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crime_and_inkTitle: Walk Through the Manhattan Valleys of the Dead
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4,730
Disclaimer: This is based on the depiction of the characters in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. No offence is meant.
Characters and pairings: Ray Person, Brad Colbert, Walt Hasser, a bit of Nate Fick; Walt Hasser/Ray Person, vague background Brad Colbert/Nate Fick.
Summary: Ray gets to the city and the problem is that that's the end of his plans.
Note: For the square ‘tech regression/failure’ on my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
au_bingo card. The second fic in the Goodbye to the Sky ‘Verse.
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
softshinythings who provided the title from a song by The National.
I am so sorry that it’s taken so long to write this. It’s been almost finished for ages, but I had a huge block when it came to writing fic for a long time, so it’s only recently that I managed to finish it. Will probably be edited and added to in the next couple of days because I’m feeling picky.
1. I Figured Out What We're Missing
The city isn’t the same as it looks in the newspapers (the few they got back home) or in the old photos Ray found in a box in one of the closets. There are no wide open spaces, or at least no clean ones. Everything bigger than a yard is littered with some sort of rubble; the apartment blocks look like they should be demolished, some of them leaning to one side, the brick beginning to crumble. Something in the distance is burning or smouldering; coils of smoke rising into the sky and disappearing into thick mixture of clouds and smoke that always hide the sky.
“Hey, kid, you going to the bus station or you want to be dropped off at the city limits?” the bus driver calls.
Ray looks away from the window – he’s been the only person on the bus since they stopped at the last small town before the city – and shrugs. After all, he doesn’t really have a plan beyond get on the bus, get to the city.
“Bus station it is—and get your feet off the seat.”
The station doesn’t look much better than what Ray saw of the city in the bus. It’s an old building, the bare bricks on the outside a dark grey that’s either natural or caused by years of pollution and people burning everything in sight. The sparse lighting flickers and casts long shadows across the grimy floors. People queue up when they exit the buses, holding out their papers to show the row of guards.
Ray bypasses the falsely perky looking women and the men who look pissed off until he gets to the last man, who looks more bored than angry. His nametag reads COLBERT in ugly, blocky type. It looks like the lettering along the tops of the letters from his high schools, the ones he always threw in the bin without reading them.
“How old are you?” he asks without looking up, taking the papers and running them through a scanner. The scanner screeches, its lights flashing for a second, before there’s a series of snaps, crackles and a pop that’s enough to make Colbert take a step back, and then the scanner goes dark. Colbert sighs, as if this is an everyday occurrence – maybe it is, maybe the situation here is as bad as it is back home; little electricity, next to no gas and everything’s terrible when you can get it – and begins to look over it.
Ray stares at the scanner. He’s never seen one up close before and the photos in the books sucked ass: all blurred and the books were badly printed. It doesn’t look much like the photos, more like it’s been cobbled together from bits and pieces of what little survived of the sleek silver units.
Colbert clears his throat. “Age?”
“Eighteen.”
“You do know you’re not supposed to travel between towns or cities until you’re twenty-one, don’t you?” Colbert says slowly, as if he’s given people this same speech a million times, or he thinks Ray’s too thick to understand – and if that’s why, fuck him, because he aced every single class, even when the teachers hated him – and it sounds like he’s reading it off a card. “If you want to travel, you need the appropriate paperwork, signed by a parent, guardian or the people who ran the group home. If you don’t have the paperwork—ˮ
“You’re not much older than me,” Ray says and Colbert ignores him even though it’s true. He can’t be much older than Ray, maybe four years if he’s being generous, and working in a public place? That means he’s been working here for a while, especially since it’s a bus station and not some shitty little shop hidden away down an alley. “Hey, did you come from one of the little towns with the huge metal fences around them? Oh, or one of the ones that doesn’t have any electricity? Those look like they’re full of inbred freaks and guys fucking their moms and sisters – but they’re the same thing, so I suppose they’re just full of motherfuckers and sisterfuckers. Is that a word? Sisterfucker?”
If it isn’t, it really should be.
It’s only after Colbert’s stopped looking for imperfections and mistakes – typos, ink that looks wrong, pretty much everything that Ray had checked the forgeries he’d left under his mattress back home for – and has waved him through the second set of gates that Ray realises that he’s got a problem.
The plan was get out of school, get away from the dicks who went to the school and get out of the town. He’s never really planned for an after. It’s not like he’s got a lot of options: he’s too young to work for the government, he’s already graduated school and he’s got a little money, but not quite enough to rent a decent apartment. He doesn’t really want a bad apartment, either. You don’t get paid very well unless your address is good, and he wants to be able to send money home to his mom and his grandma (and she wants letters or postcards, to know what the city looks like because she hasn’t seen it for years).
“This could be a problem,” he says and the nearest person – and woman with short dark hair and what look like burns on the left side of her face – speeds up as she walks past him.
Well, fuck. He can go home, but what’s he supposed to do then? Hang around the back of the grocery store and wait for a part-time job to come up, knock up one of the girls he went to school with (or get beaten up when someone opens their big mouth and tells everyone about him and Kyle) and never leave again.
The funny thing is, he can go home again, but if he does, he can’t come back. Tickets to the city cost a lot as it is and ones that are open return? Ray’s been trying not to think about the price of them. Probably more than they usually set aside to spend on anything (including birthdays). If he goes back, he’s going to be trapped one way or another.
“No fucking way,” Ray says and another passer by shoots him a funny look and walks a little faster.
