North

by Frank Owen

  Kurt led Felix on, deeper into the factory’s innards.

  He was rewarded. There was Adams, standing over a crew of three people, each of them pressing explosives up against the biggest pipes running straight up through the ceiling like a cathedral organ. When he saw Kurt, he jerked his gun up and away.

  The boy made his way forward, Felix lurking behind, trying to hold down a fit of coughing. Kurt was as calm as if he were approaching cows or sheep.

  ‘Hellfire, son! What are you doing? I nearly sent you to kingdom come!’ Adams lowered his weapon. ‘Felix’s young friend. Kenny, right? I almost put one between your eyes! Ah, and the old man himself! Felix. Good to see you.’ He had to raise his voice against the clanging and shouting of the battle in the building.

  Kurt was holding up his hands in surrender. ‘Friendly fire. Isn’t that what they call it? It’s Kurt, by the way.’ Felix bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

  ‘Well, I’m glad to see you anyhow. Can you watch over these three? They just need a couple more minutes to set the bomb. If anyone else comes through there,’ Adams pointed his gun at a couple of gray metal doors, ‘you make sure it’s the last thing they do.’

  ‘Sir, I am happy to help,’ replied Kurt. He unholstered his pistol.

  ‘I got to get some elevation,’ Adams explained. ‘Rule of war, right? We need to see what we’re dealing with on the way out. If there’s a way out.’ He grinned. ‘Kidding.’

  He turned his attention to the grimy explosives crew, each twisting wires and setting dials. ‘If I’m not back in five minutes, you go ahead and let her rip.’

  One of them nodded, intent on her work.

  ‘Good,’ said Adams. He limped to the exit, passing Felix. ‘That kid of yours is the real deal. I hope you’re proud of him.’

  The old man wanted to protest, but with his breath came the coughing.

  With Adams gone, Kurt put the pistol in his belt and looked around, playing guard. He felt in his pocket for the multi-tool. It was where it always was.

  He took it out idly and examined the hinges, where blood had congealed. That would make it hard to open: that was bad. He cleaned it off with his fingernails and wiped the tool down.

  It had to go. All of it. The building and the bomb – and the bombers too. It would just be the two of them: Callahans together, as it was always meant to be. They could remake the world the way it should have been in the first place.

  Kurt moved, fast and quiet, his lips drawn back over his teeth. He set about butchering the explosives crew: one fast, hard blow to the neck each time.

  There. That was for his asshole family.

  There. That was for Bethie, who never loved him.

  And there. That was for the stupid fucking cat.

  He was done and bloody to the elbows before Felix could stop him.

  56

  Vida and Ruth sat at the bench, trying not to seem as though they were looking. Dyce would be somewhere not far along the bank, directly behind Ruth.

  After a minute of scanning the leaves, Ruth said suddenly, ‘We shouldn’t look, in case someone’s watching us.’ She turned her head to stare out over the water.

  ‘I keep expecting jets,’ said Vida. ‘A big roar and then napalm or something raining down. The end of the world ought to be like that. You ought to know it’s happening.’ If she was looking for reassurance, Ruth was the wrong place for it. Another trio of geese passed over and Vida wished for their wings and their certitude.

  ‘If we were here for anything else, this would be pretty idyllic,’ Ruth said mildly. It was costing her to look casual, Vida thought. Ruth was holding tightly to the edge of the table. The bottle was hidden somewhere Vida hadn’t seen. Where was it?

  ‘How are you feeling, Vida?’

  ‘I’m okay, Mama. If it changes, I’ll let you know. Don’t worry so much.’ She paused. ‘Actually, there’s something I want to know.’ Ruth tensed. ‘I never asked you how you got to the Capitol Building. You would’ve told me already if you’d felt inclined, right?’

  ‘We were busy.’

  ‘A little distracted,’ Vida agreed. The women smiled the same smile at each other.

  ‘Well, now. In the river,’ Ruth began, ‘I tried real hard to swim back to you but the water took me. It wasn’t so deep, was it? But it was strong as the devil. I woke up staring at the ceiling of an ambulance, a nurse over me, holding my IV. Took me right back. For a while I thought she was me and I was out of my body, floating somewhere near the roof of the ambulance. I didn’t know how close I was to drowning for real.’ Her mouth turned down and a tear slid out. Vida held her hand tight across the table.

