Most of the basic commodities of a home aren’t available in Anarchy. Electricity and plumbing aren’t readily available. To get water, you have to put buckets out in the rain, or travel to the nearest source of clean water. My parents usually filter the water we collect, although may body seems to have adapted decently to unfiltered water.
Electricity is not so hard to come by, if you have a generator. We owned one, a typical medium-output gas powered generator. We used it as scarcely as possible, usually to power necessities like the water purifier or the lamp. We kept only one lamp, and rarely used it, to preserve our scant supply of light bulbs.
My mother did not ask me why I was gone for so long. With things the way they were, it was to be expected. Any number of hardships could slow a person down. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded at me as I walked in the door. She always did that. I’d asked my father about it once, and he’d explained that she worried horribly every time I left, and didn’t feel better until I came back through the door.
“Welcome back, honey,” she greeted me slowly after a moment. “Did you get the gas?”
I nodded. “Of course.” I took the can out of my backpack and gave it to her.
“Thank you! I’ll go refill the generator.”
“All right. I’m going to go out for a while. I should be back in an hour or two,” I explained to her.
She nodded at me. “That’s fine. Stay safe!” She left to go fill the generator.
I went back outside. The sky looked even more cloudy and smoky than before. Shadows hid most of the street.
As I walked, I listened to the distant gunfire. The shots sounded closer and more frequent than normal, but I dismissed it as my imagination.
The sky was even darker by the time I reached my stash a minute later. It was starting to get late. The sun would set within an hour or two, bathing everything in darkness.
I made my usually journey up the stairs and into my room of supplies. I dug around for a kerosene lamp and then lit it with a match. Kerosene and matches are much easier to come by than flashlight bulbs and batteries.
Under the flickering illumination of the lamp, I opened up my backpack and pulled out the feed roller and ammo belts for the M60. Then I dug around through several boxes until I found a screwdriver, rusty but still usable. I set to work disassembling the machine gun.
After twenty minutes of carefully removing various pieces and mentally cataloguing them, I had the inner workings of the gun exposed. With the end of the screwdriver, I popped out the pieces of the broken feed roller and replaced it with the good one. If all had gone well, this would enable the gun to fire again.
Next I went through the painstaking process of reassembling the weapon. When I finished, I stepped back and admired my work. Theoretically, this would make it work. I desperately wanted to test it out, but faced the same problem as I had earlier with the Ingram.
Satisfied with my results, I extinguished the lamp and left.
Back in the street, I decided to go for a walk. There was little else to do. As I walked, I started thinking.
One thing in particular that I wondered about was why I wasn’t afraid. At any given moment I was at risk of being shot, or stabbed, or any other number of things. Even so, I never worried about it. Did the guns in my pockets keep me calm? Was I just overconfident? Or had being born into this place affected me? I don’t mean to say this in an egotistical manner. I’m not proud of myself for not being afraid. I just never knew why I wasn’t.
This line of thought transitioned to other people. Were they afraid? The people who waved around guns and attacked without warning or remorse, were they afraid? What about my father? Or my mother?
I also wondered whether women were more afraid then men. Most women seemed to stay inside, but that could be out of a desire to avoid conflict rather than out of fear. Evne though I’m not afraid of a fight, I don’t usually look forward to it. . Surely there were women out there who were also never afraid. Of course, without really knowing any girls, I had no way to be certain.
The thought of a fearless girl excited me, though. I began to fantasize about going on adventures with some perfect, fearless girl. For some reason this appealed to me.
A crunch around a corner snapped me back to reality. I realized I was several miles away from home. It was very dark, the streets only illuminated by moonlight. How long had I been wandering around?
More noises came from around the corner, this corner in particular being a building at an intersection. I was on the right sidewalk of one street, only a few feet away from the corner where the building turned to the cross street. Just around that corner, something was moving.
As quietly as I could, I slid the pistol out of my right pocket and raised it to point at the empty space in front of the corner.
After a minute without hearing any more sound, my patience faded. I leapt forward, swinging my arm to the right as I passed the building’s edge.
I landed in a crouch, facing the same way I had been before, but with my right arm extended directly to my right, parallel to the cross street. I leveled my Colt at the shadow standing there.
The black barrel of an assault rifle emerged from the shadow and pointed at my head.
“You can’t kill me without me killing you,” I warned.
The barrel lowered, and the figure stepped forward. “Kid?”
“Holy shit, I almost shot you!” I exclaimed.
My father laughed. “You have good instincts. You performed well.”
“But… damn! I almost shot you!”
He laughed again. “It’s okay.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then changed my mind. “Well, how’d hunting go?” I asked instead, tucking my pistol back into its pocket.
“Two rabbits, a duck, a chicken, and about a dozen apples.” He hoisted a duffel bag to show me.
I laughed. “Apples? Does that guy still have that orchard?”
“Yeah. Everyone leaves him alone as long as he gives them away, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s got more than enough.”
A hunting expedition usually involves searching for fruit trees and stray animals while defending yourself from other people who want the same food. Meat was sometimes difficult to come by, but animal populations spiked after the collapse of the country, and so there was usually at least something edible nearby.
