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What is the true value of money?

 

Whether in a pre- or post-apocalyptic world? Does it’s concept change with our circumstance? What does it buy? Material things? Comfort?

But what if there’s nothing to buy and you can only dream. Will it buy a dream? And would you really want that dream if you found you could buy it?

Perhaps in a post-apocalyptic world, the ability to move and keep on moving is the only thing that has any value. Can money buy that? Or is it what anchors us in our modern day perception of currency where a huge mortgage can be a desirable display of wealth and success.

Suppose that, on one day, the way to your dream sits gleaming in the palm of your hand, reflecting in your eyes with relentless sunlight and promise. What would the animal buried deep inside of you buy then?

Your dream or your freedom?

 

Bruv

 

 

 

I take a deep breath, wheeze a little from the dust.

‘Take this road,’ I say.

Harich bounds around me, skippin’ over the coon-tail straps of his pack.

‘It’s all part of it, part of that whole damn ‘moth-candling’ thing. You get on and it sort of draws you along.’

Harich grunts, slides off into the edge and kicks dirt into the hot dry air. The desert waits out there, wide, silent, watching. I spit the dirt from my mouth.

‘F’ Chris’ sake Harich!’

Harich falls back to the middle of the road. He drops to all fours, wide squat nose truffling up the faded centre line.

He laughs, ‘Harich Snufflepig!’

I kick his rear.

‘Get up, F’ Chris’ sake!’

For a moment he slaps along beside me, hunched away from an expected blow, great feet plating the hot tarmac. I reach out and he shrinks away. I pat his head, stroke the downy nape of his neck, brush a little dust from the mat of hair down the length of his spine. He turns. He smiles.

‘Bruv.’

Don’t matter how many times I tell him I ain’t his brother. Don’t matter anyways. Might as well be. I was a loner ‘til they banged me up, put me in with Harich. Seems like another life, well, some way ago now.

Harich walks behind me, doggin’ my steps like a one o’clock shadow. I feel his hot breath, hotter even than the day’s breath, on the back of my neck. I stop. He stops.

‘Harich!’

‘Bruv Bruv…’

It comes from somewhere close behind my ear. I turn. He smiles, fangs gleaming in the desert dust of his face. He tips back his head and laughs deep down primeval inside, deeper than his open throat, somewhere else way down in the past where it has something animal-boned about it. Some days he scares the shit out of me but I’ll never let it show.

I kick him in the shin.

‘Harich, don’t do that!’

His face falls, closing the vast cavern of his mouth. Inside him the thunder rumbles like it does across the desert dark mornings. I wait for the lightning that will surely one day come. The thunder passes. It ‘solves away into his quiet murmur, passin’ slowly, eyes cast.

‘Bruv ?’

I ignore him and walk on. Harich stands his ground muttering. The tension fades behind me with the distance. The wind falls. I listen. Behind me the faint slap, slap of feet begins.

‘It’s like I said Harich…’

…back over my shoulder, words falling like dust on the wind…

‘…like this road. Comin’ from nowhere goin’ someplace. Just like us. An’ nothin’ seems as if it can stop it.’

I wait, silent in the fall of wind. The slap, slap comes and then is torn away across the shrub and brush, tumblin’ out of earshot.

‘Like I said. Like walkin’ a destiny. Like walkin’ the lines on your hand. Knew a woman once said she could read a man like a book just by the lines on his hand. Said my life would take many paths. Hell, I could’ve told her that! Been moochin’ since I can’t remember. You too I guess. Eh? Bruv?’

Harich slaps up beside me, panting. I turn without stopping.

Harich looks up, ‘Bruv?’

I smile. He ducks. Does a kind of half skip.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘I’m Bruv.’

The road picks up about two miles ahead and tricks a cleft around two bluffs sticking up like piss-proud boners. Town’s the other side. I know. I ain’t never seen it but I heard Tell an’ Tellin’s all we have left an’ so it has to be right.

A Teller has to be kinda careful. It ain’t no job for no liar, leastways, not for long. Last Teller we met was five days gone. Two more behind since we escaped and those spent guessin’. Life don’t leave no room anymore for guessin’.

We paid the Teller an old scrub hen Harich ran down flocking with a pack of ro-birds. They took no notice of him, kept peckin’ away and liftin’ stones and searching in the dust and the rust for somethin’ who knows what.

