April Tale 2021

Hello! If you're new here, here's how this works: in the beginning of the month, I ask a question. I get answers from people, hopefully. I take one of those answers and write a short story based on it, then put it out on the last day of the month. Sometimes they're actually pretty good, and sometimes they're a real mess. But at least every time I put some words on paper. Screen. Whatever.

Here you can find that story.

I also read it into an audio format, if audiobooks are more your thing than actual written words.

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If April had a tagline, what would it be?

April - the month where you need a flame thrower, it’s tick season again. (answer from Nela)

I noticed we were almost out of lake wort when they brought the boy to my mother with a nasty-looking leg wound. In this profession, nothing was a certainty, but without something good to keep infection away, you didn’t need a professional to tell the odds were bad. Which meant someone needed to go out.

“No.” The look on mother’s face could have cut through stone.

We hadn’t had the conversation in front of the family. Obviously. We’d cleaned the wound, lathered it with paste to keep it clean, bound it and helped the family get home. Now it was just the two of us.

“Yes. Please. I know what I’m doing.”

“I’m going to see if Jim has any left. Or if the party got some last time they were out.”

“He ran out a couple of weeks ago. And you know they didn’t. They were only out for the day.”

“I thought you’d grown out of this,” mother sighed.

“Never,” I grinned. She glared at me.

“When you finally started to train with me, I thought you’d be safe.”

“Safe? In this world?” I laughed a light laugh. “You know they only stay out because there’s plenty else to suck dry out there, and we’re too much trouble.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You know I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing. I’ll leave tomorrow morning as soon as the Sun comes up. I’ll be at Reservoir before it’s dark and stay the night there. I’ll bring back as much as I can. Every day we go without, we’re risking lives.”

“Don’t forget the flamethrower,” she finally said.

***

Like I’d promised, I was out the door as the first edge of the Sun crossed the horizon. I walked through the still-sleeping town. The air was chilly, but I could feel it would be a warm day, eventually. I got to the gate, unlatched it, and pushed it open enough that I would be able to get through.

I hesitated. I hadn’t been out there for almost two years. I knew what I was doing, I knew I would be fine, but it still made me nervous to leave the town again. I took a deep breath and stepped out the gate, closing it carefully behind me, and started walking. Just me, enough food and water for two days, and a big backpack to stuff with lake wort. And, of course, three big knives strapped to my legs, and the flamethrower.

At first I was fidgety, walking with a pace I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up all day, jumping at every sound. But the further I got, the more comfortable I became. It was like putting on a pair of boots you hadn’t worn in a while. With the first steps you notice everything that’s different from the ones you normally wear, how it’s a little tighter around the toes, or how the sole is a little harder, or they come a little higher around your legs. But they're still your shoes and after a while the shape of your feet remembers the shape of the shoes, and you forget that for a moment you thought they didn’t quite feel right.

The first half of the way to Reservoir was an easy path to follow. People who had lived here a long time ago had built some sort of a road here, not wide, but impossibly flat and even. Whatever they had built had long since been covered with plantlife, but the route was still clearly visible in the terrain. Here their road was a ridge, higher than the ground around it, there it had a canyon cutting into a hill, like it was once too much effort to go over or around. At one point they’d even dug a tunnel. There wasn’t as much growing in the dark inside, and half-way through it I could see a thick, rusted metal bar running along the path for a little while. As I walked I wondered idly why the ancient people would want something like that on their road, but it disappeared under the plants again well before I was out of the tunnel.

The first hours went by with suspicious ease. Nettle was the most threatening thing I had run into by the time I entered from the forest into Ruins. We knew nothing of Ruins, except that it had once been a city. It was full of still-standing walls, far too straight, thin, and close together to have come there on their own. Almost everything was covered in grass, moss and vines, but the shapes the walls formed were undoubtedly the remains of houses. Here and there the grey of the walls beneath peeked from between the leaves. The most bizarre thing were the still-standing walls that reached far higher than any building I had ever imagined before seeing this place for the first time.

I stopped in Ruins for lunch and rest. I picked a sunny spot, where the ancient walls protected me from the chilly wind. I stayed a little longer than I had planned, simply enjoying the warmth of the Sun on my skin.

As I continued on through the broken city I started to go from baseline alert back to fidgety. It wasn’t that I wanted trouble, but this had been too easy. I was startled by a magpie taking flight from what seemed like out of nowhere. I hurried my steps. The sooner I got out of Ruins the better. The walls around me were blocking my view too much. I wouldn’t be able to see danger until it was uncomfortably close, while danger would be able to hear me. As the green walls around me gave way to unobscured forest, I almost sighed in relief.

From there the path wasn’t as clear as it had been before. I was no longer following an ancient road (or if I was, all traces of it had completely disappeared beneath the forest floor), but I had been to Reservoir many times before, and I knew the way. I continued on, keeping a careful eye on the forest around me.

That’s when I heard something big moving through the forest. I gripped the handle of my flamethrower, ready, but relaxed again as I saw the moose. I knew there were some in the forest, but I’d only ever seen one before. I stopped and watched in awe as the huge animal rushed across my path in a hurry fifty meters ahead of me. As it disappeared from sight, I heard something the noise made by the moose had masked: the tapping of smaller feet, now heading towards me instead of after the much faster, running moose. Two ticks appeared in front of me, both bigger than my head, coming towards me at full-speed.

