Free Watershed by Jane Abbott Page B

the Watch not taken me on, there was a good chance I might’ve ended my days on that stand.
    Last of all, in the hot northwest sector and hidden from sight (if not from memory), lay the refuse dump, crawling with its Pickers – all the outcasts, anyone diseased enough to be considered a concern. Why they were kept alive at all was a mystery to me. It would’ve been a lot quicker and a shitload more merciful to kill them straightup, but it seemed even the diseased had their uses and the Pickers kept the rubbish from piling too high. Not much of a life for them, but never overly long either. Every few weeks the Guards would draw lots and the losers would have to mask up and go in to torch what remained of the dead and leave vats of water for the rest. And every day dumpers would push their loads over to the guarded hatches in the wall, open them up and toss the rubbish down the chutes. If you were close enough when a hatch opened, you’d hear the Pickers crying out for help; the sound of it haunted for hours. Other than that, they were left to themselves. Not allowed in, but not allowed out either, they were kept in a living purgatory for as long as it took.
    It was forbidden to climb the walls. Not because it was dangerous (which it was) but because the Guards didn’t like anyone looking down on them. Even so, kids were always daring each other to the top, willing to risk any consequences. I’d done it myself a few times. They’d get a belting or worse if they were caught, but it really wasn’t worth the effort, even for a minute, to stand on all that rubble and get a sky view of what lay outside the last wall. In fact, it was a real disappointment.
    The remains of the old town, all the buildings and roads, all the lampposts and signposts and the dead trees, all the stopped-forever cars and trucks and other machinery, had been broken up and pulled apart. What wasn’t deemed useful for anything else was piled to make the walls, any gaps in the jumble filled over time with driven sand and dust. Now, aside from a clump of old turbine stalks, silent monuments to what might’ve been had there been more of them sooner, and so tall you didn’t need to scale any wall to see them, all that remained on the surrounding plain were base reminders of what had been. Like a colony of frantic ants, we’d raided what was and carted the spoils across to build what is. Every year the cutters had to trek further and further to fetch dead wood, and if anyone had given any thought to what might happen when the last of the trees had been chopped and burned, no one said.Despite what had gone before, our survival depended on the now and few eyes looked to a distant future.
    But within the confines of the inner wall, it was a different story. Buildings that hadn’t been ransacked or burned during the raids had been badly patched and were now home to hundreds. The rest were rickety wooden structures, fire hazards that leaned precariously over narrow, twisting lanes that were shaded, where possible, by cloth or slat, keeping out the worst of the sun but trapping in the stench of unwashed misery: troughs of piss filled ready for boiling, carts of shit waiting to be rolled out and ploughed into the dust, the rich odour of rotting fish, the heavy aroma of slow-stewing goat meat, the pungent, old-sweat smell of cheese, wilted yellow and flyblown. And there was as much noise as there was stink – a deep clamour made by people living hand to hand and day to day, none of them knowing if it might be their last.
    My grandparents had called this the new world, said when the place had come together everyone had been hoping they might’ve learned enough from past mistakes never to repeat them, but having heard their stories of how things used to be I couldn’t see a whole lot of improvement. All those petty hatreds about the colour of a man’s skin or the way he spoke had, for the most part, been put