So he sits down on one of the benches, picks at the peeling paint on it, and waits. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, but it’s better than walking around a strange city without knowing where he’s going or what he’s doing.
He’s waited for years to get this far: he can wait and see if something happens.
It takes a while, but things begin to slow down. The queues die down to trickles rather than surges, and the seemingly endless queue for the payphone finally begins to shorten. It’s probably the only phone in the bus station, although maybe there’s a staff one somewhere because Ray doesn’t see Colbert or Fick – another guard who looks even closer to his age than Colbert, like he used one of the fake I.D.s that Ray never managed to get a hold of – using the phones at all. They use battered looking walkie-talkies to communicate. When those fail, they shout across the station. Ray’s tempted to point out that he can probably fix those in minutes.
It’s beginning to get dark when the buses stop arriving and most of the guards leave. Fick offers him a sympathetic smile. He’s probably seen dozens of people arrive and end up stuck at the bus station. Ray wonders what happens to people when they don’t have anywhere to go. There are rumours about people being locked up, but he thinks those are just stories that little kids are told to keep them from running away, or at least he hopes they are.
He really doesn’t want to find out.
“What are you still doing here?”
Ray bangs his head against the bench in his hurry to get up, the jacket that was acting as a pillow falling onto the bag that sits on the ground beside the bench. It feels like the strap’s cutting off the blood to his fingers, but at least it’s still there.
It takes him a moment to realise that someone spoke to him. Colbert’s standing in front of the bench, imposing even in the poor lighting, looking very much like all he wants to do is go home.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Ray says. “I mean, I could go out on the streets and try and earn some money for rent, but how many places would rent to someone who gets their money from having sex with total strangers? I could steal, but that’s boring and if I’m bored, I talk and if I talk, I’ll get caught anyway and I’ll end up in jail and do you know what they do to people in the jails here?”
Colbert’s expression is quickly becoming pained. Ray tries not to smile.
“If I find you somewhere to stay, will you shut up?”
The apartment’s not very big, but it’s warm, has running water (most of the time) and electricity (the supply is patchy at best) but Ray’s just glad that he’s not going to be sleeping on the bench at the bus station.
Ray’s room has two single beds in, a couple of cabinets and a closet full of old electronics. Radios, what looks like half a television set and bits and pieces that could have come from anything.
Brad – who only told Ray his name after Ray talked for twenty minutes straight – has hardly left the room when Ray begins pulling the shit out of the closet. It actually looks like it might be salvageable.
“I’ll make you a deal: you do something with these radios and I’ll see about finding you something to do that doesn’t involve sitting in a factory and thinking about your aunt-mother and uncle-father back home.”
That’s as good a deal as Ray thinks he’s going to get.
They had working TVs once, and Ray thinks that must have been pretty sweet, being able to sit at home and watch something instead of crowding into the tiny little cinemas that smell like burnt popcorn, sweat and feet—actually, minus the popcorn, the smell a lot like the buses in and out of the city. Ray makes a face. That’s gross.
Anyway, there haven’t been TVs since the day Ray was born, because someone dropped some more bombs – big ones, the ones that killed thousands of people – and everything just... died.
Unlike the day the sky disappeared, there’s not much information about why there are no TVs, why the electricity is patchy at best and why the most advanced thing anyone has is a radio – although maybe they were a bit too busy taking care of all the bodies left after the bombs fell silent – and even then you have to be good at fixing them, or rich enough to find one of the few people who can build and fix one. Not many people bother to learn because they don’t think there’s any use for them.
Ray did. Well, he didn’t really learn like most people, because most of them had people teaching them and some bastard of a teacher with big glasses and an ugly moustache standing over them and going on about how in my day kids knew how to listen or something—okay, he doesn’t really know what teachers say, because he never cared enough to pay attention to most of them, but anyway...
Ray learned from books. Old ones that had been piled in the back of the library and the shed, forgotten by everyone the second they stopped being useful.
The electricity supply gets worse not long after Ray moves in. The lights don’t stay on for longer than two hours, the street lights haven’t been on for a month and the lights at the bus station flicker like they’re on their last legs, ready to snap, crackle and bang, plunge the entire building into darkness.
They don’t waste electricity on the fridge, instead sticking to food that can be bought and eaten without having to be cooked or kept for very long.
Brad and Nate talk in low voices about planning things, about Rudy and Pappy and Poke and people whose names Ray hasn’t heard before.
Well.
Brad talks about how something’s going on; Nate tells him that it’s not his job to worry until Nate tells him to.
Ray pretends that he doesn’t notice the way they stand too close, watch each other too carefully. It’s easier this way.
There’s a visitor in the middle of the night. Ray’s busy rewiring one of the tiny systems he’s created inside the radio (the only way to get enough power to get it working is to build multiple smaller networks inside the radio and hope that he doesn’t blow out the power to the whole street when he plugs it in) and doesn’t pay any attention to them. Nate comes over sometimes, talks about plans and how the day’s gone, using words that Ray’s sure have special meanings attached to them by Brad, but he doesn’t ask and they don’t tell. If he gets this right, Brad’s promised to introduce him to Rudy and Pappy, who have access to more electronics. It’ll be a nice change from being sent to his room like a badly behaved child the few times Rudy and Pappy visit.
Tonight’s different, though. It isn’t Nate who stands in the kitchen; this one casts a different shadow across the wall. Ray notices that and then goes right back to working on the system. The wires are so tiny he’s half afraid he’s going to damage them when he’s trying to connect them, so he tunes out everything except the low hum of conversation behind him.
