The long shad­ows cast by the falling sun fright­ened Pietra and she squeezed her brother’s hand tightly.
“Ow. Not so hard.”
“Sorry.”
“Did Mum and Dad tell you any­thing about the meet­ing?”
“They never do. You know that,” she said indig­nantly.
“Sorry. I thought you might’ve heard some­thing.”
“well I didn’t.”

Yakov thought of his father and the look on his face as Yakov had pulled up. Some­thing big was def­i­nitely happening.

A large group of adults were milling around the front of the old church so he ducked around the side and clam­bered up the rick­ety fire escape, half drag­ging his sis­ter the whole way. They sat in a win­dow sill and watched silently as the adults scat­tered them­selves around the pews.

“Order! Order, please!” bel­lowed a large man stand­ing at the altar. “The sooner we get this started, the sooner we can all leave.” The crowd hushed. “Right then. Ahh…umm…”
“Get on with it!” said a voice Yakov imme­di­ately recog­nised, to his embar­rass­ment, as his father’s.
“See, here’s the thing. We’ve got noth­ing left.”
“What are you talk­ing about?” His father again.
“Every­thing we thought we had. We don’t. The cans of food, the stock­pile of com­busta­bles. We only have the emer­gency rations now. It was an admin­is­tra­tive error.”

The hall exploded. Anger boiled and epi­thets were thrown. The front rows began to angrily march on the sweaty man.

“Peo­ple! Peo­ple, please. We can fix this.” The crowd con­tin­ued to con­verge. He fum­bled for any­thing the thought would stop them from killing him. “The Rite!”
The crowd paused mid step and the fat man fell on the open­ing like lion on an ante­lope.
“We can use The Rite to find new food sources. Ones far beyond the reach of the other Sub­urbs.”
“The Rite is noth­ing more than basic ori­en­teer­ing. In areas we know are safe. You want to put our kids at risk? By send­ing them into the bad­lands?” asked Hans.
“Don’t you see? It’s per­fect. There’s got to be plenty out there. Just wait­ing for some­one — us — to come claim it.”
A woman on the other side of the church piped up: “You want to risk our chil­dren on your the­ory?”
“Not the younger ones, but cer­tainly those closer to 18 should be considered.”

After that flaw­less argu­ment the fat man felt he was win­ning over the crowd. They’d stopped mov­ing towards him now. That, plus the pos­si­bil­ity they were con­sid­er­ing his pro­posal made him very happy. He began mop­ping his brow, then stoped when he saw Hans bar­rel towards him. Appar­ently mak­ing up his mind far quicker than the othes.

“You want to change our one remain­ing sacred act? The one thing that keeps us bound to the old days? This is not your deci­sion to make.”
Yakov stood up and cupped his hands to his mouth. The final rays of light framed him in the lead­light­ing. “He’s right, Pop. The deci­sions not any of yours to make. It’s mine. I’m going to do this.”

Light­ning crack­led omi­nously outside.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 1:54 am and is filed under Collabowrite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.