Skippy’s Worldby Frederick D. Rustam |
Table of Contents |
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| Chapter 1: Beyond the Blue Horizon |
Prologue
When the New Sun was born in the sky above the nearby city, journeyman carpenter Josef Melanowicz and his young son, Joe Jr. — better-known as “Skippy” — were working in the basement. Joe was teaching Skippy how to use a jigsaw to cut small pieces of wood without cutting off his thumb. Although the New Sun’s blast wave turned the basement windows into a hail of glass daggers, neither Josef was injured.
Josef’s wife and daughter were less fortunate. When they heard the old Civil Defense horns bellowing, they went to the big picture window in the living room and looked out to see what was happening.
Joe Sr. buried his wife and daughter at the end of the back yard, where there was less debris. He recovered his shotgun and took all the supplies he could find to the basement, where he and his son would live in the postnuclear world.
Caught
A chill wind blew brittle leaves through the debris-littered street at the entrance to the Colonial Park Shopping Center.
Skippy Melanowicz, now eighteen and feeling ruggedly independent, was scavenging in a hardware store when he heard the loud voices of an approaching puker (postnuclear) gang. He left by the store’s rear entrance and headed for a hideaway he’d built behind the Shopping Center’s long building.
* * *
He itched. But scratching wasn’t a good idea.
He kept still in the dusty dark. He had a cramp in his right leg, one that had bothered him for some time. He wondered if it might be some kind of disease. Such annoyances spoiled the pride he felt about hiding here in this clever hole. He had little enough to be proud of, now. He sat with his legs pulled to his chest, resting his chin on his knees. It was a stable position, if not a comfortable one. He thought of Indian yogis who sit in odd positions for hours. They had the comfort of belief. He believed only in the desirability of tomorrow.
No! His nose began to itch. A sneeze was on its way. By force of will he suppressed it, but he was rewarded for his effort with a trickle of mucus. He stuck out his upper lip so it would drip onto his knees. He breathed through his mouth to avoid snuffling.
The pukers were close, now. What’re they doing back here behind the stores?
He was well-hidden in the void he’d made for himself in a debris pile. His hidey-hole was covered by a grimy piece of dented aluminum siding that he usually held fast from inside with a cable so it couldn’t easily be lifted from the outside. But in his hurry to hide from the pukers, he’d forgotten to secure the inside end of the cable.
Someone’s poking in the pile!
Before he could react with anything other than fear, his cover was pulled aside and he found himself staring into the cerulean eyes of an angel. She looked at him for a few seconds, as if she couldn’t believe her luck, then gave him a broad smile. Instead of being alarmed, he was besotted.
The girl turned into what she really was: a puker squeeze. “Here he is!” she shouted to the others. “I win!” Her angelic smile became a smirk.
“Some angel you are,” he muttered.
The Blue Horizon
Skippy’s leg-chain clinked as he wearily climbed the last steps to the rooftop of the Horizon Building, sentimentally known to pukers as the “Blue Horizon.” Each step stretched the chain to its limit. The vista from the building’s roof normally made the slog worth the effort. But not today. She was on duty there, and he was her relief.
“You’re relieved,” he mumbled, sourly.
She handed Skippy the lookout’s binoculars and walkie-talkie, smiling sweetly at the grunt she’d added to her gang’s retinue of slaves, as if she were certain that he had forgotten that day at the debris pile. Her slim fashion-model’s body, pretty face, and dark-blonde hair gathered against the rooftop winds made her seem out of place, as if she were just slumming in this damaged world and could leave it in her time-machine whenever she desired.
She shivered in the same ragged shorts and T-shirt that most puker girls wore in summer, even though it was now chilly October. A gust of cold air made Skippy button the top of his scarred leather jacket.
Bonnie arose from the old lawn chair the lookouts used. They were supposed to walk the perimeter of the roof and remain alert, but they correctly believed it unlikely that one of The Duke’s lieutenants would climb eleven floors of stairs to check on them.
With a casual “Thanks,” she glided to the stairwell without looking back. He began to walk the perimeter. He was determined to show responsibility, even if he was a slave. Lookout duty was considered one of the few privileged tasks allowed cooperative grunts. It was a lot easier than debris clearing.
Bonnie stopped. “Do you still hate me, Skippy?” she inquired, plaintively.
“Shouldn’t I?” he replied, leaving the matter open.
She hesitated as if to discuss the matter, then disappeared down the stairway. Skippy paused at a corner of the roof and stared blankly into the panorama of ruin that was his hometown, a suburban consequence of the city’s New Sun. The familiar desolation he saw now seemed almost comforting.
The Duke
The Duke was a thug like the other pukers, but better at it. His territory was widely-known and respected as “Duketown.”
He’d forcefully amalgamated the local gangs and had located his Operations Center in the landmark Horizon Building, a structure that had been intended as statement of suburban ascendancy. The building had lost some of its expensive, blue-glazed brickwork and many of its windows to the blast wave from the New Sun, but The Duke made some repairs and moved his trusted minions into the lower floors. At the end of each working day, he ascended to his regal quarters on the top floor, where he kept his goods and his concubines.
