“Fair enough,” Hugh said.
Tom relaxed a moment and Hugh sipped his whisky.
“Hanna said you found something at the crash site.”
“Hanna?”
“Now there’s a woman,” Hugh said. “She’s got a shine for you.”
“No, thanks.”
“Her last fella turned while she was fucking him,” Hugh said and chuckled, though it was a sad smile, conscious of the emotional sandpapering that even let him think that way about it.
“Poor woman thought she was giving Danny the ride of his life, but he wasn’t in the throes of passion, if you know what I mean?” Hugh said. “The slower you die, the faster you come back. Did you know that?”
“Can’t say I did.”
“I don’t care if Hanna’s right and you did find something,” Hugh said. “Fucking Council, those fucks don’t care about any of us. They lost too many of their own people at the Air Base, and then they had no one to rule. That’s all any of this is.”
“Cynical.”
“I know Tucker gave you one of those coffee cans,” Hugh said and shrugged and the odd man’s casual demeanor told him it was true he really didn’t care (though he was still making a point). “We all get rewards from time to time. Tucker’s smart like that. Makes people loyal.”
“The pilot had a pistol,” Tom said and believed it was probably true – not that he’d checked – and so it didn’t feel like much of a lie.
“Have you got rounds?” Hugh asked. “What does it take? Nine mil? Those vultures have the City’s ammo on lockdown. Even for us troopers. Almost like you got to suck someone’s dick yourself just to be safe enough for official duties, d’you understand me?”
Hugh knocked back the rest of the other drink and Tom found himself relieved when he didn’t make any moves for a refill. Something seethed beneath the trooper’s surface that wasn’t anything to do with Tom, but as he knew well, it sometimes didn’t take many drinks for it all to come bursting out.
“I was looking for something, though,” Tom said and offered the request like the distraction it was. “How come no one’s using computers? I’m looking for a standard laptop cable so my kids can watch a few old DVDs, yeah?”
Hugh slumped, sullen for a moment, then shook it off. Tom now realized those probably weren’t Hugh’s only drinks for the day.
“Computers aren’t worth the hassle,” the trooper said. “There’s a few Administration labs set up, I don’t know what they do it for. Everyone in the Enclave says they’re too fucking busy to waste time on electronic records. There’ll be a census, at some point.”
“Seems like a good opportunity to me,” Tom said.
“A lot of that old technology’s fucked,” Hugh said. “Amazing how something can stop working just from sitting there, but it happens a lot. Last I heard, they were using some of the little kids from the Day School to break down old PCs and cell phones for things like gold, platinum, palladium. We’re more focused on keeping what we’ve got working, d’you understand me?”
“Yeah, I understand you,” Tom said. “I just thought I could get this thing working. . . .”
“Do you remember that guy you were talking to off The Mile with all the dud radios?”
“People pay him to scan for other signals,” Tom said.
“Not often,” Hugh laughed. “I think he’s tapped that market dry. But I seem to remember he had a whole bunch of different odds and ends he thought might be worth something. Check with him.”
“OK, I will,” Tom said. “What about . . . small plastic bags?”
Hugh studied him a moment, then started to chuckle.
“For the coffee?”
“You guessed it,” Tom said, then lied by adding, “I couldn’t even bring you some as a gift tonight because I don’t have anything to carry it in.”
“Well, the factories shut up on that shit five years ago,” Hugh said with a benevolent grin. “Try fishing for them on the street, yeah?”
*
Raiders harass pilgrims on City’s north
by Melina Martelle
Reports have emerged of pilgrims encountering armed bandits while headed for the Columbus sanctuary zone.
Newly-arrived Citizens Elias Tuffy Jr, 46, and Tabiqua M, no age given, told the Herald they were robbed at gunpoint by itinerant survivors 20 miles north of Sunbury.
The report adds to a growing number of tales of desperation from pilgrims entering the City from the north.
Ms Tabiqua said four armed men and a woman set on the pilgrims while stopped repairing their wagon.
“They just took the whole thing,” she said. “Everything we had scrounged on our way here.”
Mr Tuffy said he was bashed when he tried to stop the theft.
“They had the nerve to apologize,” he told the Herald.
Last month, two pilgrims were killed in a gunfight after refusing to hand over their belongings in a similar incident.
A witness familiar with the robbery said a pair of bandits stopped the group east of the Marysville ruins.
“We didn’t have much, so I don’t know why (the male victim) Frank put up a fight,” the source said.
“It got him killed. We ain’t got nothing worth dying for, so close to making sanctuary. It was stupid.”
The incident follows an unconfirmed report about scavengers kidnapping a female Citizen who ventured into the university district while scrounging outside the sanctuary zone last month.
The news also echoes an incident last week in which a Forager crew narrowly escaped execution while clearing farmhouses on the city’s outskirts.
Department of Public Safety chief Carlos Ortega said Citizens had to stick to patrolled areas.
“It’s called a sanctuary zone for a reason,” he said.
“Outside the City, no one can hear you scream.”
Asked about reports of bandits further north, Chief Ortega said it was beyond the City’s security resources to patrol the approaches to Columbus.
