A Worn Rag
I borrowed cigarettes and antibiotics off the stragglers. I didn't set a date for paying them back.
Their other supplies I left alone. Set against what they were worth, the weight and the bulk were too much to bother borrowing. The ones who'd shared what they had without stinting took off at a run, and that was that. I'd gotten everything I needed, so there was no point going to the trouble of killing them. A gun would waste ammunition. A knife would waste my stamina. Stragglers or not, if someone happened to witness me killing a man in uniform, that would be its own kind of headache.
It looked as if no one was around, but you couldn't let your guard down. In a place like this, you had to assume someone was always watching from hiding. Looters, fugitives, snipers — any number of them could be tucked into the ruins. Of course, they'd only watch me, and short of a very good reason they wouldn't do a thing. They'd be saving ammunition or stamina themselves, or they wouldn't want to be seen killing a Postman.
The crunch of a compressed powder ration between the teeth is always a cheerful sound. The problem is that it catches in the throat. Solid until you chew it — and every time the teeth break it down, a chalky powder films the inside of the mouth. People like to name the calories-to-weight as its greatest virtue. I disagree. The finest thing about the stuff is that it tastes of absolutely nothing. That's why I prefer it to monster jerky, or zombie jerky.
Half a packet of compressed powder, three swallows of water. A meal. Enough food left, after that, to last another two days — and that's counting three meals a day, no less. If I meant to go on living in such abundance, I'd have to work diligently.
One in the afternoon. Three hours until the air raid.
The destination was coming into view. I was supposed to sound the air-raid warning no later than two hours prior, however late I cut it, so this would do.
I raised the telescope and took a careful look at the state of the place. By the coordinates, that point was unmistakably the scheduled strike site. And just as I'd been told, there was a settlement there. Judging by the scale, a little shy of a hundred people gathered. A wall some eight meters high ringed the place on every side, so I couldn't see in.
Two sentries up on the wall.
Two visible from this direction alone, so all four sides together, eight or so. Know the number of sentries, their armament, and the hour, and you can roughly gauge the scale of what's inside. Last of all, above the sentries' heads, a thick metal roof covered the whole of the settlement. Inside, there'd be a great many supports holding that roof up firm. Defensive works, built to endure an air raid. Certainly, something of that order could weather a small one.
But—
That ends today.
The scheduled raid was of considerable scale. This settlement would not hold.
"Halt! Halt!"
As I drew closer, a sentry swung his muzzle around. The other one beside him had been dozing; he startled, flailed, and dropped his gun. I waited, unhurried, until he'd picked it back up and shown me the muzzle again.
"Postman."
I held up my identification and raised both arms. The muzzle eased down, just a little. Funny, when you thought about it. They were too far off to even see the ID. I could have been holding a scrap of paper about this size with bullshit scrawled on it and a zombie photo pasted over the top, and they wouldn't have known the difference.
"Keep both hands up, just like that! Don't move!"
"Yes, yes."
One of them kept his muzzle trained on me. The other started lowering a ladder down the wall. When there's a gate and they go to the trouble of a ladder anyway, the reason is one of two things. First, it's too much of a pain to disable every security measure on a gate shut tight. Second, the gate is a fake. A booby trap, more than likely.
As the man started down the ladder, the one left up on the wall began to tense. Mid-teens at the outside, at face value. A fair chance he'd never fired a gun in his life. Cases like that are common. Well — if a man lived with hundreds of rounds stacked up for himself alone, he might fire one or two and have the nerve to call it firearms training. But that one wasn't rich like that. The gun might not even be loaded at all. Just like the stragglers from earlier. That, too, was commonplace.
Which raised a question. When people live heaped in together, what matters most?
Conversation. If words don't get through, you're no different from a monster or a zombie. In that sense, ammunition matters.
Because ammunition is the finest medium of dialogue there is.
Guns themselves were manufactured to rotting excess in the previous age, and plenty are still around. In the Republic of Korea of the old era, they say, a gun was something you only saw in the military — but it was a country with a deranged number of soldiers relative to its population, so guns must have been something you tripped over. On top of that, the design is simple by nature. They rarely break, and when they do, they're easy to fix. If it comes to it, you can even slap together a homemade one.
The problem is the ammunition. The moment it's made, people are busy either firing it or hoarding it, so it's hard to come by, and there's a limit to what you can manufacture yourself. Starting with the powder that goes into a round, supply is already difficult. Even in the middle of all this, there are still places that can produce ammunition, and the biggest player by far is the state. But rounds the state produces are for the regular army and a handful of Hunters, so you rarely see them on the market. In the end, the ammunition flooding the market comes from the factions with power second only to the state, turning their shoddy little factories.
To put it nicely, factions with power. To put it plainly, lucky bandit bastards.
At any rate, ammunition that important also happens to be small and light, so it pulls double duty as the finest currency there is. Which means conversation or no conversation, once your stomach is empty you end up handing over your rounds, and the ones who never had any run dry of ammo before anything else. Frankly, even without ammunition you can still put on a protest with an empty gun. Hunger isn't something you can act your way out of.
"A real Postman. Damn it..."
"Why, allergic to Postmen?"
I wasn't unaware of what the man was thinking.
"I hadn't heard we were due any mail... Don't tell me it's an air-raid warning?"
The man was shaking with anxiety. Even so, I couldn't provide emotional-labor services on top of everything else.
Yes... this is an air-raid warning... I'm sorry it's come to this. You must have suffered so, building the settlement and keeping it going... How could I ever fully understand that grief...
Go on like that, and I'd never finish my actual work. If they meant to survive this, their best move was simply to move fast.
"Air-raid warning. Mind if I sound the alarm? If you've got an allergy, say so now."
I flipped my coat aside and showed him the alarm unit belted at my waist. A Postman's second form of identification.
