The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) (5 page)

Chapter Six

Banquet

I had gone back to bed that morning, but I hadn’t slept much. We weren’t monks, if the virus had reached the mountains of Tibet thousands of miles away, that was – we had a policy that everybody had a right to a good eight hours of sleep during each 24-hour cycle, regardless of when that time would be.

              I still had a few hours on the clock, and even in this world of perpetual fatigue, I couldn’t relax enough to drift off. Everybody had their duties, even if their duty was to assign duties to everybody else, and I wasn’t the type of person to call myself leader and watch the citizens do the hard work. It wasn’t me. Absolute power corrupted absolutely. Maybe that was true, but I didn’t have absolute power, and I didn’t want it. In Bastion the people had the power, and if I got too big for my own boots everybody could group together and kill me in my sleep if they truly wished to do so.

              I tried to have a little more faith in humanity than that.

              Sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes, I decided to head back out. I changed into a new t-shirt, of which there were several stacks in the wardrobe that we had raided from an industrial warehouse a while back, the rest of which were evenly split up amongst everybody else, and pulled my boots back on.

***

Before we go any further in this story of ours I’d like to address the fact that I’ve probably named a lot of names, and it might be a little difficult to remember all of them. I don’t intend for you to keep a notepad about all the names I speak of here – I don’t know how far in the future you’ll be reading this account of events, or if the future even has writing materials in abundance, or the computers that I vaguely remember from my childhood. That night, though, it was the banquet, and everybody was there. While the citizens of Bastion were my main priority, the vast majority of them have little of a part to play in the current story – for a moment, we’ll look at who we’ve mentioned already.

              Henrietta and Robbie I’ve spoken about already, as well as Carl who lived next door.

Rudy was our defensive expert – he took care of weapons and the like, in the event that they were ever needed. I spent a long time making sure that he was sane before even making him a permanent member of the community.

Marcus and Maria lived a little way down the road – he was a farmer through and through, while Maria was a mechanics expert who had helped with the water system.

Larry who you saw earlier was an elderly gent who was just happy to help with anything that needed doing – a working man, which was something that I admired endlessly.

Leah looked after and monitored everything that came in and out of Bastion, hence the reason she had joined us earlier outside of the wall. She was resilient and straightforward, the epitome of the kind of person you had to become in this world.

Sam did the cooking and looked after the general food supplies. He was indeed eccentric, but it helped when his life revolved around sustenance. He would be cooking the veal up that night.

Mae looked after medical factors and hygiene. She had been a nurse for many years prior to the outbreak, and her skills had proved to be endlessly valuable. She and Larry spent a lot of time together, and considering they were about the same age… Well, you can probably paint good enough picture on your own. Out here, finding that special someone was a lot easier considering the lack of options. But everybody needed somebody, and that was how things went around here.

Then there was Hayley… She and I… Well, I don’t know. We had known each other for a few years, but had only really seen each other as platonic friends. She had been part of a commune that had been overrun a while back, and had wound up on our doorstep in something of a state. Mae had brought her back to health. She was a year or two older than me, and she, Robbie and I had hung out a lot over the years. We had never really had much of a prolonged childhood or even a period of teenage years where we could all just have fun and play in the streets, so we could be immature at heart.

That was part of the reason that we had built the treehouse in the forest so many years ago, which we hadn’t been back to in ages. Remember that little patch of trees by the wheat field just outside the walls? Well, in a world where the spoils of the past no longer existed, we had found ourselves building a treehouse in the woods, Robbie, Hayley and I. When I was a little I had seen the other kids in movies building them, and I had wanted to do the same, but there were so many things standing in the way of being able to do it – landowners who did nothing with the forests other than letting them sit there, people ripping them down for no good reason other than because they could, and as well as all that the resources.

It had only taken the end of civilisation and the deaths of 99.98% - or whatever it was - of the planets population for me to be able to build a fucking treehouse with my friends in peace.

Go figure… what I wouldn’t give to have the landowners, the bullies and the absence of wood panels back again.

***

Over the course of the rest of the day I helped set up the park benches along the road down the main street of Bastion. We had looted them from a park years ago during a period of resource hoarding, and had decided to keep them as they were rather than to strip them down for wood. There were enough to place side by side so that everybody could sit together on an enormous table on the rare occasions that the entire community ate together.

              Tonight would be one of those rare occasions.

              We used slabs for our eating rather than plates – they were durable and required less upkeep than traditional crockery, not to mention the fact they weren’t nearly as prone to shattering. Knives and forks, on the other hand, were one thing that we always used. It was one of those things that seemed to separate animals and humans, I thought, and everybody else seemed to agree. Eating and drinking, this one thing that every human had in common, was something to be done in a civilised fashion as opposed to gnawing at our food like animals. It kept us on our feet and stopped us from descending into some lower quality of living.

              I set everything out in the street, and after half an hour or so some of the community came out to join me and ask what was happening. I told them about the deer, removing the gory details, and it reminded me why I loved this place. Seeing their faces light up with the prospect of eating a good dinner with meat and vegetables brought me a happiness that I couldn’t have ever found anywhere else.

***

That night, as our community flocked to the tables in the evening light around 7pm, Bastion filled with a warm bustle. People laughed and smiled and talked, and after letting Henrietta take over management I made my way through the streets to the Kitchen.

