North

by Frank Owen

  She nodded, lips compressed.

  ‘Shall I go on? Well, then. I have always had allies in the South. They formed what you might call a task force. I didn’t say that I was looking for my daughter – never let the enemy know your soft spot! – but I told them to keep an eye out for anyone special. Anyone immune. And would you believe it? I actually had some promising reports from my man Tye Callahan, just before the storm hit.

  ‘Oh, Vida, it was a mixed blessing! I knew that a storm that big would unearth every dormant virus I’d sent over the years. Imagine my distress! I wasn’t sure that your single dose would hold out against our history of illness. The system had never been designed for that – one at a time, yes, maybe two, but not hundreds.

  ‘So when that storm came and went, I thought I’d lost my chance. I’d lost you. I’ll be honest with you, Vida. I nearly gave you up for dead.’ Renard shook his head, and Vida expected him to produce a spotted handkerchief from one of those white pockets and honk discreetly into it.

  ‘But fortune was on our side! I got the call, like a message from heaven. Come and sit back down, Vida. Come and sit with your old Papa Lazarus.’

  Vida had stood again as if to stretch her leg. Now she coughed, then fell forward onto her hands and knees and pretended to retch. Renard sprang up, hobbling and concerned. Do it now, Vida told Ruth in her head. Do it now while he’s helping me. Poison this devil! Give him a taste of his own vicious medicine!

  Renard took hold of her arm with his bloodless hands, his grip a vice. He’ll never let me go, she thought as she wiped her mouth. Never, ever.

  He helped her to sit back down and regarded her with those silvery eyes. She cleared her throat. ‘I just want to know why.’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why any of it?’

  He frowned. ‘There is no why. Why does anyone do anything? Why did people build the Hanging Gardens or the Colossus of Rhodes or the Empire State Building? And why did other people try to tear them down? I did it because I could.’

  ‘But all those thousands – millions – of people are gone.’

  ‘And even I cannot bring them back. Have something to eat,’ he said, and began buttering a slice of bread for her. ‘Your baby needs more than it’s getting. Come, come. The bread’s good.’ He put it on a plate, then forked two pork sausages from the bowl and set them on top. Vida felt the nausea, real this time, and reached for her mother’s cold coffee. She took a sip to rinse her mouth and spat it out onto the grass, along with a coil of bile.

  ‘There’s no shame in it,’ said Renard. ‘Get it all out.’

  She sipped from the cup again, hoping that Renard would do the same. He did, then peered into his cup.

  ‘What’s this?’ He fished a fragment from the liquid and wiped it on the table.

  ‘A maple leaf,’ said Vida.

  The first bullet arrived before the sound of its shot. It hit Ruth side-on, entering her left breast and punching a hole all the way through her. Vida shrieked and the geese honked their alarm too late and skittered up into the air over the lake. What was Dyce doing?

  Ruth slumped forward and Vida scrambled to her, trying to duck whatever was coming next. ‘Mama. Mama. Mama. Please be okay. Please.’ The plastic bottle rolled away from them into the water, where it bobbed and then filled.

  The second shot hit Renard as he jumped back, slamming into his left shoulder and staying there. He fell to the sound of his own high screaming.

  It took Vida a second to realize that it wasn’t Dyce who’d fired. The shots were coming from across the lake. Dyce was nearer to them, behind Ruth’s bleeding back.

  The realization hit her with almost as much force as a bullet. This was the reason Adams had chosen the open water of Maple Lake as the meeting place: it made a clear line of sight for a man with a rifle and a scope. Not a shrub or a leaf or a blade of fucking grass in the way – a clear line to make sure Renard was dead.

  And his family too. Every single one of them.

  Renard wasn’t dead yet, though he had quit screaming. He was stumbling, holding his bloody shoulder, Ruth’s poison in his veins. But he was upright, determined as one of the machines in his factory. He was a few paces away already by the time Vida collected her thoughts and ran him down into the shallows.

  Another shot whizzed by, missing them both. Then, holding as tight to Renard as a little girl to her daddy’s neck, Vida took a deep breath and swam down as far as she could under the water.

  57

  ‘Kurt! No!’ Felix yelled. ‘What are you doing?’

  The boy turned to face him, the new blood pinned to him like roses, and a small spray in his hair.

  ‘I’m doing what we spoke about, Uncle Felix. I’m ending it all.’

  Felix made a lunge for the boy, but he hopped back out of his reach.

