Susan Kim - Wasteland

“We got to go after them,” he shouted, his voice hoarse. He was nine, with a baseball cap pulled backward over his shaggy brown hair. “Before they attack us again.”

An older girl sitting on a table across the room shook her head. She was dark skinned and had several colorful belts cinched around her grimy robes.

“You mean go into mutant territory?” she shouted. “That’s crazy… they got more people. Or whatever they are.”

At that, the room erupted as everyone started talking once more. Another boy, pale and freckled, spoke up from where he sat on the floor.

“Maybe they are people,” he said. He looked to be about eleven. “Like us, only different. They’re boys and girls in one body. Maybe—”

The older girl sitting next to him, also freckled, smacked him hard across the ear. “Shut up!” she hissed; but no one had even heard. Another boy, so small his feet dangled a good two feet off the floor as he rested on the edge of the counter, piped up.

“And they got weapons. How can we fight if they got weapons and we don’t?”

Others chimed in.

“He’s right. We don’t got a chance.”

“But if we do nothing, they’re gonna come back. Maybe next time, they’ll kill us all.”

“They almost killed Jonah. When we brought him inside, he was bleeding pretty bad.”

People glanced at the would-be hero from the roof, who leaned against the counter; the side of his face was badly scraped and his left arm hung at a useless angle.

Nearby, Bekkah stood close to Eli, the blood-soaked T-shirt tied around her head not quite hiding the ugly purple and yellow bruise spreading down her cheek. Her left eye was swollen nearly shut and when she spoke, she sounded exhausted.

“They always been peaceful,” she said. “Now they’ve attacked us four times. What do they want? It don’t make sense.”

As the arguments raged, one person was watching the proceedings with a shrewd eye.

It was the leader of the town, who leaned against the far wall, with his arms folded. Short, with wide hips and stringy hair, eighteen-year-old Rafe had been elected to his one-year term the previous winter by the usual show of hands. It hadn’t taken him long to realize how much he enjoyed not only the prestige of his position but the perks as well. He was spared work assignments and was also given an extra weekly allotment of food and water. And so despite his advanced age, he was planning how he could be reelected for another term.

The recent variant attacks, he figured, gave him as good an issue to run on as any.

Rafe held up his hands for calm. As usual, he remained silent while the others exhausted themselves with bickering and suggestions. When he did speak, this gave him the impression of both thoughtfulness and authority.

“There ain’t never been sense to mutants,” he said. He also knew enough to speak softly; this forced everyone in the room to lean forward to hear him. “They’re like wild dogs. And I say we wipe ’em out.”

The girl next to him was shaking her head, arms folded over her thin chest. “That’s always your answer, Rafe,” she said. Against the relative whiteness of her robes, her skin looked dark and withered; she appeared at least two decades older than her sixteen years. “It ain’t so easy.”

“Let him speak,” shouted the boy with baseball cap.

“Yeah,” chimed in another voice. “How do you say we do it?”

Again, Rafe waited until the room grew quiet.

“We go to Levi,” he said. “We go there and we ask for weapons. Real weapons, I mean. Knives. Arrows. That way, at least we got a chance—”

The dark-skinned girl sitting on the table cut him off.

“But there ain’t no gas left to trade for the things we really need—like to eat and drink,” she said, her voice shrill. “And Levi’s been cutting back on what he pays us.”

Most were nodding their heads in agreement. The dark girl continued. “We got nothing else to give him. Without gas, why would he even talk to us?”

Rafe smiled. He had anticipated this question.

“Maybe not to you or me, unless we got something to trade,” he said. “That’s all he cares about. But there’s one of us I bet he’d talk to.”

Then he turned to look at a girl sitting alone by the window.

It was dusk; the meeting had been going on for nearly two hours. The small sentry at the window had relaxed his vigilance and dozed at his post. Behind him, several of the townspeople had lit candles, which they set on the tables and counters. As the nighttime darkened around them, the gritty windows reflected what was going on inside the room. From outside, the townspeople were all too visible, and with no view of what might be approaching.

If attackers were to come, they would arrive unseen.

And in fact, two people were now scuttling toward the lit building. Yet they were not there to do harm.

Esther bent low and ran from one shadow to the next, zigzagging down the sidewalk. She had been gone since before dawn. Although Esther chose to ignore the far-off explosion, she knew that it had to do with the variants. Now, uneasy, she could not help but notice the freshly smashed windows and broken storefronts that lined the main street of Prin.

Behind her was a reluctant and increasingly panicked Skar. With the stink of burning gasoline still lingering in the night air, the last thing she wanted was to be confronted by the town.

“Esther,” Skar whispered, pulling at her friend’s arm for what must have been the hundredth time, “please. Let’s not do this!”

“Don’t worry,” said Esther. “They can’t see us.”

And Skar had to admit: This part was true.

It wasn’t just that the darkness gave them ample cover. Over the years, Esther had worked hard to become adept at variant ways—the peculiar stalking, hunting, and trapping methods that Skar had taught her, skills that had been second nature to the variant girl since early childhood. Skills that let you become almost invisible.

Esther ran on the balls of her feet, using cover and shadow to hide her progress, avoiding the straight line of approach, doubling back, leaping up to edge a few steps along railings and windowsills, seizing every possible handhold and foothold available to her: all the tricks a variant did to confound expectation and confuse the eye. If she were to be honest, Skar could fault Esther on a half dozen mistakes: Her tread was too heavy, her breathing too loud. The worst was that the girl still couldn’t interpret the terrain as having many possible pathways, not just the obvious one; she didn’t know how to strategize on her feet. Even so, although she would never say so out loud, Skar had to admit:

Not bad for a norm.

The two reached the building where the meeting was taking place and slipped into the adjoining alley. Esther took a swift, birdlike peek into a window, as Skar cringed in the shadows beside her, trembling with anxiety.

“Big group in there,” Esther said; “looks like everybody in town.”

Skar’s expression grew even more tense. “Can we go now?” she begged.

“Not yet,” replied Esther. “We’ve got to hear what they’re planning. It could be important.”

“What are you going to do?”

Esther didn’t answer. Skar was about to repeat her question when she saw what Esther was doing.

She was trying to climb the bare brick wall.

Despite her mounting anxiety, Skar couldn’t help smiling. Esther was attempting something she had learned only that week: using the tips of her fingers and toes to gain a hold on even the shallowest dents and faintest bumps in a surface. In this way, a variant could—with practice and the right combination of strength, balance, and weight distribution—scale even the smoothest-seeming wall, like a fly. Esther was able to grip the bricks with both her fingers and the tips of her sneakers, and she moved upward clumsily, yet with surprising speed.