Day 6: Night Fell

I should have started writing this well before tonight's rehearsal.  I keep wanting to crank out short pieces--five hundred words or less--and I end up writing stuff like this.  Which, admittedly, is less than twelve hundred words.  But still, 4am is a bit late.

Night Fell

When night fell, the Harpies came. They drove '69 Camaros, front-end loaders, Yamaha Gold Wings. They carried scythes and Garden Weasels. They surrounded the homestead and had a barrel of Real Fire. They threatened to turn us into crispy critters.

Norton went out to parley. I stayed up in the eaves with the rifle and the infrared scope. Norton told me to pick them off while he was still out there. I told him that was a stupid idea. I wasn't going to shoot anybody unless I had to. I didn't want them to take it out on Norton. Norton thought he was impervious. I knew better.

The Harpies wanted our water. All we had was a condenser unit and the two gallons it made that day. Norton carried the two gallons out there. The Harpies would break the condenser a couple of hours after they took it off us, and we'd die a few days later. So I told Norton not to mention the condenser. He gave people too much credit.

Norton talked a long time. I don't know what lies he told them. Maybe: we got it off a passing Water Freak, he's gone now. Or maybe: we had a lot but now we're down to our last jerrican and we'd rather die slow than quick because we were stubborn like that. (That last bit was true. We were stubborn like that.)

He got emphatic. Waved his arms. I heard him say "c'etait le prochaine" two or three times. The Harpies pushed him down and kicked him for a little bit, then they got in their go-buckets and left.

After their lights disappeared I ran downstairs. Got out to Norton where he lay staring up at the stars. He was hurt but I know his ego was hurt worse.

He looked up at me.

"Hi," he said.

I said hi back.

"They took our water."

"I know," I said.

"And the jerrican," he said.

"We can use a bowl."

"That's a pain. Dust gets in the water."

"I know," I said. "You want to come back into the house?"

"Yeah."

He got up on his elbow and winced. I knelt down and helped him up the rest of the way. It was a slow walk back indoors.

I dabbed antiseptic on the places where he bled. I wrapped him where maybe a rib was broken. I put him in bed.

Then I put the bowl under the condenser tap. I didn't want to forget in the morning. Crawled in next to Norton and tried to sleep. I was thinking he would thrash around all night but he snored long before I went out.

When I woke up Norton was banging around the galley, cooking up powdered eggs. If he wanted to push himself I wasn't going to stop him. At that moment, not worth the fight.

I walked outside and looked at our hut. It wasn't homey. More ramshackle. No technology visible. And nobody would think us food-rich just from looking at us. The only reason the Harpies knew we had water was because we were here in the desert and we were alive.

Of course, strangers didn't get a good look at me, if they even saw me at all. It doesn't pay to advertise that there's a woman on the premises.

Back inside, Norton had laid out breakfast.

“Looks good.”

“Thanks.”

We ate quietly. After we finished, I started to clean. Norton objected.

“I can get that.”

“You can rest.”

“I can do it!”

I kept cleaning. He sat at the table, fuming. That was fine. Neither of us wanted to talk about the real problem.

Some recent history: Weather got weird. Crops failed. Cities failed. What famine didn't destroy, war did. The globe had a stretch of madness there. We got lucky, because after the Hot Thirties, temperatures stabilized. Still, there's a lot of desert.

Not many people, though.

So there you go. We had a ton of freeze-dried food. One third of the Library of Congress on a reader, and a couple of hundred paper books. We had well-camouflaged solar panels, a moisture condenser for water, batteries to store electricity, some guns, and lots of ammunition. But we didn't get along with the neighbors.

Good thing the neighbors were far away, most of them.

We could live a long while if we didn't screw up.

The real problem: what would happen when the Harpies came back?

The Harpies made it easy to screw up. They were unattached men, most of them under twenty-five. They took whatever they could from homesteads along the Front Range. Somehow they kept finding gasoline, so they kept moving back and forth, settlement to settlement, picking the low-hanging Fruit of the Apocalypse.

This had been our first visit. All we gave them was a jerrican of water. They'd be back.

Not during the dust storm. That shut down everything for a few days. Norton wrote in his daybook. I caught up on my Willa Cather.

After a week Norton moved without noticeable stiffness. I mean I noticed it but I ignored it. That was when he renewed relations.

He caught me with my guard down. The sun was setting, a ball of fire with tendrils of scarlet cloud licking the horizon. The dust did a lot of things: knocked planes out of the sky. Killed off the all the asthmatics. Gave us beautiful sunsets.

Beautiful sunsets made me feel tender inside. I knew what they had cost us.

We made love, and when I came, I cried. Whenever this happened I told Norton it was because I loved him so much. Which was true. But really, I cried because it made me think about when he'd be gone.

In another three weeks the Camaros returned. Norton went out and met them. A mistake. They caved his face in with a pickaxe, then busted up the shack. I hope he didn't suffer for long. I wish I'd shot more of them before they pulled me out of the eaves.

The Harpies didn't get a chance to use me up completely. They got themselves killed in a raid on a settlement. One of our neighbors. The neighbors took me in, but they don't like me much. That's generous, since I don't think I can get pregnant anymore. Maybe they like that I can teach their kids. Not many readers here.

It's alright. I've made my peace with worse places. That house with Norton was probably the best. It's the only place where I liked the man who helped me build it. The only place I lived that smelled like me. It was quiet and unassuming and miles from everything, which means that nearly everybody just left us alone.

Nearly everybody.

This place, there's too many people and too much barbed wire and a rotten library. Certainly it's safe, and no one goes out of their way to be cruel. It's just not mine.

The sunsets are still beautiful, though.

(c) 2011 Michael Bernstein