“Yeah?”
As we were walking, I was leaning on my precious fishing rod and he was using a branch.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that from the medical field, our group has a GP, midwives, a chiropractor, a physiotherapist, a gynaecologist and a pharmacist,” I was listing them on my fingers, “but no psychologists?”
“Why would we need a psychologist?” he frowned in surprise. “What, are you saying that you think it’s mentally straining to abandon your old life, go to the other side of the world while there is an apocalypse unfolding around you, be stuck in a basement for six months, and then, in the middle of absolute nowhere, start over from scratch, with three hundred and seventy strangers, who by the way constitute the entire human population?”
We exchanged a look and then almost broke down laughing.
“Yeah, I’d say it’s weird,” he said when he could speak again. He stood up and wiped the tears of laughter from his face. “The Collectivers have probably figured that we’d be able to deal with anything, since we have good hearts.”
This good heart, mentioned in so many of our letters, had become something of a motto for our community. The Collective had clearly been very careful about who would get a second chance; they wanted to build a new, perfect society. If we weren’t feeling the best after recent events, supposedly we just had to rely on other people’s good hearts.
“Or, maybe they did choose a psychologist, and they were one of the six adults that didn’t make it to the tree. Hard to say. Why do you ask?” he stopped again, but this time he looked at me quizzically. “Is everything okay?”
I shrugged. How could I explain that to him? “I guess we’re all dealing with the same stuff.”
He started walking again, but didn’t say anything. Maybe he was waiting for me to open up.
“It’s like you said. You’re living your ordinary life, then you fly abroad on holiday, and it’s all turned upside down by a deadly virus, deliberately released by people to wipe out the population. That alone is hard to deal with. But… to watch your daughter die, then have to lock your granddaughter and yourself in an underground prison and listen as strangers come to the house to search for food every five minutes. And be scared that maybe you two are the last ones on Earth.” I stopped and then waved my hand in a would-be nonchalant way. “I guess I’m overreacting, sorry.”
He sighed. “I think we should ask Nelson to go through all the adults and have a little chat with everyone. He must have done some psychology in med school…”
A few minutes passed in silence only interrupted by the sound of whispering leaves and small branches cracking under our feet.
“I have nightmares every night,” Billy confessed. “When I wake up, I don’t know what is worse, the nightmares or reality.”
We left it at that. The end of the forest was almost in sight and the rippling of the river was getting louder and louder. We didn’t even need to bring a map to find this place, I thought as we were getting settled on some boulders. I took a worm dug out of the ground the previous afternoon out of our bucket, put it on the hook and cast the rod. We had several hours of peace and quiet ahead of us.
Luckily, Billy had thought to bring two big plastic bags he’d found, or shall I say almost slipped on in the kitchen when Nadia was taking them out of a cupboard. We lined our backpacks with them, and then filled the bags with our bounty.
“Otherwise we’d be smelling like fish for the next twenty years,” Billy noted, satisfied.
I had longed to go fishing so I could stretch my legs on the hike to the river, and then sit on the bank for a few hours without having to deal with any pressing community matters. The few fish I thought I’d catch were supposed to be taken back in a bucket with a bit of water.
But it turned out that nature had been taking full advantage of six months without any human activity, and since nobody else had been messing with the river, it was overflowing with fish of all kinds and sizes.
“I know an opportunity when I see one,” Billy said after the fifth catch in ten minutes, and that’s when he pulled out the plastic bags. “I guess this is pretty much the end of our idle philosophical debates. You catch, I clean. This here is our dinner, pal.”
And so the morning trip became a mission to feed almost four hundred hungry mouths. At first I watched Billy massacre the fish with my knife, wasting precious meat, although of course unwittingly. He cut the fillets helter-skelter, clearly he’d never cleaned fish before. I suggested we switch and showed him how to use the rod. He was much better at fishing, so I could laugh with relief and then turn it into a joke.
“I’m a musician, Frank,” he said, smiling. “I can strum the strings and play the keys with my eyes closed, that must be a good-enough excuse for being clumsy with a knife, right?”
“Sure, sure,” I waved my hand and took another catch from him. Kill it, cut the head off, slice the sides into fillets, remove the bones, put the meat into bags. Everything else went back into the river. I wanted to come back to this place, so it wasn’t wise to leave a banquet for stray dogs who’d end up hanging around, expecting seconds. Plus, the remains would start reeking after a while and I certainly didn’t want to add anything to the smell carried by the wind.
At first we worked in silence, but in the end we used this opportunity and started chatting again. Soon it became a game of “Don’t you think it’s weird that…”.
Billy was asking about The Collective and the Association
