Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  “I had no food for my babies. The relief convoys never brought enough. We were always hungry.”

  “I buried my son in the communal cemetery. He died in my arms.”

  “When the rains came the tents flooded. We were always cold.”

  “I cried a lot. I cried for my children, and I cried for our country.”

  “Sometimes I just wanted to die – to give up the fight. There seemed no reason to go on. Every day was a new desperate struggle just to survive.”

  “The camp stripped me of my dignity as a woman and as a human being. We clawed and fought for food. We were so desperate…”

  The monitor played for several more minutes until the man felt himself physically reel. The tragedy of each woman’s story, and the vast desolation in their voices struck like physical blows. When he got to his feet at last he felt crushed by their grief.

  The man saw the boy sitting pensive and brooding in another corner watching a separate monitor and he hesitated. Bill, the tour guide came quietly to his side.

  “It’s shocking,” the man said and made a sorrowful gesture with his hands as though he could not find words more adequate.

  The tour guide nodded. “As the apocalypse spread north, the refugee camps became forgotten by the government. Aid and relief was infrequent. Life and death in places like this became arbitrary. Many died, and many of those who survived wished they hadn’t.” He shrugged his shoulders, bereft. “It came down to chance, fate. Some camps survived because the women there learned to band together to stay alive. They turned tents into churches and gathered their meager scraps of food together to create soup kitchens. In some camps they organized music and singing to entertain the children and bolster their spirits – even crude schools. Through the tragedy of death they found a way to rise above their dreadful circumstances and endure. Babies were born – life went on…”

  “And what about the other camps?” the man’s voice was strangled in his throat by his own demons.

  The tour guide shook his head like a surgeon who emerges from an operating theatre to deliver the worst possible news to a waiting family.

  “They collapsed into anarchy and chaos,” he confessed. “Women committed murder for a handful of vegetables, or a bottle of water. The whole organized structure descended into Hell, and many refugees were driven out of the camps and forced to fend for themselves and their children like outcasts from a society and a government that already was too overwhelmed to help them. They disappeared.”

  Past the tour guide’s shoulder, the man noticed a wall of photographs picturing camp life. One was an aerial view of a refugee compound and he went towards it. The image depicted tents and crude wooden huts divided into long rows like a wartime concentration camp. The man peered for a long time and then physically shook himself. The comparison between the refugee camps of the apocalypse and the horrors of a World War were so frighteningly stark that he had to remind himself that what he was looking at were pictures of the recent past in a world accustomed to internet and cell phones – and not the holocaust days of almost a century before. In a time of change, the plight of warfare’s victims remained gruesomely similar. Beside the image hung a more detailed photo showing a high chain-wire perimeter, with a single set of gates, surrounding the entire area. In the aerial image the man could see several dark blobs lined up outside the gates, and a grey mass pressed along the inside of the facing fence. He turned to the tour guide and looked a question. Bill touched at the dark line of shapes. “Trucks,” he said. “One of the infrequent relief columns. They parked outside the camp because otherwise there would have been rioting. That’s what you can see behind the restraint of the fence – that grey mass is what a thousand or more women and children waiting for food and water to be unloaded looks like.”

  “Rationing?”

  “Of course,” the tour guide said. “Everyone was allocated a ration card. Without it you didn’t get fed. The women would line up with tin mugs, or old cups – sometimes just a shoe… anything that could hold a few scoops of rice or whatever could be found to feed them. They lined up for hours in the sun and the rain and the snow. There was simply no other way.”

  “And this happened every few days?”

  “No,” Bill shook his head. “The camps were supposed to be supplied every week through the government groups like FEMA and a network of aid organizations all working together. But the system collapsed. The aid organizations couldn’t function in the midst of the apocalypse, and the Army was too stretched across the battlefront to spare precious trucks and supplies when everything they had was needed to continue the fight against the undead. The supply system quickly became chaotic. Some camps received food weekly for the first month or so…”

  “And then?” the man looked up sharply.

  “And then the trucks simply stopped coming,” the tour guide said.

  The man grunted like he had taken a heavy blow. He walked slowly alone along the length of the wall peering at the bleak images, and then turned on his heel and thrust out his jaw determinedly. There were two canvas tents he had not yet been into, and he went stiffly towards them now, resolved but reluctant, his shoulders squared like a man going to the executioner’s wall to face the firing squad.

  The first tent was not set up as living quarters, but rather as a macabre display. In the center of the space stood a low wooden cabinet, the top made of glass. He peered into the display case and saw a collection of crude weapons. Some were knives fashioned from steel tins, their edges serrated, the grip just a tightly wound wad of cloth. Beside it was a shiv; a stiletto bladed spike twelve inches long with the handle fashioned into the top section of a Catholic crucifix. The bottom of the crucifix was the sheath that concealed the wicked weapon. The man stared with a mix of wide-eyed shock and horror. There were many more knives and even a rudimentary mace shaped from the bottom section of a baseball bat and sprouting vicious nailed barbs from the sawn-off end.

  The man came from the tent and almost bumped into the tour guide who was waiting for him on the dirt path.

