Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(2)
I wouldn’t describe myself as a soft-hearted person – I’ve stolen food from a woman giving birth – but Pennyweight had managed to find his way in anyway. Three years ago, I was passing by the Starbucks on the edge of Glenmore, trying to ignore the sweat dripping down the middle of my ribcage, when I came across a scene I’d seen many times before. Two winters had passed since the mass deaths and, by that summer, children had become desirable because they couldn’t fight back. I watched from behind a house with melted siding as a man in his thirties slammed a bat with nails in it into a spindly goblin with skin too small for his bones. The child was beyond wailing tears, but every time the bat came down he made a sharp sigh like air being pumped through bellows. Seeing that the man was occupied, I bent down and picked up a rock, took aim at the man with my gun, then threw the rock at an overturned plastic tub on his other side. The man’s head whipped toward the noise, and my finger twitched. He was dead before he hit the ground.
I was totally indifferent to the child. All I cared about was reducing my competition for the remaining food, and I’d seen wild children before. They had judged that it was better to starve than to be raped, eaten, or forced to crawl into collapsed buildings in search of food, which, more often than not, seemed to result in a stuck child starving to death. I couldn’t say that I blamed them. As I approached, he folded into himself like a paper airplane but I went to the dead man instead, stripping him of his clothes and belongings. He had brought a snack, a little box of Sun-Maid raisins, which I opened and dumped in my mouth.
There are always two or three that stick to the bottom, so I lowered the box to scrape them out. Before I had even gotten the box to digging level, the child had sprung up and snatched it from my hands. I went for my gun, then thought better of wasting ammo, and by the time I had taken 10 steps in his direction, he had disappeared. Was it worth following him into his territory and risking injury over two raisins he had probably already eaten? I tied the dead man’s possessions in his jacket, made a bindle with his bat, and started back to the tree house I was living in at the time.
None of my traps went off that night, or the next. It was on the third day that I heard a squeal. The boy was standing as still as possible, one of his feet stuck through rotted plywood, the other on the dirt. If he tried to pull his foot free, then there was a very good chance that he would lose his balance and fall forward. There was nothing he could do but watch as I approached, gun at the ready.
“You’re lucky that you’re so light,” I said. “Otherwise, you would have fallen into a pit full of nails and broken glass.”
He stared at me, taking in the massive knot of scar tissue that I called my left cheek, and my broken nose. I returned his gaze. He seemed to have cleaned up somehow, and whatever swelling his face might have suffered, it had gone down enough for me to tell that he would once have been considered an indigenous person. As I paused to assess him, his cracked lips broke into a tenuous smile, and he pulled something out of the garbage bag he was wearing, then held it out to me. It was a bullet from my gun. He held his other hand out as well, palm outstretched and empty, and after a moment I took the bullet from his hand. His smile widened.
“I’ll let you out, but don’t come around here again,” I told him, and once I freed him, he ran off.
As I covered the hole in the board with Gyprock, I considered what had happened. Perhaps he had felt that he had to pay me back. I doubted that he had felt any qualms about retrieving my bullet after what the body it was buried in had done to him. Well, hopefully, he would have enough sense not to test my traps again.
A week passed, and I forgot about the child. During the second week, though, I came across a cache of ammo and food stowed away in the Rutland Salvation Army, and waited in sight of the entrance for its owner to return. I was there for almost a full day before I heard shrieking not far off. Stalking quietly but slowly, I located the source of the noise one street over. The child was standing beside the body of a woman with a broken, rusty knife stuck in her skull. She had managed to graze his ribs with a bullet before he had finished her off, and she had tiny, bloody handprints on her corpse where he had touched her in order to remove her clothes. Now, his slight, elfin frame was dressed in cargo shorts, and he was struggling with her leather jacket. When he saw me he paused, and then, setting the jacket down, he gathered everything else she had on her.
“For you,” he said.
I am snapped out of my reminiscence when I feel a tap from Pennyweight on my forearm, followed by two lines down and one to the left – his left. As I swing my scope down, I feel him tap me three more times, and a glandload of adrenaline trills through my veins. He saw someone.
Sure enough, as I focus on the old docks near the remains of the bridge, two people are emerging from the shack, both male and in hunting garb. Apart from their years, they look identical. The older one has grey hair streaked brown and a braided beard, while the younger one, around my age, only has a goatee and keeps his hair under a black toque. The young one aims a shotgun at the scenery while his elder approaches the houseboat attached to the dock. Stroking his beard as he goes, he walks up and down the mildew-slicked boards, and when he sees that the boat has no leaks, his coarse face splits into a grin. Tonight, I am sure he is thinking, they will cross the lake. Tonight, they will eat again.
He turns around to give the younger man the news. When he does, I can see the M21 on his back. Though their clothes are filthy, their guns are clean. I wonder if the older man taught the younger one how to clean a gun. I feel Pennyweight quivering beside me, and then I wonder if the older man ever brought the younger one to the beach. As the older man brings up his rifle to scope out my side of Lake Okanagan, I wonder if, five years ago, they might not have been here before. Maybe they took pictures in front of the sails and got goat cheese scones at the Bean Scene before the younger one went off to play volleyball and the older one read Dean Koontz on a towel with nothing on but shorts and a driftwood necklace. Maybe they dangled their feet in the lake and fed the ducks and maybe, just maybe, the younger one went through the water park.