Savages

by Christina Bergling

  Savages

  by

  Christina Bergling

  Copyright © 2014 Christina Bergling

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1-62827-979-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-62827-979-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of this author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Bad Day Books, an imprint of Assent Publishing

  To all the people who protected me and educated me during my brief time in Iraq; you gave me a new perspective that I needed.

  1

  We sat in the middle of the field, he and I, feeling like the last man and woman on Earth.

  Wind swept the tall grass, making the bloodstained blades dance. They bowed to the song of the breeze while the blood dripped from them red and slow. The sun poured down quietly on this otherwise calm and clear day. We just breathed, both sitting among the grass and amidst the carnage, arms propped on our knees, weapons still dangling from limp fingertips. The wind spirited the sounds of our respiration away, snatching the air from our lungs and sucking it far across the quiet world.

  I stared out ahead of me, past the field and down into the empty town—what remained of another small American city, with what was left of the populace in pieces at our feet. How long would I smell like them this time? How long would we haunt their abandoned houses and scavenge their stagnant grocery stores?

  This view could have been on a post card. The town probably used pictures shot from this very point for their tourism website. The lush field sprawled down until it washed up against the quaint buildings, hills rolling out to the sides. The sun’s rays split the few clouds, casting light and gentle shadows. Without the severed limbs and mangled torsos in the foreground, it was quite picturesque.

  I looked down. A finger lay curled around the toe of my shoe. It reached up through the grass as if coming out of the ground itself. Yet it stretched out in isolation. There was no hand, no body—just a lonely, marred finger left behind. At one point, I would have recoiled, shrunk away from death this close to me. I would have personalized this finger, imagining the memories in the flesh and the life it led. It would have been a piece of a human being, and that would have stirred the empathetic humanity in me. Yet I just sat there, looking and breathing, noting the line of dirt crusted deep under the fingernail. It was just another dead body part.

  I finally nudged it with my foot, letting the digit rest haphazardly in the dirt, like the rest of the pieces peeking out of the grass like twisted lawn gnomes.

  The sound of the blood was near deafening over the gentle wind. It was simply everywhere, falling from the grass, from the pieces; dribbling lazily, dragging out each drop, making itself known. I couldn’t help but think about the chocolate blood I had made for Halloween costumes, how much it looked just like the real thing now all around me. My mouth nearly involuntarily watered, remembering that forgotten taste of chocolate.

  An empty eye found me from between wilted blades, staring out from a skull cleaved in half, awkwardly fixed on me without seeing me—without seeing anything ever again. I could tell that the eye was blue, but they all looked milky without life behind them. The more I saw these dead eyes every day, the less they looked like people. They could have been slabs of meat at a butcher shop; they could have been road kill on the shoulder of the highway. It was all the same anymore.

  Beside me, he looked past all this, past the crimson field, the fingers and legs, past the vacant eyes. He stared out ahead, above our sad little reality—like he was always able to do. Leaving me behind, grounded in my discontented flesh.

  As the sun meandered across the sky and the moments stretched out long across us, I grew restless wallowing in our aftermath. I began to fidget. I shifted my weight from hip to hip, moved my legs in, then stretched them back out. I looked at him, back at the town, down at the victims. My breathing tightened as I waited on him.

  He just existed in his space. He sat like a statue beside me. His arms rested apathetically against his knees as the mingling of blood and dirt stained the bottoms of his pant legs. The colors grew and crept upward, invading the fabric further with each passing day, each battle. His sword hung in its permanent home among his curled fingers, continuing to let wayward droplets of blood splash to the grass.

  His eyes were perpetually obscured, hidden behind his dark ballistic sunglasses, but I could tell they were venturing out past our horizon. What I truly knew of his face was a sharp nose bearing the leathered abuse of so many days traveling under the sun and thin lips that never turned up, only moved to speak to instruct or antagonize me. He managed constantly to battle back the hair sprouting from his head, keeping it close and clean. Everything always in order.

  To him, this was just another place; these were just more neutralized threats. It all just was. It did not change him. He let it break over him like waves against the rocky beach. And I envied him. I could never escape. I could never flee the moment. My only alternative was to tumble into the past, which was far more dangerous.

  Then without a word, he stood, and I followed. He led me down the field and toward the town, stepping over the dismembered bodies without looking down at them. I let my eyes swing from side to side, sweeping the leftovers. Seven by my best fast count. It was easiest to count the heads, or what was left of them. Limbs just got too confusing, four on each body, carved into however many pieces, strewn far and wide. Heads were larger, easier to spot and easier to count.

  There was the milky-eyed half head that had been staring at me; a skull blown open out the back with its body sprawled down the hill; an ear with hair poking out among the blades; a bloody rock on top of what I remembered was a head; three other round lumps protruding from the grass. Seven heads. Even less than the last town.

  Where were they going? Were they killing each other off, like they tried to do to us? Were they just dying off?

