Butt of the Spear
Melanie Griffin

Hang on, what’s that?

Deep breath, Georgie. You’ve been walking too long, maybe, and you’re hallucinating. Maybe.

But look — Hank’s frowning in that way he does when he’s gearing up to say something. See what it is and go from there.

He stops at the edge of a little cliff, nothing extreme. Nothing’s BEEN extreme during this latest leg of the trek, just pine trees and rotted-out mid-priced cars lining the interstate.

But eventually you found this bit of a dip, and now Hank wants to know, “Why does the wind smell like blood?”

He’s right. Ripe copper scent fills the valley below, both of your nostrils, and the part of your brain that should be alarmed. There is a twinge, a ghost of a reflex, that will probably never die completely. But frankly, after the last five years, it’s unimpressed.

You move to stand beside Hank. He’s taller than you and uses the whole length of his legs for each stride, so you’re usually a little behind, but you’re better at finding where people stashed their supplies, so it evens out.

Now you see how thin your brother’s gotten. It squeezes at your heart. When the sirens cut off six months into the Plague, he cried. Twenty-two years old and he’d done everything he was supposed to and none of it mattered now.

Remember what Dad said, when he brought Hank home for the first time. When they had to leave Mom in the hospital morgue a couple decades before cremation became mandatory.

“Here’s your job, Georgie.” Dad had stopped crying but his eyes still looked like they wanted to. Hank had looked like a little red scrunched-up monkey in Dad’s arms, and later when you learned about evolution it made perfect sense. “Help me take care of him, okay?”

You nodded, even though you were five and the most experience you had taking care of people up until then consisted of making sure each of your Barbies had equal space on their shelf.

But you nodded. You promised and somehow you’ve kept it. You’re both still here, aren’t you?

Now his voice, accompanied by his pointing finger, brings you back to the cliff.

“Look, Georgie,” he says. His eyes obey his own orders. “It’s smoke.”

You follow his line and oh my god he’s right.

You squint, trying to tamp down your heart. It’s leaping all over the place, being absolutely no help in deciding whether you’ve found other people or not.

Which is not entirely impossible. Hank says the Plague ended up killing eighty-five percent of the population outright, although he got that number from the right-wing cranks who outlasted everyone else in the news. But say that’s about right, then factor in five years of civilization collapse.

You’ve never gotten to the end of that equation because the answer is too damn bleak.

You don’t want to look too closely at your luck, either. The stuff that’s kept you and Hank alive and together feels fragile enough to dissolve if you poke it.

So you don’t. You concentrate on the important shit, like breathing.

And eating. The smell in the valley is making its way to a connection in your brain. You stand very still and close your eyes and concentrate and —

“THE GLOBALISTS HAVE ALREADY WON! DON’T YOU PEOPLE SEE? THIS IS WAR for our SOULS!”

Goddammit. It’s gone.

You open your eyes and shoot a glare over to your brother. He’s fiddling with the portable radio that’s hung on his belt since he found both a few months ago.

He quickly turned the volume knob down. “Sorry,” he says. “I was just checking.”

You instantly forgive him, of course. You’re just as hungry as he is for any news of the rest of the world. It’s not Hank’s fault that only the low-ass ends of the AM dial survived.

Dad would settle there, too, while he was cooking at odd hours because of his swing shift. You and Hank were too young, and then too busy and too wrapped up in your own shit for it to penetrate, so the yelling is weirdly soothing. It reminds you of —

Meat.

It clicks so hard in your head that you stagger back a step. Your brain stumbles into Gram’s kitchen on Sunday afternoons when you’re seven, eight, nine. She cooked a roast for everyone on that side of the family until she couldn’t anymore and everyone seemed to agree without saying anything that it was too depressing to try and replicate it at the nursing home.

But Dad kept the recipe. He busted it out at all the wrong times — who eats roast beef for their birthday sleepover? Everybody, including you, just housed the Doritos and cake, not bothering to be polite.

Now, though. Now you would go straight to the fancy platter Dad inherited, unhinge your jaw like an anaconda, and swallow that roast whole.