“They firebombed my apartment,” the new guy says and Ray decides that, yes, he should probably start giving a shit about what happens around him because the new guy? He doesn’t sound like he’s from the city. “I think they worked out that I’m involved.”
Ray slides across the wall until he can look out of bedroom door. He can see right across the living area from here: Brad’s standing in front of the kitchen counter, the stranger hovering uncertainly between Brad and the door, as if he can’t decide if he’s staying or going; he’s got a bag slung across one shoulder.
Brad leans against the counter, coffee cup in one hand, and kicked out a chair for the new guy.
“Walt, you know I’d let you stay any other time, but I’ve got a tenant right now,” he says regretfully, and Ray can’t see Walt’s face, but he can see his shoulders slump. “I’ll have to get in touch with Rudy and Pappy in the morning, and see if Poke and Nate know of anywhere you can stay until we can make you disappear again.”
“I don’t mind,” Ray says, and the look of shock on Walt’s face would make him laugh if it wasn’t for the fact that Walt looks like he hasn’t slept for a week, and Brad looks about ready to kill him if he says anything that isn’t strictly necessary.
By the end of the first week, Ray’s decided that he likes Walt,
Walt’s a good roommate. He doesn’t complain when Ray gets up in the middle of the night, or finishes the milk without telling anyone. He doesn’t even say anything when he gets out of bed and steps on pieces of the radio that Ray left out the night before, and he limps for a week after that.
He’s a better roommate than Ray is, something Brad points out several times. Nate thinks it’s funny (and Ray catches Walt’s eye and makes exaggerated kissy faces whenever Brad and Nate have a Serious and Hushed Conversation).
“My parents worked for the government,” Walt says one night a few months after he arrives, the lamp flickering even more than usual. There have been more power outages lately. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t. Fuck, maybe this whole shitty city is going to come crashing down around them, or the government’s going to nuke it or some such shit (not that Ray knows if nukes really exist, but there are rumours and there’s usually more truth in a rumour than in the newspapers).
Ray rolls over to look at him. This is the first thing Walt has said since they met that wasn’t criticising Ray or asking him his work on the radio. In a way, it’s a good thing, but Ray gets the feeling that this is going to be one of the most depressing conversations he’s ever had.
“They were killed when I was a kid,” Walt continues.
It’s an old story – as old, maybe older, than the ones about the men blowing up hospital wards full of babies born with the worst conditions – but Ray’s never heard it from anyone who was there, or who was that closely related to people who were killed. Immediate family members are usually executed pretty quickly; entirely families can be killed in a matter of hours.
“Let me guess,” Rays says (too loudly; Walt moves away), “a bodyguard snuck you out the house through a secret tunnel built under the house just in case someone decided to kill you as well as your parents.”
It sounds like something he read about a film that was almost produced (in the last ten years, three films have been produced; only two had sound and only one had vivid colours; Ray remembers sneaking into the back of the old cinema and staring at the explosions across the screen and wondering if that was what it looked like when they bombed cities).
“No. They left me because I was a kid. They were hired to kill my parents; a kid wasn’t part of the deal.”
Or at least that’s what they told you, Ray thinks and stretches across the space between the beds, to brush his fingers against Walt’s. Walt looks up, surprised and wary, and he hardly has a chance to do that much before Ray grabs his hand and pulls him towards the edge of the bed.
“Want to see something cool?” he asks, standing up and leaning over Walt. Walt’s hands are cold and clammy, but he doesn’t try to pull away when Ray tugs on his hand until he gets up and follows him.
There’s a thin layer of dust over the cabinet, but the books Ray brought from home are still there. Books, catalogues, old instruction manuals, well thumbed; the edges of the pages soft. He opens a few of them and spreads them out on top of the cabinet, watches Walt trace a finger across the designs, the parts that Ray knows as well as his own hands.
“I can’t imagine having anything like this,” Walt says and Ray shrugs.
“If I get enough equipment and enough raw materials, I can build shit like this, but better.”
“You sound like you think you really can.”
Walt’s sleep rumpled, still half asleep, and he quirks a small smile when Ray holds up an old Polaroid of the walkie talkie he built a few years ago.
“I know I can. There’s a difference.”
Walt props himself up on his elbows to watch Ray rewiring the radio again. It’s the third time he’s had to do it because this part’s the hardest, he keeps knocking things loose when he’s trying to get everything to connect, but he can’t take it apart without pulling a lot of important wired out, so he’s got to do it again and again.
“Do you really think it’s going to work?” he asks, and he can’t quite hide the traces of real enthusiasm, the hint of awe, that are just underneath his words.
Brad’s taken to talking about rent and how it costs a lot to pay bill, his meaning clear: if Ray doesn’t hurry up, then he’s got to find a job or start stealing—and stealing will be easier than finding a job.
“Of course it’s going to work: I built the fucking thing and everything I build always works—well, except that coffee machine I built from scratch, but that was Dowell’s fault for giving me old wires, it really shouldn’t have blown up the first time he used it.”
At Walt’s wary look, Ray shrugged.
“He only lost a finger. Really, it wasn’t as bad as it looked; they found that out when they cleaned up the blood.”
He doesn’t say that it took them a week to clean up the blood, or that infection set in and that Dowell lost the use of most of his hand.
“Who the fuck wants coffee, anyway?”