              That’s
Kitchen
with a capital
K
– in Sam’s spelling of the word the
K
was backwards, of course, but that didn’t matter. The Kitchen was a place of wonderful sustenance. Like many of the other buildings and storage houses, it was one of the old suburban bungalows, but unlike the others it was certainly the most highly modified. While the food was stored in a nearby building kept under several locks and chains, the Kitchens had almost the entire outer wall removed in order to cope with heat management mechanisms. Sam worked a certain way, and I respected that as long as he kept us all fed – which he always did.

              I made my way up to the front of the open house, beneath the rolls of tarpaulin that he brought down when the rain picked up, which wasn’t a problem we had had lately. On a sanitised metal table top inside the carcasses were laid out. I won’t go into excessive detail about how it looked, but it was fair to say that he had stripped every piece of meat he could off of them. They looked nothing like they had done when Carl and I had watched them in the field, or even when we had moved their bodies into the trunk of the Ranger.

              ‘Over there, over there!’ Sam shouted, ushering Laz over to one of the metal countertops with a plate of meat. Laz was his assistant, a young guy who had been with us for some time now. The kitchen was about the only thing he was good at operating, but Sam still gave him grief no matter what he did. For some reason Laz could take it, though. That was why he didn’t want to work anywhere else.

              Sam turned to me, holding his arms out.

              ‘Tommy, my boy!’ He shouted, but I held up my arms in a signal to tell him that he I really didn’t want a hug.

              ‘Food poisoning is the last thing I want, Sam. We can hug it out later. How’s it coming along?’

              ‘Impeccable. Stellar. Plenty for everybody. I’ve no clue how you get this lucky sometimes…’

              ‘It
was
a stroke of luck,’ I admitted. ‘We just stumbled on them.’’

              ‘Well, stumble or not, we’ll all have full bellies tonight. Veg is ready, and plenty of meat, so you can start moving them. Lazarus! Boy! Help Tommy with the food.’

              Laz and I took a huge platter each, both filled with meat, and set off for the tables. By the time we arrived I didn’t know what to expect. As we set them down it wasn’t stunned applause or stunned silence – instead we were showered with praise, and I couldn’t help but smile, not at the kind words of everyone but at the smile on Laz’s face as people shook his hand and patted him on the back, admiring the food. Usually it was Sam who got the praise for everything, but seeing Laz adorned with it made me feel more than happy.

              After a few more trips all of the food was on the tables, and everybody was ready to dig in – even Sam had joined us, and now it was for me to say something before we ate.

              I never sat at the end of the table, and neither did anybody else, but while I spoke I stood there, watching everybody’s faces turn to me.

              ‘Thank you all for joining us tonight for this magnificent feast that Sam and Laz have put together,’ I started. ‘If we could give them a round of applause, that would be lovely.’

              Thunderous, unanimous applause broke out amongst the community, while Sam and Laz’s faces took on a brighter shade of red than the one usually brought on by the heat in the Kitchen.

              I looked out over the faces as they turned back to me – Henrietta, Leah, Carl, Rudy, Marcus, Maria, Hayley, and everybody else.

              ‘I’ll keep this short, because I know you all want to get stuck in,’ I continued. ‘There’s only so many times that I can say the same thing a different way, but thank you to everyone for keeping this place running. People often have a way letting things get worse and worse until it’s too late, but as a community I think that we embody the opposite of that. Despite the old world running by that mantra, every single one of you works hard every day to keep each other warm, fed, comfortable and alive. So, thank you to each and every one of you. To Bastion. Cheers!’

              A resounding
cheers
broke out, followed by an actual cheer and the indulgent digging in of everybody to the food. For a few moments I stood there, admiring the sight of civilisation before me.

              I traced my eyes amongst the rows of people, eventually seeing Carl sat in his seat. I tried to catch his eye to see if he was all right, because he hadn’t even begun to make a start on any food. For the third time that day I followed his line of sight to the point where he kept occasionally glancing over, and saw that he was looking over at Maria and Marcus.

              Maybe it was because of what the two of us had been through that morning, or maybe it was because of the fact that he just wanted to go for it, but after about ten or fifteen seconds of watching him, he stood up, walked all the way to the other end of the table before rounding to the other side, stepped up to Marcus and tapped him on the shoulder.

              Carl was of sound mind, but in that moment I had no idea what the fuck he was going to do. My heart was pounding in my chest, when-

              Marcus turned, and Carl stuck out his hand. Marcus looked him up and down, smiled, and returned the handshake. They spoke and laughed for a few minutes before Marcus invited him to sit with them.

              I couldn’t help but smile once again. All was well as I looked out over what we had built together… before I realised something.

              Robbie wasn’t there.

              I dashed down towards Henrietta, who was already dishing up a plate of food.

              ‘Mom. Where’s Robbie?’

              ‘He’s still on guard duty. Got another hour on his shift.’

              Damn it. I had completely forgotten about that. Aside from him, there were another three out there, missing out on the festivities. Problem was that we still needed somebody on lookout.

              ‘Here,’ Henrietta said, handing me a plate. ‘Take that to your brother. I’ll get some of the others to take food to the other posts.’

              She didn’t need to tell me. I took up the plate, grabbing up a few extra strips of veal and vegetables before heading off to the lookout post. The streets were as quiet as they had been that morning when Carl and I had gone wandering through them, and when I reached Robbie he was stood dutifully at his post, looking out over the fields.