by Trevor Zaple
The next day he moved into residence at the old City Hall. The inside of the building was decayed, like any other building of those long-dead times, but there had been a concerted effort to maintain it lately. Many of the more rotten floor boards had been ripped out and replaced with roughly-cut replacements that did not fit well but did the job. The drapes on the windows had all been replaced with heavy, newly-made cloth curtains, and the old electric lights had of course all been replaced with oil lamps. Oil was in short supply, naturally, so most of these lamps were shut off during the majority of time. The only lamps that were in more or less constant usage were the ones that lit the meeting rooms of the important people, which were on the second floor along with their sleeping quarters. The servants slept in the basement, much like at Karl Tiegert’s farmhouse, and while the accommodations were not ideal, they were better than the tent that Richard had been living in.
Richard had been sceptical about the amount of work for servants of even the important people during a static interval like a siege, but it quickly became apparent that he had been wrong about that. Even with the threat of destruction lurking somewhere outside of the twin circles of defence, the House Speakers and the rich free men demanded the best of everything, and that right quick. Richard at first found himself more exhausted then he had been in decades; eventually he got the hang of it, but he still managed to fall asleep at night with very little provocation. Carolyn was the only factor in his staying awake; after hours of serving the only thing that kept him from falling asleep once his head hit the pillow was her touch, reaching into his bunk in the darkness to run her hands over him and to bring her naked, impossibly warm flesh into his own hands. These midnight trysts were silent affairs at first, but after they heard others coupling in the darkness they let themselves express their desires vocally. The release was bigger that way, and the resulting rest that much deeper. Richard would awaken in the morning after these grasping, rutting nights with more energy than he had felt in a very long time.
The man that he had been servant to before Karl had been demanding, or so he had thought at the time. He had been a drunken lecher, throwing wild, infamous parties in the capital of the Republic where drugs, alcohol, and raw sexuality were on display in every corner. He had seen any number of strange, mind-shaking things, but on the whole the job had been fairly easy. People on lethargy-inducing drugs rarely needed much checking up on; they needed their clothes changed once in a while and they needed to be fed, but besides that they were often capable of taking care of their own affairs. These men that had taken up refuge in the inner keep of the castle they had constructed out of downtown Stratford put all of them to shame. They needed their meals brought to them at exact times; they refused to dress themselves and would often switch through several changes of clothes within the course of a given day; they needed massages, quick rub-downs, scented oils; they had sexual urges that the younger servants satisfied whenever asked. Richard found himself disgusted with them at first, and later he found himself actively hating them.
There were only a few who tried to make the lives of the servants easier; Karl Tiegert was one of those men. Whenever Richard was forced to wait on one of the more demanding citizens, he would sometimes see Karl looking apologetically at him from the corner of his eye. Richard would shake his head whenever he saw that; Karl could be as apologetic as he wanted to be, he decided, but he never said anything against the others. He simply let them ride over the exhausted, frightened serving staff, and quietly refused to do the same. In a way, Richard found himself hating his master as much as he hated the others.
He brought this up in a conspiratorial whisper to Carolyn one night and she sighed heavily.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” she warned him. “This isn’t like Brantford. We’re trapped in here and we have to make do in the best way we can”.
“It shouldn’t have to be like this,” he seethed. “Why should they continue to live the high life while everyone else fades and shrinks from the way we’re living here? They’ve cut back on the food rations outside, you know. All the people in tents will be eating less this week, and probably even less the week after”.
“I know,” Carolyn whispered. “We’re going to be in the same place, soon enough”. She paused, and the discomfort embedded within her was palpable even in the near-total darkness. “Richard, are we winning this thing?”
“We?” he asked cynically, but he knew what she meant. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. They obviously aren’t able to get food to us, even if we are winning”.
“I don’t want to die anymore,” she whispered, her voice breaking, and Richard felt an intense sadness crush his heart. He found her hand in the blackness and squeezed it confidentially.
