The Girl With the Owl on Her Shoulder

The Savage, Part One

Whenever the rich folks from the East need to move something into the occupied West, they find us. Not us specifically, but at least a group with similar expertise. Myself, Ford, and Lynne. The rich folk like to call us bodyguards, but that has a mildly crass connotation. I much prefer we go by a better name, but one doesn't exist. They call us bodyguards. I'd say professionals.

I was relieved to find out we'd be getting another job. The demand for our services has been dwindling since the savages acquired a more permanent hold on the West. The client sent me directions to his place of residence. I took the van up there with Ford and Lynne. We decided to leave the combat armour in the trunk. Gated communities don't like it when their guests are armed. This one place, Infinity Meadows, was real swanky. Good looking families, well-trimmed lawns. The sorts of houses I'd want to live in.

The man we were meeting was named Mitchell Farkas. Farkas was a grotesquely thin man, tall and wiry with hair like a candle's wick. He happened to be very friendly.

"You're the people I sent for?" he asked when I appeared at his door.

I nodded.

"Excellent, excellent. Please, come in."

I hadn't been welcomed into a house this nice in a while. Usually, people who hire us don't want to meet on home turf. Farkas was naive and well-meaning. I was quite grateful for his hospitality; it was a nicer place than our current residence in a bombed-out shack near Burnaby.

"I must seem quite unprofessional in my dealings," Farkas remarked as we took our seats in his living room.

"Nonsense," I said, eager to make this sale, "It's a welcome change from tense meetings in parking lots."

We all laughed, Ford especially. He laughed like he had something to prove.

"Good to hear," Farkas chuckled, "Then this won't be very hard for you to swallow: I need you to help me get someone out of the West."

Lynne gasped. Such a job was a rarity nowadays, given that anyone who would have wanted to hoof it east either already did or had their head on a pike somewhere along the border. I liked a challenge.

"That shouldn't be too hard," I replied, "What do you know of this person's whereabouts?"

This'll be easy money.

"I actually have the long-lats for her house written down," Farkas said. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a small scrap with a few numbers written down. The GPS in the van would have no problem with this.

"Are you sure that this person will still be at this address? The landscape has been scoured by savages. Your target may have been forced to escape," I continued.

"I thought of that possibility as well. I don't think it's exceptionally likely, though. See, she's my great aunt. Robin. She's pretty old to be running from savages," Farkas said.

Ford, Lynne, and I exchanged worried glances.

Farkas continued. "She lives in a walled compound on the island. Savages only invaded her area less than a month ago. It's very possible that they haven't broken through her defences. I know that they will eventually, though. I want her out of occupied territory before its too late."

"Very well, I'll have supplies rounded up and my team will leave before sundown," I replied, the deal made.

"Actually, I'll be coming with you," Farkas announced as I stood to leave, grabbing my wrist and sitting me back down.

"That's not going to work for us," Ford said in his most gravelly of menacing voices.

"Well, it'll have to. That's the only way she'll go. If I'm not there, you'll be wasting your time."

"I can agree to it, as long as we get the money up front," Lynne said, businesslike as always, "I'll be quite frank: there's a very large possibility that you'll die en route. I'd like to get paid before that happens."

"Of course, of course. I was prepared for that anyway," Farkas replied politely. He had the tone of someone who was anticipating the entire conversation before it happened.

There wasn't much more to our stay in Infinity Meadows after that. Farkas was ready to leave right away. I had Lynne show him how to put on the combat armour. I said that we'd head for the border right after we'd stopped at the bank.

Where the World Began

The world's inception came about from something rather inconspicuous. Nothing flashy. Nothing ornate and nothing loud. The world was a sanctuary, a refuge, and a place where I could feel comfortable in my own skin. My world began when I was a child, and not far from my home.