"Goddamn it... Do whatever you want. I'm going to see the Captain."
So the local headman's title was Captain. It differed from place to place, so it was worth remembering. He vanished up the ladder in a hurry, and I took a small titanium case from my bag. Turn the mechanical dial, enter the code, and the cartridge inside shows itself. Earplugs in, cartridge into the alarm—
A raucous alarm shook the earth on its axis. The roar went on for a dozen seconds, until the cartridge had burned itself completely out.
The signal of annihilation.
From inside the wall came screams, as if the alarm had thrown people into a fit. A moment later—
"Postman, come around wide to the right. There's a safe door on this side."
"How kind of you."
The small door you had to duck to enter was the real door. The rest were all fakes. Before I went in, there was a body search. Time was pressing, and still they spent a long while and did it thoroughly. A settlement that had already been badly burned once for skimping on a search. A terrorist come disguised as a Postman, or something of the sort. Routine.
"...Come in."
Inside, the people of the settlement had come out to greet me.
"Is it real this time? How do we know the armband and the ID aren't stolen?"
"What are you on about? He set off the alarm."
"Let's just grab our things and go."
"The alarm? So what about it. I mean, seriously, how do we know that guy's a real Postman and not someone who tortured a Postman until he got the code?"
"Yeah, sure. You stay here. Don't come out."
"Bastard... So the day's finally come."
So they hadn't come out to greet me after all.
One look at the residents, and the food shortage was clearly severe. In a corner, a child of about five was picking something off the ground and eating it. If it was something that could actually be eaten, that was a mercy. When things get truly desperate, people put things in their mouths that can't be eaten at all. Whether they're seeing things that aren't there, or they simply want to fill their stomachs that badly. A Hunter had swallowed batteries, once.
Still, with no food, at least the packs would be light when they left.
The houses, thrown up any which way, had managed only the barest costume of being houses. The pillars holding up the settlement's enormous roof didn't look particularly sound, either. They would never survive an air raid.
"Two hours and thirty-nine minutes remaining until the air raid."
The instant I finished speaking, a great many of them left their places. A wise decision. Take whatever might be worth something, and leave in a hurry. But not everyone listens to me. They never do.
A small group was holding their ground some way off, stock-still, glaring at me. The Captain was probably among them.
There's a point of caution when you visit a settlement for the first time. Don't make a show of yourself. Learn their peculiar rules.
Don't react until they speak to me first.
There was a time. A little kid was kindling a fire with such practiced skill that I found it commendable and stuck my thumb up, and the child's mother beside him immediately put a muzzle in my face. I nearly lost a finger. They hadn't been friendly from start to finish as it was, so I couldn't just let it pass. I asked why the hell she was throwing a fit, and the mother said—
"That happens to be the worst insult among us, you know? Our system of hand gestures is different from the outside world! Do you understand? Difference is something we mutually resp—"
So this time I held up my middle finger and asked what this one meant.
"That is the highest expression of gratitude! If you offer it when parting, it also means boundless thanks!"
When I'd finished delivering the mail and was leaving the settlement, every resident with the finger strength for it, from age three to eighty, came pouring out. And at my departing back they raised their middle fingers and wagged them for all they were worth. I put both hands behind me, raised a matching pair of middle fingers, and — a smooth flick, round and round — spun them with spirit. Doing it behind my back was a little uncomfortable, but I'd already turned away. I couldn't spinelessly show my face again.
That's how it is. Learn a settlement's rules, and you can reach a heartwarming conclusion. Any sense of having been fooled is just your imagination.
"You there. Postman."
A man in his forties, apparently the Captain, addressed me first. He kept it short.
"What."
I don't lose, either.
"How likely do you figure our nest is to survive the raid?"
He said it while pointing at the enormous metal roof covering overhead. There are always people who don't want to leave a settlement even when a raid is coming. The ones gathered in front of me alongside the Captain were surely thinking exactly that.
"Ask an expert about that sort of thing. I'm just a Postman."
"This can't be the first raid or two you've seen."
"Seeing them doesn't make everyone an expert. Here, look at this. An expert drew it up."
I handed the Captain a document the government had prepared. A single sheet forecasting the scale of the raid, the time, and the rest. In effect, a death list.
He crumpled the paper at once and flung it behind him.
"I get nothing from this kind of number-shuffling. You'd know what scale the figures written there actually amount to. And whether this nest can survive."
"Don't know."
"That can't—"
"Don't know."
"..."
"Anyway, you did build this meaning to ride out a raid, didn't you? Looks awfully shoddy."
At that, one of the officers behind him burst forward.
"Quit the cocky talk and just do your job and leave, why don't you?"
The Captain wrapped an arm lightly around the man and sent him back. Watching that, I stubbornly laid one more line on top.
"The state of the defenses is really... wouldn't you be better off building new?"
This place would absolutely not hold. I had no intention of telling them so.
"...I see. A Postman isn't supposed to say that sort of thing. I've been rude."
The Captain had it right. Whether a place can hold against an air raid or not — there is a Postman's rule against carelessly offering such presumptuous forecasts. But keeping that rule wasn't why I wasn't telling them.
Two reasons.
First: the ones who don't want to leave won't leave, no matter what I say. This was a situation where, if you felt even slightly endangered, leaving was the obvious thing to do. The second reason mattered more than that.
There is such a thing in the world as one in a million.
Maybe they'll survive.
One in a million. I'd been that, once.
"...Then, Postman. Do you still have work left?"
"There are some formalities. Nothing much. Cooperate properly and it'll be over quick."
"All right."
And so the Captain grinned.
"I'll cooperate fully."
And raised his middle finger right in my face. So I answered with both hands.
"Well, thank you kindly."
A smooth flick. Round and round.
I don't lose, either.