Wanderer

By Justin Mynheir

As head of security, Teddy saw every newcomer as suspicious, but the sixteen-year-old also hungered for news of life elsewhere. He lounged in a tattered lawn chair and set his hands onto the plastic folding table. The olive-green tent around him snapped against the poles as he waited to see why the boys on the watch had called him over, but the faithful shelter stood against an oppressive wind. The walls of rusty tin surrounding their small town kept most of the storm at bay. The townspeople hid anyways, which Teddy understood. Nobody liked the reminder of a dying world.

One of the kids posted on the watchtower, Curtis, marched a stranger inside, readjusting the oversized crossbow in his small hands. The newcomer eased down onto a stool facing Teddy and crossed his legs. Multicolored fabric hid beneath a leather duster shredded through use, and a reflective visor bulged out from an intricate gasmask partially concealed by a hood. Effective protection against the freezing South Dakota nights, the layers made sure that not a single inch of skin met the sun or the sand.

“So, you were walking through a sandstorm, huh?” Teddy removed his baseball cap and slammed it top-down on the plastic. “You must be pretty tough. I’d be blind if I was in something like that. Actually, I’d be dead…. and so should you. Talk.”

The stranger scanned the breadth of the tent in a single head movement. “My calculations failed to predict exactly how powerful the winds would be. This particular storm happened to be broken up by the Black Hills. Nature sometimes has fortuitous timing.”

“Four two, what?” Teddy shook his head and slid a .38 revolver onto the table, lifting his chin high to intimidate the weak stranger. “What’s your name?”

Oblivious to Teddy’s posturing, the stranger sat still, neither tense nor calm. He almost seemed to be perfectly balanced. “Others referred to me as Andy. That name is shorthand, not for Andrew as one akin to yourself might assume.”

“You use a lot of big words.” Teddy frowned, curiosity getting the better of his protective instincts. “How old are you? The oldest one in town is Betsy, and she’s only twenty.”

Beside him, Curtis nodded in agreement.

“I lived for some time before the world faded to dust, long enough to remember computers and the internet,” Andy admitted. “I now wander here and there to record people and places for posterity. That is my life now.”

“That’s gotta be something like thirty years!”

“Forty years since the disaster, to be precise.” The stranger held up four fingers.

“I know how to count!” Teddy crossed his arms. “The cough should’ve taken you. We’ve never seen somebody make it past twenty-five. Right, Curtis?”

“That was Mister Yoshii,” the kid from the watch agreed, lowered his crossbow, and tugged at the right shoulder strap of his overalls.

“Yeah, so you’ve gotta be lying. We don’t trust liars here.” Teddy set a finger on the revolver. “Who are you really?”

Andy waved both his hands in a slow, even pace. “Giving trust to the untrustworthy would be an obviously poor decision, but I am speaking the truth.”

“Prove it,” Curtis ordered.

Teddy shot the boy a glare for even the slightest attempt at undermining his authority. “Yeah, prove it.”

“What hurt could that cause?” Andy shrugged. “I will make you a deal. If you allow me to interview your citizens and make a record of your town, then I will take off my mask to prove my age.”

Teddy wanted to jump in the air and scream out his excitement. The wanderer across from him traveled all over, maybe even in another state. The stories he could tell must be amazing, wandering the wastes, living in huge cities before all of this. Also, everybody needed a distraction. Three of the kids had died in the last week, and people were getting emotional, girls mostly. Not Teddy. He didn’t cry like a toddler.

“Okay,” Teddy relented. “Pop it off. I wanna see what an old man looks like.”

Andy unstrapped a belt holding the hood over his gasmask. Curtis inched closer to see, eyes wide. Teddy leaned over his gun and cap. He wanted to… No, he had to know if Andy was as old as he claimed.

“Honestly, it has been two years and seventy-four days since I saw my own face.” Andy hesitated before pulling off the last piece of headgear. “The years take their toll, and sand and I have always been at odds.”

He lifted the gasmask off.

The skin appeared human, at first, but the longer Teddy looked at the flesh, the more it carried the leathery texture of a moccasin. Andy had no hair, and his ears, mouth, and nose seemed normal. The biggest change could be found in the eyes: metal spheres replaced the white of an eyeball, and bright yellow lenses covered where the irises and pupils would be. A scar of unknown origin ran on the left side of Andy’s head. Within the open wound, minute arms and gears clicked against one another inside a plastic skull.

Teddy gulped, finally understanding what could survive the Midwest Wastes, disease, and age. “Is Andy short for…?”

Tiny metal arms pulled from beneath the skin to form a smile with parted lips. “Andy is short for Android.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When Justin Mynheir is not editing his Military Science Fiction trilogy or writing an Urban Fantasy one, he attends college, outlines new ideas, writes short stories, studies any number of statistically violent topics, and defends his distracted daydreaming by calling it “creative practice.”

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