Unravelled
"The End of the Edge of Town" (c) Dan Wylie |
Jesse van der Vleis slouched out of the alley behind the
block of flats known as The Hub, scuttled along shadowed African Street and
ducked into the entrance to Peppergrove Mall.
He was taking a risk, doing this on his own, but he had his father’s old
30.03 hunting rifle and a knife at his belt, and dusk was as good a time as any
to get out of town. And maybe there was something left to scavenge that he
could carry out to his family’s smallholding on the edge of the suburbs.
The food
outlets either side of the mall gate were dark and gutted, early targets of the
hungry. Likewise the ATMs in their alcove, though no amount of cash was likely
to help you get anything you really needed now. Some shops had been left alone,
like the little laundromat and the gift shop on the corner, though the pharmacy
on Jesse’s left had been broken into and partially looted.
His main
aim was to root around the back of the supermarket – though that had been
everyone’s else’s idea, too, and he had little expectation of finding anything.
The big doors at the entrance had been ripped aside, the interior was a black
maw, the rows of grey shelves emptied of all edibles and essentials. A few
remaining shopping-trolleys lay tipped on their sides, and battered cardboard
boxes were piled at the largely untouched magazine racks.
He kicked at
a box in passing, more in frustration than hope. The box yelped. He turned it
over with his boot: a tiny grey-striped kitten hissed at him as he bent to look.
He picked it up, manky and mewling, by the skin of its scruff. Hardly enough
for more than a mouthful, if he were to cook it. Shocking: he actually thought
that. On the other hand, if he kept it, what could he feed it? He should
probably just stamp on its skull and be done. But there was something plaintive
and appealing even in the little creature’s feral spitting, and he elected to
stuff it into one of his capacious jacket pockets for now.
Even the
animal-food shelves had been pretty thoroughly stripped – people were eating
even Husky and Whiskas, especially the canned stuff – but he did find a couple of broken bags of
cat-biscuit spilled on the floor, and he scraped a dozen handfuls into a twist
of packaging and tucked that into the other jacket pocket.
As he had
suspected, there was nothing else left of value, unless you needed a Verimark
mop or a double adaptor. Only if you owned one of the half-dozen generators
that were still functional and you’d smuggled in enough diesel before the roads
were completely cut off. Certainly nothing to take even the edge off his niggling
hunger.
Boots
crunching on broken glass and a yell brought him up short: security guard,
shit.
“Oh,
Xolani, injani!” he said lightly. Fortunately this was a man he’d known from
his time on the university campus. “What a mess, hey!”
Xolani
looked a little suspicious, but escorted him languidly to the entrance; after
all, there was nothing much left to secure.
“How are
things up in the township?” he asked the guard.
Xolani shook
his head sadly. “Like here, but worse. The tornado destroyed many homes. Many
people have left, they have gone to relatives in King or Transkei, anywhere.
Some stay. We survive, you know.” He laughed wryly.
Of course,
ironically, the poor were in some ways best equipped to deal with hardship. The
rich felt deprivation most keenly; but township dwellers had in many cases
lived without water and electricity for years on end. Despite all the warning
signs – several years of water supply issues, Eskom’s death spiral and rolling
blackouts which had already begun in 2018, the municipality’s increasing
indebtedness and incapacity, the escalating breakages in sewage lines and road
surfaces – the richer side of town had proven complacent. Very few had
installed rain-tanks of any capacity, or ever bothered to save water much at
all; even fewer had installed electrical backups like inverters or solar panels
or generators. Even among those, who had thought to lay in more than a week’s
supply of water or fuel?
Jesse
cocked an eye at the turbulent overcast sky. “Just a fortnight of storms –“ he
clicked his fingers. “And maybe more rain coming, huh?”
“It all
happened so quickly,” Xolani agreed. “But a long, long time to fix up.”
“I must get
home.”
“Sure,
there are bad people move around here at night.” As they spoke, indeed, a
clutch of ragged-looking men was emerging from the corners where the Wimpy had
been, looking vaguely predatory. Xolani shouted at them; Jesse unslung his
rifle, trying to look menacing. The group moved away with that slouching,
not-quite-casual pace of habitual opportunists.
Jesse took
a quick scan of the shops on the south side of the mall: the medical lab, the
bookshop, the travel and estate agents, the mini-casino – all untouched, though
it looked like someone had had an opportunistic go at the MTN outlet. Not that
cellphones were much use now, smartphones needing daily recharging and no power
to do it, except for a few.
In truth,
almost all looting had happened only in the second week, and been directed at
food outlets which had cranked up their prices in response to the sudden
shortages. The first week – once it became clear that the PE highway had been
washed away (again), the coastal roads and the Port Alfred road bridges
flooded, and that resupply wasn’t likely to be quick or sufficient – was just a
frenzy of panic buying. The retailers had been slow to ration, so some
households went off with weeks’ supplies, leaving most others with nothing.
Then the black marketeering had kicked in, raising prices and tempers
accordingly.
Now there
was no more than a trickle coming in, trucks having to be diverted onto the
Bedford and Fort Beaufort roads, both of them deteriorating into
near-impassable conditions in the continuous rain. Gangs had targeted at least
a couple of convoys, making suppliers chary of sending more.
