He set about the business, though two of the cups were thick-handled glasses last used for Shirts’ ultimately fatal hooch. There wasn’t much water in the pot, better to make it boil faster, and he switched off the flame trying not to wonder how much of the gas canister was left.
“We need to find some . . . deal bags,” Tom said as he moved the cups and the water to the benchtop, opening the can, finding a spoon, as excited as his children had potentially ever seen him.
“‘Deal bags’?”
Lilianna screwed up her face in blessed puzzlement. Tom only chuckled, though he was conscious of Lucas inching towards the door, and it was the sentiment more than his son’s actual behavior that troubled him. Tom walked across and gently took the boy by the upper arm and guided him back to the counter.
“Think of it as a manhood ritual,” Tom said.
“What?”
“It’ll put hairs on your chest.”
“I don’t want hairs on my chest,” Luke said.
“Me neither,” his sister said.
“Metaphoric hairs. Figurative hairs.”
“Keep your figurative hairs to yourself,” Lila said.
“No,” Tom said. “Here. Try this.”
He passed over two cups which were duly taken.
“I scored this on my last run with the Foragers,” he said.
“You stole it?”
“No, there was . . . an incident –”
“Right,” Lila sighed. “That’s more like the dad I know. What ‘incident’?”
“That’s really not the point of this story,” Tom said. “Coffee’s a rare commodity here. Like . . . mythical. We can break this can down into half-ounce, even quarter-ounce bags, and trade for almost anything we need. At least while it lasts.”
The children absorbed the new information while simultaneously showing a total lack of enthusiasm for the steaming black coffees each held. Tom sighed tightly and scratched his growing beard, picking out a louse, then scratching the back of his increasingly shaggy graying hair imagining the parasites everywhere, which he followed with another sigh Lucas and his sister mistook for impatience. Lila tried to hand back the drink, while Luke took a stiff shot he followed up with a pained face.
“Ew, that’s gross.”
“‘Gross’?”
Luke shrugged. “They say that here.”
“At School?”
Tom chewed the inside of his cheek anticipating his son’s correction and noting when none came.
“What sort of projects are you and your friends working on?” he casually asked.
Lucas didn’t say anything. Lila tested her coffee, perhaps intrigued by it. She sipped cautiously while their father studied each in turn, pensive, turning his attention now to the cup he poured himself while again ruing the lack of anything to sweeten it.
“Damn,” he muttered to himself. “The times I’ve craved this.”
He abandoned a nostalgic laugh and took a drink instead. Lila asked if it was as good as he remembered, but Tom only shrugged, assailed with the images of coffee shops he once haunted, back when such things existed, staying instead with the taste of the coffee like an unimpressed wine judge, then duly swallowing and finishing the cup in one hit.
“I’m more interested in turning it into currency,” he said.
He motioned to Lucas as he stood.
“I thought with a few more resources, steady supplies, we could talk about what it is you might rather be doing. Where you see your place in the City? Like, if we still want to do this?”
Lucas nodded, eyes shifting to the door.
“I don’t know what that’d be,” the boy said. “I’m OK for classes right now. And I’ve gotta go.”
“Need an escort?”
“Only if you’re going that way,” Lucas said. “It’s safe, dad.”
“School?”
“Classes,” Lucas replied. “But I meant . . . the City.”
Tom only laughed, bereft, and also motioned at the front door as if to indicate beyond.
“The City’s safe?” he said. “You think that, after this morning?”
“It’s the second attack in this building since we’ve been here,” Lila said.
Luke’s eyes turned on his sister and hardened as if it the interruption, though he doused the look with another teenagerish shrug and slung his lightweight pack over his shoulder and saluted them farewell.
Tom watched his son leave with a deep unease he couldn’t tack onto anything the boy’d said. Instead, the front door closed and a sliver of broken wood dropped to the ground, turning Tom’s attention back to more tangible problems long overdue a solution.