Skippy was on the Blue Horizon’s roof to keep a eye out for The Duke’s enemies. Marauding puker gangs from other suburbs were a constant danger. Skippy wondered how far it was to nature’s blue horizon. His dad had told him that the horizon changed, depending on how high you were. From here, Skippy could almost see freedom.
Freedom’s Prospects
He slept the sleep of the just. She roamed the night like a cat.
Bonnie stood on tiptoes to make sure it was Skippy in the upper bunk. She gently shook him with one hand and kept the other ready to cover his mouth if he gave a cry of surprise. He awoke reluctantly. Dreams of good old times were an escape from his dreary life of subservience. When saw Bonnie shaking him, his eyes widened. What’s she want?
“Shhhh. Do you want to run with me.”
“Huh?” Her query seemed a cruel joke.
“I feel guilty about ratting you out. I want to make up for it. Besides, I don’t want to die in Duketown. Do you believe me?”
Drunk with sleep, he replied, “Yeah. I believe you.” But he wasn’t really sure... the stories he’d heard about her. “You owe me, Bonnie.”
“Tomorrow night this time, I’ll have a chain cutter. You’ve got to be ready to move fast.”
“Who else is running?”
“Just Mel. He’s getting us the cutter.”
Melvin was a geeky puker whom The Duke especially enjoyed bullying. Mel accepted His Highness’s abuse to keep himself free from a grunt’s shackles. Nobody knew why The Duke picked on the guy. Mel and Bonnie were an item, even though serious affairs between pukers were officially frowned on. Girls and women were for general use — except The Duke’s.
“Okay. I’ll be ready.” Skippy briefly fantasized settling down with Bonnie on a distant farm, where there was plenty of food and real freedom, not shackled freedom. But he knew he could never live anywhere with her.
“Good.” Bonnie crept back through the men’s dorm with the stealth of a panther, leaving an infatuated Skippy to admire her even more.
Escape would be easy, at first. The pukers didn’t closely guard their grunts. Their shackles slowed runaways so they could more easily be hunted. The Duke liked a good chase. When hobbled grunts ran, His Highness and some of his lieutenants hounded after them. Scuttlebutt was that runaways didn’t get very far. The Duke always returned from a hunt with someone’s head. He had his “mortician” grunt boil and prepare it for the collection he displayed in the formerly-elegant lobby of the Blue Horizon. Each skull signified a successful hunt.
Skeptical grunts claimed The Duke kept a separate collection of old skulls so he would always have one to display in case a hunt failed. Others said that his skullboiler was an old geezer who hated kids and ate their noses, ears, and cheeks after he boiled their heads — another bogeyman in a world of terrors.
Skippy knew why Bonnie was bringing Mel along. It wasn’t because he could steal a chain cutter or because she loved him. It was because, like her, he had the wasting disease. “Besides, I don’t want to die in Duketown,” she’d said. Promiscuity within the puker community insured that all the pukers and their squeezes who didn’t care about their futures had it. Disease victims in their final stages were called “zombies,” a cruel appelation for the times. These were banished from Duketown to die out of sight. Skippy heard stories about zombies secretly returning, hiding in the ruins and being fed by sympathetic friends. The Duke didn’t bother to hunt them; they weren’t trophy material.
Skippy fell uneasily back to sleep. He was racked with uncertainty about his probable future as a runaway in the farmlands with two zombies-to-be.
Confrontation
The runaways didn’t quite make it to the farmlands before they experienced their moment of truth.
A bright half moon was many times reflected in rainwater puddles as they approached the limits of The Duke’s territory where his writ ceased and that of country folk began. Mel splashed through the water carelessly, as if he didn’t care who heard him. Bonnie shushed him, but he ignored her. To Skippy, the guy’s intransigence seemed a crude denial that he wasn’t the subordinate member of his and Bonnie’s relationship.
Mel, a skinny, self-confident thug with a bad complexion, had the manners of a kid who’d been a petty criminal before the New Sun created puker gangs. He was known for being shrewd, not for being smart. Some believed that The Duke kept Mel on a string to match wits with him. Mel couldn’t quote Shakespeare or name the capital of Burundi, but he knew pretty well what was happening in Duketown.
But even tyrants grow tired of their toys. Mel took himself too seriously and became increasingly irritating to his master. He felt that it was time for him to move on, although he dreaded what would happen to him if he were captured in a hunt.
Skippy asked Bonnie, “Do you think we got away clean?” He was apprehensive about the runaway hunt stories he’d heard. Her answer gave him no relief.
“Probably not,” she brutally replied. Mel cackled and scuffed his boots on the wet pavement.
“Why?”
“The Duke has a weird way of knowing about runaways, Skippy. Don’t ask me how, but he does. We’re testing him. If he wins, we lose big.”
Mel scowled. “What’s the matter, babes? Don’t you want your headbone to occupy a place of honor in the Blue Horizon’s lobby?”
“Only if yours is next to mine, love.”
Skippy suppressed a smile. They trudged on, he alone glancing behind them for pursuers. The dark of night afforded him little confidence.