  “You look shocked,” Bill said.

  The man nodded. “I never thought – ”

  “The situations in some camps became so desperate that many women felt the need to arm themselves,” Bill explained, justifying the display inside the tent. “The exhibition shows some of those weapons that were seized, or found.”

  “I… I just can’t imagine any woman…” the man broke off and then started again, seemingly on a new subject, as if his mouth had skipped ahead of his thoughts. “I’ve seen the evil that men do,” he said grimly, staring directly into the tour guide’s dark eyes. “I’ve seen the very worst of mankind in all its wicked evil cruelty. Nothing surprises me any more. But women…?” the man shook his head again and his voice tailed into silence, as though his own sense of decency and courtesy had been shaken and he could not resolve this new reality from his genteel perception.

  The tour guide watched the man, bemused. “You think men are the only ones capable of cruelty and violence?” a note of incredulity crept into Bill’s voice. He shifted his weight onto one foot, leaning closer. “Can you name me any creature more vicious, or more cold blooded and ruthless than a mother protecting her babies?”

  The man said nothing. Instead he glanced sideways at the last remaining tent and gave a jerk of his head. “Anymore surprises in there I should be prepared for?”

  The tour guide shook his head. “No,” he said. “The last tent is set up just the same as the first two you visited. It was a family’s home.”

  The man narrowed his eyes, walked past the tour guide and without hesitating, ducked into the darkened gloom of the fourth tent.

  There were three bundled blanket beds on the ground, a long one and two much smaller. Through the canvas sides he could see pinpricks of light where the fabric had worn to holes. The man drew his eyes slowly back down to the beds, and then frowned oddly. The air inside the tent seemed somehow thicker, tinged with s
omething almost rancid and tainted. It was like the smell of cigarette smoke that could never quite be purged from a room – but it was not the odor of tobacco. He had a sudden sense of foreboding and then felt the creeping flesh sensation of something repulsive, like imaginary insects, crawling beneath his skin. The man came out of the tent and gasped out a long breath he had been holding.

  The tour guide watched him carefully, his eyebrow arched curiously.

  “Did you smell it?” he asked.

  The man nodded his head and drew the back of his hand across his mouth as if to wipe away the taste that coated the back of his throat.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The tour guide nodded. “I told you it was a family’s home – a young mother, her baby daughter and her son. Apparently, one evening, in a fit of utter despair, with no food and no water to feed her children, the lady murdered both the little kids,” he explained. “She cut their throats and then sat and watched them die. When they had bled out, she carefully tucked both children into their beds. Then she slashed her own wrists.”

  “The smell…”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Death and blood. No one realized what had happened. It was like those stories that the newspapers once published about elderly people being found dead in their homes by neighbors. No one discovered the bodies in that tent until the stench of corruption hung so thick in the air that it couldn’t be ignored. She wrote a note. By the time they discovered the three bodies it had been seventeen days since she had committed suicide.”

  “With so many tents crammed so close together, no one thought it strange that the woman and children suddenly disappeared. No one bothered to check on her?” the man asked in disbelief.

  Bill grimaced, his lips peeling back over his clenched teeth. “These camps were not a community – not a neighborhood,” he said darkly. “Every refugee was looking to do one thing – survive another day. They became so isolated by their own misery and desperation, nothing beyond the flaps of their own tent mattered.”

  Somewhere below the layer of his consciousness, the man realized the room was silent – the video monitors were no longer playing. He glanced, frowning, over the tour guide’s shoulder, looking for the boy, and when he could not see him, he spun quickly on his heel – and realized that the boy was standing, waiting for him.

  The boy stood alone on the graveled edge of the path, his shoulders slumped and his head hanging. His jaw was clenched, his lips set into a thin brave line, but his eyes were brimming with tears. The boy was peering down into a fire pit beside one of the other tents. Set into the cold ashes was a soot-blackened cast iron cooking pot.

  The boy seemed to sense the man’s eyes upon him and he lifted his face slowly, the defiance frozen in his features. And then a single tear welled over the lower lid of the boy’s eye and ran glistening down his cheek, cutting a runnel into the dirty face.

  “This was my life!” the boy cried out in a wrench of anguish and agony. He flung his arm in a wild angry gesture. “This filth is what you left me and mom to live alone in – for years.”

  The man took a faltering step towards the boy and then stopped. The boy seemed to cringe away. He clenched his hands into tight white-knuckled fists as though he might fight.

  “I was born into this filth,” the boy’s voice began to rise, becoming hoarse and belligerent. “This was all I knew – all I ever knew,” he kicked at the cooking pot and it toppled over with a sound like a ringing bell. “And when I was old enough – old enough to know that you had abandoned us and left us to fend for ourselves instead of taking us with you, God how I hated you!” the boy’s mouth twisted. “I felt like you didn’t want me. I felt like I wasn’t important to you – and all the while mom defended you. She used to tell me these fantastic stories about how you would come for us one day. How you would take us away from the camp, out of the dirt and away from the rats. She said you were finding a safe place for us, somewhere we could all be together as a family, and I believed her!”

