Dusk - Chapter 3

         It was just what Trace had said – an entire city, closed off and made into a giant prison. There were no houses. The first night was chaos as the loudspeakers boomed out intermittent, conflicting orders and the people looked for loved ones. Raff walked down on of the alleys, between two brick buildings. There were windows above his head, but they were covered with butcher paper.

         He found a door, pea green paint peeling around the doorknob, and pushed on it. Nobody had entered the building yet, and he slipped in and closed the door quietly. Strange shapes hung in the shadows, machinery with poisonous coils and great jointed arms in poses of distress. Outside, many pairs of shoes hurried past. Maria, someone called, and then the footsteps were fading. He moved away from the one thread of light that stretched from the doorway and found a corner that would stay dark even if the door was opened.

         He didn’t remember falling asleep. Broken voices all night, once a woman’s relieved crying outside his door. I thought you were dead I thought you were dead I thought – all muffled at once by the shoulder of a jacket or a desperate kiss. Children crying and parents shushing them. Sometimes children crying alone and nobody saying anything to them.

         As he stood up, there was a rattle of gunfire from the direction of the front gate. He had a hand on the door but dropped it, waiting to hear more. He listened and when there was nothing, he cracked the door, watching for someone to walk past. Before that could happen, a scent of some kind of food came to him. It had been over a day since he had eaten anything. He stepped out into the alley and headed into the main street, which had been chaotic last night and was now abandoned. The early morning light struck the gray cement and made it seem somehow more gray, more permanent.

         It was soup that he smelled. There was no threat invented which could have stopped him as he headed toward the city gate. Around the corner, he saw the crowd. They were huddled together, subdued. He slipped in amongst them as he saw a pair of guards approaching.

         “Get your breakfast before it’s gone,” said a woman beside him. She had two children of her own and was wiping their mouths with a corner of her dress. “Really, hurry.”

         He made his way through the crowd, excusing himself when he jostled someone or found his path blocked. Some people scowled, but most moved aside in indifference or willing good humor. As he got through the last barricade of people before the soup vat, he found himself face to face with one of the guards. Hunger seemed to leave his mind, even his memory. The cold expression, the dead-looking and rigid hand holding out the soup bowl, all made him feel he had passed over a divide and now hung, irretrievable, in between two lives.

         The soup was thick and lukewarm, but tasted good. As he finished, there was a sudden blare from the loudspeakers.

         “You will all gather in the main street. Everyone must be present at the courtyard.”

         He was shocked at the number of people there when he reached the paved courtyard. From every quarter, people came. A scuffle broke out between several men who were all trying to get through a doorway at once. The morning breeze was chilly and he realized it must be the first cold snap of fall. It would be bad if there was no way to heat those buildings. He had no doubt they would be here all winter.

         “Where did you disappear to last night, kid?”

         Everett Trace was standing among the crowd, leaning backward around someone to talk to him.

         “I just found a place to sleep,” he said.

         “Yeah. I guess you didn’t hear the commotion this morning, then.”

         Raff shook his head.

         “What was it about?

         “Four or five folks decided they could slip over the gate last night. They caught ’em, of course, and made sure to shoot ’em in front of everyone who happened to stay near the gates last night.”

         The speakers crackled and a new voice came on. This one was gravelly and familiar.

         “Everyone here will be working a different job. All the men need to move over to the right side of the courtyard. Women, go to the left.”

         Once that was done, the voice continued,

         “Your work captains will divide you up further and assign you to one of the many factories in this community. You are here to help the Protectorate army as it faces threats from abroad and within the cities. Do not try to escape – you all know what happened to those who foolishly tried to leave last night. We do not wish to harm anyone, so do as you are ordered and you will be given food and a place to stay. Outside these walls, you have no guarantees.”

         A discontented murmur went through the crowd. A few women called their little boys away from the group of men and glared defiantly at the loudspeakers on the tops of the buildings. The men were getting louder and some of them were starting to argue about the best way to go about changing that butcher’s mind. The captains showed up and began to separate them out.


         The factories were of all kinds; fabric cutting and sewing, grinding grain, making armor, shoes, knapsacks, bread, soup, processing coal brought in on the trains each day. In the heat of the afternoon, the coal boys carried bags between them. The length was just right to make it appear that they were carrying one of their own in the bag, scraping the dead curved back on the ground now and then. It was startling when he happened to look up and see them, black-smeared faces scowling with effort as they lugged the bags down the alley to the coal plant. They fought in the alleys between carrying the coal, shrieking insults at each other and throwing easy punches as if they had been born fighting.

