Circles in the Dust Read online

  Once again David was flabbergasted. This girl was exploring the deserted woods alone, came from some faraway place where people still existed, and apparently had magical powers.

  “Thanks,” he said as he studied her face.

  Who was this girl?

  CHAPTER 8

  David got the food cooking over the fire and went to his cabin to find a second bowl and spoon for Elizabeth. He walked through the doorway and looked around, wondering where he would have such items. It had been a long time since he had needed more than one of anything. There was a heap of plunder against the wall on the left, full of scraps of old tents and sleeping bags, lanterns with long-dead batteries and jumbles of rope. He collected all the things he thought might be useful in the future from abandoned camps, a pack-rat to the end. It was rare that he went through it; over the years he had mostly made deposits. Anything readily useful never made it to the heap, so most of what remained here was junk. Now he had a specific amount to withdraw, it seemed he would never find it. He started lifting piles of things off the top, seeing old flashlights, bits of string, parts of boots. A spare hat or a cooking stove with no gas would have done little to improve his quality of life, but there was probably a luxury or two he had overlooked in here somewhere. Hopefully a bowl and a spoon. Just one bowl, one spoon. Was that too much to ask from a pile of junk?

  He sifted through canvas bags and cardboard boxes that crumbled at the slightest touch, over hill of garbage and dale of junk, only to come up empty-handed. He punched a ratty blanket in frustration and cursed as his fist collided with the tin box underneath it. He unwrapped the box from the deceitful old rag, thinking it might have to do as a bowl, and breathed a sigh of relief as he looked down at a small mess kit. Inside the metal dish was a small plastic spoon, and he nearly cried. He walked back out to the fire, prize in hand.

  “I found something for you to eat with,” he told her as he held out the small metal bowl.

  “Thank you,” she replied, taking the bowl and looking at the inside. He hadn’t thought to wipe it out but thankfully it had been scoured by time and she was satisfied.

  “Those beans should be just about ready.” He reached down and stirred them with the stick that made its home in a loop in the rope holding the tripod together. “I don’t think I have any salt left,” he said.

  “That’s all right. I’m so hungry I would have eaten them cold.” David laughed nervously.

  He grabbed the handle of the pot with a rag and spooned some of the beans into his bowl, giving her the lion’s share. She held out her bowl to give him some of hers, but he refused. She thanked him with a shy smile. David looked over and thought he saw her cheeks redden. That was good.

  “So you said you’re from… the north?”

  She looked at him for a moment, studying him, before mumbling through a mouthful of mush, “Yup. Pretty much straight north from here.”

  “Wow. I wouldn’t want to live any farther north than here. Must be cold. I though most people tried to make their south, hoping to find warmer weather,” David replied.

  “I doubt it’s very warm anywhere,” she said, without taking a break from chewing.

  “That’s why I never left,” David replied, only half-interested in the chipped ceramic bowl in his hands. He was starving but his mind was much more interested in this girl at the moment. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but when there are no fish left, the last is just a tease.

  She let out a mumbled laugh in consent and continued shoveling food into her mouth. He watched her, sifting through what he knew about her in order to plan his future moves. Her name was Elizabeth. He liked that name. She had found him and saved his life and come back to his cabin. At least she hadn’t run away or left him on the riverbank to die. She was cautious and hesitant, so she might even be real, though she had started the fire without using flint or any kind of tinder that he had seen. Could she have matches? If she had matches, she might have more luxuries from the old world. Back where she lived. He knew that was somewhere in the north, and that there were at least some other people there, though not how many. His mind caught on the fact that she came from the north; why didn’t that fit?

  “You said you came down from the north, right? On your way to the city?” he asked her, forcing himself to take a bite of the beans that were beginning to cool off.

  She studied him for a moment and swallowed the bite she had been working on, taking her first break from focused mastication since they had begun eating. Her gaze was icy but her green eyes stirred something in him; something he had not felt for a long time, something he feared would interfere in his plans.

  “Yeah, though I’m on my way back at the moment, actually,” she responded, keeping her eyes level with his. David held her gaze and noticed while he thought of his next move that she hadn’t looked him in the eye for more than a moment since they had met.

  “You must be a little lost,” he stated. He had found her by the river, and that was an hour’s walk east from where they were now. The city was west, a fevered night’s journey from his camp.

  “I was just a little off track, I guess,” she answered, her eyes never leaving his. He saw her swallow hard even though she had yet to take another bite.

  “Oh, okay,” he said evenly.

  “I meant to head straight north from the city, but I thought I’d try and find an easier route back to the Base.”

  The Base? Elizabeth withered visibly as David’s face registered surprise at the name. “The Base?” he repeated.

  “That’s just what we call it. Where we live. It’s just an old farmhouse, but we all took to calling it ‘home-base’ and that just kind of turned into the Base,” she explained. She stuffed her mouth full again and dropped her eyes back to rest on the ground.

