The Advisor's Apprentice

by Karpa, Boris

  Another empty magazine fell to the concrete roofing next to him. Arthur surveyed the battlefield calmly – and he liked what he saw. About three dozen ghouls lay on the ground in various poses. Dozens more had become distracted – munching, chewing, and so forth, tearing flesh of long-time airline passengers or workers. Nothing existed in their world but food and hunger. But yet other creatures continued to advance, shambling towards the target from every direction.

   “Retreat.” – the advisor uttered curtly. He remained cool and aloof while he interacted with Arthur – as though he was a military commander in some 90's film. In some sense, Arthur considered, this is a good thing. After all, we have not come here to load up our bags with stolen goods – or have we? What methods is this Turner spouting?

  The advisor got up first. Within a few minutes, he had folded up his sleeping mat and attached it back to his backpack, collected the empty rifle magazines and placed them into his pockets, like a competition shooter that had just finished a difficult stage. Only at this stage, the costs of his bet were far greater. There no longer was a chronometer and a judge to write down the results and declare a winner, Arthur thought absentmindedly. If you lived, you won out. That was it.

   “Get to it!” – the advisor shouted, ripping off the sound-proof earphones. And Arthur moved faster – folded the mat, attached it to his bag, placed the two empty rifle magazines into the pockets of his vest. Next to him, the advisor was already up, with his long rifle reloaded, the heavy bag hanging off his shoulder. With a belated gesture, Arthur rammed a third and final magazine into his gun, and they started across the roof. Far below, the ghouls were already pushing through the front doors of the office building.

  Having crossed the roof at a jog, the advisor sounded like a surgeon asking an assistant for a new tool. Without a word, he proceeded down the fire escape, his long rifle scanning every exit. There were no creatures on long, rusty-metal stairway when they went up, but one could never be sure. Perhaps they would appear. Perhaps-

  Something slammed against one of the office windows from the inside just next to Arthur's ear. He barely restrained himself from screaming – at first just a reaction to the sudden noise, but when he looked at its source, he nearly screamed out again. It was a woman, her face pressed tight against the glass. Dead, broken fingernails scratched hopelessly against the window plate, trying hard to get at him. The clothes across her stomach were bloody, and her eyes, empty and white, were looking directly into his own.

   “Arthur!” – the advisor shouted – “Now! Your gun!”

  He did not think about his next motion – he simply drew his pistol, pressing the barrel against the glass. For a moment, he was not focused on these terrible eyes. The rear sight of the pistol came into focus again – and then there was a deafening blast, and the nightmare vanished. Instead, there was only a round, white hole in the transparent glass. Behind the window, he could just barely discern the woman lying on the ground, a black, smoking hole added to her face just at the base of her nose.

  - “No time, Arthur! Go, go, go!”

  They were by the car in two minutes. Tree minutes – and they pushed the bags into the vehicle. A minute later and the engine roared to life, taking them down the narrow alley. It had been empty, of course, save for a single corpse. It had met them here when they arrived, and had been easily reduced from a walking corpse to the regular kind. The advisor had not even required a gun to do so.

  The vehicle sped down the alleyway. Two ghouls appeared at the end, blocking its path – but the advisor did not even take his foot off the gas pedal. The vehicle brushed one of the ghouls with its side. There was a loud cracking noise, the creature spinning around and fell.

  - “I think we got its hipbone.” – the advisor said, turning the car out of the alleyway.

  *

  The building where they had taken their sniping perch had been at the very edge of the city. Quite soon, the car was tearing further and further away from the ruined metropolis.

  Six months ago it was the City that Never Slept. That was six months ago. When the dead rose from their graves, of course, it had perished, like every other city everywhere in the world. The highways locked up in a merciless snarl of traffic jams, where fear-maddened men fought to the death for a chance of escape – the same as the highways of Rome, Madrid, Paris.

  Now it was The City That Never Slept again – for a different reason. The blackened skyscrapers were raised up towards the skies like dead, burned-out fingers, and the living dead wandered its streets – day or night.

  The car was speeding away from the city, rolling along the old, abandoned railway. This particular line was abandoned long ago, when the world was still alive and vibrant. Two long wire fences, designed to keep thieves away from stealing the steel and copper in the rails now protected the railways from being overrun by the dead – and made it a perfect escape path for the advisor and his apprentice.

  - “So... Mr. Schmitt, what was the purpose of this lesson? I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn, apart from how... they, how they eat each other... was this the lesson?” – Arthur asked when he had finally caught his breath. The image of the woman's face pressed against the glass was still burned into his mind.

  The advisor shook his head. – “My name is Martin. Why do you insist on calling me by my surname, kid?”

   “I know, but... you're my advisor.”

   “Shut the hell up. I reject that nonsense. I saw you wanted out and I took you. You're being a big help to me now, and you're going to be a bigger help when you're done learning.”

  Arthur closed his eyes. What came up was not that woman against the glass. It was the thing that happened just After. His other nightmare was the Camp.

