Impetus (4 page)

Clyde turned to Solomon
before leaving. He reached down and flipped a few of the plates onto the floor, spilling whatever slop was on them. “Clean this up,” he said, waving his hand around the room. “Or your body and my boot are going to have another meeting when I get back.” He snickered and then walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Or maybe I’ll pay your friend downstairs another visit.”

Solomon stared back. Hatred
boiled inside him. Hatred not only for Clyde but for himself, because he would clean this mess up as much as he detested the fact. He hated them all for a multitude of reasons. But as much as he hated Clyde, he hated King the most. He was the one that pushed Clyde over the edge of sanity. He was the one that nudged him toward the blackness that was inside him all along.

CHAPTER 4
 

Mick woke after another restless night spent worrying about things he had no control over. He drearily rubbed his heavy eyes and allowed them to adjust to the faintest of glows produced by the lamp from out in the main room. Each morning came like the one before it: melting into the previous night, not nearly as delineated as he remembered it once being. Very little light shone through the particulate-laced atmosphere to begin with. And while he could still differentiate between day and night on the outside, it became a much more difficult task while inside the subterranean world in which they dwelled. But the human body had the most amazing alarm clock built into it; one that woke him around the same time each morning.

He
reached to his left to nudge his kids awake.

Nate grumbled, his eyes still firmly shut,
and rolled over in his sleeping bag. “Five more minutes,” he said, haphazardly waving his arm to leave him alone.

Nate
would get up soon enough. He always did. And it would do Mick no good to pester him. While his fatherly instinct was to make sure Nate stuck to a schedule and did not “waste his day away,” as his father would put it, it was his hope that Nate would fall back asleep and into a dream that carried him to a better place, if only for a few more minutes. To rob him of that opportunity didn’t seem fair.

Kathryn rubbed her eyes
and yawned. “Morning.”

“
Morning, sweetie.”

It was at these times, when the dim light played tricks on his eyes, that he could not help but stare at Kathryn and see his sweet little four-year-old baby instead of the fourteen-year-old young woman she was. He liked to hold on to the trick of the dim light, hold on to his little girl. In the brighter light, he could see that over the past year her face had begun to morph into that of her mother. And each day she matured on both the inside and out
, making him prouder than he’d ever imagined he could be. At times, he could swear it was Sue, his sorely missed wife, looking back at him, telling him that everything was going to be all right and that he was doing a fine job of raising the twins.

Mick
swung his feet over the edge of the cot and scratched his scraggly head of hair, which had recently begun to bald in the back center. Ironic, considering his graying beard seemed to get thicker with time. But few things made sense anymore. With his head bowed in tiredness, or maybe just simple reluctance to rinse and repeat the day before, Mick forced himself off the rigid cot. It was a more difficult task than he ever would have foreseen. With very little to look forward to motivation became elusive, especially first thing in the morning.

Chester, typically the first one up in the morning,
was in charge of the food store and its upkeep. He was not fat. He was husky, or so he told Mick on more than one occasion. And Mick believed him considering they all ate the same meager meals, yet Chester stayed the same round shape. Rarely did the food store grow. But Chester helped to keep it from diminishing before its time. It was an important job that he took a great amount of pride in.

“
Morning, Chester,” Mick said, exiting the sleeping quarters and stepping into the glow of the single kerosene lamp.

“
And a good morning to you, my friend,” Chester said. “Hungry?”

Mick
took a seat at the table. He was starving, actually. “What’s on the menu today? Poached eggs? Pancakes?” he said, yawning. Then something so cruelly delicious popped into his head. “Bacon?” Why did he even think that? What a tease. But he could have sworn the unmistakable taste of pork had hit his tongue with its salty deliciousness. His mind suddenly salivated for it. He would have traded his rifle at that moment for a seat at a greasy spoon.

“
No,” Chester said. “None of those things. I have something much better.” He smiled.

And Mick
knew all too well what that something was.

Chester reached down and laid
Mick’s plate in front of him. One slice of canned meat, thinly cut as usual, still with a bit of the yellowish gelatin preservative on it. He also placed a cup to the right of his plate half filled with water from the storage tank. Each morning was the same, rarely a deviation and never anything worth waking up for.

The building
they called home had been sanctioned by the city as a fallout shelter twenty years back, ten years before Colossus. Mick had been hired to help wire the building’s telecommunications during its remodel. There was enough food, water, and fuel for up to one thousand people to survive for three months; plenty of time for the nearby residents to ride out almost anything imaginable. Turns out they did not imagine the right things. And, luckily for Mick and crew, the city had not officially opened the facility as a shelter before Impact. So few people knew of its existence. And those who did know apparently did not survive long enough to reap the benefits. The large conference hall that would have been used as the living quarters for the one thousand people had collapsed before Mick had brought his kids there, and the remaining sections of the shelter held the eight of them comfortably. Most importantly, though, was the fact that the food had been untouched when they’d arrived. It was like winning the post-apocalypse lottery, if there ever was such a morbid thing.

