North

by Frank Owen

  As the liver cooked, the juices dribbled out, and Kurt’s taste buds tingled. He sliced the meat away, carving it down bit by bit. He took a long sliver and dropped it through the crack in the window he’d left open so Linus got some air. The cat crouched, waiting for Kurt to sit back down at the fire before he leapt down and deigned to eat it.

  ‘Wasn’t that good? Yeah. You’re mad, but you’re not stupid. You’re gonna get real grateful as we go.’

  When the meat was finished and the fire had burnt down, Kurt got back into the car, where he curled up on the back seat. Linus shrank into a tighter crouch. That cat had a bladder made of iron.

  They slept.

  23

  It wouldn’t stop. He knew he was safe for the moment, but every time Dyce closed his eyes, he saw the mushroom mines: their earthy catacombed walls housing the army of the innocent dead. All those children. Some babies, even, and – good God Almighty – here he was, he himself, about to be a father! The idea was terrible and thrilling. He could feel the spores blooming beneath his fingernails and rupturing the skin, cool and efficient as razor blades. Life found a way, even where it wasn’t wanted. And did he want this baby? Could he be responsible for the life of a whole other human? He shuddered. An actual baby. Fuck. How was it possible?

  He gave up trying to sleep, and sat up instead. He had chosen to sleep up here with Ruth, so they could take turns to keep an eye on Vida. As far as he could make out, the other Southerners had gathered downstairs in one place, like old-timers circling the wagons against whatever was hunting them when the sun went down. Only Felix had chosen to sleep apart from the rest of the survivors. He’d taken off with blankets and sheets and a pillow to find a hidey-hole of his own. Typical. He didn’t care about anything but himself.

  Dyce listened, imagining the sleeping bodies. Mostly restful.

  Except for Vida.

  Her sleep was an effort and it showed on her face, her forehead lined with some interior struggle and flight, the sweat leaking through her skin, slick as oil. She was fighting for two now, and Ruth had been pretty clear about the risk: the fever couldn’t go on too long without endangering the baby. Lips compressed, she had given Vida a time limit. If the fever hadn’t broken by 10 p.m., they’d have to move on to the next step. When Dyce had asked whether amputation was really and truly the next step, Ruth had squeezed his arm so hard it hurt, and hissed, ‘We’re not baking cakes here, so don’t be a baby.’

  Then, just after everyone else had settled themselves downstairs on the army cots for the night, Dyce had caught her in the main kitchen. She was pawing through the drawers, head down, lips pressed tightly together.

  Dyce felt his heart drop. ‘You should be sleeping,’ he told her.

  ‘So should you,’ Ruth replied. She ignored him and kept going.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Cake mix.’

  Dyce got the message.

  But as it turned out, ten o’clock came and went. Ruth checked her daughter’s forehead, then checked her again.

  ‘The morning,’ she said. ‘If it’s not over by morning.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say what it was they would have to do.

  What had she found in the kitchen? He imagined her reaching over the side of her cot in the middle of the night while everyone else snored and dreamt of their old lives. Out of the bag she slid a meat cleaver and held it up, her small bicep flexing as she turned it over in her hands. She tested her index finger against the sharp edge and hissed in breath as it sliced into the thin, nerved pad. She sucked the cut finger and then hefted the cleaver a couple of times to get a sense of the weight of the thing in motion. Like a guillotine, thought Dyce.

  Now he got up and walked to the boarded window, where Ears sat like a totem on the sill, watching the room with his seed-eyes. Dyce peeked out between the slats. It was deep night and there was no distant lifting of the dark along the horizon and no singing birds. There was still time for Vida. The small hairs of his ears shuddered, and in the quiet he was aware of footsteps in the hallway, cushioned as they were by the carpet like a funeral parlor.

  He first thought of Felix, searching rooms for a place to throw his blanket down. But the steps were too swift. Plus there was something sinister in the deliberate quiet, the heel-toe padding. As though whoever it was was hoping to creep right into the room unnoticed, to be on top of them before they opened their eyes.

  ‘Just the night watch,’ Dyce whispered to himself, though he didn’t believe it.

