It makes him feel good to assemble things like this. Like a puzzle he faithfully knows how to solve. A challenge in logic, a question of what goes where. It all works out, no gaps left behind. The perfect little handheld machine. He can take it apart and gaze at his handiwork, dismembered, and put it back together just the same like nothing happened. Cold metal, sleek and aerodynamic. As all things should be, he thinks.
Recently, he’s been working on getting his time shorter. He uses a stopwatch to time himself when no one is looking.
The digital display flashes a minute and forty three seconds. He blinks once, swiping his grimy thumb over the cracked plastic to wipe away the dirt. He’s a few seconds off from his best time. Not good enough. Could always be better.
Suddenly, his boss is here, knocking twice against the concrete wall.
“Hey, buddy. It’s time to lock up.”
He pockets the stopwatch and swipes his hands against his cargo pants, smudging oil down them like a skidmark in a car crash. He realizes belatedly that he’s the last one remaining in the factory. Twenty one oh three. Everyone must’ve clocked out by now. It’s easy to get into a flow state when you’re doing things like this. Repetitive motions, clicks and turns, parts fitting smoothly into each other. Hands moving rhythmically.
“What’re you doing back here?”
“Finishing my quota for today,” Harper answers, clipped. That’s not true. Harper knows it and his boss knows it too. He’s the fastest assembler by far.
“Well, I have to kick you out,” his boss says, sighing. “Mind helping me close the garages?”
Harper nods cordially, putting the gun down slowly with a clack against the steel table. Metal on metal makes a definitive sound, he remarks mentally. Loud. Reminds him of a drum. He’s lowering the iron gates down over the garage, grid like a tic-tac-toe times infinity. That’d probably be impossible to win. The chances are pretty low.
They stand outside the factory door, street lamps humming with fluorescent light. Fat moths dance around the beams. Sometimes he hears one hit the bulb. It’s almost a jingling sound. Like a raindrop on a glass pane. His boss has a smoke. Harper stands next to him and waits because that feels customary, like it’s what he’s supposed to be doing. The sparse light casts their shadows long and gangly.
“You know, Harper,” His boss remarks over a cigarette, smoke floating into the cold air. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the other copy of the master key went, would you?”
A glint of suspicion like a sharp knife bares itself from the other man’s gravelly voice. Harper would have to deal with this very carefully.
“No, sir,” Harper says quietly, eyes darting furtively from side to side. “Probably due to the crooks that’ve been coming in. We’ve dealt with them, you know. They shouldn’t be back.”
“Alright, then.” His boss says, gruffly. “I’ll take your word for it. Just don’t want it happening again.”
“Thanks,” Harper nods, “I appreciate your trust.” That sounded a bit too much like an automated response. Like an e-mail sign-off. Too unoriginal. Not thankful or tender enough for this situation. He’ll work on it next time.
“Yeah, yeah,” His boss snuffs out the cigarette, grinding it with his heel against the gravel.
He waves a curt goodbye to his boss, who starts his rusty pickup truck that coughs to life after a few seconds and drives off. When he’s out of sight, Harper inwardly breathes a sigh of relief, fishing said stolen key out of his jacket pocket. His boss should’ve been smarter than hanging it near the coat racks, really-- but, well, he probably didn’t care if a thing or two went missing. The state of the dollar has gone to complete shit since the war.
A silver key, presented to him, gift wrapped in grease and particles. This single key unlocks all of the doors in the facility. He thinks of all of the rooms in the factory, all of which his boss has just handed over to him. Practically on a porcelain plate-- well, how long has it been since he’s seen a set of fine china that isn’t shattered to bits again?
He clenches the key between his fingers. He’s going to need this later. Its jagged edges feel like a promise against the crevices of his hand.
Harper lives close enough to the factory to walk there and back every day. It’s hardly a scenic walk. Most of the nature in the area had been eviscerated years ago by the big nuke, the only view in sight being the twisted infrastructure of buildings. Skeletons of once-great beings. Kind of like the dinosaurs, he thinks, only the dinosaurs didn’t nuke themselves. That’s kind of a stupid analogy, actually, he thinks. Maybe if dinosaurs got better and smarter at killing each other they’d eventually get to nukes, and then the analogy would be accurate.