  ‘Well, it turned out that she was me, in a way. The way I used to be, I mean. I used to work with her mother back in the day. Angela. How’s that for coincidence? I knew that face. When we worked it out, she told her mother, and she came to the hospital right away. Middle of the night! All those years later and she hadn’t forgotten me, Vida. All those people I left behind in the North too.’ Ruth sighed.

  ‘She wheeled me right out the front door, sat me in her Mazda, and drove me straight to the Capitol Building. They told me that if you were alive, you’d get there too. So I waited, and you came. I knew you would. You are my whole life, given back to me. The only thing. You’ll know how that feels real soon.’

  ‘God, Mama.’ Vida was crying too: the last few minutes they had before everything changed. They looked out to the water to let the air cool their faces.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ said Ruth finally. ‘Carrying a baby. No one can tell you how it really is. You’re an incubator for this life that comes from somewhere else. A carrier for the little human seed.’

  ‘I’m a regular old recipe book, Mama.’

  ‘But you are. You really are.’

  After that there was time for less intense but more loving words, and Vida felt the air between them thicken with the bond of tenderness again, the way it had been when she was little.

  Forty minutes later, around what must have been eight o’clock, a maroon Jaguar rolled along the road that skirted Maple Lake. The invisible driver parked it beside Buddy’s pickup.

  ‘E-Type,’ said Ruth as the door opened. ‘Typical. It’s him.’

  Even from a hundred yards away, Renard was not the man Vida had imagined. He was smaller, for starters, barely taller than the roof of the car when he stood straight to set the jazzy panama hat properly on his head. He was darker than she had expected too. In her imaginings he’d always been white: cold and dazzling, powered by some diseased internal light, or the monster of her nightmares.

  But there he was instead, like a hundred people Vida had known in her old life, an ordinary man in a summer-weight suit, old and stiff enough to move carefully. Vida saw Ruth’s knuckles whiten, but her mother’s face stayed the same.

  He looked right at them on the bench, then waved and smiled as if they were paparazzi. They didn’t wave back. He moved to the trunk of his car, popped it open and searched inside it for something.

  ‘What’s he getting?’ Vida whispered. ‘A machine gun?’

  Christ. Renard was pulling out a wicker basket.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she murmured. ‘Mama. Look at the checkered cloth!’

  He settled it on his arm like an upmarket waiter, and made his way over the low wall to the lake shore, strolling along the water’s edge toward them. His white suit flashed in the morning sun, and Ruth thought of all the baptisms she had seen back home, the billowing vestments of the newly adopted being swallowed by the gray-green water. He was holding the basket away from his body so that it didn’t bump against his thigh at each step, and Vida felt a dangerous bubble of laughter rising from her throat. All along she’d thought he was the wicked wolf, but here he was in Grandma’s nightgown.

  Stop it, she told herself sternly. You just stop it. You know how rotten he is on the inside, like the nested electrics in a condemned building that sparked and
burnt anyone who touched them. She made herself think of all those walls with ‘Fuck Renard’ scribbled on their crumbling concrete or scratched into their cladding, easily more powerful than ‘God bless us, every one’. Each one had been sincere, and each one had been born of some terrible act Renard had designed. It didn’t matter what he looked like, did it? He might as well be the snake-headed man or the giant with the fists like mallets or the hooded man with the devil’s eyes. It was what was on the inside that counted.

  The pendulum weight of the picnic basket connected with his leg and he hopped away from the pain, the basket swinging back – but now Vida wasn’t smiling, not even to herself. And then he was there. He stopped and cocked his neat head to the side.

  ‘Ruthie!’ he cooed, fond and familiar.

  Vida felt her mother draw herself up with something beyond outrage and revulsion. She had a pretty good idea of what it was. Self-loathing. Ruth wouldn’t even say his name now except to curse it. She felt a burst of pride for her mother. It wasn’t the mess you made that was important. Wasn’t that what Ruth had always told her? It was how you cleaned it up afterward. Reparation.

