Circles in the Dust (4 page)

Frigid mud squelched under his weight as he knelt down on the bank of the river, dipping his bucket into the dark, icy water. Even with the awful impact mankind had had on the world, the natural world remained relatively unscathed. It was a beautiful desolation. The trees and rivers that had acted as buffers between life and death since the dawn of life remained and supported him, just as they had done for man’s earliest ancestors as they rose from the primordial ooze. Some resilient bushes continued to produce a few berries; a small number of animals had found a way to survive. Most had been wiped from the Earth or fled, though he doubted there was anywhere safe to escape the ravages of the old world. The old world, with its complex societies and technologies, its class systems and increased life expectancy, its luxuries and cushions. That was what separated the old world from the new; humans had once thrived. They had gone full circle. Once more, they survived.

David pulled his bucket out of the water and turned quickly back toward his camp, thinking about the meal waiting for him. He started for the trees and stopped suddenly, looking around. He scanned the river, eyes lingering on the far bank, then spun around and set a quick pace away from the water. His bucket swung violently by its thin handle, threatening to overturn and douse the already wet ground with its contents. David lifted it higher, holding the bottom with his other hand, not willing to stop and settle the lively container. Lowering it again once its contents had calmed, he used his other hand to check the slight bulge protruding from his hip for reassurance. A nervous habit.

He continued under the emerald canopy, weaving through the trees he had survived alongside, reaching out occasionally to place his palm on the bark of a brother or a sister as he passed. He smiled, thinking as he patted one trunk that these were his closest friends, the only family he had. He had a dog once. A scrawny thing he found wandering in the city one day. That dog was his best friend, and it owned his heart. Until food ran short. The worst part of that night had not been the butchering or the look in his canine companion’s eyes before he slipped the knife into his fur at the base of the skull; the worst was how much he had enjoyed that meal.

There was the old man too. By the time David found him, the elder was no help. He had nothing to offer but stories and myths of the old world. He had let David into his camp for a night, that one night had turned into a second, then a week, and eventually a bed of boughs and eventually a sleeping bag the man traded a few cans of corn for. His throat tightened to think of his old friend. He had taught David a lot. Shown him how things worked and why. The old man had a lot to say, had filled the hours with his constant blathering about everything from history and what had led to the war to the mechanics of a toilet. He had kept the darkness, the loneliness, at bay. The forest blurred as David remembered. He coughed and pushed a rough hand into his eyes, clearing his vision.

He sloshed through the small puddles that formed in dips in the ground in his old worn-out boots, patched and smudged with filth. It was getting colder; the evenings brought a chill, more than they had a week ago though so much less than they would, come winter proper. He wished he had worn more than his light jacket on this expedition, the navy sweater that was his uniform. He would have to start wearing his heavier coat, the wool one with the polyester lining. It was an ugly thing, lumpy and stained with stiff clumps of filth, but it had outlasted the rest. It always kept the icy fingers at bay.

Before long he was enjoying the company of a crackling fire once more. It sizzled and popped as it fought to stay alive in the damp evening. He set the bucket down in its usual place by the fire then tramped over to the stack of freshly cut firewood that leaned up against the already sagging side of his cabin. He loaded a few logs from under the saturated top layer into his arms and walked back over to the glowing embers. He shifted his load to his left arm and began constructing a small pyramid around the remnants of his fire. It sprang back from death’s door with the coaxing of a few heavy breaths.

When the fire was chuckling contentedly and David had a dented pot of water boiling, he went to his cabin for his knife. The door swung in on its loose rope hinges, falling back as he stepped into this room that contained everything he had salvaged from life before. In the corner was a bed, a small twin mattress that sat on the ground, dirty and disgusting, his favorite possession nonetheless. He had a few old blankets and a couple pillows lying haphazardly on top. Those pillows were his crown jewels, more valuable to him than the largest diamond. Next to the bed a book rested on a small table he sometimes upturned to use as a sort of sled; it was the single piece of literature he had saved from the implosion of humanity that had taken most of its knowledge to the grave along with it, a simple story he knew by heart.

