The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 51

They drove back through town, to the far side of it, to be well away from the militia, and any militia watchers who might be out and about.

They drove right through town and out the other side, to the emptier countryside on the outskirts, and then found a place to stop. The empty driveway of what had once been a farmhouse, long ago. A gap in the trees which ran up to a charred ruin, a gap overgrown with grass, but with no larger bushes, so Joe was able to drive up it and park out of sight of the road.

Ellie told him to sleep, because he’d been driving, and then she and Sameh took it turn and turn about to rest while the other sat on the front of the SUV and kept watch.

They stayed there for a few hours, long enough for the day to become quite warm, and then Ellie woke Joe, and handed him a food pack and said, “Let’s go.”

Joe ate as they drove. He chewed, as they went back through the town towards the militia compound.

As they drove, Ellie looked out the window at the people they passed. She had been looking at the faces, for a while. Looking idly, not especially noticing. Just looking to build an awareness of her surroundings.

Suddenly, she consciously realized what it was she’d already half-noticed, without completely noticing.

“Where are all the old people,” she said to Joe, suddenly.

“What old people?”

“That’s what I mean. There aren’t any. So where are they?”

Joe looked at her, and his expression was odd. His voice was odd too, when he spoke. “We don’t have old people,” he said. “Not any more.”

“You must have old people,” Ellie said. She wasn’t completely paying attention to Joe’s reaction. She was just talking, being smart, assuming that her sense of normality was universal. She was thinking of suburban Sydney, and of hajji villages, and how there were always elderly people just around, there somewhere, even if you didn’t especially notice them. “They can’t just die.”

“They die,” Joe said.

Ellie looked at him. “What do you mean?” she said.

“We don’t have old people any more,” Joe said. “Now, they die.”

Joe definitely sounded odd, Ellie thought. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure what kind of odd it was. Odd guilty or perhaps odd angry, she wasn’t sure which. She wasn’t entirely sure Joe would even know either.

She felt awful for bringing this up. It obviously wasn’t something people talked about here. But she had, and now she had, she wanted to be clear what Joe had meant. She sat there for a moment, looking at Joe, still a little uncertain what he was saying.

“Why do they die?” she said in the end.

“We let them.”

Ellie still didn’t understand. “Why?”

“Because we started letting them die, the ones who caused all this, and we never stopped again.”

“I really don’t understand,” Ellie said.

“We used to just let old people die. Because we were angry with them. With their greed and selfishness and all the rest. The old people who caused all this. Who ran up the debts and made the laws which broke governments. We’d already stopped funding healthcare, so a lot of them were in a bad way. But then we just stopped everything else. We stopped caring for them at all. We let them die, those ones, the ones who probably deserved it. And then we never started caring again.”

“I mean, you just… what, leave them outside?”

Joe shrugged. “Not outside, usually. But there’s no medicine, and no heat, and no work for them once they’re old. Unless they have families who care, close families…”

“They just die?”

He nodded.

“Fuck,” Ellie said. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in years, but strangely, she suddenly wanted to. Perhaps not speak to them, exactly, but she wanted to send them money, and make sure they were okay.

They would be okay, she knew, because they weren’t in an awful place like this. Měi-guó was horrible, and Ellie knew it was horrible, but even so, realizing just how horrible came as a shock. Even backwoods hajjis halfway up the mountains to nowhere didn’t treat people quite as badly as this.

Ellie looked at Joe for a moment, and had no idea what to say. She had no idea, so she didn’t say anything. She just sat there, silently, watching fields go past out the windows.

After a while, she said, “I’m sorry.”

Joe shrugged, and didn’t say anything else.