Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

That made me remember Sam, who looked littler and not so strong now that she was dead. And it made me think of the kid who couldn’t walk and was now lying on his face in his spot in the circle, and those two thoughts kind of joined up and started walking toward another thought about Mama and how she couldn’t walk because the cart had landed on her legs, and I yelled at those thoughts in my head to SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, until they went away somewhere else and I could be smart again and ANALYZE MY SITUATION like Mama would tell me to do.

Us kids had to sit really still because two raiders were circling behind us, round and round, like the circle of kids was a planet and the raiders were orbiting moons. ORBITING means going-around, which is what the raiders were doing. Going around with their weapons in their hands, making sure we didn’t do anything bad.

We weren’t allowed to talk, of course. There was a boy next to me, on the not-Nina side, and it was weird to think he’d been walking behind me this whole time and I didn’t see his face at all until now. This boy tried to ask for water and the raider passing behind him swung her weapon down and smashed him in the cheek without even slowing down. Her weapon was some kind of heavy stick or club with sharp things sticking out of it, and the boy put his hand to his cheek and pulled it away all bloody and started screaming. That brought more raiders, and one of them started yelling at the one with the stick, and then she went away and the new raiders unchained the screaming boy and dragged him off into the dark and came back later without him.

They had to feed the rest of us so we could walk tomorrow. There was a big raider argument about that. Some of them didn’t want to feed us, said there were still three days hard march to Last Chance, whatever that was, and then I didn’t listen anymore because my whole mind was full of THREE DAYS HARD MARCH and I knew, just knew, that my feet could never walk that far, I’d end up like the dead boy with the inside-out head and never see Mama again.

But when they were done arguing they fed us. Not a lot. Each kid got one little strip of weird dried meat and one little broken-off piece of stale flatbread and three tiny dried berries, so small and hard that I couldn’t even really chew them, they just got stuck between my teeth.

We had to eat the dried meat first and fast because if we took too long the salt in it would draw ghosts down on us from as soon as they took it out of its ghostgrass bag. One time Mama told me that the Grayfall king’s first torturer used to sprinkle salt around his secret-keepers and let the Waste-ghosts at them bit by bit, but Mama never did that. She said it was lazy, and sloppy, and cruel. I never knew if she meant cruel to the secret-keepers or the ghosts.

We also got two sips of nasty water from a bottle the scav army raiders passed around. An older girl tried to take more water. I don’t think she could stop herself, she got that water to her mouth and her mouth kept moving all on its own to take more. So the raider behind her reached down, took the bottle, then stepped in front of her and kicked her in the stomach so she threw up the water and tiny bit of food. The raider left and the girl looked down at the throwup. She looked like she was thinking about something, probably THREE DAYS HARD MARCH, because she picked the throwup meat and berries off the ground like a dog and ate them while we all stared. It was really hard not to make any noise or say anything while she was doing that, but I didn’t want to have to choose between eating my own throwup or dying on the Waste-road from being too weak to walk, so I locked my mouth like Mama’s work bag and kept it locked.

After that was sleeptime. Just there on the ground, which I thought would be fun before I tried it but then when I did it wasn’t fun at all, it was cold and the ground was hard and I had to pee. The raiders had made a fire but it was far away by where they slept and didn’t warm us kids up even a little. I wanted my pillow and blanket and most of all I wanted Mama. I tried to close my eyes and count big numbers until I fell asleep but Nina was next to me sniffling, not letting herself cry, so I whispered to her COME CLOSER SO WE CAN STAY WARM but then she just sniffled into my hair instead and you can’t fall asleep with somebody doing that no matter how tired you are. So I scooted away and rolled over and something in my pocket went squish.

I pretended to fall asleep so the raiders wouldn’t watch me, but really I was spying on them out of the tiniest opening in my eyes. After a long time one of them said I’M FREEZING MY BALLS OFF, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE and the other one kind of swept a look across us kids and said WELL THEY’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE, and then I closed my eyes quick while the raider stepped over me, and I could hear them take a couple steps away, but then the first one stopped and said LOOK, MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST and the other one said THEN STAY, I’M GOING OVER THERE and their footsteps crunched away over the ashy Waste dirt toward the fire and when I opened my eyes again they were gone.

So I snuck my hand down to my pocket, really slow and quiet, and there was the blackberry pastry from the king’s castle, all gummed together and mushed into the cloth of the pocket. But it was food, so I scooped it out in little slow secret bits on my fingers and ate it. It tasted like treasure. I felt bad about not sharing with Nina, but if I shared with her then all the kids would want some, and they’d be noisy and the raiders would come back and drag me away into the darkness or kill me right here on the ground.

When I couldn’t scrape any more crumbs and fruit goo out of my pocket, I licked my fingers as quiet as I could, then licked the crumbs from around my lips and ate them carefully, one by one. I couldn’t let the raiders smell the sweetness on me, and I wanted every speck of that food-energy to go to my walking feet, my seeing eyes. I still had lots farther to go.

The raiders were wrong. It was FOUR DAYS HARD MARCH to Last Chance, not THREE. Well, THREE plus ONE where we had to stop right where we were on the road and wait for a storm to blow over. It took all day, which was good for me because my feet hurt so much that I don’t know if I could’ve walked on them even if all the scav armies in the whole wide Waste were chasing me, and bad for me because the extra day meant we ran out of food before we got to where they were taking us.

They put us all together while the storm was going over, and told us to keep our heads down and close our eyes and they tied pieces of cloth over our noses and eyes to keep the ash and dust out, and told us to shut up and go to sleep if we know what’s good for us.

But there’s no sleeping in a Waste-storm, at least not for me. It’s too loud and too windy and every time you breathe you can feel some Waste sneaking into your nose and mouth so you sneeze out black gunk for days.

I tried to open my eyes just a little to see if I could see Mama anywhere, which was a mistake. Waste-ash flew into my eyes as soon as I opened them and I couldn’t even wipe it back out because my hands were covered with it too. My eyes were too dried out to cry the ash away so I just squeezed them super tight so it wouldn’t hurt as much and after a while I guess I fell asleep because I saw Mama walking toward me, no smashed legs, no chains, so I knew it was a dream and I woke up.

The day after that we ran out of food, and the day after that we arrived at the scav army town Last Chance, and by that time there were only twelve kids left on my chain plus me, and they put us straight to work.

Here’s what Last Chance is NOT like: Sunrise. Grayfall. Any kind of town. It doesn’t even have houses, not really, just tents and carts all shoved together in a kind of messy townish shape. It has chickens running around but no kids playing. It has dogs to pull the carts but no goats for milk. There’s not even a garden, which is the number-one important thing for a town to have, Mama says, because people get sick if they don’t have green growing things to eat, their bodies don’t work right and they die, just like what happened with Jamie’s big brother and his friends who went out to draw a map of the Waste past the mountains and got lost from first-apples day to second snow.