The War Game (7 page)

             
John and I sat with our feet in the water by the Splash. I ate my lollipop. It hit my bad tooth. John saw me wince and laughed.

             
“It’s called a sucker for a reason. You don’t eat the thing,” he told me.

             
“Don’t care,” I stuck my foot deeper into the grimy water and got his shorts wet. He warned me that he would get me back.

             
We headed over to the theater for the meeting. The sun was not quite down yet but most of the people had just arrived. The theater’s colors were in deep red and gold. It still had the marquee sign but it was blank except for the broken or missing light bulbs around its edge.

             
As we walked in, some men at the doors were handing out programs and another was making tally marks on some Hello Kitty stationery, counting the people that walked in.

             
We sat down near the back rows and discovered the programs were just maps of the park. “What the hell,” John unfolded the colorful tri-fold rendition of the park.
             

             
They closed the doors and pushed some office furniture against them as soon as the last person wandered in.

             
Micah jumped on stage in one swift move and whistled. That is one skill I have never mastered, whistling. Especially that high-powered whistle that can get people’s attention. Micah began, “Thank you for attending this meeting, it looks like everyone who came on the buses is here. Now, we’re going to start off the night with the most urgent topic to discuss. As you may have already discovered, we are not alone. The park was not empty when we arrived. It seems as though a first generation of detainees were brought here some time ago. So far, they haven’t caused any trouble and I’m not too worried about them. But with that said.”

             
Some people clearly hadn’t known this, as the whispering across the room nearly overpowered him. He let them talk for about half a minute before regaining their attention, “And, with that said, they seem to want to be left alone. But a man that came on my bus is missing. I didn’t catch his name on the way out here. He had brown hair, a little gray around the edges. He had trouble hearing in one ear. Has anyone here seen him?”

             
Some murmured no, others shook their heads. “I don’t want to raise any alarm, but as a precaution, do not provoke them. Do not intrude onto their territory.” He grabbed a copy of the map from his pocket and unfolded it; others followed suit and a wave of paper-flapping echoed through the theater. “We have marked off in red pen where they camp on these maps. You are not to go into the red boundaries. Let me repeat myself: You are not to go into the red boundaries.”

             
I unfolded my map and pinpointed the spot where John took me to see the Nomads. We were in the heart of their territory. Someone had gone to the trouble of outlining exactly where that was on the map in red pen. The only other area marked off in red was the miniature golf course.

             
“Also note, that the golf course is also marked in red. They have buried their dead in this area. Please be respectful and do not detour or loiter through this area for any reason.”

             
I sunk down in my seat. The news of our “adventure” had obviously made the rounds in the park.

             
I pretended to study my map more so I could possibly deflect any attention from that mess. It struck me as funny, mostly odd, that these colorful maps helped guide visitors to various destinations of the park. Now they were being used to guide people out of danger.

             
Then the meeting got really boring as they read the inventory sheets, took attendance (“Pearl. I haven’t heard that name in a while. So what’s your last name? You don’t have one?”), and then everyone who was interested in repairing some of the rides stayed behind and went to talk about the plans in the lobby. The rest of us found a spot to sleep in the theater.

