Circles in the Dust Read online

“When what happened?” She looked up at him, her eyes shimmering with tears not yet fallen.

  “When everything went to shit. When the war started,” he elaborated.

  “Not really,” she stammered after a minute. “I was pretty young.”

  “Hmm.” He felt a stirring within him. He missed the way things used to be too. He may not remember them that well, but he missed his family. He missed knowing what would happen every day when he awoke. After all these years, he remembered that feeling. He wanted to stop. A part of him wanted to suppress the memories, just like he had done for years. He wanted to forget the old man chattering in his ear while he worked to keep them alive. Another part of him wanted to tell her. He did not know why but he wanted her to know. “I remember. I remember my home being blasted apart with my family still in it. I remember children crawling, bloody and screaming, through the street, only to be trampled by the terrified masses. I remember watching my innocent home town burn. Not an enemy soldier in sight. They just dropped bombs on us and watched us burn.” He choked, trying to suppress the tears that were on their way. His throat was tight and his eyes stung. He wanted to stop, to change the subject, but he had never spoken about that night. Not to the little gang he had been a part of at first, not around one of the communal fires that had attracted him in the beginning, when the adults who had survived would debate in vain what had caused the deconstruction of civilization and how it could have been avoided. He had never wanted to revisit it, had avoided ever thinking about it; but now he was ready. He wanted to tell her, he wanted this to be a part of the new David and for her to see this new side of him.

  “It was… awful. I was young too, but those things don’t go away. They get burned into your brain forever. I never really thought there was a chance to start over, but if there is someone out there trying, a reboot of the past is the last thing they should strive for. In the past, most people were okay with being ruled by a few old assholes who started wars and told them it was for the greater good. They watched their people die and praised them for sacrificing themselves for their country, never telling them that they were really fighting for supremacy over another group or retaliating to some little political jab. They lived with the belief that their group was always better than the rest, and were just fine with going to war and annihilating them. They led us to this, this nightmare we live in, and why would we want to repeat that?”

  The words gushed out, his pent-up feelings finally given a voice. He had been looking in Elizabeth’s direction as they sat around the fire, fiercely concentrating on her eyes, though he was talking more to himself than to her. He just felt relieved to have gotten that out of himself, and hoped he hadn’t undone his previous work of bringing them closer together. She looked afraid at first. Her eyes were wide, her face pale, though that could have been the moon spilling its first light down on them. She stared at him for a minute, a beautiful statue, the waning firelight dancing across her skin.

  David rose to gather some firewood, going off into the forest without saying another word, leaving her still as stone behind him. He returned with an armful of fallen braches, set a few on the dying fire and dropped the rest in a pile beside it. He sat down on his blankets, centering his attention on reviving the fire, stealing a glance at Elizabeth every once in a while. She never took her eyes off him. What was she thinking? He wished he knew.

  Eventually she spoke.

  “I’m sorry you lost your family,” was all she said.

  He looked up at her and forced a smile. “It’s all right,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to start a new one. I never thought about that before, but now…”

  A shy smile lifted the corners of her lips as he said this, bringing life back into her.

  “I’m sure you will,” she returned. “Back home, no one stays single for long. Got to rebuild the population.” Her voice was quiet, shallow, but picking up a little as she spoke.

  “That makes sense,” he said with a crooked smile. “Though, ironically, overpopulation seems to be a big problem of yours.”

  “That is true,” she relented. “But still. I’m sure you’ll find someone soon enough.” She looked away from the fire out into the night.

  David laughed a little at that and dropped his eyes. Suddenly the air felt tense, and he didn’t really know why. His thoughts wandered to the girls he was sure to find at the Base, what they looked like, the color of their hair, their eyes, how they would act around him.

  He didn’t realize Elizabeth was looking at him again until she cleared her throat and caught his attention. “It’s late. We should probably get some sleep,” she said evenly.

  “Good idea,” he said. “How much farther do we have until we get there?”

  “We should be there tomorrow night, maybe the morning after,” she said as she slid down into her bed, rolling over so her back was to David and the fire.

  David simply grunted a response that he had heard her. One more day and they would be at the Base, and he would have to explain himself to a whole host of people he never knew he would find. As his head hit the ground, the question popped into his head whether he would recognize anyone, or if anyone would recognize him. Depending on the person, that could change things, make them harder. Maybe Mitch would be there. He hoped Mitch had made it; he was the one person David considered to be his friend out in the woods, and he hoped he had survived.

  He drifted off to sleep after settling his mind on the girls waiting for him at the Base.

  CHAPTER 12

  They continued on their journey the next day, Elizabeth in the lead, David trailing behind. He had little trouble keeping himself from staring at her today; his mind was overpopulated with concern that he had gone too far last night and blown his plan, that he was no longer a good candidate to hold the fate of the Base in his hands, even if his own was tied to it. They had said almost nothing to each other that morning as they prepared to leave, rolling up their bedding in silence and stuffing their possessions into their packs. The sun was just peeking over the horizon when they departed. Not that David had lost any sleep because of the early departure; he had lain awake most of the night, falling in and out of slumber, never fully diving in.

