Grit

The world ended. It did not burn in nuclear fire, or crumble beneath a mighty meteor, or suffer a great pandemic. The world ended…in dust.

There was war, make no mistake of that, many battles and terrible weapons that were unleashed at the hands of the Old Ones. And first, that is likely all anyone thought it was - fallout from another great weapon, the after-effect of some world-breaking bomb. The fine red dust that fell from the sky, coating everything and everyone.

And it fell. And it fell. It covered the people and their marvelous devices, and it got into their workings, and those marvelous devices ceased to work. And their food tasted of it. And their clothes were colored by it. And still it fell.

And the dead rose.

- From the Writings of Brother Felix St George

The girl called November lay on the vast red dune and watched the dead walk. They did not walk with purpose, as people did. They milled, bumping into one another, crimson dust spilling from old gashes and tears as they did so.

The girl adjusted the scope of her rifle. It was old and worn, but had only a fine layer of grit in its mechanisms. November had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time that morning cleaning and stripping the rifle to be sure of this. It was not clean - nothing could ever be really clean in the wasteland, but it would most likely fire. And if it didn’t, the Dusters were too far away to hear anything.

She shifted her sights from shambling figure to shambling figure. She was looking for a very particular target. One recently dead, not too badly polluted by grit, and ideally not too deep into the pack. She assessed. Shifted sights. Assessed.

Eventually, she settled on a young man at the edges of the pack. He was fresh enough he still had hair and you could even tell he had probably been handsome, in a raw-boned sort of way. Some of the Dusters were so far gone you couldn’t even tell if they were men or women.

She moved the rifle slowly, and as she did at moments like this, she listened to the Old Man in her head.

Lead your target. Match your pace to his. Pretend there’s an invisible string from the barrel of your rifle to the target. You don’t move to follow him. He moves, and the rifle moves. You aren’t involved. He moves, and the rifle moves.

He moves…and the rifle moves, and he moves…and the rifle -

The flat crack of the shot echoed across the red sand. The Dusters turned in response, but their eyesight was poor and November had dug herself into the red grit of the dune, except for the precious rifle, held as clear of the grit as she could dare.

The young man was down. November had known he would fall the moment before she pulled the trigger - you did with some shots. Now, all that she had to do was wait, until the pack moved on. It would only be a few hours.

November fingered the skinning knife sheathed at the back of her belt and waited, her cheek hot against the dry red dust.

There are two types of soldier, the Old Man said, the patient and the dead.

November was not dead. And the sun beat down.

*****

He woke to the sound of them scratching at the reinforced shutters of his caravan. There were a lot today. His head hurt from the drink last night and when he shifted in the folding chair that served as his inadequate bed, the book on his lap nearly tumbled to the floor, but he snagged it at the last moment, palms suddenly sweaty.

No matter how bad the hangover, some things were sacred. He carefully placed the scrap of paper that served as his bookmark between the pages, and closed it and put it back in its rightful place.

The scratching grew louder. He did not want to get out of the chair. But he had a duty. Some things were sacred.

He heaved himself to his feet and pulled on the cord by the shutters, squinting as the caravan was suddenly flooded with light and his head equally flooded with pain.

“Mister! Mister!” the children called, little hands reaching over the counter. There definitely were a lot today, more than before. “Have you got more?”

“Now, now,” he said. “You know the rules.”

“First, you return before you can take,” the children chorused obediently. “Second, no sticky fingers on pages.”

“And third?”

“No late returns. Or the Library closes.” He could see the panic on their dirty faces at the thought. Slowly, he started to take their offerings. Comics mostly, best-loved, simple and faded, but a few of the older children had graduated to proper books. Carefully, he noted each return. Then he took requests and each child signed for their paper treasure - those that could write properly. Those who couldn’t painstakingly scratched X’s in exchange for picture books and promises that they would attend his afternoon classes.

Despite his aching head, he could not help but feel a warm sense of satisfaction as they scrambled away, his precious books clutched close. A Librarian’s duty was demanding, but rewarding, even to one who had been on the road as long as he. The Abbot would not have approved of his alcohol-assisted slumber, but the chair was nigh-unbearable to sleep in sober.