He kicks a rock and it skitters over the others like a beetle. That was probably a concrete wall at some point. Maybe it was a Marshall’s. Maybe it was a Chinese restaurant. It’s unfathomable to him that there was a point in time where the world wasn’t littered in bald patches like this, rocky gray gardens with a fresh new crop of exposed rusted wire.
His apartment is a little ahead, around the corner, above the laundromat. It’s noisy and busy all the time. Where the land isn’t totally destroyed by radiation, construction proliferates like a weed growing through the cracks. Life is stacked in building blocks, cobbled together carelessly by a toddler. He squints. There’s new graffiti and a few dents in the side of his building’s wall with exposed rebar. Oh yeah. Home sweet home.
He’s about to turn the rusted handle of his apartment door, and—
“What’s up, Harper?”
It’s Nikolai.
He twitches. “Hi.”
“It’s been a little busy, y’know? Running around the power plant n’ all…” Nikolai sighs exasperatedly, running a hand through his blonde hair. He sure talks with his hands a lot.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Harper nods in false sympathy.
Nikolai is his neighbor. He moved in more recently than any of the tenants. They’ve known each other for a little while, bumping into each other as they’re passing in and out of the complex. More than strangers, less than friends.
“But, well, how’s it going with you? Still kickin’ it at the weapons factory?” Nikolai makes a sort of punching motion. Ka-pow.
“I guess you could say that.”
“Mhm, mhm. Good to hear that, then-- Oh yeah, I was meaning to ask, do you want to go fishing tomorrow? Like we usually do.”
Harper pauses for a second, buffering, then concludes with a curt “Sure.”
“Fantastic! Then I’ll see you in the morning. Usual time, you know it.” Nikolai stretches like a cat and yawns almost cartoonishly. “Well, it’s getting late and a guy’s gotta hit the hay, so I’ll have to see you later.”
“Me too.” He looks down at his watch. Twenty-three-thirty-three.
Harper can barely even get another word in before Nikolai quips “Sweet dreams,” salutes, and shuts the door behind him.
That’s just how Nikolai is, he figures. Always operating on two-times-speed. On some higher level where he has to do everything all the time. Maybe this standard of being a good neighbor applied in 1950, but Harper doesn’t even know the rest of his neighbor’s faces. Nikolai’s like the perfect nuclear family dad in a sea of asocial shell-shocked survivors. Hey, wanna go fishing? Hey, wanna come to my barbeque? We’re serving fire-roasted irradiated deer. He’s always got something to do, someone to be with, some aspect of socializing to complete.
Honestly, he doesn’t even know why Nikolai bothers to interact with him at all. Harper isn’t that kind of guy. They’re not made of the same stuff. Built for different purposes, maybe. Different models.
Harper shakes his head and sighs, stepping into the warm nothing of his small apartment. Dilapidated cube of a room. Betta aquarium of a room. Crumpled papers on the ground, gray walls devoid of pictures or personality. His desk is a mess. It has been, ever since he’s taken up his most recent project. Blueprints, screws, wires, and metallic scraps. Stolen, of course, scavenged from where he could find them. And finally, in the center of his room, an amalgamation of machine parts, compact in a little black box.
He looks behind him just once, back into the hall, inconspicuous. No one. Nobody knows what’s inside his room. He shuts the door behind him firmly, kicking over a loose bolt.
The thing is that Harper is going to build a bomb. He has been for a couple of months. Well-- maybe it’s better to say that he’s been leading up to this. The first few months were dedicated to research. Of course, he can’t go blowing apart his apartment or blowing off his hand. This stuff takes time and effort. This stuff takes tender loving care. He’s like that one scene of that one guy in Jurassic Park with the velociraptors except it’s bombs instead. He’s always been good with his hands. It just took a little knowledge to know what he could do with them.
It was never a matter of willpower. He was neck-deep in it. He always has been. He just never had the right resources for it. The missing piece. The key in the lock. The key to the back storeroom of his shithole weapons factory job.
