Spare Parts
Part Five
“Take me with you.”
She was trying her best to whisper but the palsy made her speech hitched and hard to use. He rose and tried to whisper as well but she pushed down on his chest with one shaking hand. “I’ll die here. My whole life, you’re the only person who’s ever been kind to me, and even your kindness hurt. I don’t want to be hurt anymore. Please.”
Garrett nodded and rolled over, feigning sleep. The bunker could be irradiated, partially or entirely. It could have suffered the sort of meltdown that creates the terrifying abnormalities and predacious haunts he had encountered in the wastes and in the Tumor Queen’s bunker. The bunker would certainly be without power or food, and most likely water that wasn’t stagnant and/or poisonous. He certainly couldn’t take her with him on his fatalistic journey to the coast and dragging the palsied girl into those depths seemed cruel, a certain death sentence.
Garrett avoided her the next day and he avoided looking at the open bunker door. Two more days had him ready to try and explain just why, as awful as things were there, leaving would be even worse for her. That night two overseers came into the pail men’s quarters and raped the girl.
The morning of that third day, Garrett walked up to one of the overseers and pointed toward the small group of bushes where the pail men were allowed to alleviate themselves while they worked. He was quick to collect what he needed, remembering the freezing final days he spent in his home village. An extra length of cloth would have to do both as a glove to pick the toxic plants and the plants coated in glow dust, as well as serving as a make shift cover to keep the toxic material away from his skin. Luckily, he didn’t need much but there would be no disguising the taste, not in regular water or food. He would have to pick more the next day, and the next after that.
The girl kept coming up with lengths of spent cloth and Garrett kept going for his quick jaunts behind the bushes until there was enough of the plants to make a pillow out of and then and only then, after it was all dried and easy to crush did he dare a single late-night walk to the laundry.
The one great thing about rigid, highly organized cults are concepts like laundry day. One day a week all of the Believers gathered to wash their clothes. The men would wet the clothes and work at them with stones and the women would ring it all out and hang it. Everyone, even the smaller children would be involved, except for the pail men and the overseers stuck watching them that day. Pail men only washed when they fell or walked into the creek too deep.
As for the rest of the plan, such as it was. The palsied girl came to him with a sharp kitchen knife and an old axe with a splintered handle. It was the best she could do and she no doubt paid dearly to acquire them.
The escape came on washing day.