Circles in the Dust Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER 4

  As the days meandered by, David found himself pacing around his camp, through the trees, along the river. He walked for endless hours up and down the stony bank. He could be hunting or making much-needed repairs to his cabin or collecting firewood and tree sap for future fires. He knew these things had to be done if he were to survive. He made list after list in his head of all the preparations that could not wait. He would start on them, full of zeal and determination, but never accomplished more than one or two at a time. It was never long before he found himself peering over a cliff or swimming across a swollen stream. Searching. For what, he did not know.

  Soon he began returning to a cold fire with an empty belly. He would wake sopping wet to a shocking reminder that his roof leaked and needed to be patched. The wind would slip inside his clothes and brush his arm as he sat at the top of a cliff, gazing off into a desolate valley, and only then would he think about patching the holes in his coat. Something was wrong. Something inside him. His skin crawled, itched, his muscles felt tight all the time. He slept less and less. Walking was his solution, combing the forest his prescription, but it brought no relief. He went days without eating, realizing it only when he couldn’t get out of bed without the world spinning and nearly going black. It was late in the fall, and rain fell near constantly. The air began to harden, to sharpen and freeze in his throat. Winter crept ever closer but he hardly noticed. He felt lost, confused, unsure of something he couldn’t put his finger on. It didn’t make sense. He got no satisfaction from anything he did. He felt empty, hollow, drawn out of himself.

  But he always had water.

  He found himself at the river more and more often, gathering water as if there were a lack of it in the eternal torrents of rain. He went to the river without his bucket, spending hours walking up and down the sandy shore, feeling there must be something just around the next bend, this bush, that rock. The river gave him the most relief, lessened the burning in his chest. At the same time it quickened his heartbeat, forced him to run until he collapsed. His eyes darted faster than they were consciously bid. He found himself wandering to other rivers and streams miles from home, sitting next to rushing water for days at a time. Waiting. He felt thin, like a sheet pulled tight, stretched until it hurt.

  He had been so strong once. He’d watched others lose their hold and sink down into their graves. He had wandered through camps of other survivors over the years, appalled at the resources left untouched around their pitiful, starved corpses. But no one ever had found him dead in his cabin. He kept it together. Kept his head on his shoulders. That’s why he was still here. Where had his strength gone? It was leaving him and taking his sanity along with it. He paid no mind to what he ate or where he slept. He woke in the forest on the brink of death, soaked through, the last heat of his body sinking into a merciless bed of needles. He would snap out of his daze and stumble back to his camp and nurse himself back to health, feeling himself again; he was a survivor who had made it this far, and was not done yet. Sometimes that itch would leave him for a moment and he was himself again; he would gather some meager plants and dry them for winter, finish a stack of firewood, but all it took was a good look out into the world beyond his cabin and that faceless desire sank its teeth into him once more, dragged him out of bed, away from food and shelter, and sent him on a quest with no cause.

  It wasn’t long before rain turned to snow.

  A layer of fresh snow blanketed the valley, a creamy silk broken only by the treetops poking their heads above the glistening mounds and hills of winter. The morning ambiance gave the world a two-dimensional look. The sky was a brighter shade than it had been for years; there was even a subtle hint of blue. No movement could be seen in the forest below, no sound but that of a river bubbling by and a lonely breeze floating through the branches of the snow-laden trees.

  A bird sat on a rock overlooking the valley where David made his home; the enormous tree that set it apart rose up behind the little quail which had his head buried in his feathers. The tree leaned heavily to one side, weighed down with its crushing winter burden, threatening to snap from the stress. Flecks of blue in the bird’s earthy plumage grabbed David’s attention back from his scan of the valley. He watched the bird shift its attention from cleanliness to hunger as it began paw
ing at the bare patch of dirt at the base of a sapling. Keeping his eyes on the bird, David’s fingers groped beside him and he slowed his breathing. The inconvenience of sitting while hunting became painfully clear in that moment. His hand wrapped around the weathered frame of his bow, the quail still unaware of the predator just a few feet away. As David lifted the bow in one hand and fitted an arrow to the string with the other, he watched the movements of the creature, waiting for a sudden cessation of motion, a hesitance, a stiffening that meant the end of his prey’s ignorant bliss. The bird remained unaware while David lifted his bow to sight down the shaft, slower than a passing glacier. He could see the kill in his mind’s eye. Every muscle tensed and focused, his body an arrow intent on the hunt.

  Something flashed on the edge of his vision. There was a movement in the forest below and David let his fingers relax, his arrow flying off into a mound of snow and his bow forgotten and abandoned as he ran to the edge of the rocky outcropping, now vacant of any potential meals. He leaned over the edge of a large boulder as far as he dared toward the movement he had seen, willing himself to fly to the scene below. His eyes were wide, manic, his breath held while he scanned the panoramic view for that one dot of motion. He raked the landscape with ravenous eyes until he found what had lost him his lunch. A tree swayed lazily back and forth, a bright spot of green where its snowy coat had just sloughed off.

  David’s mouth dropped open, forming silent words, fumbling for something. His brow knit together, his face burned and his eyes stung. A lump formed in his throat, choking him, allowing only a brief sob to escape his tight chest. He fell to his knees, letting his hands fall into his lap, arms limp. He slouched over and nearly fell off the rock before catching himself and collapsing on his back, the sky occupying his vision, consuming his rapid, frustrated emotions and leaving him blank and bare. He let the sky have him. He lay there for a while, focusing on the sky, hating it, hating himself, hating the bird. He imagined chopping that deceitful tree into tiny little pieces, hacking at the bark and needles that had given him so much hope, throwing them into the fire, pissing on the ashes. It didn’t make him feel any better.