going to let Teah stay. One to sulk was Jake, definitely one to sulk.
He was an odd one, too. Never made eye contact with her, not once. Maybe he was just frightened of girls, like Lester had said, or maybe he was just frightened of competition. Either way, he’d just up and left without a word.
Ever since then, Lester had been worried about him coming back, and that worry had taken its toll, that or the winter. Lester had gone downhill fast these last few months, and he wasn’t showing any sign of getting better. He’d begun to blame the mine, reckoned it had done in his lungs, but Teah had never been that close. She hated confined spaces, hated the dark ever since she’d had to crawl out of the city. Ever since she’d had to crawl through those pipes, the ones where she’d found Zac’s brother, Connor, that day. She often wondered about him, but for some reason her brain wouldn’t let her wonder too hard.
“You going to cook that rabbit?” Lester asked.
“Later. There’s an hour till dusk.”
“May as well have a nap, then,” and Lester said no more.
Teah stayed in that shack for a couple more weeks, but without Lester, it just wasn’t the same place. She buried him in the soft earth and scree beside the mine. The old man probably deserved more, probably, but she really hadn’t known him. He’d never said a whole lot, not about his life, nor how he’d ended up where he had. He’d never said a lot about anything, apart from to warn her to keep away from the mine, and watch out for Jake—both problems solved by leaving. One thing she had learned from him was how to hunt. One thing she’d learned from being a stiff was how to defend herself. One thing she’d learned about having a child, you couldn’t fight or hunt with one. She knew she needed to start again. Whatever else, Lester had served a purpose. She’d hidden away for two years. She’d survived. Clay had survived. Now she had to take a chance.
Lester had told her that preppers were up the valley. Teah had heard of their communities, but although appearing safer, she knew they were on the government’s target list of things to shut down. She could come across a snitch anywhere, a small town or a village, but more than likely every prepper community had already been infiltrated. No, she needed to be wiser than that. She needed to hide in plain sight.
Taking the cart, she filled it with what she could, damned sure the ass was older than Lester, and aimed it downhill. She kept Lester’s coat, though, and his hat. She quite liked the catt
leman, and it kept the sun off. With a last look around, she smiled thinly to herself. By then the fire was well and truly raging, no shack left now for Jake.
3
Teah’s story
Strike time: minus 5 years
Location: Aldertown
“Afternoon, Teah,” Trip shouted across the muddy road.
“How ya doin’, Trip?” she shouted back. Trip always made her smile. He was seventeen going on eighteen and had a shine for her. Then again, that wasn’t a huge compliment seeing as she was one of only two single females in the little village. Teah ducked onto Jenny White’s porch—ducking to avoid the dangling herbs, numerous wind chimes and some of those peculiar amulets with all-seeing eyes in the center—and walked around the cane furniture that littered it, keeping an eye out for sleeping dogs. Jenny was around twenty years older than Teah, though neither had ever actually asked. The funny thing about the forest folk, as Teah referred to them, was that they were as polite as city folk were rude. So you never asked a woman’s age, though it didn’t stop you guessing.
Jenny’s door was open. Teah didn’t bother knocking. Clay ran up to her before she was even halfway through the door. He was up to her stomach now, shooting up like an eager sapling reaching to steal the last bit of sky between two giant redwoods. He was also like a battering ram, was Clay, when he needed to be, and growing up to be the size of Zac.
“Has he been a bother?”
Jenny looked up. She was sitting at their big, round dining table, from which a half-knitted scarf trailed away. Tired was beyond what Jenny looked like, and guilt washed over Teah for having left Clay with her for most of the day. God knows having a kid was exhausting enough, but Jenny was sick with something. How she coped, Teah couldn’t even imagine, but they both needed food, so someone had to hunt.
“No bother,” she said. “Ned helped out a bit for a while.” Jenny grinned, like she always did when she talked about her husband. “If I’m truthful, I had most of the day to myself. I’ve been feeling bloody awful.”
“Tired again?”
“All the time. Must be something going around. Do you want me to make him a snack? It’s no bother.”
“No,” said Teah, “you hang tight. I’ll go hang the carcasses and stick around until Ned gets back. If you want me to?”
Jenny put the scarf down. “They’ll keep,” she said as she got up and went over to fix them something anyway. Teah kept Jenny in meat, her hunting more than enough for their own two mouths. Besides, she always thought the folks around here had been good to her.
Jenny turned back. “Thanks, but you know you can’t hang around. It’ll be too dark before you get to your cabin. If I’ve told you once—”
“I know: move into town. Trouble is, I like my little cabin.”
“Then you need a horse or something.”
Teah laughed and pulled up a chair. “And where round here could I get one of those?”
It was Jenny’s turn to chuckle. “From Saggers,” they both said.
Ethan Saggers was the unofficial town leader. Unofficial because the town wasn’t big enough to need one, and small-town hierarchies were banned by the city anyway, or at the very least frowned upon. No, he was as much the main man around here as Hannah was the main woman, Teah thought, and that was strange in itself. Plus, Ethan Saggers, like Trip, would like to have enjoyed more of Teah’s company, and that was a complication she didn’t care for.
Teah chose to walk back to her cabin with Clay.
It was still early afternoon and he had plenty of energy left. He wore blue dungarees, hand-me-downs from Helen’s boys, who in their own turn had probably inherited them from someone else. His strawberry-blonde hair was cut in a bob of sorts, not girlish but a cut at least. Teah was banned from doing it after her first attempt had been frowned upon by one and all. Maybe that’s what Lester had meant when he’d said she needed more than him to survive. She needed little things, like dungarees, meat loaf and a haircut.
