North

by Frank Owen

  ‘Carson, come over here quick.’

  He moved fast then, and they stood flash-frozen at the sink, watching as pedestrians bled from their mouths and ears and noses, as if they had eaten rat poison. As the wind rustled the salvia, the passers-by stopped and doubled over, retching their guts onto the sidewalk. He took hold of the window to open it for a better look, but then drew his hand back.

  ‘There’s something in the air,’ he said, and his mouth pulled funny. ‘We got to seal this place up, Tammy. Right now.’

  ‘I’ll check the bathroom,’ she said. Dyce and Garrett watched her run. She never ran.

  Their dad found a jar of Vaseline next to Gracie’s ruffled bed, and he began to work it into the seals around the kitchen windows. Garrett was old enough to follow instructions, and he was set to stuff wads of toilet paper into the old steel air vent beside the front door. Their mom slotted towels under the interleading doors: Dyce remembered her kicking at them to compress the fabric, her lips pressed tight together.

  When the Vaseline gave out, their dad used stale margarine to seal the bedroom windows. Their mom moved on to covering the taps and drains with cling film. She was crying, but trying to do that silently too.

  When next they looked, the street was lined with bodies – some writhing, most still. ‘All fall down,’ said Dyce, and then flinched away from his mother: he was sure she was going to slap him.

  Garrett, years later, said he could see Gracie’s pale knees jutting up beside the park, halfway off the sidewalk, her dress soaked in vomit and the bag of ground beef leaking blood into the gutter, first red and then gray.

  They were too afraid to open the door, or to check that she really was dead. ‘We’re just going to sit tight,’ their dad told them. ‘Right, boys? Like camping.’ He almost looked like he was enjoying it.

  Oxygen was precious. They couldn’t use the gas stove or the hot water, which relied on a pilot flame to heat the pipes. According to Garrett, they spent the week listening to static on the radio and eating Cap’n Crunch and stale multivitamins that said ‘For Women’ on the box. Then they ate the raw onion.

  Since all the toilets were covered with cling film, they shat in the poky little study, using cooking pots lined up on the mottled carpet. They sealed off the stink and tried to limit toilet time to once a day, except for Dyce, who was too little to hold it in. Dad went first each time, then the kids, and Mom last of all. She prayed secretly that they would get out of there before it was her time of the month, the stale air already heavy with headaches. FEAR NOT, she kept reading. FEAR NOT, FOR I AM WITH YOU. The four of them stared out at the flies swarming over the bodies in the street, or sitting fat and bristly on the windows, mercifully obscuring the world outside.

  On the fourth day, their dad saw a man and woman with cloths over their faces making a run for his car. They turned the old Dodge Dart south.

  ‘Headed for the coast,’ said their dad, with some satisfaction. ‘Gas in the tank won’t get them far.’

  On the sixth day, the kitchen radio came to life and announced that the air was safe to breathe. The national emergency measures had been lifted. The War was over. Hallelujah!

  Garrett and Dyce watched their mom huddle against their dad, crying, her shoulders jolting. He said nothing. They’d lost.

  The announcer, his voice deep with professional concern, explained that concession talks were being set up. Those who’d survived had nothing more to fear. ‘Unfortunately, there have been casualties,’ he went on, reading from his script. ‘Some civilians have paid the price for peace. We pray for the families of those fallen heroes who contracted the virus. Our sympathies are with them.’

  Their dad seemed to draw energy from the news. He was up early the next morning to siphon gas from abandoned cars to pour into Gracie’s tiny Lark. They packed up their few things and waited while their mom slowly rigged a blanket across the back seat, the corners wedged into the rolled-up windows to make a tent for the kids – and to keep them from seeing the carnage outside. She said nothing at all on the return journey: Carson had forbidden her to say her last goodbyes to Gracie’s body on the sidewalk. She knew he was right, but it was some kind of betrayal. Dyce felt as though he really did remember that part, the miasma between their parents, the dark thrill of their cocoon as the car wove around the bodies on the road. They headed back home thinking that they’d seen the worst and survived it.