Council President Lowenstein said troopers at the two northern checkpoints would carry out limited security sweeps of the area.
“Our Safety personnel are spread thin,” she said.
“Any harm befalling pilgrims headed here is regrettable, but these are isolated reports.”
Cr Lowenstein said the “whole purpose” of the City was to provide a safe haven.
It was beyond the Council’s control what happened in other territories, she said.
*
TOM AWOKE LISTENING to rats scurry through the walls, lying in bed knowing he could only really afford a one-day weekend. While the children readied themselves for the day and the sun arose outside, he allowed himself a small pot of coffee and sweetened it with half the tiny blob of honeycomb Hugh’s wife gifted him on their departure the night before. Tom’s children had an open invite for a return visit, though as always, Daisy’s enthusiasm was missing in action, however warm her shy mother seemed.
Tom filled the cistern with the run-off water from the sink, then allowed himself a peaceful shit, an old phone book on the commode for the finishing business. There was a Tupperware bowl of cloudy water in the sink for his hands, and while he scrubbed them, Tom dwelt on Hugh’s choice of the word “medieval” to describe the times they were now in. But having even the most basic sanitation argued against that.
He emerged into the living and kitchen space as Lucas stepped from the pantry with his school bag, at which point he froze, spot-lit by Tom’s unexpected arrival.
“Hey,” Tom said. “What’re you doing in there?”
It was an innocent question, but Lucas didn’t say anything, and for a long moment they simply stood looking at each other. Lilianna swept from the bedroom to the bathroom and voiced a grunt of complaint at the stench and then closed the door behind her, plunging Tom back into the Mexican standoff with the boy who wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I don’t mean to be weird about it,” Tom said with a levelness he
didn’t feel. “What’s in your bag?”
“Just . . . nothing.”
“Nothing?” Tom asked. “OK, it just seems weird you were in there. Larder’s practically empty, kid. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
Luke still wouldn’t meet his eyes. Tom swallowed his concern, unable even to intuit what was going on.
“I thought we could eat together later on if Einstein’s still trading,” Tom said casually. “We traded the hard stuff in for . . . local currency, yesterday.”
“I have classes.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Listen, I’m really feeling like I don’t want you going there anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I feel like I’m sending you to jail every day,” Tom said. “That place makes me worry for you.”
“I’m fine, dad,” Lucas said. “I want to go.”
He moved as if to head back to the bedroom, but no sooner than he vacated the spot, there was a soft thump as a knife fell from his bag onto where the hard floor no longer covered by the rug Tom removed in the aftermath of Laurance’s death.
“What the hell is that?”
Lucas knew better than to dive on the weapon. His father crossed the short distance and retrieved it. The handle was long-since gone and someone’d fashioned a twine grip. It looked precisely like a prison shiv and the solid image of it confirmed the very same dread voiced just seconds before. A line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth tumbled unbidden through his thoughts.
“‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?”
Lucas stared at his father a long moment, waiting for the eruption.
Tom drew a deep breath and spoke on.
“‘Come, let me clutch thee’,” he said in a measured voice. “‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind’?”
Lilianna entered the room halfway through the impromptu soliloquy, the dedicated pace of Tom’s recital giving her enough time to glean there was anything but a happy atmosphere despite her father drudging up his faded Shakespeare as if on a whim.
Tom’s gray eyes flicked her way.
“Lucas and I need a moment,” he said.
Every straining fiber showed her begging to know what was going on. Instead, Lilianna clutched her own bag and nodded to them both.
“Putting in another day at the factory,” she said. “Mabel said she’d bake a pie for anyone who clears the main septic. After Janet’s rhubarb cake last night, that’s all the motivation I need.”
Lila left the apartment without further ado. Lucas surrendered at that point, walking himself to the sofa like escorting himself to a cell. He sat heavily, adopted the dejected posture of misunderstood youths everywhere.
“I want to look in your bag,” Tom said. “Sorry.”
Luke tossed the haversack onto the remaining rug and Tom confirmed as quickly as he could the bagged oats and a tin of beans inside. Tom stayed next to it in a crouch and tried not to sigh and failed completely.
“I look at this and it just makes me more worried,” he said.
He sat on the opposite chair, enthroned by Lila’s growing greenery.
“If someone’s pressuring you to bring them food, Luke –”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You’ve got a knife.”
Lucas didn’t have as quick an answer for that one. He looked away dolefully. Tom swallowed hard and returned his gaze to the confiscations on the floor.
“Look, you can forget about classes,” Tom said. “Wouldn’t you just rather we were hanging out together anyway?”
“I want to go to classes, dad.”
“Why?” Tom replied. “You’re carrying a knife. You’re stealing food and smuggling it to School? I said we’d give it a chance and School blew it, man. No way.”
“But I want to go,” Lucas said. “It’s not like that.”
“Why on earth do you still want to go?”
“Because . . . I have a friend who needs me, dad.”
The most obvious admission in the world somehow carried a titanic weight. Tom halted the urge to immediately chastise his own stupidity, because of course the kid was going to crave a peer group, however fucked up it might be – maybe even more so, raised in isolation from the world and with no more than a dozen-or-so companions at any time during the years.