Nails jutted haphazardly from the walls, holding all the tools that made life possible. He unloaded his bow and quiver on their hooks of honor next to the door and reached for his rusty hunting knife hanging in a beaten leather sheath a little farther down, above the few old bags and boxes that held the rest of his belongings. It was a pitiful stack. He stood there a moment, knife in hand, allowing the cozy atmosphere of the room to draw him in, remind him that he was truly home. The meal awaiting him had a stronger pull though, and he returned to the fire. Lifting the rabbit onto a battered and slashed old board, he slipped his knife into the throat of the animal and wrapped the blade all the way around its neck. His fingers moved with care, peeling the tube of fur away from the delicate body he would sink his teeth into before long. A line of blood ran down the slimy pink flesh, just as a bit of drool slipped over David’s lips. Soon enough he would be enjoying this delicacy, this treasure. He looked up at the tree against which his cabin rested. His tree. He thought of curling up on his bed under that giant with a full belly and smiled.

CHAPTER 2

Morning came with a torrential downpour at its heels. David woke to the patter of raindrops colliding with the tin roof overhead. The sound was comforting, a reminder that he was protected from the elements in his cave, buried in a nest of blankets and a fog of drowsiness he was loathe to shake off. He lay there, curled up in a ball, listening to the sky besiege his cabin, letting his thoughts roam. Rain meant he should stay inside most of the day. But there was so much to do. How to occupy himself once he finally rose from his tomb? He needed to start preparing for the coming snow, and there was more than enough to do on that front to occupy him for a day. Of course he knew what he would do, but wondering allowed him to stay in his cocoon a bit longer.

He lifted the blankets, wincing as the cold air shocked his naked torso. His eyes opened to the scenic view of the wood-framed ceiling of age-warped boards supporting a rusted tin roof. Light seeped through the cracks between the walls and roof, leading the way for rivulets of rainwater. There was task number one. Of course, before even that came breakfast. He sat up, running his hands through roughly chopped, copper locks, pushing it back. He would have to start wearing a shirt when he slept soon, but for now he woke bare-chested, nothing between him and the rough warmth of the blankets. Reaching for an old sweater, he pulled it over his head and rolled out of bed. He folded his blankets and collapsed into the old chair that was the only other real piece of furniture in his cabin. The upholstery was torn and frayed, nonexistent in some places where the wooden skeleton showed through, but its cushions had conformed to his shape over the years. He slid his feet into the cold bellies of his boots, wishing he had some clean socks. The ones he wore crackled stiffly.

Ignoring the crunching as he stood, David opened the small camping cooler that held the food he dared to keep around. A few vegetables he had managed to reap from his dismal garden were strewn about the bottom, representing the grand sum of his agricultural efforts. He took out a stunted carrot and tore into the end. The meager array of veggies shared the space with a few cans of corn and peas and a large can of rice. He could still remember his surprise the first time he had cracked open one of those cans. Who canned rice? Whoever it was, he could not have been more thankful they were ever alive. What remained of the rabbit he had dried in strips and set apart in a corner, though there wasn’t much left. As long as he paced himself, David could make that rabbit last him a week. A large canteen held what water he had. He drank a few gulps and took it outside with him, wrapping himself in his old wool coat on his way out the door.

He covered the fire with a tarp and rekindled the feeble flames from the previous night’s fire before beginning his morning journey to the river. The rain soaked his hair and dripped into his eyes. His bucket had an inch of water in the bottom by the time he knelt down to fill it. He stood up with his bucket, looking upriver and down, suspended in anticipation for a moment. His coat hung heavy on his shoulders, his pants clung to his legs. A chill ran through him and he was roused back to consciousness. He brushed the hair from his face and trudged back into the woods.

