You Never Know

Rating: PG

Summary: You never know what light might be found in the darkness.

You Never Know

            He puts on his shoes, the good running shoes that don’t have any holes in the bottom, with sturdy enough laces to keep the shoes from slipping off: white laces turned to gray on the left, day-glo yellow turned to dusk on the right. They are reliable shoes and laces, because he won’t wear them unless he absolutely has to. And today, he absolutely has to.

Today is Food Day, the only day worth remembering and the only reason to mark the days as they pass. If not, the scuttlebutt confirms it and the scuttlebutt is never wrong. It can’t be wrong, because everyone depends on it, especially those who forget to mark the days.

He gathers the things he’ll need: his spear fashioned from metal, tape and the head of a blade, his shoulder bag like a drunken quilt or rags and stitches, and his resolve. The latter is always slippery. He’s not fond of the outdoors, not the outdoors he’s going to, far from the safety of his niche and his things. He has so many things, but he’s confident they’ll be left alone. Food Day is the day everyone goes outdoors, and you’re an utter idiot to miss it for a few shiny trinkets and bits of useless plastic and glass. Trinkets can get you other trinkets, sometimes useful, sometimes pretty to give you a happy moment, but they don’t get you food.

He is about to leave, but before he does he pulls back the raggedy cloth covering the wide window of his niche. It’s what he loves best about his niche. All niches have windows but very few have them are fully intact, and he’d been fortunate to be born into a family that had kept this niche for generations. For most, a window is a hole in the wall worth nothing; it doesn’t give you food and doesn’t give you something to barter with. For him, it lets him outside without having to actually go outside. His niche is ten floors up, high over the skeletons and ashes of the city where he can see the flash of distant bombs, watch columns of acrid smoke rise into the urine yellow clouds, witness people too slow and stupid get dragged away by the Abominations. And, sometimes, when the noxious canopy thins and the sun sets, he can see stars, prettier than shiny broken trinkets. It makes him happy and makes the window worth it.

It also makes him reluctant to leave, because you never know (something his mother used to say, only in a cheerier way, with a melancholy smile on her gray and tired face). He lets the cloth fall back, blocking out the yellow light.

He leaves his niche, stepping over what is left of the wall that had once made it an enclosed room. He is in the hall between more broken walls and he stands there in the darkness that his eyes know like an old friend. He sees bundled shapes scurry away from him like the rats in the junk piles. Unlike the rats, he ignores them as they ignore him. It’s Food Day, no time to be nervous. Except he is nervous, and his heart flutters like a bird in his chest.

(His mother had once tried to save a bird. He didn’t know why, she hadn’t known why, only that she’d wanted to).

He follows the hall to the open spaces where there are no rooms, only a wide floor that is a forest of pillars supporting the floor above. He keeps to the wall on his left, far from where the floor ends, where the hollow echo – deep as an exhale – is loudest. Where there is nothing – not floor, not rooms, only gutted emptiness: eternity, or what he likes to think of as eternity. Not really eternity because he knows there is a bottom, but because he can’t see the bottom, a part of him will always believe it’s bottomless.

Some say (those few willing to say anything) that the building had once been whole with no hollow middle, but that some great beast or bomb had hollowed it out; scooped up the center or blew it into nothing. Others say it was always like this, that the building had been built without a center, and that the floors are merely starting to give. Bits of concrete and wood jut like the jetties of the sludge lake over the nothing, a challenge for young boys looking to prove that they can be brave. He had been one of those boys. He’d looked into the nothing twice – once to prove to the other boys that he wasn’t the coward they’d claimed him to be, another time to prove it to himself. He had looked with the confidence of a child who thought fear was rubbish. He’d looked into that maw, that craw, that gargantuan throat and choked on the terror of being swallowed alive, down, down, down into forever until his screams were swallowed with him. He’d looked twice with the same results, then never looked again.

That had been some twenty-odd years ago, maybe close to thirty, maybe more… or less… he doesn’t know anymore. Neither does it matter.

He keeps to the wall, his heart fluttering like three birds wanting to get out. He can look in the direction of the building’s throat, at the planks, concrete jetties, and bits of chains and rope dangling from higher up – that isn’t so bad. So long as he never goes to the edge and looks down, then the throat doesn’t exist.

He enters the stairwell, follows the rusting stairs dripping with moisture, down to the dark bottom not quite as intimidating as the building’s throat. Not until he comes to the door-less entrance gaping yellow in the cold afternoon. He swallows, his breathing fast, outracing the flutters. He wraps one arm around his sharp ribs and with the other grips his little spear. It’s dangerous out there. The further you go, the worse it gets. But it’s Food day.

