The Wall [Featured Story]

Chapter 2

He took a few more steps and emerged onto the town square. The fading light could not disguise the grime, the slowly rotting buildings and quickly rotting people. A pair of glassy eyes, half full of question half of sorrow, were staring at him and he dwelled there for a second seized in the orange flicker of her sadness.

She was pretty but bony and had the kind of withered face that comes from huffing solvent. A small boy was clutching at her knee burying his dirty face into the folds of her flowing dulled white dress. The boy took a glance from behind it with thumb in mouth before swiftly returning to safety. The woman's hand lay behind his head stroking the blonde hair he had inherited from her with a gentle yet frantic thumb.

'Francisco, is that you?' She said through tears.

Scott's motionless silence was her only answer. He had little sympathy for any huffer and it wasn't him whom she was crying for so he resumed his slow march in the squeaky fanfare of his suit. A tickertape parade of trash swirled around him caught in the warm evening wind. Scott was distant to any of the addicts whether their vice be alcohol, meds or solvent. He hated them all but most of all it was the huffers that repulsed him. It was the way that the solvent sent their skin gaunt and withered and the way their eyes yellowed and bulged. He didn't really see them as human any more and would be happy to see them all gone. Then of course, there was the sex fiends and those who looked for it with children and usually these were the children of the huffers. This was easier to ignore though for him and everyone, hidden away in back rooms, away from eyes and away from minds. Looking away is the easiest of things to do.

A few of the huffers and assorted drunks lay littered around the town square, collected in the shadows to morbidly watch the parade of volunteers. Other people were simply making their way home, taking fleeting guilty glances towards Scott. He hopelessly searched their faces for someone, anyone to take his place in that truck. There was no one kind enough or more realistically, that stupid. They didn't want to help. They didn't much care. They wanted water.

It was the height of the water shortage but then it was always the height of the water shortage, the perpetual and incrementally worsening water shortage. A water shortage that Scott could not remember the start of and was sure he would never see end. The growing need for water followed the growing heat and the growing desert. With the moisture collector yield, almost zero it was now the job of volunteers to search the abandoned cities for above all else water before the towns supply ran dry.

The huge and hugely complex apparatus sat in front of Scott on the town centre square and its tethered Balloon wavered high in the air above him. It seemed to taunt him, flying free while he was trapped. A pipe runs down from the balloon to the main body of the machine where any water vapour is condensed into drinking water after a filtration and decontamination process. In addition, a buried pipe sucks moisture from deep within the earth. It should have been the main source of water for the town but it was seemingly always under repair. 

I could fix it, he thought, I know I could, it's a machine and I know machines. I know how they work and I can learn if I have the chance. I could do it. It was too late for those thoughts now he was marching towards the truck.

Scott walked on and the orange reflection in the woman's eyes slowly grew to cover all. The buildings and people all lit up under the lowering fiery ball apart from the picking truck which seemed to absorb all colour and show itself in its true unceasing grayness. It was an old armoured truck with huge wheels and thick metal plating. A relic of the military, still going after the guns it was designed to withstand had stopped.

Standing next to the open side door of the truck was a tall skinny man beckoning Scott forward. He was dressed in a similar suit and mask to Scott's but his was green and clean. Hollowly and simply, he was known as the picking supervisor but every night he sent man after man and woman after woman to their deaths. As he was always masked and suited, no one knew who he was. He must have lived in town, shopped, ate and drank beside everyone else but at night, he pushed pickers out into the wastes to die. There were so many theories and wild accusations as to his identity but no one knew the truth but a select few. It was not wise to pry into the identity of a state employee anyway and really, what difference would it make. He like everyone else was just following orders.