“We’ll get out of here somehow,” he assured her. “We’ve done it before”.
“Sort of,” she replied, uncertain. “We left that situation and found ourselves in this one. It’s almost like we never got away at all”.
“The rest of them did,” he said, remembering the story he’d heard from Troy Larkson. “They made it to Niagara and from what I know they became free”. A sudden thought struck him. “Maybe some of them are out there, in the army surrounding us”.
“They’d be pretty old if they were,” Carolyn replied doubtfully. “I suppose some of their children might be, though”.
They lay in silence for a long time, until Richard became convinced that she had fallen asleep. He was about to make a concerted effort to do the same when she whispered once more.
“Promise me we’ll die together, if we have to die”.
Richard swallowed several times before he could reply. The tears suddenly seemed to stream down his face.
“Of course,” he replied, forcing his voice to remain steady. “If we have to, we go together”.
The next day, the rich and political were meeting with a messenger that had come through the inner gates at dawn. Carolyn was amongst the staff serving them but Richard was not; at first he spent the day wandering through the ground floor but eventually he found himself on the top floor holding the tablet. He found an empty room and curled up next to the window; the light that was coming through the dirty glass was steely grey, and he couldn’t pinpoint where the sun was. From somewhere not far off, a pair of those strange coughing thumps came.
He switched on the tablet and eyed the battery level with trepidation. He brushed through the folders dully, skipping through essays, lecture notes, and instant messaging logs without really reading much of anything. He exited out of the document folders and began flicking through the settings, going idly over everything that could be disabled or altered in the system. At first he was fascinated with the control the system offered the user in terms of their experience, but then he grew utterly bored with it. None of the controls would really mean anything now, when the thing was devoid of any context with regards to other devices. He found the panel for the wireless settings and with an impulsive finger-swipe he opened them up. He saw that the wireless adapter had been turned off; Samantha had likely disabled it to save power. He wondered if she had done it that morning before they left, before they discovered how hard the new world could be. He thought back to that morning and could not believe that he had lived it. In his mind it seemed to be something that he had observed, like the memory of a movie he had seen two or three times. He tried to shake the cobwebs of these thoughts out of his head and turned the wireless adapter on. The spinning circle that denoted a process running in the background appeared and after a time Richard thought that it might have crashed. He was about to shut the tablet down to kill the process when it jolted back into life. The adapter was on, and was now searching for networks. He snorted and wished it luck.
He peeked out of the window while the tablet was working and saw that nothing had changed. The tents shifted and billowed in the stiff wind that was blowing through the inner defences, and many of the people seemed to be taking shelter inside. At the walls b
etween the buildings, the soldiers loitered much as they had for weeks. He turned back to the tablet and saw that the screen had changed. A box had popped up overtop of the control panel. The following wireless networks have been detected it read. Beneath that was a list of one entry, which read Linksys. Below that were two buttons, asking him if he wanted to CONNECT or CANCEL. He stared at it for a moment before the full import of the dialogue box hit him.
He shook slightly as he ran his finger over the edge of the tablet. There was a wireless network out there. An active wireless network. With a shaking finger he pressed CONNECT. Within a moment he tablet connected to the network and showed that he had full access. With a growing sense of unreality, he exited the control panel and opened up the tablet’s browser. The browser defaulted to Google, as so many of them once had; Google was long gone, however, and the page that came up apologized for the website being unavailable. It continued on to suggest that he retry at a later time or perhaps contact his network administrator. He laughed at this. At that moment he would give almost anything to know who his network administrator was. He tapped a few more sites into the address bar but all of them came up with the same “page not found” error. He was about to try one last site when another dialogue box popped up overtop of the browser. It was a simple rectangle with a small OpenChat logo in the top left corner.
WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? was all that it said.