Ray plugs the radio in – it’s huge compared to what he started with, clumsy and unwieldy, but he doesn’t have the right parts, and his mom always told him he was good at improvising – and flicks the first switch.
The tiny light glows red and Ray laughs, flicking it off and crawling up his bed until he’s level with Walt, only a foot away from him. Walt’s smiling and it changes his entire face, lights him up like a fucking firework and Ray tries not to think about kissing Kyle when Walt crowds into his personal space to look at the radio.
“I told you so. I can do anything with electronics.”
His grandma used to say that she’d known a boy with the same talent.
What happened to him?” Ray asked one day, fixing the old phone yet again (fixing it because replacing it is too expensive) and cookies his mom told him to bring them over, lying abandoned on the kitchen counter.
I married him. Where did you think you got your talent from? Things like this don’t come out of thin air, now stop fooling around with that phone and eat before your mom starts trying to tell me off again. He liked his gadgets too much, too.
Ray ate some of the cookies and didn’t ask about his grandfather: he’d died before Ray was born. Government work. Lots of people who worked for the government died.
Well, they say that they died. It’s not exactly the truth, but it’s what everyone believes (and even the ones who don’t believe it don’t really question it because if they do, they’ll die as well).
Ray works.
Whenever Brad and Nate are working at the bus station and Walt’s helping Rudy and Pappy down at the garage, he spends hours sitting or lying on the floor; checking, repairing or replacing wires; twisting flimsy metal until his hands are bloodied and bruised; always freezing when the electricity flickers because this might be the last time the lights work.
He’s always tired because he spends half the night talking to Walt about all the places in the city Walt’s lived: the slums where you can’t sleep all night because someone might break in and steal everything, and maybe even kill you; a gated neighbourhood where a nice family took him in for almost three years before government agents started sniffing around; his last apartment, which was firebombed minutes after he left for work.
Brad says that night’s the only time that Ray shuts up and then tells him to shut up when he tries to argue.
The water gets turned off twice: the second time Walt pushes Ray against the sink and pours bottles of water over his hands to get rid of the blood, shoves him into the bathtub and threatens to strip him off and leave him the rain until Ray lets him pour more bottles of water over him.
“Hey, where the fuck are you going?” he asks when Walt turns away to leave, grabbing his wrist – better to grab his wrist than his hand because it’s harder for him to slip away – and they’re both soaked (because Ray’s never done anything without some sort of fight), and pulls his close.
Walt freezes like the electricity’s flickering again, but he doesn’t pull away (like they’re back in the bedroom, dead parents and dead family members on their minds, a city that’s always falling apart around them) and Ray kisses him because he can (and Kyle’s far from his mind).
“I think I’m nearly done,” Ray says when he pulls away. Walt blinks at him for a second until he realises what he’s talking about.
Five red lights light up and they don’t even flicker. So far so good. Ray plugs the last one in and bites back a whoop when the sixth one lights. Now all he needs is for it all to work when it’s connected to the main electricity supply because they batteries can’t sustained it for very long, and they aren’t enough to power the radio itself.
He plugs it in and flicks the switch.
Silence.
“No!” Ray shouts, ignoring the complaints of the neighbour right above him, wanting to kick it, throw it across the room, smash it into pieces because he did everything right. He took it apart, rebuilt it, made it up perfectly and it’s supposed to work. “No! Mother! Fucker!”
He ends up on the floor, forehead pressed to the floor beside the radio, curses coming in an almost constant torrent from his mouth because he did everything right, he did everything right, and it should have worked. It should be working.
The radio crackles into life right next to his ear – which fucking hurts, by the way – and there’s someone screaming at him to get off the frequency! and Ray hits the switch so hard that he thinks he’s going to break it again, or un-fix it, or whatever made it work.
Ray doesn’t sit and wait around. Instead, he jumps up and scrambles over the back of the couch, his ear still ringing (he really hopes that’s going to go away soon), and heads for the bus station, locking the apartment door carefully behind him.
“Brad!” Ray yells, jumping one of the benches and dodging through a group of kids being shepherded towards a bus by Poke – poor bastards, probably too young to travel or runaways who couldn’t get decent forgeries – and skidding to a halt in front of Brad, who barely glances at him. “I fixed the radio, and I even got it to work—someone yelled at me to get off the frequency.”
Brad looks around and waits until Captain America – Ray doesn’t know his real name, and he’s suggested some (ruder) alternatives, but Brad and Nate seem to like Captain America for him – is out of sight and Poke nods at him before he gestures for Ray to duck into the staff corridor that runs along past the toilets. It’s deserted, as usual; most people avoid using the toilets here and Ray can’t blame them, because he’s only used them a couple of times and someone tried to buy a night with him both times.
“Brad, Brad, it works. The radio works, which means that you’ve got to take me to see Pappy and Rudy – that was part of our deal – and we need to find Walt and tell him because I promised him that I would tell him as soon as I got it working, but I don’t know what he does during the day.”
“Do you think you can set up a few more?” Brad asks as soon as they’re beyond the toilets and out of range of anyone who happens to wander down the corridor.
Ray shrugs. “Maybe, if we can find more and make sure we can get the right wires, but those wires are hard to find and even then there’s no guarantee that they’ll
“Hey, does this mean I get to live in the apartment rent-free?” Ray calls and Brad looks a bit exasperated again, but this time the expression’s tempered by amusement.
“We’ll see.”
Just before Brad disappears around the corner, when Ray’s got one hand on the emergency exit – never alarmed; the alarm hasn’t worked for years according to Nate – he shouts, “I’m taking that as a yes!”
