Dusk - Chapter 4

         The cold poured through the open door to the mess hall when people came in late to eat. Once the evening’s ration of bread and salted beef had been eaten, everyone would go to the bunkhouses. There were two – men’s and women’s. Children generally stayed with their mothers, although some had no mothers and these unfortunates had to follow their fathers through the factories or were simply turned loose to play or fight with the other motherless children in the courtyard and alleys.

          The Protectorate soldiers were nervous about something, but no one seemed to know what had them on edge. At first, mealtimes had been orderly. Plates and mugs were filled by low-ranking guards, who then enforced that there was no stealing or brawling. Now, only two were stationed inside the room. Fights broke out nearly every night, when everyone was hungry and the meal did not fill the hunger. The guards just stood with glazed eyes, looking at the high windows or watching the fists and the wrangling limbs with amusement or boredom. No matter how loud the yelling, Raff never looked up anymore, just ate as fast as he could.

          The rest of the guards were patrolling the edge of the city, blustering to each other as they strode the perimeter. Rumors flew at dinner that night. A man who worked in the boot factory said it was they were being threatened by Underground fighters making attacks on the borders. Everett didn’t think so. In fact, he thought it was ridiculous to pin hopes on a bunch of ragged idealists who didn’t know how to fight, and who were no doubt trying to avoid the work cities themselves. The other man shrugged and went back to scraping his bowl with the spoon. Someone across the table, the man nearly the size of a steer, lifted his hand and said,

          “Naw, that’s not it. They don’t have the means to keep these things going.”

          “How would you know that? Friends with the General?”

          “Ha. You see the food. It’s not what it was when we got here – not as much, not as good. People are gonna start dyin’ when winter sets in hard. Disease is gonna come. The medifac is stocked but it’s not gonna last if there’s an outbreak. They’re stretched too thin and they know it.”

          Everett said he might have a point but they weren’t the type to give up just ‘cause their jugular was cut. They’d keep on going till they’d wrung every drop of blood, even if they lost as much of their own.

          As the men finished, the door swung wide and stayed open, letting in the biting wind of night. Men turned angry faces to the door, only to return to their plates subdued and expressionless. It was Moessing, looking as if he merely wanted to get a look at the mess hall. No one believed it.

          He stood aside from the door, as the women were now coming to eat. The men stood to make room at the tables, gathering their bowls and mugs. Raff watched, followed the ragged line to the stack of dirty bowls. The men were leaving the room, and he was one of the last in line. He heard the mutters of hatred and hunger from the men going out the side door into the cold.

          Moessing was looking for someone, and he soon found her. A girl in her late teens went past him white-faced, knowing he was there and trying to slip by. His arm whipped out and stopped her

          “What is this?” he demanded, shaking a military shirt in her face. “You explain this to me.”

          “It was an accident,” she said. “I was set to iron, and it just got burned.”

          Raff saw now that the sleeve of the shirt was blacked around the shoulder, and that Moessing wore spotless jacket and pants that looked as if he never moved at all, but just stood, watching, waiting, killing without ever bending his arms or raising a gun. The polished buttons of his jacket glinted. He didn’t wear his authority lightly.

          Moessing did not say anything else, but he drew the flexible baton from his jacket. The girl dropped crying to the floor, saying it was an accident, it was an accident.

          “Take her right hand,” he said to one of his underlings. “You are here to work for us.”

          A stroke across the palm, and Raff would have looked away if he had been able, but it was too frightening just to hear.

          “And that means you must do things right.”

          When the flesh of her hand split, Raff did look down at his bowl. The greasy soup left a ring in the bottom of the bowl and his stomach lurched. The screaming stopped suddenly.

          Welck was standing in the room, having come in from the side door. He strode across the room and ripped the baton from Moessing’s hand.

          “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

          “Protectorate honor must be upheld, in workers’ speech, their deeds, their minds. Isn’t that what the Manifesto says? And this girl ruins my shirt – on purpose or not, what does it matter?” Moessing replied.

          “All this over a shirt? She stands to lose her hand because of your vanity.”

          He laid the baton across Moessing’s neck and Raff was gratified to see that Moessing felt the sting, that though he made no sound he went very pale and then very flushed.

          “How old is she?” he asked the room at large.

          A weeping woman, the mother of the girl or a mother of someone else, said she was sixteen. Welck turned to the man still holding her arm.

          “Take this man and give him sixteen strokes of the baton on his back.”

          “But he’s second in command,” the man stammered.

          “You – ” he yelled at two other soldiers standing nearby. “Take him now and do it in the courtyard.”

          He did not go to see the girl’s hand himself; it was not fitting a General to show that kind of concern. But he did send her to the infirmary with the crying woman and wrote a note of some sort. Raff saw him, but Welck did not acknowledge him. The stooped shoulders said more than any expression of the face, any word in the mouth.


          It was a serious punishment for a lieutenant general. Moessing did not appear in the open for five days, and when he did the movement and reach of one arm was altered. The girl did not lose her hand. Raff saw her working in the boot factory the next morning, using her left hand to tug brown paper from a roll and then stuffing it inside the boots. Her other hand was bandaged like a club and she kept it on her knee.


          The next train brought grain to be ground in the mill, but it also brought half a train of workers. Raff watched them get off the train, some stumbling. They looked thinner than any of the ones in his city, and more ragged. Work had stopped, and none of the guards had time to send them back to their stations. They scowled and spoke roughly, but nobody said anything about the work.

          A crowd had gathered in the courtyard, and in the alleys, too. Raff watched them getting off the train, and began to think about what this meant. Crowded quarters, smaller meals. Already he had seen what the men already knew, that the food was getting more scarce. There were at least fifty now, standing huddled in the courtyard, some glaring about in defiance, others standing with shoulders bowed and heads down as if sensing that they were disliked already.