  He moved to the wall and followed the progress of the feet. They slowed, then stopped at the door. There was a long silence, minutes passed. All the while Dyce watched the brass door handle, unable to stir in case there was an eye on the other side of the keyhole waiting for movement.

  After ten minutes he had to wonder whether the person had moved on without his noticing. A minute more and he began to doubt whether he’d heard the steps at all. He’d had a lot to chew over these past few days; he was twitchy, and he had a fucking right to be. He was about to step back from the door and lie down again when the handle dipped. He stiffened against the icy pulse of adrenaline in his muscles.

  There it came: the click of the deadbolt catching on the strike plate. Thank God he’d locked it. The handle lifted again in defeat and the footsteps retreated. It’s about what’s already inside, the woman with the wild hair had told him after the meeting. Be afraid of what’s already inside.

  Dyce was sure he wouldn’t sleep after that, but it was already weak morning when the knocking woke him and Adams called through the door.

  ‘Southern folk! Let’s get this day started. Half an hour. Downstairs foyer.’

  Dyce stood and went across to Ruth. She was leaning over Vida, trying to get her to drink from an oversized coffee mug, which said I HEART IOWA. Vida was gray. Dyce had known that human skin went ashy under stress, but this was a new and alien spectrum. She raised her colorless head and drank a few sips, then lay back down, almost without waking. Her eyes were bulbous under their lids, like a baby bird’s. When Dyce looked at Ruth, she shook her head.

  ‘Why don’t you let me have a turn?’ he said softly.

  ‘No. I owe her. She did it for me. Besides,’ and she actually smiled, ‘I don’t trust anyone else to do it right.’ Her own eyes were puffy with exhaustion, the skunk streak in her hair bristling. ‘This is the kind of thing that needs to be done right or not at all. You wouldn’t want to screw it up and not be able to forgive yourself, would you?’ Her tone sharpened. ‘It’s going to be a hard day for everyone, anyway. I hope you’re ready. Midday, got it? That’s the absolute longest we can wait. We’re going to need all the light we can get.’

  They let Vida sleep on, locking her safely in her room, while the rest of the yawning Southerners gathered downstairs.

  It was good to be back with the others, with Pete and Sam; even Ruth seemed happy to be there. Dyce felt his stomach untwist a little. He didn’t know the names of most others, but he recognized their faces from that miracle day in the ghost colony – the day his blindness lifted like a veil. He’d never forget the hope with which they’d stared at him. Now a woman hugged him and asked after Vida.

  ‘She’s been better,’ Dyce told her.

  Adams, with a fresh dressing on his cheek, met them in the foyer where the old brass-plate map of the building was still displayed. It had been part of a pre-War audio tour or something, Dyce guessed, the kind with numbers that had once matched up to recordings of trivia about the building, the sort of thing made by people who’d loved it for what it was as well as what it stood for.

  No one would be going on that tour now, though. Dyce imagined the new version playing through a set of grimy headphones.

  This, ladies and gentlemen, is where we shit in a hole. And this is where we sleep in our flea-ridden piles. Over there is a woman hanging streaky diapers, and here’s a man with a home-made guitar! Isn’t that something?

  Adams led the group along a passage,
past the bathrooms to a windowless hall that must once have been used for staff meetings – the kind of place where the HR woman would’ve cut a communal birthday cake. Now the room was partitioned with untidy plastic sheeting, some panels transparent, some speckled with paint.

  In each pocket made by the partitions there were Northerners. They were standing over desks with measuring spoons and egg whisks, the tables strewn with mortars and pestles, cups and bowls, like an alchemist’s chamber or a science class. When the workers noticed the Southerners congregating, they put down their utensils and joined the meeting.

  ‘Find a space to sit,’ said Adams. He was rubbing at the pain in the bulbous joints in his hands.

  Arthritis, thought Dyce. I guess that’s coming too. But only for the lucky ones.

  ‘Get ready to be blown away,’ said Adams. ‘I mean it. I’m going to let you all in on the grand plan to bring down Renard and every single asshole under him. Now I know you all can get behind that, right?’

