The Lear Library

This idea came to me after a rather odd month. It seemed that everywhere I looked, everything I read somehow involved a nuclear apocalypse or some cataclysm. Films, books… In the space of one week alone, I’d read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham and Doctor Bloodmoney by Philip K Dick. So it was no surprise that, after such subject material from such excellent authors, I’d try to emulate their success somewhat.

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The raiders slithered down the steep sand-dune, a plume of yellow-orange drifting into the sky as their boots kicked up the fine grains. They slipped between the rocky outcrops of flat, grey rock, weapons drawn.

On the far bank of sand, over a hundred meters away, Overseer Eta watched the group of men and women approach the ruins of the ancient city, half-buried beneath the desert. The hot winds swirled around her, making her cloak flutter and tug at its moorings. Eta had weighted and staked sections of the cloak into the sand; from a distance, it made her look like just another dull grey outcrop of rubble.
It was hot in her cocoon of cloak and hood, but Overseers were trained, both by life and by their peers, to survive harsh environs. Since the Harrowing, climate change was neither regular nor mild as the year passed. There had been times when the desert before her had been covered in snow.

Eta unclipped the pin holding the front of the cloak together, and a long rifle slowly edged out of the gap made in the heavy folds. The long carbine’s telescopic sight was brought up level with the woman’s eye, the soft clink of the scope’s sight touching the smoked glass of her respirator mask’s eyepiece lost in the growling of the desert wind.

She heard only her breath on the inside of her mask. Felt only the shifting of sand beneath her as she slowly moved, raising one knee to rest the long barrel of the rifle against it, sliding the rifle-stock to her shoulder and nestling it there gently. The insistent pressures of the wind on her back as she watched the raiding party slowly trudge closer through the sand towards her protectorate.

She was a good sniper. She’d always been a good hunter, even before she’d become an Overseer. And that expertise had served her well. The sun was behind her, beating mercilessly on her shoulders. Her neck and head were protected by her hood, the dip of the material and the smoked glass in front of her eyes ensuring that she wouldn’t be dazzled in any way.

She waited until the group were stuck out in the open stretch of dead sand between the dune and the outskirts of the city ruins, examining her targets. A raiding party, it was not. There were too few of them, and too lightly armed. Most likely a group of scavengers, but she could tell from the distinctive tribal markings and mode of dress that they were from one of the larger raider groups. Probably the Wild Dogs or the Corvids. Best to discourage any further investigation on their part, which would mean leaving one of them alive to tell the story.

She took a low, rasping breath of the parched air in through her respirator. It tasted desiccated and scrubbed too clean through her facemask. Then came the slow hiss of breath released… held…

The sharp report of the bolt-action rifle was a thunderclap, and the large calibre bullet blasted from the long muzzle like a dog let off a leash. It leapt to the target and snatched her off her feet at the neck, sending her sprawling into the dirt.
Her companions unlimbered their weapons and ducked low, spreading out as best as they could in the fine, restricting sand, their feet dragging sluggishly.
Eta slowly drew back the bolt of her rifle, confident in her invisibility, and felt the brass canister of the spent bullet spring from the breech and slap against the cloak’s confines before rolling to a stop in the sand.
She adjusted her aim and sighted at the only party member carrying a gun designed for accuracy over distance. A priority target, of course. The bullet meant for him shattered his jaw and a portion of his spine, the unfortunate man flopping to the ground with a puff of dust.

It was hardly a difficult task, and Eta pursued it with professional detachment. To take glee from killing was to become a wild animal, and to be cast out from civilization like the Raiders. There were probably more than enough Overseers in their breed already… ones that had become inhuman. Not mutated by the harsh punishment of the Harrowing… that was simple biology. Humanity, everyone knew nowadays, was a state of morality.

In due time only one raider remained. It had been a young girl, surely no more than about sixteen, armed only with a pistol. Most likely it was the girl’s first assignment now that she was free of the Raiders’ ‘home camps;’ Nothing more than brutal prisons where those that survived with their minds more or less intact were pressed to some useful service. Not trusted with the good weapons, expected to work on the front-line… This girl had probably suffered enough hardship in her life already. It was a wonder she wasn’t being used by some important raid leader as a plaything.

That meant that the girl had a strong will to survive on her own terms. Eta wouldn’t underestimate that.

She stood, the stakes that held her cloak in place sliding out of the soft sand. She collected them, and then began to walk towards the bewildered raider, her carbine aimed squarely for the girl’s left breast. A messenger would be better than a corpse, but Eta hadn’t survived by being incautious.
The hiss of her breath was loud in her ears.

“You!” She shouted, and the noise sounded hard inside the confines of the mask. She knew it’d carry as a raspy hiss, masking the voice of the person beneath. The raider stiffened and looked up. Her pistol was in her hand.
“Don’t try it!” Eta shouted trying to inject as much friendly advice into the tone as possible, even though she knew it’d come out flat and dead. “A gun like that is only accurate up to about two hundred yards, and you’re trying to aim into the sun. You’ve already seen how accurate I am. At this range, I could probably sever your carotid.”
There was a long pause, then the gun was lowered and the woman shouted back.
“What’s a carotid?”
Eta chuckled. “It’s a place where, if you get shot, you’re sure to bleed out fairly shortly. You’re going to take a message back to your tribe. Who is it?”
The woman hesitated, and then called back “Wendigomen!” that surprised Eta. The Wendigomen usually kept to the more reliably snowy regions. Winter must be coming back around soon.
“Alright,” she called back, remembering to make a note of the tattoos the woman bore as Wendigomen marks… usually you wouldn’t get to see their tattoos, as they wore extreme cold weather gear most of the time. “You go back to the Wendigo and tell him not to come ’round this area again. This place is under Oversight.”

