Monday, December 24, 2210

“Earth to Chris. Earth calling Chris Thomson.”

The voice tore through the pleasant dream I was having like a sonic wrecking ball. I strung together a line of mumbled insults and tried to return to my sleep. Unfortunately, I became very aware of a pointy rock under my mattress that was digging into my back. I sighed and cracked my eyes open to glare at the source of the voice.

“So you are still alive!” My best friend Joel Williams grinned, unaware of how close he was to getting his face punched. “I was getting a bit worried there.”

“It’s too early,” I protested. “Go home and let me sleep.”

“It’s almost noon,” Joel said. “You sound like Amanda.”

“I resent that,” I said, rubbing my eyes. Joel’s sister Amanda was well known around town for her ability sleep through anything. It was rare to see her in the morning.

“Yeah, well, she’s awake already. Even made it out to the food truck on time. You missed it, by the way.” Joel reached into his pocket and tossed me half a bagel. “I saved you this.”

“Thanks.” I inspected the bagel for mold and scarfed it down. My stomach was unimpressed and growled, but the bagel would have to be enough until the evening food truck came around. “So what’s going on this morning? Did you just feel like breaking into my house?”

Joel shook his head. “First of all, I didn’t break in. Your plank blew over last night. You really need to get yourself a real front door.”

“I’m trying, but Norm keeps outbidding me when the traders come through.”

“Why does that not surprise me? Dude’s house must look like a hardware store inside. Anyway. Not important.” Joel waved his hand. “We’re going into the city and I’d feel safer if you come with.”

I sat up, suddenly very awake. “The city? Why?”

Joel sighed. “It’s about the Christmas tree.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Ever since the Protection soldiers dropped it off, Amanda’s had some sort of Christmas fever. Now she wants to go into the city and get a star to put on top… long story short, she’s roped Kelly in too and they’re going with or without us.”

“Huh.” I slowly rolled off my mattress and pushed myself to my feet. “She knows that the city was full of raiders last time we scouted it, right?”

“She does, yes.”

“Cool. Just wanted to make sure.” I threw on the cleanest pair of clothes I could find and ran a comb through my hair. “And no one in town has any decorations we can use?”

“No one we could find. Plus, I think Amanda just wants to go on an adventure.”

“There are plenty of less dangerous places to adventure,” I said, grabbing a knife and hooking its sheath into my belt loop.

Joel shrugged. “I’m not the one you need to convince. But you know how Manda gets when she’s got her mind set on something.”

“Do I ever.” I couldn’t help but admire Amanda for her persistence at getting what she wanted, even when it drove Joel (and me) nuts. “Fine. I’ll come along, but we’re leaving at the first sign of raiders.”

“That’s the spirit!” Joel said. “I’ll grab my bow and meet y’all at the edge of town.”

After Joel left, I stuck a smaller knife into my pocket for insurance. You could never be too careful in the city. We hadn’t lost any scouts there yet, but there had been plenty of close calls. Rumor had it that some of the raiders had ray guns. One well-aimed blast from one of those would immediately disintegrate a human, down to the atomic level…

I shook my head. Worrying wouldn’t do any good.

My house got chillier as I got closer to the front door. Joel had been right — the wood plank that I used as a door was lying uselessly flat on my front porch, letting the cold winter wind inside. I sighed and leaned it back across the doorframe as I left.

A familiar circle of houses and makeshift shelters greeted me. Whatever the town had been called before, now it was Nameless — a collection of people, mostly from the surrounding Texas area, who had survived the War and had better things to think about than town names. As far as places to live in the wasteland went, Nameless was alright. It was certainly warmer in the winter than my native Ontario would have been. In the middle of the circle, surrounded by children playing, there stood a tall artificial Christmas tree. The Protection, Earth’s new government, set it up in an attempt to bring some cheer and normalcy back to our battered community. Now, seeing it stressed me out.

Amanda stood next to the makeshift stable at the edge of town. She was engaged in a lively conversation with Old Pete, the owner of the stable and unofficial mayor of Nameless. Kelly stood off to the side, trying not to draw attention to herself. Amanda saw me coming and cut off whatever Old Pete was trying to tell her.

“Chris! Glad you could make it. Can you tell Old Pete that we’ll be careful?”

Old Pete crossed his arms. “I’m sorry, Williams, but I ain’t lending you any horses. Not if you’re goin’ into the city.”

“What if we got off a good ways away and tied them up out of sight?” I volunteered, wishing I hadn’t been pulled into the conversation.

“That’s a good idea,” Amanda said. She looked at Old Pete with hopeful brown eyes. “Please? It’s for a good cause.”

Old Pete mumbled something under his breath and scratched his bushy beard. “Your brother still have that bow?”

