carbon prevails

It was a dark and stormy night, the kind of night that made a person glad for whatever shreds of food and shelter they had. No matter how cold and tired and hungry a man might be, there was always someone out there who had it worse. You could always be glad that you weren’t them.

That was Scotty’s way of looking at things. Sure, the world might have ended. Sure, it might have been twenty years since he’d lived in a building with electricity or running water. Sure, his knees had started clicking recently and his back hurt almost every day, and sure , he had almost forgotten how it felt to have a full belly, but—

Where was I going with this? Scotty couldn’t remember. Sure, it had been weeks since he’d spoken to another human being. He had seen a couple other scavengers back near La Pine, but they hadn’t looked friendly and Scotty had given them a wide berth as he passed through. He might be an optimist, but he had a good sense of self-preservation yet.

His stomach rumbled. Scotty grabbed the battered shoulder bag he’d picked up in—someplace east of La Pine. He couldn’t remember. He opened the side pocket and pulled out a plastic bag of questionable meat jerky and his plastic bottle of water.

Ah, right. He returned to his former train of thought with a sudden burst of clarity. Sure, the world might have ended, but that was no reason to lose his will to live. Scotty had already tried that, anyway, years ago, after Rock Springs collapsed into civil war and Keenser, his companion of almost five years, died in the fighting. Losing the will to live hadn’t fixed anything then. In fact, it had almost gotten him killed, and Scotty had realized then that in spite of it all he didn’t want to die.

He didn’t want anyone to die. But it had been twenty-odd years since the end of the world, and he had learned that his fate was the only one he could control.

Rain pattered on the roof of the house. Scotty assumed it had been a house at some point, though only about half of the original structure remained. He had found his way inside around the time it started raining, and tucked himself into a back corner on the ground floor. The second story of the house was long gone, but enough remained to form a shelter, and Scotty had a blanket with him. It was moth-eaten and smelly, but a blanket, all the same. He tucked it around his shoulders and huddled next to the remains of a stone fireplace, and it was almost cozy. As close to cozy as anyone’s like to get, nowadays, Scotty thought. He took another bite of the mystery jerky.

Rain drummed on the roof, lulling him into a hazy half-awake state. He leaned back against the wall, and let his spine curve into the sagging drywall, though he knew his back would hurt like hell in the morning. He couldn’t do much about that. He tucked the blanket in tighter and closed his eyes against the dark, and that was when he heard something moving outside.

Scotty bolted awake. Adrenaline shot through his veins. He stood up, clutching the blanket around his shoulders like a cape. Then he stood absolutely still, listening hard. Rain clamored against the old asphalt road outside. For a moment he thought he might have imagined the noise, but— No, there! He heard it again: footsteps scrambling on the road. Then the creaking and crunching of ancient wood and drywall as someone blundered through the wrecked half of the house.

Just one of them. Heading this way. He dropped the blanket and drew his knife. Almost no one carried a gun anymore—least of all a lone scavenger scrabbling through the ruins for shelter. The knife might give Scotty just enough of an edge. He had never been the strongest or fastest fighter, but tenacity had to count for something.

He heard the footsteps again, closeby, crossing the floor and then—

Another human being fell through the doorway opposite the fireplace with a yelp. Scotty made a similar noise and lunged with the knife. The intruder rolled away from him and scrambled onto his feet, grabbing the wall for balance.

“Wait! Please!”

He wasn’t armed. He had one hand on the wall and one open, reaching out. Scotty broke off his attack and backed up a step. He kept the knife handy. The intruder stared at him with wide eyes, just visible in his pale face. “Please,” he said again, his voice high and reedy.

“This spot’s taken,” Scotty said, as loud and gruff as he could manage. “Move along.”

“I—” The other man swayed. Scotty could hardly see in the dark, but it looked like he was leaning against the wall now. Like he couldn’t stand up straight. “Please, I—I won’t be trouble.”

He had a noticeable accent. Eastern European of some kind—maybe Russian. That itself was unusual enough to make Scotty pause.

“You can’t stay here,” Scotty said, quieter.

“Please,” the intruder said, “I—I can pay!” He dug into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a handful of—something. Scotty couldn’t make it out.

“What is that?”

“Электроника. S-scrap metal. Wires and caps—” He swayed again. His hand fluttered against the wall and he stumbled forward.

“Whoa!” Scotty surged forward. The smaller man gasped and cowered away from him, and Scotty suddenly remembered the knife in his hand. He pulled back.

“No wait, please, Я не причиню—no trouble, I won’t, please—” He sank to the floor, one arm shielding his face. His voice died away into a pleading sort of murmur, too quiet to hear. Scotty stood over him, feeling monstrous.

