The flavor of the savory juices in the meat still clung to Ocean’s mouth. She’d chased it down with enough water that her throat no longer felt as though it were coated in finely ground glass. She’d felt guilty, drinking that much, but every time the cup she shared with Gauge was emptied, either he or Corduroy would refill it from a large, plastic bottle.
Her stomach felt as though it were three times the size it had been only hours earlier. At first there had been cramps… little jabs of pain that felt like someone was sliding a knife between her abdominals. But she had eaten her way through them, dissolving those sharp pangs with flavor and succulence.
After eating, Pebble had curled up on one of the large cushions and was making the glass monkey hop along the hills and valleys of the fabric. Levi went to check in on the baby, and Corduroy remained seated at the table, following Ocean with his good eye. There was something about the man which made him slightly different than the others. During dinner, she’d been shocked to see that his plate was piled with pale potatoes, carrots, and little green balls that she’d never had before… but none of the steaming roast with its trickles of clear juices. Who the hell doesn’t eat meat? she’d wondered as she shoved another bite into her mouth.
The thought made her uneasy for reasons she couldn’t understand. At first she tried to tell herself that it was simply his appearance but, in reality, Ocean knew it wasn’t his burnt and twisted face or the way he barely passed as human. She had grown so accustomed to such things that, in the world she had always known, the other three would have been looked upon as the freaks. With their shiny, flowing hair and unblemished flesh, they would have stood out among the diseased and starving.
No, it wasn’t the scars, but rather something about the way he looked at her. As if his eye were constantly sizing her up…
Gauge, on the other hand, seemed to delight in showing Ocean around her new home. His eyes twinkled like clusters of stars as he showed her the room that had been cut into the earth, which he called the kitchen, and then explained how a large metal box had been shoved into the hearth to cook their meat.
“But it gets so hot that you can also fry stuff on top of it. Have you ever had an egg, Ocean?”
“Once… “ She remembered her father finding the nest in the limbs of a tree. He’d shimmied up the narrow trunk and when he returned, held this little oval in his hand that was as blue as the sky on a cloudless day. He’d told her to tilt her head back and open her mouth. When she did, he tapped the shell lightly against a rock. The contents inside had slid into her throat and she remembered him smiling down at her as the yellow goo oozed out of the cracked shell.
“It tasted kind of funny,” she continued. “It was kind of slimy and Daddy didn’t have to give me it all. He coulda just gave me a little taste and saved some for himself like Mama always does.”
Mama. Dead and alone, mouth hanging open as the flies had their revenge.
“Well, you’ve never had them the way Corduroy makes them. Actually, you probably won’t even know you’re eating the same thing. I’ll show you the cages where we keep the pigeons in a bit. I think you’ll like them, sweetie.”
Sweetie. A single word chased away the tightness that had bound her chest when the image of her mother materialized in her imagination. Sweetie.
She felt light and airy, like a cloud that had drifted far into the sky. As she looked up at Gauge, her whole body seemed to sigh and that strange sensation was in her stomach again. Almost like a tickle, but from the inside.
She wanted to say something, to say anything, but the words had fled from her mind. She could only look at that wavy dark hair, the stubble covering the dimpled chin, and grin to the point that it felt as if her face would split open.
“Umm… you got something… “ Gauge bared his teeth and tapped on them with his fingernail. “Right there.”
Ocean’s tongue subconsciously passed over the sliver of meat that was stuck between the gaps of her teeth.
“I know… I’m saving it for later.”
Gauge’s laughter was rich and deep, its echoes seeming to mock Ocean as they repeated into infinity. She felt her face flush and her smile melt away. Somehow, she felt smaller now, as if she were shrinking and would continue doing so until she was so small that the scrap of food in her mouth would crush her like a toppled building.
Then Gauge placed his hand on her cheek, his palm was warm and rough. The touch light but carrying a sort of charge that made it feel like her heart would momentarily stop beating.
“Ocean, honey… you don’t have to do that anymore. You’re with us, now. Come on. Let me show you something.”
He led her by the hand, back into the large room where they had eaten and guided her to the other side. Standing before a dark hole in the wall, Gauge looked into her eyes for what could have been a few seconds or an eternity before speaking again.”We call this Heaven.”
Pulling a candle from the rickety table that sat beside the opening, Gauge led her into the darkness beyond.
