Walking the Ruins

Feeding Sven, and an Epilogue

"Boah, boah, boah," I say, and Sven eyes me with blue-eyed amazement, opening his mouth. I seize the opportunity and feed him a spoonful of apple puree. To my great relief, he starts to chew it, methodically working on it with his single tooth, his first one.

The sunshine makes his fine, blond hair glitter like tendrils of gold. The wooden wall of the house at my back is warm.

He stops his chomping and looks at me thoughtfully as if pondering the mysteries of the strange world he has been born into. "Boah!" he suddenly says, the word accompanied by an avalanche of puree pouring over his chin, his clothes, and my lap.

"Eeek!" Anna, sitting by my side, laughs. "Being a godmother seems to have its risks."

"Yup," I say and clean up the mess with a striped sock. It seems to be the same sock that Rose used to dry dishes with, way back in the house at the lake, nearly one year ago.

So much has happened in that year, so much has changed.

Sven's face lights up as he sees his mom. Rose is coming back from the fields, holding some carrots in her hand—green fronds and orange, dirt-caked bodies.

I gratefully swap the baby for the vegetables. I have felt his belly tense a few minutes ago, and it's time for his mother to do some sanitary inspection.

I carry the carrots to the communal water trough for washing. Two village girls sit by its side. One of them dips a leaved twig into it, then pulls it out and shakes it in the other's face, sprinkling her with drops of liquid. The victim shrieks and runs off. The one with the twig follows, laughing.

We have not been able to remove the chips. But Kevin discovered that the machine Robert used for the implanting has a function to disable them. This worked pretty well for the kids—they soon started to show feelings and got accustomed to them within weeks. For the grown-ups, it was a different matter. In some cases, months passed before they grew more animated, and then some of them seemed unable to cope. We had a number of incidents. Two men got into a fight over a girl. One woman fell into a depression. And there was one suicide.

For Steve and Jenny, it was easier, fortunately. Probably because their brains were already accustomed to handling emotions, their return to normalcy was quick. I was relieved, in particular because Jenny was pregnant, too. She had a girl in spring. It was a difficult birth, nearly killing the mother and her child. It made it clear to me, once more, how alone we are. We only have each other. If we can't handle things by ourselves, we won't survive. 

Sometimes, I still see images of red. But now is not the time to dwell on them. I have made up my mind to do some surviving—I must not look back, but forward.

Surviving in the wilderness, killing. Savages that we are.

Having washed the carrots under the water running into the trough from a faucet, I return, passing Emma on the way. She's pregnant, too, just as Anna predicted, and she is due any time now. The village is experiencing a baby boom. It seems that mother nature has been waiting to have her way with the humans in these parts.

Emma gives me a nod while she's slowly waddling down the alley, her hands on her hips and her shoulders pushed back for equilibrium. Even though she doesn't talk much, I think she has forgiven me for killing her father. 

I haven't. But as I said, this is not the time to dwell upon the past.

I have been told that the relation between Emma and Jan had always been a difficult one, even before he opposed her friendship with Frankie.

Anyway, she gave me her pistol, only a few days after I shot Jan. Of her own volition, I never asked her for it. She did it front of everyone, just saying that I should have it. She looked relieved to be rid of it.

After that, Anna told me that this made me the leader of the group. I don't know. We never had any vote on that. I don't feel like being a leader, and I tell everyone that I'm not. But when I suggested that they all move out of the bunker and into the village, they obliged, with hardly any resistance.

I am a killer, and they have made me their chief. In spite of it. Or rather, because of it. We are the savages.

Looking out over the field I see a heron alighting close by. I stop to admire its elegance. Even though I've sometimes seen these animals while hunting, I've never killed one. It didn't feel right. I've come to think of them as guardians of this world.

It looks at me, head slightly cocked to one side as if it's judging me, weighing my worth to live in its world of ruins. I shrug, then I continue—I guess it will never tell me its verdict.

I arrive at the house I share with Rose and Kevin. He's not yet back from the Reduit, the bunker. He spends much of his time there, it's a tinkerer's paradise. Most of the equipment was maintained by Jan, who had taught no one how to run it. I guess that was part of how he kept himself in power. Few people really liked him, but they needed him to keep things running. Fortunately, the Holy Wiki—which turned out to be a kind of tablet computer that's still working—contains operating manuals for most of the installations.

Kevin's most recent passion is some radio equipment that's apparently connected to an array of antennas up in the mountains. He hopes to make it work again, to send a signal to those still babbling voices far, far away.

I have to cook dinner now. We'll have guests, Anna and her brother Carl. It took Carl some time to get used to 'the outside', but now he seems to have settled in. 

And he's cute.

We may be savages, but our lives feel so rich. 

I hardly think of the world we left, the world I grew up in. It seems unreal now, like an old black-and-white movie. I'll tell Sven about it when he's old enough. But for him, it will be nothing but a fairytale.

Sometimes, Rose still talks about the house on the lake, but she doesn't call it home anymore.

I stand in our door and take a look back at the village.

That's home now.

Then I enter, there are vegetables waiting to be chopped.