Lionel, be careful!
I pull my rifle into my hands from its place on my shoulder and, holding it in front of me like a torch lighting my way through some dark cavern, I nudge the door open with my foot and step inside.
“Don’t move!” I yell, aiming the weapon around the room.
A high-pitched scream fills my ears.
“Don’t kill us!” begs a trembling voice. “Please don’t kill us! Have mercy!”
It’s a middle-aged woman, her face wet from crying, with a bulge in her abdomen suggesting a late-stage pregnancy. She cowers in the corner of the room, opposite me, watching me with eyes that refuse to blink.
“Go away! Go away, you monster!” shouts a tiny voice from behind her. A young boy, hiding behind his mother, his arms wrapped tightly around his even younger sister who’s crying loudly in a broken, irregular rhythm.
“Please, we have nothing,” sobs the pregnant woman, shifting nervously to the left, to shield the children fully. “Don’t kill us. I’ll do anything.”
I lower my gun and shake my head.
“I’m not here to kill you,” I say. “Are you prisoners?”
“Prisoners?” she asks, wiping tears from her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean. I live here with my husband and his brothers and my children and—”
“Why did you shoot our dad?” screams the boy, leaning around her shoulder. “You’re a horrible person! Why do you want to kill us?”
Suddenly, I feel a wave of nausea. I wretch slightly, then shake it off.
“The men who lived here tried to kill me,” I say simply. “They prey on innocent, desperate people. They’re nothing but depraved scum. Monsters.”
The woman wails loudly.
“Please! We do what we have to do to survive! Please understand! My children… Our children… They’re too young to starve. My husband said it was the only way.”
Bullshit. You’re marauders.
I open my mouth to respond, but the words get stuck in my throat. I feel sick again.
“Lionel!”
The woman starts to wail again as I turn around.
Jessica walks slowly into the room. Her head is bowed.
“Come on, let’s go,” she says in a monotone.
I’m silent. The woman and her children continue to sob softly.
Jessica looks up and stares at them. Her face looks wet and her eyes are bloodshot.
“Please,” begs the woman. “Please.”
Jessica’s face contorts with anger. She starts to raise her gun, but I hold out a hand and stop her. She lowers the weapon and hangs her head. After a moment of silence, she looks up again, her face blank. She spits at the woman.
“Don’t follow us. Don’t make a fucking move until we’re gone, or I’ll blow your damn head off. If I never see you again, you go on living. Understand?”
The woman nods. Her children bury themselves in the shadow behind her.
“Lionel, let’s go,” Jessica says again, heading for the door.
“What happened?” I ask.
She doesn’t respond. I follow her out of the room, and we walk in silence through the empty house. We come to the kitchen riddled with corpses, and Jessica stops. She stands over the bodies and contemplates them. I hear a soft sob.
“Jessica, what happened?” I ask, touching her arm softly.
“Rowan’s dead. Those bastards killed him,” she says in an expressionless voice. “We’re done here.”
She removes my hand and walks ahead.
Chapter Nine
It’s an awkward walk back to camp from the farmhouse.
“Are you okay?” Claire asks as we cross the field towards the forest, our footsteps crunching in the snow. “What happened?”
Jessica walks ahead, moving as fast as she can, not looking back.
“She found her friend. He wasn’t able to join us.”
Claire nods her head thoughtfully.
“I heard the gunfire. I knew you’d probably be okay, but I was still worried,” she says. She falls in line beside me and we walk for a while. I glance at the bandage wrapped around her head. The skin underneath is tinged with red and tiny smudges of grey.
She feels my gaze on it, and instinctively rubs it with the palm of her hand.
“It’s fine, I think,” she says. “It’s been stinging a lot, and it keeps getting itchy, but I suppose you’d get that with any cut this size.”
“Are you sure? It looks like there’s some swelling, and your face is flushed.”
She yawns and shakes her head. “Just a bit of a fever, I suppose.”
“I’ll ask Jessica to give you some more medicine when we get back to camp.”
“Leave it. I’m fine. I can deal with a slight temperature.”
I look away, unsatisfied. I’m worried about her, and I want to force her to take it easy and get better, but at the moment, my mind is on other things.
“Claire, there were people in that house.”
“Huh? You mean, aside from the marauders?”
“A pregnant woman and her children. They weren’t prisoners.”
Her eyes slightly widen. “What do you mean?”
“They were with the marauders. Dependents of the marauders. Pitiful, desperate people. They begged me not to kill them.”
Silence for a few minutes, as we continue walking, coming onto a winding road of cracked, waterlogged asphalt that leads into the hills, and then…
“Lionel, you didn’t kill them, did you?”
She clasps her hand tightly around my wrist.
I stop and look at her. Her eyes are pleading.
“No, I didn’t kill them. Of course not.”
“Then what did you do?”
I sigh.
“We left them there.”
“On their own? How are they supposed to survive like that?”
I wrench my wrist away and quicken my pace.
I’m feeling sick again.
“Lionel? What did you do?”
“I don’t know, but at least I didn’t kill them.”