Harich wanted to take him with us. The Teller, that is. Parcelled o’course. I said no, Teller was there when we needed him an’ if we all did that then there wouldn’t be no Tellers no more and life would be all about guessin’ an’ I guess we’d probably all end up probably dead …I guess.

Harich had smiled at that, a large serpent-like smile, fangs white on red. He’d looked at me with wide expectant eyes.

‘No,’ I’d said.

 

Harich bounds along, sometimes in front, sometimes dropping off behind before chasin’ up, kicking dust-devil swirls off the heat-haze blacktop. The packs are lighter now. It’s two days since we left the beach an’ the shrub-hens we caught were gettin’ lean and hardly worth the slicin’. We have enough until we hit Town and then maybe it’s anythin’ we can steal. We ain’t got nothin’ else left since we paid Teller.

Harich stops dead in front of me. I rattle his heels with the toe of my moccasin.

‘Get on, Harich.’

He doesn’t move. He bends down and I fall over him and down we go all legs and packs spillin’ out an’ the dust gettin’ into everywhere and my eyes stingin’ from Harich’s arm across my face like a pole-axe.

‘F’ Chris’ sake, Harich.’

The sun pulls my eyelids closed against the swelling. My britches rip across the knee-backs. Harich puts out his hand. Grips my arm. The lightning draws back.

‘Bruv!’

Harich points to a small round hole in the faded blacktop. I can see something in the bottom. It’s dull where the dust sits on it like the years on my face when I look in a pool. I blow the dust off, my face pressed close to the road. The sun gleams back up at me like a beacon.

‘Dig it out, Harich.’

Harich levers the small round disk off the road with talons grimed with dust and pitch. Hands it to me.

‘Bruv?’

I pick up a handful of dust and rub the disc between my fingers, polishing the surface. I spit dry-mouthed into a paste and spin the rim on the edge of my sleeve. A man’s face gleams up at me. On the other side an eagle grips like death on a flag.

Harich shuffles, jostling for a better look. I push him away.

‘It’s a coin.’ I spin it in the bright heat, ‘I hear tell there was lots of ‘em. They say a man could get whatsoever he wanted with one of these, Bruv.’

I close my fist and feel the coin round and hard inside my hand.

‘Whatsoever he wanted…’ I pause, then draw a rich mans breath.

‘Bruv? Hold?’ says Harich.

I hesitate, toss the coin once more up towards the sun and watch it fall bright and spinning back into my hand. I clutch it tightly.

‘Okay,’ I say.

Harich snatches it from my hand, his fingernails drawing furrows across the skin. He hunkers down in the road and examines the coin, turning it over and over in his fingers.

He points to the eagle, shakes his hands up into the sky, fingers like dark, thick feathers splayed on the desert wind.

‘Ro-Bird.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘Well, Hell, maybe yes.’

He turns the coin over.

‘Bruv!’ he says, stroking the face gently with a talon.

I laugh.

‘Yeah. Big Bruv.’

Harich roars with laughter, mouth wide and fearless.

‘Big Bruv! Big Bruv!’

He leaps around, pushing the coin up to my face where it gleams in the blackness of his talons.

‘Put it away, Harich.’

He slips the coin into the little pouch he’s made inside the ‘coons head on the top of his pack.

‘Careful Bruv,’ I say, ‘Don’t go losin’ it now. That’s a dream, Bruv. A real dream.’

Harich gambols on ahead. I know it’s safe.

 

A mile up the road a Snufflepig crosses the highway, snatching up the remains of a wreck with its wide distended maw, its great bulk blotting out the twin bluffs, the attendant flock of ro-birds sweeping like a black wind across the road, peckin’ an’ turnin’ the dust around the space where the wreck had been, smellin’ metal with magnetic noses, siftin’ with plastic beaks and wings. We slow our pace and watch it drift towards the horizon, the Grindworms in its belly chainsawing their noise across the sand behind it.

‘Come on, Harich.’ He picks up the pace. A half skip. A stumble. A smile, an’ then he’s off up the road apiece, scuffing the blacktop with wide, splayed toes, looking for coins.

‘Hey Bruv,’ I shout, ‘Ro-birds got ‘em all?’

