Scarred

The radio’s low and the place is mostly cleared out, this time of the evening, when we hear the roar of regulators down the street. Delia looks at me, eyes wide with fright, and the knife she’s using to chop the vegetables clatters to the wooden table. “Dae—”

“It’s okay.” I’m the big brother; that’s what I’m supposed to say, though she doesn’t believe me. I busy myself with the bills and try to ignore the choppy thunder of motorbikes outside. Maybe if I pretend I don’t hear them, they’ll disappear into the night. They’re just looking for fun, that’s all, and there’s none to be had here.

Only someone forgot to tell them that because the next thing I know, the bikes cycle down outside and harsh laughter punctuates the still night. Then the bell above the door tinkles out in the main room, heavy boots echo off our worn floor, someone whistles and someone else laughs and then Maeve scurries into the back of the diner to tell us, “They’re here.”

Regulators. I remember a time when they didn’t exist in my world, where a man trying to make an honest living could manage to get by without having to answer to such lawlessness. My da used to tell me stories before the terror attacks, stories I’ve told my sister Delia on the nights when she cries herself to sleep. It wasn’t always like this and maybe that’s all the hope we need to go on, to know that there wassomething more, there can besomething more, if we can just get through this present strife to find it. We canget by, I tell her, when I hold her close in the darkness. We will.

But I can see she doesn’t buy that—it’s in the way her hands tremble as she scoops the minced vegetables up from the cutting board to dump them in the soup that boils beside her on the stove. From out in the dining room, a ragged voice calls for service, and I see the way she clenches the knife in one fist, toying with the idea of hiding it on her somewhere for protection.

I hate this fear in her. “Don’t.” I place a hand over the knife. She looks up at me, her lower lip stuck out in a slight pout, and I shake my head for emphasis. “It’ll just get them mad, Delia. You know that.”

“They’ll touch me,” she whispers. “They’ll want—”

“I won’t let them,” I promise.

She stares at me a moment longer and then nods. She knows I’ll not have that in here. I’ve stood up for her before, I have the scars to prove it—emotional scars that cut deeper than the scratches from McBane’s belt that cross my lower back, scars that ache worse than the bones he crushed in my wrist that never quite healed.

When another of the men calls out for service, I nod at Delia and whisper, “Go on. The sooner they’re fed, the sooner they’ll leave.”

Maeve twists her hands in her skirts and watches Delia push through the service door that leads behind the counter. “I’ll mind the soup,” she calls out, ever eager to please. She’s only fifteen, Delia’s charge, picked up from an alley not far from here one day some years back, and the child didn’t want to speak or eat or even live until Delia convinced her otherwise. Another war orphan, like the rest of us.

I try to tell her my da’s stories, too, to keep that world alive, but it’s nothing she remembers and she thinks they’re just fairy tales, she’s said as much, make-believe things I come up with to get us through the day. She doesn’t remember a mother or father or a time before all this. Delia doesn’t, either—she’s four years older than Maeve and all she knows of our da is what I can tell her, which isn’t much anymore. But she wants to believe things haven’t always been like this: ragtag rogues running the streets, shells falling in the night, the world crumbling around us like so much brick and mortar.

I want her to believe there can be so much more than this. Otherwise, what’s the use in going on?

“You want I should go out there?” Maeve asks, breaking into my thoughts.

I sit at my desk by the walk-in refrigerator, not far from where she stands stirring the soup, and I can hear every word that’s said out in the main room—the catcalls when Delia steps out from around the counter, the raucous laughter, the snickers and jokes. Five different voices, maybe six—regulators don’t travel in larger packs.

One leader, usually the roughest of the bunch, mean enough to scare a handful of others into following him. They tear through the city on their motorbikes like postmodern desperados, nothing more than street gangs, that’s all they are. There’s so many, too, I can’t keep track of them, they ride in here like glory and shake us up a bit until they lose interest and we just have to hope we can hold together that long.

McBane’s group is the worst of the bunch, but I don’t hear his voice out there in the main room. Thank God for that. He’d have called me out there to him by now.