Carl smiled and nodded, placing his fingers to his neck again and wincing as he touched the cut.
Chapter Five
Robbie and Henrietta
After having locked up the front door once again, I opened the footlocker beneath the cabinet in the hallway and carefully replaced the rifle, locking it up once again.
I looked up at the mirror that resided above the cabinet, staring back at my reflection. For a guy barely into his mid-twenties my face was rugged with stubble, my dark hair kept short, my features sharp. These days we spent so much of the summer outside tending to our duties that my skin had already tanned considerably. Looking at my white t-shirt in the mirror it was a wonder that nobody had asked me about the occasional red spots on it – they could have been put down to the deer, of course.
We had all devolved into weathered, rugged people, living off of the land in the ruins of the fallen civilisation that we now occupied. This overgrown suburb and the surrounding area was all I knew except for the frequent ventures that some of us made out into the world beyond. Fifty miles in the Ranger was the furthest I had gone, and I knew pretty well that there was nothing out there but empty houses, abandoned towns and cities, and the skeletal remains of those taken by the virus. We scavenged for goods frequently during these treks, crossing off on a map the areas that we had investigated before moving onto the next zone.
Would it all run out one day? Definitely, but that would be long after my time. Right now, I just wanted us to survive, and we were doing a pretty damn good job of it.
I headed through the living room and into the kitchen – things were pretty much the same as from when I was a kid, except a little dirtier and lot more faded, kind of like an old photograph that fell beneath the floorboards.
Robbie sat at the kitchen table, scooping bread into his bag along with a few jugs of water. My brother and I had gotten along perfectly for the longest time, even if we did have back and forths on occasion – not even the fall of mankind could take away sibling rivalry. He was exactly like me at that age, only a little less organised. 19, a good kid, always ready to help out.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be on lookout duty on the west gate today?’
‘You know I am,’ he said quickly, throwing his rucksack on his back and heading towards the back door, ‘and I’m late.’
‘Is mom still asleep?’
Robbie stopped in the doorway abruptly and turned to look over at me.
‘No… She’s gone to see Dad for a while.’
‘Okay…’ I said, nodding. ‘Have a good shift.’
‘Oh, I will…’ He said sarcastically, his joking demeanour returning as he ran at the garden wall and jumped up on to it’s eight foot height with a single deft movement before vaulting over into the alleyway. While the front door was well-guarded, I didn’t worry about the back door; we were surrounded by walls, and Robbie was the only one who could make that jump out of everybody in Bastion.
‘With Dad…’ I muttered to myself, looking about the well-kept garden. In her older years my mother could do less and less – she was in her late 50s, and manual labour wasn’t exactly something she was suited for. She did, however, have an aptitude for helping out with duties around the community and keeping people company, as well as keeping our back yard filled with all manner of plants and flowers.
That is, except for one small section – a small doorway in the fence that I had built when I was a younger. Well, I say a door, but it was more like a hinge and latch where the fence posts were nailed together and lifted up when you pushed against them.
I had built it when I was younger, so now it was like stepping into a corridor that got smaller and smaller when you went through, and I had to bend over in order to make my way inside and into the clearing. It reminded me of a part in a book that Henrietta had read to Robbie and I when we were younger called Alice in Wonderland.
Stepping into the pasture was like stepping into a greenhouse, or a setting from another fairytale. It was perhaps only four of five yards in diameter, and aside from the fenced entrance and exit was surrounded in a circle on all sides by thick hedges and trees, the branches of which overhung above, letting just the right amount of sunlight in to allow the grass to grow in abundance.
It was the kind of place I could have lived out my entire life were it possible – that was how peaceful it was. Even with it being where my Father was buried.
On the opposite side of the clearing was his gravestone. It was a crude stone section that we had set up with cracked tarmac from the road, the words etched into it with hours upon hours of painstaking work;
Jack Hadley
1987 – 2027
A Loving Father and Husband, and the Founder of Bastion.
The last part wasn’t technically true, but his bravery had kept us going in the early days, when we didn’t know whether or not we would survive the first few weeks, or months… If it hadn’t been for him, I doubted that Bastion would have been founded at all.
Before the grave, sat a little way before it, was my mother.
These days we took whatever clothes we could find, and when it came to domestication and cleanliness… Well, that was an improvised act altogether, but we did pretty well. These days Henrietta spent most of her time with her hair tied up in a sharp ponytail when it wasn’t short, something that had become a necessity. She was wrapped up in shawls and gowns, her calm face staring down serenely at the stone.
In the old world she had been a hairdresser, and my father a waste disposal manager who had a decade of experience hauling trash before having worked his way up through the organisation. They used to joke that there were jobs that would always be needed, even in times of economic collapse – people always needed their hair cutting, and they definitely always needed their trash taking away. Those were two of the last things people would give up.
I knew she had heard come through the fence, she just didn’t turn around.
‘You haven’t been here in a while,’ I said, walking slowly to sit down by her side. I took a long look at the grave before glancing over at her quiet face as the hint of a smile rose to her lips.