He smiles and pats the ‘coons head. I laugh at the look on his face.

‘Ok. Not all, Bruv.’

 

In an hour we top the rise where the road tricks around the cleft and then falls down, down aways into Town. I pull up to the shade of a bluff, drop the pack and put my back against the quiet stone. Harich is off down the road, seeing nothin’, hearing nothin’, still looking for the glint of gold in the blacktop.

‘Hey.’ The echo comes back at me from the bluff across the way. Harich looks around, puzzled. He can’t see me in the shade.

‘Hey!’

He gallops back up the road then turns and sees me. He dives across and jumps me, fangs out clean and white, talons raking in lookin’ for throat and skin to tear. He stops, grinning, an inch from my face.

‘Hey Bruv!’ he says.

I pat his head and the lightning goes away. He points down the road.

‘Town, Bruv.’

His talons sink deep into the flesh of my arm, pulling me irresistibly to my feet. I grab his ear with my free hand and twist.

‘Let go, Harich!’

He lowers me back into the dust.

‘Sorry, Bruv.’

‘I should think so. Set down quiet. We wait.’

‘Wait what why, Bruv?’

I pat the dust beside me.

‘For dark. Set down and be quiet, I want to think.’

Harich sets the pack down beside me in the shade of the tall slender rock, his feet and legs stretching out into the road. He picks up the ‘coons head pouch and begins to croon to it, looking deep into its empty eye sockets as if there were something that should be there, something as animal as himself that was missing and torn from it with a knife. One of them things no matter how fast you moved you couldn’t never seem to put your finger on, nor never see which way it went.

I seen that light go out myself and never thought to wonder before I met Harich. Perhaps I’m too far and gone from the animal in me. Perhaps that’s why Harich and me kind of fit together, like he’s a part of me that I’m missing and wouldn’t never have known it if it weren’t for him.

I think on the coin. I heard tell of coins, never expected to see one though. Strikes me it ain’t big enough to do all the things a man heard that it could do. I wonder if a coin was maybe just for one thing. Not like a shrub-hen, not like a ‘coon that can be cut up and sliced to buy maybe two, three things at once.

I remember how it felt in my hand. Hard, hot from the blacktop. There ain’t no way I could share it. It may be a man had to have one coin for each and every thing he wanted.

Perhaps before the ro-birds found ‘em, coins were just littered about like dreams waiting for a man to pick ‘em up. Somehow it don’t seem fair that we should have only the one dream between us. Perhaps Harich doesn’t dream.

Harich grunts, shifting beside me, never taking his eyes from the ‘coons dead and empty sockets.

I wipe the sweat from my face.

‘Do you dream?’ I ask him, hoping that the answer will be ‘What Dream, Bruv?

Harich places the ‘coons head gently on the top of his pack and wraps his long arms around hunched knees. He bends his head between them. The answer comes muffled and low as if even shifting the dust were sacred, his face buried and gone from sight.

‘Woman,’ he says.

Shit. I should’ve known he’d say that. That was how he’d ended up in the slammer. I was figuring on maybe hot water from a long tub to soak away the taste of holding pens and deserts …and a little of that cactus juice they have in Towns, the kind that makes your head fall apart and then puts it back together in a different kind of way and you can still feel the nails in the mornin’ but hell, it’s fun while it lasts.

Harich takes the coin from out of the pouch, licks it, holds it up and looks at me with the lightnin’ flashin’ way back in his eyes.

‘Woman,’ he says.

I pull out the knife, a flensing blade hooked like a beak.

‘Shave first,’ I say.

 

After dark we pick up the packs and set off toward the fires and the smoke from the Town. Harich is scraped naked and trembling in the thin desert air. The Town’s a mile or more off and spans a ridge so it’s hard to tell where the fires leave off and the stars begin with their flickerin’ an’ all. The desert’s black as sky and the hot wind’s whistled back to some hole in the ground from where it’ll leap out again tomorrow an’ suckin’ with the heat to take a mans last drop of fluid down to his bones.

I guess I been lucky that way, with Harich. Harich can smell water a mile away. Old water, new water. He can tell it right off. When he gets close he can even smell water buried right there under the sand, sat waiting away from the heat for a man to dig. Some days we just set and pushed our hands into the quiet cold to soak the parch from our skin.

