Crap Monkeys (a short story)

This is the start of a story I’m working on. I’d love to hear what y’all think. I might release it here, in instalments, if anyone wants to read more.

No-one remembered who started the war with the Crap Monkeys. It had been going on since before Zap was born. There was a pile once, she’d heard, a lovely deep pile filled with medical waste. Syringes and plastic bags and pipes and scalpels — back then when scalpels were a thing a person could still find in the piles.

They’d found it first, she’d been told, and then the Crap Monkeys pushed in and took it. People died in that fight, who needed to be avenged. And then the Crap Monkeys needed to avenge the ones they killed. And so it had been, back and forth, for as long as anyone could remember.

Zap was nearly nine now, and almost at the age when she would be expected to take her part in the war. But not yet. Now, she was on guard duty, lying on her stomach on top of an old car bonnet high up on one of the piles, keeping a look out. She was bored, so he was idly turning through the trash at her feet.

Her hands touched something smooth, and she gouged away the stuff on either side to see what it was. It was a metal box, about the size of her chest, heavy and white. One side was made of glass. Zap prodded it, and the glass swung open like a door. Neat, she thought. Best take it to Wire.

Zap heaved the metal box to her chest and made her way back to the camp. Their camp was a series of corrugated-iron shacks on a particularly stable pile. They’d long ago cleared away all the broken glass and jagged edges from the area, so that it was safe for the little ones.

It was just before lunch-time, so the camp was filling up with their people, coming back from guard duty or scavenging. The women were just starting up a fire over the methane hole. Zap saw Socket go over to the roach pit and carefully pull out two large females for lunch.

Zap remembered how much smaller roaches were when she was a girl. Then, a person seldom saw one bigger than the palm of their hand. They’d been bred bigger and bigger. Now they were the size of a person’s head and would scratch you if you weren’t careful picking one up. Zap wondered if, by the time she was old, roaches would be bigger than people.

She couldn’t see her mother, so she went ahead and hauled her find over to Wire’s shack.

Wire was sitting cross-legged on the mat he’d woven from old plastic bags. In front of him was an engine. Wire was contemplating it, like he could make it work if he just stared at it hard enough. Wire was as skinny as his name, and the cataracts made his eyes glow white out of his hollow face.

At fourty-two, Wire was the oldest person Zap had ever met. Her mother said he remembered the before-time. Zap didn’t know if she believed her, but Wire sure did seem to know everything. No person could fix something from a haul like Wire could.

“Hey Wire.”

“Hey kid. Watcha got there?”

“Dunno. Found it out by West pile.”

“Lemme see.”

Zap dumped the box on the mat, and Wire’s face lit up.

“Ah kid, y’know whatcha got here, you got a microwave! Hant seen one of these for a long while.”

“Whatsit for?”

Wire swung the door open and clicked it shut again, giggling to himself. “For cookin, kid.”

“How you reckon?” said Zap, trying to image how a person would get a fire going inside that small space.

“Battery power. Hey, grab me that screwdriver.” He swung the box around and opened up the back. “Hey! The guts look good. Think we could get it runnin.”

He prodded around in the back a little more and pulled out two red wires. He stripped the plastic off the ends and held them above the nodes of a small car battery that he kept in the back of his shack.

“Heregoes.” He touched the wires. Nothing happened.

Zap crouched down next to Wire and stared into the thing’s guts. “See here. This thing’s burnt through,” he said, pointing to a small copper box.

“Reckon you can find another one?”

“Yeah! I’ve seen things like it before in the piles. I’ll go scavengin.”

“You be back by sunset, right? Then I’ll make you microwaved roach. It’ll be the juiciest roach you ever tasted.”

Zap bounced up and trotted out of Wire’s shack. She’d better tell her Ma where she was going. She did worry about her when she was out on the piles the whole day.

She found her Ma in the shack, brushing the straggly hair on one of her dolls with her fingers. She had wrapped a sheet of plastic around herself like a dress, and was wearing the rubber ring of a washing machine on her head like a crown.

“You bein a princess again, Ma?”

She ignored Zap and continued to stroke her doll, humming to herself. She’d lined up every doll in her collection on the floor, like an audience. They sat there staring up at her, all missing limbs or heads, mangled half-people.

“I’m goin scavengin, Ma. Gonna find a part for Wire to fix a cooking machine. Be back by sunset.”

The air in the shack was stale and hot. Zap nearly ran out of there.

“You watch for Crap Monkeys,” her Ma called after her, as she left.

Socket handed her a roach as she walked through the camp. She ate as she went, enjoying the crunch of the wings in her teeth. She thought how good it would be to bring back her Ma a really juicy roach, cooked in a microwave like people in the before-times did. She’d smile and maybe forget about her dolls for a while.