  David couldn’t help but think her behavior queer. Granted, he had only known her for an afternoon and she was the first person he had seen in nearly two years. He could be wrong.

  “What’s it like?” he asked, unwillingly to drop the subject.

  She looked up at him, annoyance coupled with fear spelled out in her expression. “It’s, I don’t know, a lot like this, I guess,” she said, looking around at David’s camp. “We don’t have a lot and we just barely get by.”

  “Well, I can understand that.”

  “Are you really the only one out here?” she asked, locking her fiery eyes with his.

  “Yes,” he responded hesitantly, aware of a sudden transformation that had just taken place in the girl across the fire. The timid mouse had just taken on the visage of a fox.

  “And you really don’t know where any of the other people out here went?” she continued.

  “Where they went? What do you—” He stopped as it struck him like a blow. He had completely missed it. How had it never registered? Everyone was gone. Not dead. He hadn’t heard the cries, the moans, hadn’t smelt the decay or stumbled on that many abandoned camps or bodies. In his wanderings had he really missed the fact that while there were the remains of camps littered throughout the forest, he hadn’t actually buried anyone? He always buried the dead, but his shovel sat untouched behind his cabin. The valley really was empty.

  “I—” he started and couldn’t think of anything to say, just sat there with his mouth gaping like a trout, beans dripping out of the bowl his hands had trouble holding on to.

  “You really had no idea, did you?” she asked with a quizzical, almost pitying, look.

  He sat for a minute, looking down at the ground, unable to conjure up any words, this passed-over fact burning in his mind, holding any other thoughts at bay.

  “They’re gone,” he finally spat out. “I thought they all just died and left me here. But they’re just… gone.” David couldn’t believe the words that were spilling out of his mouth. How had he missed everyone packing up and leaving?

  “I may have some good news,” she interjected after they sat there for a few minutes in silence. He looked at her, still in shoc
k, feeling sick and confused and oblivious. “I think I know where they are.”

  CHAPTER 9

  David stared at Elizabeth. She knew where all his neighbors had gone? Who is this girl? he thought. It struck David suddenly that he had no idea what was going on in the world, not even in the valley he thought he knew like the back of his hand. Where could they possibly have up and moved to, and why would they have left this place? Was there some paradise somewhere that they had gained word of, maybe some place where civilization hadn’t been turned on its head and there was still some semblance of order? There had never been any sign that David had seen that the old world still survived anywhere; though why would anyone want to come to this desolate wasteland just to see if anyone had survived the full wrath of twenty-first century warfare and bring the survivors home with them? David had assumed that the planet had been stripped clean. Was he wrong?

  “You think you know where everyone went?” David said in a bland, emotionless tone born of complete awe.

  “Maybe,” she answered. Elizabeth had been drilling into him with her gaze since she had brought up the subject. “Well, where I come from, the Base, there was a kind of migration from the countryside. A lot of Outliers found out where we were, that we had supplies, and-”

  “Outliers?” David questioned. “Is that what we are?”

  “It’s just a name we came up with, some way to distinguish the original inhabitants from the people who lived elsewhere,” she explained.

  “Oh,” David mumbled. Something the old man had said about the war that left them out here in the wild came back to him. “Separating ‘us’ from ‘them’?”

  “No, that’s not—” She paused. “Well, we had to call them something.”

  “How about fellow survivors?”

  She continued without acknowledging his question. “A few people started coming in, wanting to join us. It happened a lot in the beginning, someone here, a family there. Then it stopped for a few years and we thought we must be the only ones left in the area, just like you.” She pointed at him and forced a small smile. “But then, last spring, we started getting a small trickle, then a torrent of people. We took in everyone at first, gave them a job, found a place for them in our little community. But they just kept coming, and pretty soon we had to start turning people away. We didn’t have the resources to support that many people; we grow as much food as we can, and the harvest gets better every year, but it still doesn’t feed everyone.”

  “Harvest? So, it’s like a farm then?”

  “Yeah, basically,” she said. “It’s like a little town. We have the fields, a few houses, though most people live in the big, main house. We forage and take from our stock. Trust me, it’s not much better there than what you’ve got here.”

  “I’m sure it’s awful,” David responded. “You guys must be running really low on food then, if it’s so much like my life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  David reached down and lifted the can of corn they had yet to open off the ground. He studied it for a moment. “This is it,” he said.

  “That’s it…?” Her question trailed off.

  “This is all I have left.”

  “Well, when you just live off what you can scavenge,” she chided.

  “What I can…” He shook his head. She just didn’t get it. “Come here, let me show you something.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Come here,” he repeated. He got up from the log he had rolled over from his meager stack of firewood against his cabin and began walking around to the back of his home. She watched him turn away, sitting for a moment before rising just as he wandered out of sight. He stopped when he reached a small, bare patch of earth. The soil had been churned and turned up, but not even a weed poked out of the soil. It had been that way for too long. He stood with his arms crossed as he surveyed his garden.