          He made himself look on them as they were and it nearly made his eyes water. Misery was in them all. There were no children there, only adults and a few kids his age. It was not a good sign.

          And then he saw a familiar face, a woman’s face now that had been a girl’s the last time he had seen her. And he wondered if it could be that Mia had been brought to the same city, and then knew it was true because Gene was nearby, looking angry and pushing someone to make room for his sister. They made it out of the crowd and she sat down on the step of one of the houses, head in hands. Raff wanted to run to them, but there was such a weariness on her that he felt that even the presence of a childhood friend would be intrusive, wearying. He fell back into the shadows and watched until he began to remember the day they had been taken from the lake house. Then he left and went to the empty boot factory. He shoved all the supplies off his table and heard them crash in a jumble on the floor. For a long time he seethed with sorrow and anger, leaning on the windowpane, and then he cleaned up and set everything back in order.

          The evening meal was nearly chaos, people fighting over bowls, mugs, anything to hold the stew, then pushing to be near the front half of the line. It was plain there would be little enough to go around. Raff was not big enough or hungry enough to get a bowl through fighting. He stood in the back corner, watching, until the crowd settled out and the men were at the front of the line. A few men herded their women ahead of them in line, guarding them, making sure they got food. Others were shoving their bowls out long before they reached the soup vat. Women and children huddled behind the last few men.

          “We can’t believe you’re here.”

          Gene was standing at his side. Mia was near the doorway, watching them and holding a mug loosely in one hand.

          “Yeah.”

          His friend had gotten thinner, and he supposed he had, as well.

          “I never thought to see you show up here,” Raff said. “Where did you come from? What’s going on?”

          Gene said they had been farther north.

          “People were getting sick. There wasn’t enough food. Last week there were fifteen people that died.”

          “Is that why they moved you all?”

          “Who knows? Yesterday we thought we were all going to be shot.”

          Raff felt as exhausted as Gene looked as he slumped against the wall, rubbing his head. His blond hair was cut close, but he still looked his age – twelve.

          “All the kids died,” he said after a minute. “Every one. Some got hurt and never healed. And then there was sickness.”

          “I’m sorry.”

         “We were in the 18 square. I think it was near the coast, because there was a lot of coming and going of the cargo trucks. We had fish sometimes. Lately there hasn’t been much of anything to eat.”

          “Better go get something, then.”

          Raff was still not very hungry, but he followed Gene. They were among the last of the people to get soup, and the spoon was scraping the bottom of the vat. In a way it was almost better than being first, because some of the meat and vegetables had settled to the bottom. Mia followed behind them, pushing through the crowd that still stood. All the tables and chairs had been removed that day.

          “Raff,” she said, as if he didn’t already see her, wasn’t already watching her fight her way over. “It’s been such a long time.”

          They got to a corner, the three of them, and ate in companionship. Everett strode up to them after a while, when they were silent, and asked who they were. Raff told him and he nodded.

          “You’re one of us,” he said, especially to Mia. “I heard your camp was in bad shape.”

          “Yes,” she said. “It was.”

          Then Raff noticed the shadows under her eyes, the way the skin of her cheeks was drawn against the bones. She wore a man’s cast-off sweater, and the sleeves hung slack and dropped down to her elbows when she lifted her spoon to eat. He could see the knobs on her wrist and the ridges on the back of her hand.

          “Are you alright?” he asked her after Everett had considerately moved on.

          “Of course,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

          “You look thin.”

          “Everyone is thin.”

          He didn’t say anything else. She was older than they were, after all, and if she didn’t want to talk, there was nothing he could do.

          There was a sudden uproar at the front of the room. A man in work clothing was out near the door, shouting about someone being killed and pointing down toward the factories. The Protectorate guards herded them all out of the mess hall and sent them to the barracks immediately. None of the new people knew where to go, and there was a lot of shouting instructions before everything was straightened out. The lights were not turned on, which seemed strange since a murder had just happened.

         Raff and Mia and Gene wandered toward the barracks. She left them, slipping into the women’s barracks without hesitation.

          The next morning he learned that the murdered man had been Welck. He had been found lying spread-eagled in his office, throat slit. Moessing told them all this from the steps of what had once been the city courthouse. The body was lying on the ground before him. The white steps were now mud-tracked, and the pillars had been defaced with soot. Although the courthouse was a forbidden area to the workers, the young sometimes slipped up to it and marred the pillars with soot or sometimes mud. Once there had been cow entrails dumped in front of the door, and although Raff was not daring, it was something he wished he had thought of.

          Another man was being brought from the inside of the courthouse between two of Moessing’s men. They had their rifles out and he was marched to the bottom of the steps and executed. Raff saw what would happen as they lifted their guns and didn’t watch. The man had said no word – he hadn’t had time. Then, Moessing made them walk past the two dead men on their way to the factories.

          During the work hours, the talk was all about the killing and the executed man’s innocence. There was little doubt who had murdered Welck. More than thirty people had seen the baton whip across Moessing’s neck and Raff had felt cold at the sight of it. To see the evil punished and yet alive is not enough to give peace of mind. You must see him destroyed, dead in horrible form.


          Raff lay awake that night, thinking of Welck. He was not vicious. But he was wrong, and he had been the one, certainly, to lead the Protectorate into the lake house to take his mother. But there was the admission of regret, the deep lines carved prematurely near the mouth. He thought for the first time in a month of the look of betrayal on Diane’s face. She had believed in the Protectorate. Welck had, too. But he had seen evil. He had been there when the stifled dead had been laid back in the vans, and he had been the one to give orders that captured escapees would be executed. He did not deserve pity. Yet there was no stopping the sorrow living inside, making his throat close against it, and making Welck appear as just a man.