             
Chloe, Amber, and few of the smaller kids made a little sleeping mouse pile at the end of the stage. I still can’t get over how feral some kids can get. It’s just the kids who’ve been in the camps pretty much their whole lives. Sometimes they even join together to make a wolf pack. Or a puppy litter. And then move around like one, trying to pry open fingers to get food because they don’t have the words to ask for it.

~~~

             
The strange noise occurred about an hour after the meeting. And it was a very loud noise, like a dinosaur was using cars as batting practice.

             
Then what came next sounded distinctly like a helicopter and something else that sounded like that octopus coming alive and tripping over its own tentacles. A couple of the men, including the speaker from last night’s meeting, went outside to see what was going on.

             
They were gone about twenty minutes and then we heard laughing outside. They came through the theater’s doors, each carrying a huge box.

             
“Someone dropped this!” a man with long, thin gray hair in a ponytail joked. He took out a small steak knife from his jean jacket and sliced through the tape.

             
It was packed full of smaller, colorful boxes of breakfast pastries. “Pop Ups.” I hate those but they sounded like a gourmet treat now, even though they were clearly a knock-off from the original. I ate a bunch back at the college but they had a different wrapper on them. I could recognize them no matter what, they had a weird smoky smell and burnt bottoms. I don’t get why they needed to come in different wrappers, they all have the same stuff inside. 

             
Some of them rushed back outside to get the rest of the boxes. The camp could now have a good sized meal, feasting on: Pop-Ups, Cinnamon Cereal Chomp, powdered milk, Slim Tims, and several loaves of Wander Bread. It all tasted exactly like their names implied. A lesser version of the original. But that didn’t matter much right now, as food was food to them.

             
John and I appeared to be the only ones disinterested in the food, as we didn’t move an inch since the boxes were brought in.

             
Micah glanced our way. John said out loud, “What if it’s poisoned?”

             
“It’s probably from the Underground.”

             
I looked to John for an explanation. He said there was this group of rich citizens out there who smuggle people like us out of the camps and into Canada. If they can’t rescue us, he said, then they try to feed people. Clothe people. He said that they’re everywhere, you just don’t know where. Like it could be a soldier or a police officer or even a priest. John said that the Underground was growing.

             
I wasn’t weary of consuming questionable food from an even more questionable source; I just wasn’t hungry.

             
People didn’t really listen to John, as they were divvying up the stuff, and deciding what would be eaten now and saved for later. They were all sitting on their knees, huddled around this one box with strawberry jam filling smeared all over their faces from the breakfast pastries. Most of the people slept soon after without bothering to wipe the strawberry jam off their faces. They looked like they had devoured the bloody guts of a few small children during some sort of ancient wayward religious sacrifice.

             
They relocked the doors and John helped them push the furniture back against them for added security.

             
Then we heard another loud noise.

             
This was way more frightening, in my opinion.

             
We heard voices, dozens of angry voices shouting intelligible words.

             
One of the women inside started freaking out, “Oh my god, we took their food! They’re going to kill us! Quick, throw some of those boxes outside to them.”

             
Some people rushed to her aid, grabbing what remained inside those boxes to give a hasty peace offering but Micah stopped them.

             
“Wait, wait,” he waved his hands. “The other men and I left half of those boxes for them, they have no reason to be angry.”

             
“Yeah, they can’t expect us to starve on their behalf just because they were here first,” John piped in.

             
“We should still give them back!” the same woman squealed.

             
“It’s best that we all stay in here,” someone else said.

             
“Don’t you open those doors!” another yelled.

             
“They’ll bust in!”

             
“I want to try and hear what they’re yelling about,” the man with the ponytail said as he crept up near the front of the theater, where the source of the voices were coming from.

             
Intrigued, John followed the man.

             
They both listened for about five minutes, without responding to the Nomads. John returned, “They were going on and on about a ‘last meal.’ It was hard to make it out but they kept saying, ‘Attack! Attack!’ too.”

             
Micah was calm and lost in thought. Probably weighing the options and each possible outcome as I was.  Like, maybe they’re warning us about something. Maybe they’re trying to hurt us. But I don’t see why they would think that they could possibly hurt us. We still have muscles.

             
Micah finally walked up and asked for a steak knife from the long-haired guy. He let it drop into his shirt pocket.

             
They were both pushing a big desk aside when the bomb hit.

~~~

             
They looked like they were on a bad reality TV show, like some producers dumped them on an island. The Nomads. I didn’t go near them, as most people in the theater didn’t either. Not out of fear, but out of smell. A mix of every offensive smell known to man, with a top note of urine stain.

             
A few of the Nomads died, a lot of damage was done to where they had been living, and I got my stuff back. Some of it, anyway. John found it. I didn’t ask him how or where he got it, I didn’t care. I did ask him, though, whether or not the food in boxes might be poisoned. He said he didn’t think so because, “Explosions are fun. Food poisoning is boring.”

             
The Nomads carried their dead in a sort of haphazard ceremonial march to the golf course a few hours later.

             
I guess the first time the helicopter dropped the boxes of food at the park (long before John and I arrived here), the Nomads went and got it and brought it back to where they camped out. By the missing section of Something Wicked. They went on to say that this is how the enemy smokes us out. They do it by starving us and then dropping food. So we crawl out of our holes and they drop the bombs. They also mentioned that we shouldn’t move so much during the daylight hours and stay hidden and scattered, as the enemy would prefer us to be confined in one location (such as the theater) because then it would be like taking out a litter with one stone.

~~~

             
It was weird talking to the Nomads. They had been here just a few months and had been at some other camp before then. They must have had an awful time because there was maybe a full set of teeth for every five people and clothes that looked like they were salvaged from the garbage can of a mechanic. There were perhaps a couple dozen of them left, they said there was at least a hundred of them in the beginning. But bombs were dropped and people were starved so their numbers were whittled down. So it was decided that we would move at night in small groups.

             
After the ceremonial march thing and the Nomads said a few words, people started to scatter into their mouse holes.

             
A few stayed behind to dig the grave. No one had shovels; they all used their hands and feet to break away dirt. One had a small cardboard box to scoop up dirt. One woman stood by, holding some wilted flowers she probably just happened to find growing somewhere while on her way to the burial.

             
John and I hung around for a little bit with a handful of people from our camp. We helped them dig a hole and find some flowers to put on top. Made it look like we cared.

             
Here we were again at Adventure Golf, where the fun never stops. I spotted the same shoulder blade from before just a short distance away.

             
“That one there was my wife,” a Nomad who smelled of rotten, black bananas pointed to a body-sized dirt patch. We expressed some condolences and one of his comments struck me as odd, “She was laid to rest less than a week ago.” I saw a small bone sticking out, either from a finger or a toe. You’d think they would bury the bodies a bit deeper.