Fruit was even harder to find, because people who found the trees tended to eat as much as possible without regard to preservation for the future. One person, however, had claimed a fairly large patch of land as his own. Apple trees covered much of the area, and he tended the trees while distributing some apples to whoever wanted them. He managed his orchard well, and there were always plenty of apples.
“That’s a good haul,” I replied. “Should last a few days.”
He nodded unenthusiastically. “Not long enough.” Then he shrugged. “What are you doing so far away from home?”
“I’m just walking. I lost track of time,” I explained.
“Oh. Well, all right then. Should we head home?”
“Lead the way.”
He began walking, but asked, “What? Don’t you know your way around?”
I stopped. “Not very well around here. Not in the dark.” Our surroundings, old stores and other buildings, looked vaguely familiar, but I had no idea where we were. I probably could have found my way back home quickly enough, but it’s always better to follow someone who isn’t lost.
My father knew his way around. “We’re in the southern district.” The ‘southern district’ was a nickname for the area a few miles south of our house. My second weapons stash was in the south district, but we weren’t near by it.
We started walking again. “Well, that explains it. I don’t come down here much.” The area was not very populated, and there was nothing of interest in the area. More people lived in the area around and above our house, known as the ‘north’ or ‘northern’ district.
As if to punctuate the thought, a group of five shadows emerged from a building half a block up the street.
“You’d better drop your weapons and surrender!” one of them called out.
Instantly my father dropped into a crouch and fired a three-round burst from his M16. The muzzle flash illuminated the street for an instant, and our surroundings burned into my eyes. Meanwhile, the man who had spoken dropped to the ground.
Almost immediately the other four returned fire. In the flashes from their weapons I could see four men holding submachine guns. Bullets whizzed past and tore chunks out of the road around us.
We split up. My father shrugged off his duffel bag and ran left into an alley. I ran right, navigating with the what I’d seen in the flash of gunfire. As I ran, I drew both of my Colts.
A glass window in my path blocked the way into an empty department store. More bullets zipped past me, and some of them hit the window. It shattered. Thousands of shards of glass, sparkling slightly in the moonlight, showered to the ground.
With nowhere else to go, I dove through the raining shards. As I dove, I twisted around and fired one shot from each of my Colts.
I landed heavily on my backpack, knocking the breath out of me. Miraculously, none of the bullets in it went off. The marble floor was slick and I slid backwards several feet.
When I stopped sliding, I leapt to my feet and hopped over a counter. As I landed behind it, a short stream of bullets ripped across the far wall, leaving a line of holes and spraying dust.
After a moment’s pause, I set down my left 1911 and gripped the other one with both hands. Then I leapt to my feet and spun to face the front of the store.
The first shot I fired reflexively; it missed both of the men chasing after me. The second shot I actually aimed, and in hit on of them in the shoulder. The force of the impact spun him around slightly. I quickly fired two more shots, hitting him once more in the arm. He shrieked and then fell silent.
I dropped back behind the counter as the other man began to fire. Bullets tore the counter to pieces, leaving little for me to hide behind.
Mentally, I counted off the number of rounds I had left. I had fired four – no, five. Since the Colt carried a seven-round magazine, and I’d loaded an eighth round into the chamber, which left me with three shots left.
Silence filled the air. The other man was waiting. I crawled silently to the edge of the counter, facing the other end. Then I leaned back, exposing my upper torso but not my whole body.
I could see a figure silhouetted against the moonlight outside. He had his weapon trained on the counter, but he couldn’t see me in the darkness. I fired the last three shots at him. Blood splattered against the floor and he crumpled after it.
Then I heard my father’s M16 firing from across the street. A barrage of automatic fire from someone else quickly followed. I exchanged the empty Colt for the other, and then ran outside to help.
Three men aimed MP5 submachine guns down the alley where my father had hidden. A fourth lay dead on the ground.
I ran towards them, firing with my right hand. The kick of the .45 hurt against my hand, but I ignored it.
One of them I hit several times. He fell screaming and writhed for a second. The other two turned towards me.
As the first one leveled his weapon at me, I jammed the Colt into my right pocket and slipped my left shoulder out of its strap. Then I grabbed the side of my backpack with my right hand and swung it around into his gun. The MP5 slipped from his hands and landed several feet away. I continued running into him, tackling him to the ground and rolling as we landed.
The other fired at me, but missed and hit the one I had just tackled. Meanwhile, I rolled again, fumbling with my pack.
I came up in a crouch, with my backpack open in my left hand and the Mac-10 in my right. The man, only a few yards away, flinched.
I fired. The weapon bounced around, and recoiled upward. I dropped the backpack and steadied it with both hands. The .45 bullets sprayed at my target. Most of them hit, shredding his chest and sending little goblets of blood flying. He tumbled backwards.
Click. A gun barrel pressed hard against my neck.
“How many of you bastards are there?” I asked.
There was a single shot, and the person standing behind me collapsed. I spun around. It was the same man I had tackled.
My father emerged from the shadows of the alley, holding his M16.
“All right Kid, grab our food and some of their weapons so we can head home.”