He thinks he’s grinning about it until he comes face to face with his reflection in the greasy bathroom mirror. In reality, he’s got this weird look on his face, pinched and furrowed as if he were lifting something heavy, eye bags and creases only made more prominent by the overhead light. Not nearly normal enough. He tries to pick up the corners of his mouth but his eyes stay the same. Still glassed-over and hollow.
The moth hits its head into the bathroom light, over and over again, as if it enjoyed the feeling of hurt. Plink. Plink. Harper slaps it dead with his hand, not thinking about the consequences until his hand is coated in moth juice. Fast and efficient. He looks down at his hand. How’d you like that, moth?
He doesn’t bother to flick on the lights in his bedroom, letting the ambient light of the complex guide him to his mattress.
Harper curls up on the cot, letting his head slip into the foam, cushioning his thoughts. He closes his eyes, eigengrau flooding his senses while the drowsiness kicks in. The world and its cogs churn like a stomach under him, a constant reminder that even as the world is vacant, desolate, and on its last remaining stilts, it is begrudgingly alive nonetheless.
It started with knives. See, knives were easy. You could shape a knife out of anything. Like those videos of that guy making knives out of shit like soot and resin. All he had to do was get a sheet of metal from the rubble and cut it just right with a twig as the handle. He’d spend many a day sharpening and sharpening and sharpening against sandpaper. Aerodynamic. Streamlined to hurt.
And he got that job at the factory and learned his way around a gun. It was easy to pick up and aim them, but it was different when he took them apart, their insides laid out for all to see. It felt more intimate that way. Step by step, he learned to piece it together like a perfect anatomical jigsaw. He’d smuggle out a handgun behind the factory at night and shoot tin cans off crumbled concrete supports.
And then it was bombs. He’d make small ones, just powder loaded into little canisters. He’d light the flame and throw it square into a clearing of asphalt, watching as it blew nothing into even smaller pieces of nothing. Those ones were rudimentary and unpredictable. For his next project, he needed something bigger. Something better, more ruthless and efficient. Something that’d detonate at the precise moment, that’d cause the most damage.
The thing with bombs is that you get nicks in your hands when you’re making them. As with any craft. It’s unavoidable. That’s what they made thimbles for. Martha Stewart-level shit. Hand me the embroidery loom, I gotta have something to wrap all these wires around. What, I can’t use your fabric scissors to cut through my reinforced metal because that’ll make them duller? Sorry. Jesus.
Harper’s trying to wash the residual oil and grease from his hands but the small cuts are making it a pain in the ass. Being a little more careful would probably solve this issue, but his mind’s operating at maximum power at all times. No, he can’t be stopping to mind the soft flesh of his hands. That’s just a waste of time and effort.
There’s this thing that happens when you’ve been filthy long enough where the dirt just embeds itself into your hands. Permanent grime. It takes months to come off, or until you scrub off the top layer of your palms. That must be what Harper has. Permanent sludge. Always covered in some sort of tacky substance.
The dim light of the morning trickles through his window, blue and ashen gray from the particles in the air. For the past few hours, Harper’s been face-first into research, taking stock of what he needs. He’s got articles saved on his hard drive locked behind a password like a porn-addicted scumbag.
A little soap gets into the cut. Water runs into the grooves of his hands, making them look bloodier than they really are. It stings. He catches sight of himself in the mirror and his face is fixed in stone. He looks away.
There’s a knock at the door, or rather, a series of quick raps in succession. Shit. He must’ve lost track of time. Reflexively, he looks down at his wristwatch and determines that yes, it’s fishing time, and he’s super fucked if Nikolai sees any wires trailing from his living room.
“Harper?” He hears a call from outside. “C’mon. Up and at ‘em.”
He scrambles to grab his hunting knife, nearly tripping over a wrench or two before opening the door just a crack. Of course it’s Nikolai, wearing a dumb looking trucker hat.
“Hi,” Harper offers, sliding out of the doorway quickly and shutting the door securely behind him. Smooth operation. Nothing suspicious to see here.
“Jesus, man,” Nikolai says, “How long have you been up?”
“Since five.”
Nikolai shakes his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“My internal clock is like that.” Harper shrugs as he hops into the passenger side of Nikolai’s car. “It’s been like that ever since I was little.”