Raff had never hit someone in anger except for one time in the edufac, when an older boy had called his mother one of those radical broads. He hadn’t known what it meant, but the sneer had told him enough that he gave the boy (younger then than he was now, he realized, and probably not as malicious as he had seemed at the time) a fat lip.

         He knew that one of the boys still sucked his thumb at nine or ten or eleven or however old he was. He knew this because his work station had one of the windows that overlooked the junction of two alleys. This one boy would lag behind when he had lost a fight or been tripped by the bigger boys, wait for them to turn the corner, and then lean back against the wall, hidden by a dumpster, and suck his thumb for a few moments. His mouth was always black with coal dust.

         Raff put a few stripes of glue on the cheap sole and slipped it into the shoe. When the laces were pulled taut and the tongues were arranged nicely, he put the finished pair of boots on the cart. It took thirty minutes for him to do the finishing assembly on one pair of shoes if he hurried. It took 10 pair of shoes to fill the rolling cart. He filled two carts a day, which meant 10 hours of work. He knew the boots were Protectorate standard issue, that their soldiers wore them as they stalked across the cities. Sometimes he put a wrinkle in the toes of one sole, or cut the laces inconveniently short. But not often. There was always the chance that someone would notice before the cart left his station, and he had seen the jail at the end of the city and didn’t want to go inside.

         Everett was working in the armor warehouse, not in manufacturing but in moving the crates of vests and helmets from one place to another. He had once been a stockman in Texas, running cattle to the stockyards or scraping out horse hooves.

         “Those were the good old days – does anyone say that? It’s not a funny phrase anymore,” Everett said that night as they ate supper at the community hall.

         The bench rocked as an ox of a man settled himself with a plate of casserole. He looked down mournfully at the portion and then began tucking it away as if it was shrinking before his eyes.

         “Do they say what?”

         “The good old days? Never mind. I guess that’s a concept that’s better not to think about. Anyway, I would rope them when it was branding time – I could tie their heels together faster than anyone else. You got to be tough out there. We all got kicked once in a while. Ribs, knees, backs all took a lot of punishment. And now, I’m moving crates for an army that wipes its feet on people like me.”

         Raff didn’t know what to say. It was not that Everett wanted sympathy. He only wanted to talk. They ate in silence for a few minutes, the hot food fairly bland but good because it filled the caverns inside them, the hunger that was becoming a constant in the way they worked all day without a bite to eat, the longing for home that was somehow partway dissolved by the hot potatoes and carrot slices even if they did taste like they had been harvested from a compost trough sometimes. It was noisy in the big dining hall, the clatter of plates and mugs, the rough arguing and banter from the men that would have been in jail anyway, the nightly buzzing of the tracks that ran through the middle of the dining hall and were unused but connected to the main outgoing tracks.

         It was the shipment of grain that would be ground in the early morning hours by the fifty women who worked in the granary. They operated the machinery, and the men carried the sacks to the trucks. Someone had tried to stow away on the truck a few mornings ago and been shot in front of the line of trucks. The Protectorate left the body where it was until the trucks had all left, and then Moessing had ordered three of the other grain men to get what was left of him into a bag. The bag had been hung from the wall near the back door of the granary, where all the people who worked with loading the trucks would have to pass it twenty, fifty times a day.

         Moessing was one of the most hated men in the city. His own squad never spoke his name without a tinge of disgust and a bewilderment akin to fear.

         “If it was a matter of fighting these people,” Everett said in a low voice. “But it’s not. It’s a matter of staying alive until they fall apart. Because there’s too many of ’em to kill. We tried that already.”

         “You were in Kentucky,” Raff said, continuing the conversation as they stepped outside into the flood of darkness.

         They never turned on the lights unless someone was trying to escape. Raff was glad it was pitch black tonight, that any scraps of overheard conversation would be useless without a definite face to go with the words. Protectorate soldiers passed them by, but they kept walking until they reached the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t as far as it had looked the first few weeks. The world seemed to be shrinking every day.

         “You must have been in the Cumberland raids,” he said.

         “Ha,” Everett answered. “I was a general. Well, we didn’t really have the titles, but I told them where to go and who to attack and when to retreat. We only retreated once or twice in those three years. Then I wound up inside the borders, stuck on a recon mission. My whole brigade was captured and executed.”

         “I remember. We heard about them at the edufac.”

         “Sure you did. Killers without cause, right?”

         “I never believed them. My mom told me they were on our side.”

         Everett nodded and sank down to sit cross-legged on the ground. They could see the fence gleaming in the little moonlight. It was like a cobweb, but it would kill you the moment you touched it.

         “I was the only one left, and I was alone in a strange town with ’em swarming the streets, waving those guns at anyone who didn’t jump out of the way. So I went to work as a roofer. Someone must have recognized me, ’cause they came with the vans. And you know the rest.”

