“It must be amazing, bein' inside the TV.
Them bad guys never get away with nothing!”
Pan, McMinnville
It was a lonely existence for Pan. His father, Patrick Dougal, had been a survivor in McMinnville. The war had been declared over, the Chinese forces had been all but driven back with peace treaties signed, but several sleeper detachments in and around the area and had kept their orders to carry on regardless, sustaining the devastation and atrocities of the Hanean war.
Assured that the war was over, and that American forces would take care of any remaining threat, he and his wife remained in McMinnville, thankful that the war had not reached their town.
During the middle of one night, the Chinese detachments launched simultaneous attacks, moving with lightning speed through the Oregon area, shelling and bombing as they went.
He had lost his wife, and his mind, that night under sustained mortar fire. She had been standing by the window, watching the goings on, when it exploded under a mortar round, sending shrapnel and glass throughout the room.
While the rest of the town was evacuated, he stubbornly remained in his home with his child. Desperately he clung to the only thing that made any sense.
Pan was only a toddler then, unaware of the world around him, unaware of how it had changed from cinemas and bars to hunting out rats for food and fighting other survivalists for fresh water.
He grew up under his father's care, learning how to hunt, how to conserve his rations, how to tell if water was fresh or diseased.
They had a television and a rusting refrigerator that only worked when the sun was shining, since they were hooked up to a small cluster of solar panels that Patrick had rigged up.
The house was full of the appliances scavenged from other buildings. There were fans and motor parts and tools. There were clothes and shoes.
Sometimes Patrick came across a can or two in a pantry missed by other scavengers. Sometimes he would come home empty handed.
It was himself and his son versus the world. It had taken everything from him and he was convinced that, given time, he could take it back, piece by piece.
And that was just the way things were. At least until the rags moved in.
Driven away from the more populous areas, the gangs lived on the outskirts, close enough to launch small raids for food, weapons and, of course, drugs.
Concoctions of steroids or amphetamines were brewed up by their cooks. Since every raid would bring a different batch of drugs, it was a bit hit and miss. Some nights were subdued, others were revelry.
Some nights were pure mayhem, if a cook managed to hit a good combination. Cares and morals pushed to one side, the rags would celebrate with an orgy of violence, blood, sex and destruction until the drugs ran out and the effects wore off.
In those times all a survivor could do was to barricade the door, keep his head down and wait it out, for days on end sometimes.
It was on one of these occasions where Patrick had been out gathering water from a water tank he had found hidden under a collapsed wall in a small timber yard.
The feed-in pipe from the roof was still intact and had been reliably collecting run off water. For two days he had successfully returned with several containers of mostly clean water.
On the third day of his trek, armed only with a makeshift slingshot for killing small animals, he was no match for the crazed rags that had wandered in during the night to shoot up in the derelict shops that had lined the streets.
Pan, thirteen years old at the time, not that he was counting, watched on from his hiding place as the mob took turns at breaking his limbs and fingers, punching his face and snapping his ribs.
Incapacitated, bloodied and in unspeakable pain, they rammed a sock into his mouth, brutally beat and sodomized him, then strung a rope around his neck and hauled him from a gable of the McMenamin's Hotel.
Throughout the rest of the night, while their livers frantically processed the drugs, they practiced their martial arts on Patrick's lifeless body, whooping and yowling all the while.
Pan, powerless and scared out of his mind, watched his father all through the night. He never took his eyes from his body, even though by then it was little more than a broken red bundle of meat dangling from the gable.
On that night, Pan inherited his father's insanity. For hours he looked on, hoping and praying that he would come back to life, take the noose from his neck, pick up his water can again and come back to the shelter, just as he had always done.
He did not. Instead he slowly swung in the faint breeze blowing that night, what was left of his face frozen in a ghastly look of pain.
Pan did not know the word for cowardice, but that was what he felt. He wanted to kill every one of them, to bring his father back, to make things the way they should be, but he could not.
His legs would not move, his watery eyes remained fixed on the scene in front of him, and there was nothing he could do but silently cry.
It started to rain, lightly at first, then heavier, as if the night sky was crying with him. The pools of blood were diluted and washed away, and the ground turned into a sodden mess.
One by one the rags, tired and coming on a downer, moved on.
The sun came up to reveal empty syringes and discarded hypo-tubes on the ground, and Patrick's broken, empty body, abused and disgraced, still dangling like a hunter's quarry from the hotel.
Pan had no more tears left in him and his legs came back to life. So he grabbed his father's knife and crept out.
It took a while to crawl up and cut the rope, and even longer to haul Patrick's body back to the shelter. Pan was fit but not very strong, and dragging and rolling his father's mass through the grime and mud only made things harder.
He finally got the body to the shelter, covered in mud and dried blood, and rolled it inside.
He stared at his father's face for hours, looking at it from this way, from that way. He blinked, he looked away and looked back again. He walked from the room and walked back in again. But it did not matter what he did, he could not see his father.
It was his body. He had watched the whole scene. Nobody had swapped it over.
It was broken beyond belief, but it was definitely his father's body. He would know it anywhere. But Patrick, his dad, was not there.
Frustrated, he got some water and cleaned off the muck from the face, and stood back.
It did no good. His father was simple not there. He whimpered and looked back outside to the hotel, in case he had missed anything, but there was nothing there, either, only mud and pain.
Resigning, he opened up the door to the basement and rolled the body down in anger. He locked the door, never to open it again.
And that was the way things were for Pan. He lived his years as his father had once shown him, hunting muttrats, finding water, watching and learning from the faint images on the television.
He kept safe for several years. He deftly avoided the various gangs of rags that moved in and out of the area. He avoided other survivors that came traipsing through. A young hermit, he craved company but had none.
He tried talking to the various appliances, but that was just silly. The television only talked to him, it would not listen to what he had to say. The only reasonable response he ever got, was from himself. Very soon, he was his own best friend.
Then, one gloomy and raining day, he noticed a ship flying through the sky. It was not too strange, since there were often things of that nature flying overhead, going here or there. But this one was different. This one was stopping.
He watched as six strange people came out from it, and walked into the McMenamin's Hotel. The ship flew away again, without them.
“They must be varmints. Up to no good,” he said in a distinctively older man's voice.
“Nah,” he said to himself with a young rag's attitude, “You don't know that. They could have stuff on them, you know, good stuff.”
“Well, what are we to do? What?” he asked in a timid voice.
“Sneak up on 'em. Grab of their gear and git!”
“Or rush 'em and stick with yer sticker!”
“Either way,” said young Pan's voice, “I can't sit and do of nothing. I can't! I can't!”
“Don't worry at it lad,” said his old man's voice, “We've got your back.”
Determined not to have the same feeling he once had, that feeling of cowardice, Pan conferred with himself and agreed to confront these strangers.
His legs were working, he had a weapon this time, and there were no tears to blur his vision.
And he had his new friends to help him.