You don’t realize you’ve been drooling with your eyes closed until Hank nudges you.

“How about it?” he says. His voice is a notch softer than usual, which happens when he wants you to take charge of a plan that has a decent chance of failure.

“Yeah,” you say. Of course. The two of you have been slowly, methodically making your way from canned food stash to canned food stash for the last five goddamn years. Hank’s a walking pile of sharp angles and you lost your period somewhere east of the Savannah River. You are going to cram in as much cooked dead animal as you can keep down. And then, as soon as that’s settled, you’re going to eat more.

“Let’s check it out.”

***

You follow Hank down and around the hillside in a half-assed sort of crouch. It’s broad, merciless daylight and the tree line stopped abruptly like a bad wig front a while ago, but a gesture at stealth still feels necessary.

The smoke is easy to trail, a dark, singular line that might as well be a friggin’ arrow to the barrel that sits sideways over a fire pitched right next to a series of building-sized concrete cubes.

You pass no walls or gates or guards or dogs. No wires trip on Hank’s walking stick, which he slides around in front of his boots in methodical sweeps. You’ve been burned before, and somehow those times were slightly less creepy than the complete open access that greets you here.

When you get two feet from the barrel smoker, Hank stops and holds up a fist. You roll your eyes. Of all the shit to retain from the action movies you grew up on.

But you stop, too, and stand up straight so you can crane your neck to study the barrel.

Hank holds out his stick. It’s pointing to what looks like a seam in the metal, or at least a promising weak spot, so you nod. And he pokes.

As soon as the wood makes contact, your world is on fire.

Hank’s set off an alarm that’s directly wired to the fear center in your brain. It’s not the whoop, whoop of police or the parabolic wail of a first responder flying through a red light. You grew up enough in the city that those blended in and only caused a flash of annoyance. At worst, a gut check and relief that they weren’t for you.

No, this siren climbs and settles on a flat-note plateau only heard during the Panic.

“Hank!” You yell it. You know you shouldn’t, any sort of trap like this means predators, but you’re suddenly not in the valley of whatever godforsaken hunk of land you’ve made it to this week, you’re in the apartment with Dad trapped in bed and Hank trying to move him and bombs, real fucking bombs, Jesus they’re loud oh my god COME ON HANK LEAVE HIM HE STOPPED BREATHING TEN MINUTES AGO FUCK FUCK FUCK—

It’s too much. You can’t make it this time. You pass out.

***

You wake up behind bars. They bisect the scene in front of you, which looks like some sort of dug-out basement. It’s hard to tell because it’s really fucking dark.

Behind you Hank makes a noise. You know it’s him because he started making the same wet whimpers in his sleep the first time you had to sleep rough.

“Shhh.” It comes out automatically, decades of practice rising to the surface like fat in broth. “Shh shh shh.”

Down here it no longer smells like meat, and somehow that’s more devastating than discovering your brother is tied up and propped into a corner.

“Who did this?” At least you’re not; at least you’re free to save him. Again.

He takes a deep breath as soon as you yank out what’s blocking his mouth. Some sort of t-shirt that still has factory fold creases.

“I don’t know.” Hank is dry heaving — fear, maybe the dirt floor. Whatever, it’s making untying him a bitch, and you resist the urge to yank too hard.

… no, you don’t. You’re already sick of this new wrinkle. Sans new food, it’s a giant step back.

“—you went down and I swung at em and — “

“At who?” It’s close. You can see useful information pooling in his eyes.

Then it catches on something behind you and drains.

“Goddamn it, Hank — “ You whip around to face the bars again, those impossible things, ready to rip them out of the ground even if it just means getting to another couple cans of beans —

And someone stops you.

A short barrel of a man with a head that blends right into the shoulder blades stands just outside the bars. His polo shirt strains across his chest, in some spots gasping to threadbare. One hand holds a cup that clinks and smells like a college house party. The other cradles a gun.

He isn’t pointing it anywhere but up. Still, it’s enough to freeze you in place.