Mick
picked up his fork from the table, which Chester had laid out in a neater manner than the times demanded, and flipped it over as he always did, checking for his name written in permanent black marker. Dishes were not washed. Clean water was only for drinking. So utensils and plates were all permanently assigned to each person. Germs were less likely to be passed that way. At least that is what they told themselves.

It became more of a habit than anything
: checking for his name. Mick knew full well that germs were going to spread regardless of proper utensil hygiene. The eight of them could be locked in a box for only so long before becoming one giant organism, living and dying by each other’s woes. But he still practiced the ritual. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong with being a stickler for routine.

With a certain level of care it di
d not deserve, Mick used the fork to push the remaining gelatin off to the side of the slice of canned meat like a plow clearing a wintery street. Except this street had been covered in slimy yellow goop. The overly processed meat concoction had an infinite shelf life as long as the temperature was right. The taste, if it even had one to begin with, had deteriorated over the years to the point where it and cardboard were indistinguishable from one another. But it was the protein that mattered, not the taste.

Mick
folded his slice of canned meat in half, now clean of all gelatin preservative, and shoved it in his mouth whole. All he needed was the bit of nutrition it provided. And the quicker he got it down his throat the better, as he gagged almost every meal. Something about the texture and the way it slid around inside his mouth did not agree with him.

Sandeep
was next out of the sleeping quarters. “Morning to you both,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He pulled out a chair opposite Mick at the cold metal table and plopped his lanky frame down. He then scratched his patchy beard down to its brittle roots.

“
You’re just in time, Deep,” Mick said, yawning again. “Chester’s serving up bacon this morning.”

Mick
called him Deep for two reasons: the first being that he tended to shorten people’s names without knowing it, a bad habit from growing up in a neighborhood where everyone had three- or four-syllable names. There was no time for full names back then. They had games to play and places to run to during their busy childhood; a time when life was simpler and still relatively normal. Sandeep was also quite intelligent, having been a teacher before Impact. He waxed philosophical on more than one occasion. His thoughts were as deep as his soul was good. Deep would constantly tell Mick how thankful he was that he took him in after Impact. In reality it was Mick who was thankful for Deep.

Sandeep
looked over his shoulder as Chester put his plate down, identical to Mick’s. “Truly amazing things they can do with bacon these days.”

Chester smiled.
“Bon appétit,” he said, removing his hand from the plate and vanishing into the dark food pantry behind them.

Sandeep
, like Mick, pushed the thin patches of gelatin off the canned meat. He then cut the mushy slice of canned meat with the side of his fork into six equal pieces like he did at every meal. He put the first piece in his mouth, always the top left corner. He chewed slowly, hunched over his plate as if contemplating just how gross the canned meat had become, and stared down at the five remaining identical pieces. He then looked up from his breakfast and across the table at Mick, gave him a quick smile, and forked bite number two into his mouth. The second piece was always the top right corner. That was followed by the bottom left corner, the bottom right corner, then the two center pieces at once—never a deviation. Mick had come to find out that he was not the only creature of habit remaining in this broken world.

Chester reappeared from the panty.
“Will you be joining us for prayer this morning, Mick?”

Mick
looked up and slowed his chewing. He peered at Chester through the corner of his eye. He then swallowed his breakfast and washed it down with a bit of water. “The answer never changes, Chester,” Mick said with a quickly vanishing half-smile. “Your perseverance is admirable, though.”

Chester
nodded as he always did before turning to prepare the others’ breakfasts.

Before I
mpact, Chester had worked as a minster at a local Unitarian Universalist church. He still practiced his beliefs daily. Each morning after breakfast, Chester would sit and read scripture. Some of the others came and went from these sessions. Greg, an Irish Catholic who was raised in South Boston, made a habit more than most to attend before going up to the roof for lookout duty.

Mick
made a point to tell his kids that it was up to them to decide what they believed in; it was a choice they would need to make for themselves when and if they were ready. When it came to his own beliefs, Mick was resolute that there could be no possibility of God—not in this life or the next. If there was a God, then his wife would still be here with him. A true and good God, the one preached about across the globe, would never take such an important soul away before her time. And truly, if a divine being did exist, then the meteorites never should have hit in the first place, leaving a people supposedly created in God’s image to wither and die. No. Mick simply believed in what he could put his own two hands on. Practicality was his religion, and it had served him well up until that point.

He
downed what remained of his water, which over the past year or so had taken on the taste of its large plastic holding tank. Sandeep assured him that the water was still perfectly fine, just a bit different-tasting. Sandeep said the storage tank had held their water for longer than they had been there, and that the water was bound to take in some of the tank’s essence, as he put it.

Mick
said his good-byes and kissed his kids; Kathryn on her cheek and Nate on his forehead. He then donned his dusty blue peacoat, shouldered his rifle, and made his way back up the stairs he seemed to have just come down only minutes ago. Chester followed him up and locked the door behind him.

“
Safe journey, Mick,” Chester said.

“
Be back soon.”