For once Harich pads along silently beside me, the soft bustle of his breathing the only sound in the dark, deep, desert night. Off to sunset, lightning cannons back up to the sky, flashing the underneath of the clouds. I see the answer in Harichs’ eye. I count the seconds…four…five…a soft rumble sounds deep in Harichs’ chest. His mind’s away, thinking, dreamin’.

I feel him dark and animal beside me in the night. He smells of hot dust and somethin’ else. Then I realise it’s the smell of my own fear, driftin’ up and fillin’ my nostrils now the wind’s died. Fear of Harich, fear of Town, fear of being banged up and fear of tomorrow. Maybe that’s how a man stays alive. Maybe he’s just too afraid to die.

 

We hit the first shacks barely out of the desert with wide spaces between ‘em full of nothin’ but the night. Harich and me, we drift in and out like black smoke in a tar pit.

We keep out of the light. Harich ain’t afraid of fire, I’m afraid to let ‘em see him. The way he looks, it ain’t pretty.

I park him in an empty hut about a third of the way in. Three sides are stood but the fourth bangs across the front tippin’ the roof edge up like it’s pointin’ at the stars. In the corner away from the fires it’s pitch. Harich melts into the shadows. I take the ‘coon pouch from his pack and tip it out into my hand. The coin takes the firelight before I slip it inside the hollow of my cheek and push it down against my lower jaw, safe from trick-johns and slitters. Harich’s hand comes out the shadow like it’s cut off at the wrist, like it’s floatin’ in the dark, and grabs the band of my pants.

‘Bruv?’

‘Yeah, Bruv. I won’t be long.’

I pat the hand where it grips like an eagle on a flag.

‘You gotta stay here. Promise me you’ll stay here.’

He doesn’t speak. His breath whiffles in and out rapidly and then settles like it does when he’s thinkin’.

‘Ok, Bruv.’

I know he’ll stay. He thought about it. It ain’t like one of those things he does when he says OK right away and you just know his head’s full of skips and jumps and this and that and turn your back and he’s off somewhere stumblin’ an’ snufflin’.

‘Bruv?’

His voice seems deeper comin’ in from the dark. I like the dark. It settles Harich.

‘Woman, Bruv?’

Oh hell. I thought I’d got him off that kick.

‘No, Bruv. Food. Eats. Cactus juice.’

There is a faint rumble. Back there in the dark, I think I see… no … just sparks in my head. I slip away.

‘Back soon, Bruv.’

Town is full of shadows half-pressed against the huts and trailing people as they cross the open-spaced firelight. I walk further in, courtin’ the dark like a lover. There is a growing noise, like Grindworms, like rocks chasin’ each other down a scree and I look up expectin’ a Snufflepig then remember they’re programmed to skip the Townships an’ then remember again that the sound is only people goin’ about the things that people do in Towns and how quickly the desert helps you to forget.

I catch the arm of a man who streams out of the firelight pushing his shadow long and slanted across the ground. He stops and looks at me, his eyes like the ‘coons empty sockets in the dark. He’s so close I can feel him breathing, long, deep and steady. His arm hangs limp in my grasp. He turns his head and nods in the direction of a large shanty, piled two, maybe three storeys high, just the other side of the fire.

‘Over there,’ he says.

His voice is dead like the night, like the spaces between the huts, like an echo in the desert.

‘What’s over there?’

‘Whatever you need. Whatever you got. It’s all the same. All ends up right over there.’

His arm slides through my fingers. He breaks away into the night and is gone.

I move around an edge of the firelight until I’m stood outside the shanty. The walls are some kind of wavy tin and where it doesn’t fit right the gaps are ablaze with light. A large tube sticks out through the roof and I see heat and sparks pourin’ out into the night. Around the back I hear the steady putter of an alcohol generator, almost lost against the rumble of voices from inside. I find the door and slip through the sackcloth drape into the heat and the light and the noise.

In the centre of the room a huge tube comes down out of the ceiling and beneath it there’s a brick hearth with flames shootin’ up sparks and dirt. The tube glows red hot for about five feet before it disappears into the ceiling. The heat from it’s like the noon-day sun. The bottom of the tube is turned out into a rim and a kid is flippin’ coon steaks and pushing root vegetables around on the glowing metal. The smell knots my empty stomach.