She watched the woman stiffen a little. Places were under Oversight for a reason, people had found that out fairly soon. Normally it wasn’t to keep people out, but to keep something in; Disease, radioactivity, or even some sort of mutated creature. It wasn’t simple greed that made these things restricted areas. Overseers had gained a reputation in the beginning as just being a more territorial gang, but soon enough they were seen half as bogeymen and half as custodians. Which didn’t mean they were lax, of course – Soft touches didn’t last long, post-Harrowing.

“I’ll tell them!” The girl shouted. She began to turn and walk off, but Eta hailed her again.
“Hey!” The woman stopped. “Take the provisions and weapons, except the rifle! I’ll see to your dead.”
The woman nodded, then shouted back “Funeral pyre!” to inform Eta as to the Wendigomen’s traditional send-off. Then she took what she could from her friends and began to trudge back the way she came.

Eta waited until she was over the sand-dune, then began to make her way down to the corpses forlornly scattered around, already half-covered in sand.

***

The worst part of the Overseer’s job was learning how to survive the intense and extreme weather changes outside. Sometimes the world would go from a harsh desert to the deepest winter in a matter of mere days.
Scientists had hypothesized that the Harrowing had caused the world to tilt radically on its axis, creating new seasons that came crashing to an end without warning. Days would spasmodically lengthen or shorten, then settle down for a little while before changing once again.

She’d taken over the remit of Overseer Eta after the last one had been murdered by a looter. Her first task had been to retrieve any stolen goods and exact revenge on the one who had dared to interfere with the important work of the Overseers.

All Overseers were trained with the long rifle by custom and because the Overseers still had a ready supply of glass. Some of their technicians had rediscovered the art of fusing glass and grinding it into lenses. The new scopes were nowhere near as powerful as the Old World magnified scopes, but they were easily enough to give the Overseers the edge over most.
Partially, ordering the revenge killing of the murderer was to do with pride, but partially it was the cold practicality of maintaining a monopoly on high-powered, scope-sighted rifles. It had become a tradition since that a new Overseer would take the retired one’s rifle when they took up their new station.
The rifle assigned to Eta Station already had many faded notches on its stock… not from counting victims, but from counting owners. Some more whimsical soul had assigned the reliable rifle with a name, which was etched into the metal plate. It had been named “Isabella,” which the woman that became Overseer Eta found faintly amusing, seeing as a gun was generally seen to be a surrogate phallus.

She cradled the rifle… she refused to refer to it as Isabella, as she felt that was unnecessary sentimentality… in the crook of her arm and watched as the dirty grey snow began to fall over her desert.
The snows would last long enough to make temperatures plummet to startling lows, blanketing everything in snow, sometimes up to two feet deep. Then the sun would return and the great thaw would begin, creating a blossoming, fast-blooming oasis of vibrant green plants, which would in turn die again as the sun grew more intense, leaving only hardier plants behind. Eventually the snow would return, and it’d begin again.
Still, the snows were a good thing, generally. It meant a return of ready supplies of water. Eta would harvest patches of snow and compress them into blocks of ice, storing them in an underground ice-house. She’d then have a good supply of free, safe water for several months. And in the growing season, cacti would sprout. While the atmosphere was now free of harmful radiation, the cacti would have to be checked and monitored for safety, then stored appropriately. It was only in the depth of the desert season where water would become incredibly scarce. And the desert season lasted longer and became deeper than all the others.

Looking back at the drifting snow beginning to cover the rolling dunes, Eta recalled the murderer she’d been told to track down and kill to finally become an Overseer.

It had been in the deep winter season, and she had walked for almost three days before coming to Eta Station. She was cold to the bone, but grew more cautious as she approached the station. The killing of Overseers was a rare occurrence but hardly unheard of. Quite often, when an Overseer had been killed, the murderer elected to remain inside the station, and with good cause; they were well-maintained, provisioned and well-situated. Overseers lived hard, lonely lives, but they did have some creature comforts as compensation such as a roof, food and a bed. Not many could claim to have so much.

The woman that was to become Eta, at that time simply known as Initiate Kappa, had pulled the small, folding shovel from beneath her heavy cloak and begun digging into the thick snow. It was daytime, with bleak grey skies that would soon give way to night-time. And she planned to lie in wait for the murderer. To that end, she burrowed a small sinkhole into the snow and slid into it, letting the snowfall gradually cover all but the smoked glass of her facemask.
Being surrounded by snow was surprisingly warm, and she began to appreciate the advice her survival masters had told her about entrenching when walking long distances in the cold season. But for now it was less for survival and more for camouflage.

From her vantage point, she pulled an old rifle-scope from her belt and held it up to one eye, squinting through it to begin to get an idea for the lay of the land.
Down in the valley surrounding Eta Point, she could see the neat, rope-guided paths that the previous Overseer had made in preparation for the cold season. The snow could blind you so badly that you couldn’t even see a foot in front of yourself… most people stayed inside, or underground, but Overseers had duties to perform even in the depths of the snows.

Following the rope-paths, Initiate Kappa could reconstruct some of the sketched plans that her mission assigner had given her, forming an idea in her mind of the layout of the valley.
It would be likely that the murderer was in the main Station building, but she’d been told that it had no toilet. There would have to be an outhouse.

Letting the snow fall around her, oblivious to her own requirements for food and sleep, Initiate Kappa waited, and hoped the snows would not become so bad as to render her unable to see her quarry when he emerged.