Authors: James Cook
The human power of accumulation never ceases to amaze me.
Take water, for example. Under accommodating circumstances, a human being drinks an average of two liters a day. If that person lives to be seventy-five, they will drink a whopping 54,750 liters of water in their lifetime.
Looking at the wall surrounding Carbondale, I bore witness to what nearly eight thousand people could accomplish in three months when they all worked together.
Carbondale was far larger than Hollow Rock, and the perimeter wall seemed to stretch for miles even though I knew it was not that far. The north and east gates were built mostly of concrete with rolling steel doors to restrict the flow of traffic. Long sections elsewhere were made of concrete as well, others masonry, and some of shipping containers welded together and weighed down with ballast. Unlike Hollow Rock, however, none of the wall consisted of double-layered wooden palisades.
Steel and stone. Exclusively.
It made me acutely aware of how vulnerable Hollow Rock really was. Our wall was great for keeping out the infected, but one insurgent with a napalm Molotov could reduce nearly two-thirds of our outer defenses to ashes. If that happened, the dirt sandwiched by the layers of palisade would crumble into the trench below, exposing a second line of timbers. If they went down, Hollow Rock would be wide open.
We followed a four-lane stretch of crumbling asphalt surrounded by artificially short grass. Highway dividers lined the road the last half mile into town, forcing us poor, straggling pedestrians into a semblance of a line. There had once been woodland all the way up to the city’s edge, but the locals had cut it back to provide a field of fire for the city’s defenses.
Rotting tree stumps and the burnt, crumbling remnants of buildings were visible in the field, slowly sinking into the earth. To my right, in the distance, I saw tiny figures swinging blades at ankle level. Other figures armed with rifles followed along. The people doing the work appeared to be chained together, but I could not be sure without a closer look. I wondered if the gunmen were there to protect them or keep them in line. Maybe both.
“Look alive,” Gabe whispered. “We’re getting close.”
We trudged along, pushing our cart with hundreds of other tired, filthy people. There were mutters of sullen conversation, grunted curses as carts jolted over potholes, and the snort and bray and stench of horses, mules, goats, sheep, and pigs.
Ahead of us, a woman pulled a small wooden cart loaded with chickens. Rather than transport them in cages, the woman had bound the chickens with lengths of vine and stacked them like cord wood. Their little heads gyrated and clucked, eyes bulging in desperation. An efficient method of transport, if not terribly humane.
Despite the multitude, I heard no laughter, no singing, no calling of friend to friend. Surely, I thought, these people must know each other. Walk the same path to work long enough, and you get to know everybody. At least that’s the way it was in Hollow Rock. The morning commute—which is to say, foot traffic—was a jovial time. Back home there would have been conversation, jokes, people sharing gossip, and everyone complaining about their husbands and wives and lazy kids. Here, there was a feeling of dull drudgery and a heavy sense of muted foreboding. It reminded me of driving to work when I used to crunch numbers for the hated, long-dead mega bank. I still shudder when I think about that place.
A bell sounded ahead. One hour until lockdown. Our intel was the gates were only open twice a day: two hours after sunrise, and two hours before sunset. We would make it. I hoped the others entering through separate gates would as well. As per the intelligence asset, we avoided the west gate. It would have been nice to know why.
I called to mind the city data for this place. There were close to eight thousand souls living inside the wall, and another ten to fifteen thousand in the surrounding area. Three quarters of the population within the wall were free citizens and one quarter were slaves. More than half the slaves were owned by the government. They swept the streets, cleaned up garbage, maintained the landscaping, collected buckets of piss and shit for fertilizer production, distributed daily water rations, conducted repairs and routine maintenance, and did just about everything else that made life livable for the people enslaving them.
The slaves’ every movement was watched over by the city guard. Any guardsman could punish a slave for even the slightest infraction, real or otherwise. The only restrictions were the guards could not inflict mechanical injury, impregnate a slave (without authorization), or kill them. The city wanted its slaves functional. Beyond that, they did not care.
The rest of the slaves were privately owned and performed a variety of tasks according to their abilities. Treatment varied from owner to owner. Sexual abuse was epidemic. Disobedience was punished harshly. Attempting to escape could result in anything from flogging to execution; it was up to the owner. Slaves had no rights of any kind, meaning a slave owner could do with a slave as he or she pleased. They were, in the truest sense of the phrase, nothing more than property.
I looked again at the people walking toward the gate with me. Many of them had been up since before dawn and had walked hours to get here. When their work was done for the day, they would walk those same weary miles back, and tomorrow, do it all again. I wondered what they thought of the slave trade. In its absence, many of them would have been employed by the city or by citizens that owned slaves privately. They could have lived within the wall, their families protected, and enjoyed a decent, dignified living. Instead, they had … whatever the hell this was.
The line bottlenecked at the gate. There was no order. The guards picked someone out of the crowd, pointed at them, and ordered them forward. Then came a quick inspection for bites and signs of infection, a pat down, and on they went.
“They might not like that we’re armed,” I said.
Great Hawk spoke without turning his head. “It will be fine.”
We waited in the midst of a grumpy, sweaty, stinking press and slowly inched toward the entrance. The gates were wide enough to allow a cart through, but no more. Two guards with scoped rifles looked down from watchtowers while four others conducted inspections. Half the guards were short, wiry, and quite obviously Asian. They wore combat fatigues, old-fashioned load bearing harnesses, and carried their AK-47s with practiced ease. They spoke only among themselves, and only in their native language. The American guards ignored them, but I noticed the looks sent their way by passing civilians. Hostility, fear, and naked hatred. It seemed pretty clear the North Koreans were not well liked. By the evil glares on the foreign troops’ faces, I surmised the feeling was mutual.
