Shattered Ladder 1-2

Chapter 2: Some Kind Scraps

 A silent judgement sat on the horizon as Ken kept staring off at it, wind picking up low and sad through the scrap-fields. Dust flew far and high away from the village, a gray powder that could sometimes come packaged with a deadly payload; rust and glass and metal shavings worn down over who knew how long.

Fine and fragmented, the stuff managed to get into everything.

Absolutely everything.

Today’s dust was more annoying than deadly, the stuff stinging his eyes as a bit of it settled onto what bare skin it could reach. It took too much washing to ever get it all off. Not that we got much water for that anyway.

Dust aside, cold seeped through the thin fabric of his, some dead person’s oversized green cast-off too big in the shoulders, too long in the arms, and just too big all the way down to his knobby knees.

Even still, clothes were clothes.

Fingers rose up to the side of his head, dried blood stiff in a thick patch behind one eye. It still pulsed, dull ache steady as a heartbeat giving him something to focus on. Pain you knew was better than pain you didn’t.

I hate this place.

The thought came back cold and flat. No heat in it, the anger of when Gram was still around to hear him complain gone with her. It was a fact now, simple and solid as the waste-dirt under his feet.

I hate this life.

More than that, he hated the look of it.

The endless gray and brown and copper-red of rust, nothing bright or clean or alive outside the Valley, just an endless landscape of junk. He hated the feel of it too; a constant hunger in his belly and the deeper gnawing hunger that lived in his chest just above that, the one that always got worse just before the shakes would start up and leave him… useless.

He spat on the ground, saliva flecked with blood as his tongue scraped at his raw gums.

The smell of it was worse though, a permanent near-solid stink that clung to everything and he did mean everything. At least hundreds of years of death, decay and damp metal that crept up on you like rust-rats, a sick fog that got into your clothes, your hair, your breath.

It lived in his gut, more often than not, and he could only be happy he rarely had anything else in there. If he had more to eat… well, he might have thrown up more often than he already did.

His head pulsed harder, the whole world tilting sideways for a second as everything went dizzy and blurry and…

Ken blinked slow, fingers tracing the cut on his head again. Head wounds always looked worse than they were… right?

Maybe, but it didn’t explain why he could smell fresh-cut grass.

The same fresh-cut grass on his last hot summer day, the smell so clean and fresh it hurt to remember. The feel of his chest clamping shut came next, throat raw, and a fist of panic squeezing his lungs till they felt like burning paper.

The taste of iron and fear flooded his mouth as he fought for one useless breath.

He remembered the last thoughts in his head, the same last thoughts that did nothing but tell him what he already knew.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t—

Then nothing. Fifteen years of a different life, a different world, just gone.

Wiped clean in suffocating darkness.

Waaaah!

Light so bright it was a physical blow, air so cold it burned, screaming from a throat he didn’t know, lungs from a different smaller throat; a brand-new baby, helpless and crying in a world he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

Ken’s focus snapped back hard, breath catching in his throat as he forced out a gasp. Hand on his chest, gripping tight, he pulled in a quick breath. S-stop it. He scoffed on the inside, shaking his head slow.

Did it make sense?

‘Course not.

But twelve years of waking up every day in this garbage-heap of a world made him look stupid for thinking of this as a dream, or fake, or anything else but what it was.

Real.

A brief cold spike of gratitude hit him hard, Ken thankful that the rest of his old life stayed blurry and almost impossible to remember, nothing much to drag back with him to this hell. Knowing what he’d lost? Remembering it clearly, down to names and faces and feelings?

That would have made all this, every single terrible second of it, so much worse. Almost as bad as knowing this new body, his twelve-year-old one, was weaker than what he’d lost.

Bad meat gets worse meat.

Ken pushed the memories down, buried them under the cold hard weight of now. Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath.

Just like thinking about his parents.

Gram had told him about them once, her voice quiet and sad as she stitched patches onto his pants by lamplight. Mother died giving birth to him, body too weak for the strain.

Another weak one.

And his father; a decent warrior, and a better hunter according to Gram, took one look at his newborn son and walked away. Not a word left his lips as he turned his back on the village and disappeared into the endless mountains of scrap.

Even good meat couldn’t stand bad meat.

Sparkless,

Gram had said about his father. Not one of the ones blessed with the power that made Chief chief, but still strong anyway.

Good man. Good meat.

A hunter’s memory could only last so long, no matter how good he was, but Ken knew he could thank that little thread of debt for the food the village bothered to give him everyday.

Fragile thread, though.

Thoughts of a dead man he never met bounced around no matter how hard Ken tried to push them away. After all, who’d want to think about someone that didn’t even bother to stick around to see if he lived past his first hour?

Gram told him he looked just like him, though, dark skin and curly hair, eyes almost as big, not like Gram. Not like most of the clan either.

He wasn’t pale and his hair wasn’t straight either. He didn’t like thinking about that either though, something else to remind him what he wasn’t.

