Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Later that night, Artie shinnied up the drainpipe to my room, and we sat there for hours in the dark while he told me stories of King Arthur and his knights: men who defended the helpless instead of victimizing them, men who fought against the villains of their age and inevitably prevailed. Not until many years later did I learn what a spin he put on the stories for me that night, to make me believe that once, there had been people who cared about the likes of me, who stood for justice and nobility of spirit, who made it honorable to protect the weak.

That night I took the name of Morgan, not because I ever believed it was magic, but because I wanted to be a part of that ideal. I needed the hope that King Arthur represented, and I saw it in my Arthur—Artie. To think of myself as his sister pleased me in a quiet, deep way I could not explain.

Nor was I the only one so drawn to Artie. He had already begun to acquire a following when I met him: children he had grown up with, and others like myself whom he befriended along the way. There was safety in numbers, as long as no crossbows were involved. A pack offered the protection of a dozen knives that could not all be taken away at once. And then we discovered another form of protection—or rather, Artie discovered it, and it changed him. It changed us all.

We were thieves in those days; I hate to say it, but that’s what we were. Artie was a thief. I was a thief. There was an ethic to our larceny, for we never stole from people poorer and weaker than we were—the rather rude beginnings of the Code. But we took things we did not own and thought no more of it than a goat thinks of cropping grass. That’s how we came by the first bicycles.

Jose started it. A procurement convoy had come in from outside, loaded with goods for the Launch Pad. That’s what we called the sectors where the engineers and administrators and other elite live, those who will surely have berths on the next transport ship carrying people away from this dying planet. While the last driver stopped to flirt with the gatekeeper, Josh jimmied the lock on his truck and slipped inside. He was working for some older kids, of course, but by the time they road blocked the convoy in G5, Jose had the cargo mapped out so they knew which crates to snatch. One of them had six bicycles.

The bike was his fee. No one could have been prouder than Jose when he showed up with that bicycle. He carried it on his shoulder, because he didn’t know how to ride, and it had slipped its chain, anyway. Artie looked at it, and looked at it, and I could see the ideas spinning through his head like a cyclone. He was thirteen by then, and though he was still skinny, he’d grown into his ears and his teeth enough so the girls were starting to give him second looks; but when an idea possessed him, he still looked like a goofy kid, his mouth hanging slack and his eyes glazed over.

"You can ride it, right?" Jose asked, because like most of the younger kids, he believed implicitly that Artie knew everything worth knowing and had all skills worth acquiring. Artie had even wrangled his way into Spark Academy, which amazed everyone. Kids from B9 didn’t get into Spark Academy. Most of them didn’t bother with school at all.

Artie had not answered Jose’s question; I wasn’t sure he had even heard it. I nudged him. "I can ride," I told him softly. "Learned outside. Bikes lay around free-for-nothing; my old man, he fix one up for me."

Finally Artie’s eyes left the bicycle and fastened on me, still whirling with the enchantment of his racing thoughts. "Your dad can fix bicycles?"

I shrugged. "He know machines ’n’ things. That how we got under shield, finally. Learned him welding."

At that, Artie scowled and came back to the present. "Don’t talk street, Morgan," he chided. "You’ve got to practice Book English if you’re going to get into the Academy with me."

That was his dream for me, that I would pass the entrance exams to go to Spark Academy, too. I worked at it, because he thought I should, but I never had much hope. "Yes, Artie, he knows something about bicycles," I said with exaggerated articulation. "I’m not sure how much."

It was enough. When my father got off shift, he had the bike running in less than fifteen minutes; then Artie took it, and me, and found a deserted stretch of tunnel where he could master the two-wheeler without an audience. I was the only one he trusted to witness the ignominy of his early failures. A week later when he returned the bike to Jose, he rode into the street where the others waited, braked to a smooth stop, and dismounted with practiced ease.

"We need more of these," Artie announced. "We need every one of us to be mounted. We can outrun anyone on these things. We can pick up our families’ rations and not worry about being mugged on the way home, because no one will be able to catch us. We can get to a friend who’s in trouble, and we can get away from trouble when it comes looking for us. Bicycles are the answer."