by M. E. Parker
“What’s going on?” The head ghost barked at Mille. She paced outside the ration distribution bakery behind an empty ration pushcart, her journal tucked under her arm. At least twenty other commissary clerks stood in a similar fashion, fidgeting and hopping from one foot to another to keep warm, all with empty ration carts.
“It’s closed,” Millie barked back, pointing to the ration bakery, a warehouse adjacent to the supply depot that smelled either of baking bread or entrails, depending on the time of day.
“Locked up tight.” The clerk for 11-D, gave his cart a nudge.
Myron thought that if they had ever gnawed the flesh off a coyote bone, felt the surge of nature running through their blood, they’d forget all about that pureed mash, hit the wild, and never look back.
“All right, let’s break it up here.” Two more ghosts walked up with discipline rods drawn. Four others followed closely behind. “Bakery’s closed today. Come back tomorrow.”
“What’ll we give out for rations?” Millie asked.
“Slogs work until someone tells them to stop,” the ghost on Myron’s right said. “Food or not. Anyone who has a problem, give them this.” The ghost pounded Millie’s ration cart with a blow so hard that it broke the shelves into pieces.
A civil guard with four black stripes on his shoulder, a captain, came out to the center of a growing throng of idle workers. He held up a megaphone to speak. “The Superintendent of Industry has an announcement.”
“Is the war over?” A voice shouted from the crowd.
“The war’s over?”
“Oh, mercy, heavenly day.”
“No,” the captain shouted. “The war is not over.”
From the top of the stanchion in the supply depot, the speaker crackled with static ahead of a rare public message.
“Fellow countrymen, fellow workers, shift mates and friends,” the Superintendent of Industry began. “Three days ago,” his voiced echoed through the maze of redbrick walls, “I received a dispatch that our main source of coal fell under enemy attack. Our forces have mobilized and we have every confidence that we will secure the region. We have not taken delivery of coal for two days. Our reserves have been diverted to Munitions, but that will last only two more days. The Civil Guard has the authority to dispose of anyone not cooperating with emergency procedures.”
Gasps erupted from the crowd.
“Effective immediately, in teams supervised by your shift foreman and accompanying Civil Guards, you are charged to scour the countryside bound by the Jonesbridge Gorge and return anything that our fireboxes can burn as fuel. This means every shin pine, every weed, stick or log, dry grass, and scrap of wood from Old Town. I want to see this valley look as though you’ve given it a morning shave. With our numbers we will fill our fireboxes! With our numbers, we will continue production!” His voice grew louder until the speaker box cut out in the middle of his words. “With ou… n…bers, we will k…p …ur troops supplied and take back our ...oal!”
Myron’s entire body weakened as he imagined every worker in Jonesbridge scouring the countryside, ripping it to shreds top to bottom, destroying the old chapel, finding Coyote Man’s cave and unearthing the bunker with Myron’s flying machine inside.
“What should we do with him?” The ghost tapped Myron with his jerry-rod.
“He’s no murderer, but throw him in the coop for shirking. Then get with a group and get firebox fuel like the Super said.”
Chapter 12
Blanketed by darkness, Errol stopped and knelt down. Holding Sindra’s hand, he patted the ground, grappling with something on the floor. The boards creaked around them when he pulled open a door in the floor. “Careful. These steps are narrow and steep.”
Sindra climbed down the steps sideways to fit in the narrow passage, following the contours of the wall as the staircase curved. Ahead of her, the sound of Errol’s crutch landed, followed by the plop of his foot behind it, until even that fell silent. Dim light emerged as she rounded the last corner of the staircase. At the bottom of the stairs, Errol’s face flickered above a candle.
“Where are we?” An odor of waste and illness met her at the bottom of the stairs.
“Cellar. People in the old days used to keep fermentations down here. Quickest way to the stables without being seen.” He nodded to shadowy recesses in the stone corridor. “It’s also the quarantine.”