  The field spilled into the streets of the small and quiet town. He led me down the empty road lined on both sides with abandoned cars. A minivan had half mounted the curb when it collided with a parking meter. The side windows were smashed out, and I thought I saw blood on the leftover frame. I could hear the echoes of screams as the passengers were dragged out. A luxury sedan was parked with the doors gaping open. A briefcase and umbrella tumbled out onto the concrete, worthless now.

  All the towns looked the same. I wasn’t even sure what state we were in anymore; those boundaries no longer existed. It didn’t matter where we fell on the map; it was all the same. Nothing moved in these forsaken places. There were no sounds, as if animals had fled as well. It was eerie, stagnant, unsettling. Something in my survival instincts could not sit in the dead silence. Yet I always looked for something: another maniacal survivor, a dog, a bird. I cast my eyes down forgotten alleyways and over relics of lives left behind.

  The side street we entered converged with downtown. Tall buildings narrowed the sky, split the ground before us into stripes of shadow. He walked two or three steps ahead of me and to the side—enough to keep me in his peripherals. I caught his head shift slightly in my direction, making sure I was still in my place, still calm and following. His wind-burned cheek betrayed the wrinkles that grew deeper by the day.

  I imagined him before, in the previous life: close-shaven in desert camo BDUs, doing whatever it was soldiers did when they weren’t at war. I had known nothing personally about the military or soldiers in the past life. Only a jumble of stereotypes dancing in my head. Empty crew cut heads bobbing on top of combat boots and marching into gun shops, strip clubs, and tattoo parlors. Not people so much as a faceless collective. I never wanted t
o know; I wanted to stay safely separate and civilian. Yet now this faded soldier I followed was all that remained.

  We both clutched our weapons close for comfort, kept our limbs tucked in tight, our hackles up. Lessons painfully learned. What was dubbed just a sweeping shadow was revealed as the long knife that nearly sank into my shoulder. What was dismissed as a gust of wind had been the first of a flailing pack of wild-eyed savages cornering us in an alley. Everything was a threat.

  As we trudged, my mind strayed dangerously from the risk mitigation at hand, from analyzing every inch and every flutter, and took gentle and seemingly innocent side steps into questions. Moving through all that was, the empty buildings and the dead streets, I wondered what I always wondered when we were in a town. Out on the road, it was easy to forget civilization had even existed before it all utterly fucking collapsed. However, here in the remnants, I always heard the question echoing around inside me: had the world ended everywhere else? Were they drinking wine in Paris, playing soccer in England, flying a plane in China, reading and watching on the news how America had collapsed, how the government had imploded, how there was no country left and its people were scavenging off each other?

  I could almost imagine them all carrying on with their normal lives, all we lost just a colorful story on the screen or the page. Laughing at how all those fat, lazy, dumb Americans got what they deserved. How it was always inevitable. I would hate and resent them if I could fully believe they were out there living like we once did.

  The scraping of his boots on the street halted and brought me back to the fallout of our reality. I stopped behind him two or three steps back and to the side. Instinctually and habitually, I pivoted to face the opposite direction, turning my back to him, watching our backs and tracing our trail for followers.

  “Grocery ahead on the left,” he said.

  “Do you really think anything is left? If they survived this long, they had to have raided it,” I replied.

  “Worth a check. Unless you have somewhere to be.”

  I laughed softly to myself as we fell back in step.

  Carts stood at random alone among the few cars in the parking lot. Another scene of suspended animation. Any appearance of normalcy or order was unnerving. Cars no longer belonged lined up between lines of paint on the asphalt; shopping carts no longer needed to be racked up for collection. I didn’t like to remember how things used to be. I would rather traverse an empty, barren crater than amble through relics and reminders.

  There were two rotting bodies on the pavement, long decayed from their fleshy start. One skeleton lay twisted and reaching alone in the center of the pool of black asphalt, frozen in his dying disappointment. Another was contorted and collapsed into a pile of sticky bones on a median that probably used to have plush grass. Those horrors were the new normal. Dead bodies did not make me cringe nearly as much as a place setting left abandoned on a dinner table.

  “They didn’t bury their dead,” I mused, stepping over the sprawling failure on our way across. Wrinkled bills waved in one gnarled hand, now completely and utterly useless. It wouldn’t even make good kindling. Once they killed you and left your money, it was all truly over.

  “Less human the farther we get.”

  “Then why do we keep going in this direction?”

  “Running out of directions to go. You’ve seen what happens if we stay.”

  They came breaking through the walls of an abandoned apartment complex; they came pouring through the halls like water. Eventually, they heard us. Eventually, they found us.

  I nodded reluctantly.

  The doors to the store were long since broken out and ripped away, the floor covered in months of dirt and leaves blown in from the world gradually reclaiming the building. Daylight poured in from the front before dissipating among the aisles. It was as I expected. Ransacked, picked over, stripped down to the bare stinking bones.

  I could smell the rot from the produce section, from what had turned before the looters came; the stench of thawed and decayed flesh from the deli section. No one believed it was the end until it was too late, until what was left had already started to spoil.