Nikolai starts up the car and shivers. “Geez. Someone should just sedate you. Put you in a coma and let you rest for at least a year.”
“I don’t mind it.”
A couple keychains, a rosary, and an air freshener dangle from his rearview mirror. They make a jingling noise, clicking together like an orgy of windchimes when Nikolai presses on the gas. The interior is a tan color, though mottled with tears and stains. There’s one of those sun-bleached solar powered hula girls sitting on his dashboard. Beachy Californian despite it all.
“Ha. Very Harper answer of you.”
He doesn’t know what that means or how to even respond to it, but Nikolai picks the conversation right back up anyways. Harper’s kind of glad about it.
“God, I hope there’s something good out there today. Not just the puny minnows. I want the big catfish.”
“You always say that.”
“Sure, yeah. But this time it actually matters because I’m going to have people over later and I can’t just have nothing, right? Imagine showing up to someone’s house for dinner and all they have is, like, a rabbit. That’s really lame.”
“I see.”
“So I’m gonna fish really hard this time, and maybe even find some vegetables or something like that. It’ll be a feast, man. I swear. You’ll be hearing about it”
There’s a crack in the passenger seat window. Harper traces it with his eyes, distorted light reflecting like a spiderweb on the glass. Street signs and stout building blocks pass by. Gray expanse. It seems that no one else wants to go to the river bank with the way they’re the only people on the road.
The closer they get to the river bank, the more land is blanketed in green. That’s how you can tell that the land is uninhabitable. Where humans flee, nature reclaims its rightful belongings. You don’t have people dumping toxic waste everywhere and burning shit to the ground.
Harper finds a booklet shoved at his face by Nikolai. “Can you check if we’re going in the right direction?”
Wordlessly, he flips through the notebook. It’s travel guide-sized, nature park reserve pamphlet-like colors, only the first few pages bear instructions on how to protect yourself from radiation. Big yellow hazard symbol with the three pillars branching out like a lifesaver.
“It’s annoying, right?” Nikolai eyes Harper as he flips through the book. “They used to have technology for this kinda thing.”
“You should probably keep your eyes on the road.”
“Yessir,” he salutes, pitching his voice in faux-machismo.
“We’re almost there, by the way.”
“Thank god. My legs hurt.”
They pull over to the side of the dirt road. Nikolai makes a show of stretching his lanky body out as if he were trying to gain an extra inch out of it. Harper unloads the gear from the back of the car.
The lake is silent and riddled with rocks. They’re about a quarter of a mile into the dense woods, sheltered from the noise of civilization. All that’s audible is their twin sets of footsteps and the clack of Nikolai’s fishing rod against the ground.
“Stop dragging it, you’re going to damage the handle,” Harper mutters. Nikolai smiles sheepishly.
“I’m just focused on keeping on the lookout for the catfish,” Nikolai says. “Usually you can see ‘em from the surface.”
“You’d have to be blind not to see them.”
You can usually see them from the surface because they’re huge. The catfish of this specific creek have tripled in size. Nobody knows why it happened and nobody cares to question why. There’s more important things to worry about. Nikolai thinks that they just got this way because there’s no other fish that can compete with them. Harper thinks that the radiation did some heinous shit to their gene sequence.
“So, then, do you think that if we lived out here with the nature and all, we’d also be thrice as big?” Nikolai wonders aloud, spearing a worm onto his fishing hook.
“No. We’d be dead. That’s why we don’t live out here.”
“Okay, but what about adaptation?”
“I don’t know if we’re made to adapt to nuclear fallout, Nikolai.”
“Well, we’re doing pretty well, aren’t we?”
“That’s not how adaptation--” Harper cuts himself off with a sigh. No use getting scientific with a walking Archie character.
“Say, you getting any catches?” Nikolai tries to prop his rod up with a rock. “I swear, we’ve been here for a while.”
He’s right. The sun is drifting from overhead, the shadows elongating at their feet. Harper looks behind him at the pile of river trash that’s been accumulating instead of fish. A couple coke bottles, a geiger counter (could’ve been useful if it actually worked,) a shoe caked in mud, a gas mask dated to 20 years ago.
“Yeah, I’ll assume not.”