We don’t talk after that. We keep travelling through the hills, passing snowed-in houses and wrecks of vehicles that are half metal and half ice. We go past a field covered in grey, old grazing land. Frozen animal skeletons litter the snow, starved to death long ago and forgotten. The forest of dead trees awaits us at the end of the road. We’re nearly home.
As we pass into the realm of the dead, I can’t help but feel like I’m being watched by something sinister, hiding amongst the tangled husks, telling me to turn back. To go away.
You belong out there—it taunts.
With the marauders.
* * * *
Night has fallen. We’re eating dried biscuits by the light of the campfire. The flames glow weakly, dimly. Dying. Flakes of snow drift down from the sky and threaten to bury everything under a blanket of white. Nothing can live here.
I feel cold.
Jessica’s been silent ever since we got back to the camp. She’s sitting on the other side of the fire, reading a worn-out book, but she’s been staring at the same page for the last half hour.
As I pull myself closer to the fire to roast the tip of my biscuit in it, she looks up at me over the faded paperback and stares with bloodshot eyes.
I stare back while I chew the rest of my food.
“Fucking hell,” she suddenly spits, tossing the book into the fire. “Damn it all.”
“Are you okay?” asks Claire. “You can talk about it if you like.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” replies Jessica, with a resigned sigh. “Rowan’s the only friend I’ve had since the world all went to shit. He’s the one who brought us to New City, h
e’s the one who taught me how to survive, but he’s dead now.”
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
“Not much to do, I guess,” she says. “Go back home, to the city. Take you back with me, get your sister some medical attention and get you a job. Forget everything that happened today.”
With that, she looks away, and starts unrolling her sleeping bag along the ground.
Beside me, Claire has a fit of loud coughing. She spits a globule of mucus into the fire, and rests her forehead in her hand.
“Sorry,” she says. “It hurts a little.”
Finished with her sleeping bag, Jessica rummages through the sports bag beside her, producing a half-filled water bottle and a roll of gauze.
“Here,” she says, leaning around the fire and giving them to Claire. “Replace that bandage, and take some more of that medicine. I don’t know how much it will help the fever, but until we can get you to a proper doctor, it’s all we’ve got.”
Claire takes them gratefully, and I set to work replacing her bandage. Underneath, the wound is covered in a layer of brown grime and dried blood, and the skin around it is purple with bruising. She winces as I dress the wound with disinfectant and then wrap a new length of bandage around her head.
When I’m done, I get another biscuit out of the tin laying open in front of me and sit back, staring at the fire. It crackles softly, somehow soothing my mind. I dig into the snow with my fingers and extricate a tiny twig, which I toss into the flames. It blackens and crumbles, slowly becoming an orange cinder that rises into the night air, where it flickers and vanishes. The twig is gone now, reduced to a handful of ash and black dust.
Everything becomes dust, eventually.
“Is that where you’re from?” Claire finally asks, passing the biscuit tin back to Jessica. “New City?”
Jessica nods.
“A couple days’ worth of walking from here, a bit to the south. We call it New City because it’s built out of the ruins of an old one. It’s on the coast, so there’s a desalination plant, which does a decent job of cleaning toxins—radiation or whatever it is that makes it poison—out of the water. We’ve got clean water, so we’ve also got crops, and we’ve turned the old public swimming pool into a fish farm. There’s still not much to go around, and it’s not an easy place to live, but it’s better than being out here.”
“You said there’s a doctor there?” I ask. “For Claire?”
She nods again. “Most of the city was destroyed when the world turned into a shit hole, but, for whatever lucky reason, the hospital stayed standing. We brought the power grid back online and so now we have a working hospital. There are only a handful of doctors left to run it, but there’s a bunch of others who make do with medical textbooks and a little bit of supervision, and that helps.”
“What else do you have in this city? How many of you are there?”
She shrugs in answer. “A few hundred, I think. Maybe a thousand, if you’re pushing it. There really isn’t much there aside from the hospital and the farms. A couple of refurbished apartment buildings for everyone to live in, a dining hall, a shower block that’s lucky enough to have access to heated water, and the old police station, which is where we got our guns.”
“Why were you having trouble with marauders?” Claire asks. “Do they attack the city?”
“No,” Jessica replies, shaking her head. “They’d be stupid to. We have enough guns to kill the lot of them. We’ve had trouble because sometimes we send people out to look for supplies—ammo, medicine, canned food if we can find it—and sometimes, they don’t come back.”
“And you’re allowed to take us back with you?” I ask.
“As long as you can work,” she says. “That’s the only rule for living in New City: everyone works for their food, and nobody gets more than their fair share. We just can’t afford it. Plus, seeing as how I’ve come out here for nothing, and Rowan’s...not coming back, I may as well bring you with me, just so I don’t go back empty-handed. I want me risking my life today to be worth something.”
She yawns loudly, and starts to crawl into her sleeping bag.
“Jessica,” I say softly, as I dig through my backpack for our blankets.
She looks up.
“Why did we leave those people at the farmhouse today?”