         Raff sighed.

         “My mom would have liked to meet you,” he said. “She wanted to do everything. She wanted to save the world.”

         “What do you think happened to her?”

         “I don’t know.”

         He realized he had never thought she could be there. At once, the flame of memory leaped up. Eyes burning, he asked,

         “You think she could be here? There’s a lot of women here. She might even work down the street from me.”

         “Maybe so, kid. If you think that.”

         Everett stood abruptly, spitting a wad of smuggled tobacco into the fence five feet away. It sizzled and sparked and he shook his head and started to walk away. Then he stopped.

         “Raff, your mom wouldn’t be here. I’d by lyin’ if I said anything different. They don’t mix prisoners like her with work detail like us. That would be asking for a riot.”

         He nodded, knowing it to be true. He would have felt it if she had been near.

         “She must have been a firebrand to get taken in the first arrests. You come from fighters, Raff. Don’t forget that. You’ll need it one day.”

         After Everett left, Raff laid on his stomach and watched a raccoon as it walked back and forth outside the compound. Maybe it could smell the food. Maybe it was just passing through. He wondered if he would ever have the chance to walk farther than three miles in a straight line again.


         The next day, he saw Welck. He had known the man to be around since the day they had been separated for work by the loudspeakers. Still tall in his general’s clothing and the nearly civilian-style boots he wore, Welck had turned gray and had a slight jowl. He was standing on the porch of the officer’s quarters and Raff watched to see if he would recognize him.

         After a few minutes, Welck caught sight of him, but the gaze was meaningless and traveled on without anything more than a passing acknowledgement that yes, someone was standing there watching him. Raff went near enough to the porch to be heard, but not near enough to get in trouble for intruding on Protectorate property.

         “Are you still in charge of 15?” Raff asked.

         Welck looked surprised and this time gave him a searching look.

         “If it isn’t Raff,” he said, rubbing his stubbled chin with one hand. “You’re lucky to be alive, I can tell you that much.”

         He stepped off the porch, not quite spry.

         “Which one do you work at?” he asked.

         Raff gestured to the boot factory.

         “I haven’t really looked at it,” Welck said. “In use, that is. Might as well see how things are progressing today.”

         They went up the stairs to the work stations. The general scrutinized the line of workers. He moved to Raff’s empty statement with no comment other than an ironic lift of his brow, and looked out the window.

         Below, three men were fighting. One was gesturing at the back wall, and when Welck pushed the window open, he could be heard.

         “Get out of my way,” he yelled. “I’m moving it over there.”

         “You do that and you’ll have ’em down our throats. Moessing left it, and he didn’t say we could move it.”

         Welck looked at Raff, uncomprehending.

         “It’s just a – well – you better just come see.”

         They went outside and to the back of the granary. There was a definite smell of death. The three men were still arguing when Welck approached, but fell silent as soon as they heard the creak of his boots. Welck stood there, staring them down. One faltered, but the other two did not. Then his gaze turned to the bag, which had begun dripping a dark fluid on the wall and down to the ground.

         “What’s this?”

         One of the men told him and then said,

         “We just want to move it. It’s making everyone sick having to pass it all the time.”

         Welck’s voice was curt.

         “Get a shovel from the coal loading area and get it done. You’ve got half an hour and then you better be back to work.”

         The men left and he stared off into space, toward the courthouse where the Protectorate had set up its offices.

         “Men like Moessing are what I fear will overrun this army,” he said. “Discipline is what’s needed now.”

         Raff watched him a minute, then asked,

         “Someone said you were a butcher the other day. Why would he say that?”

         It seemed Welck had not heard, as he continued staring at the dirty street. Just as Raff was ready to leave, he turned a resolute look in his direction.

         “Because war means people die,” he said.

         “But you don’t – you’re not like Moessing or Hargam – ”

         “I’d rather be dead than be one of them,” he said. “You’re wrong, though. I have killed people. Some of them even deserved it. But I always did it for a peace in the end. Protectorate didn’t mean work camps in the beginning. It meant simply a new way of trying to fix the mess of this place.”

         He waved a hand that touched not only the city but the entire coast, the whole country.

         The men were approaching. Welck gave him an almost kind look and said,

         “I regret that the three of you kids had to be taken. Your mother – and the other two – they were dangerous. It’s people like them that caused things to require these measures. But I still have regret for the kids.”

         “General Welck – ” Raff said, a question on his mind.

         “I’m not a good man,” Welck said brusquely. “Go back to work.”

         Welck had returned his attention to the men with shovels. Raff didn’t want to be there when they took the bag down and he hurried into the boot factory.