A watch captain—non-North Korean—stood atop a raised platform observing the morning indignities with bored eyes and a dispassionate bearing. The proceedings beneath his boots held as much interest for him as a slug crawling across a rock. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and bleak, the hot sun beating down without mercy. I was glad I had remembered to wear a hat. It was straw, and it was ugly, but it was better than nothing.
Ahead of us, the woman with the chickens approached at a signal from the guards. They searched her, groping as they did. If the treatment affected her, she gave no sign. Her expression did not change throughout the process.
Good for you. Don’t give them the satisfaction
.
The guards then sorted through her cart, took one of her chickens, and sent her through. She walked out of sight and the guards turned their attention to us.
“You four,” one of them said. “Park it over there.” He walked through a gap in the highway dividers and beckoned us closer. We obeyed. He told us to stop and eyed us up and down.
“You’re armed.”
“Yes, we are.” Great Hawk said.
“You the one in charge?”
“Something like that.”
“Let me see your rifle.” Great Hawk handed it to him. He looked it over, compared it to his own, and said, “Where’d you get this?”
“Traded for it at Dead Crow Station. Municipal auction, same as all our weapons.”
The guard asked to inspect them. We let him. He said, “First time here?”
“Yes.”
“Where you coming from?”
“Missouri. Trading salvage from outside Jefferson City.”
“You got balls to be salvaging out there. Heard the place is crawling with Rot.”
“There are many infected, but we know how to handle them.”
The guard handed Caleb his rifle back, his manner now relaxed. “Yeah. You shoot the fuckers in the head.”
The guard gestured for Gabe to peel back the tarp covering our cart. We watched as he dug around, pulled items out of boxes, and generally made a mess of things. He took a bag of dried fish, an ancient box of condoms, and a jar of homemade peach jam.
“All right,” he called to his fellow guards. “They’re good.”
As we turned to leave, he said, “You can keep your ammo, but you’ll have to turn your guns in at the armory. You’ll get a voucher for them in case you want to trade or gamble them or whatever. Guns aren’t allowed in town, so don’t get let a guard find you with one. It’s worth ten lashes in the city square and a month’s hard labor.”
Gabe pointed to the stag-horn handle of his bowie knife. “What about these?”
“Knives are fine, just don’t kill anybody with it. And if you do, don’t make a fucking mess, get rid of the fucking body, and don’t leave any fucking witnesses. Too much goddamn paperwork.”
With that, the guard walked back to his post. The way opened and we walked into Carbondale, capital city of the Midwestern Alliance.
*****
“I hope he uses those condoms,” Caleb said. “And I hope he catches the clap.”
We had rented a room two blocks away from the restaurant where we planned to meet the intelligence asset after nightfall. The building had once been mixed-use office space, but had been converted into what passed for a luxury hotel. Some attempt had been made to improve the décor—scarlet curtains on the windows, single beds with clean mattresses and laundered sheets, a highboy with a wash basin, soap, and a large pitcher of water, and a complimentary bottle of moonshine—but the carpet was the same cheap, shitty crud all office buildings seem to have.
“Why do you care?” I said. “It’s not like that stuff is worth anything to us. We’re leaving it all behind.”
Our room was large. By its shape and dimensions, it had probably once been a conference room. Two beds on one wall, two on the other, and a narrow walkway between. Small tables next to each bed with large beeswax candles in brass holders. Dressers and wardrobes in the middle, one of each per bed. At the far end by the door stood the highboy. I walked over to it and poured some water in the basin, washed my face and hands, and dried off with a small white towel.
“It’s the principle of it,” Caleb said. He had taken off his boots and was lying on a bed with his hat over his eyes. “Folks getting robbed just going to work in the morning.”
There were four expensive crystal tumblers on a shelf above the washbasin. I took one down and opened the bottle of moonshine. By the smell, it was of post-Outbreak vintage. I tasted it. It wasn’t bad.
“You want a drink?”
“That shit any good?”
“It won’t kill you. Other than that, no promises.”
“Sure. Got nothing better to do.”
I poured two and handed Caleb his. “To victory.”
“To victory.”
We clinked tumblers and drank. I walked over to the two large windows facing the street and opened them. The windows were new, probably placed there by whoever owned the hotel. If the building had been like most office buildings, the windows on the upper floors probably did not open when the proprietor bought this place. Not a problem in the winter, but damned hot and stuffy in the summer. Hard to run a luxury hotel if your guests keep dying of heat stroke. Hence the windows.
The breeze felt good. It did not smell good, but the movement of air against my skin cooled me a bit. The windows looked down on the front entrance of the hotel, so I leaned my palms on the sill, stuck my head outside, and took in the scene.
People bustled by in both directions while scantily clad whores worked the corners with bored eyes and empty smiles. A kid wearing a poster board sign advertising a casino walked by shouting invitations and puffery to an indifferent audience. The bar across the street was doing brisk business. A food vendor rounded the corner with a steaming cart. I smelled charcoal. The old vendor stopped under my window and sold a man some kind of meat and vegetable matter folded in a large piece of bread. The man paid with coins.
Currency? Interesting.
The scent of roasted pork, onions, and peppers wafted up to me. My mouth watered and my stomach rumbled. I took a sip of the moonshine and wished like hell I had some ice.
“See the others anywhere?”
I shook my head. “No. Might not be back for a while.”
Gabe and Great Hawk had gone to put the cart in storage, make contact with the rest of the team, and buy us all something to eat. We still had rations left over, but fresh food beats preserved road food any day of the week.