Nobody looks at me. I stand for a minute an’ let the heat suck the desert night out of my bones. Across the room there’s a counter with bottles of cactus juice and what looks like clear water except I know it’s wood alcohol …and a man never sees more’n his first drink of that.

The room is full of people, mostly men, talkin’ and not lookin’ an’ mindin’ never more than small amounts of each others business. A woman grabs my arm from behind.

‘What can I get you?’

My throat catches when I look at her. Faded as a centre line. Thirty five. Lost looking. Filthy. Some teeth, mostly round the front. Not pretty. Never was.

My voice comes back like a shadow in the heat and light.

‘Cactus juice.’

‘What you got?’ she says.

‘What do I need?’

‘Somethin’. Anythin’.’

‘Well, I got somethin’.’

‘What you got?’ she says.

‘Nothin’, I guess.’

‘Then that’s what you’re gettin’.’

‘Hold on,’ I say, ‘What about this?’

I retrieve the coin with my tongue from the inside of my cheek and poke its milled edge wet and glistening between my teeth. Just a glimmer so she can see I ain’t kiddin’.

Her eyes grow big and round like bloodshot moons.

She slaps her hand to my mouth and growls.

‘For Christ’s sake put that away. You want to get yourself skinned?’

She takes my hand. Hers feels hard and horny and not like I’d sort of expected.

‘Come with me,’ she says.

She takes me to a corner. We duck through a drape and suddenly we’re climbing stairs in total darkness and I look through a chink in the tin sheets and there are the stars right out over the desert away from the glow of the fires. We duck through another and into a room that’s lit so bright it hurts my eyes. The tube runs up through this one too. The heat is unbearable to an outsider like myself. A tall, lean man sits behind a small desk up against the far wall. His clothes are sharper and better cut and more like the old style than any I’ve seen in a while. Behind him, a curtain is drawn across a window against the night. Two other men lounge on chairs at either side of the drape we came through. The tall man folds a book shut and puts it beneath the desk out of sight. He looks up without smiling.

‘Hello, Manny.’

The woman speaks quietly but her hand trembles in mine.

‘Sorry, Mr Dee, but I thought you’d better see this right away.’

The man continues, unsmiling.

‘See what, Manny?’

The woman nudges me, pushing me towards the desk.

‘Show him.’

I turn around. The men by the door are sittin’ upright now. The one on the right is gettin’ the balls of his feet beneath him. His weight shiftin’ almost unnoticeably.

I wear my brightest smile.

‘Show him what?’

I feel a knife point sharp against my ribs. I look down. It’s hers.

‘Show him. Show him the coin.’

The man behind the desk starts to rise.

‘A coin?’

‘Looks like gold, too,’ says the woman, ‘Kind of hard to tell in the firelight though.’

I retrieve the coin and spit it into my hand. I hold it up high, the spread eagle flashing in the heat and the light.

‘You mean this?’

For an instant their eyes are gripped like the flag. I twist, turn, my hand comes away from hers, free, as the coin slips back into my cheek and the knife comes away from her hand and into mine as if she’d pushed it there.

The man from the right lunges across, hands reaching for my throat. I fade around the tube into the waiting arms of Mr Dee. I elbow him good and hard, drop, turn out of his grip and swing him by one arm around and back into the tube. His clothes melt and stick to the metal. I see the back of his hair catch fire.

I wonder where the third man is, then I see him sprawled into the corner with the woman called Manny, blood flowing dark between them with Manny shuffling hard to get out from under. The first man comes back around. He stops to pull Dee, burning, from the tube. I hit the draped window feet first, fall ten feet then hit, bounce, slide and roll from the tin roof of the shanty into the black dust by the generator. Dee’s screams echo in my ears. I watch him topple forwards from the same window, clothes blazing like a falling star. His first bounce showers sparks back up into the night sky. He hits the floor beside me and lays still. The fire sputters out. A hand snakes into my hair and drags me flailin’ backwards into the shadows.

Bastard!’ she says, ‘Stupid, stupid Bastard!’

I realise then that my breathin’ has stopped, and I fall winded into the dark edge of the shanty. Manny pulls a loose tin sheet across in front of us and lays tight against me. Her cheek is up against my lips and nose. She smells like a week-dead ‘coon. Pretty soon there’s a commotion and a lot of voices and nothing, it seems, from the man on the ground.

