You Asked Where It Came From

Blondie was retelling one of his many profane and fictitious stories about his life in the before times when he suddenly jumped back from the railing and hid behind the billboard wall.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A target!” He peered around the edge then dropped low, lying spread out across all the upturned metal teeth of the high-traction safety platform. His rifle was aimed down the long meadow valley. “Look there, out at the gulch.”

I followed his line of sight and spotted a slow wanderer carrying a rifle on their shoulder. They were alone, walking a tangent path about five-hundred yards away from our billboard tower.

Blondie slid back the bolt and chambered a new round, tossing a perfectly good cartridge off the tower, seemingly just to announce his intentions.

I put my hand over his scope. “What are you doing?”

“What, you don’t think I can hit them from here?”

“I mean why are you shooting?”

“Dude, we’ve got a responsibility.”

“Our responsibility is security,” I said. “Wasting ammunition to snipe strangers in the woods doesn’t do any good for the camp.”

“What about gathering resources?”

“Sure, if you want to walk a third mile through the weeds for some pocket lint.”

“And what about another gun?” asked Blondie. “You think ammunition grows on trees?”

“You would the way you’re using it. You’re gonna shoot a mile over their head and they’re gonna know they’ve just been shot at, and every possible outcome will be worse than if you’d just let them walk on.”

“Fine.” Blondie slapped my hand off of his gun. “But if they start heading our way, I’m going for it.”

“Sure,” I said.

We watched the stranger as they dipped into the gulch, considered the steep wall on the other side, then turned our way towards a gentler slope.

Blondie smiled and took his shot.

All the way down the tower's spiral stairwell, I followed the dull bell sound of Blondie’s knuckles swinging against the handrail. He liked to say it kept them strong. I think he just loved making as much noise as possible.

We held no conversation as we trudged through the clearing, but that’s not to say Blondie went in silence. “They knew it was coming,” he said. “Must’ve seen the muzzle flash. I saw their face turn up right before they went down. Did you see it?”

I kept silent, but admittedly, it was an amazing shot.

As we neared where the body dropped, he told me to hang back and keep a lookout in case “the scout’s crew” came around. I watched him walk out to the shallow end of the gulch, stomp the weeds a bit, then stare off in confusion towards the path the stranger took.

When he looked back at me, he was pulling up his rifle and preparing to shout.

A boom behind my right shoulder spun Blondie’s head in a twist, throwing his body backwards to sled down the weedy slope. A coarse, “Don’t!” kept me still.

I watched the red cloud that flew out of Blondie’s thoughts come drifting down in the breeze, and I slowly lifted my empty hands over my head. Before allowing me to turn around, the raspy voice directed me to remove the rifle from my shoulder and toss it. I did. Then I faced the lonely wanderer, Blondie’s killer.

She was a small woman with strong shoulders and this ex-military looking high and tight hairdo. Young as I'd been, I thought she looked incredibly old. In hindsight, she was probably no older than fifty.

I was expecting harsh treatment and a quick death, but she didn’t act vengeful or even upset. Her breath was wheezy, she could barely stand up straight, and before she could ask me any questions, she broke into a coughing fit like she’d been holding it in for years.

“Alright,” she finally said, “quick answers. No bullskaff.”

“Sure.” I was trying very hard to keep my eyes on her and not the barrel of her gun.

“Are you and your buddy alone out here?”

“Yes. Actually, no. Yes it’s just us out here, but no, we’re not alone. And no, he’s not my buddy.”

"Then who is he?"

"We’re from a camp about a mile south. He’s just my security rotation . . . buddy. Okay, he is my buddy by title. But we're not friends."

“A big camp?”

"It’s decent. There’s about two dozen of us. Definitely too large for one person to take advantage of."

“Any tinker types?”

“Any what?”

“Anybody who’s good with mechanical problems? Anyone who used to work on cars?”

“We don’t have anything close to cars. Everything is mill powered or hand cranked.”

“So there’s somebody who knows how to hold a wrench?”

“Sure.”

She broke out into another coughing fit, doubling over and clutching her left side. I told her I saw her get thrown to the ground. I saw the impact of the bullet punch her in the chest. I asked if she wore cold-thread under her jacket.

She shook her head, but didn’t explain further. She asked why we shot, and I tried explaining what type of jackass my security buddy had been. Blondie’s trigger-happy ego aside, she also had to compliment his aim.

“Real dead shot,” she said, unbuttoning a window in her jacket. She showed me the bright red crater where her third and forth ribs should have connected to her sternum. The skin did not bleed, but there was a dent like she’d been smashed with the broadside of a sledgehammer.

“Oh skaff!” I said. “How are you still alive?”