Not that it was a joy, even with liquor’s aid. He stretched with a crack of his hips and began sorting the returns back into their proper places. He was hungry, but he would only permit himself to go for food when the work was done.

Some things were sacred, and the Dewey decimal system was one of them.

****

The pack had moved on, and November slid carefully down the dune towards her kill. Despite her confidence in her shot, she slowed her approach and kept the rifle up until she was close enough to see the clean hole through the forehead.

One shot, one kill, the Old Man said approvingly.

She unfolded a sack from her belt and began to clean and dress the kill. It was important to cut away anything too obviously human, like fingers or toes. The townsfolk knew what she hunted, but there was no sense in rubbing their faces in it. She had learnt that in other towns, when she was first on her own. She packed the cut-away portions of meat in a smaller bag for herself. She wasn’t a fussy civilian.

It was hard, hot work and she paused from time to time for a sip of water from her canteen. It tasted flat and, of course, of grit. Grit got everywhere. It was a truism of life.

So intent was she on her task, that it took her a moment to first register the familiar-but-unfamiliar sound across the dunes. Then she abruptly dropped flat next to her kill, smearing blood from her knife across her face and lying still. It couldn’t be, could it?

Anything is possible in war, the Old Man reminded her. And everything is war.

It was. A single engine, spluttering slowly and determinedly in the distance. Now that her adrenaline-fueled instincts had settled, she ruefully realized it was far too far off for the driver to have spotted her down in the valley between the dunes. She tore off a piece of the Duster’s clothing and wiped away the blood of her improvised disguise. Civilians were funny about such things. She kept listening, expecting to hear more engines, but the splutter remained stubbornly solitary. It was rare enough to find someone who had managed to keep and maintain something as complicated as an engine in the face of the ever-present grit. Most cars or trucks were the vanity trophies of the more well-to-do townies. And it was nothing short of foolish to drive a single one this far out into the wastelands, where there was so much grit that an engine failure was only a matter of time.

Grit got everywhere. And everywhere it got, it broke things, jammed them or clogged them.

And yet, the impossible engine kept coming closer. She leopard-crawled back up the dune and brought her rifle to bear on the glint in the distance. A white boxy vehicle, bigger than a car, but not like any of the military transports she had studied in the Old Man’s books. At least it wasn’t family - she never would have heard them coming.

Something moved on top of the vehicle, and she instinctively dropped back behind the rise of the dune. She waited a count of twenty. Two types of soldier.

Then she slid back up and brought the scope to bear on the roof of the vehicle, and froze in the face of the truly impossible.

****

The Librarian trudged towards the market, exchanging nods and greetings with passers-by. A Librarian was welcome almost anywhere, and he forced himself to respond to smiles with smiles. There was a certain reputation he had to maintain. Librarians were not supposed to be hung-over. Or bored. Or stuck in the same place for six months after their horses got grit-poisoned and had to be put down, and their meat traded to drag his caravan off the road and into town where it had become something of a local fixture.

He had already traded with all the locals for any books that they possessed, and read the few new ones they had offered cover-to-cover multiple times.

He stopped by one of the stalls and eyed a grit-dusted potato. “Two .38s,” the vendor said cheerfully. “Four, and I’ll boil it for you too.”

The Librarian rooted around in a pocket and handed over the bullets, reminded of an economic treatise he had studied as a Novice at the Glass Castle, a lifetime ago. Before the End, people had traded based on abstract numbers and systems representing value. After the End, abstracts were a luxury no one could afford. It made sense to use bullets as a de facto currency - they were portable, could be cast with simple machines that could bear up against the depredations of grit and were useful against Dusters, or other people, as needed.

What had made less sense to him, was the higher value being assigned to larger and rarer calibers. A .50 caliber round was worth a fortune even though hardly anyone had a gun that could fire one. The treatise had waxed lyrical about how possession of an item with limited practical value was seen as a status marker unavailable to those less-fortunate. Or, as some wag had commented in pencil in the margins, size did still matter even after the apocalypse.

The boiled potato tasted atrocious.