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4,730
Disclaimer: This is based on the depiction of the characters in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. No offence is meant.
Characters and pairings: Ray Person, Brad Colbert, Walt Hasser, a bit of Nate Fick; Walt Hasser/Ray Person, vague background Brad Colbert/Nate Fick.
Summary: Ray gets to the city and the problem is that that's the end of his plans.
Note: For the square ‘tech regression/failure’ on my
au_bingo card. The second fic in the Goodbye to the Sky ‘Verse.Thanks to
softshinythings who provided the title from a song by The National.I am so sorry that it’s taken so long to write this. It’s been almost finished for ages, but I had a huge block when it came to writing fic for a long time, so it’s only recently that I managed to finish it. Will probably be edited and added to in the next couple of days because I’m feeling picky.
1. I Figured Out What We're Missing
The city isn’t the same as it looks in the newspapers (the few they got back home) or in the old photos Ray found in a box in one of the closets. There are no wide open spaces, or at least no clean ones. Everything bigger than a yard is littered with some sort of rubble; the apartment blocks look like they should be demolished, some of them leaning to one side, the brick beginning to crumble. Something in the distance is burning or smouldering; coils of smoke rising into the sky and disappearing into thick mixture of clouds and smoke that always hide the sky.
“Hey, kid, you going to the bus station or you want to be dropped off at the city limits?” the bus driver calls.
Ray looks away from the window – he’s been the only person on the bus since they stopped at the last small town before the city – and shrugs. After all, he doesn’t really have a plan beyond get on the bus, get to the city.
“Bus station it is—and get your feet off the seat.”
The station doesn’t look much better than what Ray saw of the city in the bus. It’s an old building, the bare bricks on the outside a dark grey that’s either natural or caused by years of pollution and people burning everything in sight. The sparse lighting flickers and casts long shadows across the grimy floors. People queue up when they exit the buses, holding out their papers to show the row of guards.
Ray bypasses the falsely perky looking women and the men who look pissed off until he gets to the last man, who looks more bored than angry. His nametag reads COLBERT in ugly, blocky type. It looks like the lettering along the tops of the letters from his high schools, the ones he always threw in the bin without reading them.
“How old are you?” he asks without looking up, taking the papers and running them through a scanner. The scanner screeches, its lights flashing for a second, before there’s a series of snaps, crackles and a pop that’s enough to make Colbert take a step back, and then the scanner goes dark. Colbert sighs, as if this is an everyday occurrence – maybe it is, maybe the situation here is as bad as it is back home; little electricity, next to no gas and everything’s terrible when you can get it – and begins to look over it.
Ray stares at the scanner. He’s never seen one up close before and the photos in the books sucked ass: all blurred and the books were badly printed. It doesn’t look much like the photos, more like it’s been cobbled together from bits and pieces of what little survived of the sleek silver units.
Colbert clears his throat. “Age?”
“Eighteen.”
“You do know you’re not supposed to travel between towns or cities until you’re twenty-one, don’t you?” Colbert says slowly, as if he’s given people this same speech a million times, or he thinks Ray’s too thick to understand – and if that’s why, fuck him, because he aced every single class, even when the teachers hated him – and it sounds like he’s reading it off a card. “If you want to travel, you need the appropriate paperwork, signed by a parent, guardian or the people who ran the group home. If you don’t have the paperwork—ˮ
“You’re not much older than me,” Ray says and Colbert ignores him even though it’s true. He can’t be much older than Ray, maybe four years if he’s being generous, and working in a public place? That means he’s been working here for a while, especially since it’s a bus station and not some shitty little shop hidden away down an alley. “Hey, did you come from one of the little towns with the huge metal fences around them? Oh, or one of the ones that doesn’t have any electricity? Those look like they’re full of inbred freaks and guys fucking their moms and sisters – but they’re the same thing, so I suppose they’re just full of motherfuckers and sisterfuckers. Is that a word? Sisterfucker?”
If it isn’t, it really should be.
It’s only after Colbert’s stopped looking for imperfections and mistakes – typos, ink that looks wrong, pretty much everything that Ray had checked the forgeries he’d left under his mattress back home for – and has waved him through the second set of gates that Ray realises that he’s got a problem.
The plan was get out of school, get away from the dicks who went to the school and get out of the town. He’s never really planned for an after. It’s not like he’s got a lot of options: he’s too young to work for the government, he’s already graduated school and he’s got a little money, but not quite enough to rent a decent apartment. He doesn’t really want a bad apartment, either. You don’t get paid very well unless your address is good, and he wants to be able to send money home to his mom and his grandma (and she wants letters or postcards, to know what the city looks like because she hasn’t seen it for years).
“This could be a problem,” he says and the nearest person – and woman with short dark hair and what look like burns on the left side of her face – speeds up as she walks past him.
Well, fuck. He can go home, but what’s he supposed to do then? Hang around the back of the grocery store and wait for a part-time job to come up, knock up one of the girls he went to school with (or get beaten up when someone opens their big mouth and tells everyone about him and Kyle) and never leave again.
The funny thing is, he can go home again, but if he does, he can’t come back. Tickets to the city cost a lot as it is and ones that are open return? Ray’s been trying not to think about the price of them. Probably more than they usually set aside to spend on anything (including birthdays). If he goes back, he’s going to be trapped one way or another.
“No fucking way,” Ray says and another passer by shoots him a funny look and walks a little faster.