Halfway back, he took a quick look around and turned a sharp right into the trees. He walked for a few minutes until a squat maple surrounded by a crowd of pines came into view, looking like some ancient pagan ritual frozen in time. He approached the center of the circle, the tree that stood out. Leaving his bucket a few feet from the foot of the tree, he walked up to a pumpkin-sized rock at its base. He rolled it aside and looked down into his cache. There were a few stacks of cans in the little hollow place, a few of the big bags of rice and flour that were the staples of his diet, alongside a handful of extras, like a tin of salt and baking powder. His last food store. He had been lucky and ended up with a good supply of food soon after the war started, though he regretted sometimes the way he had come by it. The bulk of this cache came from a large family he and the old man had found huddled in the basement of their home. The old man had said they were probably Mormons. David still didn’t know what that meant. They had enough to last them at least a year. Being alone, it had lasted David much longer than that.

But it was running out.

He took out a can of coffee. This he had found among the remains of an old woman who had succumbed to the cold last winter. It was all she had left. She must have traded everything she had for a little food to keep her going one more day, until she had nothing left but a can of coffee, which David had found clutched in her arms where she lay dead. No food, no water, but she clung to that can, wrapping herself around it, keeping it pressed close to her in a final embrace. David buried her and thought of leaving her last treasure with her, the one thing she’d managed to hold on to when the old world tore everything else away. Just before the dented metal vanished under the rising dirt in the grave, however, David had snatched it. He had never tasted coffee, had no idea why that woman would have kept it. It seemed such a waste to leave it there. It went against every instinct he had. So he kept it, squirrelled away. He thought of the half-frozen corpse as he stared at the faded label; and thoughts of another he had buried rose to the surface. The can slipped from his fingers onto the sodden ground.

He would need that coffee now. The mystery would give him something to figure out while he waited out the winter. There would be little to do when the snow came and entombed him in his hollow. At least during the summer there was a river to walk to, wood to be gathered, food to be prepared and stored. The winter would be quiet and dull. Lifeless.

He reached in and pulled out a few cans of vegetables and a bag of rice, wishing he had more of the cans. They saved so much better. He kicked the can of coffee back into the hole and replaced the rock.

Spoils held precariously in the crook of his arm, he tromped back to his cabin. Still faces covered with bits of earth crowded his thoughts, too many to count. He could still see them, still smell them, their naked bodies stark and pale against the dark soil-

He was shaken from this reverie by the sharp caw! of a crow behind him. He snapped his head around to stare at it, hating himself for leaving behind his bow. His hand fell against the bulge at his hip, but he decided against it. Not for a crow.

             
He lifted the last biscuit off the charred pan suspended over the fire. He took a bite out of one, trying to silence the growling in his stomach. His last tin of flour, spent making these few, bland cakes, rested on the ground at his feet. He sat by the fire, chewing the tasteless mush, staring off in the direction of the river while the fire sputtered next to him. Absently grabbing a few more of the hot cakes, he wandered into the night.

             
Firelight glinted off his bucket, sitting forgotten next to his seat.

CHAPTER 3

A bead of sweat dropped onto the log just before the ax. It was there for a moment, barely visible on the damp chunk of pine, before the blade swept down and split the wood in two. Splinters jumped in every direction like soldiers trying to escape an enemy grenade. The head of the ax fell into the snow, hanging from a limp, exhausted hand.

             
“I am telling you, the whole damn thing was unnecessary.”

             
A weary smile cracked David’s composure as the old man rattled on behind him. Day in and day out, the air was never empty of the man’s opinion, theories, and facts.

             
“Do you hear me, boy?” the old man said. “I am telling you, if it wasn’t for the army swooping in before anything was officially declared, I’d be in my bath right now with a bottle of good red and you’d be in a classroom, where someone else could be teaching you all this…” The mumbling teetered off into discontent grumbling about his own classroom where he had taught ethics and political science. David caught a word here and there, but had long since ceased trying to drink in the words. He had drunk, and he was full up.

             
The rest of the wood was cut and stacked a short while after. David added it to the top of the heap. Soon it would be taller than he was. The snows, as heavy as they were, made leaving the hollow where the two had set up camp daunting, and leaving the old man alone made David increasingly nervous. Chopping wood was something he could do, though, without straying too far or leaving his elderly companion unattended. At least it meant doing something.

             
He had long since heard all the stories.