  The man took another step closer, his eyes darkening with the kind of anguish that only a parent can ever know.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered softly.

  The boy shook his head, snarling with his pain. “No!” he shouted. “Don’t say that. Don’t dare say that! You weren’t sorry. You were never sorry. If you had been you would have done something. You would have come back for us.”

  “I tried.”

  “Liar!”

  “I did,” the man’s voice was quiet.

  “I don’t believe you. You let mom be sent to a refugee camp when she was already pregnant with me – with your son. And you left her. How could you do that? What man does that to a woman, knowing she was carrying his child?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “You’re lying!” the boy raged. “There’s always a choice. It’s the choice between right and wrong. The difference between honor and cowardice.”

  The man’s shoulders slumped. He took one more shuffling step towards the boy and held out his hands in a stifled appeal. “I mean it,” he said, torment and guilt thickening his voice. “If I could have stayed with your mother, I would have.”

  “No,” the boy’s voice was emphatic. He shook his head in dismissal. His lips curled into a sneer of disgust. “You’re not the kind of man who stays, and you don’t stand for anyone… or anything.”

  The boy turned and ran for the exit, his boots in the loose dirt kicking up dust. He flung the door angrily open and let it slam loudly behind him.

  * * *

  The boy burst into the next exhibition room and stared about him, panting wildly. He stood within a large area, brightly lit by floodlights, and filled with an eclectic variety of military weaponry. In a corner he could see the green camouflaged bulk of an old Army troop carrier, and beside it, perched next to a steel catwalk and steps, hunched the open canopy of an aircraft fighter jet. Along the walls were vast wooden display cabinets of weaponry; heavy machine guns, assault rifles. The boy took it all in with a single hectic sweep of his eyes – and then he saw the two doors.

  One was a black door that stood on the far side of the exhibition area, and the other lay to his right. Above the nearest door hung a green ‘exit’ sign. The boy went towards it at a run.

  The door had a horizontal metal crash bar. The boy slammed the palm of his hand against the steel and the big heavy door was flung wide open by the urgent impetus of his momentum. He heard the faint hum of a buzzer, and then suddenly he found himself standing on a sidewalk outside the museum, gasping in the frigid air. Across the road he could see the corner of the parking lot and the straggling brown shrubs that bordered it.

  “I hate him,” his mouth was still wrenched tight, the words spat like filth. “I hate the bastard!”

  It was snowing heavily, the sky grey overhead, the air misted and hazed. A thick white powdering lay across the concrete and he sank down to his ankles. The wind came biting at him and he felt the sting of it against his cheek and arms.

  The boy looked left and then right. Close to where he stood was a square brick building the size of a public toilet block. There was a padlocked door and no windows. From within the structure he could hear the steady monotonous humming of an old generator. Beyond the blockhouse he saw nothing except the ghostly silhouettes of brown trees swaying behind a swirling veil of white, and the rugged outline of hills against a smudged horizon.

  In the opposite direction there was just straight road, already covered by snow, that lead past broken and burned out factory buildings. The boy set out in the direction of the urban wreckage, and then suddenly changed his mind and turned the other way. He started running towards the distant trees.

  * * *

  “The boy doesn’t know that you served, does he?” Bill asked, standing close to the man without turning his head. They were both staring at the doorway, the sound of it crashing closed behind the fleeing boy still resounding as a loud echo in the heavy silence.

  The man looked s
harply at the tour guide. “What makes you think I served?” his voice was suspicious.

  Bill smiled tightly but went on as if he had not heard the question. “You should tell him,” he said. “He needs to know.”

  The man shrugged. “That’s why I brought him here,” he sounded like something inside him was breaking. “I wanted him to understand what it was like…”

  “Why not just tell him you were in the Army?”

  “I tried. I tried a dozen times over the years… I just couldn’t find the words.”

  Bill nodded his head with slow understanding. “No soldier survived the apocalypse without scars, and a lot of veterans are like you,” he admitted. “I think it’s been the same for soldiers ever since the very first wars were fought. The horror – the blood and mud and tears – it’s not exactly the kind of subject that’s easy to talk about if you have experienced it.”

  “No,” the man agreed. “It wasn’t the war for heroic stories, and the real ones are just too horrible to share.”

  “And so you brought him to the museum to gain an appreciation of what we lived through?”

  The man nodded. “I thought if he saw the war the way it really was, and if he understood the sacrifices soldiers and civilians made, it would be easier for me to tell him – easier for me to explain why I wake up in cold sweats, why I can’t sleep some nights… why the horror of it all still comes to me in my nightmares.”

  “He thinks you’re a coward?”

  “Yes.”

  Bill nodded grimly and then his voice lifted just a little with something that sounded like hope. “I think,” he said carefully measuring his words, “that by the end of this museum tour, we might just be able to change his mind about you.”

  The two men walked side-by-side to the door and then stepped into the next exhibition space. Bill frowned with concern and alarm. The exhibition space was empty, a warning buzzer humming. He glanced to his right at the exact same moment as the man. The exit door was ajar, snow and cold wind swirling through the open gap.