A series of alcoves that once housed wine flickered with candlelight, accompanied by sounds of coughing and hacking. “This is where you go if you get really sick—wet lung, trench mouth. On half rations, since they’re not working.” Errol pulled his smock over his nose. “Cover your face.”
Sindra followed his lead. The woman to her right coughed, sounding as though her insides might gurgle out of her mouth.
“Sometimes they recover and return to work. Most times they don’t.”
Errol pulled some bread and a couple of protein sticks from his smock. He broke the bread and handed it to a woman with swollen eyes. She looked up at him, the whites of her eyes the color of blood.
“Why here?” Sindra whispered.
“In case they’re contagious.”
Sindra panicked.
“This is part of my duties as mule caretaker. Bring the sick folks their half ration.” He shrugged. “Close to the stables, I guess. Anyway, how do you think I was able to keep you alive? I brought you some of what these folks were supposed to get.”
He continued to dole out rations. “Way I see it, if you get some extra rations, you owe these slogs.” He filled a cup of water next to the woman, careful to keep the canteen from opening and touching it. “I’m a pious man of sorts. I didn’t like short-shrifting them. But you’re alive and that’s what matters now.”
They surfaced through a doorway in a freestanding wall, balanced by the sheer will of its bricks without any building behind it to hold it. Sindra could smell the stables before she could see them as she followed Errol along a path through several more alleyways until they reached the long line of wooden lean-tos and a corral where twenty or more mules milled around, some with their heads in a trough. In a separate corral, three horses snorted at the gate. The donkey stood like a statue in a smaller pen.
“Lala. You got a visitor,” Errol said, his voice a coarse whisper.
Behind them, a stable door swung open. The stall had been swept clean of its hay and had a chair and table in the corner near a cot. A dark woman draped in rags, older than anyone in Jonesbridge, ambled through the door opening. She walked as though she had a limp in both legs, grunting slightly with each step. “What are you poking around out here this time of night for?”
“She needs your expertise,” he said pointing to Sindra. “With a medical condition.”
“Looks healthy to me.” Lalana flattened her hand against Sindra’s forehead.
Errol reached over and lifted Sindra’s smock all the way to her breast. “Look.”
“Oh my.” Lalana turned around and ambled into the stable. “Well, come on inside.”
She lit two candles and plopped down in her chair. In the flickering yellow light Sindra could see Lalana’s face. She had skin the color of a rusted poke-iron and round cheeks with mesmerizing narrow eyes in the shape of eggs. From a cabinet behind her, Lalana reached for a purple root, pushing aside jars and boxes of assorted shapes and sizes.
She grabbed a triangular bottle filled with greenish liquid and poured some into a bowl, measuring out extra after she eyed Sindra from top to bottom. “I’m going to whip you up a black whisper.” She broke off a hunk of the purple root and began to grind it into a stringy soup in the bowl. “This’ll stop that life growing inside you.”
“A black whisper?” Sindra asked. She was relieved that this visit to Lalana would not involve surgery, that all she had to do was drink something and it would all be done with. “What is it?” Worn boxes lined her shelves, each labeled with letters Sindra could not read.
Lalana positioned the bowl over t
he candle until the mixture bubbled. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that. A smatter of Viper thistle. Spit of Hornwood extract.” She reached for a red box on the shelf full of leafy vines and crumbled some into the bowl. “Bit of billet thistle for any pain.” Then Lalana stuffed her own cheeks with a wad of billet thistle and took a deep breath. “Might taste a little ripe at first. Probably won’t sleep too well tonight. Then no more problem.”
Sindra watched Lalana mix the concoction, tossing in one thing after another, still doubtful about her decision.
“Okay. It’s ready.” Lalana handed Sindra the bowl. “Drink all of it. Quickly.”
Sindra kissed her fingers and placed them on her abdomen, wishing the tiny him, or her, a safe trip to the Great Above. When Sindra took the bowl, the smell caused her to turn away. She pinched her nose, closed her eyes and gulped it down in three swallows, not allowing herself an opportunity to change her mind.