*
AFTER LILIANNA DEPARTED, Tom pirated the leftover coffee in Lucas’ cup and added it to his own, filling it with the remainder of the pot as he moved through the apartment, coffee in hand like a shadow of his former self and feeling every inch of it. Weirder yet was retrieving the dead laptop from its bathroom cabinet hiding place and carrying the inert thing like some artefact of the fallen world, back out to the kitchen bench where he opened it and stared pointlessly at its black screen.
Tom mumbled a few impotent curses and finished the coffee, eyes trailing to the useless electrical sockets on the wall, his tour taking in the entire kitchen and ending with him reclaiming the bowl of awful gruel he’d scavenged out of their existing rations supplies. He scratched his hair again, thoughts freeform as he forward-projected his morning and sensed more than actually collated the growing list of tasks demanding his attention.
“God damn it,” he muttered and finished the coffee, making a face as he ran the tap into the plastic dish in the sink, then dunked his mug into it.
He forced his way through the oats in his bowl, imagining honey, sugar, cinnamon, even the old artificial sweeteners he’d resort to back in the day when people had to worry about having too much sugar instead of not enough to eat. The memory was enough to cause a snort, Tom trying to embrace the humility of his family’s predicament rather than get overwhelmed by it. He finished his sermon to himself by dumping the dirty bowl in the water as well.
Down at the street corner, he instinctively scanned for signs of any of the so-called Urchins who potentially caused the pre-dawn attack. Fresh graffiti adorned the side wall of the bike shop, an inverted version of the old Greenpeace symbol Tom happened to know was itself an inversion of an ancient Viking rune. His fingertips traced the black spray paint, curious to know if it was wet still, coming back instead with just a few grimy particles. Again he scanned around for potential culprits, puzzling at the vandalism and the utter cold-bloodedness of the architects of the night’s most recent crisis.
Tom waved to Kit Conners opening the shop, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his green anorak as he turned towards the surging masses of The Mile.
He met Tucker near Speaker’s Corner. The older, hairy-armed man gave him a bright yet guarded grin, secure in his manhood with a Bushmaster hanging by its strap over one shoulder. The Foragers commander shielded his eyes against the morning glare, a summer feel dominating the air. Tom greeted him with a wordless handshake and removed his coat, overdressed yet again, his hunting jacket like a security blanket.
“You ready?” Tucker asked.
“Yeah, let’s get moving.”
“I thought you might want to grab breakfast?”
Tucker motioned back towards the Night Market despite three other vendors firing up for the day nearby, their alluring smells undercut by a trio of young boys on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign advertising a bucket full of dead rats.
“I’m on a budget.”
“Ha,” Tucker said with muted enthusiasm as they started walking. “Still figuring your way through it all?”
“Bartering?”
“Yeah.”
“Kinda,” Tom confessed. “Coffee isn’t how I remembered it. Worth more in trade, huh?”
“That’s an option,” Tucker said. “Let’s go get your gun.”<
br />
*
THEY WALKED WEST past the First Gates and continued along the boundary road towards what people called Brown Town, apparently, foot traffic easing off once they had The Mile at their backs, side by side like on patrol past a row of tall wire fences. Couriers, Safety personnel and workers hurried around them on more urgent tasks.
Beyond a slew of haphazard, low-level buildings, several big brown brick apartment complexes dominated the skyline, their roofs ablaze with laundry snapping like the sails of ships at rest, and at the turn of the main concourse below, the streets crowded again with staggered internal barricades made by a village of buses parked at opposing angles, their wheels long gone, some converted into housing, others like an open-air market for the immediate population of Brown Town.
The precinct had its own neighborhood feel, and Tom walked with Tucker down Short Street at the back of the Foragers’ Depot. It was only coincidence taking them that way, plus Tucker promising the quickest route “away from all the damned people”. The cramped houses, apartment blocks and traders’ stalls eased off again once they’d threaded their way through, and the huge open land on the district’s periphery – one of the many boundaries of the Council-controlled City, a chunk of land once leased by a stonework and haulage company – was now turned over to productive agriculture. Safety troopers stood on duty there too, as seriously as anyone could with their eyes warding the gaps in imperfect fencing, guarding the transplanted and netted orchards and long garden bed rows humped in the loamy soil like mass graves. More productive land framed the other side of the concourse, dusty in the summer heat.
