Survival Colony 9 Read online

  We managed to clean out the basement before the sun got high. We also moved our equipment around, transferring it to the corner that seemed best protected from the wind. But the area of the compound just east of the central crater, where we’d set up our sleeping quarters, still swam under a sea of dust.

  “We could shift the trucks,” one of the officers suggested. “Create a windbreak.”

  To my surprise, my dad agreed. If it had been a matter of moving the trucks more than a couple hundred yards, I’m sure he would have said no.

  The drivers jumped into the trucks and started the engines. Two motors churned to life, two puffs of black smoke chugged from tailpipes. Two of the three trucks crept forward. Aleka and my dad stood in front to direct the drivers where to pull in.

  That’s when I noticed that the command truck, the one my dad always rode in, hadn’t moved. It hadn’t even started. Araz sat hunched over in the cab, doing something I couldn’t see. His head bobbed out of sight for a second, rose back into view. He rolled down the window and gestured for my dad.

  “We’ve got trouble, Laman,” he said.

  He lowered his bulk from the cab as my dad limped over. The two of them poked around under the hood for a couple minutes, then Araz swore. I strained to hear the rest of their hushed conversation, but I couldn’t make anything out. Araz kept pointing at the truck, then at my dad, his face contorted and his lips moving nonstop. Finally he slammed the hood down and stomped away, wiping greasy hands on his already filthy pants.

  “Get back here, Araz,” my dad called.

  Araz kept on walking. My dad was left standing by the truck, his face calm but his eyes stormy. In a minute the hollow clatter of propane tanks echoed from the storage basement. Aleka slipped away, I guess to stop Araz before he blew something up.

  I took a step toward the truck. “Dad?”

  “Where’s Mika?” he said, talking not to me but to the group, or maybe to himself.

  Korah’s mom, the black hair she shared with her daughter cut short over her ears, separated herself from the crowd and approached him.

  “Distributor cap,” he said, and she winced.

  “Everything checked out fine last week,” she said.

  “It’s cracked,” he said. “Can it be replaced?” He corrected himself. “Fixed?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  She lifted the hood and quickly confirmed the diagnosis. Heat, dust, rough terrain, or just age, she couldn’t tell. Whether it could be fixed she refused to say. But there was nothing like a replacement part, unless somewhere out in the desert we stumbled across an abandoned auto supply store that hadn’t been smashed to pieces or ransacked by colonies past. The trucks were old, no one knew how old. Soldiers had probably driven them to the wars that swept away the old world. There’d been three times as many when he was a boy, my dad had told me, enough for everyone to ride in with room to spare. But one by one they’d died, lost working parts, developed flat tires that couldn’t be patched, and one by one they’d been left to litter the landscape. We’d circled past one a couple months ago, found it axle-deep in dust like it was being devoured by the hungry land.

  People in camp exchanged nervous glances. With three trucks, we could barely squeak by. If we’d had only two the night the Skaldi attacked us, not all of us would be standing here.

  And after two, one. And after one . . . what?

  The thought of sabotage jumped into my head. I tried to catch people’s eyes, but no one would look at me. If a vandal had left any tracks, the dust storm had erased them. The idea that someone would actually disable one of our last vehicles made my stomach twist, but I wondered if the thought had passed through anyone else’s mind too.

  A crowd watched in stony silence as Mika got to work. She rechecked under the hood, crawled beneath the chassis with a flashlight in her teeth, as if she might spot some miracle hidden from view that would cancel out the one thing that was obviously wrong. Araz wandered over to take a look at her progress once he’d finished beating up on propane tanks.

  “Give it a rest, Mika,” he said laconically, leaning against the hood. “I’ve been over all that.”

  She pulled herself from under the truck. “Unless you’re here to help,” she said, “why don’t you go find something else to do?”

  Araz kicked a tire. “Such as?”

  “Be creative, Araz.” She ducked back under the truck, her tools banging away. “Take a nap. Torture puppies. Just get the hell out of my hair.”

  Araz spat on the ground and sauntered off, hands in his pockets. My dad watched him go and, for once, said nothing.

  But he wasn’t letting the rest of us off the hook that easy.

  “What are we waiting for, people?” he said to the group of loiterers who stood there listening to the muffled clatter of Mika’s tools. “Let’s move.”

  He pulled the sentries to patrol the compound, assigned a couple teens to keep an eye on the little kids. While Korah stayed with her mom to work on the truck, Aleka and a couple officers gathered the rest of us and we trooped back to the sleeping quarters. She told us to empty our rucksacks and lay the contents on the ground. If the truck couldn’t be fixed, we’d need room to carry more supplies in our packs. Yov grumbled, but he hauled out his pack along with me and the other teens. The grown-ups simply stood there in stunned silence.

  “Everything?” one of them said at last.

  “Everything,” Aleka said flatly.

  I watched as people stooped over their packs and shakily began removing items. For the first time ever, I was glad not to have anything from my past.

