Piping Chapter II Howl

The thing about the workers was that they were utterly selfless. Nobody recollects the exact point in this apocalyptic civilization when individual personalities came to be utterly sacrificed at the altar of more practical day to day survival,on a scorched earth devoid of sunlight or water. We can speculate that this was very much like the pilling of the dirt, a monument of standing up to assured extinction. Free will as a concept fades into inconsequentiality when you may live no more than a day.

What happens when you are a collective, a single cell in a multitude of cells obeying nerve impulses and chemical triggers.The body lives even if the cells building the body die every moment and are unceremoniously and silently replaced.

When the time came nothing, no one told Meg what to do. Three winters and the queen had produced twelve fresh workers including the not-good-enoughs. There were around forty but the numbers were plummeting.The workers had to venture out further and sometimes,they would not come back. Even if they did make it back, it was only a matter of time as they shriveled progressively, hunched over, bleeding through every orifice, have their throats swell up like a potato growing between the skin and the esophagus. The other workers at that point stop wasting any precious food and salvage whatever that can be salvaged; hair being a good source of rope for instance.The sick worker, barely alive but beyond salvation even, gets entombed by the radioactive ash floating in the air. The place left behind is to be filled by someone younger, perhaps physically stronger once last longer in the outside.

Meg waited.She had felt it. Workers feel without touching, talk without moving lips and know what they know. She had felt but like the aforementioned collective. She had felt her coexistence among the pantalets, felt each heartbeat of her womb sisters, she had felt that there was something about the blue eyed twins that they never had and hence they must be protected. She had felt that the drones would be something only the queen would have and her alone. She had felt the death of older workers, unwanted workers, and old drones shooed outside during the winter. She had felt everything what Sky had felt.After the nursery, Meg with herstunted brain had made her own world revolve around Sky. She never had a front cortex big enough to form sentences from heard words. She had felt others like her, at the nursery glancing at the virgin queens chambers some noticing only the right and others only the left.

Meg had felt everything collectively. The dying workers that won’t make it and the new they have to keep on living. So when it was time she got up.A youngling, another partial anencephalic, was cranking the Geiger. She, Jeff who had been around 9 or maybe 10 winters hadn’t bled and probably never would, simply fill in the blank space left by Meg leaving. Meg got up and moved towards Sky in her bed of collected mattresses. She was beautiful yes she was.Meg and any other worker wouldn’t need a mirror to know what they looked like. Sprawled, she never slept on her side or curled up from the cold, framed with shimmering black hair, reflecting the dancing flames of the fireplace.High cheek bones, a straight nose. She would be a queen some day and we all will survive. Meg picked up a small strand from a broken brush tied it around her little finger and without a second glance walked out of the room. The cold hit her immediately with a slashing brutality which she felt to her bone.She had left the good clean Geigerwith Jeff. She felt absolute cold without any benefit of a fire or walls for the first time in her life. She had never left the side of Sky, never. Other workers had fed her and bathed her and cleaned her like Sky. She felt it new but the being of the she knew about it all. She need not be told what cold, hunger, radiation was she knew it all.She  had always known.

She steadied herself, as if going through her daily routine. She made her way down to a worker dying ever so slowly in the yard. Meg had felt this workers death. The yard is the one place the creators of the pile could call their own. Their stockpile of provisions.  Where they ate and slept, lived and died. Workers never talk much, they can’t, their bodies are not capable of such feats. However, they do not need to. Their shared gestalt awareness takes over for what was lost to the poisons. It is just like how Meg found Abra. The vacuum she had to fill. Whatever that space used to be it was now fallen. Eyes whitened over. Her skin stretched tight over her fragile skull. Teeth bared in a big smile. Ear to ear.Rotting teeth in a yellow gum. Her gaze held nothing. Bleeding from her eyes she was not yet dead. Meg knew her fingers twitched like the last feeble moves of a windup toy. Her rapidly declining pulse. Her lungs like deflated balloons slowly losing out. All this Meg knew, that she was the vacuum meant for Meg to inherit. She accepted the rusted old Geiger, the patchworked over coat, the large leather mask she checked for the activated carbon in the screwcap tin can, what of it was left. Activated carbon. Bone char made by roasting the bones of fallen workers in a black fire and then hacking away with a hammer. Meg felt the long talon of fingers collapse from the clench. Abra closed her eyes. Someone was salvaging her hair, it came off in bloody clumps that caught on the shears. Meg closed her eyes; she looked less subhuman that way. She cleaned Abras face, felt her skin. Paper thin and coarse.Abra. That’s who she was. Nearly naked without her gear.Silently bequeathed to Meg, the vestments of the office that was now hers.A shrunken dried corpse. It was as if she was no more than the shed parchment skin of a long gone reptile or hollow shell of a spiders meal, all sucked dry. Sad, the other worker and Meg carried her. Meg held the shoulders, Sad the legs. They went out of the pile. It was dark and the mounted lamps above head didn’t help much. They swung Abras husk twice and then let go. Abras husk rose in the Air then descended, crashed down a slope, a broken puppet with the strings cut. They felt Abra crash. they felt the last of her breath pass through her still smiling teeth. She slipped down the slide into a steel silo to rot. To be used as manure later, her bones to become the part of their pile. The walls? Some tools maybe? mostly burnt in a black smoking flame to create bone char.