Amanda nodded. “Yeah. He’s the best shot in town.”

“I’ll let you borrow some horses, for some meat. Deer. Two of ‘em at least.” Old Pete spit on the ground in front of his boots. “Sick of the crap they bring in on the food truck.”

Amanda lit up. “It’s a deal! Thank you-”

“But you better bring them all back in one piece,” Old Pete said. “Unless you want to clean the stables for the next ten years. I don’t need to remind you how much they’re worth.”

“Doesn’t sound that bad, actually,” Amanda whispered to me.

“Speak for yourself,” Kelly said wrinkling her nose at the stables. She turned to Old Pete. “We’ll be very careful, Mr. Pete. I’ll make sure.”

“I’m here!”

Joel ran up to us, now with his bow strung across his back and a quiver of arrows on his belt. Once it was clear that the world would be drastically different after the War, Joel had taken up archery. His bow was his most prized possession, taking over from his (now dead and useless) phone as the object he needed to have nearby to feel calm.

“Just in time!” Amanda said. “Old Pete is going to let us borrow some horses for the trip.”

“How’d you manage that?”

Amanda coughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you later.”

***

An hour and a half later, we reached the city. One hour on horseback, then half an hour of walking. The half bagel in my stomach was doing little to keep me from feeling a bit faint. No one lived in the city. Not permanently, at least. The threat of long-abandoned high rises collapsing made it too dangerous. Plus, the far end of the city was irradiated. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” I said quietly. “Amanda, do you know where we’re going?”

“I think so,” Amanda said. “There’s a store I noticed last time I was here. Not too far in.”

“Very cool,” Joel said. “Let’s hurry there so we can get out of here.”

I ran my fingers over the button that kept my knife in its sheath. If so much as a whisper came from the surrounding buildings, I’d pop it open and pull out the knife. A low rumbling creak came from the other side of the road, and I whipped my head around to stare in that direction. It seemed to just be one of the skyscrapers. I looked up to check. Maybe it was just my imagination, but one of them looked like it was tilting over the road. I stifled a shudder and kept walking.

“See that?” Kelly pointed at some dust and debris ahead of us. “Footprints. There are definitely raiders here.”

“I wish you hadn’t seen that,” Joel said. “Can we pretend they’re just animal tracks?”

“I bet they’re wolf tracks,” Amanda said, a mischievous glint in her eye.

Joel crossed his arms. “You don’t get to joke about this until we’re back safe.”

Amanda rolled her eyes and turned into one of the buildings. The glass door had clearly been broken a long time ago, but she opened the empty metal frame anyway to avoid the jagged pieces sticking up from the bottom. “Here we are.”

The sign on the building was gone, but the layout looked like a thrift store. A peeling poster on the far wall advertised 50% off all Christmas items. Unfortunately, a thick layer of dust covered the empty shelves.

“Doesn’t look promising,” Joel said, swiping his hand across the checkout counter and coughing.

Amanda’s face fell. “Just look around. There’s got to be something here.”

Joel opened his mouth to protest, but Kelly shot him a pleading look. He straightened his shoulders and nodded. “I’ll take the left side. Kelly, you wanna help?”

As the two of them started searching, I grinned at Joel’s back. He would do pretty much anything Kelly asked him to do, and half of Nameless was waiting for him to figure out why. Unfortunately, I was pretty sure Joel was blind to love.

“Do you want to help me search the right, then?” Amanda asked with a smile.

“Sure!” I replied, and we started to look through the barren shelves. As I searched, I was glad I wasn’t allergic to dust. Somehow, even without touching the shelves, dust jumped up and danced through the air, sparkling in the light that filtered through the dirty broken windows. Joel wasn’t so lucky. His sneezes echoed frequently and explosively from the other side of the store.

“Does he have to sneeze so loud?” I hissed to Amanda.

Amanda shrugged apologetically. “It runs in the family.”

“She sneezes even louder than me!” Joel hollered. I winced, thinking about the potential raiders. Even so, I was curious.

“Is that true?”

Amanda grinned, but her face was red. “That’s for me to know and you to not. Hey!”

“What?” I asked. My hand instinctively jumped to my knife.

“I found one!” Amanda got on her hands and knees and stuck her arm between the bottom shelf and the floor. With a quick yank, the star came loose. It wasn’t a particularly nice one. One of the points was broken off, and there was a large dent and a ton of scratches on the front. But Amanda sat on the floor and cradled it in her hands with one of the happiest smiles I’d ever seen from her. A small tear ran down her cheek.

“It looks just like the one we used to have,” she whispered. “Before.” She wiped her cheek and stared at it. “It’s perfect.”