He steps outside.

He forgets, sometimes, that the real ordeal is not doing something but the prospect of doing something. Outside, he finds himself one of many climbing over or picking around detritus hills toward the only road that isn’t buried or demolished; so close that he can see it from the top of the hill, so far away he shrinks back clutching his spear to his chest. But it’s not that bad, really. He’s not alone, and his mother had always said there was safety in numbers. Then again, his mother did so love reasons to be happy.

(You never know, she always said, even when she was dying).

He follows the others to the road. When he climbs the next hill, he can see, not far in the distance, the columns of smoke and the glitter of light off what looks like a shivering river of glass and metal flowing their way. For a moment that stretches on into forever, his heart beats as though the bird has taken flight. He runs down the hill, up and over the next hill skidding on plastic, metal and glass, toy trucks and porcelain dolls, plastic phones and things so torn and cracked there is no putting a name to them. He arrives to push and shove through bodies as shriveled as his, struggling for a place on the side of the cracked, black road.

The river of metal and glass crawls down the street. It turns from shining bits and pieces on the horizon to men and women, tall and strong and dangerous and wonderful in their gray uniforms and goggled breathing masks. They bristle dangerously with guns strapped to their backs and on their hips. Behind them roll the gun machines and supply trucks hissing great gouts of smoke. It’s a terrifyingly beautiful parade, as much of a highlight as being able to see the stars. But difficult, sometimes, seeing all those strong bodies, all those heroes. They come, on occasion, to find the worthy to fill the ranks: to feed and make strong, to make more heroes.

He could have been one of them had it not been for his arm that he couldn’t lift passed his chest and (according to the ragged recruiter who had studied him in apologetic pity) that he’d looked close to starving. Complete trash. He hadn’t been starving. He’d been tired, that was all. He’d had a bit of rat that day with a slice of onion. You couldn’t call it starving when you had food in your guts. But he’d been too frightened to say so, and his mother had been long since buried. She would have told the recruiter that you never know, and when that didn’t work – because it wouldn’t have – she would have told her son to have patience. Maybe next time. Maybe.

She had so loved to hope.

But she was dead and, he’d supposed after some thought, maybe it had been a good thing for the recruiter to pass him by. If he couldn’t defend himself with his voice, then what right did he have to defend others with a gun?

The trucks lumber by and the crowds go still. Layers of clothes and blankets can’t hide the stiff backs and shoulders that have not been straightened in years. The readiness hurts, but it will be worth it.

The food begins to fly, wrapped safely in shining brown plastic. The people surge like a wave, skinny arms raised high in the air, waving like dry grass in a putrid breeze. He is among them, but his bad arm only allows him to raise one hand. He is pushed and elbowed and bruised while he pushes and bruises back. Those who catch the packages run quick as they can back to their niches, and the masses crowd in tighter.

Perhaps it is through luck or some skill he didn’t realize he had until now that he catches a package. He hugs it to his chest behind his spear, and like those hulking horned creatures called bulls his mother had once told him about, he pushes his way through the masses, head down and shoulders to his ears. He clamors quick as his shaking legs will let him up the hills of junk, slowing those chasing after him trying to take what is his. Two hills put a good amount of distance between him and the desperate.

On the third hill, his yellow laces come loose and tangle in a sewing machine. He trips tumbling head over heels down the pile. Boxes and toys bruise him, broken bottles cut him and he lands in a pained heap of whimpering misery. He is not at the bottom of the hill, but somewhere in the middle, and when he looks up at the wobbling world he sees his package far out of his reach at the bottom.

A mousy figure with its head buried under shawls shuffles to his package and picks it up. The figure already has its own package, tucked to its chest as he had tucked his. The figure looks up at him.

Hers is a pinched face, pale as a skull, but not frightening. Only tired and skittish. She blinks her owlish eyes at him once, then twice. She will flee like the mouse she is, he knows, to scamper back to her niche hidden within niches, to take more than she has. That is the way of things because there is no other way. And it won’t be the first time it’s happened, nor the second, nor third.

Sometimes there is another way, his mother had said, but she is gone, taking her words with her, leaving only hollow echoes.

He pushes himself onto his trembling arms and knees. His bad arm gives on him, dropping him back to the trinkets that poke and bruise. He whimpers, because it hurts, because he failed and he’ll have to stay out longer to hunt the rats that know not to come close to the buildings.

Someone touches his shoulder with soft fingers. He looks up into the owl face of the mouse girl. She blinks at him once, twice.

And smiles, and holds his package to him.

