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It takes them months to get into the Waste.
They peel out of the City in a wild chase, all the agencies on their tails, and no matter how many of them they kill, how many cars they run off the road, how many times they switch vehicles or try to fake an accident, they never make it more than a day before the whirr of helicopters starts sounding again in the distance.
It feels desperate, like a losing battle. They will never get rid of them, never be free, never get any rest. They rarely sleep, barely eat, grazing the dense-as-stars army nutrition bricks they’d packed before the Tower, their stomachs tied into knots with exhaustion and fear.
The Waste is Cristal’s idea, memories of a file she glimpsed on an editor’s desk in another life, someone’s rejected pitch for a story about the rising price of food being due to a failed agritech experiment: an introduced plant species that had taken over an entire region, choking the farms and driving the farmers out. There had been a rough map, and once they reach the right general area it isn’t too hard to follow the warning signs.
Johnny floors it through miles and miles of ghostly landscape, sending up dust clouds that must make them conspicuous among the abandoned buildings and fields/jungles, but perhaps their luck has finally turned, because the skies remain quiet.
They dare a stop to let the engine cool and use the time to – quietly – ransack the shell of a gas station by the side of the road. The weed has made an attempt at swallowing it, but it’s still upright, the door clearly visible. They aren’t the first to come through it, but they do find a few unopened cans of beans in the back, a box of energy bars, and a forgotten packet of sour sweets, almost out of view on a high shelf. They eat with their hands, cold and messy, the sugar rush making their heads swim, and Johnny steals the last gummy from Cristal’s fingers with a crazed laugh, and then licks across her lips to catch the last of the powder.
The creeping vines are more and more present, blanketing buildings and hanging from electric lines in thick garlands. The air smells sweet from the flowers – purple, half pretty and half venomous-looking. There is no sound other than their engine, the bristling of the leaves in the wind and the ever-present, cacophonous chirping of birds. Neither of them has seen so much nature in their lives. It’s beautiful, peaceful, almost otherworldly. Hard to remember that the plant almost drove this entire region to famine.
Eventually the cracked road they’ve been following just – ends, disappearing into a waist-high sea of green, so they roll the truck as deep into it as they can and hope the weed will grow fast enough to cover it. There haven’t been any helicopters in days, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t coming eventually.
Once they start on foot, it becomes a slow-motion ordeal. They stay off the paths, such as they are, lugging only the bare necessities. They move mostly at night and try to sleep during the days, lying under the densest parts of the weeds canopy. Cristal tries not to think about where they’re going. She keeps her brain focused on the mechanics: one foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other. Chewing the rations until they turn soggy in her mouth, making herself swallow. Johnny does the same and it doesn’t stop his cheeks from going gaunt, making his eyes look huge. Cristal might look the same; she doesn’t know, she hasn’t seen herself in a mirror since they left the car. They don’t talk, they barely touch. Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe it’s all a bad dream and Cristal will wake in her bed to the smell of coffee and warm bread. But she doesn’t, and so they keep going.
They walk for days and days and days, and when it finally feels impossible to continue, their physical and mental resources exhausted, they stumble across a field towards the tall lumpy shape that must be a building, or what is left of it, still standing under its blanket of green. It’s not hard to get inside, and there they wait, and wait, and wait, sleeping in shifts, barely breathing, trying not to make a sound.
On the third day the helicopters do fly over them – but they don’t circle, don’t land, just keep going, and the silence is deafening once they’ve gone away.
Johnny and Cristal step out of the building – a barn, they’ve had time to ascertain – and promptly collapse into each other’s arms, their bodies trembling like the leaves around them, with relief and hunger both.
It’s not a “no man’s land” as much as it is “any man’s land,” and this place they’ve ended up at is empty, which makes it theirs. There’s the barn, and around it more lumps that must be fences and trees and perhaps some more buildings. There’s even the sound of water running somewhere not too far, and not a single sign of other humans, just the chirping of insects and birds and the rustling of branches in the wind.
They’re too exhausted, too weak to move on, and the weather is turning colder, the days getting shorter. So they stay.
They explore their immediate surroundings carefully, trying not to disturb the weeds too much in case it makes them conspicuous from above. They do find more buildings – a shed, the ruins of a house whose walls were torn apart by roots worming themselves between the bricks. It’s uninhabitable but there are supplies there, miraculous survivors of the elements: clothes and blankets and carefully labeled jars of preserves that got left behind when whoever lived here moved on.
The helicopters don’t come back, and once they can’t layer on any more sweaters or blankets at night, Johnny finally dares to make a fire, and nothing bad happens.
