The Long Ones

Cason had never been to the wall before. It was busier than he expected: hundreds of sweaty and starving men crammed together in front of a screen and speaker all jostling to get to the front as if that made it more likely that their number would get called. The air was noisy with the sound of the men pressing together, shuffling, coughing, breathing. Cason’s chest tightened. It was more people than he’d ever seen in one place. The crowds in the city could be intense, but he’d always had mother or sister to manage them. They were at their own lottery sites today.

The speakers were barely audible and Cason strained to hear them, fearful his number might be called and missed. Somehow the men around him didn’t seem to share his concerns. Some talked jovially over the calling of numbers. Others stared at the ground ahead, tickets clenched tightly in balled fists. None stared at the screen like Cason.

As numbers were called, men shuffled to the front and entered a van that, when Cason first arrived, had appeared large. But, with every number called, it seemed to shrink even further.

“Number 687.” The speaker crackled. “Number 687.”

Cason’s heart thumped. His palms were slick with sweat. He rubbed them against his trousers. It was not his number. With each passing selection his chances of working that day grew slimmer. And then what? Who knew when the next expedition team would be put together? It could be the next day or the next week. Sometimes months went between announcements of a lottery.

If he didn’t join this crew, he likely wouldn’t find another place to work anytime soon. The expeditions were the most profitable for the common person, that was true, but they were also one of the few employers who allowed age minimum workers to work and be paid. Cason only turned fourteen the week before, old enough to be allowed to work, yet young and scrawny enough that no one wanted to risk what meager wages there were to give out on him.

The screen flashed red. The words, LAST NUMBER, blazoned across, then disappeared. Fast enough that Cason wondered if anyone had seen it. From the murmuring and shifting around him, it appeared that everyone had.

The speaker crackled to life again. Cason held his breath. It would either be his number or he would be back to crawl from bar to bar offering to bus tables only to be turned away.

“Number 317.” The speaker said. “Number 317.” The white numbers appeared on the screen.

Cason released his breath. It was his number. Fear was replaced with relief. He started moving through the crowd. Men who hadn’t given him a moment's glance earlier, followed him with their eyes now. Unreadable expressions all. What was it? Jealousy? Pity? Both?

He shook it off and pushed past the men until he was at the van with the others whose numbers had been called. A tall man with a clipboard, the only one in a clean city-issued uniform looked down at him with consternation. Cason presented his ticket.

“How old are you?” The man asked.

“Old enough.”

The man nodded as though that were answer enough and motioned for him to join the others in the van.

Cason climbed in. There were a dozen or so men seated in the back. The ones lucky enough to get picked early were seated in chairs on the edges; the rest were crammed together on the floor, knees to chest. None stood. A few men shuffled to make room for Cason, who was suddenly thankful he was not larger. He did not know how he would fit otherwise.

Then the van door slammed shut behind him. The men were left in darkness as it pulled away and out of the city walls.

The van was windowless save for the beams of light streaming in from the dotted divider behind the front seats. Cason, who had never been outside the wall before, strained to look through these holes but, upon noticing that the other passengers kept their eyes diligently trained on the ground, he looked away. Whatever was out there, he would see soon enough.

The ride was bumpy. Men jostled into one another. No one reacted, so Cason tried not to either. He found it difficult. He was smaller than the others and a bump that was unfelt by them could send Cason up in the air briefly. Cason’s cheeks grew hot with embarrassment for so obviously being new and in the others’ way even though they did not show any notice of him. Perhaps that was worse.

When the van stopped and the doors opened, light blinded the workers. They shielded their eyes and shuffled out.

Cason was not sure what he had expected of the world past the wall. At times, he’d imagined vast deserts of sand and barren plains. After hearing an old-timer talking about Florida before it was flooded, he pictured oceanic cities with skyscrapers like icebergs, peaking out of the surface. What the world actually was, was underwhelming.

They were in a small town that had been clearly abandoned some decades before. Though, town was a generous term. It was more a strip of buildings along a cracked and broken highway. Some were homes, not unlike the ones within the walls, save for their disheveled and uninhabitable nature. Others were different: a garage, a bar, a feed store. Another tall building whose purpose Cason could not discern.

The uniformed man who had questioned Cason’s age stepped in front of them. He divided the workers into groups and pointed them in the direction of a building. They were to salvage the buildings of usable materials and return them to the truck.

Behind the van was another vehicle that Cason had not noticed before: a large truck. It appeared empty save for the drivers: two armed and masked men.