So he sits down on one of the benches, picks at the peeling paint on it, and waits. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, but it’s better than walking around a strange city without knowing where he’s going or what he’s doing.
He’s waited for years to get this far: he can wait and see if something happens.
It takes a while, but things begin to slow down. The queues die down to trickles rather than surges, and the seemingly endless queue for the payphone finally begins to shorten. It’s probably the only phone in the bus station, although maybe there’s a staff one somewhere because Ray doesn’t see Colbert or Fick – another guard who looks even closer to his age than Colbert, like he used one of the fake I.D.s that Ray never managed to get a hold of – using the phones at all. They use battered looking walkie-talkies to communicate. When those fail, they shout across the station. Ray’s tempted to point out that he can probably fix those in minutes.
It’s beginning to get dark when the buses stop arriving and most of the guards leave. Fick offers him a sympathetic smile. He’s probably seen dozens of people arrive and end up stuck at the bus station. Ray wonders what happens to people when they don’t have anywhere to go. There are rumours about people being locked up, but he thinks those are just stories that little kids are told to keep them from running away, or at least he hopes they are.
He really doesn’t want to find out.
“What are you still doing here?”
Ray bangs his head against the bench in his hurry to get up, the jacket that was acting as a pillow falling onto the bag that sits on the ground beside the bench. It feels like the strap’s cutting off the blood to his fingers, but at least it’s still there.
It takes him a moment to realise that someone spoke to him. Colbert’s standing in front of the bench, imposing even in the poor lighting, looking very much like all he wants to do is go home.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Ray says. “I mean, I could go out on the streets and try and earn some money for rent, but how many places would rent to someone who gets their money from having sex with total strangers? I could steal, but that’s boring and if I’m bored, I talk and if I talk, I’ll get caught anyway and I’ll end up in jail and do you know what they do to people in the jails here?”
Colbert’s expression is quickly becoming pained. Ray tries not to smile.
“If I find you somewhere to stay, will you shut up?”
The apartment’s not very big, but it’s warm, has running water (most of the time) and electricity (the supply is patchy at best) but Ray’s just glad that he’s not going to be sleeping on the bench at the bus station.
Ray’s room has two single beds in, a couple of cabinets and a closet full of old electronics. Radios, what looks like half a television set and bits and pieces that could have come from anything.
Brad – who only told Ray his name after Ray talked for twenty minutes straight – has hardly left the room when Ray begins pulling the shit out of the closet. It actually looks like it might be salvageable.
“I’ll make you a deal: you do something with these radios and I’ll see about finding you something to do that doesn’t involve sitting in a factory and thinking about your aunt-mother and uncle-father back home.”
That’s as good a deal as Ray thinks he’s going to get.
They had working TVs once, and Ray thinks that must have been pretty sweet, being able to sit at home and watch something instead of crowding into the tiny little cinemas that smell like burnt popcorn, sweat and feet—actually, minus the popcorn, the smell a lot like the buses in and out of the city. Ray makes a face. That’s gross.
Anyway, there haven’t been TVs since the day Ray was born, because someone dropped some more bombs – big ones, the ones that killed thousands of people – and everything just... died.
Unlike the day the sky disappeared, there’s not much information about why there are no TVs, why the electricity is patchy at best and why the most advanced thing anyone has is a radio – although maybe they were a bit too busy taking care of all the bodies left after the bombs fell silent – and even then you have to be good at fixing them, or rich enough to find one of the few people who can build and fix one. Not many people bother to learn because they don’t think there’s any use for them.
Ray did. Well, he didn’t really learn like most people, because most of them had people teaching them and some bastard of a teacher with big glasses and an ugly moustache standing over them and going on about how in my day kids knew how to listen or something—okay, he doesn’t really know what teachers say, because he never cared enough to pay attention to most of them, but anyway...
Ray learned from books. Old ones that had been piled in the back of the library and the shed, forgotten by everyone the second they stopped being useful.
The electricity supply gets worse not long after Ray moves in. The lights don’t stay on for longer than two hours, the street lights haven’t been on for a month and the lights at the bus station flicker like they’re on their last legs, ready to snap, crackle and bang, plunge the entire building into darkness.
They don’t waste electricity on the fridge, instead sticking to food that can be bought and eaten without having to be cooked or kept for very long.
Brad and Nate talk in low voices about planning things, about Rudy and Pappy and Poke and people whose names Ray hasn’t heard before.
Well.
Brad talks about how something’s going on; Nate tells him that it’s not his job to worry until Nate tells him to.
Ray pretends that he doesn’t notice the way they stand too close, watch each other too carefully. It’s easier this way.
There’s a visitor in the middle of the night. Ray’s busy rewiring one of the tiny systems he’s created inside the radio (the only way to get enough power to get it working is to build multiple smaller networks inside the radio and hope that he doesn’t blow out the power to the whole street when he plugs it in) and doesn’t pay any attention to them. Nate comes over sometimes, talks about plans and how the day’s gone, using words that Ray’s sure have special meanings attached to them by Brad, but he doesn’t ask and they don’t tell. If he gets this right, Brad’s promised to introduce him to Rudy and Pappy, who have access to more electronics. It’ll be a nice change from being sent to his room like a badly behaved child the few times Rudy and Pappy visit.
Tonight’s different, though. It isn’t Nate who stands in the kitchen; this one casts a different shadow across the wall. Ray notices that and then goes right back to working on the system. The wires are so tiny he’s half afraid he’s going to damage them when he’s trying to connect them, so he tunes out everything except the low hum of conversation behind him.