In fact, a few days later, they realize that there are other columns of smoke rising in the middle distance. Not many, but a handful, and it’s reassuring to think that there are people who’ve managed to survive here. Nobody comes to meet them, and they don’t venture out of the perimeter they’ve come to think of as “theirs.”
The first winter, they eat through the jars from the shed, and when they run out of those, they go through their leftover rations. It's just like in the tunnels once Sadia stopped supplying them with fresher food. Except that their meals, meagre as they are, taste better than anything ever did, back in Monopolis.
They survive, and nobody runs them off the property, and the skies are still silent.
Wordlessly, they settle in.
The second year, they make preparations, and an unexpected contact. There is actually water on their land, a small brook running across the field behind the buildings, but even better: there’s a well. It takes three days to uncover it and figure out how to repair the mechanism, but when they do, the water is clear and delicious, and they get fully clean for the first time since they’ve left the city. Cristal cries a little bit, and Johnny takes her into his arms, and that night they get reacquainted with the taste of each other’s skin.
They find berry bushes growing in the shadow of the weeds, and some fruit trees whose branches have poked through the canopy, and one spring day there is a hen clucking on their doorstep. She’s sitting in a plastic bin with a note written on a piece of torn cardboard that reads, once she deciphers the improvised spelling: “Don’t make trouble for us and we won’t make trouble for you.” The hen is sitting on a few eggs, which hatch before they can try to eat them. The hen and its chicks stay with them while they figure out where to keep them safely outside, but even after the coop is ready they still come back to the barn at night, and they don’t have the heart to make them leave.
After that there come other offerings – the ends of hard bread, a head of cabbage, a bag of deformed turnips. They don’t really know what to do with them but they learn fast that anything you boil for long enough will end up edible, no matter how unpromising it looked going in.
Johnny keeps exploring their territory, worming under the blanket of weeds and hacking away where he thinks won’t be visible from the sky. He finds a buried root cellar, a few sacks of grain and flour, and gamely eats all of Cristal’s attempts at baking bread before she gives up and just starts dumping small handfuls of the flour in their stews instead.
The real saviours come later that season, once the cold has started setting in. Their hens stopped laying once the temperature dropped, which was an unwelcome surprise. They waited too long to start eating them, reluctant to kill their housemates, and when they did the meat was too lean, chewy and tough even after cooking for ages. At least there’s no shortage of material they can use to fuel their fires, the weeds growing back inexorably every time they clear an area. The leaves make the smoke fragrant, and the vines, full of sticky sap, crackle and spark in the hearth. Cristal and Johnny look into the flames, leaning against each other, and wonder how long they can really keep themselves alive here, when every day is such a struggle just to get by. Still, they never say a word about going back.
But then, in the spot where all of their gifts appear, there is a small glass jar full of sour-smelling goop, and a carefully folded piece of yellowing paper, which turns out to be a recipe for yeasted bread, torn out of a book. Cristal's baking finally starts yielding something recognizable. She improves in fits and starts, producing ugly, filling loaves, though they remain denser than they probably should be. Johnny's never had fresh bread before and can't tell the difference, but she knows.
Second, a few days later: a bag at the edge of their land, full of bits of the big roots that they recognize from pulling up the weeds, plus a handful of leaves and chopped-up shoots. It doesn't make sense until they see the note, which just says, “FOOD,” though the D is facing the wrong way, and oh, Cristal could slap herself. This was an agricultural experiment, she finally remembers. Which means that the weed is a crop, and they can eat it.
That changes everything, and they wish they could thank their mysterious neighbour, but there is clearly nothing they have that whoever has been taking pity on them could want.
The third year, healthier and full of the lessons of the first two, with the knowledge that they will have enough to survive even if it all fails, they decide to experiment. They’re living on a former farm, after all, abandoned equipment scattered everywhere. They find little envelopes containing seeds, and neither of them has any notion of what to do beyond 'put them in the earth and add water.' Most of the seeds fail, but a strange plant takes to its soil magnificently and turns out to be potatoes. When Cristal pulls up the first few dozen, she cleans them carefully and then places them in the plastic bin from the hen, leaving them at the edge of their land with a brief "Thank you.” She doesn't know if their saviour will be able to read more, and there are no words that would express everything they owe them, anyway.
They try to build up stores in anticipation of the winter, and to improve the inside of the barn, now that every hour of the day doesn’t have to be spent trying to secure their next meal. The holes in the walls get more permanent repairs; Johnny climbs onto the roof and fixes the leaks so they can stay dry. He builds some shelves to keep things out of the damp, and out of the way of the mice, their nemeses.
Cristal keeps putting potatoes in the bin, and sometimes they get taken, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the bin gets filled with something else when they’re not looking – different seeds from theirs; a bottle of syrup that seems, from the taste, to be made from the weeds as well; once a woollen scarf and some long metal needles which turn out utterly useless without instructions on what to do with them.