  “We’ve all tried, you know,” David said as he heard her footsteps coming around to where he stood. “We’re not scavengers,” he spat the word out, “we are survivors. That is what we call ourselves.”

  “This is your garden?” She sounded unimpressed.

  “Like I said, we’ve all tried. It’s not easy,” he went on. “I don’t know how you guys make it work. I lived in the city, in an apartment. The closest thing we had to a garden was a few flowers on the balcony. I came across a flower shop once when I was back in the city, and it took me all day but I hunted down some seeds too, just a handful, and it cost me, but I thought I had found the end to my struggle.”

  “If you have a garden, why are you out of food?” she asked.

  “Like I said, I’m no farmer. I have no idea what I’m doing, and neither did anyone else who lived out here. I’m out of seeds. There’s grass growing up all around my garden,” he said, just noticing. “Grass everywhere, but nothing growing where I need it to. The farmers that were left in their homes might have shared their secrets given the chance, but they had food, and everyone knew it, so they didn’t last too long. Food was worth more than knowledge, in the short term.” His face hardened. “I guess it’s hard to think logically when you realize you’re starving to death.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, lifting her hand to his arm, thinking twice about it, and letting it fall back to her side, where it rested on the small lump on her hip.

  “I just thought you should know what kind of people it is you’re talking about, when you call them ‘Outliers’.” He put quotes around the words with his fingers. “Anyway. People started showing up at your Base? How’d they find out about it?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “We thought we were the only ones left, and then one day someone saw a man walking down the road toward the Base. He looked like a skeleton, like a picture from the Holocaust.” He stared at her. “It was some awful thing that happened in the past. Genocide. People starved.” She must be older than he was, to remember something like that from school. The way she brushed over the explanation reminded him of the old man. “He just comes walking down the road, all skin and bones, and a few people went out to meet him. They walked up and tried to talk to him, but he just pointed at his throat. Eventually someone brought him some water and bread, and he said he found heaven. Can you believe that?” She looked at David with awe. “Someone gave him a glass of warm water and a slice of crusty bread and he thought he was in heaven.”

  “I think I can wrap my mind around that.” David looked down at the ground, feeling emotional all of a sudden. “Though it probably wasn’t just the bread.”

  Elizabeth studied him for a moment before continuing with her tale. “He ended up recovering, and told us that there were others out in the woods who were starving to death every day. There was a lot of debate, whether we could handle taking on more people in our already tight system, but eventually it was decided that we couldn’t just let them die. He left with a few others and came back a few days later with a handful of men, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. He had talked about more, but said they hadn’t believed him and wouldn’t come. We thought that would be the end of it, they would live out there and we would live in the Base, and maybe they’d wander in, but things were getting better, and no one really worried about it.

  “Before long, those few guys had become part of our society, and we mostly forgot about the people out here.” She motioned around her. “We went on with life like we had, and everything was all right. But after a little while, some of the men who went out into the woods for things like firewood and hunting started talking about people camping around the Base. They said they never saw anyone, but sometimes they’d see smoke rising out of the woods and find footprints trailing through the ground. It wasn’t long before people starting showing up. They all wanted in, they were all at the end of their rope, and they were all surprised that the place existed. It’s not a paradise by any means, but we have enough to eat and we survive.

  “It caused a lot of problems, more than you would probably think. Taking i
n a few people meant we had more hands, which would be tough at first but would pay off eventually. But every pair of hands came with a hungry mouth, and soon we’d added so many to our number that there was nothing for them to do, and they became a drain on our food supply. There were those who were all right with the strain and couldn’t send them out to starve. But their voices were drowned out by the majority, who saw them as a threat to our own existence, and eventually we had to close our gates to any more Outliers,” she saw his eyes tighten at the use of the name and searched for a different term, “newcomers. They still came, but we had to tell them we had no food for them, that we ourselves would starve if any more people came inside. At first they seemed to understand; a few were violent and, well, more than one grave had to be dug. But overall, it seemed to work out all right, and they mostly ended up moving on, looking for something else.”

  “So these were the people who lived around here?” David interjected. “There couldn’t have been that many, not enough to overrun your Base.”

  “I’m getting there,” she assured him. “I don’t think these first people were from here, most of them came down from the north. I’m still talking about them trickling in. Eventually, we would get someone every day, and we had to build a wall and post guards. People started camping out in the woods surrounding the Base. They had nowhere to go, I know that. But they kept us from leaving, so we were cut off from any fresh game or any chance to search for farms or houses around that could have much-needed supplies. No more berries or mushrooms. We were confined to the food we could grow and what we had stored in the barn, which wasn’t much.”

  “So no one can go in or out?” David asked.

  “Not easily.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Very carefully.” She snickered. He gave her a look of annoyance. “I snuck out.”