Jesse slunk
past the drive-in fastfood joint – shut, too few having fuel enough to drive
anywhere – and then past the fresh-water supplier, who had done a roaring trade
for a week or so before also being forced to close – and walked through the
short alley leading onto New Street. The street was empty, deeply pitted with
potholes of long standing, and in a couple of places slick with reeking sewage –
another problem years in the making but now critical with the flooding of the
antiquated and neglected piping.
"The Scavengers" (c) Dan Wylie |
Jesse
sloped past the soldiers, hoping to be ignored, but one hailed him and summoned
him over. A sergeant. “Do you have a licence for that weapon, boss?”
“I do,”
Jesse said, but made no move to produce it. Was this guy going to be so
officious, now in this time of chaos?
Apparently
not. “What is that in your pocket?” Jesse had momentarily forgotten about his
little cargo, which had fallen silent. He grinned, “A dead cat. Supper.”
The
sergeant just nodded, turning the corners of his mouth down, as if to say, That’s
what it has come to, and waved him on.
Jesse
kicked his way through a heap of posters left over from the election earlier in
the year – smiling Cyril, poor man, won the vote but remained trapped between
socialistic revolutionaries and conservative businessmen, unable to generate
the investor confidence needed to crank the economy out of overwhelming
unemployment and indebtedness, unable to replace the tens of thousands of
incompetent civil servants parasitic on a shrinking tax base. The unravelling
of Makhanda was just the sharp end of groundswell problems. No resilience; no
recovery plans. And now the fury of global warming.
He moved on
past the university. Though in theory it was the middle of the fourth term the
campus was darkened and empty. After the first week of storms, the flooding of
the dams, the breakdown of the water pumps (again), the blowing of the
electricity supply right across the district (again), parents pulled so many of
their kids out of both university and schools in such numbers that almost all the
schools decided to close. Only a few hostels remained open for those who hadn’t
got out before the fuel ran out. A couple survived on the rationed power eked
out by the three undamaged wind turbines on the edge of town, but almost all
that was reserved for the hospital, the police station – and, it was said, certain
officials.
Which
meant, Jesse mused, the economic heart had been ripped out of the community.
Not to
mention his own career as a fourth-year anthropology student; he had no idea
when or if he would sit his finals, or would have to raise funds for another
whole year, or what. A bit like the 2016 disturbances, which he’d lived
through, the ripple effects were potentially huge. Now he was actively contemplating
how to live on as a kind of modern hunter-gatherer – just like the allegedly
ancient cultures he had been rather distractedly studying!
For some
reason the area of the Drostdy Arch and the corner of High Street had attracted
garbage-dumping over the last two weeks, since the municipality had stopped
collecting it. One good thing about all the rain was it had put out the fire at
the landfill site to the north of town, which had burned almost continuously
throughout the preceding months of severe drought. Citizens had briefly tried
to fill the collection gap, but without fuel, these efforts had faded. Indeed,
there had been any number of wonderful initiatives to band together, to help
those whose shacks had been washed away or blown to bits by the gale-force winds,
to share what they had. Ironic, Jesse thought, that those who generously
shared, ran out of food or water or patience faster than the selfish hoarders
and the aggressive exploiters, like the taxi operators who had temporarily made
a killing charging exorbitant fees to transport people out of town.
"Trash City" (c) Dan Wylie |
A few people were scratching
through the stinking garbage, though Jesse didn’t think they’d find much beyond
rats and disease (there were already reports of dysentery, a threat of
cholera). Maybe he should try to catch a rat for the kitten. He put his hand in
his pocket and the animal squeaked and spat and dug its tiny teeth feebly into
his thumb. He swore; he could get tetanus from this damned thing. Maybe he
should chuck it in the garbage where it would just have to fend for itself,
like everybody else.
He had to admire its spunk,
though. Maybe he could train it to hunt for him.
After all, how long was it going to take to bring things right? Even in the
richly resourced US, it took weeks sometimes to get the power back on after an
ice storm or whatever. This was more like Haiti after the hurricane: two years
later, people still living without the ‘basics’. But if they were still living,
he pondered as he started to stride along Somerset Street, how basic were in
fact those basics? One had to entertain the possibility that the entire turn of
global technological so-called civilisation had always been on a hiding to
nowhere, that in fact the hardscrabble lifestyle of the ‘impoverished’ was
ultimately the only sustainable one.
He could, in theory, hunt. But
what happened when his bullets ran out? What if he couldn’t just order more
over Gumtree? A rumbling interrupted his thoughts: a pantechnicon, followed by
a fuel bowser, escorted by two army trucks, lurched and ground past him,
doubtless headed for the big Shoprite parking lot, where there was some chance
of distributing what there was without violence. Jesse briefly considered
trotting after them, but he figured that by the time he got there nothing would
be left; he quailed at the thought of the inevitable riot of desperation. Maybe
he could shoot a pigeon or something.
So he headed the opposite way, turning
right where the robots leaned, defunct now for a few months already, and headed
for his farm home just outside town. The last of the sunset lay in a crimson shawl
beneath heavy grey clouds threatening further storms; a solitary wind turbine
stood on the gaunt ridge, its vanes buckled and locked. His stride began to
fall into a rhythm. In his pocket the kitten was so still he wondered it was
dead. But he did not want to find out – not just yet.
"Who will be left?" (c) Dan Wylie |
*****
(This is fiction. Any
resemblance to people living, past or future, is unintentional.)
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