“Does it really matter?” she asks. “Let’s get some sleep.”
I don’t move. Claire’s fingers fumble around my shaking hand. I take hold of them.
“Is it really bothering you that much?” Jessica asks. “They were savages. Cannibals.”
I’m silent.
“They were unarmed, and hungry,” Claire says. “We could have helped them.”
Jessica sighs.
“A pregnant woman and two children? And how could they possibly contribute anything useful if we brought them back to the city with us? We can’t afford to feed people who can’t work. We don’t have enough to go around as it is. Everyone has to contribute; that’s how New City works. If we don’t abide by that, everything we’ve struggled to rebuild will collapse. Those people were weak. Hungry.”
“We’re weak and hungry too,” I say, through gritted teeth. “So why bring us with you?”
“You’re not marauders,” she says in a weary tone, “and, judging by how you’ve survived this long, you’re probably stronger than most and that means you can work. You,” she addresses Claire, “you’re young and fit enough for manual labor once you get over that fever, and you…” She nudges her chin in my direction. “Know how to use a gun, and that’s a valuable skill in New City.”
I shake my head in confusion.
“I thought you said marauders don’t attack the city. Why would knowing how to use a gun be so important?”
“Because…” Jessica sighs, pulling the front of the sleeping bag over her face to block out the cold air, muffling her voice. “There isn’t enough to go around, and sometimes, that makes people go a little crazy.”
So you shoot your own people if they don’t do what you say?” Claire asks in disgust.
“It’s not like that,” comes Jessica’s muffled reply. “People are desperate. They do desperate things. Someone needs to maintain order, or we’ll have nothing left.”
She yawns.
“Look, it’s not as bad as it sounds, okay?”
Her sleeping bag rustles loudly as she turns onto her side, away from us.
“Get some sleep. I want to be out of here as soon as the sun’s up. I’ve had enough of this place. Too much has happened today.”
Claire curls up in the bundle of blankets beside me, and within minutes, the two of them are asleep, free at last from the pressures of reality, for just a few scant hours.
I settle down in front of the waning fire and try to sleep as well, but I find myself once again lying awake.
Why does it keep getting harder and harder to sleep?
Something’s bothering me, and I can’t shake it out of my head.
I can still feel something menacing watching me.
Chapter Ten
I don’t feel any better in the morning. I open my eyes after two hours of stolen sleep, haunted by dreams of dying children and crying women, to a terrible headache and a feeling of foreboding even more intense than before.
I can’t concentrate.
What is the date today? March twenty-seventh? March twenty-eighth?
I’m not quite sure. In either case, it isn’t too different than yesterday was, so I doubt it matters. It’s still cold. Everything’s still grey. It’s still hopeless, yet hopeful at the same time, but now, that hope is slowly fading.
Jessica breaks another loaf of bread in half for breakfast, brushing tiny pills of frost off its surface and passing me a chunk of white fuzz.
I take a b
ite. It’s stale and tasteless. I feel my stomach heave as the sickness from yesterday returns. I spit the bread back out.
I don’t feel like eating.
“Are you okay?” Claire asks, studying my face with a look of concern.
“Just a headache,” I say, in a voice that sounds surprisingly strained. “Didn’t sleep well.”
She reaches into the knapsack beside her and comes back out with the flu tablets Jessica gave her, which she pushes into my hand.
“Take one of those. It’ll help.” I shake my head and push them back away. Her face is still tinged a purplish red. “You need those more than me. Your head...”
She manages a wry smile. “I’m used to the stinging now. Are you sure?”
“Pretty much,” I say, unable to smile back. “I’m just tired.”
She watches me for a moment longer, chewing on her bread as I bury my face in my hand and run my fingers slowly through my hair.
“It’s those people, isn’t it?” she asks softly. “Those marauders you left behind. It’s bothering you.”
I don’t answer.
“You know you could have helped them.”
I turn away and start packing up our things. She doesn’t talk to me again for the rest of the morning.
* * * *
We spend most of the day walking, though I don’t seem to notice. I spend the entire journey lost in thought, and looking over my shoulder for the unmentionable thing watching.
Why are you going to the city?—it taunts.
You’re just like the marauders. This is where you belong, in the wasteland. There’s nothing but monsters out here.
The trees start to get denser as we go further into the hills, and the snow gets deeper. Jessica leads us away from the forest, and we start to walk down a winding country road, which is crisscrossed with cracks from years of disuse and sparkling shards of ice imbedded in the crumbling asphalt.
Every now and then, we pass a rusted car, half metal and half ice, its windows opaque from condensation and its wheels fused into the road. At one point, Claire gets tired and so we stop to lean on one to rest, and I scrub the ice away from the window with the butt of my gun. The inside is blackened and warped. A festering wraith sits lonely inside, slumped over the steering wheel, tatters of burnt and faded clothing still clinging to its moldy body. I find myself staring at it, and I think for a second it somehow stares back, but then Jessica urges us to keep moving and Claire agrees, so we move on. I don’t glance back.
Sun Bleached Winter Page 7