As is whatever spotlight he suddenly shines on you. It blows out the world into a giant whiteness that forces your eyes shut so you only hear what comes next.

***

Texas. Specifically, you and Hank have somehow made it all the way to Austin.

“Actually a little past it.” The man’s voice sounds like the gravel driveway Dad attempted to install one winter break. “We were in the city proper for years but they finally chased us out.”

It’s the man on Hank’s radio. Your brother blurted out his recognition as soon as it’d popped into his head, which, to his credit, seemed to help things along.

The man had grinned. The spotlight had still been on you, throwing his face into shadow that obscured any detail, but the broad strokes seemed genuine. You stayed tense as he opened the bars as casually as a bathroom door, something he used multiple times a day, and you’d stayed tense when he’d brushed past you and gone directly to Hank.

“Sorry about this, brother.” The man doesn’t bother to untie your actual sibling. Instead, he produces a pocket knife and saws away. “Gotta be careful out here. You understand.”

Hank’s nodding, and you join in, even though the man hasn’t glanced your way yet. Hank does, though, and you shoot him a reassuring smile that you don’t feel.

“Boy, we gotta put some meat on these bones!” The man holds up Hank’s wrist that just popped free. He bracelets it easy with his own red-knuckled paw and barks out a short laugh. “Lookit this!”

Your stomach, wretched, shrunken sack that it’s become, chooses this second to beg for inclusion.

The man finally seems to acknowledge you, albeit indirectly. “Y’all are in luck. Lunch is almost ready.”

***

He takes you and Hank through the compound — his word, not yours, although it’s exactly what you’re thinking.

Everything is gray and underlit and most of the space between the concrete walls looks abandoned. But like post-Plague abandoned: cots and sheets jerry-rigged between them speak of communal sleep; toppled pyramids of beer cans show the drunken boredom you’ve been too paranoid to try yourself.

The man sighs as he leads you and Hank down a hallway. You’re above ground, or at least a collection of plywood steps higher than the cage. But even up here there aren’t any windows. You feel a sudden claustrophobia that comes from not knowing where the sun sits in the sky.

Hank seems fine, though.

“We used to have a great crew.” The man’s eyes soften, presumably focusing on the past. It’s a bad habit you have to shake yourself out of all the time.

“But now I make do.”

He reaches a pair of double doors and throws them open to reveal something so man-made that it almost breaks you, right there on dirty linoleum: a TV studio.

The far side looks like what you and Hank glanced at as you moved around Dad in the old living room, only bigger and shinier. Ridiculously so. An anchor desk, chromed as a hotrod bumper, spans the room’s width, stretching the show’s logo beneath until it practically hits you in the face. The wall behind it is spangled in the US flag on a windy-ass day, competing with a picture of the Liberty Bell and part of the Constitution at Dutch angles. You feel a foreign urge to salute.

Hanks looks over at you, worried. The man chuckles. “Don’t worry, son. If the chi-cons got to her, she’d be dead by now.”

His laugh is totally, obviously fake, and his pat on Hank’s shoulder is heavy enough to shove your brother a few inches forward, towards one of the cameras that dot the closest strip of floor. He flips a switch and everything is suddenly, painfully bright.

And noisy. The phlegmy cough of a dying generator kicks in on the other side of the far wall.

Now that it’s pushing hidden banks of lights to their limits, you see dust in clumps on the electronics, and crumbs around the desk. The man makes his way to the desk, and its logo comes up to his khakied hips, thrusting the rust on its 3D letters into the spotlights.

“Alright, folks!” The man thumps a fist on the desk and sits down. A pile of papers molding next to his knuckles tips over. “Showtime!”

***

Four hours.

The man keeps you and Hank hostage for four hours as he monologues at a camera that isn’t on, into a microphone that is. You are instructed to keep watch through a lens that has no life left in its red eye.

Across the room, Hank’s ass is parked in an honest-to-god office chair. With padding. And a giant board of knobs and buttons that look like human hands have touched them within the last few weeks. Days, maybe.