  There were murmurs of holy assent. These guys were ready to go without even a couple of warm-up hymns. Dyce half expected people to moan and faint as Adams worked himself up to a couple of rounds of can-you-give-me-a-hallelujahs, and then some frothing and writhing on the carpet.

  His stomach gave a warning twinge, and he felt his neck tense up. Some fuckery was coming soon.

  ‘So here’s the thing,’ said Adams. ‘I’m gonna spell it out again, just so’s everyone is on the same page. To get to Renard, we need immunity – and I mean to all those path-ee-gens he’s sending out, and all the ones he’s ever sent out. We need a blanket cure-all, and here’s why. If we try to set up an attack on him or his factory, his men will simply wipe us out with some new virus while we’re ten miles away. You want to know how we found this out? Happened once before. I can tell you about that another time when you feel like throwing up your Cheerios, but it was, as they say, a lesson. You can trust me on that. And we in the Resistance are quick learners.’ He looked around, gauging the impact of his words on the raggedy group. Dyce wondered what it was, exactly, that had eaten his cheek. Noma? Leprosy? Good old-fashioned staph gone wild?

  Adams went on. ‘So, to get to Renard – the head honcho, the big kahuna, Baron Samedi, the man himself – we need immunity to every single thing they can throw at us. Every goddam virus imaginable. And the ones you can’t imagine too. Once we have that in the bag, the plan is to knock his factory offline. Now, I know what you’re thinking.’

  Dyce raised his hand. ‘How exactly?’

  Adams shrugged. ‘The usual way. Blow it up. But we need to cut the head off the snake, so to speak, else the whole system will start up again. This room you’re in here, this is where we’ve been trying to manufacture our own antidotes. As you can see, I tested some of them myself.’ He stuck a finger in the fabric dent of his cheek.

  ‘You-all know this story, but for the benefit of our new friends, this was part of a little miracle that worked for three whole days. A long time in politics, as the man said. Anyhoo. I stopped drinking the water, the way we always start these things: control group, don’t you know. There were some high-fives those first few days – then I just started to rot clean away. Took some months before I could walk again too. My missus didn’t like that so much, but the cause is the cause, right?’

  ‘Fuck Renard!’ said someone. Dyce couldn’t tell if it was the same person who had wanted to fuck Renard the day before.

  ‘And I was lucky too.’

  Dyce snorted, and Adams gave him the side-eye. ‘Believe it, sunshine. Lots more folks volunteered too, but they ain’t here to give you the history tour.’ He hitched his thumbs into his belt loops. ‘So this is where you-all come in. You know we been looking for Southerners, right? That was an idea that came right from one of our founders, a brave lady who did some of the early testing. It didn’t turn out well for her, else she’d be the one standing here now, talking to you fine people.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ Dyce again.

  ‘You got a lot of questions, son.’

  ‘And you got the answers, right?’

  ‘Look. A lot of us here in the North bought into the idea that the South was sending these viruses over the Wall. And why wouldn’t we? It came straight from the horse’s mouth. Horse named Renard, that is: the government, home of the free and land of the brave. But this lady, she saw it at the source. She was a nurse – used to work in one of Renard’s labs. Said she saw things there that made what Mengele did at Auschwitz look like a round of flu shots. What she told the Resistance – and there were only a few of us back in the day – was that she knew for sure that it was Renard himself who was poisoning the South.’

  ‘But why bother? Wasn’t he winning the War anyway?’

  ‘Son, your faith in the history books is touching, but let me tell you this: Renard was losing the War there, right at the end. You believe that? He didn’t, either. That was round about the time the viruses got really out of hand. I guess it was his way of decimating the South so it couldn’t rise again, but it also made sure that there would be no coup back home in the North. Divide and conquer, little buddy.’

  ‘And now? What are you saying here?’

  ‘I’m saying no one can get close to Renard, not as long as he has a hundred strains of poison on his side, and a bunch of dumb-bunny citizens afraid to ask the big questions.

  ‘But that’s not the end of my tale, friends. This lady, her plan, her idea, was to get back to basics. Find some Southerners. She figured that anyone who made it over the Wall would have to be some kind of superhuman. They’d have a kind of blanket immunity, you understand? And a handle on the truth. Otherwise they’d already be dead and buried.’

