The Code
Short Fiction
The conversations were, if not identical, then all much the same: how little money they made or how much someone owed or how much they would never see. It added to the tedium of waiting for her organs to shut down, although we thought she did not have long to go.
Outside the car, a bony man was crumpled against the guardrail, surrounded by heaps of things that could have been his belongings or simple detritus, difficult to say which. In his lap was a snare drum he was tapping feebly with worn sticks held in his gnarled fists. He wasn’t keeping any discernible time, of which he seemed to have ample supply. He was extremely old. I checked the back seat where the moribund, who continued her rattle-breath ordeal, was lingering, because she was not very old at all—just extremely unlucky.
I wanted her to live. Yet, her identity and the circumstances of her imminent death were completely unknown to me. We were all strangers now, and these occurrences, though mysterious, were not uncommon. I found her too late. She was passed out from hemorrhagic shock, and I’d had to drag her to the car myself. My bandage was holding her together. The Eldon said she was AB and I was A, so I set up the kit, what was left of it. She was slight. Three hundred mils now, but I guessed she’d need at least four more transfusions over the next eight hours.
The old man was selling something out of the snare. If it was a narcotic, that would be ideal, although the others said not to trust him. Her injury to the leg was minor compared with the one to her upper body. I watched her over the next few hours. As soon as it was dark, I honked three times. The code for ‘get over here’. I heard a car door slam and Rune showed up first. Turns out he knew who she was and was rolling up his sleeve before I said anything. Type B. Mick came next, he was O, my universal guy. After the third transfusion, I felt her pulse. It was still there. I slept until a shard of light hit me in the face. She was still sleeping. Pulse was better.
Why was she wandering around on the bridge so late the night before? What was she even doing outside her car? The people in the ones in front of us and the lane to the left were concerned. They’d witnessed the whole thing. I signed the danger was over. It wasn’t safe to go outside except maybe to pee or shit over the side of the bridge. Down below, the river was egregious, orange, something unnatural and deadly. So corrosive. It poisoned the lungs if you breathed in the air overhead for more than an hour. I kept my mask hidden under the wool hat just to prevent confrontation. It was really hard not being able to move but the old cars were the wide sort, roomy. The moribund was laid out on the back seat as if she had just decided to nap, her shoes butting up against the door. No one was going anywhere. The gasoline in the tanks had long ago degraded to a gummy residue. Nothing else worked either. Sometimes we checked batteries, but most of them were useless. We had to keep moving.
From the bridge we could see our next stopping point in the distance, about fifteen kilometers away. We listened for any movement or activity and were met only with silence. The ones we could not reason with had moved off to some other part of the city. We needed to find a place where words and rules still mattered. We would have to travel over miles of unsafe ground, but we had a code to guide us. It had two parts. One was social, the other practical. The social code said that we looked out for the group, no excuses. The practical one was an updated version of a very old one. No one knows who invented it, but everyone recognized the symbols for warnings and advice. We knew where to go and where it was no use going, where to keep quiet, where murder had taken place, where there were thieves, doctors, kind people with food, and armed people who would not pity us. We learned where people would give to get rid of us, and where a house or camp was hostile. Sites where you couldn’t stay, but where people helped you if you helped them. Sites where you should leave immediately.
These cars had been a godsend. A place to rest, but we couldn’t stay any longer. I could already hear the coughing. We had to get away from the poisoned river. The old lunatic was selling a kind of amphetamine I didn’t know or trust—no painkillers, although I could hardly hear him through my respirator. He said he could get them the next day, but that was not likely. I scrambled back to the middle row of cars where Mick and Rune were, and where my stuff was.
—We need to go. What do we do about your friend?
—Elise. She’s not my friend, but I remember her from a place about three hundred kilometers back. I talked to her for like five minutes.
—Leave her some water and let’s go. There are other people on this bridge, said Mick.
—No. We’re the last ones, I said.
—She would have died. We shouldn’t have intervened, said Mick.
—Come on, man, we need to take her with us, said Rune.
—Fine, but you’ll be carrying her, and if you slow us down, we won’t wait for you.
—What’s the point of continuing at all then? I said.
Mick looked at me harshly.
—We have a time constraint, he said.
Elise whimpered and murmured something.
—What is she saying? asked Rune.
I touched Elise’s perspiring forehead. Infection had set in. She was mouthing words and then in a husky voice I heard her.
—Pompos, take the coins from my eyes and speak the truth, she said.
Mick frowned, and I shook my head.
—She’s delirious. It’s the fever, I said.
—Leave her here; she’ll be dead by morning.
I checked the wound under the tatters of her jacket and shirt. It went clear across her torso. Shrapnel. Rib fractures for sure. Possible pulmonary contusion, but the lung was not collapsed, and the wound had stopped bleeding. It was bad, but not so bad as to give up on her.
—You think that’s convenient for you, Mick, but you’re wrong. She’ll be one more fighter, one more caregiver. You said yourself we couldn’t lose anyone else. No. I say she comes with.
With my mask in place, I wrapped her in the blanket, one arm under her legs and the other behind her torso and carefully lifted her out of the van. Rune took my pack for me. Mick had already sprinted fifty meters ahead. Fine. Let him scout for us. Should he encounter anything nasty, AI dogs or drones, we would know to take evasive action.
—Pompos, put me in the ferry. I trust you with my soul.
She was reciting something. Pompos was the Greek word for guide—Charon, the ferryman. For all I knew, Elise was a poet or an artist. We didn’t see too many of those nowadays. To me this was precious, like I was carrying a piece of our humanity.
—Gotta be at least 104º; she’s hallucinating, said Rune.
—Might be. How long till we get to the next sanctuary?
