Fat Ones

She was right behind him, but the living storm now ripped his name from her throat and casts it impossibly far away. Despite the others trying to pull him back behind the protective flap of the jeep, he kept reaching for her. His arm stretched into the impenetrable wall of dust, wind-whipped debris forming numerous cuts on the palm and back of his open hand. The sharp stings morphing into an almost… ticklish sensation?

No, a skitter. Something was moving rapidly across the back of his hand with a disturbing number of legs. Eyes still closed, he crushed and shoved the creature into his mouth. Not knowing, not wanting to know. Delicate wings and spiny legs with guts that tasted vaguely like peanut butter in the least comforting way.

The man wearily propped himself up, shrugging off the thought that it was probably a neo locust. One of a dozen new varieties that suddenly appeared and devoured all crops after the initial destruction of the storms. It must be his lucky day, soon they too will be gone when there’s nothing left to eat.

Having had his impromptu breakfast, the man’s attention now snapped to the stranger who had somehow crept dangerously close while he was asleep. He instinctively back-crawled and palmed the largest rock within reach. The other man registering his movements also backed away and put his hands up as a gesture of non-threat.

It would be hard to describe the features of this visitor without using words like dirty, unkempt, and disheveled. All of which have become the norm and looking otherwise would be an invitation to get ransacked at best.

Sensing the easing tension, the adequately filthy stranger moved in closer again, this time slowly. The man could swear that he saw movement in the cloth bag over the shoulder of his uninvited guest. The heat can do that, causing images to shimmer and outright hallucinations. Heat and hunger, for the third day in a row now.

He noticed for the first time that it was not him that this stranger was eyeing so intently but the glint of gold that peaked out from under his shirt collar.

“That!” a knobby finger jabbed at the metal under his shirt, “I’ll give yer two of these here for that!”

The enterprising stranger shook two wriggling mass of fur in the man’s face, so close he could see his own reflection in the beady eyes darting frantically for an escape.

“Fat ones, live! Eat’em when yer want,” pressed the rat peddler, giving his best toothless salesman smile.

Without hesitation the man clasped his right hand around the locket through his shirt and silently but firmly shook his head. The peddler said nothing, though a clearly confounded expression raised his brows. His offer of the two rats was far more valuable than the bit soft metal the locket would’ve been melted into. Gold was relatively worthless now when compared to steel or cooper, holding value only in nostalgia of a time when such frivolous things could be considered a luxury. Then with a suit-yerself shrug the rat wrangler shoves his living wares back into his shoulder bag and turned to leave, certainly weighing his options to return in a few days when his foolish customer have expired to claim a token prize for his trouble.

Almost as soon as his food for the next week was out of sight, the familiar dull jabs returned in the man’s gut. The pangs of starvation and regret have been difficult to discern. He unclenched his left fist now that the stranger was gone, not wanting to show his weakness before. The man looked down at his hand, at the freshly closed stumps where his ring and pinkie finger used to be until last week.

He remembers briefly deliberating between his wedding ring finger or the middle, finally opting for the more practical choice. He remembered the last time he smelled meat cooking, it was his own flesh on the fire. A costly mistake in trying to go into the nearby city to scavenge. In retrospect, he still wonders why the ragtag band that surrounded him settled for such a small offer. There were enough of them, at least three that he could see. They could’ve easily killed him and had plenty more to eat. Maybe they didn’t want a fight, he thought he glimpsed a hint of something like shame in their downcast eyes. Maybe they still cling to their former lives; office workers, baristas, and police officers refusing to accept their new cannibalistic tribe existence.

More than that, he was sure that they were also clinging, however desperately, to the same hope he was. That it will get better. It has to or else there was no point to suffer the hunger, the danger of sleeping when you have to, the constant thirst. All of that still a welcomed distraction to the real loss. The unbearable loss that will swallow the man alive if he stops moving on hot days when the sun reduces all exposed life on the surface to a husk, stops digging with bloody hands for those precious drops of moisture squeezed from the roots of plants and weeds to survive.

The metal heart shape feels smooth and hot against his skin. Some days when the sun was especially unforgiving it seared into his chest like a brand, a ferocious reminder of what he’s lost. He does not remember the first time he saw the locket; it was just another ordinary trinket waiting to be given meaning to by a special occasion. It sat there in the window of the department store he passed by every day on his way to the office. Just a few blocks from the station, downtown on 5th, it might as well have been in another world now.

Their anniversary was the day the first storm came. The small present had been sitting inside his briefcase for a week prior, he prided himself on being prepared. Ironically, the briefcase was also the only item he managed to grab out of habit and panic. In the first year, he clung to this remnant of his old life like a buoy in the ocean of chaos that washed over the world. Around six months later he finally ditched the tattered briefcase as it had become dead weight. It had, undoubtedly, acted as a sort of warding talisman, kept at bay other survivors turned looters from taking their chance with the crazy businessman still trying to make his 9-5 commute post apocalypse. Had they wasted their energy on him, the content of the case would’ve been a crushing disappointment. Proposal drafts and corporate contracts became crumbled insulation in the space between his shirt and jacket when the freezing nights came.

The locket is all that remained. He hated that it was new, in the sense that it contained no small photograph in its hollow. Instead, often as he does now, the man closes his eyes and gently shakes the locket next to his ear listening to the thin clatter inside. A 1000 terabyte crystal silicon chip containing the last 10 years of their life before the disaster. Birthdays, vacations, their wedding, silly Sunday videos, all of it entombed inside the delicate wafer of technology. Closed off and inaccessible.

Days turned months turned years, it does not help to keep count. The man continues to carry the locket because it marks the turning point, an end to the end of the world. It will never be his world again, he belongs nowhere now. Not scraping by in the present, nor in the past marching towards the same inevitable end. But maybe when things start to get better, maybe when the world’s fixed enough, he’ll be able to see her face again. In the digital space of their former life.