“That’s it,” Lalana whispered, reaching for the empty bowl.
Sindra’s lips puckered. The mixture tasted the way the stables smelled. She gasped for breath. “What now?”
“Wait.”
“This is just awful,” Sindra said. “So few people left in the world. We need more people. Just doesn’t make sense.”
Lalana pointed to Sindra. “That is the reason,” she said clicking her tongue. “So we don’t extinct ourselves like we did the animals. A slog baby, if it doesn’t die right away, comes out deaf, blind, or missing limbs and such. Or it carries along invisible abnormalities.” She bent down for a handful of dirt. “The earth is sick. It’s changed us. You’re a slog. Here for production and that’s it.”
Sindra’s stomach ached, unsure of why she was sick, the black whisper or what Lalana had just told her. “You are a doctor, right?”
“When I was a girl, my daddy worked as an animal caretaker for a traveling menagerie. Shame. No animals left these days except beasts of burden, and there are precious few of those.”
“Goat foxes,” Errol corrected.
“Yeah, and some lizards and mice and such,” Lalana added. “I’m speaking of the grand beasts.” She held the bowl over the candle flame with a pair of tongs, sloshing it as the syrupy liquid bubbled and popped, boiling away the remaining fluid. “Those three horses over there.” She point to the corral. “That’s all I know that exist. Something happens to them, I don’t know where to find more.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Clean farmland. That’s what we’ve been fighting over for decades. Some places weren’t exposed to the things that alter your insides. Everyone else gets whatever food they can make out of this God-forgotten soil, because the damage has already been done.“
“How do you know?”
“I’m an old woman.” Her eyelids folded into wrinkles when she chuckled. “Before I came to Jonesbridge, I worked for the farms near Simonville, before the E’sters torched it. This change I’m telling you about isn’t something you can clean.” She clasped her hands together and sat them on the table. “Lordy, I don’t know what our ancestors did to this earth. Bit by bit, like the birds and the grand beasts, people will fade away, too. Had to put a mule down the other day because it was born without most of its brain.”
“So, even if I keep my secret, that I’m not sterile, I still won’t be able to have a baby?”
Lalana’s eyes jerked from staring into the corral to Sindra’s eyes. “That baby,” she said with a point to Sindra’s abdomen, “had to be a product of relations with a ghost. They aren’t as messed up on the inside as a slog. That child might have half a chance.”
Sindra had buried the pain of the rapes, nurturing dreams of a future where she and Myron would escape and raise the baby together, as though their union had brought life into the world. When he left, she held hope that a baby could still be in her future somehow if no one found out she’d kept her womanhood, but if what Lalana told her was true, this might be her one and only chance at it, a fifty-fifty shot.
Sindra stumbled to the edge of the stable and stuck her fingers down her throat, tickling the back of her tongue until she heaved. The black whisper roiled in her stomach, rumbling up her throat.
“What are you doing?”
Errol ran over to Sindra to check on her. “I risked my neck to bring you out here.”
“I know, I know,” Sindra said as she continued to heave the purplish concoction onto the hay. She kept going, not satisfied she’d purged herself completely of the black whisper, not until dry heaves burned her throat. It had only sat in her stomach for a few moments. If she’d managed to vomit it up before it soured her baby, she held hope that she would mother her child in a matter of months. A fifty-fifty chance was one she wanted to take.
Sindra rested on the hay for a while before she willed herself to sit up. She’d been too young when her mother died to really get any sense of mothering and the sorts of things a mother does. The rail-walkers had taken on that role for Sindra, but they had a patina around their souls, like the old bronze that sometimes wound up on the salvage floor, as likely to wallop her as let any tenderness show through. They did drop bits and pieces of advice here and there, but mostly they looked out for themselves, they had to, surviving rails.
