Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [52]
“I don’t have anything I could offer as a gift though,” Peter said.
“No matter,” Krupf said. “Even if you could get a signed pass, you’d never find a job anyway. They’re all gone by now. I can’t spare a bit of work, or even a crust to pay you with. Mostly now I think the Ministry only keeps its doors open to lure in the less wary vagrants and street tramps. It’s the labor camps for you, I fear.”
“But if I don’t find a job soon, I’ll have to leave the city in order to feed myself.”
“You can’t do that either,” Krupf said, “unless you get a different pass from the Ministry of Travel. The new overlords don’t want people just wandering free and unregistered about their countryside, now, do they?”
“But I got into the city without a pass.”
“I’m not surprised. They want you in the bigger cities and towns. Easier to scoop you up then. No, young fellow, I fear it’s the camps for you. Best turn yourself in now and get that first bowl of dinner all the sooner.”
And so it went.
Peter had no documentation, but documents of some type or another were required for anything he might try to do to stave off hunger. Even begging was regulated in this strange new empire. Beggars required their own brand of written license to do so, which were issued by the Ministry of Charity. Unfortunately the Ministry of Charity was no more charitable than any other of the town’s uncountable regulatory offices. Hamelin was limited to no more than thirty such passes, and the waiting list to get one was already over a thousand names long — or so Peter had heard. He wasn’t willing to enter any government building to find out for himself.
With no other recourse, Peter turned to eating garbage, but in a city as crowded as this, there was precious little of that to be found. And what he could find was often difficult to keep. Usually he had to be willing to fight others for it. Scavenging turned increasingly difficult as the days went by. Most of the other vagrants, finding themselves in the same position as Peter, formed gangs of desperate ruffians, all the better to fight off other gangs for the few scraps that could be discovered. Peter refused to join one of the gangs, since the standard rite of initiation required killing some smaller, weaker street-dweller to prove one’s will and ability to do all to serve the gang and to survive.
He continued to sleep in alleys and gutters, but never for more than an hour or two at a time. Patrols of the goblin nightwatch regularly searched likely places where street tramps might be found. Some of the bolder gangs were even worse, routinely killing those they could find still living on their own, so as to keep its reputation growing, its members in fighting trim, and to reduce the number of mouths competing for the available food trash.
The rat populations were increasing too, as they always did in a place where the human population is so much greater than the available food supply. The dead and dying may have been too terrible a food source for most of the town’s starving people to yet contemplate, but they proved a wonderful feast for rats. Turnabout being fair play, many of the street-dwellers started hunting rats. Peter tried it with limited success.
On most days Peter was too weak from hunger to succeed in catching and killing one of the big Hamelin rats with only his bare hands and teeth as weapons. They were tough, fast and fought viciously when cornered. On those rare occasions when he did triumph, Peter ate the thing raw, meat and guts both. Then, strengthened just a bit, he usually celebrated by taking the rest of the day off to search for his lost friends and family. His reasoning was sound for the most part. If one or more of them had survived to make