Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

One time Mama tried to scare me, said the giants move while we’re asleep, they go around town and peek into the houses with their windowy eyes, but I know that’s not true. It’s a lie, but not the bad kind. The giants are there to protect Sunrise with their old magic. You learn that from little. You put your hands like this and say GIANTS WATCH OVER ME IN ALL MY ENDEAVORS and they do. Endeavors means stuff you want the giants to watch you do and make sure you do a good job and nothing bad happens.

But the giants can’t watch the whole long highroad, so how can they protect you if they can’t see you?

We went to Grayfall thirteen times, me and Mama. But we only came back twelve.

Mama says there are bad parts in every story. Scary parts. Sad parts. If it was happy and fun all the time, it wouldn’t be like life, so it wouldn’t be a good story.

Fires in the Waste means traders or scav armies, Mama says. A cookfire makes smoke, and that could be anybody, but scav army raiders burn their dead to Carrion Boy, and that smoke looks pretty much the same from far away. And you don’t know what kind of fire it is until it’s too late.

Here’s what Mama taught me to do. Hold out your arm as long as it goes, make a fist, then stick out your thumb. If the smoke from the fire is wider than your thumb, that means Stay Off the Road, Somebody’s Close. Same if there are lots of little fires all together. Same if you’re by yourself alone on the highroad, even if there’s zero fires you can see.

The day the scav army raiders got us coming back down the highroad from Grayfall was a zero-fires day. I don’t know what happened, I was asleep on Mama’s shoulder in the fancy cart, having a bad dream about big dogs chasing me, and then when I woke up I was sitting in a scorchweed bush beside the road and my shoulder hurt and the leftover blackberry pastry I was saving in my pocket for Jamie was all mashed up against my leg and I didn’t know why I wasn’t in the cart anymore.

I wasn’t in the cart anymore because it was lying on its side in the middle of the road, three raiders poking around in the guts of it. They took out Mama’s big orange work bag and my blue backpack. I wanted to yell at them for taking our stuff, but then I saw that one of the raiders was dragging the cart driver out of his seat and tying his hands together. His face was all bloody, and seeing that made my voice dry up in my mouth.

I looked at the cart again. Half of Mama was lying next to it. Something happened to my eyes when I saw that—everything went all white and sparkly for a second—but then the sparkles melted away and a raider was pulling Mama’s arms and she wasn’t cut in half at all, just her legs were stuck under the cart. But really stuck, I guess, because when he pulled she screamed. It was the first time I ever heard Mama scream. Also the last. She didn’t sound scared though, just really, really mad.

“You stupid fucking slag-for-brains,” she yelled at the raider. “Do you KNOW WHO I—”

That surprised me even through my scaredness because I’d never heard Mama use words like that before. I was saying STUPID FUCKING SLAG-FOR-BRAINS to myself in my mind when Mama’s eyes landed on me, and she looked pretty surprised to see me there in that scorchweed bush. I guess she’d thought the other raiders already got me, because something happened in her face, something sad and happy both at the same time. She did the thing with her eyes that means Listen To Me Right Now Or You Will Be Sorry Indeed and shaped her mouth like the word RUN except no sound came out.

But I didn’t want to RUN. I wanted Mama. We should have moved to Grayfall. Then I’d be safe eating blackberry pastries, watching Mama sharpen her work-knives until they were shiny like stars, instead of sitting in this poky bush with my shoulder hurting and some stupid fucking slag-for-brains stealing my blue bag.

I made a face at Mama that meant No I Will Not, Come Over Here And Make Me, and I turned my heart into a stone too heavy to be moved, no matter what face she made back at me.

Instead she waited until the raider stopped pulling her arms again. Then she took his knife out of his boot and stuck it into his leg and he fell over, screaming and kicking at Mama with his good foot. Mama pushed herself partway up onto her elbows and threw the knife toward me. It landed next to my scorchweed bush. I knew she wanted me to take it and run away before the raiders saw me, but my body wouldn’t work. Then the man’s foot kicked hard across Mama’s face and she made a little noise and fainted. Fainted means your brain goes to sleep for a little while. I see people faint all the time when Mama works, but none of those people have been Mama before now. I knew it was just that she fainted and not died because Mama would never die and leave me here alone.

The fainting part still scared me, but it made me mad too. Nobody kicks my Mama. I don’t remember getting out of the scorchweed bush, or picking up the knife, just the way the world was going dark around the edges like I couldn’t see right and be this mad both at the same time. But I guess I picked it up because the next thing I knew there was a raider taking it out of my hand and another raider picking me up by my feet and I swung through the air like on my tree swing but not really like that at all and then I heard a loud bang and everything went dark.

I want to say I woke up and it was all a dream, but instead I woke up because somebody was shaking me and kind of whisper-yelling KID, HEY KID, ARE YOU ALIVE and I wanted to say my name’s not KID, it’s ANEKO but when I tried to move my mouth it hurt so much the world went white and sparkly again and my head felt like it was coming unstuck from my body and I wondered if that was what Mama felt like when they—

I came awake all at once, sitting up and grabbing at whoever it was in front of me. It was an older kid, a girl like me. Her face was dirty and her feet were tied together. I grabbed at her and lost my balance. That was because the floor was moving, just like in the fancy cart, except bouncier, and also my feet were tied together too. She grabbed me back so I wouldn’t fall over. I decided she wasn’t a raider. A raider would’ve let me fall.

“Have you seen Mama?” I asked her, before my brain caught up with my mouth and I remembered she wasn’t this girl’s Mama, just mine. I wanted to say she looks like me, but then I remembered her squashed legs and her kicked-at face and didn’t know if that was true anymore. I wanted to say she always has a big orange work bag with her, except the scav army raiders took it. I didn’t know what I could say that was still true, but then something fell into my head so I said it. “She works for the king in Grayfall.”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know Grayfall,” she said. “I’m from Chooser’s Blindside.”

“Where’s that?”

Instead of answering, she tapped a wall of the cart where there were all these little scratches. More scratches than all my fingers and toes put together. I didn’t understand but I nodded like I did because I didn’t want this new girl to think I was a stupid fucking slag-for-brains and leave me alone to die.

There was a map of the Waste in the king’s castle but it was confusing. A little dot I could cover with my fingertip was supposed to be the whole town Sunrise, and even the huge city Grayfall was so little that if a baby sneezed on it it looked like it’d blow away. Maybe there was a Chooser’s Whatever on there somewhere, but I didn’t remember.

I thought about that for a minute while I looked around. We were in a closed-up little box, bigger than the fancy cart but it didn’t have any windows, just little holes high up on the walls that let in a little bit of light. Mama has a box like this, all folded up in her big orange work bag, made special to fit over a secret-keeper’s head. It’s full of holes that she closes up one by one until the secret-keeper wants to talk. So I knew the holes up high on the cart-walls were for air. Bundles of dried ghostgrass hung in them, just like any window, keeping us safe. Which is kind of funny when you think about how not-safe we really were.