Your stomach growls in the middle of the man talking in circles. The man growls back, crescendoing to the rafters then segueing into ranting about demons. When he’s finally forced to take a breath, he uses his next exhale to shout, “TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY!”

This is apparently a signal, because he sends an emphatic nod to you and Hank. Your brother turns a dial, and you scramble to keep up because his slogan has gotten you lost in the fog of wondering exactly what day it is, what is tomorrow, and how long has it been since any of that has actually mattered.

The man deflates behind the desk like a toad after danger has passed. He claps his hands together. “Lunch?”

You scramble off the camera to follow him, forgetting literally everything else.

***

You eat the meat, of course. It would be idiotic not to.

You haven’t seen this many calories in one place for three and a half years. Fuck it up.

You try to chew but it’s so good and rich and firm but yielding that as soon as it touches your incisors you swallow it down and down and down and it piles up inside your belly, pushing for room until it settles, smug and sticking together until you want to throw up.

But don’t you dare. You sit there and you digest like a fucking anaconda until it’s all gone and you can do it again.

When you finally look up, the sun is failing around you. You’re sitting next to the smoking barrel at a wooden table on a bench next to your brother, who looks almost as dazed as you feel. Both of your plates are cleaner than they were before the meat was added.

Across a few splintery planks, the man grins at you.

“Good, idn’t it?”

This close with the sun behind you, his teeth are gray.

Neither you nor Hank have beauties, either. He’s got a hole or two in back from chewing sour gummy candy whenever he finds any, and yours started migrating even before the Plague because fuck it if you were going to wear a retainer to college and beyond.

But there’s so much toothpaste left in the world. The good stuff, too, bright blue or green and foamy with chloride. People forgot about it as they were dying or looting or running, and now it’s your only indulgence.

In fact —

You run your tongue along your teeth now, picking out a few strings of meat. It’s still fucking delicious, but you’re ready to wipe your slate clean. You reach down for the fanny pack that’s lived around your waist since Hank found a couple at a deserted mall.

You can’t shake your belief that they are the dumbest-looking thing to come back into style, but you have to admit they’re useful. When they’re where you buckled them yesterday.

The man sees the panic you’re trying to hide and lets out another fake chuckle. If it’s supposed to reassure you, it does the opposite.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ve got a ton of top-notch all-natural super toothpaste in the warehouse. My dad found this great alternative to chloride, bless his soul…” He shakes his head. It stirs up the scent of old, layered sweat.

He goes on, but you do worry, of course. Not least because he uses “we” when you’ve seen absolutely nobody else around.

“Where is everybody?”

Usually, the pseudo-telepathy you and Hank have developed from depending on each other keeps you both from doing something stupid. But sometimes it does the exact opposite.

You kick Hank under the table. That makes him make it worse. “What’d I do?”

The man grins again. You really wish he’d stop doing that. “It’s okay. It’s a great question.” He blows an enormous sigh through his teeth and nose — it smells like barbeque that’s been in the sun too long.

He talks for a long time again, circling a main point that you eventually figure out, and it’s bog standard: they decided to leave as the food ran out.

“Sucks for them.” Hank says this with the last chunk of his portion wedged between his molars.

You swallow your own and aim for a conversational tone. “Where’d you get pork? All the grocery stores we’ve been through, that’s the first thing that went.” Half a decade ago.

“I hunt.” The man waves a hand at the land around the compound. You scan the scrub for any signs of life besides gnats.

He notices you noticing. “Y’all are lucky. This was the last outta the deep freeze for the season. But we’ve got some incredible survivor food left from our last promotion –”

He goes on. It’s a sales pitch.

You wish he was better at sounding reassuring, but at this point you’ll take what you can get.

***

The next day, he puts you both to work.

The compound interior needs, according to this man, “a woman’s touch.” Then he hands you a rag and a spray bottle.

You laugh in his face. No one has cared about cleaning anything except their own bodies since May 2020 when the CDC declared you a dumbass if you continued to Lysol your groceries.

