Alex kept his rifle up and then kicked the other guns out of reach once he was close enough. Both men were skeletons. Their flesh resembled the same hide as the deer and their hungry minds were propelled by the same infinite quest for food.
“Where’s your community?” Alex asked.
The skeleton twitched, its nerves overloaded with the rush of adrenaline that accompanied the barrel of a rifle being shoved in its face.
“Where is it?” Alex repeated, barking the words more harshly.
“W-we don’t have one. We’ve just been running across the states, trying to find any place that still had food left,” the skeleton answered.
Nomads. If neither of the men had a community, then who knows how many others they had killed to feed themselves? With the confiscation of weapons by the Soil Coalition, the only members of communities that were allowed to have rifles were the designated hunters and the sentries stationed in each to maintain control over its members.
If the skeleton had any water left in him to form tears he would have, but the malnourished figure before Alex didn’t have any liquid to spare. “P-please, you don’t have t-to do thi-”
The bullet that cut him short sliced right between his eyes. What little brain matter the skeleton possessed oozed out of the back of its skull. Alex took stock of their weapons and patted them down for any other supplies or ammo. All they had between the two of them were the two rifles and the ragged, soiled clothes on their backs.
Alex grabbed both rifles and restarted his journey back to his community. The lone tree atop the hill in the north flashed in his peripheral view. He stopped again to look but quickly dismissed his glance and marched forward, gripping one rifle in each hand. The skeletons would be left to rot along with the deer carcass, and like the skeleton behind him, Alex had no tears to waste.
With the sun almost completely setting behind Alex, the tiny cluster of buildings in the distance signaled the final few hundred yards back into the community. But before he passed through the community’s checkpoint he made a detour to the dead forest.
Alex stepped over logs and crunched the smaller twigs under his feet. The dead cousins of the lone tree that he’d seen on his hunt were clustered together here in a single mass grave. Whatever life was abundant here had disappeared long ago, and with it the sustenance that Alex used to survive on. Now, he had to trek farther and farther away from the community in order to hunt what fresh game was still alive. And he wasn’t sure how much longer that was going to be.
He walked all the way through the forest to the other end and started digging at the base of the biggest tree trunk he could find. The goliath he had settled on was at least six feet wide, and despite having no nutrients left in the soil beneath its roots, it still gave a solid thud when Alex thumped the trunk with his knuckles. He tossed the two rifles in the hole and covered it up. He pulled his knife from his belt and carved two scratches into the bark.
Alex checked the perimeter of the forest before exiting, then headed down toward the cul-de-sac where the community’s citizens’ housing was located. He stopped at the back of one of the houses and knocked on the door. The door cracked open, and Alex was greeted with a sliver of Daniel Harper’s eye staring back at him.
“You alone?” Harper asked.
Alex pushed the door open and stepped inside. “No, I brought a few sentries with me.” Harper quickly shut and locked the door as Alex made his way to the kitchen. The counter rattled from the weight of the pack when Alex slung it off his shoulder. He unpacked a quarter of the meat and handed it to Harper.
“How far did you have to go this time?” Harper asked, grabbing a knife out of the sink.
“Why don’t you keep your utensils in drawers like normal people?” Alex asked, peering into the sink filled with knives, forks, and spoons.
“What? They’re clean. So how far?”
“Forty miles.”
Harper almost dropped the deer meat onto the floor. “Are you serious?”
“I’ve got to get the rest of this to town before the sun goes down. The sentries are getting stricter with curfew.”
“All right. I’ll get this canned and handed out to everyone by tomorrow.”
“Tell everyone to be careful. We’re overdue for a blood sampling.”
“Will do. Thanks, Alex.”
Alex slipped out the back and headed toward the community’s official entrance, where he was greeted by the same thick-skulled, wide-jawed, mindless sentries every time he came back from a hunt. Each of them was weighed down with Kevlar and helmets and armed with fully automatic weapons, which thankfully hadn’t been fired in quite some time. And Alex wanted it to stay that way.
Alex extended his hunting papers, and the sentry ripped the pack off of Alex’s back and dumped the contents onto a makeshift table. The sentry’s partner then manhandled Alex in a pat-down.
The mechanical motions of the security check was a ritual he’d grown accustomed to. The time of his absence was recorded into the Soil Coalition database, the meat was weighed, the rifle was locked up, the hunting knife was seized, and the sentries checked every item he had to ensure nothing more nor less had been brought back with him.
The sentry shoved Alex’s pack and hunting papers into his chest with a force that made him stumble backwards. “Drop the meat off at the meal station and return to your home immediately.”
Alex’s boot sank deep into the community’s main street, which was nothing more than a long stretch of muddy filth. A few of the community members hurried over to Alex, their eyes glued to the pack of food on his back.
“Get anything, Alex?”
“Yeah, did you have any luck out there?”
“You were gone a long time.”
If Alex would let them, they would eat the deer meat in the back of his pack raw. The responsibility of providing fresh meat for the forty-plus community members rested on his shoulders, and even though the bodies of the people around him were thin, he still couldn’t help but feel their weight starting to wear him down.
“Tracked a buck north of here, just south of the Nebraska line,” Alex answered then leaned in close.
“Harper will be making some deliveries tomorrow.”
Their bony hands gripped Alex’s lean arms and shoulders. The thankfulness in their eyes and touch that helped fill him with purpose lingered on him until it was replaced by the forceful hands of the sentries at the meal station that seized every last ounce of meat, which would be distributed evenly to all communities across the state of Kansas. His community members would be lucky if they saw three pounds of that deer.
It was the Soil Coalition’s belief that each citizen had to contribute to the greater good of feeding the nation. The famine brought on by GMO-24 had taken the lives of over a third of the country’s population and decimated whatever soil its seeds found their roots in, leaving nothing but the dry ash that Alex had spent the past two days trekking through.
Aside from the meal station, the only other community buildings were the water unit, medical center, communication building, trade post, work station, the community hall, and the sentry housing. Each was constructed and maintained with the same care and efficiency of a tyrant keeping his people alive only to feed on them once he was hungry.
The only source of power a community had rested in its generators, which kept the lights on in the sentries’ quarters, refrigerated what food needed to remain cold, and provided any electricity needed to keep the community work stations operational. Aside from those three buildings, the rest of the community was living in the 1800s.