The Seven Habits

Then Gauge placed his hand on her cheek, his palm was warm and rough. The touch light but carrying a sort of charge that made it feel like her heart would momentarily stop beating.

“Ocean, honey… you don’t have to do that anymore. You’re with us, now. Come on. Let me show you something.”

He led her by the hand, back into the large room where they had eaten and guided her to the other side. Standing before a dark hole in the wall, Gauge looked into her eyes for what could have been a few seconds or an eternity before speaking again.”We call this Heaven.”

Pulling a candle from the rickety table that sat beside the opening, Gauge led her into the darkness beyond.

Ocean gasped as she stepped into the room, her jaw dropped open as if she were back on the street, hunting flies. She spun in a slow circle, her eyes wide and round. For some reason, she felt as dizzy as if she’d whirled around as quickly as her feet could pivot.

“What… where… how… “

Gauge laughed again as she struggled for words. This time the sound seemed so hazy and distant that embarrassment would never be able to find her. Ocean pressed her hands against the side of her face, blinking rapidly, as if she could somehow steady reality.

In the flickering orange glow of the candle, walls of cans were revealed. They were stacked atop one another from the floor to the ceiling, and formed long rows with just enough space between for someone to walk. A lot of them were nothing more than silver cylinders, but some still had yellowed labels wrapped around them. Some of the pictures she recognized from childhood; yellow kernels of corn, orange disks of carrots, mounds of spherical peas. But others were strange to her, there was something that looked like the moss-like strands that covered the bottoms of stagnant pools. Something else that looked almost like little white brains. And there was even some that had pictures of dogs on the labels.

“I… I never knew you could get dog in a can…”

Gauge chuckled and shook his head slowly. “No, sweetie, it’s not dog in the can… you have a lot to learn, my dear.”

She pulled her eyes away from the cache long enough to glance at the tall man beside her. “Where… where did you get so much?”

Gauge sighed and closed his eyes as he rubbed the bridge of his nose between pinched fingers. “Do you remember the Food Wars, Ocean?”

“Not much. I was pretty small back then. Bits and pieces…”

Gauge put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently so that she was looking directly at him again.”Okay, a little history lesson then. When people realized that things just weren’t going to go back to the way they were before, we got scared. I wasn’t much older than you back then, but I remember everything. People fighting in the streets over a single tin of tuna. Bashing each other’s heads with rocks. Stabbings. Beatings.”

“Daddy told me about that. He called it man’s inhumanity to man… but I never really understood what he meant.”

Gauge’s face looked pinched now, and he seemed to be looking through Ocean rather than at her, as if he could see some distant point beyond her, causing his eyes to glisten with wasted water. “Some people still had guns back then. Ammunition. If you had guns, you had power. So these gangs started forming. All the people with the guns broke off into little groups. And they started stealing from the people who didn’t have any guns.”

He closed his eyes now and his face seemed to drain of color. There was a slight quiver to his voice and Ocean took his hand with a gentle squeeze. “It was a massacre. One long, bloody, stupid massacre. Men, women, children, the old, the sick. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the food.”

From the other room, Ocean could hear Levi talking softly to Pebble. Corduroy was whistling some tune that seemed to start and stop again at random intervals. In the soft lull of Gauge’s voice, those sounds seemed as unreal as a dream.

“After a while, these gangs had just about all the food. So then they started fighting each other and left everyone else to starve while they stockpiled their loot away. The more food you had, the more people wanted to join your gang. The more people you had in your gang, the more food you could get. It was a viscous circle.”

Gauge took a deep breath and opened his eyes again, scanning the room slowly. “This was the hideout of The Butchers of the New Dawn. This is where they piled up everything they took from others. Levi and Corduroy… they think this room is called Heaven because it’s the promised land. Where the rivers flow with milk and honey.”

Ocean felt her own eyes stinging as the pain in Gauge’s voice seeped into her heart. She wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and chase away the nightmares like her father used to do for her. She could only chew on her bottom lip, could only hold his hand in hers and listen.

“But me? I call it Heaven because I look around and all I see are the souls of all those people. The people who died for these precious little cans. Just so I could eat…” He closed his eyes again and let his breath escape so slowly that it almost sounded like the wind. He bowed his head for a moment, then forced a smile as he looked at Ocean again.

“Okay… wow. I didn’t mean to… you know…”

“It’s alright.”

Ocean saw her mother again, saw herself stepping over the woman’s lifeless body and crossing the clearing, saw the rat’s body as she picked it up and how she’d sat down, right then and there, and bit into the coarse hairs of its coat. The little squirt of blood as her teeth punctured it’s flesh… and the entire time Mama simply laid over there. Motionless. Unfeeling. “You do what you have to in order to survive. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

And, at that moment, Ocean wanted nothing more than to simply believe in her own words…

After they left Heaven, Gauge continued the tour. She saw the baby for the first time, a little bundle of life squirming beneath his blankets as his balled fists rubbed against his rosy, peach fuzz cheeks. She’d wanted to hold him in her arms, to feel his tiny feet kick while little bubbles of spit gurgled from his mouth. In the end, she just touched his gossamer hair lightly and smiled as he cooed.

From there, Gauge showed her a little room with a dark hole in the floor. The room smelled like the frothy water of the waste bucket she’d had to empty for as long as she could remember. There was a large white bowl of water sitting in the corner beside a pile of ripped fabric. Gauge explained to her that it was called the bathroom, and that anytime she needed to relieve herself, she should simply let it fall down the hole.

They’d have to make a new one soon, he said, because it was getting pretty full and would need to be filled in soon.

By the time he was leading her through some of the other tunnels and telling her how these would be the means of escape if they needed to leave in a hurry, the shock of everything had worn off. Ocean skipped ahead of Gauge, listening to his words as she scampered from one new thing to the next. She was smiling and happy and so excited that, for a while at least, memories of her mother ceased to haunt her every time she blinked.

Gauge was so wonderful… so patient and kind as he explained how things worked to her. He often laughed at some of the questions she asked, but the sound no longer burned her cheeks with shame. No, now it was a different kind of heat that blossomed in her chest when he’d throw back his head. Something warm and nice and cozy… Ocean saw a metal door up ahead, embedded into the wall of a tunnel. She ran to it, wondering what marvels were hidden behind it’s rusty facade. “What’s in here?”

Gauge had run after her and was by her side as her fingers closed around the iron handle. “No! ”

His hand shot out like a striking snake, smacking against Ocean’s face so hard that her body spun around. She tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground, pain radiating from the red hand print that covered her cheek.

He loomed over her, his face looking just like her mama’s had right before she’d attacked—lips drawn back into a sneer, lines and creases molding his features into gnarled knots of rage. He jabbed his finger toward her, his voice booming through the silent tunnels. “You are never to open that door. Understand? Never!”