Finally, they meet another human when a cow comes trampling through their potato patch, scaring them half to death. They catch it and keep it penned in, standing watch, until a gruff man comes to fetch it, brandishing a gun that looks like an antique. They haven’t spoken to anyone except each other in so long, it feels like speaking a foreign tongue, but the man must deem them trustworthy because he sends a boy along that evening with some butter and a few tomatoes, dark red and ready to burst. The boy looks at them with huge, curious eyes, and runs away when Cristal tries to ask his name. They don't find out if these were their mysterious suppliers all along.
That night they eat the tomatoes with a thick slice of Cristal's bread, still warm, slathered in a fat layer of salted butter, with a fried egg on top. It took them a while to get used to eggs; Cristal had had them before, fancy poached ones and healthy egg-white omelettes, but there was a difference between eating one on a porcelain plate and picking one up from under a hen, knowing exactly where it had come from. Johnny had never eaten any that didn't come powdered, or out of a foot-long tube. He was suspicious of the texture, the gloopy white and runny yolk. That night he sponges up the yellow creaminess with another piece of bread, and then cuts out the middleman and licks the edges of the plate clean. It makes Cristal laugh, and glow with pride inside, and she climbs onto his lap, eating the last piece of bread straight out of his hand, licking his fingers as she does.
That winter they eat better, with more variety, although they learn the hard way that half of Cristal's canning efforts have failed and need to be thrown out. Sooner than they'd hoped the frost outlasts their reserves, and eventually, their neighbours' too. They go thin again by the end, their slices of bread looking more like slivers than slabs, their ribs showing through their skin on the rare occasions they are warm enough to divest from all the layers. But as always, Spring comes, and they are alive, and it is enough.
The fourth year is uneventful. They have time to grow bored and start picking fights, bickering endlessly about needless things. Theo, the neighbours' boy, comes back and brings a smaller sister, and Cristal teaches them all the songs she knows. Marta, their mother, thanks her solemnly and offers to teach her to knit in return, becoming offended when Cristal turns it down, saying she doesn’t want payment. Survival here is based on fairness and quid-pro-quo, Jeremy, her usually silent husband, finally explains a few days later. You can’t turn down someone’s fair offer like this, not if you want to last around here. So Cristal gets over her shame of having nothing to offer in return, and learns how to knit. But she can read, and she knows about the world beyond the weeds, and that turns out to be a skill of more value than she would ever have thought. More neighbours slowly emerge out of the green desert; Paul and Lia, Maria and Sumaya, Alix and Ian and Steph, clutching various bits of writing they need help understanding; old letters from loved ones and instruction manuals and even the occasional novel Cristal reads them out loud during the winter months.
The fifth year they try to apply everything they've learnt, growing safer and more involved in their unexpected little community. Their efforts get derailed when Cristal falls off the apple tree, breaking the wrist she tries to catch her fall on. Her bad knee, fragile from a dance injury, just shatters on impact, and for months she can't do anything, and Johnny is as good as useless with worry. Unwilling to leave her side while she’s laid up, he stays inside and learns to bake their bread, and turns out to be much better at it than she ever was. This, and the weeds, and their friends, keep them alive through that episode, through the fevers and the sleepless nights of unrelenting pain. Once Cristal is back on her feet, limping but more grateful than she’s been in years, she cannot believe she ever thought of this place as a Waste.
They stop counting. It's a hard life but their land prospers, and so do they, despite obstacles and setbacks. Sometimes Johnny is called on to take Jeremy's gun and scare off an intruder, and sometimes things turn violent, and he grows sullen for a few days, lost to memories of his life before. They lose one of the elders to illness and mourn her together, dividing her possessions between themselves carefully.
Time trickles by. One year, a group of men move into one of the empty plots of land a few miles away, and the helicopters are back, circling like bad omens, and Cristal and Johnny spend the summer in Alix’s cellar, just to be safe.
But despite the fear, it’s nothing like how they used to feel, when they first arrived here. They are not alone. They know, this time, that it is only temporary. Their land and their hens are being taken care of in their absence, and the families take turns bringing them food and supplies. Cristal leans against Johnny’s chest and listens to him hum one of the songs she taught the children the month before. She devours the day’s buttered bread, most of the leafy stew, all of the sharp cheese, and half the honey cakes, all made by the hard work of the hard people who’ve adopted them, feeling unfathomably content as Johnny's hand absently plays with the stretched out hem of her shirt. She tries to hand him the last bite of the apple she’s been eating, but he pushes it away gently, which she's secretly glad about. She is so full, and yet so hungry still.
“You go ahead, love,” he says. “I know you’re eating for two now.”
*
The end :)
