Project Purple

51 - The Sayer

On October thirty-first, Halloween, they celebrated-if one could call it a celebration-by finishing the last of the whiskey. Each survivor, including their conscript, received a thin finger of the alcohol, and they sniffed it, and allowed it to wet their lips and tongues, and lapped at it, and sloshed it, and luxuriated in it.

Renee toasted the others, "November begins on a high note!"

Their hunger worsened. A few of the others were vomiting a sick, greenish bile.

Renee was gaunt, with bony fingers and toes. Soon her ribs would stick out like the old photos of Nazi camp survivors, as her body fed on itself to provide energy to the vital organs.

Once a herd of wild reindeer had trooped by during the night, and they went out the next morning and picked through the dung in hopes of finding undigested husks of grain.

They recooked all the old bones, and held strips of hide over the open flame, singing off the hair of the goat, then boiled it into a pulpy glue and swallowed it, gulping it with relish.

Renee suggested they chew the wood of the remaining furniture, just to get something into their screaming stomachs.

"After you," dared the Goatwench, just like she did with the fish-the day she usurped Renee's authority.

Renee's suggestion didn't garner support. Instead, they boiled nettles and beetroot seeds, anything they could scavenge.

The nights had become brutally cold. If the evenings were free of cloud cover, it meant that any warmth was radiated back into the black void above them. And Renee would shiver and ache with the pain of the cold.

Now she was out some big muscle with the loss of the Buckskinner, who hadn't retuned-meaning he never would.

They looked for him, but to no avail. And Renee curled her upper lip like the team leader: She knew he had loved her, that the Governor had loved her, but that she was no beauty queen anymore-that the early signs of starvation were obvious in everybody.

"He didn't even leave me his boots," she blubbered through barely audible sobs.

Their new conscript grinned.

"Never mind her," the Bibliothecary said to him, as if excusing a crazy relative, "she's an ugly, calculating tramp."

The conscript held the grin. "No one would call her ugly."

He would be Renee's last hope.

***

They went out one final time to look for the Buckskinner, and Renee volunteered to stay behind to keep an eye on him. Surprisingly, the Goatwench had relented under Renee's steady insistence.

When they were alone, he gave her an inquiring look, "They've all gone south."

She shrugged, "He said he was hunting in the south canyon."

"We need to go north."

"That's what I figured." She looked down at her collection of the warmest things she could gather- a durable stay and waistcoat, the stockings, the shifts, the felt hats, even the ragged coifs were some protection against the elements.

The decision ws an easy one-She cut his ropes, and they slipped out through the clumsy hatch that served as their door.

Renee was one of those people who believed themselves exempt from the laws of gravity, that she was deserving of a higher status, and that for her, what went up did not necessarily have to come down. She was as cunning an optimist as one was ever likely to come across.