****

No civilian would have recognized the stubby, rotating cannon mounted on a tripod on top of the vehicle as anything other than a big gun. That would have shocked them anyway, the mere sight of an Old World weapon in actual working order.

But November recognized the Mark-IV Argus Auto-Turret, capable of firing 100 rounds a second, with automatic motion-tracking, thermal imaging and basic targeting AI, and the sheer impossibility of it made her rise to one knee for a better view - and the turret abruptly ceased its spin and snapped to bear on her.

Automatic motion-tracking. Of course. Caught completely flat-footed, November cringed at the imagined scorn of the Old Man. Rifle uselessly low, facing something that could shred her in a heart-beat, she was every bit the hapless victim as the Duster had been in her sights hours ago. She deserved to die for such stupidity.

The vehicle grew closer, the turret adjusting constantly as it did so. November continued not to die in a hail of bullets. Eventually, it came to a halt, and a short scruffy figure jumped down from the driver’s seat. Another girl, probably a couple of years younger than November, who had survived to her 20th summer. She wore grease-stained overalls, and a wide smile that didn’t belong in the wastelands.

“Don’t worry!” the girl shouted cheerfully, completely at odds with the cool machined death above her. November continued to worry.

“Hi!” the girl called. “You’re not mute or something, are you?”

November wasn’t mute, but she hadn’t spoken for a few days now while hunting the Duster pack, and her voice came out raw and cracked. “That’s a big gun.” She was proud of herself for talking about the Mark-IV Argus like a civilian would. No sense in giving valuable intel away to a potential enemy.

“Oh, right!” the girl said, flushing. “Sorry! Rattler, quit it!” she yelled, in tones more appropriate to chiding an elderly relative than addressing a semi-sentient weapon of war. The auto-turret seemed to droop almost contritely and then resumed its slow revolutions.

November lowered her rifle. It seemed the polite thing to do.

“I’m Scout!” yelled the impossible girl, walking up the dune towards her. “I fix things!” November did not know how to respond and the Old Man remained unhelpfully silent. The idea that some under-age tinkerer had somehow managed to restore and maintain not only a vehicle, but an Old World device, was laughable. Ridiculous. Impossible. And yet here she was.

Scout stuck out her hand, and November reflexively considered how to grab it, dislocate it and bring the impossible girl around as a human shield against her sentient weapon. It struck her that Scout having already surrendered a huge tactical advantage and offered a friendly greeting, this might be an inappropriate response. Unfortunately, it remained stubbornly stuck in her head while Scout waved her hand awkwardly in the air between them. Eventually, November shook it.

“And your name?” Scout prompted.

“November,” said November. Scout’s face scrunched up. “That’s a weird name! I’ve never met someone named after a month before!”

In actual fact, her name came from the NATO phonetic alphabet, but November still felt vaguely stung. “Well, it’s my name. Scout is a pretty weird name, too.”

“Not so much,” the other girl said. “I scout out old tech and fix it up. So Scout.” It struck November as implausible that the girl’s parents had recognized her apparent technical genius so early on as to name her after it, but she wasn’t one to judge a made-up name. After she first left the Old Man, she had tried calling herself ‘Jane’. It didn’t stick.

“Anyway,” Scout continued, “There’s supposed to be a town called Haven around here somewhere. I’m guessing you’re from there?”

Insofar as a trading relationship of a few months counted as ‘from’ - and it was certainly easier than the truth about her family. “Yes,” November said. She felt something more might be needed. “I am from Haven.”

“Great! Then if you want, you can hop into Win, and I’ll give you a ride in exchange for directions.”

“Win?” November echoed.

Scout grinned. “Short for Winnebago. I name all my gear. So, you coming?”

November considered that this strange girl was about to let her ride in her somehow-functional vehicle, inside the only place her incredibly-lethal cannon would not be able to fire, right next to her and in convenient stabbing range. After about five minutes conversation as complete strangers.

November came to a realization. If indeed, Scout had somehow managed to restore an auto-turret and vehicle - and November was having a hard enough time with that - then she might possibly be a genius. But when it came to survival, she was definitely a moron.