“It’s broken,” Joel said, rounding the corner. Kelly jammed her elbow hard into his ribs.

It was a nice moment. Unfortunately, I let my guard down. Next thing I knew, the four of us were staring down the business end of ten ray guns.

“Don’t,” the raider who appeared to be the leader said, waving his gun at Joel. Joel stopped, with his hands halfway to his bow, and dropped them to his waist with an annoyed huff.

“That’s it,” the raider leader said again. “Now you’re already outnumbered in here, and I got even more outside. So nobody does anything stupid, right?”

“Right,” I said, making a show of moving my hand away from my knife.

“You want to tell me what you’re doing on our turf?”

“Your turf?” Joel started to say, but I gestured at him to calm down.

“We didn’t realize. It won’t happen again.”

“Ah.” The raider stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. “You look like Nameless folks. I guess you didn’t get the message from your last scout?”

“How’d you know we were from Nameless?” Joel asked.

The raider grinned. “Didn’t, until just now.”

I closed my eyes and imagined sewing Joel’s mouth shut. “Alright, you got us. If you let us go, I promise we won’t come back-”

“That’s what your scout said. But here you are. You just gonna “accidentally” pick the whole city clean?” The raider pulled his hands out of his pockets and grabbed a ray gun from the guy next to him. “Nah. I think we might have to send a stronger message this time.”

“Please.” Amanda stood up and took a step forward. “We’re not taking anything you want. I promise we’ll leave right away.” She held out the star for the raiders to see. “I just want this.”

The raider looked confused. “Why?”

“We finally have a tree again this year and I…” Amanda’s voice quivered. “I just wanted things to feel a little normal again.”

“What a load of-” one of the raiders started to say, but the leader silenced him. His rough face softened ever so slightly.

“I had a daughter,” he said. “Would’ve been about your age by now.”

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said.

The raider coughed. “I don’t want to see you on my turf ever again. You understand that?” A chorus of protests erupted from the other raiders, but he shut them down with a terrifying glare. “Shut up! You let them go, or you’ll have to deal with me!”

“We understand,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the pounding of my heart in my ears. “Thank you.”

“Just get out of here.”

He didn’t have to ask twice.

***

We didn’t tell Old Pete anything. If he knew how close we’d come to losing his horses, we probably never would have been able to borrow them again. As far as anyone in Nameless knew, we’d had an uneventful trip to the city, but there were probably still raiders there and maybe it was a good idea to stay away for now. Someday we’d be able to look back on the day’s adventure and laugh.

Someday.

“I think my adrenaline is still spiked,” Joel grumbled. “If my sleep schedule is ruined, it’s all your fault.”

Amanda ignored him and looked at the tree. It didn’t have any lights, but the nearby fire we were sitting around lit it up nicely against the dark sky. The star on top, in particular, reflected the firelight in a way that made it look like it was shimmering.

“Lighten up,” Kelly said. “We’re still alive, and the star is pretty. What is there to complain about?”

“So many things,” Joel said, but he couldn’t hide a smile. “But fine, I’ll admit that the star is pretty.”

“Was that so hard?” Amanda said. She got up and threw another log on the fire.

“Don’t make it too big,” Joel said. “The tarp on my roof needs to stay watertight until I can fix the hole. I already had to patch a spark hole last time.”

Amanda grinned and placed one more log on the fire, then sat down next to me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Thanks for coming along, by the way. I don’t think Joel could’ve negotiated us out of there.”

“I heard that,” Joel said.

I shrugged. “I think it was more you then me. But you’re welcome.”

“We always used to take the tree out super early,” Amanda said. “Like early November. If the War had started just a couple days later, I probably could’ve set it up one last time with Mom and Dad.” She smiled. “I hope they were watching today.”

“I’m sure they were,” I said, and smiled back.

A group of people started singing Christmas carols and making their way towards the fire.

“More ways to wreck my sleep schedule!” Joel said. “Hooray!”

Kelly sighed. “I know what this is. You’re getting hangry again. Amanda, please watch your brother while I get some snacks.”

“Will do,” Amanda said.

The carolers reached the fire, and we stood up to join them. Amanda pointed at her eyes and then at Joel to let him know she was watching him, but he was already asleep. Apparently his sleep schedule was doing just fine.

“That’s that taken care of,” Amanda said. “Merry Christmas, Chris. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here too."

The world was still a nasty place on a good day, and there were plenty of reasons to be jaded and cynical. But as we stood around the fire singing Joy to the World, I started to think that maybe there were reasons to hope, too.

The adventure continues in Heroes Rise, the first book of the Tearing Through Space series! Available now digitally, and in paperback from Amazon!

Copyright © 2024 Chris Bosman.