As the door swung shut
, Mick took a deep breath to gather his senses. He itched for a break in the monotony. This was a new day. And while the day felt no different from the last, or the hundreds of days before it, he could change that. No. He
would
change that.
Today’s going to be different
, he told himself. He was not sure if he believed it. But he found that sometimes words could motivate actions. Maybe today was one of those days.

CHAPTER 5
 

Solomon reluctantly cleared the mess the heathens had made when slopping their various scraps down their worthless throats. He tried not to think while doing it, as the anger brewed the more thought he put into it. He cleared his mind and thought of Ms. Stella. She’d taught him to control his anger, that it would only end up hurting him in the long run. People were going to act the way they wanted to. Solomon had no control over that. Ms. Stella had reinforced in him to do the best he could and ignore whatever he was able to. He used that knowledge each day. He let the others around him stew in anger and hatred because of what had happened to them, to the planet, to those they loved. He had resolved to dwell in a better world inside his mind where he had complete control. For it was truly the only place he felt safe.

Solomon
’s mother, a heroin addict who had later died of her addiction, had blamed Solomon for pushing his father away. He, too, had been an addict and destined to leave regardless of Solomon. His mother had later insisted that he’d abandoned them because Solomon was “different.” That it was his fault they had no money. That her life would have been better if he had not come into it. In her drug-clouded mind, it was newly born Solomon that had ruined her life and not her true master, the one she injected into her veins whenever she was able to steal enough to reunite with the darkness. It was a miracle he had been able to survive as long as he had given the mental anguish he had endured. Aside from the care of Ms. Stella, Solomon had never felt wanted.

After his mother passed, Solomon found himself alone
in a society that did not want him. With a mere seven years of age under his overburdened belt—seven years that had matured him before his time—Solomon was forced to fend for himself, to learn things on his own that should have been taught to him. He learned to eke out a life on the streets. And he did so until the ripe old age of twelve. It was then that he met Ms. Stella. Very few things made Solomon smile. The world gave him no reason to. Yet the memory of her, especially the first time they had met, still forced a grin to break the gruff exterior he was forced to adopt.

Solomon remembered the day vividly. Probably because he tried to forget so many painful things
, the truly wonderful memories did not have to fight for space.

It was dusk
, and the pre-Impact city of Boston bustled with those leaving work for the weekend. The streets were cluttered with honking horns and slowly moving traffic. Nothing abnormal, aside from where Solomon was looking for food. He did not go around that particular neighborhood often. Too many of the residents tended to come outside and sit on their stoops. Too many eyes watched what everyone was doing. It was bad enough that he had not eaten in days. The last thing he needed were the judging tones and shooings away that tended to happen when he intruded on a close-knit community. It had happened before. Many times at that. And it wasn’t like Solomon really cared what others thought of him. He was nobody to them—just another dirty beggar on the street, even though he had not begged a day in his life.

“
You shouldn’t be in there,” he remembered Ms. Stella saying to him. Her first words in what would become a life-altering relationship.

He was
Dumpster diving. In the alley a few streets from her house. Solomon was halfway into the Dumpster, his legs dangling over the outside, when Ms. Stella found him. He stopped sifting through the trash.

He heard her shoes click and clack down the alley. Ms. Stella then lightly tapped his leg.
“Are you all right in there?” she said.

Her voice was soft but firm. It
was the first time that Solomon had not been afraid to listen to what someone had to say. It was as if the bond they would ultimately share reached out and invited him in instantly. A strange sense of worth that he had never felt in his life up until that point washed over him. Solomon pushed himself out of the Dumpster and came face-to-face with Ms. Stella.

She was nicely put together in a long
burgundy dress with a sweater over the top. But what he remembered most was her smile. For whatever reason, Ms. Stella seemed genuinely happy to interact with Solomon. He was not accustomed to that. In fact, he could not remember a time when that happened. Most people refused to make eye contact with him. He had been the bastard child of the world for so long that he did not know how to react. His instincts, wrong at the time, told him to run; he shouldn’t trust anyone. He would only get hurt.

A
s he started to flee, Ms. Stella again did something he was not accustomed to. “Young man,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me? You look like you could use a nice hot meal. Would you like that?” She walked closer to him and gently brushed a tuft of hair from his eyes. “I don’t think a shower would hurt, either.”

Solomon said nothing. He rarely spoke. Typically because he had no one to speak with, but also because he had been so jaded over the
years from being called stupid and the harshness society surrounded him with was less so when his mouth was shut. He wanted to speak, though. He knew in his soul that Ms. Stella was not one of those practitioners of pain. The tiniest bit of hope grew inside him as he stood in front of her. But he still did not speak. He simply nodded. Old habits were hard to break.

Remembering the times he had with Ms. Stella somehow les
sened, to a minor degree, the pain he lived in now.

Solomon finished clearing the room the best he could. Not that it made much difference. The entire abandoned police station that they lived in was rife with
filth. But it was enough of a change so he would not have to listen to that idiot Clyde.