  Elizabeth had retained a defensive expression all morning, and David was unable to glean the lingering effects of their talk the night before. He wanted to reassure her that he would do what he could to save the Base, that his own life depended on it, that failure of his plan would most likely result in a premature death. She avoided his eyes and eventually he gave up and resigned himself to watching the land change.

  As they continued east, away from his valley, the trees began to thin and the rough edge of the forest loomed at the far reaches of sight. David’s discomfort at the thought of his increasingly unsure future was now compounded by the fact that he had to leave the forest, where he had spent most of his life, where he had grown up. Those thick trunks had been his friends and protectors and leaving them behind was making him feel vulnerable.

  Might as well get used to it, he said to himself. He was about to throw his lot in with a group of strangers who were becoming increasingly hostile to outsiders, asking them to accept him after sinking himself into an even more hostile group of nomads as a sort of double agent. What a plan.

  The ground was losing its green shag carpet, revealing a dusty brown floor interspersed with dry, golden grass. David hadn’t been this far from his home for years, and it took a grand effort to force his feet to continue across the foreign ground. The trees here were smaller, thinner; pines gave way to broad-leafed strangers. David looked around warily, seeing more yellow than he was used to, looking back at the green haven he was leaving behind. He scanned the skyline for his tree, his old friend, but couldn’t quite pick it out. His stomach lurched.

  “So we’ve got another day or so?” he ventured. His anxiety at leaving his home was overshadowing his fear of talking to cranky girls.

  “Yup,” she said. Plodding along without
a pause, she didn’t turn her head back to look at him. “Maybe two,” she added after a moment of tense silence.

  David acknowledged her with a nod of the head she couldn’t see. He had one, maybe two days before he would have to throw his life up into the air, hoping to land on his feet.

  They continued on this way, away from the woods and into the flat plains that David had never felt the desire to explore. There were few trees, all of them spread far apart, their growth stunted, none of them rising more than thirty or so feet. David felt sympathy as he looked at these poor, hunched, lonely beings; at the same time, he felt repulsed by their alien nature. He imagined his pines would see these little trees and laugh. The thought made him smile.

  For another hour or so, David was engrossed in his own mind, thinking of his trees to distract himself from the anxiety that was clawing its way to his heart. His stomach started growling but he was loathe to say anything more to Elizabeth while she remained so reserved. Thus he ignored the complaints and focused on the scrawny trees that dotted the flat land. At length, Elizabeth stopped and David slowed to a stop behind her.

  “I’m starving,” she said in explanation, turning to look at him for the first time. Her face was still unreadable.

  “All right,” he responded. She sat down on the hard earth and, after rummaging through her bag, pulling out a few hard biscuits, not unlike the ones David used to live on. She handed him one and he looked at it for a moment before biting into it. Whoever made this knew what they were doing. He let it melt in his mouth before crushing it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue. After that first bite, he couldn’t help but devour the rest of it, hardly chewing. He finished in a matter of moments and sat back, idly picking crumbs off his shirt and licking them off the tips of his fingers.

  He looked up to see Elizabeth staring at him, a look of suppressed merriment on her face. Oh, look, Mommy! Look how the savage eats! her eyes said. Her pent-up laughter burst out in a tidal wave of guffaws. She subsided into a fit of shaking giggles as he gave her a confused look.

  “Hungry?” she asked when she finally managed to speak. She took a large bite of her biscuit.

  “A little.” He laughed, embarrassed, feeling himself blush.

  “You look like you haven’t eaten for years,” she mumbled through a mouthful of soggy bread.

  “I haven’t eaten anything like that for years,” he explained, unable to wipe a smirk off his face. She chuckled in response, shaking her head, slowly nibbling at her biscuit. She held her hand out with another, then whipped it back when his hand raised to grab it.

  “Better pace yourself,” she said as she tore it and tossed one half to him. This made her chuckle even more, and he wondered if she were mocking him to get back at his inadvertent remarks about the Base the night before.

  David took his time with this biscuit, sucking each bite until it slipped easily down his throat. He took long enough that she ate the other half, glancing up at him while she did then away across the sea of scraggly grass.

  “This used to be farmland.”

  She spoke without looking at David, her voice directed at nothing in particular.

  “This is where we used to get our food, my dad says, before the world went insane and ate itself from the inside out. This used to be a source of life, and now look at it. Nothing grows here but shitty grass.”

  David’s eyes were locked on her, though his tongue was tied and he didn’t know what to say, so he kept listening. She continued, her voice aimed out onto the flat plain before them, along with her eyes.

  “Even the forest isn’t much better than this is now, though. We fucked ourselves. We really did.”

  David had not heard her use profanity before now and for some reason it didn’t fit the picture of her he held in his mind. Her face tightened as she spoke, growing tighter, her voice lowering and gaining an edge.