Cason did not know what the guns were needed for exactly, but he had guesses. Just as he had heard rumors and imagined stories of the world outside the wall, he’d heard tales of the dangers that worked there as well: flooded cities infested with sharks (he pretended to know what those were and looked them up in an old library book later), starving packs of wild animals not afraid of humanity any longer, raiders from tribes of people not belonging to any city, and the long ones.

The long ones were what Cason believed in the least. Everyone knew the plague long past. And everyone knew of the change in the climate that followed and that was how people came to live in the walled cities. In school, they taught that the plague was some historic virus awakened from the defrosting of the Antarctic ice sheets. At sleepovers, however, the children told a different story. It was at one of these sleepovers when a classmate, Jed, told a story of his brother who had worked beyond the walls, not just as a collector, but as an armed guard of the city.

Jed’s brother had applied many times. City guard was a competitive and well-respected position among the City’s working class. It came with a stable salary, board in the apartment blocks which were rumored to have working air conditioning, provision of a weapon, and the potential to rise to higher ranks within the guard. It was rumored that the commander of the guard himself was a commoner who’d risen through the ranks. In short, it was a coveted position with many applicants every year. The year that Jed’s brother received the letter accepting him for service, he had nearly not applied. It was his last year for eligibility and only the ritual of trying kept his pen on the paper.

The guard started their appointment with a months-long bootcamp where they were trained in firearms use, crowd control, military tactics, etc. It wasn’t until one of the last days that Jed’s brother worked up the courage to ask an instructor what, exactly, they were training to fight?

The instructor smirked and nodded in approval as if he had been waiting for the class to ask this question for a long time. Then he replied.

“Raiders, of course. And the long ones.”

Everyone in the class chuckled at the joke. But when the instructor’s stern expression remained, it ended quickly.

As it turned out, Jed’s brother told him, the plague was not brought about by melting ice caps but by the long ones. No one knew where the long ones had come from; whether from deep within the Amazon, the Marianas Trench, outer space, or even the melting ice caps themselves. What they did know is the long ones brought the plague. And, though the plague was long gone, they or their descendants remained. They were why people remained within the walls of the cities, not a ravaged and destroyed world.

“What do they look like?” One of the kids asked.

Jed’s brother shook his head. “He’s never seen one and they never told. Only,” he paused for dramatic effect, “only, they said you will know when you see one.”

Cason had felt a chill down his spine. Then another kid had burst out laughing and the room joined in. Appropriately scared, the group had moved on to other ghost stories they’d heard from the parents and around the school. Cason did not remember those. He did not remember anything from the rest of the night aside from one thing: he’d watched Jed’s face as the others laughed and Jed hadn’t laughed. He’d smiled, not as though he’d been telling a joke, but as if joining in on laughter he didn’t quite believe in.

Cason had forgotten all about that night until now and, upon seeing the armed guards, he felt a similar chill down his spine. He looked out to the endless horizon of brown dirt and dead trees around him. There were no long ones he could see, not that he knew what to look for.

A heavy hand rested on Cason’s shoulder. He jumped, startled, and looked up to see the well-dressed commander looking down at him with a severe expression. Up close, the man’s pitted face looked as dirty as all the other workers and Cason wondered what about him had seemed so clean from far away. The man pointed in the direction of a dilapidated house. The other two men of Cason’s party were gone and Cason realized he was the last worker standing at the van. He mumbled an apology and hurried after the others.

The men were already inside their assigned house, so he hurried through the entryway.

The inside of the house was somehow even more dilapidated than the outside. Chunks of ceiling sagged dangerously downward. Holes riddled the walls. Musty air tickled the back of Cason’s throat. He coughed. His eyes watered.

What the hell was supposed to be useful in a place like this?

Neither of the men were on the ground floor with him. Cason called out to them and immediately felt stupid. Just look, dumbass. One of them called from the basement to come down. He did, taking care to go one at a time and test each step. They creaked but otherwise did not show any sign of collapsing.

It took a moment for Cason’s eyes to adjust to the dark of the basement. When they did, he found the basement to be surprisingly clear of debris. In fact, the basement looked as if it had been unaffected by the damage to the rest of the house. This was not what the man had called him down to the basement for, though. While Cason was staring at the clear basement: including bar and living area, the other two stood at the far wall.

Cason made his way over to them to see what they were looking at.

There was a hole in the wall. A regular, rectangle shaped hole at about eight feet off the ground. The other side was pitch black.

“I don’t see nothing in there, man,” the short, bald one said.

“There was something there. It moved. I know what I saw,” said the man who had called him. He was tall and visibly the oldest of the two men. He sported a stubbly gray beard and stooped shoulders.

“Not saying you don’t,” the shorter man said. “Just saying there’s nothing there now.”