The noises of the camp and the smell of the methane fire vanished behind her. Zap took a deep breath, smelling the rich rotting smells of the landscape, the smell of copper and rubber and iron. As far as she could see, the piles rolled over the earth. The midday sun glinted over tiny objects far away, beckoning to her. There were so many useful things waiting to be found. Zap’s world was rich with possibilities.

Zap chose a direction and started climbing out towards the edge of their territory. All of the piles around their camp had been picked clean, so a person had to go out a little further to find something good.

Moving through the piles was dangerous — every person had a brother or an auntie who’d fallen into the piles and never got out. But Zap was still light and had a good eye for the stable places. She leapt lightly from foot to foot with no fear.

She wandered for hours, until the sun was nearly touching the horizon. She was nearly out in Crap Monkey piles now, so she was moving carefully, hopping from cover to cover, checking the way before moving. Every time she found a likely looking patch she’d stop and dig through. So far she’d found some bunji rope, a screwdriver and a headless Barbie doll for her Ma, which she’d stuffed into her pack for safekeeping. But no copper boxes for the microwave.

Gradually, she became aware that a person was following her. Just one person, probably. She could hear the junk being unsettled behind her every time she moved, as though someone was crouching out of sight behind her.

Zap pulled the screwdriver out of her pack and fingered it, listening carefully. There it was — a crunch. She whipped around and saw a boy, a year or two older than her, walk out from behind a car frame. He was carrying a sheet of metal that had been folded up like a sword. He was a weird-shaped kid, all legs and arms. The bubble in his neck bobbed up and down as he swallowed.

“Whatcha doing here on our pile, Crap Monkey?” he growled.

“Ain’t no Crap Monkey. Just out here lookin for a part. Don’t mean no trouble,” she said, shifting the screwdriver more firmly into the palm of her hand.

“Sure look like a Crap Monkey to me. We don’t like your kind out here on the Edge.”

“Didn’t know I was on no edge. I’m just a kid, don’ even play in the wars yet.” Zap assessed her situation. There was a television she could leap onto, just to her left. She could try to get from there back to the route she’d come by. She could make it if she was fast. Probably.

But the boy looked nervous. Nervous enough to do something stupid. She saw him shift his grip on the piece of metal and take a half-step forward. It was now or never.

She lunged to the left and began scrambling up the pile. She heard him start forward, but too fast. He wasn’t looking where he was going, stupid kid.

The boy yelled, and his voice broke as he did. It went high and girlish. Zap whipped around just in time to watch him sliding between two car parts, deep into the pile.

She stopped. The boy was whimpering and sobbing, from somewhere under the junk. Come to think about it, he didn’t look like a Crap Monkey at all. Looked like a scared kid stuck in a deep pile.

Her Da had died that way. She’d listened to him die for three days. They’d sat vigil for him as he called for help from deep within one of the larger piles near the old city. Three days he’d called. Too dangerous to try to get him out, the men had said. You disrupt an unstable pile like that, it’ll all slide in on you and you’ll just go right on and die in there with him. She remembered Battery putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, don’ worry kid, methane’ll choke’m long before he dehydrate.

No person should be left to die in a pile. Not even a stupid kid from god-knows-which gang.

Zap crept back, still holding onto her screwdriver. “Hey kid?”

“Leave me, CrapMonkey! You killed me down here.”

“Already toldya ain’t no CrapMonkey. Whatcha under?”

“Don’know,” he whimpered back to her.

“Well a person should look so they can prop’ly assess the situation.” Important that she sound calm. If she was calm, he’d be calm. It worked on her Ma.

She heard him shuffle around down there. He didn’t sound deep. Maybe a metre, but she couldn’t see him and was wary about stepping on whatever was trapping him.

“Leg’s under something heavy.”

“Rest of you’s free?”

“Thinkso.”

She craned her head over the place his voice was coming from, but she couldn’t see him. The whole place was unstable. He was a stupid kid to step on it in the first place.

No point trying to dig him out, she thought. Leg could be damaged, then what would be the point of risking her life on him? A person didn’t last long on the piles as a cripple. And even if he wasn’t damaged, she’d learned this lesson early: someone falls in the piles, you leave them there. There weren’t so many people left in the world that a person could afford to risk his own life being a saviour. Most likely, that just means two less people instead of one.

“Sorry, kid,” she said, hitching up her pack.

“Hey, whereya going?” he called.

She said nothing, but began to pick her way back through the piles. She felt tears on her face as she did.

This story is inspired by Pieter Hugo’s remarkable photographic project, Permanent Error: http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/hugo/index2010.htm