  His parents had died Before – several months Before, he had been spared from having them devoured, like his uncle. After his uncle had died, he had been picked up by a rescue team, which placed him with a refugee camp that claimed to provide a safe haven for children. It did not matter to the rescue team – back when there still were rescue teams – that Arthur was fifteen and eight months old. He was a child; he went to the refugee camp. They were good, honest people. They had just assumed that because it had walls, and people with guns walked the walls, he would be safe there. Nobody asked Arthur anything. Nobody asked the men at the Camp many questions, either.

  That had been a mistake, of course. Serenity Bay had been a boot camp – the sort of place where young men Arthur's age were taught discipline. At least that was what they claimed. After the End came the people who ran it decided that the rules no longer applied – and the young men and women who had been doing time at the camp, or who had been turned in by people who couldn't take care of an extra mouth after the end of the world. Children as young as twelve, and young men Arthur's age were both taken up. They turned away really young children, of course, under any pretext – they needed Arthur and his ilk to do work, ten hours a day under the blazing sun, everything from helping grow food to washing dishes. In effect they became slaves, and the administration of Serenity Bay, their feudal lords.

  - “For the eighteenth time, Arthur. I do not know what they did to you there. But I don't own you. I'm not your master or anything like that. Look at you, you're a grown man with a rifle and pistol. You've killed your own share of ghouls. I would not give a man a rifle and a pistol and a good knife if I didn't respect him, even back in the day. Now? When I trust you to stand guard while I sleep? You could slash my throat with a kitchen knife and I would have nothing to do about that. Or walk away and let the dead things eat me. I'm not an 'advisor'. Hell, I hate that word.”

  They were called 'advisors'. Men who didn't only know how to survive in the new world, but how to fight and make a profit. They ventured between the small, fortified outposts of humanity, into the wastelands infested with the living dead – sometimes even into the cities. They brought back trophies – food, medicine, tools. They carried messages and they helped fight
the ghouls. They were called 'advisors' – like the mercenaries of the world Before – and also because they were willing to share their knowledge. For a fee, of course. And sometimes, they took apprentices.

   “These people at Camp Serenity?” – the advisor said – “They were always asses. But you know what, it's not like I could burst in there before all of this happened and torn the place down. I've always ignored them. After the balloon went up, at first I hung around with a partner. Then, three months in, my partner died – not ghouls, just an accident. They also happen. So I decided I would get an apprentice. I thought I could free a man from that place – just one. Didn't want to put them into the habit of raising slaves for sale.”

   “So what does this have to do with me calling you “Sir”?” – Arthur asked, a bit perplexed.

  The advisor raised an eyebrow. “I want you to call me Martin. That's my name. Martin Schmitt. We're partners in this. I'm not your boss, okay? You could leave now, except of course I would stay if I were you. You still have a lot to learn, and we could tough it out until it is over.”

   “Until what is over?” – Arthur looked at Martin, perplexed. – “What do you mean?”

   “It? The whole apocalypse thing, with the dead people walking the streets? When it is over, when we put down the last of the ghouls and get back to our cities, and our jobs, and using the Internet and taking long hot showers and bitching about the morning traffic.”

   “Martin? If you want me to call you Martin... well, can I speak frankly, Sir?”

   “...yes. Yes you can speak frankly. And don't call me Sir. It's Martin.”

   “You're crazy, Martin.”

  For a moment, the advisor looked down at his apprentice. He paused before replying.

   “You've seriously not learned a whole lot today, have you?”

  09:30

  Perhaps one of the reasons Martin had survived the one hundred, ninety-two days since Before had irretrievably become After was because he had a home like this, Arthur thought. Standing at the top of a small hill, the house provided a view far out across the plain. After the world had shattered, the white fences that had surrounded it had been replaced by coils upon coils of barbed wire at the very foot of the hill. Several bones still hung on them – ghouls that had gotten stuck in the early days, and had been shot by Martin. They attracted other ghouls to gnaw on them, and they'd been shot as well.

  Here, up on the hill, Martin and Arthur could enjoy a brief moment of serenity. They sat on the porch with large cups of steaming tea – with their rifles leaning on the wall next to them, of course, in case a ghoul turned up – and ate their lunch. It was simple and sweet – a glass jar of jam and some sweet biscuits to go with the tea, something to break the repetitive boredom of eating the same food over and over again – most of the time their diet consisted of canned food and rice, the former easy to procure if you dared to raid into the city and the latter coming from Martin's own supplies. Somewhere in the six months that followed the apocalypse he'd come across a truckload of rice and took as much of its as his car would carry.

   “I had what I call just another one in a chain of truly brilliant ideas. When I was in college, I could make two pounds of rice last me a week or so – here I had perhaps a few tons. I took several trips to that truck – still couldn't take all of it, you understand, but I took a lot. Some of the packages were torn, and of course eventually I started being concerned about the fuel. So we have us some rice.”

  Arthur raised the hot cup to his lips. “Can we please not talk about the rice? I mean, we're not eating it right now, isn't that quite a good reason not to talk about the rice? It is sort of traumatic, you know.”

   “Fine. Let's not talk about how brilliant I am at procuring food. Although I think it has a great relevance to what we're doing today.” – the advisor got up, walking up to the edge of the porch, resting one hand on the railing. – “Arthur, what happened on that rooftop?”

