Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Three sides of the little room were just big piles of broken bricks with some long pieces of metal holding them up. It looked like somebody, somebody big, the Sunrise giants kind of big, took the metal pieces and shoved them into the ground really hard and left the long parts sticking out, but really I knew it was just the way this one Before-building fell. The other side of the little room was a giant-size letter S, taller than the tallest grownup I ever saw, and some long pieces of metal leaned up against the middle part of the S made up the ceiling of the room. I could just make out the top half of the S going on above the metal-pieces ceiling where the sun shone through.

Nobody had been here in a really long time. Maybe never. I could tell that right away. For one thing, Mama taught me to look for footprints and people-marks anywhere I go in the Waste ever, to see if people were there before me, and there weren’t any here. For another thing, there was Before-stuff on the ground of my little room, poking up out of the Waste. Pieces of easy carrying size. Stuff other kids on chains or raiders or whoever would’ve grabbed up way before today.

I didn’t have time to go through all the stuff really carefully. Maybe the SUPERVISOR would be just as happy with lots of sort-of-okay things as he would be with just one EXTRA GREAT one. So I just picked up everything I could as fast as I could. Anything that wasn’t attached to the stuff that was holding up this ruins-cave from falling on my head. Plastic. Metal. Broken pieces of Before-brick, better than the best lake-clay. The dry darkness of the ruins-cave had kept this stuff from rotting in the sun and rain. I didn’t look real close at anything, just shoved it all in my pockets.

“You in there,” the SUPERVISOR yelled from outside. “Hurry up.”

“Found stuff,” I yelled back, fast and breathless, anything before he pulled me out and started hitting and put me back on the chain and sent Nina in instead. One chance. “Just a minute.”

I glanced over my findings. Random nothing scraps of junk. But thanks to my find, the SUPERVISOR would flag my little room as a scavenge-spot, and other kids would be all over it like flies on a dead dog.

I had to do this smart. There was stuff sticking up out of the Waste, so it was an easy guess there was probably more stuff deeper down.

I started poking around with my digging-stick. The Waste was ashy and loose like always, and I could wiggle the pointy end of the stick down into it no problem. Then I could kind of get a piece of metal down in there and use that together with the stick to pull stuff out. I knew not to reach down into the Waste-ash with my bare hands. Too many tiny bits of glass and poky metal, too small to see, but it’d go into you like needles and you’d get an infection. Infection means when stuff gets into your skin that doesn’t belong there and your blood has like a war with the bad stuff inside you and the bad stuff wins and your hand or whatever gets all red and puffy and you get nasty sick until they cut off your hand, and maybe you die anyway.

A little bit down it was hard to dig any deeper. There was something in the way. One time Jamie and I had to help dig new beds in the Sunrise town garden and that was really hard because just underneath the top layer of Waste there’s all the stuff the ash has blown over and covered up, and you have to dig it out. It’s like the Before is right there, sleeping under your feet, snuggled up under an ashy gross blanket that people walk on every day.

But Before-stuff is exactly what I wanted, so I just dug harder, shoving my digging-stick into the ground until it got totally stuck in something underground. I pulled, I pushed it back and forth, but it was stuck, and if I came back out of that ruins-cave with no digging-stick, it was going to be a bad day for me.

I took the piece of metal and tried to dig a hole around where the stick went in. Scooping out the ash was hard because it just kept sliding back down into the hole I was making. So I tried to go under the mystery underground thing instead. Sometimes you could lever up a rock like that, if you get something in under it and push down to lift up the end you can’t see. Jamie’s dad taught us that, when we were out digging for the garden.

The SUPERVISOR was shouting again. “I have to send somebody in after you,” he was yelling, “you both pay.”

“Something’s stuck,” I heard myself yell back, all frozen scared because what was stuck was my digging-stick and not some piece of ruin-treasure that would save me from the hitting. Then, making the lie even worse, I yelled, “I can get it, I just need a few minutes is all.”

The SUPERVISOR went quiet again. I didn’t know if he was sending someone in, or who it would be, or how I would keep them from telling the SUPERVISOR about my lie. But the SUPERVISOR couldn’t fit back here, and I knew he was scared to come in under that huge pile of ruin-stuff himself. All the raiders were. Nina said that was the whole reason us kids were here doing their scav army work for them, because we’re expendable, which means nobody cared if we got crushed like bugs under all of this.

So I wiggled the metal piece in as far as I could and leaned on it. Then, while I was still leaning on it, I took another piece of metal and dug around my guess of the shape of the underground thing I couldn’t see. It felt round and smooth, like an egg bigger than my head. That was disappointing because round and smooth meant rock, and the SUPERVISOR wasn’t going to care about that, even if rocks were actually even older than the other Before-stuff, like every little knows.

But… how do you get a digging-stick stuck in a rock?

I did my best to get the hole dug around the maybe-rock and then I grabbed the digging-stick and pulled with every drop of my strength.

It didn’t move.

I pulled harder. I pulled with muscles I didn’t even know I had until I lost my grip and my balance and fell over backwards. It hurt, but I stayed quiet so the SUPERVISOR wouldn’t hear.

The stick still hadn’t moved. It was poking up out of the ground exactly how I’d left it.

I started feeling myself getting mad. Really mad. The kind of mad Mama always tells me not to get, because it’s not productive. Productive means being able to do your best at something because you’re not too busy being so mad that you can’t think right and you want to kick everything instead.

But Mama wasn’t here to tell me to take my calm-down breaths, so before I could stop myself I kicked the stuck-out part of the digging-stick as hard as I could.

And it moved.

Quick as I could, I jammed the piece of metal down in beside where I guessed the edge of the thing to end, fast before the ash could fill the hole back in. Then I kind of pushed the metal up and down with my foot while pulling the stick up and sideways the other way with both hands and praying to the One Who Got Away for strength and silence and the SUPERVISOR leaving me alone a little while longer.

It felt like pulling up a big old corpseroot out of new garden dirt, except even tighter stuck. I got my feet in a better position and dug in with my heels and fought that piece of Waste for my digging-stick and whatever dumb thing it was stuck to.

Deep under my feet, I felt something give way. There was a soft pop , so quiet I felt it more than heard it, and then the stick flew out in my hands, raining dirt and ash and those tiny sharp bits of Waste-stuff all over, and I shut my eyes.

When the stuff stopped raining down, I carefully wiped around my eyes.

Then I opened them and almost screamed.

Stuck to the end of my digging-stick was a head. A big, hard, made-of-Before-stuff head. Like the Sunrise giants, but way way smaller, more the size of like a big round bucket. Maybe it was metal, maybe plastic. Sometimes with Before-stuff it was hard to know for sure. It wasn’t very heavy but it felt really strong, like if my head was made of this stuff, the SUPERVISOR’s hitting-stick would feel like the tiniest mosquito booping against it, not bothering me even a little.