  If they’d only known, he thought now. He felt the point of the scissors, still tucked away in his sleeve. The sun had risen and Vida was asleep on his shoulder, her arm limp across his lap.

  Something beeped near the driver’s footwell and Buddy leant forward and picked up a device that looked like one of those pre-War medical pagers. It had been through the wars: it was wrapped in gray tape and the back casing was cracked. He held it up to his ear and closed one eye, to hear the tiny speaker better. Then he set it down. After a slow mile he reached his arm over to the passenger seat backrest and turned around to look at Dyce.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. Vida stirred and opened one eye. ‘There’s no easy way to ask this, but do you guys know a Felix Callahan?’

  8

  The man in the passage stepped forward and helped Felix to his feet, examining his naked body as he lifted him up, eyeing every pockmark and scar. In the shaft of light from the bathroom, Felix repaid the inspection, sizing up the man who stood over him: the old habit, to look for the weak point that would mean the bloody end of a fist fight. He knew what the man was seeing. It was safe to say there’d be no more hand-to-hand combat for Felix Callahan: those days were long gone. A stiff breeze would do him in, he thought, never mind Renard’s invisible critters along for the ride.

  But this fellow, this Northerner, didn’t seem much better off. Twenty years younger, maybe, but ravaged in the way Felix had gotten used to seeing. On his cheek the man wore a sticking plaster that ran from the bridge of his nose and then down in a square from the hinge of his jaw to the corner of his mouth. Sometime earlier in his life – and it wasn’t over yet, even if he did look like the walking dead – welts and blisters had erupted and scarred his skin like constellations. And just like constellations, the spaces between the big-daddy blemishes were littered with the signs of older pustules and boils. And even then between those there were still more signs of suffering. Felix could read the whole history of illness over his face, from plague to pestilence and back again.

  The man winked. Felix felt himself relax just a little – his stomach unclenched and the knot of his fist loosened. He stared at the fabric plaster. Whatever was behind it was leaking. Yup. The odds were evening out.

  ‘We been looking a long time for you, Felix. ’Bout seven years now. Whaddaya make of that?’ There was something about the way he said his words: they sounded mushy. Damage to the palate, maybe.

  The man winced – something hurt, Felix bet – and unscrewed the lid from a water bottle, taking a long swallow. Goddam! Even in the low light of the house, that stain on the plaster seemed to spread a little with each rise and fall of his Adam’s apple.

  ‘Now, I hate to rush your first shower in, what, a hundred years?’ The man smiled, then stopped when it stretched his crusted skin. ‘But we got to get you out of here. Pretty sure I’m not the only one looking for you.’

  Felix tried to nail down one question that would make sense of the whole shebang, but he just kept thinking of that damn giraffe, placid as you like, foraging in the trees of suburbia.

  Before he could speak, they heard the sound of an engine slowing. As they listened, it sidled up into the driveway, where the fan belt shrieked and the engine died. A door opened and there was the sound of two men talking, though Felix couldn’t make out the words.

  The man in the passage pushed past Felix and grabbed the fallen clothes that Norma had left for him. Then he reached one arm into the shower and turned the faucet on full blast. It hissed at first, then gushed again, the sound covering their talk.

  ‘L
et’s get going. We can get you covered up in a minute if you’re still breathing then.’

  The man nodded toward the street and Felix followed him, feeling the cold.

  Fuck me sideways, he told himself. I been more naked these last few days than I ever been before in my life!

  The man led the way to the kitchen and out through the back door. They crept around the front of the house, Felix all the while thinking of that game his brothers used to play – keeping low and out of sight so they could scare the shit out of him. He was prey from the day he could walk till their mother told them to quit it. ‘Brown streaks in the laundry,’ his brothers said, when he asked them why they stopped.

  The two men had paused, bemused, trying to figure out how to get in. As Felix watched, the one standing on the welcome mat shoved his shoulder forward at the door, trying to force it open with his weight. He had set his pack down to do it, and he was really putting his back into the break-in. Skinny, both of them, one with a moustache, the other with a few days’ stubble and a murderous look. The pissed-off one began pulling the storm boarding off the front window, but the water-damaged door gave way first. The men disappeared inside.