Ocean gasped as she stepped into the room, her jaw dropped open as if she were back on the street, hunting flies. She spun in a slow circle, her eyes wide and round. For some reason, she felt as dizzy as if she’d whirled around as quickly as her feet could pivot.
“What… where… how… “
Gauge laughed again as she struggled for words. This time the sound seemed so hazy and distant that embarrassment would never be able to find her. Ocean pressed her hands against the side of her face, blinking rapidly, as if she could somehow steady reality.
In the flickering orange glow of the candle, walls of cans were revealed. They were stacked atop one another from the floor to the ceiling, and formed long rows with just enough space between for someone to walk. A lot of them were nothing more than silver cylinders, but some still had yellowed labels wrapped around them. Some of the pictures she recognized from childhood; yellow kernels of corn, orange disks of carrots, mounds of spherical peas. But others were strange to her, there was something that looked like the moss-like strands that covered the bottoms of stagnant pools. Something else that looked almost like little white brains. And there was even some that had pictures of dogs on the labels.
“I… I never knew you could get dog in a can…”
Gauge chuckled and shook his head slowly. “No, sweetie, it’s not dog in the can… you have a lot to learn, my dear.”
She pulled her eyes away from the cache long enough to glance at the tall man beside her. “Where… where did you get so much?”
Gauge sighed and closed his eyes as he rubbed the bridge of his nose between pinched fingers. “Do you remember the Food Wars, Ocean?”
“Not much. I was pretty small back then. Bits and pieces…”
Gauge put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently so that she was looking directly at him again.”Okay, a little history lesson then. When people realized that things just weren’t going to go back to the way they were before, we got scared. I wasn’t much older than you back then, but I remember everything. People fighting in the streets over a single tin of tuna. Bashing each other’s heads with rocks. Stabbings. Beatings.”
“Daddy told me about that. He called it man’s inhumanity to man… but I never really understood what he meant.”
Gauge’s face looked pinched now, and he seemed to be looking through Ocean rather than at her, as if he could see some distant point beyond her, causing his eyes to glisten with wasted water. “Some people still had guns back then. Ammunition. If you had guns, you had power. So these gangs started forming. All the people with the guns broke off into little groups. And they started stealing from the people who didn’t have any guns.”
He closed his eyes now and his face seemed to drain of color. There was a slight quiver to his voice and Ocean took his hand with a gentle squeeze. “It was a massacre. One long, bloody, stupid massacre. Men, women, children, the old, the sick. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the food.”
From the other room, Ocean could hear Levi talking softly to Pebble. Corduroy was whistling some tune that seemed to start and stop again at random intervals. In the soft lull of Gauge’s voice, those sounds seemed as unreal as a dream.
“After a while, these gangs had just about all the food. So then they started fighting each other and left everyone else to starve while they stockpiled their loot away. The more food you had, the more people wanted to join your gang. The more people you had in your gang, the more food you could get. It was a viscous circle.”
Gauge took a deep breath and opened his eyes again, scanning the room slowly. “This was the hideout of The Butchers of the New Dawn. This is where they piled up everything they took from others. Levi and Corduroy… they think this room is called Heaven because it’s the promised land. Where the rivers flow with milk and honey.”
Ocean felt her own eyes stinging as the pain in Gauge’s voice seeped into her heart. She wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and chase away the nightmares like her father used to do for her. She could only chew on her bottom lip, could only hold his hand in hers and listen.
“But me? I call it Heaven because I look around and all I see are the souls of all those people. The people who died for these precious little cans. Just so I could eat…” He closed his eyes again and let his breath escape so slowly that it almost sounded like the wind. He bowed his head for a moment, then forced a smile as he looked at Ocean again.
“Okay… wow. I didn’t mean to… you know…”
“It’s alright.”
Ocean saw her mother again, saw herself stepping over the woman’s lifeless body and crossing the clearing, saw the rat’s body as she picked it up and how she’d sat down, right then and there, and bit into the coarse hairs of its coat. The little squirt of blood as her teeth punctured it’s flesh… and the entire time Mama simply laid over there. Motionless. Unfeeling. “You do what you have to in order to survive. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
And, at that moment, Ocean wanted nothing more than to simply believe in her own words…
After they left Heaven, Gauge continued the tour. She saw the baby for the first time, a little bundle of life squirming beneath his blankets as his balled fists rubbed against his rosy, peach fuzz cheeks. She’d wanted to hold him in her arms, to feel his tiny feet kick while little bubbles of spit gurgled from his mouth. In the end, she just touched his gossamer hair lightly and smiled as he cooed.