‘Mmm…’ She started absently, peacefully. ‘He was never really one for shoving his pride aside, your father. Even in death. After it happened I worried for so many nights that you and Robbie would… Would get sick too. I still worry about it sometimes.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ I said, ‘we’re fine here. We’ve built something good, and we’ll keep building and looking after our own.’
‘I know, Tommy… Your brother looks up to you a lot, you know?’
‘What? No, he doesn’t.’
‘I’m your mother, trust me. He does. He always has. You were always around to look after him and keep him in line. You’ve been the man of the house ever since we returned to the surface, and now that you lead a place like this… Why wouldn’t he look up to you?’
‘He’s a good kid. I just hope he doesn’t let this world get the better of him.’
‘That’ll never happen in a million years,’ she laughed, ‘He’s you, just a few years younger. Did you ever let this place get the better of you? No. So he won’t either.’
A pause.
‘Are you okay, mom?’
‘Me? I’m fine… As fine as I’ve ever been.’
‘Okay.’
We sat in silence for some time, in the quiet, watching presence of the memory of my father.
‘Right,’ Henrietta finally said, pushing herself up to her feet. ‘Can’t mourn all the livelong day. Couple of people need their hair cutting, they’re starting to look like damn savages.’
‘Right,’ I smiled.
‘You could do with having that beard trimmed, mister,’ she said. ‘Back in the day the guys your age were running around with these unkempt things, looking like you are now. That was the style back then, you see.’
‘It’s too hot for that,’ I said, ‘I’m actually starting to get a bit bothered with
it. Reckon you could sort it for me?’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’
‘Because I don’t trust myself with a knife.’
‘That’s god damn true. All right, hurry it up and get back inside.’
My mother is the only person on the entire planet that I trust with a knife, maybe aside from Robbie, although he lacks the trade skills that she possesses. There are two reasons for this.
The first is the fact that she’s the person I trust most. She had raised Robbie and I since we were kids, literally through the end of the world, and taught us right from wrong in a place where those lines all too often crossed over. If somebody was going to cut my throat, it certainly wasn’t going to be her.
The second reason is that when it came to shaving, a cut in the old world could be resolved pretty quickly with some antiseptic formula. Now, though? The tiniest could become infected, and it was something Mae had enough trouble keeping at bay all the time. In short, Henrietta was a pro, and her knife skills certainly wouldn’t bring any harm to me.
Chapter Six
Banquet
I had gone back to bed that morning, but I hadn’t slept much. We weren’t monks, if the virus had reached the mountains of Tibet thousands of miles away, that was – we had a policy that everybody had a right to a good eight hours of sleep during each 24-hour cycle, regardless of when that time would be.
I still had a few hours on the clock, and even in this world of perpetual fatigue, I couldn’t relax enough to drift off. Everybody had their duties, even if their duty was to assign duties to everybody else, and I wasn’t the type of person to call myself leader and watch the citizens do the hard work. It wasn’t me. Absolute power corrupted absolutely. Maybe that was true, but I didn’t have absolute power, and I didn’t want it. In Bastion the people had the power, and if I got too big for my own boots everybody could group together and kill me in my sleep if they truly wished to do so.
I tried to have a little more faith in humanity than that.
Sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes, I decided to head back out. I changed into a new t-shirt, of which there were several stacks in the wardrobe that we had raided from an industrial warehouse a while back, the rest of which were evenly split up amongst everybody else, and pulled my boots back on.
***
Before we go any further in this story of ours I’d like to address the fact that I’ve probably named a lot of names, and it might be a little difficult to remember all of them. I don’t intend for you to keep a notepad about all the names I speak of here – I don’t know how far in the future you’ll be reading this account of events, or if the future even has writing materials in abundance, or the computers that I vaguely remember from my childhood. That night, though, it was the banquet, and everybody was there. While the citizens of Bastion were my main priority, the vast majority of them have little of a part to play in the current story – for a moment, we’ll look at who we’ve mentioned already.
Henrietta and Robbie I’ve spoken about already, as well as Carl who lived next door.
Rudy was our defensive expert – he took care of weapons and the like, in the event that they were ever needed. I spent a long time making sure that he was sane before even making him a permanent member of the community.
Marcus and Maria lived a little way down the road – he was a farmer through and through, while Maria was a mechanics expert who had helped with the water system.
Larry who you saw earlier was an elderly gent who was just happy to help with anything that needed doing – a working man, which was something that I admired endlessly.
Leah looked after and monitored everything that came in and out of Bastion, hence the reason she had joined us earlier outside of the wall. She was resilient and straightforward, the epitome of the kind of person you had to become in this world.
Sam did the cooking and looked after the general food supplies. He was indeed eccentric, but it helped when his life revolved around sustenance. He would be cooking the veal up that night.
Mae looked after medical factors and hygiene. She had been a nurse for many years prior to the outbreak, and her skills had proved to be endlessly valuable. She and Larry spent a lot of time together, and considering they were about the same age… Well, you can probably paint good enough picture on your own. Out here, finding that special someone was a lot easier considering the lack of options. But everybody needed somebody, and that was how things went around here.