  ‘Car,’ said Felix’s kidnapper, and he grabbed Felix’s arm like a gentleman helping a lady over a puddle. They dashed to it, a silver Ford De Luxe, which had once been a soft-top. Someone had since hammered some plyboard together to enclose it, then painted it white to keep the water out. And praise Jesus and the stupidity of mortal men! The key was right in the ignition. Some people never learn, Felix thought. The man only just waited for him to round the vehicle and get in before he turned the key. The engine coughed once, then sputtered out.

  ‘Come on,’ he hissed through his teeth. ‘Come on, you bitch.’

  Felix leant over. ‘Cain’t force it,’ he said, and then he turned the key himself. ‘Gotta be gentle with the old ones, even when you’re in a hurry.’

  With a bang, the grateful engine took and the man wrenched it into reverse. The car leapt backward into the street, tires spinning. Felix craned back to see the two men come running out of the house. One had his hand shoved in a backpack and Felix understood he was feeling for his gun.

  ‘You gonna tell me who those guys are?’ he asked.

  ‘Border patrol. Police, basically – keeping an eye out for folks just like you. And now they know you’re here, they’re not gonna let up.’

  ‘Just when you think you’ve outrun the Callahans.’

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  There was a thunder crack. Felix ducked but the bullet missed, as it had all his life except for that once. The car jerked again as the driver flung his arm up to shield his face.

  ‘Jesus!’

  It was the giraffe, galloping beside them, terrified, its hooves thudding along the asphalt.

  Felix expected another shot, but it didn’t come. The driver righted himself and the giraffe veered off the road, then pulled up, wide-eyed and frothing, as the De Luxe gathered speed like a tank and headed north. The rain started again. Felix rubbed his stinging eyes. It took him a moment to work out where it was coming from – a tiny vanilla-scented basketball hanging from the rear-view. What was with Northerners and their car fresheners? Didn’t they know cars smelt great just because of what they were? The musty fabric and the plastic, the rubber and gas: Felix took a big sniff of it all again. Why ruin a good thing?

  The man reached to the back seat where he’d thrown Felix’s new clothes and tossed them in the old man’s lap.

  ‘Gonna catch your death,’ he said. ‘And then the boys’ll hang me as soon as look at me. But I am also tired of looking at your weenie, I gotta tell you.’

  Felix pulled a face. ‘Not my idea of a first date neither, pal.’

  The man grinned, and then touched one finger gingerly to his cheek. ‘Aw, shit, this hurts.’ He looked sideways at Felix and said, ‘Name’s Adams, by the way.’

  Felix sorted through the pile of clothes. ‘Guess you all know who I am. There better be coffee wherever we’re going.’

  Adams laughed, then coughed, nodding, and covered his mouth. Felix pulled the shirt carefully over his head, then held up a cable-knit sweater, pea green and musty as last year’s Christmas baubles. An appliquéd reindeer leapt from one armpit to the other.

  When Norma heard the De Luxe coming she looked out the diner window. The car raced northward on the highway. She ran outside into the gathering rain just in time to see the ghost of her dead husband in the passenger seat, pulling on his favorite sweater.

  9

  Buddy was talking, a squeaky jumble of words.

  ‘The Resistance sent me down to drive the border roads in the worst of the storm. I was looking out for folks like you, anyone washed up over the Wall and still alive. Chances were pretty slim. Then when I picked you up, I couldn’t be sure you folks weren’t what you said you were – a couple of out-of-luck Montanans. I was trying to figure out a way of asking you without giving the game away, until I got the message here saying to look out for a Felix Callahan.’