Harper doesn’t think twice before flipping his pocket knife out and stepping into the stream.
“What are you-- You’re going to scare the fish away,” Nikolai protests.
“It’ll be more efficient this way,” Harper says, taking another step forward. He remains still, scanning the area for unsuspecting catfish. The minnows dart around his shoes like they’re dancing.
Nikolai looks at him weird. “Right. Efficiency. I’m going to keep doing this while you do that.”
The water ripples with every slight movement he makes. His eyes dart back and forth. He keeps his body rigid like he’s doing a push-up, militaristic precision down to the very split second when sees a flash of green scales, gripping his knife tight and sinking it into flesh like a snake bite. The fish puts up a fair fight, writhing and thrashing its body against Harper, but he keeps a vice-tight hold on it, dragging his knife down the middle in a perfect line, its frantically gasping gills parallel to the searing cut. Eventually, it ceases to move, abortive twitches of dying neurons still firing wracking its body. There’s mud up to his forearms and blood up to his palms. Microdosing on murder.
He holds the catfish out of water. It’s probably half of his body in length. His tendons flex to hold the carcass in place.
“Call me proven wrong,” Nikolai whistles. “You’re pretty good at that, aren’t you?”
Harper looks at the catfish, evaluating it carefully. It’s probably a female, 2 and a half feet long. A couple pounds worth of meat, more than a week’s worth of dinners. Unfortunately for himself, he didn’t take a liking to the taste of catfish much. Survival first, preferences second. “You can have half of it if you don’t catch anything,” he decides.
Nikolai lights up. “Aw, shucks, really?”
Harper nods silently and dumps the fish into their bucket. It barely fits, slippery body pounding against the plastic rim like a drum. He knows Nikolai probably isn’t going to catch anything like that. Not if he didn’t get his hands dirty.
Nikolai smiles, doing a happy dance of some sort as if he were emoting in-place. Harper curls his fingers around the knife wet with pond scum, casting his vision back upon the stream green with algae. How did this stuff even survive out here? The water is still, waterbugs dancing across the surface of the water. It must be some sort of perfect tension that keeps them afloat, some sort of learned skill. Something about their exoskeletons.
"Dude, holy crap," Nikolai is saying suddenly. "Are you okay?"
"What?"
"Your hand."
Harper glances down and is met with the sight of red steadily dripping down his palm. He must've knicked himself in the struggle. He shrugs. Well, how was he supposed to know? It's hard to tell catfish blood and human blood apart, Nikolai.
"You can't just leave it like that," Nikolai is saying more, ever-persistent like a mosquito buzzing by his ear. Or is it a mayfly? Or a moth? The moth takes Harper's hand into his own, palm up, open wound exposed to the world. It hurts more when the air hits his flesh. It hurts more when he looks at it directly, glistening layers bleeding red into the setting sun. It's deeper than he thought.
"It's fine," Harper mumbles, but it's obvious that Nikolai is having none of it. Nikolai shushes him, wetting a spare rag with drinking water. The first gentle caresses between the cloth and his open wound feel more like touching a hot stove. He feels a knot forming between his brows.
"I told you it's fine," Harper tries to say through gritted teeth. Something like this wouldn't hurt as much if he just closed his palm and waited for it to stitch itself up.
"It'll get infected and it's gonna scar," Nikolai says, purposefully patronizing. "You've lived for a couple of years, Harper, I thought you'd know better than this."
A scar means that it'll be harder to knick himself in the same place again, Harper thinks, but he doesn't verbalize it. It would be useless and unappreciative to struggle against him at this point. Nikolai is tying a dry rag around his hand, now. He doesn't know why Nikolai would go and waste two perfectly good rags on him. They were nice and white before. Now they're a bruised, mottled red. He didn't have to do that.
“What’s with that expression?” Nikolai asks.
“What expression?”
He laughs. “Don’t worry. It’ll be done soon. The hardest part is over with, rest assured.”
Harper gets the feeling that he's being looked at closely. He attempts to will any knots between his brows away, inwardly recoiling at the reality of this strange, botched social interaction. "Are you done yet?"
"Impatient," Nikolai tuts, "but yes." Harper lets his hand drop to his side, gravity taking the wheel.