The voices go away, draggin’ somethin’ heavy. After a while, Manny slides the sheet away and pulls me off into the dark away from the people millin’ at the front of the shanty. We head out into the desert then skirt back around to where I left Harich. I approach the hut from the shadows, keepin’ Manny behind me.

‘Harich?’

‘F’ Chris’sakes!’ says Manny, ‘What kind of a name’s that?’

‘Don’t matter none,’ I say, ‘We’re brothers.’

I hear the whiffle of Harich’s wakin’ breath.

‘Bruv?’

‘Yeah.’

I hear him sniff the dead air.

‘Woman, Bruv?’

Oh Hell.

‘Yeah. I guess.’

I pull Manny into the dark of the shelter.

‘Say hello to Harich.’

She moves closer to the shadow in the corner of the hut, pushes her hands slowly into the night-space.

‘It’s ok,’ I say, ‘You can touch him.’

Her hand draws back quickly.

‘Kind of stubbly,’ she says.

Harich sits quiet, lets her touch him again.

‘Kind of strange,’ she says.

‘Nah, that’s just Harich,’ I say, ‘He’s different, is all.’

She looks up at me, eyes lit by a star no more than a passin’ spark.

‘Thought he was your brother?’

‘Well, yeah. Sort of…’

‘He’s a mutant! I ain’t touchin’ no mutant!’

I grab her wrists until she calms down.

‘He ain’t no mutant. Doc in the pen said he was a throwback, and that’s what makes him special. That’s Harich.’

‘You’re sure he ain’t no mutant?’

‘Doc says he’s…’ I pause to get my mouth around the words, ‘Nee-and-earth-all-man.’

‘Sounds kind of homely,’ she says.

‘Well, I guess by daylight you could call him that.’

Harich shuffles around in the dark. His breath whiffles in and out rapidly like he’s tryin’ to say somethin’. Like he does when he knows it’s goin’ to make me mad. His hand reaches out of the shadow and touches Manny gently on the shoulder.

She sits bolt upright.

His voice breaks out of the dark.

‘Woman, Bruv?’

‘Hell no! Not for nothin’!’ she says, ‘An’ I ain’t ‘Woman’. The name’s Manny.’

I lift Harich’s hand from her shoulder. It disappears back into the dark.

‘What the Hell kind of a name’s that?’

Manny edges away from the dark in case the hand comes back.

‘Was Mr Dee. He gave it me. Said it’s like short for Mannequin. Said I was a store bought dummy.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s in the book. The one under his desk. Called it a dickshunary. Said it’s full of the old words, like the ones that pulled us down. An’ he said it helped him remember how it must have been once and how they could push us up again if only more of us remembered.’

‘Kind of like the coin, maybe?’

‘I used to rook the ‘johns while they were asleep, go through their packs an’ all. Dee said if I could find him a coin …showed me one in a picture all gold-lookin’ and shiny  …said it would buy me out of here.’

I watch her face fall haggard in the firelight.

‘Where would you go?’ I say.

‘Don’ know,’ she says, ‘Twenty years ago it might have mattered. Was just a dream, but boy you killed it good.’

‘Then why ‘d you help me?’

She looks up and the shadows hide the lines in her face. I see a dark patch on the rough tunic near her left shoulder.

‘Don’ know,’ she says, ‘Maybe I thought you was just too stupid to die. As if there ain’t enough stupidity in the world.’

I laugh softly.

‘An’ I thought I was just too afraid.’

‘You ain’t afraid to be stupid,’ she says.

I put out my hand to touch the dark patch on her tunic. She paws away my hand.

‘Got nicked in all the fun. Tain’t much. Can I see the coin?’

Her eyes go big and round in the flickerin’ firelight as I pull the coin from out my cheek. I hold it up and turn it slowly, watchin’ the light and dark play over it.

‘Can I hold it?’ she says.

‘Not ‘less you can get us some food. An’ maybe a little of that Cactus Juice.’

She gives me a look like I was a new disease and then she’s off duckin’ the light across the compound. Harich sits quiet. The tension is comin’ in waves from out the dark.

‘Soon, Bruv. I say.

Manny returns half-dragging an old beat-up pack.