  Dyce felt his sore shoulders relax. This man was no threat, and that was a bigger relief than he’d reckoned. The days of combat and panic and flight piled up now that he had had a chance to sit tight and think on it all, and he let the heaviness take hold of him. Every damn thing he had done until now was resistance, as if the world was packed tightly over his head in layers and he had to dig himself out. Himself, and Vida now as well. She wouldn’t say but he knew that her leg wasn’t getting any better. It was starting to smell weird too, or maybe that was just the bloodied cloth around it. Every dumb beat of his stubborn heart felt like work and he missed Garrett like a limb. Now Buddy was telling them where they were headed – something about Des Moines – but in the end Dyce gave up and felt his head nodding.

  Buddy eyed him in the rear-view mirror, slumped against Vida, his sore eyes flickering closed.

  ‘Just so you know, we’re not going to stay on this road for long,’ he said. ‘The storm’s given us a free pass, but soon as the sun’s up we’ll be sore thumbs out here in the open, just begging to be pulled over for questioning. So take a nap if you like, but I’m gonna have to wake you in ten. I won’t be able to haul your asses out the car all by myself, skinny as they are.’

  Vida had stayed awake. She knew better than to close her eyes too. If she surrendered to the yawn that threatened to unhinge her jaws, it would just keep going until the top of her head was sawn clean off. And what a relief that would be! She thought of her mama, keeping her midwife’s watch over her young mothers all those days – and nights too, because babies don’t wait for you to tell them when to be born. How had she done it and not lost her mind? Someone always had to keep watch, and that was the hardest job because it was never-ending. Dyce could drop away into nothingness – a sleep so deep, his daddy used to say, that he could see Saint Peter – but Vida had to be on guard. The pain throbbed up through the bones of her leg to keep her company.

  But it wasn’t Saint Peter that Dyce saw when he fell into sleep – no early-pearly gates or goose-down clouds. It was a pure dark. In his state he thought it was the halfway place people get to when they’re too tired to dream. But the place he was in had the soft, ominous smell of the cellar – and he knew he was back in the mines below the Mouth, stumbling in the dark ripeness of the killing tunnels under the town.

  With the realization came the wet walls pressing in on either side, the greenish glow of the mushrooms like St Elmo’s fire. Dyce felt his fists clench as his feet were set on a path that endlessly angled away from him. With each in-breath the air was thicker and hung with spores, until he felt the water in his struggling lungs. He coughed, his hand in front of his mouth. When he took his hand away, he knew the palm would be stained with black mucus, brought up from the slick chambers of his own rotting body.

  There was no way back. He knew the passage led only to the catacomb laboratory, where the useful dead lay with thei
r faces upturned in fruitfulness, the mushrooms springing from the holes in their bodies. Dyce pressed himself against the clammy walls of the passageway and fought the scream. He tried to grip with his feet to slow his progress but they sank anyway, further and further in, until he was sure the caverns would swallow him.

  From the death vault the spores began to leak faster, like flies. Dyce watched, hypnotized. The two cold hands punched through the wall and clamped his head on either side. In his dream a thick tongue probed his ear and he half sobbed, ‘Ester!’ She was part of the water table now too, wasn’t she? Biding her time, the mindless, vicious clots of her reassembling like DNA, flowing under the cool earth to surprise him again with her violence and desire. He would never be able to kill her. Somehow she would always come back.

  The smell was choking him; Dyce felt his lungs sticky with panic. Then those hands with their superhuman strength began slowly to lift him off the passage floor. His feet kicked as if he was treading water, desperate to keep his head above the tide of spores that kept spilling from the room. Garrett had lifted him the same way when they were kids, making Dyce feel he was blind with rage and helplessness, sure that his head would be ripped from his skinny shoulders. Now there were more hands, then more, grabbing at his exposed flesh, groping and pinching his soft parts, searching for the signs of his rich human life: his blood, tears, semen, sweat.

  He kept struggling, hoarse with outrage and screaming, but it was no use. The bony, punishing hands wouldn’t relent, and at last Dyce understood that brute strength was no help. He went limp, and in the seconds it took for Ester’s undead kin to relax in surprise, he drew up his battered knees and shoved against the wall with both feet.

  The hands flopped, blind and furious, and Dyce stumbled forward, forward and into the death room.

  There was nowhere else to go.