She nodded. She’d heard about places where numbers had swollen faster than could be absorbed; well-established taverns becoming crowded, then overcrowded, then catastrophic. There’d even been violence – rare, but luridly reported in default press that trickled back into walkaway. Lurid or not, it was disgusting. There was an arson, with a miraculous body-count of zero (the photos had been such a strong trigger for Limpopo that she’d told her readers to filter any more reports of it).
“Okay,” she said. More people trickled out.
It was cold. Their breath fogged, reminded her of the onsen’s steam.
The crowd on Limpopo’s side grew. An invisible switch flipped and anyone who didn’t stand with Limpopo’s group implicitly stood against it – not just going with Jimmy’s group because it was easiest and what did it matter, really – but actually standing against Limpopo’s group and everything they’d stood for.
Limpopo’s pack had survival gear that could keep her alive for a day in the woods, come the worst. She fired up her stove, feeding it twigs until the fan drove the heat from their combustion to gas-phase transition and the dynamo that powered the battery whirred and the idiot-light came on, telling her the stove was doin’ it for itself.
She made tea. She had a book of fold-up teacups, semi-rigid plastic pre-scored for folding into mugs with geometrical handles. She loved them, they looked like low-resolution renders of a cup, leapt off a screen into physical space. The teapot was a pop-up cylinder she filled with snow, trekking to an untouched fall on the clearing’s edge, watched suspiciously by Jimmy and his crew, and with bemusement by her people.
Once the tea was brewed, she poured and passed it around. It turned out there were others with folding cups, some with super-dense seed-bars glued with honey from the B&B’s apiary, rock-hard and dense as ancient suns, the delicious taste of home for anyone who lived at the B&B.
Why did they have this stuff squirreled about their persons? Because as soon as someone started talking about rationing, the urge to hoard became irresistible.
As soon as she shared, the hoarding impulse melted. You got the world you hoped for or the world you feared – your hope or your fear made it so. She emptied her pack, found moon-blankets and handed them to people without coats. She took off her coat so she could get at her fleece and gave it to a shivering pregnant woman, a recent arrival whose name she hadn’t gotten, then put her coat back on before she started to freeze. The coat was enough, even standing still. It had batteries for days and for temperatures more hazardous than this.
This triggered a round of normalization of outerwear, a quiet crowd-wide check-in – at least fifty, nearly the full complement of B&B long-termers – and swapping of gear. The impromptu ritual started off solemnly but turned hilarious, laughter in the face of Jimmy and his tactical meathead greedhead assholes.
They didn’t know what to make of this. Jimmy had a trapped-animal look she recognized from earlier, a near-breaking-point face she didn’t like at all. Time to make a move.
“Okay.” Though she spoke quietly, her voice carried. There was an instant hush. “Where do we build? Anyone?”
“Build what?” Jimmy demanded.
“The Belt and Braces II,” she said. “But we’ll need a better name. Sequels suck.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Definitely close to the breaking point.
“You’ve taken this one away. We’ll make a better one.”
“Are you shitting me? You’re going to give up, without a fight?”
“We’re called walkaways because we walk away.” She didn’t add, you dipshit. It didn’t need to be said. “It’s a huge world. We can make something better, learn from the errors we made here.” She stared. His mouth was open. She had his fucking number. Any second later, he would talk –
“That’s—”
“Of course,” she steamrollered over him as only someone who has to work in every conversation not to interrupt can, “there’s a good chance that you and your friends will crash this place. When you abandon it, we’ll come back and use it for feedstock and raw materials.” She did her pausing trick again, waiting –
“You’ve—”
“Assuming you don’t burn it down or loot it.” Would he fall for a third time? Yes, he would –
“I wouldn’t—”
“You probably plan on keeping our personal effects, now that you’ve nationalized our home for the People’s Republic of Meritopia?” If you bite down the sarcasm every time it rises, it gets crafty. This one hit him so square in his mental testicles you could hear it. Four times she’d stepped on his words before he could get them out and then, wham, pasted him. That felt so good it was indecent. But fuck it. The prick had stolen her house.
“Look—” This time he did it to himself, couldn’t believe that he would get a word in, tripped over his tongue. His own douchebros sniggered. He was comprehensively pwned, metaphorical pants down. He turned bright red. “We don’t have to do this—”
“I think we do. You’ve made it clear that you’re so obsessed with this place that you’ll impose your will on it. You have shown yourself to be a monster. When you meet a monster, you back away and let it gnaw at whatever bone it’s fascinated with. There are other bones. We know how to make bones. We can live like it’s the first days of a better world, not like it’s the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can’t have us. We withdraw our company.”
A bright idea occurred to him. “I thought there was no leader. What’s this ‘we’ shit? Can’t you see she’s manipulating you all—”
She raised her hand. He fell silent. She didn’t say anything, kept her hand up. Etcetera, bless him, put his hand up next. Moments later, everyone had one hand up.
“We took a vote,” she said. “You lost.”
One of his skeezoids – what must he have promised them, she wondered, about this place – gave a heartfelt “Daaaamn.” Had she ever won.
“Do we get our stuff, Jimmy?”
Bless his toes and ankles, he said: “No.” Set his jaw, made a mutinous chin. “No. Fuck all y’all.”
It would be a cold night, but not too cold. They knew where the half-demolished buildings they could shelter in were, and were carrying lots of this and that. Once they got into range of walkaway net, they would tell the story – the video was captured from ten winking lenses she could count – and rely on the kindness of strangers. They’d rebuild.
Figures, she didn’t have to say. However awful things got that night. However much work they’d do in the years that followed. However many sore muscles and blistered hands and busted legs they endured, everyone would remember Jimmy. Remember what happened when the special snowflake disease ran unchecked. They’d build something bigger, more beautiful. They’d avoid the mistakes they’d made the last time, make exciting new ones instead. The onsen would be amazing. Their plans had been forked a dozen times since they’d shipped, some of the additions were gorgeous. As she started putting one foot in front of the other, her mind went to these thoughts, the plans took form.
The girl, Iceweasel, fell into step. They walked, crunch, crunch, huff, huff, through the woodland. “Limpopo?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“But this is crazy! You made that place. You just let him take it!”
“Wasn’t mine, I didn’t make it. I didn’t let him take it.”