At one corner, framed by a plot of maturing tobacco plants, an old US Post van consulted with a horse-drawn wagon crew. Tom followed Tucker leading the way on his promised shortcut to the weapons depot as an argument broke out among the fruit pickers. One motioned wildly at the tended fields the size of tennis courts to the east, the Forager Depot beyond them, and the argument quickly descended into a three-way wrestling match.
“Leave them,” Tucker said and literally plucked at Tom’s sleeve.
Despite the clamor, Tom let himself be led away, a group of straw-hatted gardeners from the eastern plantations hurrying through a chain gate and stepping in to defuse the fray.
“That’s why newbie tags don’t get weapons,” Tucker said as the scene receded behind them. “We’ve lost too many people just to bad tempers. There’s something about almost everyone who pulled through this . . . these End Times. Left a lot of people a lot less reluctant to go postal to get their way.”
Tom nodded. The overnight attack only underscored the point, but Tom was relieved the local rumor mill wasn’t onto that incident yet. Tucker asked if he was relieved to be getting his weapons back ahead of their next outing, but Tom didn’t say much, nursing his guilty conscience out of pragmatism, and Tucker filled the gap listing his intentions for the next week’s Forager work while Tom let him, trying not to wince as Tucker tried to drill enthusiasm for their venture into him with several hearty shoulder slaps.
“You could run your own crew, Tom,” Tucker said. “Don’t blame me for keeping you on my team. You heard the story about pilgrims getting ambushed outside the northern checkpoints? Foraging’s a tough gig. Hell, I don’t need to tell you that, not after yesterday.”
Tom nodded again, trying to pitch himself as thoughtful rather than recalcitrant, feeling perhaps he should be more haunted than he was by the men he’d killed the day before.
“Cat got your tongue today, buddy?” the older man said. “You holdin’ up OK?”
“You’re asking about yesterday?”
“Well, it was only yesterday,” Tucker said and dropped his amiable grin at last.
“It’s fine,” Tom replied.
“Fine?” Tucker laughed without any humor. “You killed those two men.”
“Three, if you count the one you shot after.”
“That wasn’t on you.”
Tom stopped, not sure why he was surprised to see their transit took them all the way south, parallel to The Mile, and back towards the walled compound around the train station and its ramshackle processing center. There was a pedestrian gate between sandbagged twin machine-gun nests a hundred paces before them which defended a crest at the top of a dirt path up the embankment to a gated overpass. The five troopers on duty had stripped down for the weather, their unit commander lounging on one of the gun emplacements only saluting their arrival with a raised plastic water bottle.
“None of that was on me,” Tom said as if he hadn’t paused for ten seconds.
“Good,” Tucker agreed with him. “Those outlaws made their choices, just like you and me. I’m glad to have you on my six, Vanicek.”
The moment seemed to demand another handshake, so Tom returned Tucker’s grip knowing it made him complicit in some sort of lie. But he wasn’t ready to start trading spit with anyone in the City.
At least not until he got his weapons back.
“C’mon,” Tucker said.
And Tucker led the way up to the checkpoint, the squad leader greeting him by name.
*
WEAPONS STORAGE WAS inside the main Enclave building, something obscenely serene and cool about the dim, but airy corridors of the Administration hub and its apartments on top. The paneled halls and wood-floor corridors gave the place a private school feel – and a far cry from the grimy madness of the rest of the City looming just a bowshot beyond its stout walls. Tom recalled the sensation of only ten days before, the feeling that their motorized escort into The Mile and the City proper was as much to get them away from the sheltered Enclave hub than anything else.
