Here's the second part of Chapter 3. I'll post Chapter 4 on Thursday. Don't forget you can just buy the whole ebook straight away for $1.25, using the links on the side.
Dave
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Back on the street below, we meet with the other members of our salvage team. Six of us climb, with our bags, onto the back of the truck that brought us here, while two more individuals climb into the cabin. As the truck edges through the cluttered streets of Southside, I ask the men around me about their stories — where they’ve come from, what they did, where they’re going. What I want to know is how these men feel about Mistress Sylvia and if they believe that Mecca can deliver on its promises. The problem is that I know that some of these people worship the Mistress and that they may consider my questioning treasonous, so I have to veil my enquiries in innocent conversation. I want to scope out the scale of opinions. I know from the meeting the previous night that there is some discontent, but that many of the men are too scared to voice this. If they get thrown out of Mecca, what do they do then?
Oliver, a thin man from Garfield, answers my prompt with a voice so deep it defies his body’s physical proportions. He tells me how he also saw the fireworks and came to Mecca because of a lack of other options. He admits to a feeling of bewilderment. “Everything seems too ordered at Mecca. It’s all too ordered when everything else around us is in such a mess. Like, it’s just so out of place.” As he says this, he looks around at the others in the truck, and tries to gauge their reactions. He’s said nothing traitorous yet, but he’s on the boundary of doing so. He skillfully invites voices of disagreement into the conversation, to prevent himself from going too far with his criticism.
But before that can happen, a friend of Oliver’s rushes to an unnecessary defense. “We ain’t complaining about the Mecca, you know. Things like Mecca are exactly what we need — we need a woman around. It’s that simple. We were unnerved is all, when we first arrived here.”
Myself, Hank, and an older man in glasses exchange uneasy glances. Most of us have a problem with the Mecca setup. Maybe this is an inherent sexism of ours, instilled by the society that raised us. Maybe this uneasiness is only a culmination of the desperate emotions that stem from the magnitude of bizarre events in the last few weeks. Now we can’t trust anything, so we suspect everything. And we’re always on the very edge of our seats.
The sixth man on the back of the truck, the redhead who directed the salvage operation, flushes annoyance. Initially I can’t tell if he’s expressing anger, unease, or embarrassment, but then he yells at us. “You know, you guys are fucking ungrateful. This is indignant! Mistress Sylvia is the only thing I can see right now that can save us — save us men — and it’s obvious why and it’s pretty fucking rich that you’ll all sit there and disagree.”
“I said that!” Oliver’s friend, a Caribbean man named Timothy, replies with disgust.
The thin man, Oliver, looks down, shamed by the redhead’s shaking stare, and the old man looks to Timothy, urging him to lead our defiant argument.
But the redhead shrugs off Timothy’s reply and resumes his tirade. “When Mistress Sylvia is our only hope, we do whatever the fuck she tells us to do. If that means calling her ‘Mistress’ — and I know that’s what you guys resent — then we fucking do it, else— else what are you doing here? Get out of the Mecca if you don’t like it and give yourself to the fucking dogs. Fuck off into the streets on your own. You’ll get shot down or starve, or if you’re really fucking lucky you’ll die an old man, with nothing, and alone, and that will be it.”
Timothy starts to yell back but stutters and halts. We’re relying on Mistress Sylvia right now. That much is undeniable. Forgive the cliché, but an act of rebellion would be biting the hand that feeds.
The aged man in glasses overcomes his bout of nerves and attempts to calm the situation with his paced and studied tone. “I’m already an old man, now with nothing, ok? So you calm down. Of course these guys are uneasy.” He waves his hand at us and stares the readhead square in the eye. “There’s one woman. One woman hoping to save everybody. And yeah there might be others elsewhere, but right now there’s just one, and she has an army of thirty, forty, maybe fifty men, all doing what she says. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean nothing wrong with her being in charge, I’m not sexist but,” (but people only ever say I’m not sexist but, or I’m not racist but, before they go ahead and say something sexist, racist, classist or any other -ist you can think of) “this just isn’t right, ok? Having a woman in charge. We’re all uncomfortable, we’re all uneasy, and we’re all, well, outright scared. So relax, will you? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all just scared about the future and our place in it. So just relax.”
There’s an awkward pause and then the redhead yells, far too loud and out of place, “No. Maybe you guys need to relax!”
The old man sighs. “Fine, ok,” he says. “Yeah— fine.” He stares out of the truck at the passing buildings, signaling an end to the conversation.