‘They’re all outside the Canteen stomping Dee into the dust. Guess he weren’t ever’bodys favourite. I went in at the back. It was easy.’

The patch on her tunic looks bigger but the food smells wonderful. I pull cooked meat out the pack and push it into the shadow. Harich takes it gently from my fingers and for a while we sit quiet and eat.

Manny reaches into the pack for a bottle of wood alcohol. She pulls up her tunic. Her breast hangs low, and dark with blood. She washes it from the bottle. Her skin is pale and the lines on her face etch deep as the alcohol seeps into the wound. It don’t look much, but you never know what the blade’s pushed inside. She drops the tunic and wipes her hands on the hem.

‘Let me see the coin.’

I slip it from the pouch on Harich’s pack and hold it out to her.

‘Here.’

She presses it to her lips, presses it cool against her forehead.

‘It ain’t every day you get to hold your dream,’ she says.

I sit quiet for a time as she sways gently on her knees. Her eyes are tight shut, lips workin’, mouth saying silent things into the firelight. I hear Harich breathing softly behind her.

‘What about Harich’s dream?’ I say.

‘No,’ she says, eyes still tight shut.

‘You done worse things.’

Her eyes spring open, she lowers the coin into her other hand, grips it tightly.

‘How you know what I done?’

The tin feels cold and hard against my back.

‘I been round ‘most as long as you. You done what we all done. What had to be done.’

Her eyes close like two black holes in the sculpture of her face.

‘Alright.’

I touch her forehead gently.

‘Thanks.’

She brushes my hand away and looks kind of scared, lines tightenin’ in her face, ‘Only if I can carry the coin.’

I shrug, ‘What ‘bout when we leave?’

Her eyes catch with the fire, ‘You think I’m stayin’? Might s’well die right now.’

‘Ok.’

The coin’ll be safe with her. Out in the desert it won’t mean a thing and she’ll die without Harich to find water. She slips the coin inside her cheek.

Harich’s hand reaches out and touches her gently. His fingers curl around her waist from behind.

She stiffens.

‘It’s ok,’ I say, ‘While ever I’m here.’

She leans forward into the light, spreadin’ her fingers in the dust.

Harich draws her slowly back into the shadows until only her face remains. I hear the rustle of her tunic and Harich’s breath lift like the morning wind.

Her eyes snap wide, her mouth a cavern in the glow of her face.

She cries out. It’s a sad, animal kind of sound. Like you might hear way off in the night when you know somethin’s been took. I put my hand out towards her. She looks at me and I see, way off in the back of her eyes, that same animal lightnin’. I back off into a corner of the hut and the only things that exist are the sounds of Harich takin’ and the crackle of firelight on her face.

She throws up her head.

Her throat rattles like a ro-birds wings and in that instant I see a chink of light disappear down her throat.

We take her with us.

 

Two days later we get the coin back. Two more after that and we leave Manny sittin’ in a wreck by the road burnin’ up with fever and shakin’ and the blood flowin’ all down the front of her tunic with no sign of stoppin’.

There’s a smell about her that we all know. Harich looks up at me, eyes wide.

‘No,’ I say.

We’ve not gone far when a Snufflepig drifts by and snatches her up, wreck and all, grindworms chainsawing away on the wind. A ro-bird comes close, flits over us then returns to the flock.

‘Hell, Harich.’

He stops, waits for me to catch up, doesn’t look back.

‘She got her dream. She’s well out of there.’

The soft slap, slap of bare feet falls in beside me.

‘And you got yours.’

I fold my fingers tight around the bright, hard coin.

‘Guess there’s just mine left now.’

Harich grunts.

‘Bruv?’

‘Don’t I got one too, Harich?’

He stops beside me.

‘What dream, Bruv?’

‘Hell, Harich, if I told you that somebody might go an’ make it happen. An’ then it won’t be a dream no more. Might as well give up right now. Get on out there. Find me some water. You smell awesome.’

He trots out into the edge of the desert, head turnin’ this way an’ that, searchin’ for somethin’ only he knows how it smells. I unfold my fingers slowly and the coin falls into the soft dust.

I listen for the sound of dreams crashing.

Nothing.

The desert bends the wind around me, searchin’ out the water in my soul. I pick up my pace.

‘Hey, Harich. Wait for me.’

I never look back.