  Renard had stopped fussing with the basket; now he was dusting the crease back into his white trousers. He held out a hand to Ruth, supplicatory, theatrical. ‘You are more beautiful than the day you left me.’

  Ruth stared him coldly in the eye.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ he confided. He winked at Vida, as if they were co-conspirators.

  Then he offered his hand to her. Surprised into manners, Vida took it, only to feel its bony undead weight, an exhibit in an abandoned museum.

  ‘Baron Samedi.’

  She drew back in shock.

  ‘A little joke! Didier Renard, of course. My slave name, but I kept it.’ He looked her over with flat, metallic eyes. ‘And you are Vida. Vida. Vida! You can’t understand how happy I am to finally meet you! And so healthy! You’re blooming! Is it indelicate to comment on your condition? I am just so happy, and so very, very proud.’

  Vida found herself at a loss. She wanted to wipe her hand on her shirt, thinking of that story of the woman whose arm had been paralyzed when she touched a convicted murderer through the bars of his cell. She crossed her arms low over her stomach.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’ve hoped for you for so long! You do know that? I’ve looked and looked for you. And now you’re here and my only prayer has been answered – that I’d meet my daughter before I die.’ Renard set his hand over his heart.

  He’s mocking us, Vida thought. He’s making a show of being polite because he knows it’s making Mama furious. Renard beamed, and she thought of Adams, with his sticking plaster and his steamy rhetoric that other people breathed right in, the rhetoric that sent them to their deaths. Why couldn’t people just say what they meant? Why did they want to do evil but cloak it with pretense? It made no sense.

  He waved an expansive arm. ‘I came alone. I hope you noticed that. A show of goodwill. If you are going to make an attempt on my life’ – he smiled, as if this was beyond the bounds of all good sense – ‘then I must take my chances, no?’ They stared at him. He shrugged. ‘So now let us break bread together to celebrate our reunion. We are a family, after all.’

  Vida shuddered at the words, echoes of the way Ruth sometimes spoke, signs of a long-ago co-mingling of this man and her mother. It wasn’t just sex: thoughts and feelings and conversations, a long-enough time together so that he’d gleaned some of her language. Or had it been the other way around? Vida couldn’t tell, but it chilled her. Had Ruth been echoing his phrases all this time? And did she know she was doing it? Or was Renard just part of her, seeded deep and invisible into her flesh as mushroom spores – just as he was for Vida?

  And beyond Vida too. For her baby, and everyone who came after them, for ever more.

  Renard picked the basket up and set it on the table, chattering in a kind of relief. ‘I hope it’s not too soon for a family picnic? I’ve brought coffee and wine and pork sausages.’ He smiled at them, sure of himself. ‘They say you should never peer into the factory where the sausages are made – backstage, as it were; otherwise you would never eat them again.’

  He began to unpack the contents of the basket onto the table: willow-pattern plates; heavy silver cutlery with someone else’s family crest on it; glasses that Ruth was pretty sure were crystal. He even set out a little vase, and into it put a single stem with an unopened rosebud topping it.

  ‘I dethorned it myself,’ he said softly. He put the basket on the ground and sat down beside Ruth on the bench. ‘May I?’ he asked, after the fact. ‘And now, to business.

  ‘As I think I mentioned, you’re welcome to do your best to kill me. I don’t have many more natural years left in me. Better here with the geese and the sunrise than home in my lonely bed. But I’m going to make one request.’

  ‘You can ask anything you like,’ Vida burst out, the enchantment worn off. ‘But we’ll decide. There’s been enough of that. Enough of you getting your own way. Do you have any idea how many people you’ve hurt? How many families you’ve shattered? Homes burnt? Lives lost? Have you ever even been down South?’

  ‘You are a resilient girl,’ said Renard. ‘You remind me of someone I used to know.’