—Not sure. At this pace, a day, I think. They’ll get there about ten hours ahead of us.
—Not if we improvise. We need wheels, a cart or something.
—Nah, we won’t find anything like that around here.
—Not if we don’t look.
Rune huffed.
—Alright, consider me on the lookout for a shopping cart, a wheelbarrow or a magic carpet while I’m at it.
By now Mick was long out of sight. Fucking guy. Still operating ‘every man for himself,’ old school. Elise was asleep, and my arms were getting tired. We had come to a field with some houses. The map said to stay on this road, but not knowing who the residents might be, I thought we should stop.
—We can continue when it gets dark. We’ll know if those houses are abandoned or what.
—Alright. I’m going back to where the stores were. I might find something useful, said Rune.
I handed him my flashlight and told him to look for anything we could wrap around Elise’s ribs.
—If you’re not back in an hour, I’m coming to look for you.
I touched Elise’s cheek. Still burning up, but she was shivering. I gently lowered her to the ground and sat in front of her. The movement woke her up. She tried to sit up with a jerk, and her hand went to her side.
—You shouldn’t try to move too much. We’ll be here for another hour or so.
—Who are you?
—I’m a friend. We found you on the road, unconscious. My name’s Paul. You don’t recognize me, but we’ve met.
She squinted.
—I can’t remember.
—Doesn’t surprise me. You got caught in an explosion, looks like.
She stared up at the sky with an odd, vacant look.
—I don’t remember that either, but I hurt all over.
She looked at me suddenly as she snapped into an awareness of herself and her surroundings.
—I should be thanking you.
I nodded and said it was nothing. She would never know about my argument with Mick.
—This morning we all thought you were dying, but I guess we were wrong about that. Do you think you can walk?
—I could try.
—Well, stay put for now. We’re waiting for Rune. He went off to scavenge.
—Where are we going?
—A house where the rest of our group is. They left this morning, so they might already be there.
I didn’t tell her that the reason Mick was in such a hurry was that we’d heard the sweepers were only a short distance from the bridge and moving this way. We were unarmed.
The sun had gone down and the buildings in the distance were dark stains on the horizon. I heard a clattering sound and saw that Rune had returned with a utility cart, the kind you find in a welding shop or garage.
—This’ll work, right?
—It’s a little noisy on rough surfaces, but yeah. You did good.
—I was looking for water.
—Those houses look abandoned. We can check there, but we really need to keep moving.
It took us two days to reach the settlement where the others were waiting for us. We were hampered by rain and by Elise’s condition. She was unconscious when we got to the house. Rose, our medical worker, set up a makeshift clean space to debride the wounds and check for embolism. The infection was severe, and our stock of antibiotics could handle this for now, but a cry of protest went up.
Brandon stood up to speak.
—Rose, you, me, Rune, Mick, Jaycee, and Paul, who dragged Elise all the way from the bridge—
—I had help, I said.
—Let me finish, Paul—Alex and Maggie, all of us, we’ve been together, lived through all this, for three years now. And this woman, she isn’t one of us. And when I say that, I mean specifically that we don’t know who she is or what she represents.
—Brandon, she’s a human being. We are obliged to help her. This is not debatable, said Alex.
—Yes, it is absolutely debatable, said Mick.
The order in the room unraveled until Jaycee whistled.
—We’re not here to decide who lives and who dies, she said.
—We have constraints that have to be dealt with. They have to be read correctly or we all suffer. Right now that has to do with our drug supply. We lost Philip on a drug run, so I don’t have to warn you about how dangerous it is. And don’t talk to me about the old guy on the bridge, what’s his name?—Cecil—everyone knows his stuff is as likely to be tainted or expired as viable.
—Mick is right. Caring for this woman comes with a cost not just to our supplies. We don’t know who she is or who she aligns with. What if she’s —
—Maggie, whatever her affiliations are doesn’t matter right now, said Rose.
—You don’t get to put the rest of us at risk, said Maggie.
—You can’t decide for the whole group, Rose, said Mick.
—We couldn’t save Philip even with what we had at that point. And we don’t have even half of that now, said Maggie.
—And what if next week several of us get injured at the same time, Rose? Then we’ll be wiped out because of this, said Mick.
More turmoil.
—This is about our collective resources. We have to put it to a vote.
—It’s not a matter of resources. It’s a matter of upholding a basic tenet of human conduct, Mick. It’s not a voting matter!
I was shouting at him, something I swore to myself I would not do, but I couldn’t help it.
—And you are ripping up the basic tenet of our group which is that decisions have to be made together! said Mick.
—Well, I for one refuse to vote on this. Human dignity is not something to vote for.
—Me too, I abstain, said Jaycee.
Mick was livid.
—Then we can vote on something else: All in favor of banning Alex, Paul and Jaycee...
—You are forgetting me. If you kick them out, I go with them, said Rose.
The room went quiet, and Rose got up to tend to Elise, who was in the other room.
—There you have it, Mick. Lose Elise, lose Rose. Makes things simpler, doesn’t it?
—It does.
Then he faced the group.
—I’m for dissolving the group. These kinds of problems have been plaguing us for the last year, and I’m tired of it. Who’s coming with me? We can find our own way, our own base, and our own resources.
Maggie got up and stood next to Mick.
—Oh shit, this is really happening? said Rune, who up to now had just sat listening.
He got up and stood next to me. Alex and Jaycee did the same.
—You’ll regret this, Mick, I said.
Rose returned from the other room.
—Elise has died.
She said this without any drama in her voice.
❈
The Code was selected for inclusion in the NOICE Anthology 2026. Click on the link to check out their project.
Next up: Prose Poetry – Myth and Survival · August 12