  Because frankly, it was pathetic. I’d always assumed everyone carried pretty much the same supplies I did: rope, blankets, bandages, utensils, cot, tent, all the stuff our colony needed to survive. And they did carry those things, but that wasn’t all. The desert, it seems, wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. It constantly spit up discards from the time before. And now here it lay, junk someone else hadn’t had the time or heart to bury, scavenged on the road by one of the adults from Survival Colony 9 and hoarded for a day, a decade, a lifetime.

  It was only the grown-ups. Yov and the other teens’ packs were as clean as mine.

  One man pulled out a framed painting of a tall, slim tower with a light on top, standing by the kind of coastline I could hardly believe had ever existed: dark blue water, lush green trees, pale pink and purple clouds. The glass had chipped away and the frame was splintered and cockeyed, but the guy stared at the image as if mesmerized. Someone else had a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing, another had a pair with the frames completely empty. Practically everyone had palm-size flat screens that had once been phones, but now their batteries and the networks that used to carry their signals and the people who used to receive their calls were all dead. One guy even had a computer that opened like a book, its screen as blank as the phones. A woman produced our only picture book, the one about the mother and baby bunny, its spine cracked and its last few thick cardboard pages torn out, so it was anyone’s guess if the mother bunny ever came back or not. Another woman unwrapped a dirty rag from a foot-long stick with a fake gold ball on top of it. An old flag, possibly, though too faded and shredded by now to know which country someone had waved it for. A man had scavenged a dirty pink shoe, nubby on top and with cracked leather on the sole and toe, that didn’t look like it would fit anyone with a normal-size foot. A woman had found a plastic baby doll head, dotted with holes where I guess it used to have hair, and when she pulled it from her pack and laid it on the ground, miniature eyelids closed over empty sockets with a tiny click. Then there was the ceramic handle of what might once have been a mug. A hinged, cracked plastic case. A small paper pouch with a picture of a lumpy orange vegetable growing from a twisting green vine. The scarred remains of a piece of thick rubber, with two raised letters on it: M-E.

&nbs
p; And that was just the beginning. It was unbelievable, the stuff that came out of those packs and lay spoiled and rotten in the desert dust.

  And it was all worthless. The mug handle you could maybe use as a weapon or a scraper. The doll’s head would have been a water container if not for the holes. A few other odds and ends might be salvageable. But everything else was an obvious, total loss.

  “What about these?” an officer said, snatching a collection jar from one of the camp’s chief crazies. Its owner stiffened, eyeing the clouded jar half-full of his own hair and clippings.

  Aleka cocked her head. “I’ll have to double-check with Laman.”

  “Take your time.” Yov smiled as she headed off to find my dad. “It’ll give me and Space Boy a chance to catch up.” He nudged me with an elbow. “Now, where were we?”

  An uneasy murmur passed through the grown-ups once Aleka was gone. My dad had never made a stink about people’s jars in the past, so long as their owners didn’t slack off in their other duties. It was weird, considering that the few people who used them washed away what they’d collected every time they had a chance, but they clung to those containers like they actually held their bodies. The craziest of the bunch, the old woman who’d told me about snowstorms though she wouldn’t tell anyone her own name, didn’t use a jar herself. But she still carried her dead husband’s, a jug-size container filled to overflowing with black hair despite the fact that the hair on her head had long since turned white. He’d died twenty years ago, Korah told me, but she wouldn’t give it up. She held it, cradled it, rubbed its side, mumbled to it all day long. What she would do if it ever broke I had no idea.

  This time, though, my dad wasn’t going to yield.

  “Jars we keep,” he said when he returned with Aleka. “But not for hair and fingernails. Those are potential drinking vessels, storage containers. Empty them and set them aside.”

  “And the rest?” she said.

  “We’ve got important things to carry,” he said. “Food, weapons, medical supplies. I can’t have people weighing themselves down with junk.”

  “We could wait a day or two,” she tried. “Give them time to adjust.”

  “We might not have a day or two,” he said, and walked off.

  Aleka took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and turned her unsparing gaze on the crowd.

  “You heard the man,” she said. “Collection jars are to be emptied for future use. As for the rest, anything not directly necessary to the survival of the colony is to be placed in a pile of disposables.”

  “Necessary according to who?” the man with the painting of the light tower challenged her.

  “According to me,” she countered. “I’ll be inspecting the results in one hour.” When no one budged, she repeated, “One hour.” Then she left, striding rapidly in the direction my dad had gone.

  “If anyone tries to mess with my comic book collection,” Yov said loudly, “I’ll kill them.”

  For once, no one laughed.

  I double-checked to make sure nothing in my own pack would fail Aleka’s test, then shoved it all back inside. Meanwhile, the people who were supposed to be our elders sat there, surrounded not only by camp supplies but by four or five treasured but totally worthless things. As the minutes passed by and no one made a move to separate the essentials from the trash, I could see in their faces that they weren’t going to be able to do it. They put their hands on the items lying in front of them, moved and rearranged piles, held objects in each palm as if weighing them, threw furtive glances at their neighbors, and all the while their faces got more panicky and desperate. The collection jar fanatics sat frozen, eyes darting around as if cages had sprung up out of the dust, trapping them inside. But they weren’t the only ones. The man with the picture of the light tower hugged it to his chest like a child he needed to defend against a horde of ravenous Skaldi.