             
The light was fading from the cloudy sky when David propped the ax against the pile of wood and set about preparing a meal. The old man may be frail now, but he had managed to bring a hoard of cans into the woods with him, and had even had  the good sense to bury them.

             
“Of course I saw this coming,” he would say. “It’s my business to know what’s going on in the world. At least it was.” He would punctuate this thought with a chuckle, though a depressed sigh always came after. In recent months a painful cough might interrupt.

             
Tonight was no different. On and on the old man went, words tumbling endlessly from his mouth, dancing circles around David’s head. It had been a long time since David had found Ernest struggling to chop wood with that rusty old ax. The man had convinced the sad boy to wield it for him in exchange for a hot meal. Knowing no better, David had agreed. He may have been small and about as strong as the old professor, but he had the energy to smash enough wood for a night’s fire. He had been lucky. He could have found anyone in the woods willing to do anything with a child, but fate had carried him to this camp. The old man with a limp couldn’t have done much to him if he had tried.

             
David stoked the fire and tossed fresh firewood onto the embers before grabbing a short shovel and walking off into the trees toward their cache of food. He could just make out the light of the fire glinting off banks of snow and frozen limbs of trees when he stopped. The constant dusting of snow kept their secret for them, hiding their tracks. David wondered if they would need to move the food before long. Constantly digging it up had resulted in a dip in the snow that anyone walking by would notice. David plunged the shovel into the snow, savoring the easy crunch. Before long it was soil, and his young back groaned in protest as he lifted each shovelful of dirt into a neat pile next to the hole. A few minutes of this and he felt the shovel strike something hard. He knelt on his knees and used his hands to sift through the frozen dirt. His numb fingers felt the round side of a can and he scratched furiously at the earth around it, dislodging it and setting it on the pile of dirt. Three more followed. He took no time to see what was in them. The labels had all faded or been stripped clean off, and it made no difference anyway. The cans on top always got eaten.

             
When he had as many cans as he could carry, he rose and filled in the hole, careful to put all the dirty snow into the hole first. Not a soul would hesitate to dig this up if they thought there might be something useful buried in the ground. The woods were full of the desperate, those who’d managed to survive the bombings and raids and had the sense to escape to the wild. The forest was merciless, though, more so than the armies battling over rubble and ruin in the city. Those few who had brought supplies with them had been largely overwhelmed by the mass of naïve survivors who’d tumbled out of their homes with empty hands and empty bellies. Soon they would be gone too. David knew it. The old man often told him so.

             
When he got back to the fire, Ernest was still murmuring to himself. David smiled. That noise beat the silence of the dead world outside the ring of light cast by the fire. It was comforting. David couldn’t tell how long it had been since he’d found the old man, though it could not have been too long after he left the city himself. Wandering from camp to camp, he had kept alive, but eventually everyone had chased him away or tried to harm him. He ran from all of them until he’d stumbled into this camp, too tired to go any further and too lost to know where to go even if he had the energy. If he had to guess, it had been years ago. A few fuzzy hairs dotted his chin now and he had grown tall enough to see the bald crown of the old man’s head.

             
“What are we eating tonight?”

             
David looked up to see a pair of bright eyes staring at him from a face crinkled with age. He looked down at the cans on the ground next to his feet and shrugged.

             
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

             
The old man chortled and produced a can opener from his pocket. Spots of rust lined the steel point that pierced the cans.

             
“Green beans,” Ernest said. They had eaten almost nothing else for days, but no trace of disappointment entered his voice.

             
“Oh, boy,” David grumbled. He could feel the scolding stare of the old man but ignored it, focusing on opening some of the cans himself.

             
“Be glad you have that, David.”

             
The words were not harsh but they stung.

             
David retrieved a pot from the tent that sat just far enough from the fire to escape any drifting sparks and they boiled their meal with melted snow. Whatever he might say, David was grateful for the meal. The heat from the beans was enough

to make him wolf down all his stomach would hold. When he finished he stood up and reached for the old man’s bowl. The old man let him have it. David took a step from the fire and looked down to see that the food had hardly been touched. He tried to give it back but Ernest would not take it.

