Circles in the Dust (8 page)

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 in 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.”

             
“All right,” he allowed, “you snuck out. To do what? Find more people? That sounds like the last thing you need at the moment.”

             
“I didn’t sneak out just to find more people. I came out here—” She paused, biting her lip. She looked at the ground, pondering her response for a moment, before whipping her head around up to gaze deeply into his. “I just couldn’t sit and wait any longer. I had to do something, and there was nothing for me to do there. I thought maybe, if I could come out here, I could find something. Some answer, some solution to our problems.”

             
“You thought you were going to find that out here?” He guffawed, looking down at his pitiful little garden. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but there’s not much of anything out here.”

             
“Yeah.” She let the word fall out of her mouth, dripping into a pool of uncertainty at her feet.

            They sat there for a moment: David focused on his dismal existence with a morbid sense of humor; Elizabeth equally camped out in her own mind. The wind made the only sound in the little hollow, a low, solemn whistle. It lifted David’s shaggy locks off his face, bringing a welcome chill to the hot flesh of his cheeks. It had been a while since his brain had had to work this hard, taking stock of his situation; even longer since he had worried about another person. It became clear to him that his life in this place was over. The patch of death in front of him was a monument to his survival here, but also a cemetery where his hope of staying any longer rested. He had given it his best shot, and made a good go of it, but it was over. He would die here, or he would go back to “The Base” with Elizabeth. He hoped the sight of his failed agricultural attempt would be enough to push her over the edge, hoped that she would take pity on him. Hope. That was all he could do, all he had left, and most of it was buried right in front of him.

              Then an idea popped into his mind. He almost dismissed it, looking for another, more plausible option, before the gravity of that first idea crashed upon him like a wave. They were still standing next to each other, each looking out in front of them, so Elizabeth couldn’t see David’s enormous grin. He had it. By god, he was sitting here, hoping she would up and decide to take him home with her, like some pitiful puppy, when the path to the Base was right in front of him. In fact, Elizabeth had given it to him herself. He chanced a secret glance over at her and saw the dismay written on her face; perfect. He snapped his head back to his desolate garden and let his mind resume its scheming. This could work. He didn’t know how, but he would have time to work out the details.