Fortunately for Tom, Tucker carried an easy authority among the Administration officials. His bare, hairy arms and brawler’s gait were out of place among the neatly-dressed men and women seemingly committed to the never-ending task of couriering clipboards and pieces of paper from one table to another in a network of rooms it took Tom a few seconds to realize were what the City had in lieu of a computerized file-sharing network. Very few of the workers were older than Tom, and men and women alike, he was struck by their good health and vitality which were only enhanced by clean clothes, clean shaves, and old-world haircuts. Tucker strutted among them like a cowboy from a parallel universe, the AR15 over his shoulder a reminder of the dangerous world beyond the bureaucratic comfort zone Tom was slightly disturbed to see they’d built for themselves here in the ruins of civilization.
Tucker’s banter dragged on forever. Tom leaned against an internal wall between two rooms festooned with desks, cabinets, and stacks of paperwork, trying to remain inconspicuous and wondering what it’d be like to have one of the handmade cigarettes children sold on The Mile. To distract himself from self-sabotaging thoughts, he peered into the next room and screwed up his mouth watching two young women at desks and a man wearing headphones working a military-grade shortwave radio set beside a crate full of gaffer-taped car batteries.
“Tom.”
Tucker gestured his way as he signed a clipboard, handing it back with his best flirtatious wink to a handsome woman Tom’s age. Tucker clearly wasn’t in any rush. Nor was the woman. She hailed a fit-looking younger man walking past her, commending the paperwork into his care and then turning back to Tucker, giggling at whatever he’d said, her painted nails frequent visitors to Tucker’s hairy arm. Tom distracted himself again watching the other officials, puzzled what kept such mostly fit and capable young men and women from more urgent work.
Tucker eventually rejoined Tom, making like the delay was all about sweet-talking the Administration on Tom’s behalf. Again he drew Tom outside by his sleeve, the pair of them pulling up short as a double line of men and women in gym shorts jogged past in two lines.
“Militia?” Tom asked.
“Na, that’s just what it’s like here,” Tucker said.
“Feels like a military camp.”
“The Enclave?” Tucker asked. “And where they keep the guns.
Coincidence?”
He chortled and led Tom along the pavement until it was blocked by a network of tents and marquees filling the rest of the courtyard. Tucker directed Tom along to another doorway in the main building wall.
“Through here,” he said. “Lucky for you, they’re too busy to handle your request, but Lois said I can do it. This way.”
Tom followed him down another cool hallway, the tasteful, old-world décor making him feel like a time traveler, lost in a dream or the memory of an old film. The Enclave had solar power to keep everything running, but the daytime light was de facto in many rooms. Tom looked in on more office doorways as they passed, only double-taking at the last instant when he saw a much bigger room stacked with electrical appliances and a curly-haired man in his late thirties surrounded by helpers making adjustments to a row of computer terminals.
“What the hell?” he breathed quietly.
“Don’t worry about them,” Tucker said. “That’s Councilor Ben-Gurion’s lab.”
“If they have computers, then why. . . ?”
Tucker shrugged rather than abide Tom’s expansive gesture at the clipboard he carried.
“Special projects,” he said instead. “Like I said, don’t waste your time hoping we’re all getting iPhones again.”
Tom followed him into another office foyer. Guarded by a tall counter running along the far wall, a black woman with a no-nonsense attitude perched on a stool, tucking her paperback novel out of sight.
“Help you?”
“Lois signed these release forms for my squad member here,” Tucker said.
He passed her the clipboard. Tom was distracted trying to think why some degree of computerization wouldn’t be feasible, compared to an anachronistic system allowing such idle waste. Meanwhile, the woman behind the counter managed to look put out by their interruption.
“OK,” she said. “Come on around.”
She unlocked the old oak door behind the end of the counter and let Tucker through. Tom followed with only a moment’s hesitation, disoriented by the apparent lack of service that life in the City’s public service required. Tall windows covered in ancient security mesh ran along the top of the next room’s far wall, admitting daylight and casting rows and rows of lockers and locked compartments into a greyscale frieze.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 21
