Blackfish City(38)
People still came with cameras, in those days, telling us they were going to Tell the Whole World about what had happened to us, what was still happening to us. The poor oppressed nanobonders! Helpless victims of a savage slaughter! They came, young and full of energy and faith, not to blame for having spent their lives in enclaves of safety when the rest of us were sunk deep in utter shit. They always seemed dissatisfied with us, sad we weren’t more grateful, resentful of our sullen faces that ranged between apathy and hostility. Offended that we didn’t smile, shake hands, make friendly small talk, treat them with the openness of spirit that must have been common where they came from. It wasn’t their fault that they were ignorant of how the world really worked. They didn’t see how courtesy assumes a certain degree of common ground. Everyone can afford to be nice to each other, when no one is trying to exterminate anybody.
They thought we’d befriend them. Every one of them thought we’d make them one of us. They wanted to be bonded, to be special, to fly with eagles or howl with wolves. They saw my orca and thought I was a god. I wasn’t a god. Gods can’t be killed. Gods don’t live like refugees, watching their loved ones murdered.
None of us bothered to explain it. They wouldn’t have understood, wouldn’t have believed. They wanted so badly to think that what they were doing would make a difference, that once they Told the Whole World something would happen, someone would save us. We were a Good Story. They thought that was enough. Victims of the Multifurcation. One of thousands of communities trying to do its own thing, being pursued by another one (or more) of those communities, with the federal government completely gutted of its ability to protect anyone. The beast was starved, its claws and fangs plucked, the Supreme Court unable to muster much respect for its rulings ever since the bombings forced it into hiding.
They didn’t understand, these pretty kids, but they’d find out, sooner or later. And there was no point in befriending them, opening up our hearts, because sooner or later they’d be leaving. And never coming back. When they stopped coming we were relieved, and sorry for whatever new poor fucks were the latest Good Story. Alone, we didn’t feel the need to keep our faces hard, our emotions buried, our fear fettered.
In the mornings it would be the worst, when Ora would bring the kids to the school that was barely worthy of the name, one room where every child from five to fifteen sat and tried their best to learn from a man who’d never taught a day in his life before the troubles came, and we hunters would head out ourselves, sometimes only six or seven of us, our animals scraggly and thin and hungry, their friends gone, their hunger and their loneliness echoing heavy inside our heads.
That’s when I felt it so hard I thought my heart would break. When I knew how fragile it was, what we had, what was left, and how swiftly it could slip through our fingers.
And then I’d come home from the hunt and see the massive bird circling in the sky, Ora’s black-chested buzzard eagle, its impossibility, its magnificence, and think that if such a perfect creature could come into existence maybe we had half a shot, maybe the world wasn’t fundamentally, existentially fucked.
They went on and on, those abandoned suburbs, those rows of emptied houses where the water was poisoned or the highways gone, those communities that depended on dismantled transit systems, jobs in cities that had become savage hellholes, each one hosting a series of small-scale civil wars that added up to mass evacuations, warlord takeovers, synth-biowarfare retaliation. We stayed in those beautiful houses for as long as we could, and then we moved on.
We’d been in that particular village for six months then, and there were only forty of us. Six months back, before the last surprise slaughter, we’d been a hundred. A year before, more than two hundred. Again and again they found us.
Sometimes we’d meet other communities, nomads like ourselves or settlers clinging hard to a single block or spread of buildings. Some of them were awful, although the worst of the warlords stayed south of the old border from a malignant, terminal case of patriotism, which was part of why we fled to Canada in the first place. Most of those we met up there were decent, good people trying to survive, usually with some kind of unusual belief or practice or technological thing that had gotten them ostracized from wherever they came from. Once in a while, when the winter was bad or a crop needed working and our communities decided to link up temporarily, we’d talk internally about opening up to them. Admitting them. Sharing our blood; letting them bond.
Blasphemy, unthinkable. Some of us, the thought of it made our skin crawl. But that wasn’t why I said no. I said no because sharing our blood meant passing on a death sentence.
We knew they’d never stop. They’d find us, they’d come for us. The Scourge, the Plague, the Pestilent, they called themselves all kinds of names they thought sounded scary, but we knew them for what they were: poor dumb hungry fools like us, who’d had everything taken from them, just like us, whose anger turned outward because it’d been carefully stoked that way. Powerful people made bad decisions that brought the whole country sputtering to a bloody standstill, thousands of people who had been part of the problem, caused something catastrophically bad to happen, and every one of them found a scapegoat. A few got caught, sent to jail, strung up, kidnapped, and beheaded on the net for all to see, but mostly the Bad Guys sicced their victims against each other and snuck away while the poor fucks were scratching each other’s eyes out.