From there, Gauge showed her a little room with a dark hole in the floor. The room smelled like the frothy water of the waste bucket she’d had to empty for as long as she could remember. There was a large white bowl of water sitting in the corner beside a pile of ripped fabric. Gauge explained to her that it was called the bathroom, and that anytime she needed to relieve herself, she should simply let it fall down the hole.
They’d have to make a new one soon, he said, because it was getting pretty full and would need to be filled in soon.
By the time he was leading her through some of the other tunnels and telling her how these would be the means of escape if they needed to leave in a hurry, the shock of everything had worn off. Ocean skipped ahead of Gauge, listening to his words as she scampered from one new thing to the next. She was smiling and happy and so excited that, for a while at least, memories of her mother ceased to haunt her every time she blinked.
Gauge was so wonderful… so patient and kind as he explained how things worked to her. He often laughed at some of the questions she asked, but the sound no longer burned her cheeks with shame. No, now it was a different kind of heat that blossomed in her chest when he’d throw back his head. Something warm and nice and cozy… Ocean saw a metal door up ahead, embedded into the wall of a tunnel. She ran to it, wondering what marvels were hidden behind it’s rusty facade. “What’s in here?”
Gauge had run after her and was by her side as her fingers closed around the iron handle. “No!”
His hand shot out like a striking snake, smacking against Ocean’s face so hard that her body spun around. She tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground, pain radiating from the red hand print that covered her cheek.
He loomed over her, his face looking just like her mama’s had right before she’d attacked—lips drawn back into a sneer, lines and creases molding his features into gnarled knots of rage. He jabbed his finger toward her, his voice booming through the silent tunnels. “You are never to open that door. Understand? Never!”
Ocean pulled herself into a tight ball and crossed her arms over her head. Each word hit her with as much force as his hand had, causing her body to jerk with each sharp syllable.
“I swear to God, Ocean, if you ever… and I mean ever… go into that room… “
Her body hitched with sobs and her knee throbbed from where it had banged against the stone floor when she fell. The side of her face felt like it was on fire and there was a high pitched ringing in that ear. None of that hurt as much as the barrage of words raining down upon her.
“I won’t, I swear, I’ll be good, I promise… “ She babbled and sniffled and choked back tears as thoughts burst like sun bloated corpses in her mind.
He hit you. He fuckin’ hit you, that son of a bitch…
No! It’s okay, they’ll kick me out, they’ll make me go back, I don’t wanna go back out on the streets, I don’t wanna. I can’t, I just can’t, not after all this…
He hit you!
Please, no…
At some point, Gauge had stopped yelling and he now crouched beside her. His hands smoothed her hair, working out tangles when they ensnared his fingertips, and his voice was a low whisper.
“Ocean, sweetie… I’m sorry I slapped you, okay? But maybe that just shows how important this is, honey. You can’t ever go into that room, okay?”
Fuckin’ prick…
No, no… he saved me. He took me in and shared his food and water. He’s good, he really is. I know he is. I should’ve asked before I tried to…
“Can you promise me that? That you’ll never go in there? You promise me that and we’ll just pretend this never happened. Nobody has to know, okay?”
Ocean nodded her head rapidly, eager to get back into his good graces. She forced the other voice into the back of her mind and refused to argue with it any longer.
“I… I promise.”
Gauge pulled her into his arms and laid his cheek on top of her head, rocking slowly back and forth. Ocean sniffled and clutched at him as if she were afraid he would vanish if she didn’t hold tightly enough.
“I’m sorry I hit you, honey. Forgive me? Okay? It’s been kind of, well, a difficult day.”
Ocean nodded and positioned her head so that it was resting on his shoulder. The feeling of his arms around her, so firm and strong, made her feel more secure than she had since her father had died. As long as he held her, she was safe, nothing could hurt her. Even the tingling in her cheek slowly faded in his embrace.
But, for some reason, she still found she was unable to pull her gaze away from that forbidden door.