  And it dawned on me why.

  Everything was important to them. Jars, paintings, sunglasses, baby doll heads. Not just because of what it was. Not even mostly because of that.

  Because it was all they had.

  I rose from the ground. People sitting paralyzed among their small piles of junk watched me leave.

  “Where you going, Space Boy?” Yov called out lazily. “To ask daddy if you can keep your model train set?”

  This time, Kelmen did laugh, a mindless bark that barely sounded human.

  But I didn’t listen. I scanned the compound until I located my dad, standing with Aleka outside our makeshift fence on the crest of the hill. As I approached, I could hear their voices, see her gesturing toward the bomb shelter and the trucks, him shaking his head slowly but insistently. Watching him there, oblivious to the pain he was causing, made anger bubble in my chest. It wasn’t fair, I decided. The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt.

  Maybe, I thought, only someone who’s lost everything knows he has no right to tell others to throw everything away.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “Can we talk?”

  “Not a good time,” he said without looking at me. “Can it wait?”

  In my dad’s language, that’s not a question but an order.

  “No,” I said. “It’s important. To the colony’s survival.”

  He turned to face me, his expression keen and wary. Whether he really thought I had something worthwhile to say or was simply on the lookout for another of my brain freezes, I couldn’t tell. Only now that I found him staring at me with his dark, penetrating eyes, I felt my confidence start to crawl down my throat and look for a hiding place in my stomach.

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “Okay.” I tried to put the words together the way they’d shaped themselves in my mind. “It’s about people’s stuff. The jars and things. I was thinking, when we were sorting, I was thinking. . . .”

  He held up his first two fingers, tapped his forehead. “Clock’s running, Querry.”

  “Maybe I should go,” Aleka said.

  “No,” he said. “Querry’s got something important to say, you should hear it too.” He lifted an eyebrow. “It is important, isn’t it, son?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I took a breath and said in a rush, “I don’t think it’s fair to make people throw away their stuff. Even if it looks like junk to you. It doesn’t look like junk to them.”

  He snorted. “Which is exactly why someone like me has to make the call.”

  “But,” and I could feel my thoughts getting tangled again, “what if they’re right? I mean, wouldn’t they know their own things better than you?”

  His face showed nothing but contempt for that idea. “It’s time people in this camp learned the difference between need and want,” he said. “The difference between necessities and luxuries.”

  “That’s just it,” I said, because his word reminded me of what I wanted to say. “They’re not luxuries.”

  “Ballet slippers aren’t luxuries?”

  “Not to them.”

  “When we’re fighting a war.”

  “Life isn’t a luxury,” I said. “And if you take away the ballet slippers, you might be taking away their life.”

  He looked at me piercingly. Aleka, I saw out of the corner of my eye, watched me too, her face as stern and unrevealing as ever. I wondered what ballet slippers were, heard the distant ring of Mika’s tools against the underbelly of the truck, felt the hot wind blow.

  “Aleka,” my dad said at last, “would you check on the others? Tell them,” and his eyes never left mine, “that we’ll make a thorough inventory of camp equipment before returning to personal items.”

  “Gladly,” she said. She left, but not before leveling one last, appraising look at me.

  My dad put a hand on my arm. “I need to check the lookouts.” He let go and we circled the outskirts of camp, him limping and me following a half
-step behind.

  Nothing much had changed that I could tell. He’d posted sentries in the upper-story windows of a couple houses that still had upper stories. He pointed them out to me, because I wouldn’t have seen them on my own. He also told me he’d moved the two drivable trucks once more, west of our sleeping quarters, closer to the trail that led down the hill. It was obvious, he said, nodding at the dust that had accumulated against the foundations in the last couple hours, that the vehicles weren’t serving much purpose as windbreaks, and so he’d decided to put them where we could get to them and get out as quickly as possible.

  “Last time was too close for comfort,” he said. “The next time we’re forced to evacuate, it’s got to be fast. No time to pack, no time to look around for anything missing.”

  I knew what he was getting at, but I decided to play along. “Wouldn’t it be better to have everything loaded on the trucks?”

  “The fuel’s already there,” he said. “The rest of the heavy equipment we can load on a moment’s notice. But that plus the little ones will take up all the room we have. Everything else will have to be shipped by hand.”

  “Which means we can’t take personal stuff too,” I finished his thought.

  He nodded, his mouth set in a line beneath his mustache. “That’s the predicament. I’ve allowed people to carry that garbage for so long, I know it’s hard for them to let go. I wish I’d done away with it from the start. Before people started to depend on it. Before they got attached.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He raked his teeth over his upper lip, let out a breath. “Guess I was being sentimental,” he said. “Trying to protect them. To give them hope.”

  “And now you’re taking it away?”