The man doesn’t smile back. He continues to hold out the rag and bottle until you cave and take it. There will be more meat, he promises.

It’s an excuse to snoop, you tell yourself.

Once you start getting into the nooks and crannies of the place, you notice the mirrors. Lots of them. Propped up and hung at odd angles that startle you in jumpscares of your own face as you move around.

Some reflect the blank stares of surveillance cameras that hang dead and pointed down in ceiling corners. It looks like they were meant as a dual system, and presumably the mirrors took over as the genny found better priorities.

They feel like a layer of paranoia papering over something that happened here.

Worry worms itself into your brain as you make your way from room to room. It’s the catchy bit of a terrible song that nobody likes yet everybody knows, and there isn’t anything external to push it out.

You never thought you’d miss Hank’s encyclopedic analysis of Warhammer 40K lore, but here you are. He’s somewhere outside with the man, doing “boys’ work.” Blech. But at least the man isn’t breathing down your neck. Or watching you on video.

So you continue to poke around.

But you don’t find much except a few large rooms scraped of furniture and personality. A couple locked doors that you can’t jimmy open without your fanny pack tools. And a fraternity-style pyramid of empty Jack Daniels bottles near the studio door.

“DINNER!”

The call wants to be big, distorted as it is through something battery-powered, and to its credit you do hear it through the wall.

It’s also small enough to get away with pretending you didn’t hear it. For a good long second, you contemplate doing that.

But it means more food, so you go.

***

This time it’s rehydrated Mexican.

Next to the man, who is already monologuing, Hank eats what are probably supposed to be refried beans but look more like concrete. He’s not making any comments or eye contact, which means he hates it.

You force some down yourself, and it’s not so much actively terrible as it is extremely bland. Plenty of salt survived the Plague, did this guy realize that?

“–it’s amazing what they could do with dehydration ten, fifteen years ago –”

Here’s the plan. We’ll finish this meal, thank this guy in our best good-kid voice, then say we have an appointment in Houston, or something. We’re getting out of here tonight.

Then Hank fucks it all up by passing out in his rice.

You make a noise of alarm and try to reach over to him but you’ve just finished your own portion and it’s hitting you hard.

The man chuckles (oh my god please stop) and pats Hank on the back, which is now bent over the picnic table as his face snores lightly against the woodgrain.

“Looks like someone had a long day,” the man says.

You notice he doesn’t have any signs of rice on his own plate, but before —

***

You wake up behind bars. Again.

This time it’s on a pile of blankets with Hank strangling your midsection in a tight spoon. “Georgie!”

“Here. I’m right here.” You reach for his hand and grasp it.

“Georgie, we gotta get out of here.”

No shit. You nod. You’re close enough that he can feel it.

“But first we gotta get in the shed.” Hank loosens his grip, and you both sit up facing each other. His features emerge as your eyes strain to get used to the darkness, and they are worried as fuck.

“What shed?” You don’t remember any out-buildings from the compound tour.

Hank spreads his spidery hands at the ends of his ropey arms to describe a rectangle taller than both of you. “It’s way back on the other side, into the woods. He showed me when we checked the traps today.”

“Traps?” Despite everything, hope springs eternal. You kind of hate it for that. “Was there –”

Hank is already shaking his head. “Nothing. They’re pretty shitty, anyway. Too big to really catch much, the rabbits and squirrels can just walk right through and the deer might could too if they were careful –” He shakes his head harder, clearing it with a gesture you’ve seen a million times since all the ADHD medicine ran out. “The point is, the shed. It smells like there might be something in there. To eat.”

You hug your brother. He smells musty and sweat-sweet and bean-sour, and you love it all because it means he’s still alive.

“The shed,” you say, letting him go. You don’t really want to. “Tomorrow.”

He nods, lays back down, and rolls over. It’s time to sleep.

***

It’s easier than you thought to sneak around the man. In fact, you can’t in good conscience call it sneaking, because you ask outright.