A sigh slipped past Ken’s lips, eyes sliding up as the sky started shifting. It’d be night soon enough, the weak smear of light they called sun under the gray ceiling starting to dip behind that impossible Wall. 

Soon, but not now.

The world had yet to go dark but junk-hills were already turning into monsters as the light changed, long grasping shadows making everything look hungry.

The distant sound of metal on metal came far from the village, the sound of someone doing the heavy-work carried on the wind.

Bare feet pressed into the ground, the ancient trash ground down to powder, mixed with real dirt till you couldn’t tell which was which anymore. Ken started the walk back, head down, trying to make the fresh cut on his forehead less obvious. He didn’t have to worry about checking his way. The path may have wound through the worst parts of the waste-field, treacherous and narrow but he knew every step by heart.

The sludge river moved slow and thick, nothing growing beside the purple-pink poison because what even could? There was a reason the village was built here and why so many other villages tried to take the same lands. The layered goop of the iridescent surface that ran around the village did more than just shimmer.

It promised a slow death if you were stupid enough to touch it, any beasts big enough to cause trouble also smart enough to stay well enough away from it. Bubbles broke the surface every few seconds, popping up with gas that made your eyes water even a good distance away.

Pretty colors, though.

To his right, the metal forest rustled in the wind, wire-trees dancing back and forth.

They weren’t real trees, just old power towers stripped down to skeleton frames, their branches heavy with plastic bags that whispered when air moved through them.

Not like anybody knows what power lines are.

And he definitely couldn’t explain it to anyone either.

Can’t explain how I know, and it’s not like they’d believe me in the first place.

He didn’t even really get how nobody knew what cars or electricity or power lines were if all the old stuff was still…around, but something had to have gone wrong, some crazy disaster or mess that brought the world to being like this.

Maybe I’m in the future.

It wasn’t the craziest thought, as much as he’d tossed it around for years and years trying to make sense of how that worked. Those thoughts got drowned out by village sounds as he got closer; a clang-clang-clang of hammers, murmur of voices mixing together, sharp greasy smell of roasted rat-meat cutting through the constant noise in his own head.

Nine hundred people in a tiny island of life floating in an ocean of decay.

It could have been less, though, or even more; Ken could only count so many and most could barely count up to what fingers and toes they had left. 

His feet carried him to the village’s outer wall, the thing barely even worth the name as a patchwork mess of rust and sheets of metal lashed together with cable. Ten feet high in some places, barely six in others where they’d run out of good materials. It wasn’t like the inside was much to look at either, no matter how hard some in the village tried or how long they’d kept at it. 

You couldn’t really do much when you started with shacks built from scrap and stacked tires and the spaces in-between packed with dirt.

His stomach complained, low and hungry. At least they had nature for food, ugly and weird as it was. Four-winged stringy birds and oversized rats with two heads were better than trying to eat the trash itself.

Ken slipped through a narrow gap in the wall, the world becoming smaller as a dozen eyes dropped on him with a weight that made him hunch.

There he is. Faces told it all, no words aimed his way that he hadn’t heard a hundred times already.

Poor boy. Even those that tried to be quiet couldn’t really keep their thoughts to themselves forever in a village this small.

Open mouth to feed. Pity came from the older women, annoyance from the hunters and hard stares from the scrappers and everyone else.

Ken did as he always did and kept his eyes on the ground, walking his way through the narrow pathways between shacks, mud from the cleared ground after heavy rains sticking to his bare feet.

He walked until something hit his ears, the sound he was looking for.

Sora’s fingers moved through stripped cables, barely shaking at all as they moved quicker than his own. Wrinkles crowded Old Sora’s face, years deeper than Gram’s had ever gotten and they deepened only further as she looked up to the fresh cut on his head.

“I… “ The words caught in his throat, each one stumbling over each other trying to get out. “I c-couldn’t find any blotroot, S-Sora.”

Stupid voice.

By the time Ken could even describe the way he hated how it made him sound weaker than he was, he’d already be coughing for air again.

She didn’t answer right away, lips pressed tight as she aimed hard thoughts his way. “Joric’s work?”

Ken nodded slow, eyes on the waste-dirt at his feet. “…yes, ma’am.”

“Thin metal, that one. All noise, no edge.” A gnarled hand reached into the leather pouch at her belt, fingers finding what they were looking for without looking. With a grunt, Old Sora pulled out a root, the dark orange thing still warm from her cook-fire. “Clean the cut. Don’t want rust-rot.”

Thank god for—

Something blocked the light, Ken freezing up under a big shadow; a shadow as dark as the man it belonged to was pale.

“Jax-boy-” A hand came up, two fingers pointing past Ken. “You move out my sun.”

The scrapper stood there with a face blank as stone; no spark in him, but strong enough to hoist a good six or seven sheets of dented metal all balanced on once shoulder. He didn’t bother to move, barely even acting lik he heard the words as his eyes flicked between Sora and Ken and back again.