  “Everyone used to talk about that, back at the Base, you know. How we’d fucked ourselves. How mad they were at the president. Our president, and every other president and king and prime minister. They used to just sit around and hate them. Some of the sweetest people I have ever known talking about chopping off you-know-whats and slitting throats. Everyone was so bitter and resentful, everyone who’d watched the world burn. They were mad at themselves for letting it happen, even. They swore if they could go back, they would do it all differently. None of them were politicians or billionaires or anything, so there probably wasn’t too much they could actually have changed, but, you know, hindsight.

  “Eventually, they all agreed, one by one, as they sat around the fire at night or the stove: we would not repeat the past, we wouldn’t be led to the slaughter again like sheep by some silver-tongued, bureaucratic snake. We would be different, found our new society on different principles, not on the rich getting richer and the powerful playing chess with the lives of their citizens. We would cling to safety and security for everyone. We would do away with needless titles and wealth and do everything we could just make sure that everyone had enough to eat. Make sure everyone felt safe and taken care of, that no one would ever lead them to their doom, like our leaders before, like they led us off the cliff.”

  She paused, and David waited for her to continue, but she sat there in silence, gazing off into the nothing that surrounded them. He did not want to throw her off if she were going to continue, so he waited. He shuffled his feet and made a pattern in the dirt next to him, he cleared his throat a few times, but she made no indication that she had any more to say. Her face remained stoic, a marble bust of intense focus, save for the slight waving off her hair in the wind that betrayed the existence of life. She sat that way for a few minutes, before clearing her throat and licking her lips in preparation. When she began speaking once more, David got the impression she was fighting back tears.

  “Everyone just wants to be safe and fed, I get that. We decided that everyone deserves that, as long as they’re willing to do something to make it happen. I get that. That’s why we were letting people from outside come into the Base. But only so many could come in, because if we let them all join us, we would be spread too thin and we might all starve. Fine. But there are just so many more out there. They just want a warm meal, like the rest of us. Some of them come up to the front gate every day and beg for food. There are babies crying out in the woods; I can hear them crying from my window, especially at night when everything’s quiet. It’s not like the regular wailing of a child that’s tired or grumpy or something. It sounds so… desperate.” Her voice sounded thin and hoarse as she trailed off, choking on the last word.

  David’s brow knit together of its own accord, knowing exactly the sound she was referring to. That sound had haunted the land in the beginning, and it had been an integral part of his nightmares for years. He had done his best to block out the memory of it, and had had success in recent years; as the general food supply dwindled, so did the chance that anyone would get pregnant. Even now he tried to fight it, but the emotion in her voice was enough to break open the wound and let fresh blood drip, burning with the death of an innocent child. He pushed back the lump in his throat and listened as she went on.

  “I know that we have to look out for our own. We at the Base have to make sure that everyone inside has what they need. It’s just… isn’t there another way? Can’t there be any other way? I refuse to believe that all the Outliers out there in the woods have to die so that we can live. It doesn’t seem fair. It seems like the kind of convenient logic that got us into this mess in the first place. How can the mayor and everyone be just fine with the idea of so many people sitting around dying while we are so warm and well-fed? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like our lives are easy, but you can’t tell me that not one single person has more than they need.

  “I thought maybe if I could come out here, if I could find someplace where they made it work, some ray of hope I could take back home with me, something to make everyone believe that we can all make it through; all of
us, people of the Base, Outliers. Like you said, we’re all just survivors in the end. We all got dealt a shit hand, but there’s no reason we can’t help each other out. No one would listen to me; they all thought I was just being a silly girl, wanting to save the world, wanting to believe in the fairy-tale ending, but I know, I know, that it’s possible. And if it’s not, if someone has to die, why should we be the ones to live? Why should we be the ones to sentence everyone else to death because we wouldn’t take a chance on them? I just can’t see how we can make that decision, when it goes against everything I thought we stood for.”

  She hung her head, unable to fight the stream of tears now streaming down her cheeks. David wanted to console her, wanted to go to her and put his arms around her and tell her that he thought she was right, that he knew she could find a solution because it meant so much to her. If there were people like her back at the Base, everything would be fine. Only it sounded like she was the black sheep, like no one gave any heed to her notion that everyone could make it. But they were growing food; how could they be so selfish? He sat and watched her cry. He wanted to speak but had no words; instead he just held his arms up in a mock embrace until even his arms gave up.

  She turned to him and wiped the tears off her cheeks with her crusty sleeve. She gave him a yearning look, and he read in it that she needed him to do what he had promised, to be her ray of hope, to find a solution that would work for everyone and that would allow most people to survive. He was the only one that could see into both worlds. That must be why she was so loathe to tell him about what the people of the Base are like, so that he would be able to observe them through his own lens, without even her bias. He was what she had been looking for; not exactly her dream scenario, surely, but at least he was something, and she was placing all her hopes on him. He felt an enormous pressure sink onto his shoulders as he realized he could not fail her, but felt at the same time that it would be easy because he wanted it too, he wanted her to have her solution.