He’s just a kid.

The boy huddled against the wall, half-curled into a ball, shaking. He was soaked to the skin. He had on an old hoodie, baggy pants, and a mismatched pair of sneakers that looked moments away from disintegrating. Nothing else—no insulating layer, no waterproof jacket. Scotty didn’t have a raincoat either, but he had managed to find shelter before the storm started in earnest. The kid hadn’t been so lucky.

Scotty put his knife away. “Hey,” he said, trying to sound comforting. “I’m not going to hurt you, lad.”

The kid stilled. He didn’t look up. Scotty stepped back, and then went back over to the fireplace, where he’d left his things. That put him about five feet away from the kid—close enough to see him without crowding him too much. Scotty cleared his throat.

“I have a blanket,” he said. “It might help you dry off.”

No answer. The kid drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and uncurled some against the wall. He turned his head, presumably looking in Scotty’s direction.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Scotty said. “Well, I guess I did. I just didn’t want to get thrown out in the rain. I was here first, ye ken?”

Still no answer. Scotty heard the kid breathing. He heard the rain falling harder against the roof. The wind had kicked up, too. “I suppose you could stay a while,” he said, “if you’re not going to cause any trouble.”

He should not have said that. He wouldn’t be able to get more than an hour of sleep with a stranger in the room with him, no matter how weak and pitiful that stranger appeared. Scotty should have been nudging the kid to leave.

The kid stared at him for a long time. When he spoke, his voice sounded weak and shaky. “Did you mean it? About the blanket?”

Scotty sighed. He didn’t want to give up the blanket, in the cold and damp of a rainstorm. He’d only offered it at all because he felt sorry for the lad—because he wanted to prove that he wasn’t some heartless wasteland murderer. He couldn’t take it back now. Well, you could, but I don’t think that’ll make him less afraid of you.

He sighed again. “Sure.” He grabbed the blanket off the ground and shook it out as best he could. The kid uncurled from the wall and slid across the floor in his direction. When he got within a couple of feet, Scotty tossed him the blanket. The kid wrapped it around his shoulders. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he pushed himself across the floor to the fireplace wall. He drew his knees up to his chest and huddled against the wall, wincing.

“Are you hurt?” Scotty said.

“No,” the boy said quickly. “No, I am fine.”

“If you say so,” Scotty said. He leaned back against the wall and tugged his coat a little tighter around him.

They sat like that for a while, in the dark, listening to the rain. Scotty let his eyelids droop. He relaxed further against the wall and buried his hands in the pockets of his coat. He couldn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t safe to fall asleep, with a stranger sitting a few feet away. Still, it had been a long day. Scotty couldn’t stay awake and alert all night. He was pretty sure the Russian kid wouldn’t try to shiv him in the middle of the night. And if he did, well, everyone got stabbed now and then. Scotty was probably overdue.

The kid made a sharp, pained noise. Scotty startled awake. “What’s wrong?” he said, blinking against the dark. It was almost pitch black now.

“Nothing,” the kid said. He sounded pained. “Nothing, I am fine. Мне ж—sorry. I am sorry.”

“What language is that?” Scotty said. He wasn’t sleeping, anyway; might as well satisfy his curiosity.

“Russian, sir.”

“Hm.” Scotty laughed a little. No one had called him sir in a long time. He heard the kid breathing again. It sounded labored. “I’m Scottish, myself,” Scotty said. “Born and raised in Aberdeen.”

A slight pause. “How did you get here?” the kid said.

“Well, I moved to Chicago for university,” Scotty said. He thought back to an impossibly distant past. Twenty years ago. It felt longer. “That was before the war. I was in the city when the first bomb fell. And then….” He searched for a way to sum up the past two decades of his life, spent drifting across the western half of the United States, alone in a country he had never belonged to in the first place. He found he could not.

There was a long pause after that. Scotty pushed the memories back into the recesses of his brain. He shifted positions against the wall and dug the meat jerky out of his bag. He took a bite and let the spicy, bitter flavor ground him in the present moment.

“You went to university?” the kid said, in a hushed voice.

“Only two years,” Scotty said.

“What did you study?”

“Mechanical engineering. I wasn’t half bad at it either.”

It stirred distant memories of classes and dorm room antics and safety. Civilization taken for granted. Scotty heard the faint sounds of someone shuffling around in the dark. Then he felt the kid at his elbow and jumped at the suddenness of it. The kid flinched back a little, and then returned.

“Look at this.” His accent thickened with obvious excitement. “Look—” He held something out in front of them. Scotty could barely see it, but he reached out and let his fingers brush over metal and cracked glass.