  Ruth was quiet. Vida wondered if it was the silence of consent, a dog returning belly-first to its master. She felt her own stomach flop with despair and dread. Ruth would be no help at all. Why had she ever thought that her mother would stand up to her tormentor? She was probably still half in love with him! The nausea rippled up from Vida’s gut. Look at him. How normal he was, how eager to please. She wouldn’t be able to kill him, frail and small in his clean white suit and that silly panama hat. Why had she told Dyce to hold off on the shot? She wanted Renard dead now, before he could say anything else to charm her boneless mother back into the circle of his arms, the maiden in the grip of the vampire.

  Renard paused, pouring a cup of coffee for himself and one for Ruth. ‘None for you, young lady,’ he said playfully. ‘Not with that cargo on-board. Do you know, the night your mother ran away, I knew she was pregnant. The happiest and the saddest day of my life! A child would have been everything. Everything. I looked through the things she left, searching for clues, but your mother could be cruel. She’d left everything except her ridiculous comics and that recipe book. You remember that old thing?’ He was smiling at Ruth, who nodded slowly.

  ‘Every single other item of value she left behind. She knew I’d have eyes watching when her gold watch turned up, or that bracelet with the diamonds. But she took one other thing that I was very pleased about. She was always clever, weren’t you, Ruthie? To take that syringe from the lab? Oh, it was before the chemical warfare the South brought down on their own heads, but the nurses had seen up close what we were doing in the labs. Insurance, eh, Ruth? If it ever seemed as though we might be losing the War, why, then the viruses would save everyone in the North. Everyone who had chosen the right side. And if God is with us, who can stand against us? Isn’t that what they say?’ He broke off and hummed a few holy bars. Vida made out ‘Emmanuel’ and ‘Come To Us’ but she knew he was mocking them again. Renard, like Adams, had no use for the Almighty; men like that created the earth from scratch in their backyards, blowing their own sick breath into men made of mud.

  ‘Ah, Ruthie. You knew we’d use the viruses, and you knew when. Back then there was only one vial to take, and so you took it. You know, I’m proud of you for that master stroke. But your mother didn’t use it on herself, Vida. She waited for your arrival, like Mary waited for Little Baby Jesus. Such sacrifice. It was your birthright, the only gift your father ever gave you.’

  I don’t believe this, Vida thought. He’s comparing himself to God. She wanted to see if Ruth understood, but her mother kept her head down.

  ‘I know all of this,’ Vida said slowly. As she spoke, she saw her mother’s wrists twisting gently under the table while Renard was still busy
dishing up food they couldn’t eat. Ruth was wringing her hands.

  No. Not wringing at all.

  She was unscrewing the lid of the bottle! Her show of quiet submission was a decoy. If Vida could manage to keep the old guy talking, they’d poison him like Rasputin. She tried not to let the relief show. Ask him something, she told herself. Anything. He wants to talk. So let him.

  ‘Why are you really here?’

  Renard poured cream into his coffee, then stirred it. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘We have time.’

  He cocked one eyebrow. ‘Do we? Yes, I think we do. Well. Let me think back now. I want to get it absolutely right.

  ‘You know I had a wife? Queenie. A lovely woman. Softhearted. Too soft-hearted. When she found out about the viruses, she tried to persuade me against using them to win the War. Imagine! Every cause must have its martyrs, I suppose. Along with a fellow from the South, well, I made a martyr out of her. And it turned out well, didn’t it? Two birds, as the saying goes. One stone. It was a great time. A time without interference. I could send anything I wanted over that border, and I could make sure that the South would never rise again. And also, Vida,’ Renard turned his great unblinking eyes on her, ‘I could find you.’

  ‘How?’ asked Vida, keeping her attention from drifting to her mother’s hands.

  ‘Thanks to your mother’s light fingers, thanks to that vial of immunity, you’d be the only girl left alive. The whole of the South would be a wasteland, and just you standing. Can you picture it? The jewel in the center of it all.’ He smiled fondly.

  Vida stood, and then had to sit down again quickly when her bandage scraped against the picnic table. She winced and bent down to repair it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ruth asked. But how could she be? Renard had started the War because he was a madman, but he’d kept going, kept grinding the South into the dirt just so that he could find her! All those lives lost, all those families turned to bones, just so that there’d be one last survivor, sticking out of the scrubland like a sore thumb. God! Was it really true?