She answered by tossing a lump of metal that had been clenched in her fist. I expected this would be the mangled bullet, so I was initially shocked at the size of the thing.

It was bound to a thin necklace. I realized that this was not the bullet, but what caught it, what transformed all of that energy into a swinging hammer.

It had been an ovular canister, the size of a strawberry, the shape of a pill, and perfectly smooth. But with catching the bullet, the pill was now bent through the middle and the smooth metal surface deformed with its own crater. The edge had grown a lumpy tumor behind the impact point and the whole shape was now a bubbly, lopsided ‘V.’ The hollow space of the canister must have collapsed to less than half its original size.

“Can you open it?” she asked.

I tried getting my nails into the bent seam, but it was hopeless. I took the bend between both hands and pressed in with my thumbs, but the locket was immalleable as a rock.

“What kind of a trinket can stop a round like that and stay in one piece?”

"Armedalite," she answered. "Stronger than hell. The same skaff they were making the last bomber drones out of. It’s what’s weaved into cold-thread that makes it indestructible."

It might as well have been welded shut. I gave up on prying and handed back the necklace. “Where’d you get something like that?” I asked.

“I’ve had it forever. In the old days, it was just a place to stash powder where narcotectors couldn't scan it.”

“With that bend, it looks sort of heart-shaped,” I said. “Like now it should hold a keepsake or something.” Though, with the lumps, it looked much more anatomical than the generic cartoon shape.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

By the look on her face, and by the fact that she’d been carrying this heavy lump of metal around her neck—in a time long past powdered narcotics or their detectors—I realized that a keepsake holder was already its last good use.

I watched the red splotch grow across her chest.

She asked again about anyone mechanical at camp, anyone that might be able to open the locket. I said I didn’t know for sure, but we at least had a doctor that could examine her ribs. She asked if anyone might want retaliation for what she did to the camp’s ace sniper. I shamefully admitted that the loss would not be felt by many, that Blondie was a lazy punk who was only good at one thing, and that he couldn’t even be counted for that if a little old lady could get the better of him.

She shouldered her gun and asked if I would help her back to the camp.

I did.

On the way, she tried explaining the difference between her and Blondie, how one had what it took to become old in the apocalypse, while the other had died young, strong, and beautiful. She said people’s pessimistic eagerness for skaff to hit the fan is never quite the super power they expect it to be. Maybe it was the blood loss, but whatever point she wanted to make was not made clear. She had more to say, but by then she was coughing up too much blood to speak.

I explained it all to the rest of camp, and I was right to assume Blondie wouldn’t be missed. They didn’t even ask where his body fell.

The doctor helped the wanderer to a cot for inspection. She barely took notice of what he was saying. Words like, ‘internal,’ ‘anemic,’ and ‘shock,’ passed right through her. All she cared about was getting her necklace open.

I offered to help, to bring it to a friend who worked with the farming equipment. She handed it over, much more reluctantly than before, and the doctor gave me a worried look like I’d better hurry.

The farmer said he’d take a crack at it and clamped it down under a pedal-powered saw. After I relayed what the woman told me about the locket, the man sighed and removed the clamps. He never even turned the blade. He said the armedalite would wear his saw down to a saucer without taking a scratch, that with an acetylene torch he still wouldn’t crack it, that whatever chemical magic had forged this miracle died with all the other technological wonders society had taken for granted.

“If one bullet did this,” I say, pointing to the bubbly atrium, “couldn’t another crack it open?”

“If you want to waste the ammo trying,” he said, “maybe another few shots could do it, but not without obliterating whatever’s inside.”

The woman I returned to was not the same I left. She was a pale, damp replica who had aged ten years in less than twenty minutes. Her cool, militant stoicism had been replaced with a cold and miserable sadness.

I gave her the heart locket and my apologies. She held the metal tight to the crater it left in her chest, cried quietly for a bit, then laughed a little at how it really did now look like a heart locket.

She said I could keep it when she was done with it. I repeated the question, but she still refused to tell me what was trapped inside. I asked if it was valuable, which I regret now, and she answered that, in a few minutes, it wouldn’t be worth anything to anybody alive.

She was wrong about that.

The last thing she said about its contents was, “If I had a whole lifetime to tell you, I still couldn't explain it to you."

I love reaching the end of this story. I love when your eyes tilt slightly down and I get to soak up all of this reverent interest over the crumpled mystery box hanging from my neck. I love vicariously experiencing that wonder made new, as if it’s possible that what’s inside could hold the slightest bit of meaning to you or me. I love it, because all that curiosity shining out of your eyes is only by some dim reflection to what's really inside this locked-up heart, and what it once meant to some wandering old woman.