* * *
Above the ruins, Skippy spotted a tall, white silo on a nearby farm. They were moving down a grandiosely named street in a housing development that had been finished just in time to be smashed by New Sun. Some of the houses had been set afire by the blinding flash that preceded the blast. Burned lumber stuck out of the ruins ominously in the moon’s silvery light.
“I see a silo. We must be close to the farmlands, now.”
“Around this corner...” advised Bonnie, who had plotted their course from the Blue Horizon-dominated center of Duketown. “... and we’ll be close to a forest. They can’t easily spot us there.”
“What about The Duke’s dogs?”
Skippy never received an answer. They turned at an intersection — and stopped dead in their tracks. In the middle of the street, slouched in the old lawn chair from the roof of the Blue Horizon, was an unmistakable figure. Next to him, cradling his beloved M1 carbine, stood his faithful bodyguard, Weasel.
“Time’s up,” drawled Mel. “We lost.”
The Duke, whose real name was unknown because he’d disposed of almost everyone who knew it, had come to the suburbs when his back-country family migrated, looking for employment. He quickly lost his hillbilly accent and acquired an urbanity that, for a while, served to disguise his innate psychopathy. In appearance, he was unremarkable: of average height, weight, and general appearance. He forswore loud clothing. He was balding, and he covered it with a Smokey Bear hat. He went about his Dukedom unarmed and unafraid.
“The Duke only needs one headbone, love,” Bonnie reminded Mel. “Yours’ll do.” She remained calm and seemingly fearless in the ducal presence, but Mel fidgeted. Skippy shook uncontrollably. This was the first time he’d dared to disobey his captors. He knew how they reacted to disobedience.
“What now?” he whispered.
Weasel heard Skippy’s question and aimed his carbine at them. In its magazine were eight dumdum rounds.
“We wouldn’t get three yards,” replied Bonnie.
“Well, well, well... if it isn’t my old pal, Melvin.” The Duke’s almost-friendly greeting confirmed Bonnie’s speculation: it was Mel’s head that was going into the Skullboiler. She and Skippy were just dogmeat.
Mel held his sharp tongue, not wanting to anger the Big Guy.
“Who’s that with you, jerko? Let’s see... There’s the Bonnie lassie. Haven’t I been good enough to you, girl?... And there’s young Skippy of the trash pile. Are you three thinking of doing a little farming, or just out for a stroll in the moonlight?”
Mel’s voice broke as he backpedalled, “We were checking out your security, Duke... weren’t we, guys?” Bonnie and Skippy condemned him by their silence. Both hoped The Duke would guess that Mel had talked them into running.
His Highness scowled. “Really? You’re doing it for the first and last time, then.” He grinned like a Halloween jack-o-lantern carved by a sadist.
“The skull geezer’s been waitin’ for this guy, Boss,” snarled Weasel.
“Right you are, my man. I think I’ll have him boil Mel’s noggin while he’s still attached to it. Lots of guys and gals would like to see that.”
Weasel laughed so hard that he lowered his gun. What happened next surprised everyone.
Mel rushed him and grabbed the gun’s barrel. All were transfixed by the swift, unexpected action. Instead of releasing his beloved weapon and punching Mel where it hurt, Weasel held on to it with both hands and tried to aim it. When both combatants fell, Mel pulled a knife and stabbed Weasel’s arms to make him let go of the gun.
As Skippy and Bonnie watched, their mouths agape, The Duke leaped from his chair, turned, and ran down the street. Being armed was beneath his dignity as a gang lord — running for his life wasn’t. Overconfidence may have been his weakness, but he hadn’t lost his instinct for survival.
Mel was so full of rage that he made a fatal mistake. After he pulled the carbine from Weasel’s hands and left him bleeding on the pavement, he ran after his nemesis, screaming his anger.
“You coward! Let’s see what happens to your head, now!
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Bonnie and Skippy dropped to the pavement as Weasel shakily emptied a small ankle pistol into his attacker. They saw Mel stagger and fall into the overgrown grass of a former lawn. He tried to aim the carbine at Weasel, but he couldn’t pull himself up enough to do it. He slumped, moaning. Weasel screamed, “Your head’s mine, you little twerp! I’m gonna boil it myself!”
Bonnie ran to Mel and took the carbine from his dying grasp. She aimed it at Weasel who lay groaning and cursing, then she strapped it around her shoulder and tried to assist Mel. He was beyond help. A lucky head-shot had spoiled his skull and preserved Weasel’s reputation as a marksman.
Skippy joined his two companions. Bonnie was splotched with the bad blood of her former lover. She stared through her tears at Skippy.
“He’s gone, Bonnie. Let’s get out of here before The Duke returns with his goons and his dogs.”
“Mel saved us.”
“I know. He did real good,” allowed Skippy. “We gotta go, now.”
* * *
As they pushed their way through the undergrowth of the forest, on their way to an uncertain fate in the farmlands, Skippy considered his new situation. They were fleeing an implacable foe. He was running with a resourceful girl, an iron-willed angel with a gun and a determination to survive. But she had a fatal flaw, one she could easily pass to him if he weakened. She was a soiled angel he dared not love, now or ever.
Bonnie needed sanctuary.
Copyright © 2010 by Frederick D. Rustam