Meg and Sad paused on their way out of pile that day. White ash flakes of the radioactive fallout fell like a steady snowfall. They took out their Geigers. The newly acquired old machine didn’t feel unfamiliar to Meg, despite its clearly inferior quality to that in the young and present queens chambers. Nor the mask with the glass port holes or the leather rubber plastic patchwork coat boots and gloves. It was as if Meg had just entered a shell bereft of Abra. She might even have been Abra body and soul. Workers without the benefit of the gear were something translucent just a small light shriveled, crumpled skin and bones to be blown away in the wind. Maybe just like Abra had, not too many winters ago. The workers were all there. Scavenging under fallen billboards and hulking ruins of cars and suchike. Anything that shielded from the ambient radiation all around. Plastic sheets hung over make shift farms under wherever there was a little shielded space. Weak sunlight entering through the small port holes let in enough UV they could try grow something inside or near enough to the pile. Water was still scavenged from deep wells, from outside. The manure salvo couldn’t be inside because it smelt poisonous and made it harder to shield the queens from contamination. Food had to be grown outside checked for radioactive contamination and only the best taken inside the pile. The best of the best fed to the Queens. Meg felt a pang. She will probably never see Sky again.

She didn’t linger long. Being outside was like being submerged in water. The air was cold and viscous. The outside was a malignant malicious entity which had somehow, maybe with the destruction of its green avatar, gained or seemed to have gained some form of malevolent consciousness. That consciousness as respect to the last of the humans wished and promised it only one thing. Death.  Death was everywhere in the radioactive environment and the Geiger’s protection, for all the cranking was no more psychological than real. Being outside of the pile meant one thing and one thing only. Death. It was simple. Even with all that cranking most workers won’t make it long.  The steady wind retards your every move. Meg had never been outside and she never had worked out but she didn’t need any training. As if Abra had never left. Meg was Abra now. Meg knew what Abra knew. Nothing changed in Meg-Abras routine. She and Sad pushed through the debris. The wind had been picking up with time. Storms and cyclones were common. Sad and Meg-Abra instinctively quickened their paces. They did turns pulling up the water from a narrow manhole shielded by a plastic tent. Sad cranked the Geiger and Meg carried the old iron pails it was tougher but Meg managed through the winds which had begun to howl.

The farm was under the fallen billboard, arched over from one end while the other end held on barely. The Steel sheet had holes all over but was largely intact ,the lettering and pictures were all dulled and gone only those two words stood defiant. The arch was large enough to cover a large patch for potatoes. The workers created a bed of clean dirt and kept the radiation off. Sad and Meg-Abra quickly started digging the soils by the side and watering. The wind was getting higher. Sad kept on winding the Geiger. Meg-Abra kept on her pace. She had seen the words Sky and Air and like all the workers she didn’t know how to read but she knew what the symbols spelt it anyways.

She felt a joy in the letters “s k y”. The wind was picking up. The bill board, held in place by a rusted iron beam and a few reinforcements, was beginnig to shake. Sad had started to look up more frequently while still winding the Geiger. Meg-Abra quickened her already exhausting pace. She was small, deformed and under clothes twice her own weight. She knew the weather was getting worse and she had to water the plants and get back.