“Can I go with Hank today?” You are pushing dehydrated scrambled eggs around a paper plate at the picnic table. You’re trying to appear grateful but it’s getting harder and harder with each dusty food bucket your host cracks open. “It’s — it’s so nice outside.”

You have worked on this excuse for under ten seconds, but a cloud scoots away from the sun so an extra channel of light and warmth beams down in approval.

It lands on the man’s balding thumb head, and he winces. He emits his own cloud, this one of vodka fumes.

“Yeah, sure.” He closes his eyes on either side of the fingers that pinch the bridge of his nose. Then he takes a long swig from a bottle of clear liquid next to him, and that seems to revive him. “After the show, of course.”

“Of course.” You nod vigorously and try to get back to your eggs.

***

The woods are a cool velvet dapple, over-pinned by chips of slanting twilight through a tangle of empty branches. You let it settle in your retinas before taking any big steps.

Then you try to take a deep breath. Jesus Christ, what the fuck died around here?

Your disgust is big and plain enough that Hank catches it.

“See?” he says, triumphantly as if you’d argued with him. “Over here.”

He pushes through the underbrush until it clears for a building about the size of the cage you slept in. Pieces of corrugated steel bolted together under a peaked roof, protected by a Yale lock.

Hank scoffs as he pulls out a ring of keys with the flourish of a stage magician. That cocky look means he stole it from the man at some point.

“Amateur hour,” he says as he shuffles through the keys like cards.

You do not want him to choose the right one. “Hank, I don’t think anything in there is gonna be any good–”

When the door opens, the stench almost drowns you. Hank turns on his flashlight first because you have forgotten everything in its wake.

“Uh, Georgie?”

It’s people. Of course it is, the tenth Mass Extinction event was in full swing even before the Plague, why did you even think for a second —

You steady yourself against your brother to see what’s really there. His light catches a waist-high wooden table that has an ax buried into the top. It’s surrounded by skeletons, some disassembled, some whole, but all with distinctly human meat rotting from their crannies.

Two still have faces. Well, sort of.

“Hank.” You’re whispering and backing away. “Hank –”

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”

That is not your brother’s war cry.

The man comes running into the clearing brandishing a spear. You have half a second to despair that you and/or Hank made too much noise, or didn’t see an alarm, or some other damn thing before he zeros in and charges.

The man is easy to dodge, but the spear waves around in unpredictable arcs. When the dying light catches the point, it doesn’t shine — the whole thing looks flat black and carbon fiber-y.

You try to track its wobbles as it describes small circles in the wave of alcohol fumes it crests. Taking a deep slash to the palm, you manage to grab the blade right under the head and yank with all your strength.

At the same time, Hank hurls himself onto the man from the back. It’s unclear who knocks the man down, but he’s sprawled across the ground and not moving. Which is the important part.

You pull the rest of the spear from his limp hands and prod him with the butt. That’s as close as you’re getting to checking any vital signs.

Hank scrambles over to you. When he sees your hand, his own goes to the hem of his shirt and starts a tear. You reach over and stop him, leaving a smear of blood across his knuckles. The ones that protrude sharply into the world. Just like yours.

“We can do better,” you say.

***

The real question doesn’t come until hours later, close to dawn. You and your brother aren’t as far along in the woods as is maybe prudent at this point, but you’ve got your fanny packs and each other. Your hand is sprayed with neosporin and wrapped in a bandage from a pile of first-aid kits you found leaning against the food buckets.

Your blood stays on the spear, though. That fucker is yours. And a damn fine walking stick.

“Georgie?” Hank breaks the silence but doesn’t slow or stop his pace. “Are we –”

“It’s okay.” You can’t stand your little brother thinking he’s terrible. Only partly because it’s such a small leap to you. “We — we didn’t know.” You swallow. Suddenly your throat is dry and a little sticky.

Hank nods slowly. “Maybe we should do a ritual, or something. For them.”

With what fuel or time or — You stop yourself. It’s a good idea. Eventually.

You hook your arm into the crook of Hank’s elbow, and the two of you go on to another day.