              “Not too hungry tonight,” was all the old man would say, pushing the bowl back at David. The boy sighed impatiently but said nothing. No amount of reasoning would get the old man to eat when he didn’t want to, and lately he had been eating less and less. David kept his concerns to himself, scouring the bowls with snow at the edge of the camp.

             
He ducked once more into the tent before returning to the fire. He sat next to the old man with his bow and a rag, cleaning the already spotless frame.

             
“Have you caught anything recently?” The old man was smiling at him with that contagiously pleasant shine in his eyes.

             
“You’d know if I had,” David said. He forced a smile in return.

             
“Seen anything?”

             
“Not for a while.”

             
“You haven’t gone hunting for a while though. Maybe you should go out tomorrow.”

             
David grunted in response.

             
“We have plenty of firewood.”

             
“Never too much,” David said. He looked up to see that the smile had faded from the old man’s face. David couldn’t tell exactly what his gaze held. A certain sadness, maybe.

             
“Go out tomorrow. I want some fresh meat.” Ernest’s voice grew stern. “I’ll be fine here. You know how to find rabbits. You don’t need me to show you the tracks anymore.”

             
“I know,” David said. “I just... I feel a storm coming, and I-”

             
“Oh, shut up,” the old man interrupted. “I’ll be fine, Andrew. You go on.”

             
David was about to say something more about the storm when he realized what Ernest had said. “Andrew?”

             
The old man squinted at David, his lips pursed together. He stayed that way long enough to make David begin to squirm.

             
“David,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Of course I meant David. I’ll be fine. You know what you’re doing out there. You don’t need me to hold your hand.”

             
A rush of emotion gripped David’s throat. He took a deep, quivering breath and bobbed his head up and down, unable to speak.

             
“Good. See that you come back with something.” He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Between you and me, I could do with a break from the beans too.” He laughed at this, leaning back on the log seat they shared. He kept his mouth closed when he laughed, though his mirth was enough to shake his whole body. Before David could join in, the chuckles turned to coughs, ugly rasping coughs. A stained handkerchief covered his mouth as he wheezed. David sat next to him, feeling powerless and hating it. When the old man finally pulled the rag from his mouth, David saw a patch of crimson before it was crumpled quickly and tucked away. Ernest wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and cleared his throat a few times.

             
“I think I’m going to turn in, David. Will you bank the fire before you turn in?”

             
David nodded.

             
“Good. I’ll see you in the morning.” The old man rose on unsteady legs and teetered through the mouth of the tent. The flap zipped shut, leaving David alone. He stared at the flames, hands rubbing the rag back and forth over the frame of his bow. It was not long before the world outside the ring of light cast by the fire faded away. The night was quiet. A lonely wind swept through the trees, moaning softly. Occasionally David dropped more wood onto the fire. He waited for sleep to come tug on his eyelids, pull him into the tent, into his sleeping bag. If he were going to hunt tomorrow, he would need to get up early.

             
The moon never came, its light too weak to penetrate the clouds. Sleep never came either. In the dead of night, David rose from the log, his muscles stiff. The fire had burned down to embers. He walked to the tent and opened the flap to peek inside. His eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the intense darkness. The old man was fast asleep. His sleeping bag vibrated, moving and shifting as the old man shivered inside. Coarse breaths streamed from below as air struggled to leave the old man’s throat. It sounded painful, like the rumble of a car moving over gravel, but the old man slumbered on. David put one foot inside and reached for his sleeping bag. He held it in his hands, feeling the slick polyester and the wooly lining. The zipper sang as he opened it up. He tossed it over the sleeping form, bending over to pull the covers up to his cheek.

The shivering went on as he stood and watched, listening to the labored breathing.  After a few minutes, he thought he heard the breathing clear up and the shaking cease. Maybe it was just in his head.

He returned to the fire. A few more logs went onto the coals and his bow returned to his hand. The quiet swish of the rag over the metal frame was the only noise to be heard when the sun rose the next day.