Then there was Hayley… She and I… Well, I don’t know. We had known each other for a few years, but had only really seen each other as platonic friends. She had been part of a commune that had been overrun a while back, and had wound up on our doorstep in something of a state. Mae had brought her back to health. She was a year or two older than me, and she, Robbie and I had hung out a lot over the years. We had never really had much of a prolonged childhood or even a period of teenage years where we could all just have fun and play in the streets, so we could be immature at heart.
That was part of the reason that we had built the treehouse in the forest so many years ago, which we hadn’t been back to in ages. Remember that little patch of trees by the wheat field just outside the walls? Well, in a world where the spoils of the past no longer existed, we had found ourselves building a treehouse in the woods, Robbie, Hayley and I. When I was a little I had seen the other kids in movies building them, and I had wanted to do the same, but there were so many things standing in the way of being able to do it – landowners who did nothing with the forests other than letting them sit there, people ripping them down for no good reason other than because they could, and as well as all that the resources.
It had only taken the end of civilisation and the deaths of 99.98% - or whatever it was - of the planets population for me to be able to build a fucking treehouse with my friends in peace.
Go figure… what I wouldn’t give to have the landowners, the bullies and the absence of wood panels back again.
***
Over the course of the rest of the day I helped set up the park benches along the road down the main street of Bastion. We had looted them from a park years ago during a period of resource hoarding, and had decided to keep them as they were rather than to strip them down for wood. There were enough to place side by side so that everybody could sit together on an enormous table on the rare occasions that the entire community ate together.
Tonight would be one of those rare occasions.
We used slabs for our eating rather than plates – they were durable and required less upkeep than traditional crockery, not to mention the fact they weren’t nearly as prone to shattering. Knives and forks, on the other hand, were one thing that we always used. It was one of those things that seemed to separate animals and humans, I thought, and everybody else seemed to agree. Eating and drinking, this one thing that every human had in common, was something to be done in a civilised fashion as opposed to gnawing at our food like animals. It kept us on our feet and stopped us from descending into some lower quality of living.
I set everything out in the street, and after half an hour or so some of the community came out to join me and ask what was happening. I told them about the deer, removing the gory details, and it reminded me why I loved this place. Seeing their faces light up with the prospect of eating a good dinner with meat and vegetables brought me a happiness that I couldn’t have ever found anywhere else.
***
That night, as our community flocked to the tables in the evening light around 7pm, Bastion filled with a warm bustle. People laughed and smiled and talked, and after letting Henrietta take over management I made my way through the streets to the Kitchen.
That’s Kitchen with a capital K – in Sam’s spelling of the word the K was backwards, of course, but that didn’t matter. The Kitchen was a place of wonderful sustenance. Like many of the other buildings and storage houses, it was one of the old suburban bungalows, but unlike the others it was certainly the most highl
y modified. While the food was stored in a nearby building kept under several locks and chains, the Kitchens had almost the entire outer wall removed in order to cope with heat management mechanisms. Sam worked a certain way, and I respected that as long as he kept us all fed – which he always did.
I made my way up to the front of the open house, beneath the rolls of tarpaulin that he brought down when the rain picked up, which wasn’t a problem we had had lately. On a sanitised metal table top inside the carcasses were laid out. I won’t go into excessive detail about how it looked, but it was fair to say that he had stripped every piece of meat he could off of them. They looked nothing like they had done when Carl and I had watched them in the field, or even when we had moved their bodies into the trunk of the Ranger.
‘Over there, over there!’ Sam shouted, ushering Laz over to one of the metal countertops with a plate of meat. Laz was his assistant, a young guy who had been with us for some time now. The kitchen was about the only thing he was good at operating, but Sam still gave him grief no matter what he did. For some reason Laz could take it, though. That was why he didn’t want to work anywhere else.
Sam turned to me, holding his arms out.
‘Tommy, my boy!’ He shouted, but I held up my arms in a signal to tell him that he I really didn’t want a hug.
‘Food poisoning is the last thing I want, Sam. We can hug it out later. How’s it coming along?’
‘Impeccable. Stellar. Plenty for everybody. I’ve no clue how you get this lucky sometimes…’
‘It was a stroke of luck,’ I admitted. ‘We just stumbled on them.’’
‘Well, stumble or not, we’ll all have full bellies tonight. Veg is ready, and plenty of meat, so you can start moving them. Lazarus! Boy! Help Tommy with the food.’
Laz and I took a huge platter each, both filled with meat, and set off for the tables. By the time we arrived I didn’t know what to expect. As we set them down it wasn’t stunned applause or stunned silence – instead we were showered with praise, and I couldn’t help but smile, not at the kind words of everyone but at the smile on Laz’s face as people shook his hand and patted him on the back, admiring the food. Usually it was Sam who got the praise for everything, but seeing Laz adorned with it made me feel more than happy.
Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion Page 4