There were a lot of “if”s” in Teah’s past, she knew that, probably more so than in most people’s lives. Most of them surrounded Connor and that day on the wastelands just by the grid, the black towers that were set out in ranks, in a vast square at the heart of the Black City, but some had sprung from Lester, and some from a few days before she’d tangled with him. One had, somewhere along the line, probably decided where she’d end up, and thus whether she’d ever get to see a sequoia tree close up again. Possibly the most important was to follow directions from a soldier called Sticks. Like her decision to save Connor, she’d just gone and made it there and then, without thinking of the consequences. That decision had brought her to this forest, for which she was thankful.
It was partly because of the trees that she’d chosen to live a little outside of the town of Aldertown. It was a fairly scattered community, anyhow. Like many this far up in the hills, it had become a refuge for those parents who didn’t want the army taking their kids away. Even if the soldiers bothered coming this far up the hills and into the forest, they’d find no kids—they’d have been long gone by then, hidden in the many places reserved for just such an eventuality. Teah hadn’t yet been told where they were, though. Most of the folk were still wary of the self-sufficient, weapons-accomplished “widow” who’d just happened to bowl into their village three years before, and rightly so. Everyone knew that folk could be paid by the gridders in many ways. Many out here had children in the army whose fate depended on their actions. All were wary of strangers.
Saggers seemed to have been waiting for her along the road, leaning against the fence of his place—the only house in town to have one—or if not—then it was a remarkable coincidence he just happened to be there.
“Afternoon, Teah,” he said, tipping his hat.
Teah tipped her cattleman.
“No catch today?”
“Couple of squirrels and a brace of rabbits.”
“Not the best day, then?”
Saggers was a lean man, not skinny but not well built, especially for a farmer, if you could call it farming up here. He had a couple of chickens and a goat, and a donkeys he kept around for when he needed its particular brand of stubbornness. He also had a knack for planting stuff in just the right places; it wasn’t often that one of his impromptu crops failed. His specialty was a type of leaf you could smoke. It gave you a mellow high, one that Teah relished, and one he could sell farther down the valley for decent coin.
“Caught me a few fish too, so not that bad,” she told him. “If you want any, I’ve dropped it all off at Helen’s, apart from Jenny’s share.”
“None for yourself?”
“We’ve got enough.”
Teah wondered at the little fence he was leaning against. He’d said it hemmed in his chickens and kept the coyotes at bay, but it had no netting, and the chickens often wandered into the road. She knew he just liked having a fence; made him feel important. Teah made to carry on but he grabbed her arm. “Say, Teah, why don’t you move closer?”
“Guess I just like the forest,” she said, shaking his hand off. He held her stare for a moment.
“Might go an’ grab me one of them there squirrels.”
“Go for your life,” Teah said, edging away.
“You need any smokes?” he blurted out, as though he’d just remembered he had something to trade.
“Wouldn’t say no.”
He narrowed the distance again. Clay grabbed her leg. “Here,” Saggers said, and fished a handful out of his pocket, looking at her with ill-concealed lust. She thought he might just as well be licking his lips.
“You know,” he said, “some folk say that you think you’re too good for the likes of me. Wanna know what I think?”
“Suppose.”
“I think some folk think too much. Trust me, I don’t. Enjoy your cigarettes,” he said with a smile, appearing to think a little before scratching his head. “I mean—”
“Thanks,” she muttered to save him confusi
ng himself further, then she walked off.
She’d gotten about twenty yards when Saggers hollered, “Say, I was down the valley today, trading eggs for some papers ‘n stuff, and I bumped into a strange one. Odd looking man; mad, mad eyes.”
Teah felt her heart skip a beat and turned to face him.
“Yeah, mad as they come,” Saggers continued. “Bought me a drink and everything when he overheard me mentioning you.”
“You did what? What did you say about me?”
“Why? You got something to hide?”
Had he just tripped her up? “From you?” she said, acting a little coy, wondering if it would work dressed in Lester’s old coat and cattleman. She guessed not.
Saggers laughed and walked toward her. “Don’t worry, he was only interested in some woman who was up in the valley about three years back. Apparently, she had a kid or something. Burned down his cabin, he said. Like I said, probably mad—most of ‘em are down there.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Who? Jake? I think his name was Jake.” Saggers pulled another smoke out of his pocket, popped it into his mouth and lit it. Taking his time, he eventually exhaled two funnels of smoke. “Me? Not much. Said I’d seen some woman and a kid pass through. Told him she was the antisocial type. He said ‘That’s her’, and I told him you was headed south. You piss him off or something?”
“Nope.”
“You burn down his cabin?”
“Nope.”
“Then why’s he so pissed at you?”
“Because an old man didn’t kill me,” and with that, she turned and walked away. “Appreciate it, Saggers,” she hollered over her shoulder, holding a smile until she was facing ahead again. “Hurry up, Clay,” she whispered, grabbing his little hand.
If there had ever been a trail going to her cabin, it had long disappeared. Every day she varied their route a bit, so Clay got used to the place, and so if he ever wandered off he’d be able to find his way home. She also did it in case anything should ever happen to her, then he’d be able to find his own way to Aldertown. She told him, if he ever got lost, to go downhill, find the river and walk along it till he found the town. Simple instructions, but it worried her nonetheless.