“They firebombed my apartment,” the new guy says and Ray decides that, yes, he should probably start giving a shit about what happens around him because the new guy? He doesn’t sound like he’s from the city. “I think they worked out that I’m involved.”
Ray slides across the wall until he can look out of bedroom door. He can see right across the living area from here: Brad’s standing in front of the kitchen counter, the stranger hovering uncertainly between Brad and the door, as if he can’t decide if he’s staying or going; he’s got a bag slung across one shoulder.
Brad leans against the counter, coffee cup in one hand, and kicked out a chair for the new guy.
“Walt, you know I’d let you stay any other time, but I’ve got a tenant right now,” he says regretfully, and Ray can’t see Walt’s face, but he can see his shoulders slump. “I’ll have to get in touch with Rudy and Pappy in the morning, and see if Poke and Nate know of anywhere you can stay until we can make you disappear again.”
“I don’t mind,” Ray says, and the look of shock on Walt’s face would make him laugh if it wasn’t for the fact that Walt looks like he hasn’t slept for a week, and Brad looks about ready to kill him if he says anything that isn’t strictly necessary.
By the end of the first week, Ray’s decided that he likes Walt,
Walt’s a good roommate. He doesn’t complain when Ray gets up in the middle of the night, or finishes the milk without telling anyone. He doesn’t even say anything when he gets out of bed and steps on pieces of the radio that Ray left out the night before, and he limps for a week after that.
He’s a better roommate than Ray is, something Brad points out several times. Nate thinks it’s funny (and Ray catches Walt’s eye and makes exaggerated kissy faces whenever Brad and Nate have a Serious and Hushed Conversation).
“My parents worked for the government,” Walt says one night a few months after he arrives, the lamp flickering even more than usual. There have been more power outages lately. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t. Fuck, maybe this whole shitty city is going to come crashing down around them, or the government’s going to nuke it or some such shit (not that Ray knows if nukes really exist, but there are rumours and there’s usually more truth in a rumour than in the newspapers).
Ray rolls over to look at him. This is the first thing Walt has said since they met that wasn’t criticising Ray or asking him his work on the radio. In a way, it’s a good thing, but Ray gets the feeling that this is going to be one of the most depressing conversations he’s ever had.
“They were killed when I was a kid,” Walt continues.
It’s an old story – as old, maybe older, than the ones about the men blowing up hospital wards full of babies born with the worst conditions – but Ray’s never heard it from anyone who was there, or who was that closely related to people who were killed. Immediate family members are usually executed pretty quickly; entirely families can be killed in a matter of hours.
“Let me guess,” Rays says (too loudly; Walt moves away), “a bodyguard snuck you out the house through a secret tunnel built under the house just in case someone decided to kill you as well as your parents.”
It sounds like something he read about a film that was almost produced (in the last ten years, three films have been produced; only two had sound and only one had vivid colours; Ray remembers sneaking into the back of the old cinema and staring at the explosions across the screen and wondering if that was what it looked like when they bombed cities).
“No. They left me because I was a kid. They were hired to kill my parents; a kid wasn’t part of the deal.”
Or at least that’s what they told you, Ray thinks and stretches across the space between the beds, to brush his fingers against Walt’s. Walt looks up, surprised and wary, and he hardly has a chance to do that much before Ray grabs his hand and pulls him towards the edge of the bed.
“Want to see something cool?” he asks, standing up and leaning over Walt. Walt’s hands are cold and clammy, but he doesn’t try to pull away when Ray tugs on his hand until he gets up and follows him.
There’s a thin layer of dust over the cabinet, but the books Ray brought from home are still there. Books, catalogues, old instruction manuals, well thumbed; the edges of the pages soft. He opens a few of them and spreads them out on top of the cabinet, watches Walt trace a finger across the designs, the parts that Ray knows as well as his own hands.
“I can’t imagine having anything like this,” Walt says and Ray shrugs.
“If I get enough equipment and enough raw materials, I can build shit like this, but better.”
“You sound like you think you really can.”
Walt’s sleep rumpled, still half asleep, and he quirks a small smile when Ray holds up an old Polaroid of the walkie talkie he built a few years ago.
“I know I can. There’s a difference.”
Walt props himself up on his elbows to watch Ray rewiring the radio again. It’s the third time he’s had to do it because this part’s the hardest, he keeps knocking things loose when he’s trying to get everything to connect, but he can’t take it apart without pulling a lot of important wired out, so he’s got to do it again and again.
“Do you really think it’s going to work?” he asks, and he can’t quite hide the traces of real enthusiasm, the hint of awe, that are just underneath his words.
Brad’s taken to talking about rent and how it costs a lot to pay bill, his meaning clear: if Ray doesn’t hurry up, then he’s got to find a job or start stealing—and stealing will be easier than finding a job.
“Of course it’s going to work: I built the fucking thing and everything I build always works—well, except that coffee machine I built from scratch, but that was Dowell’s fault for giving me old wires, it really shouldn’t have blown up the first time he used it.”
At Walt’s wary look, Ray shrugged.
“He only lost a finger. Really, it wasn’t as bad as it looked; they found that out when they cleaned up the blood.”
He doesn’t say that it took them a week to clean up the blood, or that infection set in and that Dowell lost the use of most of his hand.
“Who the fuck wants coffee, anyway?”
Ray plugs the radio in – it’s huge compared to what he started with, clumsy and unwieldy, but he doesn’t have the right parts, and his mom always told him he was good at improvising – and flicks the first switch.