  We separated at the center and fanned out in opposite directions, both walking to the farthest aisle to scout, and weaved our way back together. I gripped my cutlass tightly, blade hovering up at the ready. The handle belonged in my hand, the steel an extension of my body. This inanimate object that traveled everywhere with me since plucking it from yet another stinking corpse, that kept me company in these endless wandering miles, that he taught me to use as a survival tool. My fingers had worn grooves in the wood of the handle, branding it as only mine.

  The shelves were largely raided; only tattered remnants and a few stragglers crouched in the darkness. I snagged a can of peaches from under the shelves in the canned fruit aisle. I found a couple dented cans of dog food. There was a lone bag of chips discarded near the putrid fruit, still closed. We converged in the feminine hygiene aisle, where I slipped a crushed box of generic tampons in my bag.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Couple cans. Mostly dog food. You?”

  “Nothing really. Everything left is rotten. There were some diapers and formula but not much.”

  “Yeah, the kids died first. Formula could make emergency food though.”

  “I’ll grab it just in case. You don’t need diapers, do you?”

  “Nope, already handled. Potty trained for some time now.”

  I listened to his footsteps and mentally traced him back to the baby aisle while I waited near the front. As a child, I loved being in empty places. There was something special and sneaky about being in a normally busy place when it was closed, dark, vacant. It made it feel like it belonged to you, your own private session with something public. I remembered feeling at peace walking down the hall of my childhood church after hours or alone in the diner I worked at before it opened. Now the whole world was an abandoned shell, and it didn’t feel like anything belonged to me. It felt like they all forgot me when they went. I would have given anything for one bustling grocery store, one disgruntled shopper complaining as he rushed home with groceries for his family, one apathetic store cashier texting her way through her shift.

  “I’m sure formula will make a delicious dinner,” he said, walking back up to me.

  We moved back into the light from the door and sat on the floor, leaned up against the counter for one of the registers. He pulled out his canteen and took a long swig from it before passing it to me. I held up the bag of chips. A score like this could not wait.

  “Chips?” he looked astonished. “Unopened?”

  I nodded.

  He tore into the bag and lifted one chip out gently. He placed it on his tongue and crunched it slowly, closing his eyes.

  “I never did care for barbecue chips,” he said. He paused, chewing slowly again. “Best chip I’ve ever had.”

  We passed the food and drink between the two of us in our post-slaughter ritual. Breaking bread after battle. The throbbing of fight faded from my cells; the flashing blur of blood and limbs and twisted faces stopped flickering in front of my eyes. It slipped out of our present and started to file itself among the now far too many memories.

  He fell stoic again, letting his hand massage his ragged chin as his gaze wandered out from the store and away from me. His eyes dropped deep as his focus stretched out past us. His muscles settled as he let his mind loose. Wherever he went, wherever he found refuge.

  I closed my eyes, breathed, and savored a chip. I remembered chowing down on so many potato chips in my measly college dorm room until my jeans grew tighter by the day. I remembered how it seemed right to eat whatever the hell I wanted at last, stop sleeping, and start drinking until my liver wanted to resign. Each time the salty goodness crunched and echoed against my teeth, I saw a flash of the Christmas lights I had taped to my standard issue furniture.

  Almost as if he could hear my wayward thoughts, he snapped to att
ention and stood, dusting off his filthy clothes.

  “Let’s hit the houses, find somewhere to hold up for the night at least.”

  He took his place two to three steps ahead of me and to the side, and we marched out of the store.

  2

  We wandered farther down the same street, pressing on past the office buildings with shattered high windows and puddles of decomposed jumpers melted on the sidewalk; past the convenient fast food chains with burned out cars piled up in their drive-thrus; past the parks where the grass and trees had been put to flame, leaving the playground equipment standing like charred skeletons.

  We transitioned into a neighborhood. Cookie-cutter houses distinguished only by which were riddled with bullet holes or had the windows blown out or were scorched by fire. There were always a few that managed to sneak past untouched, some kind of random salvation in chaos. I saw the first as he did. His steps turned to guide us toward a brown house. Its fence had collapsed around the backyard, but the windows were intact, boarded up.

  They had obviously lived here.

  “This one,” he gestured. “Another adjoining the backyard.”

  “They looked decently fed,” I said. “Might have a stockpile in one of the houses.”

  I watched the back of his head nod and felt a little sick to my stomach that I could so nonchalantly evaluate our attackers to gauge what we might pillage from their camps. So many starving nights made it easy. So many grizzled expressions as they tried to kill us made it easy. The others seemed less and less like people each time. It was us and them, and they were tantamount to animals snarling at our throats.

  He wouldn’t consider eating them. Even in the darkest depths of our hunger, he said it was beneath us, almost as if they weren’t worthy of our consumption. It had crossed my mind, as my stomach climbed aching in between my jaws, as every cell of my body throbbed and begged for any morsel. He had held me as I howled wildly and simply whispered to me, “We are better than this. We will find something.”