I learned very early on that children take great pleasure in casting out those who are in any way different than them. They are barbarous creatures and I did not typically have the strength to put up with such behaviour. I was the favoured victim for immature treatment by my classmates, merely because I was smarter than them, valued my schooling, and challenged the norm. No matter how often I was driven to indignant protest, the school continued to carelessly throw me to the wolves. I should have known better. For the longest time, my childhood was spent scraping by with a meagre handful of allies, even though they still didn't fully understand me. Queen Mary Elementary was, quite simply, an abattoir. I was eventually provided with a very sobering escape from my torment by a girl named Livia who lived in my apartment building.

Before Livia and I even knew each other, our mothers had met in the elevator. Their conversation had brought them to a shared interest of Livia and myself: Calvin and Hobbes. I owe my character to that comic strip. It wasn't long before I was up at her apartment and we were reading all the anthologies together.

Livia could share in my feelings of how difficult it was to survive in the world, but on a much grander scale. Livia had, and continues to live with, cerebral palsy. Her body was like a cage; she required the aid of a wheelchair to leave her apartment. Each movement would call for monumental effort. It was a constant strain to speak. She couldn't walk.

As hard as going to school every day was for me, I could barely imagine what getting up every day meant for her. Her life put mine in perspective. I soldiered on through the mess of my elementary school life with a new outlook. I was still a target for every bully and the butt of every joke, but I had gained some wisdom. You could say I was inspired.

Every single day, our meetings would continue. I saw them as a job to be done, something I wanted to do to make my world better. Finished with Calvin and Hobbes, we had moved on to other activities: her Nintendo 64. This video game console was a marvel of modern science. If we weren't playing Mario one day, it was Pokemon. It might have been The Legend of Zelda; it might have been Banjo-Kazooie. Whatever it was, Livia was a master of them all. Hands tightly knit around the controllers, we would spend countless hours in her living room almost every day. Livia was becoming less and less like my friend, and more and more like a respected teacher.

Months go by of our regular time spent up at her house. One day, I came by to find that one of her guinea pigs had given birth to a litter. Livia had kept two guinea pigs in the living room for years, a male and a female, and this was their second litter. One of the tiny animals from the furry brood jumped out at me immediately: a little black guinea pig pup. Its entire family was white and brown, and he was pitch black all over. When the guinea pigs all slept together in a river of tawny colours, he was the dam, the period at the end of their sentence. I fell in love with the squeaking, squealing creature. He was so very different from all of his peers, but that's why he was secretly the favourite of Livia and myself. By the time he was old enough to be taken away from his mother, I adopted him. The rest of the litter was given away to other families, but little Midnight, as I called him, came home with me. Midnight served as a constant symbol of the friendship between me and Livia, as well as a symbol to reinforce the importance of my individuality. Now I had two reasons to be inspired.

The world began in my apartment building, six floors up. Livia, Midnight, and I shaped it. We created our own place of solace, somewhere we could be valued. We built the world, and we ruled it.

Glass

It was the longest day of my life. Locked in a cage that brushed the clouds, I went through the motions. The grand hive of industry. A thousand workers living together in perfect synergy.

I took the elevator to the roof. Upon emergence, wind and smog whipped at my face. I gazed at my surroundings; a bleak man-made mountain range in all directions. After the smog had passed, I took a couple of strategic deep breaths. I had officially come up here for fresh air.

"Hey!" came a voice sailing across the polluted zephyrs.

I looked up for its owner. Another person on a rooftop was waving at me. One street and countless cubic feet of air stood between us. I replied with a wave of my own. The person on the other rooftop had stopped waving and was now beckoning me over with wild gestures with their arms. What did they want from me?

"How am I supposed to get over there?" I called out, letting the whistling air carry my question.

The stranger pulled out from behind them rope ladder of almost comical length.

"Come on!" they yelled, tossing the ladder over the side of the building and just barely touching the edge of my roof.

"You want me to grab that?" I asked.

No answer. They must have known that their action served as its own reply. I had no intentions of performing any dangerous stunts across rooftops today. Yet, the whimsy of the situation was inebriating. Was it really worth it to go back into the factory? Did the work need to be finished?

I leaned down, grabbed the first rung of the ladder, and sailed across the void between our worlds.