And so we sit in silence for the rest of the journey, watching the desolate, ruined streets roll by. The redhead silently fumes to himself and swears occasionally under his breath. We pass a smashed up antique store, stripped of goods. I’m amazed at the madness that gripped the city while we petered on the precipice of the abyss. I have to wonder at what use people thought they would find for antique Black Panther badges and Royal Dolton bone china tea sets.
*
Ten minutes later, the truck arrives back at Mecca. During our absence, men have cleared snow from the road outside the building, so that the chains on the truck’s wheels clank on the asphalt. Three men stand outside the building to meet our search party, and point to an alleyway where we can offload the supplies we’ve collected.
“Way to go!” one of the men calls as we drive by waving our overloaded bags.
We hand our things down from the back of the truck and proceed through the rear entrance of the building. Mistress Sylvia has stationed a guard at this door. He sits on a high stool, smiling at us, and rests a single-barreled shotgun across his lap. It appears that after yesterday’s bloodshed Mistress Sylvia has reassessed her open door policy.
The redhead walks into Mecca ahead of us, with two other men from the truck’s cab walking by his side. The four skeptics and I follow several yards behind.
“Gentlemen,” the guard says with a pleasant nod.
We pass by and head down the hallway into the courtyard, which is surrounded by the Mecca building on three sides and has a chain-link fence on the final length, bordering a narrow alleyway. Some more men are busy shoveling the snow from the courtyard while others build a collection of open-sided shelters with corrugated plastic roofs.
We dump the remains of our collected supplies in the yard and return indoors. Hank and I are about to walk upstairs, back to the common room, but Timothy grabs my wrist. “We’re having a poker game tonight,” he says, and gestures to another man at the rear of the yard. The man waves towards me on Timothy’s cue and then returns to his building task. “We were thinking you might like to join in. You and your friend of course.”
“That sounds great,” I reply. I’m flattered by Timothy’s open gesture of friendship. I guess that after the argument in the truck, he now knows he’s found allies in this desperate situation. “We’re picking up our things from Lawrenceville tonight,” I tell him, “so we could join in once we get back.”
“Ah, come on. That could take hours. You’re things aren’t going anywhere, so get them tomorrow.”
I agree with him. Hank, James, and I brought all of our essentials with us already. Our Lawrenceville hideout only contains food, books, keepsakes, and other items of no immediate importance. Besides the dog, that is. I tell Timothy that I’ll bring Hank with me, ten-thirty sharp. Ben, the dog, will be fine for one more night and James will just have to suck it up. He’s been acting like a dick lately anyway.
*
I leave Hank in the common room and return to our bedroom to find James sat on the edge of his bed.
“Long time, no see,” I joke, but with too little mirth. “How’s your day been?”
“I’ve been fixing some wiring. Fixing lights. Trying to get a generator to work.” He looks up with heavy eyes. “My dad taught me to do all that shit when I was in high school. It shouldn’t have taken long to do the repairs but the generator we have is fucked up and the guys say they can’t find another. Would you believe how many car batteries were stolen when the trouble broke out? I didn’t even see anyone doing that.”
“Yeah. We found a stash of them today.”
James looks down and I stare at the crown of his head. His hair, like my own, is filthy and matted.
He sighs and gives up on the small talk. “I hate it here, man. This utopia of— of testosterone and muscles and all this fucking useless work. It isn’t my style at all. This all kinda feels sick and futile, to tell the truth.” He drops silent for a split second before he throws me further news. “Oh shit, you know, I spoke to Sylvia today, man. She came to give us a little encouragement speech, but— Jeez, she’s fucking cracked.”
“I—”
“Really, man. She’s seems to think that she’s this, this— holy virgin mother of man or some insane shit. She said she’s ‘redeeming us from damnation’ — her words, not mine. This was after she went on about how pleased she was at the promise of electricity because it’s the first rung on the ladder back to civilization. It’s the next big step. But she reckons she’s the whole fucking deal. A real fucking nutbag. It scared me. It scared me that she seemed so insane in her fantasy and yet she’s running the whole show with all these men under her and they do what she says at the drop of a hat. It’s sick, man. It’s like a king of fascism. I’m scared though, man, and I think I really need to get out of here. But then I know that if I do that I’m fucked anyway.” His speech drops to a whisper. “Alone, dead, and fucked. It’s all the fucking same.”
He’s silent for a long time. I’m at a loss for words. This is all too sudden. Too many things have happened too quickly.
“This is Hell,” he splutters.
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