EIGHT
Richard stared at the message on the tablet’s screen for a long time, shock overwhelming him. Then, his fingers shaking, he typed out WHO THE HELL ARE YOU??. There was a long pause, and then a reply came: NOT IMPORTANT. YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE A WORKING ELECTRONIC DEVICE CAPABLE OF ACCESSING A NETWORK. WHERE ARE YOU?. Richard tapped the back of the tablet nervously. He felt paranoid, and had to physically stop himself from looking around for whoever was speaking with him. The upper floor of the old city hall was silent, except for the low murmur of voices that went on and on behind the walls.
WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? he typed. His mouth was dry. This is getting circular he thought. The whole thing was becoming surreal, and he wondered if he was actually deeply asleep and dreaming. He dismissed this thought, however. The colours were too dreary, too real. The feel of the tablet beneath his fingertips was too normal; the light filtering in through the window was exactly the right hue of reality. The tablet screen flickered.
WELL I’M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND GUESS THAT YOU’RE NEAR STRATFORD. I’VE BOOSTED THE SIGNAL ON THIS THING MORE THAN IT WAS EVER INTENDED TO GO BUT IT STILL ISN’T GOING TO REACH THAT FAR. SO LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN. I KNOW YOU’RE WITHIN A CERTAIN AREA. WHEREABOUTS IN IT ARE YOU?
Richard looked out at the iron-grey sky. He felt himself slowly losing control. Then a sudden thought occurred to him.
TROY LARKSON? he typed. There was a long delay and Richard eyed the battery indicator on the tablet nervously. It had reduced slightly, but there was still over a quarter of its life left. He licked his lips, trying to generate some moisture in his mouth.
THIS IS HE the response came, and Richard didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.
RICHARD ADAMS, SIR. STRANGE PLACE TO MEET AGAIN, DON’T YOU THINK?
WOW, YOU JUST KEEP TURNING UP the response came. HOW’S THAT OLD TABLET COMING ALONG? STILL WORKING, OBVIOUSLY. I BET IT NEEDS A CHARGE, EH?
Richard laughed; he was unable to control the volume of it, and he felt nervous and embarrassed.
IT DOES INDEED he typed.
WELL, WHERE ARE YOU, THEN? YOU MUST BE SORT OF CLOSE BY, IF YOU CAN GET THIS SIGNAL.
SORT OF, I GUESS Richard responded. I’M INSIDE THE INNER WALLS OF STRATFORD. I’M ACTUALLY RIGHT IN THE CITY HALL. ARE YOU OUT IN THE TENT CITY? I DIDN’T SEE YOU OUT THERE BUT THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE THAT I GUESS I MIGHT HAVE MISSED YOU.
Troy did not respond for a long time. From behind the wood paneled walls Richard heard the scraping of chairs. The council of the rich and the free were wrapping up their meeting, he realized. The screen flickered again and when Richard read what Troy had sent the colour drained out of his face completely.
WELL THIS IS AWKWARD. I GUESS I AM NEARBY, THEN, BUT NOT IN A GOOD WAY. I’M ACTUALLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THOSE WALLS YOU GUYS HAVE ERECTED AROUND THE CENTER SQUARE. I’M, UH, WITH THE ARMY OUTSIDE. THE ONE LAYING SIEGE TO YOU.
Richard stared at this message for a long time; he was having trouble comprehending exactly what Troy was saying. Then it struck him. The outer walls had fallen. Troy and his wireless signal were just on the other side of those walls that had seemed so comforting just weeks before. The sound of footsteps leaving the room on the other side of the wall brought everything home for him. This was the purpose of their sudden meeting. This was why they had been locked away inside of there all morning. They knew that their first line of defence had failed, and that all they had between them and a pair of large armies were the hastily-erected walls between the decaying buildings that ringed the square at the core of Stratford.
He heard footsteps at the doorway to the room he was huddled in. He looked up fearfully and saw Carolyn. Her face held the same overlay of fear that he felt his own did.