He blinks back. His jaw unhinges, inching toward the ground. But his body, smarter than his brain, reaches out and takes the package from the bony fingers into his bony hand.

The blast of a horn splits the air like an ax through glass. They both freeze, him and her, like the rats whenever lamplight shines on them. They know that sound, what it means, and their bodies are once again smarter than their minds. She runs one way and he pushes himself up and runs the other. It’s a wonder what fear can make you do, and he has no words to thank the fear that force his once shaking legs to carry him over the piles.

A metallic shriek shreds the air like a bomb on a building. He does not look back. You never look back.

Then comes a shriek that is not metallic and inhuman.

He looks back.

The mouse girl is sprawled on the ground not far from him, her package in front of her. She moves slowly as though dazed and pained, and not even the metal screams are enough to make her remember to run. He looks past her, to the empty hills, hears the gun fire of the warriors as they fight to protect the ones they tried to feed. He sees, rising over the top of a junk hill, the shape of a thing that is not supposed to exist, but does; like a hairless rat, long-legged and big as the horses the warriors sometimes ride. It sees the mouse girl, and parts is lips in a sharp-toothed and bloody smile.

The Abomination charges down the hill. Its course is straight to the girl, who looks up and cries.

Then he is running, not away but toward, his body no longer smarter than his brain, his brain squeaking a demand as to what he was doing. He does not stop when he reaches out grabbing whatever trinket his hand happens to find. He throws it with everything fear can give him.

The object glances off the creature’s shoulder, drawing blood. He grabs another thing and throws it, this time scoring its head. He throws his package of food.

It annoys the creature, distracts it, costs it the prey that scrambles to her feet while grabbing her package before she flees. If the Abomination feels any emotion then it is feeling anger. It looks at the only prey remaining, and when it parts its lips, it’s not smiling.

He skitters to a stop, sliding over junk. He trips trying to turn, grabbing at anything that will pull him up and propel him forward, and he runs. His heart is a hammer against his ribs. His lungs cannot keep up but the fear does not allow him to care. He can hear the thing behind him, thinks he can feel its breath like wet heat wrap around his neck. He has his running shoes on, and they carry him over the trinkets to his building. He leaps through the door. Up, up, up the stairs he climbs while the thing’s claws clatter on the metal steps behind him. He bursts through the nearest door. The thing follows. He runs, his course straight.

He sees the building’s throat out of the corner of his eye. It is gaping wide and endless, ready to swallow him. He feels it wrap him in its cold breath. His heart stops.

His body keeps going. Fear demands it. He runs out onto a jetty, to the very edge, the very tip pointing the way into the open where chains and ropes hang like dead vines. The creature is breathing on him for real. A claw tears a gash into his ragged coat.

He gasps. He leaps. He reaches out.

And grabs a chain. He swings forward up, up over dark eternity. The creature leaps after him, but the swing is too fast and too far. The metal snarl becomes a metal howl of terror and he looks down for the first time in forgotten years.

The creature falls, flailing its stick limbs, down and down until eternity swallows it.

The chain swings him back onto the jetty where he jumps off and wastes no time scuttling back onto the safety of the wide open floors. There is no thought – his brain has frozen. His body acts without him, bringing him to the nearest wall so he can huddle there. He becomes a shivering mass of coats and skin and bones.

He is in a moment where time does not exist, where it doesn’t matter. If the sun fades behind the hills and yellow clouds, blanketing the world in muddy twilight and silence, he doesn’t know it or care about it. All he cares about is never moving again, and he promises himself that he will never go outside, ever. Not even on Food Day.

His stomach laments this with a forlorn rumble. No food package tonight. Not even rats. This time, maybe he will starve.

Soft fingers brush his shoulder. He jumps, pushing himself against the wall as though it were possible to move through it. A figure glides in front of him, then lowers itself into a crouch.

The mouse girl with the owl face blinks at him. She settles herself more comfortably with her legs folded primly beneath her. She reaches into her layers of shawls and pulls out her package. She opens it and reaches inside slowly, like a child opening a present but wanting the moment to last as long as possible. She pulls out another package from within the package, this one clear and full of bread holding meat and cheese in between. She has to use her teeth to open the clear package, then pulls the bread out with the same reverent care.

There is a moment, a bitter, tired, jealous moment when he wonders if she is going to eat in front of him, and he wonders why she would do that. But he is too tired, too hungry, and too frightened to fathom whys.

She tears the bread and meat in half. One she keeps for herself. The other she holds out to him.

There is a new moment, timeless as the old one, but safe and quiet and pleasant. He stops his shaking, looks at the food, looks at her.

He takes the food and smiles.

She smiles back.

 

The End