Short Story

     “What do you think this was?” I held up my latest find.

     Jack never even glanced at it. “Don’t know; don’t care. You know what we’re looking for. And stop playing.”

     “Playing is how I find the best stuff.”

     That did win me a glance, if a sardonic one. “Is that what you call it?”

     “I call it fun.” I put the stained and dirty item over my shoulders. It looked something like a horse collar, except that it was open in front. I couldn’t figure it out because that would let the neck pop through.

     I looked up to find Jack watching me, a smile twitching his lips. “What?”

     “You should take that off.”

     Something in the way he said it made me narrow my eyes. “You know what it is.”

     “Might’ve seen one, once or twice.”

     “Where?” I asked skeptically. Because Jack saw the same things I did, day after day: wheat, corn, and oats, fields and fields of them, the ones that weren’t serving as grazing land for cows or pigs, that is. And the one-horse town—literally, as all the rest had been taken by the army—where we both lived. There was nothing interesting there.

     “Guess.”

     “Guess?” I frowned slightly. Jack wasn’t the guessing type. He was the strong, silent, pragmatic type, with black smudges all over his hands and forearms as he wrestled with the guts of the machine we were trying to harvest.

     “You wanted to have fun,” he pointed out. He pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped some sweat off his brow. It ruffled up his jet-black hair, which was already a mess, and set off the startling blue of his eyes.

     If he was a girl, they’d have taken him for the courtesan corps for sure, I thought, not for the first time.

     I glanced around.

     “No, it wasn’t here. That would be cheating,” he said seriously.

     Jack didn’t believe in cheating. He was too much of a straight shooter. I, on the other hand, cheated every chance I got and was proud of it.

     I pondered the problem while he wrestled with the rusted monster’s metal guts. It was bigger than most, a half-yellow, half-oxidized orange hulk slowly sliding back into the land, and until recently, a hatchery for bunnies. I eyed the nest by one deflated tire, which was now just a wallow of flattened grasses.

     Damn. Rabbit stew sounded good, with some potatoes that I could make sure fell off a wagon. That was the good thing about potatoes. Yields were never that precise, and a tater or two gone amiss would never be missed. Plus, they filled the belly nicely, especially if it had a good gravy surrounding—

     “Are you going to guess or not?” Jack asked impatiently.

     “How many guesses do I get?”

     “Three.”

     “Not here, and not on the farm, or I’d have seen,” I said. His family’s place was just up the road from ours, and had nothing but big, old-fashioned, tilt-nosed pigs, more’s the pity.

     You couldn’t shove one of them off a wagon.

     “Not here, and not on the farm,” he agreed.

     “In town then.”

     “Which town?”

     My eyes widened. “You don’t mean Bayswood!”

     He nodded. “Went there with grandad, when I was six.”

     “You never told me!”

     “I don’t remember much about it. Just pieces, here and there. And half of that I’m not sure I saw, or if somebody told me later, and I think I saw.”

     “Bayswood,” I said enviously. It was the biggest town in the region, where the governor lived and the local musters assembled. I’d always wanted to see it. “This thing is important, then.”

     “Guess it depends on how you look at it.”

     I frowned and took it off to look at it some more, but there were no clues to be had. Just a piece of that weird plastic stuff the old ones had liked, and that we kept digging up in fields, hanging up the plow. Only this was thick and slightly squishy on one side.

     Like a horse collar. I kept coming back to that, although I knew it wasn’t right. It was too small.

     “A pony collar?”

     He actually laughed at that. “Close. Although fit more for an ass.”

     I frowned. I didn’t get it. Until he told me.

     I threw it on the ground, and almost squealed before I caught myself. This place was deserted, except for the birds that nested in all the towering old ruins, but it never paid to be careless. “You bastard!”

     “I told you to put it down.”

     I looked at it again, where it had come to rest beside some piled-up wreckage. “I don’t believe you. They sat on that to—why?”

     “For padding.”

     I looked behind me. I was padded enough. But then, there were splinters sometimes. The outhouse we used was old, and the boards were well-worn down, but some others had bitten me.

     Maybe the old ones had been onto something, for a change.

     I added it to the junk on the wagon, which we were going to take back home to strip for parts and repurpose for whatever use we could find. And then sell them on the black market, which was the only way anybody made money these days. The army came through and took everything else, for their endless wars and endless greed, even though those were the very things that got us into this mess in the first place.

     People would never learn.

    I added the squashy seat thing to the rest, as an afterthought. I knew a woman who had just made a new outhouse; maybe she could find a use for it. After boiling it for a while, I thought, grimacing.

    It was getting late, and the sun was slanting through the old, ruined towers, those still standing. We hitched up old Pete, who we’d let nibble on the grasses that grew everywhere now, and took off for home. It had been a good haul today.

    Maybe we’d last through the winter, after all.