Sad had briefly stopped. Meg-Abra didn’t say anything. the bent over billboard was already shaking like dead leaf. the wind howled at gale speed and they still had to make it back. Meg and Sad stepped up and instinctively grabbed the nearest hand hold. The galewind shrieked in and nearly wretched them from their hold and blew them away. There was ice and ash everywhere. The Geiger counter blinked red.

A anchored steel line reached all the way to the pile. Meg-Abra held on to it with desperate strength. She felt the rubber leather glove slip and immediately angled the line and jerked hard. She was safe. She tried to drag herself through to the pile. She felt  the collective replace all her mental faculties mostly acting from long learned instinct.

It was as if responding to a faraway remote control directing her every move. She crawled hunched nearly on all four. By now she was mostly blind mostly guided by her instinct and collective. All her cognitive abilities had been replaced by the collective. she didn’t think, she could not but needed not to anyway. She crawled through the muck with the storm over her head tightly clenched on the line. She or Sad neednt crank the Geigers anymore. With this much ash and snow the fallout, and its radiation, was falling all over them in Skyloads. They trudged on. She felt a small glimmer of hope. A warm fire. The line was not easy to hold on and not to mention the bulky crushing gear weight.

Then she heard it.  she instinctively turned to Sad. She was behind her she couldn’t see Sad’s eyes but she felt her startled nervousness. The wind was loud enough but there was a new sound cutting through the chaos. The high pitched cry of a baby. Meg turned almost tried to stand up and run but decided against. She would have been blown away like a straw twig in that momentary dissonance of grief. Meg-Abra hunched over and started crawling forward. She was feeling even through all that chaos that something else was in the outside. Something that stood naked, against all that the outside could ever throw at it and still survive. That this something was after her.

The collective conscience like a flickering, oscillating, needle of a shaking compass pointed out the way, there was nothing in the memories to help her face this something. There have been cases of workers being lost to the weather but nothing had chased them in all the collected memories. The workers everywhere felt the terror in both Meg and Sad. The workers had fought off a invasion from something deformed before. There was no storm to take care of that time however. Moreover that memory felt different to Meg. This thing was fast like nothing before, was able to withstand the gale wind and was running in the debris. The invader last time was a deformed hulk of an animal with a slimy crawl and nothing like operating legs. The crying, shrieking, wailing madness was closing in on them.

She felt a tug in the line from behind the jerk almost pulled her back she crawled up neatly to prevent being pulled back. She had to claw on the line to hold herself down. She heard a scream. The follow up jerk almost tore her from the ground and threw her into the air. She let go of the line and collapsed to the ground on all fours. The last pull was so strong as if she had been an animal caught in a trap line hoisted into the air and immediately reeled in. She struggled through the rough gravel of broken concrete. She felt her tears as they fogged up her already stretched vision. The times when they had disposed of not-good-enough babies. She had gone through the entire ordeal as Sky and Air had. The collective had reigned supreme. She had to live by the day however. A faint wisp of dying ember still remained enlightened in her conscious as she fought against inevitability. She had to survive this moment. she had to end this day not disposed of into charcoal or manure silo. she had to be alive. Sky will be the Queen and she will be there when she becomes the queen the new life womb of the entire pile. She felt the warmth of the fires of potato’s rising. of Sky with her luxurious cascading hair. She will make it. She pulled herself mentally. the ground slipped underneath her rubber leather gloves. She slithered in the muck. She still found her handhold slathered in the muck and she inhaled deeply until she at least could still be hunched but on her two legs. She dared not raise any more the high pitched cry was still there in a constant she would make it. She ignored the ever increasing volume of the crying. She felt twigs and branches break under heavy weight grinding over them. How can this be happing the steady “Waaaaaaaa……..”.The babies were dead and nothing could create this noise. It was not real she must be hearing things. Radiation was causing this. The collective remembered having heard entire range of noises while in throes of red lamp sickness. If only she could move faster. the crunches were moving faster the stride was not quick but deliberates enough to be able to cover the gap fast. It will not get her. Meg bit her lip to focus away. She would survive this.

She felt the pressure. she shrieked. it was so strong it almost tore her from the ground. The last thing all the other workers felt was her fingers clutching at the glove prying it off and having a glimpse of a black hair tied to the small stub of middle finger. They felt her sigh and then there was nothing. The workers felt the vacuum of Sad and Meg who once were.