The tiny light glows red and Ray laughs, flicking it off and crawling up his bed until he’s level with Walt, only a foot away from him. Walt’s smiling and it changes his entire face, lights him up like a fucking firework and Ray tries not to think about kissing Kyle when Walt crowds into his personal space to look at the radio.
“I told you so. I can do anything with electronics.”
His grandma used to say that she’d known a boy with the same talent.
What happened to him?” Ray asked one day, fixing the old phone yet again (fixing it because replacing it is too expensive) and cookies his mom told him to bring them over, lying abandoned on the kitchen counter.
I married him. Where did you think you got your talent from? Things like this don’t come out of thin air, now stop fooling around with that phone and eat before your mom starts trying to tell me off again. He liked his gadgets too much, too.
Ray ate some of the cookies and didn’t ask about his grandfather: he’d died before Ray was born. Government work. Lots of people who worked for the government died.
Well, they say that they died. It’s not exactly the truth, but it’s what everyone believes (and even the ones who don’t believe it don’t really question it because if they do, they’ll die as well).
Ray works.
Whenever Brad and Nate are working at the bus station and Walt’s helping Rudy and Pappy down at the garage, he spends hours sitting or lying on the floor; checking, repairing or replacing wires; twisting flimsy metal until his hands are bloodied and bruised; always freezing when the electricity flickers because this might be the last time the lights work.
He’s always tired because he spends half the night talking to Walt about all the places in the city Walt’s lived: the slums where you can’t sleep all night because someone might break in and steal everything, and maybe even kill you; a gated neighbourhood where a nice family took him in for almost three years before government agents started sniffing around; his last apartment, which was firebombed minutes after he left for work.
Brad says that night’s the only time that Ray shuts up and then tells him to shut up when he tries to argue.
The water gets turned off twice: the second time Walt pushes Ray against the sink and pours bottles of water over his hands to get rid of the blood, shoves him into the bathtub and threatens to strip him off and leave him the rain until Ray lets him pour more bottles of water over him.
“Hey, where the fuck are you going?” he asks when Walt turns away to leave, grabbing his wrist – better to grab his wrist than his hand because it’s harder for him to slip away – and they’re both soaked (because Ray’s never done anything without some sort of fight), and pulls his close.
Walt freezes like the electricity’s flickering again, but he doesn’t pull away (like they’re back in the bedroom, dead parents and dead family members on their minds, a city that’s always falling apart around them) and Ray kisses him because he can (and Kyle’s far from his mind).
“I think I’m nearly done,” Ray says when he pulls away. Walt blinks at him for a second until he realises what he’s talking about.
Five red lights light up and they don’t even flicker. So far so good. Ray plugs the last one in and bites back a whoop when the sixth one lights. Now all he needs is for it all to work when it’s connected to the main electricity supply because they batteries can’t sustained it for very long, and they aren’t enough to power the radio itself.
He plugs it in and flicks the switch.
Silence.
“No!” Ray shouts, ignoring the complaints of the neighbour right above him, wanting to kick it, throw it across the room, smash it into pieces because he did everything right. He took it apart, rebuilt it, made it up perfectly and it’s supposed to work. “No! Mother! Fucker!”
He ends up on the floor, forehead pressed to the floor beside the radio, curses coming in an almost constant torrent from his mouth because he did everything right, he did everything right, and it should have worked. It should be working.
The radio crackles into life right next to his ear – which fucking hurts, by the way – and there’s someone screaming at him to get off the frequency! and Ray hits the switch so hard that he thinks he’s going to break it again, or un-fix it, or whatever made it work.
Ray doesn’t sit and wait around. Instead, he jumps up and scrambles over the back of the couch, his ear still ringing (he really hopes that’s going to go away soon), and heads for the bus station, locking the apartment door carefully behind him.
“Brad!” Ray yells, jumping one of the benches and dodging through a group of kids being shepherded towards a bus by Poke – poor bastards, probably too young to travel or runaways who couldn’t get decent forgeries – and skidding to a halt in front of Brad, who barely glances at him. “I fixed the radio, and I even got it to work—someone yelled at me to get off the frequency.”
Brad looks around and waits until Captain America – Ray doesn’t know his real name, and he’s suggested some (ruder) alternatives, but Brad and Nate seem to like Captain America for him – is out of sight and Poke nods at him before he gestures for Ray to duck into the staff corridor that runs along past the toilets. It’s deserted, as usual; most people avoid using the toilets here and Ray can’t blame them, because he’s only used them a couple of times and someone tried to buy a night with him both times.
“Brad, Brad, it works. The radio works, which means that you’ve got to take me to see Pappy and Rudy – that was part of our deal – and we need to find Walt and tell him because I promised him that I would tell him as soon as I got it working, but I don’t know what he does during the day.”
“Do you think you can set up a few more?” Brad asks as soon as they’re beyond the toilets and out of range of anyone who happens to wander down the corridor.
Ray shrugs. “Maybe, if we can find more and make sure we can get the right wires, but those wires are hard to find and even then there’s no guarantee that they’ll
“Hey, does this mean I get to live in the apartment rent-free?” Ray calls and Brad looks a bit exasperated again, but this time the expression’s tempered by amusement.
“We’ll see.”
Just before Brad disappears around the corner, when Ray’s got one hand on the emergency exit – never alarmed; the alarm hasn’t worked for years according to Nate – he shouts, “I’m taking that as a yes!”