  The Southerners traded looks with one another.

  ‘You get it, don’t you? You folks right here are getting something right, and I need to know how it works. You can see why.’ He held up his palms, hectoring and supplicatory. ‘I done enough talking now. It’s your turn. Tell me about those magic mushrooms. Tell me about the boomers.’

  Dyce’s stomach cramped and he twitched guiltily. Adams caught the shudder.

  ‘Jackson. ’Fess up. You gonna tell me how you two did it?’

  Every Southern face was turning to scan the room. The myriad eyes settled on Dyce; he felt them like insects, crawling curiously over his surfaces.

  ‘Son. These people are waiting. How do we reproduce them antiviral mushrooms till they’re coming out of our ears?’

  Out of our ears? Dyce wanted to laugh. Out of our eye sockets and nostrils too! Rupturing from our lungs, clean through our ribs!

  But what the hell. What did he have to lose? The least he could do was explain why this was a shitty idea.

  He hoisted himself up and began pushing his way through the group, wincing at the pins and needles in his leg. But it was his stomach that was really going to town. He had to find a bathroom right now.

  He managed to make it inside the women’s toilets before he vomited two days of rations down into the smashed U-bend that was all that remained of the original bombsite.

  24

  When Kurt stretched out his crooked spine in the morning, he saw the ruined silos not far from the road, strewn with graffiti at their bases. He bent closer to the damp ashes: they had had a visitor in the night. There were tiny footprints in the soft gray powder where a prairie critter had nibbled at the wire.

  ‘You’re a crap guard dog, Linus,’ Kurt yawned.

  Before he let the cat out, he tied a string around its neck, just like he’d done with Mason. Linus pulled back, yanking on the makeshift lead and growling.

  Kurt shook his head. ‘Got to be clean, kitty. This is your chance to do your business.’

  The cat was trying to get the string off over its head. Kurt gave up. ‘Fine. Have it your way.’ He tied the end of the string onto the side mirror and went to get his own routine started.

  ‘In days of old,’ he called back to Linus. ‘You know that one? In days of
old, when knights were bold and paper uninvented, you wiped your ass with tufts of grass and went away contented.’

  When he got back, he saw the telltale scrapes on the wet ground. Linus was still pawing at the string, growling low, the fur on his head furrowed and reversed. Kurt kept waiting for him to lose his shit completely and strangle himself, but the cat was only menacing and sullen, like he was biding his time. Maybe he was.

  ‘Well done. Doesn’t that feel better? Now let’s hit the highway.’

  The road was empty till he got near Des Moines. When a car passed, going the other way, Kurt waved at it and smiled.

  ‘Even if no one deserves to live, you don’t need to be a dick about it, right? Manners maketh the man, Linus. What my mama always said. You could do worse than take that to heart.’

  At the limits of the city, he slowed the car and parked it in a daze, under the wiry shade of an elm with its top leaves flagging. For the first time Kurt Callahan doubted himself.

  ‘Sure puts Glenvale to shame, I can tell you, Linus. How’m I gonna find Uncle Felix in all of this mess?’

  The cat was silent, the string trailing from his collar over the seat.

  ‘Come on. Time to hustle.’ Kurt got out of the car, with Linus on his string, and they walked up the sidewalk.

  ‘Thought there’d be more folks around,’ he told the cat, looking left and right at an intersection. ‘But you know what we really need right now? Elevation. One of the few things I liked about Uncle Tye was that bird of his. Now that’s real elevation!’

  Another block along he entered the foyer of a high-rise. They made their way up the endless stairwell, littered with rubble and the dried white shit of long-gone campers, both human and animal, so old it’d lost its stink.

  Linus refused to climb after the fourth floor, and Kurt had to pick him up and hold him under his arm right the way to the top. It felt familiar.

  They looked out. The city stretched away under them and the grid of roads was clear. One or two had been blocked by brick barricades from ancient protests. Far to the south-west there was activity, and Kurt wondered if he could really be hearing voices carrying over the straight-edged walls and lifting high on thin trails of smoke. He tried to memorize it all and place his car in relation to the path of the sun. He might not know how to find Felix, but he could sure fucking learn his way around.