Callous (part 4)
Note - This is the continuation of a vanity project. A novel written in parts, with minimal editing or fuss. If I like the end result I may gather up all the parts and rewrite them into something better. You can find parts 1, 2, and 3 here.
"Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders." - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Jonathan spent a few nights wandering the desert. He ran out of food on the second day, drink on the third, and just continued to walk. He still felt a strange new sense of serenity about it all… when reflecting on this he realized he had already given up, he simply understood and accepted that he would be dead soon. He lost all sense of purpose or direction, and just aimlessly walked.
The environment changed a little as he walked, he had entered a more hilly region, in which the shrubbery was much more common. It was still mostly sandy, but there were little tufts of grass all over the place. The little brown creatures were a regular sight now. Jonathan decided on the fourth day that he would try to actually catch one. He spent hours chasing them, but lacked even the basic wherewithal to work out how to build a trap. He absentmindedly wished he had kept at least a little bit of food as a sort of bait, but he knew he wouldn’t have been able to make anything useful with it anyway. After spending much of the day failing to catch a single thing, he crashed down into the sand in the shade of a fairly large shrub.
As he lay there on his back wondering if he’d ever bother to get up again, he heard a sound. Something huge was coming. He jumped up and looked all around, off in the distance beyond the nearest hills he could see a massive dust cloud. He climbed the closest of the hills and peered out. In the distance he could see that it was clearly some kind of vehicle. Thinking he was likely to die anyway otherwise, Jonathan ran (or more accurately, wobbled) towards it with whatever strength he had left.
As it got closer he could see it was nothing like the vehicles he was used to. Instead of a tiny little box with wheels, it was a monstrous thing, shiny and black, flying across the desert with ease. It seemed to be heading across to his left, past him. Jonathan looked around urgently. There was a hill a little higher than the rest right next to him so up he climbed, jumping, screaming, and shouting at the top. The vehicle (only a few hundred meters away) was heading across the horizon, still to his left.
Suddenly the vehicle stopped a few hundred meters or so away from him. It then turned and sped straight towards him. As it got closer he noticed how intimidating it was: massive, very high, huge bar wrapped around the front. As it got close he saw it was positively caked with the desert sands, but he could see something written on the back “Landcruiser”. “What is a land cruiser!?” thought Jonathan. As it pulled up close Jonathan stopped gesticulating wildly and just stood there waiting.
It stopped right in front of the hill he was on and a window rolled down.
He heard a voice like nothing he’d ever heard, rough, guttural, like sandpaper in audio form: “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?”
The door opened and out jumped the strangest man Jon had ever laid eyes on. A large wide-brimmed hat, ripped up ragged (but patched up and cared for) clothes, big brown boots. A thin white-skinned man, with a greying moustache that looked like handlebars coming down his face and hanging off the bottom of his chin. His hair was lank and blonde, hanging out the sides of his hat.
”What do we have here?” “Boy… what are you doing?” The man looked at Jonathan with piercing blue eyes.
Jonathan stammered “Hi… I was kicked out of Condonia, I don’t know where I am”
”Well now!” said the man after taking a second to ponder this. “Guess you better come with me, just one thing, how the hell did you get so fat?”
Jonathan coughed and struggled to give an explanation. The man laughed wildly, coughing as he did so.
”Get in chunky.”
Jonathan jumped in the vehicle.. saying “This is a… land… cruiser?”
The man chuckled again and said “I call it my truck” The man then placed what Jonathan had been taught was a cancer stick in his mouth and lit it, he handed one to Jonathan, and though parched, though starving, Jonathan was too scared to say no, so he coughed and spluttered his way through it, seemingly to the stranger’s amusement.
The sun was going down when they left the hilly country, and came to a place much more green. One could still call it a desert, but it was obvious there was the presence of water and life.
During the drive the man didn’t speech much, he joked around a little, Jonathan tried to explain more of his story but the man just said “Just wait boy, lets get home and we’ll talk it out”
The drive never seemed to end. The sun was well and truly gone now, and Jonathan began to drift in and out of wakefulness. He didn’t realize how exhausted he was. He looked out the side of his eye at this strange man that had picked him up. He was everything Jon wasn’t: fit, hairy, confident, and seemed to exude a powerful swagger that Jon simultaneously found distasteful and appealing. Jon then stared out the window and began to remember.
”Dad? What is it?”
An old kindly man looked over to me. My father. He said:
”Son, I am not going to be around too much longer, you will need to be prepared for what is coming”
”Yeah yeah dad, just let me finish this level!”
“Son, you’ll have plenty of time for games later, I need you to focus, now is time for training.”
Jon began to remember. His father had boxed with him daily, they went on hikes together, they even lifted weights together. He felt a kind of subdued shock at realizing he had blocked all these memories out, and had just indulged in junk, games, and Nutube. The memories continued to flood his mind, some of them so beautiful! He remembered it all longingly, he remembered his mother too, beautiful, calm, quiet, a smile that lit up his world. Suddenly everything took a dark turn and Jon remembered the rage of his father, the screaming of his mother, he remembered when everything changed - at this point he pinched himself and focused back on his immediate surroundings. He was not ready to remember.
They pulled up to a squat single-floor building. It was brown, made of something strange. It was quite large, surrounded by a fence seemingly made of thin corded metal that reminded Jon of the barbed wire on the Condonia walls. There were even some creatures Jon had never seen before, woolly strange creatures, some of which had horns!
They pulled up to the house and Jonathan went over to touch it, wondering what it could be made of. “Ain’t never seen wood boy?” said the man with a smirk. Jonathan gaped, “WOOD!?” “FROM TREES!?”
The man laughed again. “Let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll have a proper talk, then I think we’ll have a good rest, tomorrow you’ll be getting to fuckn work!”
Jonathan: “Ok, but who are you?”
The man smirked: “Bahhh I’m just a guy, a survivor, but you can call me Fred”