“Where did you find this?” he said. He didn’t need to see the ancient device to know how rare it was.

“North,” the kid said. “In Mitchell, in the ruins. Is old communicator, yes?”

Scotty laughed. “We used to call them phones,” he said. The glass paneling felt soft to the touch, in between spiderweb cracks. “Aye, that feels like a touch screen.”

The kid drew back, tucking the old smartphone between his hands. “Watch this.”

A few seconds passed. Then a blinding light flashed in the dark house. Scotty hissed and looked away, only to turn back a second later. Dull blue light illuminated the dingy room. Scotty stared at the starry sky emblazoned on the screen.

“I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “You got it working?”

The kid nodded. In the light, Scotty could finally see his face. He had light eyes, open wide, and curly hair plastered against his forehead by the rain. A delighted smile spread across his face. He had a split lip, recent by the look of it, and round cheeks despite the hollowness of his face. He looked even younger than Scotty had first thought.

The kid turned the screen off. Scotty blinked against the afterimages swirling in his vision. “How’d you do it?” he said.

“Wasn’t hard,” the kid said. He bumped up against Scotty’s arm and then retreated. “Inner workings are all still there. I just had to find power source.”

“And you, what—jury-rigged a charge cord?”

“Да. Is old copper wire.”

“Where’d you get the power?”

The kid didn’t answer. Scotty waited, as seconds stretched into minutes, and a sinking feeling settled in the pit of his stomach. Oh, he thought. Not a nice story, is it?

“North,” the kid said at last. Scotty heard him shifting around against the wall.

“That’s where you came from?”

“Yes.” The boy was quiet after that.

Scotty cleared his throat. “Well, I think this calls for a little celebration.” He grabbed the meat jerky from his bag, took one more piece for himself, and passed it over to his left, where he thought the kid was. His hand swung through empty space for a moment. Then he made contact. Fingers brushed against Scotty’s hand, hesitant at first, then a little steadier as they wrapped around his wrist. Scotty went still.

“What are you doing?” the boy said.

“There’s—” It was hard to talk suddenly. Scotty swallowed. “There’s a bit of jerky in the bag. I thought you might be hungry.”

A beat passed. Then the boy let go of Scotty’s wrist and found his way to the bag. Scotty heard the plastic crinkling as the boy touched it.

“For me?” the boy said.

Scotty nodded. “Right, yeah. Go ahead.”

He relinquished the bag. In the dark he heard what might have been the kid sliding away from him. Scotty tried not to think of the hand grabbing his wrist, holding it in place. His skin tingled.

“Thank you,” the boy said, a few minutes later. “This is good.”

“You’re welcome,” Scotty said. He closed his eyes again and rested his head back against the wall, trying not to mourn the loss of the jerky. He would find more food; he always did. He wanted to share. He wanted to be kind. The boy needed the food more than he did. Scotty had become many things since the end of the world, but he never wanted to be a monster.

Rain pattered overhead. The sound filled Scotty’s head, lulling him to sleep as sure as any lullaby. It had been a long day. He was tired.

“Lad,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “You aren’t plannin’ on stabbing me, are you?”

“No,” the boy said. Then: “Not unless I have to.”

Scotty nodded, though the kid couldn’t see him. “I’ll try to avoid that, then,” he said, and let himself relax.

The rain kept falling. Wind warbled past the house. A soft voice whispered words in an ancient, foreign language. It was almost cozy.

⁂

Scotty woke up in a sunbeam.

He stared at the dust swirling through the faint ray of light as his brain came online. That seemed to happen slower and slower these days. The sun had already risen, a couple of hours ago, by the look of things. It shone in through the sagging doorway on the other side of the room, and the outside window that still had only half of its glass. The house was quiet and empty.

Scotty sat up straight and then winced at the pain in his lower back. He looked around the greying, hollowed-out room, trying to square it with his memories of the night before.

“There was another person here,” he said aloud, as though trying to convince himself. He remembered it too clearly for the whole thing to have been a dream—but the room was empty, and Scotty couldn’t find any sign that there had ever been another person there.

Except.

He spotted it near the fireplace: a moth-eaten blanket folded into a neat square, with an old resealable plastic bag resting on top, pinned beneath a fragment of rock. Scotty slid over to it, wincing again, and picked up the bag. He left it for me, he thought, wondering. Even leaving aside the blanket, the boy had to have known how useful, even valuable, the plastic bag was. He would’ve had no logical reason to leave it behind, except out of some sense of altruism. Gratitude, maybe. Scotty didn’t know, but he wished he’d had the chance to ask. I never even asked his name.