Sindra knew what advice Old Nickel would give her now—fight and die, or run away—her words to live by. The first half, fight and die, she’d told Sindra meant that if you stay and fight, either win the fight or die trying. The second half of that mantra, the run away part, Bug had told her that if she decided to run away she should always scatter to survive—harder to catch many solitary runners than a group in one spot. At least someone would get away. This time, she would not let anyone cage her up.
“Errol,” Sindra said, “time for me to make good on our bargain. I’ll get you out of this compound. After that you’re on your own.”
His eyes narrowed and he turned to look at Lalana.
“Errol, what’s this girl talking about?”
Sindra gave Errol a nod. “I owe him. I guess you can make it, even with only one leg, since you’re some sort of war hero.” Errol’s presence had actually been a source of inspiration for everyone in 14-C. His tales of the world outside their factory compound, even horrific stories of war, reminded them all that there was still something going on somewhere else.
Lalana laughed, making the loose skin around her throat shake. “War hero? Is that what he told you?” She poked at him with the oat scoop. “This fool’s afraid of a damn mule flea.”
Errol lowered his head. “I lost my leg to a plow, not in the swamp. I invented some things.” Errol grabbed his crutch. “But I can make it.”
“A gimp and a liar. Great skills for getting across that rugged country.”
Sindra considered the risks he took to bring her water and blankets in the coop and the sacrifice the quarantined slogs had endured and acknowledged that she did owe him. “Fine, but I’m not getting caught again.”
“There’s no leaving this compound,” Lalana said.
“Sindra knows how.”
“And if I can’t get over the Gorge, I’ll take my chances on the rim.”
Lalana shook her head. “You really know a way out of this compound?”
She filled her medical bag. “I understand your desire. I never had a child of my own, either. ” She said pointing at the corral. “Except for helping a good many mules come into the world. But this is a big chance you’re taking for fifty-fifty. You threw up that black whisper. Good chance you got that life still kicking inside you.” She ambled up beside Errol carrying her medical bag. “What? You’re not thinking of leaving me behind are you?” She asked Errol who looked away.
Sindra watched Errol limp-skipping on his cane and observed Lalana’s gate, slow and methodical as if she had to think about every step. “Look, I’ve been out there. I can’t let you two get yourselves killed.”
“I’m old. I don’t know how old, but I’ve lived seventy-odd years. I’m not afraid o
f dying.”
“But there’s no clean water. Nothing to eat. No shelter.”
“All the medicines I have, I foraged for. I can spot patterns, striations, the stems that point to essential roots, things you could eat in a pinch that wouldn’t twist your bowels into a hard knot.” She dug through her bag as if to take inventory.
Sindra thought of the journey, shimmying along the Yarin, fording the canal, the climb down the ladder, the drop at the bottom, the drainage tunnel. “You can’t make it.”
“You owe me.”
She spotted a coil of rope and bridle in the stable, envisioning a way to get them down the initial drop in the drainage channel. “Get that rope and some candles. And flint rocks.”
Sindra took a deep breath and started back toward the quarantine cellar, explaining to Errol and Lalana the obstacles they would have to overcome and that each of them would have to make it to the hatch by the salvage factory alone—scatter and survive. “I’ll do my best to get you down from there.”
“Wait,” Errol held up his hand. “Something’s not right.” He disappeared around the stable. Gone for an uncomfortable amount of time, he returned with a worried look on his face. “We’re not going anywhere right now. There are ghosts crawling all over Old Town, urgent. Something’s going on.”
Sindra hunkered in Lalana’s stable, ears tuned to the other side of the corral, as the ghost activity in Old Town increased. She could hear them talking, unloading emergency supplies from the make-shift warehouses, and coming sometimes within feet of the stables.
After a tense night of waiting, the curtain of smoke had lifted and hanging in the sky was a discernible disc the color of molten copper, a beautiful sunrise over the mountains, leaving Sindra vulnerable and naked underneath an endless blue.