“What’s wrong?” she asked quietly, and Richard laughed involuntarily.
“You know damn well what’s wrong,” he said, biting off each word like a tough steak. She blinked, and then nodded sadly.
“You could hear them through the wall?” she asked, and it confirmed everything for Richard. A cold, clammy hand gripped his heart and he began to have trouble breathing. He found that the only response he could give was to shake his head in the negative, and hold out the tablet.
“What is this?” Carolyn asked, amazed, as she took it from his outstretched hand. She cooed over the wonder of a functioning electronic device for a moment and then began to read the messages. When she got to the end she looked at Richard with something that he had not expected. He thought there was actual hope in her eyes.
“You know someone on the other side? Who is this Troy Larkson?”
Richard licked his lips. “He’s, uh...he’s this guys I’ve known for, well, I guess a long time. He came into my store, the last day that it was open...”
Richard related the story of Troy Larkson – how he’d come into the store, how Richard had found him a quarter-century later, how Richard received the tablet that was now back in Richard’s hands, everything. Carolyn shook her head in disbelief when he reached the end of his tale.
“And now he’s on the other side of those walls,” she said slowly. “Maybe he can help us in some way”.
Richard gasped out derisive laughter. “What makes you think he would, even if he could? If he’s in league with the armies outside, what makes you think he would help anyone inside these walls? They’re here to starve us out, aren’t they? To wait until we’re almost dead, and then storm the place to finish us off?” He felt sour saliva gather in his mouth and fought off the urge to spit. “He’d likely just tell us to give up, more than anything else”.
“Give up...” Carolyn mused, and her partially wrinkled face furrowed in on itself. Then her eyes lit up and her face smoothed out. There was a delirious laughter dancing in her expression now, and Richard wondered uneasily if she had gone mad.
“That’s it,” she exclaimed. “He can help us to give up!”
Richard shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he confessed. Carolyn laughed and the silver sound of it went straight to Richard’s heart. He wanted to reach out and kiss her, but she continued with her original thought before he could.
“The only reason we are under siege here is because of those idiots I just had the displeasure of serving all morning. They’re here waiting for some army of saving grace to come pouring up from London to smash apart the siege”. She walked to the window and looked out over the tents swaying in the wind. “All of those people down there are just servants, slaves really. Bought and paid for by the people holed up in here. Just like you and me”. She turned to look a
t him and there was a fierce sparkle in her eyes that made him take an involuntary step back. “Just like before. Innocents caught up in the same sad bullshit that innocents always get caught up in”. She stepped towards him and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “They don’t need to be. We don’t need to be. None of this concerns us, or them”. She gestured out towards the city of tents. “All of those people out there are going to starve and none of the people in here will care. It will just mean more food stored up for them”.
Richard ran a sweating hand over the back of his head. “So what are you suggesting?” he asked nervously. She smiled, and it was a smile without warmth or mercy.
“I’m suggesting we turn ourselves away from these fools locked away inside their walls. We should just invite the armies outside in, and when they come in we should just step aside and let them do as they will to the oh-so-important people in here. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Richard snorted. “We could all get ourselves killed,” he rebutted, but it was only half-hearted. He could feel himself getting caught up in her words, for better or for worse; just like old times he thought I wonder if it’ll end up the same way?
“The worst that could happen is that we could sold into slavery, again,” she continued, echoing his thoughts. “In that case, we’re no worse off than before, and at least we’ll be fed. We can’t be sure of that here. In fact...” she crossed the floor to the door way and peeked through. Once she was satisfied that there was no one out there, she continued, albeit in a much lower voice. “In fact, rations are going to be cut again, to a quarter of what they were”.
“A quarter!” Richard exclaimed, and Carolyn made frantic shushing gestures. “A quarter?” he asked again, lowering down to a near-whisper. “People won’t be able to stay alive on that little food. A quarter of the present rations will just be enough to tease people as they starve to death”.
