1001 Nights Cast

Bargelt had seen enough ruin of every kind to consider himself hard-bitten, but sanguine: or he would, if he were sure he had any blood left. Now, he was just fed up. He’d spent months picking his way through the wreckage of civilization-as-we-know-it, as he amused himself by calling it, and found his way to what must’ve been the gulf coast of Texas, for no good reason he could remember. Here, not only didn’t it rain, and sandstorms still rule the afternoons, but food was harder and harder to find, and now it was fucking freezing. This suited Bargelt’s grim irony—he could remember humidity—but he’d survived so far keeping to himself, and lighting fires out in the open every night was not the key to his longevity. He was too experienced to risk the husks of towns back from the shore at night: he’d watch, stay low, and forage, then hole up there in the afternoons, but only when he could see to avoid the feral packs, and he’d slip away, head for the beach after the storms died down. He still called it the beach, but knew that was an inversion: the steep new dunes and the wide strip of the driest sand fringed only broken-down roads and settlements; the last time he’d tried to find water out there, he’d walked for days before giving up, though he’d collected some useful salvage, a knife, bones that he could sharpen. The packs of teenagers in the towns didn’t seem to like to cross the dunes, but a fire would be chancing his luck.

Sitting on the sand, Bargelt shrugged his coat tighter around his shoulders, sighed, and settled in to wait. There’d been five bedraggled people with a wooden cart, a day back, heading the same way. He wouldn’t have gone near them, but they’d broken down and he was hungry, so he’d risked it. The cart was some kind of old buckboard: a rectangular platform of rough planks, about eight feet by four, sides a foot high, with a rudimentary undercarriage resting on two axles and four wooden-spoked wheels. Bargelt thought it must have come from an old barn, or a primitive farm museum. A T-bar at one end allowed a couple of people to pull the cart, while the others rode. When he’d found them, an axle had cracked. Bargelt took one man with him back toward town, to watch out while he stripped bark from a tree with his knife. He used some of the water they had in plastic bottles to wet the bark, used a piece of old fence paling as a splint, and bound the axle like a broken limb. They gave him canned beans, asked if he’d ride with them, but Bargelt had thought the cart would only attract attention, and trudged off ahead on his own. Now, shivering inside his coat, he knew he’d need them to take turns standing watch around a fire. The prospect didn’t thrill him, but then what did?

He didn’t see them till the next evening, after he found his way back down the dunes to the beach. The cart was hundreds of yards up ahead of him, they were all pulling and pushing, making heavy weather of it in the powdery sand. Bargelt had half a mind to let them go on without seeing him, but remembered the frigid night and caught up. Welcomed by wary half-smiles and nods of recognition, he helped push until it was far enough for that evening. Bargelt was reassured that they already had a rotation of watches around the small fire that they built, and made his bona fides, showing them his two knives, and the sharpened bones, which might serve as weapons. Of the three other men, the smallest and stupidest, Cram, showed a length of chain with a heavy bolt through one end; Jones, the taller of the women, unwrapped a sharp triangle of broken mirror, its base still embedded in a wooden frame. Bargelt kept quiet about a square of mirror hidden deep in his own coat. They ate from cans warmed in the fire, and Bargelt slept well in his turn.

Days later, Bargelt, close-mouthed, tiring of people, and even more of pushing wooden wheels through sand, found two rubber tires half-buried next to one another in the sand. They’d almost passed when he caught sight of them. Booty beyond our wildest expectations, he remarked drily. The others, doggedly, failed to see it, tires being heavy, though Bargelt knew they had been good for trade in the north. Bargelt’s plan was to fix rubber around the wheels, to facilitate their movement across sand. That evening, the others persuaded, Bargelt worked away at cutting the rubber into lengths; Jones set to cutting and bending thin strips of metal from empty cans. Next morning, Cram and Jones set off to forage. Bargelt and the others propped the cart on one side: through the morning, Bargelt worked pieces of rubber around two wheels, then used the bones to push strips of metal through the rubber on opposite sides, which he wound around the spokes as tightly as he could as fasteners. Shoes for wheels, he thought, and then, fucking idiots, as Cram and Jones tumbled down the face of the dune in a panic of sand, yelling ‘dogs, dogs’, meaning the packs of malign teens from inland. Bargelt picked up his knife, retreated back down the beach along the foot of the dunes while Cram, Jones and the others tipped the cart back down and started pushing for dear life. Wheels augmented on one side only, heads down and hearts pounding in their mouths, the five ran the cart in one wide circle before Bargelt realized the dogs had stopped on the other side of the dune, and had run most of a second circle around before they saw Bargelt a hundred yards away, lying on his back on the sand, howling with laughter.