The part of my brain that hadn’t been out of town in a long while panicked, but the part that knew this world reacted on muscle-memory. The flamethrower was throwing flames at the ticks almost before I knew what was happening. One of them got caught directly in the fire and stopped, but the other one dodged and tried to circle me. I turned with it, ignoring the other one for now. The most important rule when dealing with ticks was to never let them behind you. The front you could defend, but if they got onto your back, you were either lucky or you were dead. If they had the moment they needed to latch on, they wouldn’t come off before they’d taken every drop of blood there was in you.

The second tick was rushing at me with a speed that made me wonder how it didn’t trip over half of its legs. I showered it with another wave of flames. This time they hit their target, and the tick squirmed for a moment before becoming still. A bitter, burnt smell filled the air as I walked over to the tick and blasted it until nothing was left but a burned husk.

I went to check the first one. It was still twitching. So not dead, only hurt, barely enough that it couldn’t come after me. I burned it to a crisp, too. I knew from experience you had to be completely sure they were dead, because otherwise they probably weren’t. And fire was practically the only way to do it. Nothing killed these things. I’d heard a story of someone who’d managed to kill one with a knife. Apparently you had to find just the right spot to stab them and then hack their heads off. I didn’t know if that was true, but I wasn’t about to let a tick into stabbing distance to find out.

Before continuing, I made sure to put out all the sparks I had lighted on the forest floor in my fight with the ticks. I didn’t want to burn the forest down. I wouldn’t have wanted to burn even the patches on which the remains of the ticks were now lying, but there was no other way. I whispered an apology to the spirits of the forest and continued on my way, only torching another two ticks before reaching Reservoir.

***

The next morning found me camped on the shores of Reservoir. I gathered my things, had a bite to eat and spent as long as I could stand wading in the cold water gathering a backpackful of lake wort.

The chill of the night was still hanging in the air as I started my way back home, but walking warmed me and the Sun chased the cold away as it climbed higher. It was a remarkably uneventful walk. Another four ticks found me in the forest. I left them behind in charred piles. One of them managed to put up a fight, and I ended up burning an uncomfortable amount of the surrounding forest before I was able to put it down. I tried to not feel bad by telling myself that the forest would recover, that really I and my fire only resulted in surface scratches.

I had been following the ancient path homeward from Ruins for a good while before I ran into real trouble. The tick appeared out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen anything, or heard anything, but suddenly it was on me, its claws digging painfully into my sides. The situation was so unfamiliar it took me a second to realise what was happening. Then for another second I simply panicked. This was exactly what anyone with half a brain cell wanted to avoid at all costs. I couldn’t see it. Another claw dug into my upper back.

I gathered my wits enough to draw a knife. I stabbed blindly behind my shoulder. It hit something. The tick didn’t let go. It was trying to find a place to bite, but my backpack was in its way. And then it was on my side, where there was no protection. Where I could see it. I stabbed at it wildly, my heart pounding. This time the blade sank in.

The tick let go with most of its legs, and I pulled it away from me with all my strength, managing to throw it off. For a moment it looked dazed, then charged at me despite my knife still being lodged next to its head. But the moment it took to gather itself had been enough for me and I unleashed the entire might of my flamethrower at it before it got to me again.

I let it burn for much longer than I normally would have, the echo of its feet on me sending chills along my spine long after it had completely ceased moving. Eventually I stopped and took stock of the damage it had dealt to me. I had dozens of cuts on me left by its claws. Most of them I couldn’t see, but most of the ones I did weren’t too bad. Which meant I probably wouldn’t bleed out before I got home. My sides and the place where my neck met my back were stinging badly. They would need proper cleaning and stitches, but I wouldn’t be able to do it myself.

So instead I pulled my now-ruined knife from what was left of the tick and headed towards home as fast as I could while being aware pushing too hard would only mean I might not be able to make it at all. After a while I started feeling faint, but there was nothing to do but keep going. I didn’t dare stop and rest, in case I wouldn’t have the energy to get back up again. At least it was an easy route to follow.

The town walls appeared in my sight approximately an eternity later. Someone must have spotted me, since I heard shouting, and a few people came out to me. They helped me out of my backpack, got me through the gates and walked me back home.

Mother wasn’t there. Someone left to find her as someone else helped me lay down on the table. It didn’t take long until she burst through the door and started shooing everyone else out.

“Hi, mother,” I said weakly as she started cutting my ruined shirt, soaking it where the blood had dried and glued it to the wounds. She worked in silence for a long while, which was worse than if she had simply yelled at me.

“This is why I didn’t want you going out there,” she finally said, quietly, while stitching the cuts closed.

“I know,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

“Just because I’ve seen much worse doesn’t mean you’re fine.”

“I will be fine,” I corrected. “And now we can keep a lot of people alive for a while longer.”

I nodded towards the backpack that now lay by the door. I winced as the movement pulled on one of the cuts. She glanced up, but didn’t stop. Neither of us said anything more. After a while the exhaustion, now-numbed pain and general weakness from being injured pulled me into sleep.

I woke up in a bed, soft and warm.

“...had grown out of the recklessness,” my half-asleep mind vaguely registered someone’s voice finding me through the cracked door. “Learning to heal people instead of going out there and getting hurt.”

“You think this was reckless?” mother’s voice came, sounding annoyed with whoever she was talking to. “As a kid the bunch of them used to go out because it was exciting and dangerous and forbidden. That was reckless. This was… a little bit of that, probably. But someone had to go. Jaime went, so a lot of people could be a lot better off, and others didn’t have to take the risk. I raised a kid anyone with any sense would be proud of, not scorn.”

I curled into the warm softness and let the dreams pull me back in.