   “I don't know.” – Arthur answered – “Look, just tell me what I did wrong. Was it that I didn't -”

   “No. “ – Martin was smiling as his lips touched the sweet, dark-red liquid – “Earl Grey is one of the finest inventions of mankind. – “Really, Arthur, you did nothing wrong. Oh I am sure I could analyze your movements to the fifteenth degree and find out that you squinted wrong when you were shooting, and it's really important to squint just right every time, but that wasn't why I took you up to that roof. Tell me, in general terms, what happened there?”

   “We got up to the roof, and we provoked some of the shamblers to attack us. Then we saw that some of them got distracted by eating their own dead. So we shot some more of them – I think at least two, three dozen – and we left. On the way out another shambler freaked me out, but it wasn't really a threat. So I shot it and we left. I'm not really sure what I have to learn from this.”

   “Well. Let's finish our tea in peace and we'll talk about this more. I'm going to ask you this riddle today, but I want you to try and figure it out for yourself.”

   “Why is that? You never teach me stuff by having me guess things, you don't play at that sensei crap. You just explain it to me. “Hold the gun like that, Arthur”. “When you drive out of an alleyway, it's important to turn just like so, Arthur”. “Tie this knot just like that.” And when you don't, you show me how it is done. What's different this time?”

   “Some of the important things in life are things you can't just have someone tell you. If I told you what it means, it will not mean that for you, it will just be words that an older dude told you. And we all know how much we older people are worth. Older people already lost the world once. We don't have a good track record, our generation.”

   “How do you mean, you lost the world? It's hardly the fault of older people this plague, or whatever it was, broke out.”

   “The hell it wasn't! We weren't ready.” – Martin shrugged – “We should have been. We could have stopped it like smallpox. Quarantines everywhere, civil defense, people's militias, whatever worked. We should have had a civilization robust enough to stand there and win, or at least hold them until we've figured something out. Now it's going to be up to you and young men your own age to restart the world. It'll be a long hard slog to get our cities back from them.”

   “What makes you think we can ever do that? There's too many of these things. Them. The world is over. Let's get ready to live in the new one. There are never going to be department stores, or call centers, or cable TV. It's dead, Martin.”

  Martin fell silent. His eyes filled with silent anger, but he did not raise his voice. He simply shrugged, as if Arthur had said the most ridiculous thing possible, and uttered just one word in reply.

  - “Whatever.”

  They concluded their meal in silence.

  *

  After the last of the biscuits consumed, the empty jar and cups washed, and the paper plates thrown away, Martin and his apprentice, once more, got into the car. They would start with only a brief drive – perhaps a dozen miles, ten minutes of careful driving and dodging until their destination came into view.

  It was a house situated, not unlike Martin's, at the top of a hill. Unlike Martin's, it was very tall – four stories where Martin's had only two, with an improvised guard tower at the top, its sides completely covered with board.

   “Mr. Ashford!” – Martin shouted, getting out of the car – “Mrs. Ashford!”

   “Who's there?” – a voice from the tower called back. It was clearly a woman, far older than either Martin or Arthur were. – “Step up, I can't see you!”

  Inside the truck, Arthur placed his hand on the grip of his rifle. He hoped he could leap out of the truck if these people suddenly tried to shoot Martin – and then fire at the tower. The boards were clearly flimsy, and he didn't expect most of that tower to provide much protection to whoever was there. He and Martin had practiced getting in and out of the car time and
time again. By now it was almost second nature to him.

   “Oh it's you!” – the voice shouted again – “Martin Schmitt! So pleased to see you!”

   “Pleased to see you two, Mrs. Ashford! I've brought the package you've ordered!”

   “You have? Well, bring it up to the entrance, don't wait!” – the elderly woman's voice sounded impatient. Thus, Martin reached into the car's rear seat and produced the package – a large, department-store package of toilet paper. Smiling gingerly, he carried up the trail and laid it down on the porch. The door opened at once, and an old man carrying a shotgun that seemed as old as himself, walked out, with a small box in the other hand.

   “Here are some fresh eggs, Mr. Schmitt!” – he shouted, as if he was somewhat short of hearing.

   “Thank you, Mr. Ashford!” – the advisor replied, taking the box – “But I think I have something you were really looking for!”

   “What is that, Mr. Schmitt?!” – Arthur could hear the man screaming all the way down the driveway.

   “You told me how you lost your Medent when you were going up here from the city! Said you would get me your watch if I found you a new one!”

   “You got me a new hearing aid?!” – the old man replied. This time his voice was not merely raised – it was a true shout of surprise and shock.

   “I have it in my pocket right now! But it'll cost you!” – the advisor took a step back. It was a measure movement – not very noticeable, but it would make it harder for Ashford to leap at him.

   “How much!” – the old man answered, his voice betrayed a note of fear.

   “One of your watches! One of the gold-plated ones from your collection! The genuine Rolexes!”

  To Arthur's ear, the old man sounded positively relieved. “Oh those? Hell, young man, I'll happily trade one of them for a working hearing aid! Why on earth wouldn't I? There's no need for a Rolex in this world, but there sure is a need for good hearing!”