We roll into town around midday, the boy still bleeding in the back. I look through the dust-caked windshield and take in the main drag, roofs hanging over walkways casting shadows pitch black compared to the glare of the sand, almost white. I check the pistol again and stow it, the other one under the dash in case anyone gets too close while I'm gone.
"I'll be right back," I tell her and jump out of the cab. She latches the door behind me almost before I hit the ground. She's a good kid; she knows what to do.
The sand's so hot I can feel it through my boots. Used to be you could still see patches of asphalt here and there, traces of ancient roads that once stretched from horizon to horizon, roads the masters of this world built before turning it into a cinder, still crackling and hissing in the sun, a perpetual desert, ash covering everything the sand can't. This world was a different place not so long ago. Long enough the little ones never knew it, but not so long ago as to be lost completely. Most of those you meet now can't remember the way it was, or won't, anyway. I suppose I understand that. The ones that could remember often found they couldn't forget, couldn't force this new world to make sense and couldn't find a place in it. Most of them have managed to find their way out of it by now.
A moment to stretch my back is about all I can stand out in the sun, so I make my way up onto one of the walkways and let my eyes adjust to the shade. The walkway runs off into the distance, stopping suddenly at the charred bones of a house or shop. I can't imagine what anyone'd be selling anymore, but I suppose opportunity springs eternal, even if nothing else does. The walkway across the road is battered, with loose boards popping up, twisted and gnarled, beneath holes rent in the roof, shafts of light stabbing through like puncture wounds.
There's no one outside, but there wouldn't be, this time of day. I make my way down the row of buildings, each shabbier than the last. A dry decay has settled into this town, beat down and on its last legs, but it's still a good step above the wasteland stretching out for eternity in every direction beyond these dessicated buildings. Though at least out there you can see death coming for you, striding across the sands, casting a shadow a mile long, ready to swallow you up. In the towns, in the ruins, there's death and danger around every corner and in every hidey-hole: cutthroats and rapers, slavers, the diseased. Cannibals. It seems sad that nowadays the safest life is the solitary one. If no one gets close, no one can hurt you. No one can sniff out your weakness, your fear, your need, and turn it on you. So you keep to yourself, keep moving, and stay away from the settlements. Except when you need something, which we do.
They're not likely to have medicine here, The good stuff, the old stuff, or the herbs and rags you find people that swear by, people missing eyes, people with weeping sores, people clutching themselves, racked with pain that won't abate. You have to trust it, they say: It's the power of belief. Well I don't and they do, and look at them.
The windows are battered and pitted, like the rest of the building, and so caked with sand and dust it flakes away under my touch. Even wiped clean I can't see inside, the darkness on the other side of the glass is impenetrable, hiding God knows what. The twisted shapes lurking within are creatures worse than any that ever strode the earth. Ghosts of decent men, driven beyond reason, molded and pounded into horrible new configurations, appropriate inheritors of this world of the dead and the dying.
I pound on the door and wait, any sound from within lost beneath the hiss of the unrelenting wind. I pound again and reach for the knob, but the door jerks open before I can touch it, open just a sliver, just wide enough for the barrel of a rifle to slink out.
"You get back in your rig and you get out of here."
The eyes behind the rifle are wide and wild, ringed by crow's feet. I tell her that we need medicine, that the boy is hurt, dying, and we need their help.
She doesn't falter, doesn't blink. "We don't want no trouble. Now whatever you brought here, you take it away with you."
I understand her decision. I imagine I would do the same thing. But all the same, it fills me with a great sadness. We've all of us become new beings to suit this new world, twisted reflections of the new landscape and the horrors it holds, our wickedness maybe not so new-found as some of us would like to believe, revealed by the same scouring wind that ground down the great towers and monuments to ourselves, leaving waste and ruin, girder ribcages with steel arms outstretched, broken and asymmetrical, clawing feebly at the sky. It seems some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: that we have the ability to visit such evil upon each other marks us as deserving of that same evil. Our capacity to inflict suffering earns us the suffering we find ourselves able to inflict.
"You wish death upon the boy," I tell her, and back away from the door. I take another look at the battered remains of this town, this little pocket of humanity struggling to survive despite itself, and I walk back to the truck, the little one opening the door for me. I climb in and meet the girl's hopeful stare, but she should know better. I take a look back at the boy. He's pale, sleeping or unconscious. Medicine wouldn't have helped him anyway.
4 September 2012
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