And all of them now dead or departed in some other terrible way.
“I’m not saying the Day School isn’t tough, dad,” Lucas said. “I was taking this stuff – I wanted to surprise you. You wanted plastic bags?”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
“My friend, Kevin, he’s got no parents,” Lucas explained, looking away in what Tom was startled to recognize as shyness.
“Kevin, my friend, he does classes for the rations, but it’s not enough,” Lucas said. “He scrounges, too. Even sometimes outside the wire. He has to.”
“Scrounges?”
“It’s what we call it,” Luke replied. “Kevin’s teaching me about it. Scroungers look for the little stuff, you know? Hard to spot, sometimes, but stuff everyone needs.”
“Like plastic bags?”
“Apparently a lot of those plastic bags you told me were bad for the environment have started breaking down,” Luke said. “People keep hold of them, wash them out now. The traders, guys like Einstein, they’ll all buy them.”
“OK,” Tom said, “but you could’ve checked with me first.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Lucas said in a dejected voice. “Kevin knows how to get eggs, too. Only a few at a time, but . . . but you thought I was stealing.”
“I might’ve jumped to a bad conclusion, based on what I was seeing at the time.”
“If you trusted me, dad. . . .” the boy said. “You didn’t believe me about Dkembe, and you just assumed I was getting bullied at school. I can look after myself.”
“Not with a knife,” Tom said. “And even if you did come out on top, what do you think the City would do then?”
*
WITH HIS SON’S weapon confiscated, Tom had the bewildering experience of seeing Lucas off to school for the day with the pilfered, but not-really-pilfered rations in his bag, mildly overwhelmed by the persistent weirdness of such a daily routine now worsened by his son’s seeming willingness to head back into it. That he’d found a friendship group – or even just one friend – was the simplest explanation, but there was too much going on in his son’s surliness to quell Tom’s fears.
That said, he’d also adopted a new and entirely untested motto not to let a day go by where the family’s earnings didn’t exceed their consumption. Fasting by choice because he had two nights in a row where someone else was feeding them was one thing. Tom hadn’t failed to note recurring references to the City’s virgin winter and the difficulties of life in reclaimed Columbus, compounded by the Ohio snow. His family had to get ahead of the ledger – and by more than just one day at a time.
For now, finding MacLaren and signing on for a day’s more lucrative Reclaimers work was the best way not to waste the daylight hours, but first, thoughts of the laptop wouldn’t stop nagging him. Tom lit out of the apartment after a minimal time sitting alone on the couch letting his worries circle his head like vultures in the harsh desert sun.
Unexpectedly, his rushed exit occurred just as Iwa Swarovsky finished locking her far-more-functional apartment door on the landing below. The doctor had her work satchel over one shoulder, heavy enough to throw off her center of gravity, and she was dressed for the outdoors in activewear, hiking boots and a functional vest. Her shimmery black hair poised constrained in a serviceable plait tickling her shoulder blades, and the whole fetching spectacle was only thrown off as she turned her impassive look Tom’s way and the sunlight slanting down through the stairwell caught her glasses and the glossy white scar bisecting her one milky eye.
The doctor smiled as if she had to awaken lo
ng-slumbering machinery, though as Tom descended to her floor, the slightest color arose in her cheeks like nature’s encouragement for Tom’s unconsciously divided advances.
“Hey, doc,” he said and then corrected with, “Eva,” as the name was said.
“Tom,” she said. “Heading out? I’m away on rotation for the next five days. Watch my door for me?”
“No problem,” he said. “I still haven’t fixed mine.”
“Talk around the building is your home invader might be closer than you think.”
“Those kids?” Tom asked her, and also wondered why she hadn’t relayed her intel a little earlier.
“No, an inside job,” Iwa said. “That’s what they used to call it, correct?”
“Well, you’re telling me,” Tom said. “Who’s saying this?”
The svelte doctor indicated Tom’s neighbors on the same floor.
“Mrs Uganda?” The name forced a scowl. “You’d think she’d tell me this direct.”
“If she didn’t, then that’s probably how she wanted it,” Iwa said and smiled softly, kind for once, though just as intently watching Tom’s face as if testing for reactions in a way at once alluring yet leaving him feeling somewhat like an exhibit in the zoo.
“Careful, Tom,” Iwa said and gently laughed, keeping her voice deliberately low and just between them. “I think Uganda might have an agenda.”
Tom could perform the hairy eyeball at an Olympic level, so he wasn’t troubled returning Iwa’s remark with a blank stare, however much he felt a brief riot of emotions.
“Seems like everyone here has an agenda,” he said at last.
The doctor smiled and looked around slowly as if checking no one else was eavesdropping.
“What’s the matter, Tom?” she said. “Feeling frustrated?”
A cat-like smile adorned her face, enjoying herself. Triggered by her playfulness like almost nothing else could, he tasted the combination of irritation and arousal associated with so many bad romantic decisions in his past, and yet the allure of it still held him fast. His granite expression softened.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 25