Harper grips the knife in his hand tight, stepping closer to the water, but Nikolai stops him yet again. “Dude. You can’t possibly keep going like that. It’s okay.”
No, Nikolai, it’s not okay. If we get less food we eat less and then we die. It’s that simple. But knowing how stubborn Nikolai is, Harper can’t protest.
“So you’re going to just stand there like that for another couple of hours?” Harper says.
“Yup. I’m going to soak up as much Vitamin D as possible. Y’know, it’s important, because when they had us in bunkers back then, people went insane because of a lack of that stuff…”
Harper shakes his head and sits down on a rock next to Nikolai, flipping his pocket knife in and out rhythmically. Maybe not with the rhythm of a song, but of a metronome.
Nikolai continues as if Harper weren’t even there, “Yeah, my folks said it sucked hard. Imagine being trapped underground all day. I don’t know what I would even do.”
“I think it would be better than dying from radiation.”
“Come on, now! Aw, man, I’d get such bad cabin fever, I can’t stand that kinda stuff.” Nikolai says, tilting his head back to the sun like a sunbathing lizard.
“Maybe you just can’t sit still,” Harper shrugs.
“I think you’re right. Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve always been up and about now that I think about it. Really sucks to stay in the same place for so long. Always moved a lot when I was a kid.”
“Moved? Moved houses?”
“Yeah, I guess my parents got tired or whatever. Tired of their stuff getting destroyed by radiation, just all shitty. Thought they could always do better… But I always thought that wherever we were was just fine,” Nikolai muses. “I mean, I was alive. Still am now. And look where I am!”
Nikolai laughs and loops an arm around Harper’s shoulder in some sort of display of camaraderie. Harper never understood that kind of thing. Profoundly useless in the grand scheme of things.
“I guess it didn’t turn out too bad,” Harper acquiesces.
“Uh-huh. Now what about you?” Nikolai prods.
“What is there to say?”
“Come on, I just shared my deepest darkest secrets with you! And you can’t even reciprocate?”
“I don’t think it’s very interesting.”
“Yeah, whatever. It’s just that I don’t know all that much about you, Harper. You’re kinda cagey,” Nikolai says while skipping rocks in the water. “But I guess you’re just a quiet guy, huh? Not that it makes you any less fun to hang out with.”
Nikolai really does not stop. He’s like a steam-powered train. Harper read about those in books, once. He thought it was interesting how people back then crashed them into each other just for shits and giggles.
“My parents were military people. They taught me a lot of things, that’s all. We used to live at a military base.”
“Ahh,” Nikolai says, “somehow, that makes a lot of sense.”
Nikolai doesn’t elaborate on what he meant by that, which ticks off Harper a little bit, but it’s alright, because he’ll take anything that shuts up Nikolai as a win.
“Maybe we should start getting back soon,” Nikolai concedes after a good amount of rock-skipping, and Harper nods. They carry the bucket back to the truck and the beating from inside of it has ceased. Harper heard once that if you cut the head off of a chicken, its body will keep running around for a while after. Maybe it’s sort of the same thing. Is it like that for humans, too?
The road stretches before them like a contortionist. The white dotted line on the pavement extends toward infinity, asymptotically. It seems like that, but Harper knows that it ends somewhere. Everything ends somewhere. It’s just that most of it ends up in rubble, unrecognizable.
“Do you ever wonder how things were?” Harper finds himself saying.
“What?”
“--Before, the… You know.”
“Oh. Uh. I don’t know. Not really. I just think… No use crying over spilled milk, right? We’re here now.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, like, we’re here. Other people aren’t. So we have to do our best together.”
You’re really simple, Nikolai. It’s almost impressive how little you must think about this whole thing. Harper’s eyes dart to Nikolai, who’s still staring straight forward into the sunset, squinting. The sky is an ashen streaky orange, almost tan.
“I’m glad you’re my friend, Harper,” Nikolai continues, “I think if I didn’t have anyone else out here, it’d be a lot worse. You’re pretty reliable, y’know?”
Harper looks out the window at the passing landscape, just horizontal with no vertical, forever for miles and miles.
“Mm. Yeah.”