He stood up and stretched, groaning as his back ached with a vengeance. His left shoulder clicked when he shook his arm out. He stuck the plastic bag in his pocket and tied the blanket up to his shoulder bag. He took one last look around the ruined house, and tried to hold on to the feeling of rooming with another person the way he had so long ago. Then he shook his head at his own sentimentality and stepped out into the ruins.

He pissed against the outer wall of the house and then left it behind, following the road west through a silent, shattered ghost town. He didn’t know where he was going, exactly; only he thought there might be people on the coast, and he needed to find a more permanent source of shelter before the winter.

The rainstorm seemed to have passed during the night. The asphalt on the road had almost finished drying out. Heavy clouds covered the sky, as they often did, but here and there Scotty saw sunlight peeking through. As the buildings thinned out around him, he kept an ear out for any sounds of running water. No water was particularly trustworthy these days, but Scotty still had to drink, and running water at least had the lowest chance of killing him.

He didn’t hear any water on the outskirts of town, but as he climbed down into and then out of a convulsive fracture in the road, he heard the unmistakable sound of another person breathing. They sounded winded. Scotty stopped, right in the middle of the road.

“Hello?” he called. His voice echoed off the rubble. It wasn’t a stealthy move, but Scotty wasn’t a stealthy person, and he had learned that humans were like bears: better not to surprise one in the wild, if you could avoid it.

The sound of breathing stopped. A few seconds passed, and then it resumed, but there was no answering call. That meant a person who didn’t want to be noticed, someone who would prefer to avoid anyone else they met on the road. Scotty moved toward the noise anyway. His boots crunched over concrete and gravel. His fellow traveler could avoid him if they wanted, but first he had to know for sure.

He crossed the street and passed between two crumbling buildings, down an alleyway littered with glass and old bricks. He rounded the corner and stepped out into a little hollow between buildings, where a familiar teenager in a faded red hoodie stood leaning against the remains of a brick wall. He looked scared.

The fear in his face softened a bit when he saw Scotty, but he still took a step back. He kept one hand on the wall. “I didn’t take anything,” he said, and if Scotty had any doubt about his identity, the accent put it to rest.

“I know,” Scotty said, and stopped several feet away from him. “I just—well, I guess I wanted to see you again.”

The boy cocked his head. He had wildly curly hair, cut unevenly against his head, and big eyes. He blinked, stared at Scotty for several seconds, and then said, “Why? You have more food to give me?”

Scotty laughed. The boy smiled, looking relieved, but he still had wariness in his eyes and Scotty could tell that the first question had been genuine.

He chose his words carefully. “No, I don’t have any more food,” he said. “More’s the pity. I just thought... it was nice talking with you last night. And that smartphone you had, that’s—” He flung one arm out expansively. “It’s incredible.”

A smile tugged at the kid’s mouth. “It is?” he said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Scotty said. “So I thought—have you heard the saying, ‘two heads are better than one’?”

“Yes, I know this saying,” the kid said. Scotty still didn’t know his name. “It sounds better in Russian.”

Scotty smiled. “Is that so?” He shook his head. “Well, I thought maybe—if you wanted to—we could stick together for a while.”

The kid frowned. Scotty stopped talking and let him think it over. He noticed that the kid was still leaning against the brick wall, resting much of his weight on it. He seemed to be favoring his left leg. He still had a split lip, and a few yellowing bruises dotted his neck.

“I could help you with your leg,” Scotty said. The kid tensed up, and then winced.

“I am fine,” he said, and moved away from the wall with visible effort. He winced again, and then grabbed a thick tree branch from the ground and rested on that. In motion, Scotty could see that he had trouble putting weight on his left foot.

“Sure,” Scotty said. “But I can help look for food, too, and I—” He stopped just short of saying I have a knife. That wouldn’t go over well. “I want to help.”

The kid eyed him for another couple of minutes. “You are going west?” he said. Scotty nodded. The kid did the same. “Okay,” he said.

Scotty let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Great!” he said. The kid gave him a skeptical look, like he didn’t know what Scotty was so excited about. He limped away from the wall, back towards the main road, using the branch as a crutch. Scotty followed him.

They reached the main road and followed it past the edge of town, into a stretch of eerily quiet spruce forest.

“What’s your name?” Scotty said suddenly. The kid looked over at him.

“Chekov,” he said, after a slight pause.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Chekov. I’m Scotty.”

The kid nodded, looking thoughtful. “Because you are Scottish?”

“And because my real name’s Montgomery Scott.” It felt like a token of appreciation, offering his real name. Scotty hadn’t properly introduced himself to someone in… he didn’t know how long.

Chekov looked over at him and smiled. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Scotty.”

Scotty laughed.

⁂