“Still feedin’ that ghost, Sora-baa?” Jax’s voice was gravel against gravel, the words aimed at Sora even as hard eyes stayed firmly on Ken. “Boy eats. Don’t work. Bad math. Bad meat.”

Ken flinched hard, whole body jerking back before he could stop it. He couldn’t help it, even as his hand hesitated halfway to the root in Sora’s palm.

True, though.

Gritting his teeth, Ken reached out and took the root anyway, fingers shaking just enough to make it obvious. “…thank you.”

“Ain’t no need to thank old Sora, boy,” her voice went softer, just a fraction, but her eyes stayed hard on Jax, open disapproval written all over her weathered face.

“You see plants like your gram did. Good eye.” Sora sighed, eyes refusing to soften like her voice. “Pity your hands shake too much to do the work.”

Another fresh sting to his gut, sharp as the cut on his forehead. Not one he could deny thougj, not as he nodded again, head bobbing up and down with no more words to add.

Time to go.

Ken moved away quick before Jax could throw more insults on his head, the man’s voice as sharp as any rock Joric could throw. His corner in the shack was empty as always, the same lumpy mattress up against the wall. Home sweet home.

Ken dropped onto it hard enough to make the springs creak, springs digging into his back as a baby fought to be heard over the sound of someone hammering metal and someone else yelled for more wire.

Barely (and rarely) cleaned teeth gnawed on the root Sora had given him, a starchy, bitter taste filling his mouth familiar as hunger.

Better than nothing.

Always better than nothing.

Ghost. As much as he hated the name… Prolly true, though. A hard thing to deny when all he did was eat, sleep, and find a few roots when his hands let him.

Bad meat.

That one hurt worse.

The root was knobby, smelling thick and heavy and damp. Like sour earth mixed with something else. Same smell as Gram’s poultices, the ones she always used to mash up for his scrapes and cuts.

Good medicine.

Ken grit his teeth and smeared the wet stringy flesh over the cut above his eye, careful not to press too hard.

Sssss.

Hard or not, it didn’t matter much as a grunt spilled out of him anyway.

Clean sharp fire spread across the wound, sting pulling another sound from him; a tight hiss from between his teeth. But underneath the pain, angry heat started fading.

Same as Gram’s medicine. 

She knew things, the same things she’d help him understand.

He didn’t understand these people, though. He saw them use the Spark every day, sure. He watched hunters make rebar-made spear-tips glow dull red just by staring at them hard enough. He’d even seen the chief lift fallen support beams that shoulda crushed him flat.

Old man’s got more strength than three good workers.

The Spark was as real as anything, Ken not dumb enough to argue with his own eyes. Some people had it and some didn’t, that thing inside them that made them just better than the rest; a fire on the inside making them more than just meat and bone.

That part was easy enough. But their stories, the way they explained it all, just felt so… weird.

So small.

The why just didn’t make sense.

Ken looked through the crack in the shack’s wall, one eye pulled to that impossible perfect line of black cutting the horizon in half. A wall that stretched forever, smooth as still water but solid as stone. Edge of the world, villagers called it. Divine Hand holding them safe.

Bullshit.

It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense and he wasn’t gonna try to lie to himself about that.

His mind flashed to last week, that t-shirt half-buried in a trash heap near the sludge river. Bright blue, faded but still cheerful, cartoon bird on the front with words he could read perfect:

Froot Loops.

How could a world with Froot Loops have a magic wall at the edge of everything? How could a place with scavenged tech, scraps that could only be made with science and factories and television, also have men who made metal glow with their minds?

Oil and water.

It just didn’t mix, couldn’t mix, but here they were anyway. Everything mashed together in this garbage-heap world that made no damn sense.

Unless…

Something wrong twisted in his stomach, another old fear popping back up, another thought he didn’t like forcing its way in.

What if they’re right?

What if after twelve years of living in this impossible place, he was the one going crazy? What if walls that blotted out the gray sky were just…walls? What if the Spark was just how things worked, and he was the broken one for questioning it?

What if I’m wrong?

What if the blue sky was the fake part? Bad meat thinking bad thoughts, just misremembered dreams to make this life… easier.

That was scarier than anything.

Twelve years was a long time.

Some days he remembered Froot Loops more clearly than he remembered what a normal sky looked like. He’d already forgotten more than he’d ever learned.

Stop it.

He pushed the stupid thoughts away, doing his best to fight the shakes, the shudders, jaws working on the root in the silent, lonely dark. The waste-dirt floor was cold under him, springs in the mattress poking through thin fabric as the sounds of the village; the crying, the clanging, the combat forced its way in through the thin-metal walls.

Don’t think about it.

Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath. Just like thinking about a dad who didn’t want him, or Gram who was gone like his mom, or any of the other holes inside that never stopped hurting.

Still here, though.

Still breathing. Still alive.

That had to be enough.