  ‘It’ll all be okay, just stay out of my way,’ Kurt said. ‘This will help.’ He punched Felix in the face hard enough to set him on his backside. Then he made for the door Adams had disappeared through.

  Kurt climbed up and up, his multi-tool back in his pocket and his gun lodged in one fist. The metal staircase groaned under his weight as if it was adjusting to the shock that had loosened it from the walls of the building.

  It held fast. And he was ready, wasn’t he? For guards to come thundering down the stairs from above. But perhaps there weren’t as many of them as Adams had figured. Why would the factory need more than the bare minimum of controllers, there in among the machines and the piping? Still, it paid to be cautious, and so Kurt held his gun ahead of him, pointing up the stairs for the first sign of trouble.

  At each landing he passed another gray door with a tiny window in the center, portholes into the inner workings of the decimated factory. The place was mostly labs, he saw now, and Renard had gone for clean design: everything was covered in plastic or painted white to show the dirt. The knobbly red lights throbbed like pimples on every wall as he climbed, but no one came to stop him. The signs attached to each flat surface went unread, and there was some pleasure in not obeying the commands to CLEAN HANDS TWICE and REMEMBER YOUR MASK. There were other less hysterical but more ominous warnings too, with their death’s-head graphics: ENTER AT OWN RISK and KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES!

  ‘I like skulls too,’ Kurt murmured. The ear-splitting alarms he had anticipated were malfunctioning or had never been installed in the first place.

  Where the staircase stopped was a final door labeled CONTROL ROOM. Renard had no sense of humor, did he?

  Kurt took hold of the handle and pulled. It wasn’t locked, but it had jammed against the bent frame and he had to yank it a couple of times before it opened.

  ‘There goes the elephant of surprise,’ he said, pointing his gun into the room. The reinforced windows had been blown out and a fresh breeze circulated inside, its own weather system. The sinking ship had been abandoned.

  Kurt crunched over the glass to a high-backed chair that faced a panel of dials and gauges and tiny clocks. He sat and stared at the buttons and levers. They were divided down the middle. As far as he could make out, the left-hand side was dedicated to the release of viruses into the air. The right controlled the antivirals in the water.

  ‘Light and dark,’ said Kurt. Even a kid could do it. ‘Easy peasy. Now let’s see. If I was Renard, what would piss me off?’

  It was obvious. ‘First step,’ Kurt told himself, and pulled every lever on the right side down to zero, ‘is to stop the miracle water supply.’

  The lights on that side of the meridian flickered out. Kurt waited. He had expected something more dramatic. Out there, far below, behind the walls of the houses and apartments, people would begin to die. A hundred different ways to go, triggered by the terrible things that already lay dormant in their bodies, had lain there sleeping ever since they were born – before birth, even, written into their genetic code when man swung down from the trees.

  But he wouldn’t be there to see it, would he? Kurt turned his atte
ntion to the other side.

  ‘Tricky.’

  He began cranking the dials up as far as they would go, throwing needles into the red zone wherever he could manage it. He felt the building hum underneath him, a rhythmic pulse, but he couldn’t tell if it had only just started, or if he simply hadn’t noticed it before. Was this it? Armageddon? Were the viruses spilling out into the air right now?

  He turned to look out the window. Then he stood and went to the empty frames. There was that weird smell again, the smell he’d caught when the building had tried to defend itself: some viral substrate on the air.

  It was much stronger. Kurt coughed. If he was Renard, he would have booby-trapped the shit out of this place.

  Adams appeared in the doorway. So that was what the rhythm had been! The sound of an angry man thumping up the metal staircase.

  ‘Kenny?’ he said, bustling closer. His face was slack with disbelief, the plaster on his cheek dragging. ‘That you, boy? What’s going on?’

  ‘Howdy. And it’s still Kurt.’

  ‘What are you doing in here? We’ve got two minutes, you know that? The building’s coming down in two minutes!’ He raced to the window and squinted out. ‘They’re here. Christ. They’re finally here.’

  Renard’s forces were mobilized at last. They both marveled at the arrangement in the Chicago streets, a tide of tiny vehicles like army ants.

  ‘Let’s move!’ Adams barked. ‘That way.’ He pointed east to a patch of open ground. ‘We’ll make it to the treeline.’

  ‘No one’s doing any running,’ said Kurt.

  Adams gaped. ‘Are you nuts? They’re here. You know what that means?’

  Kurt raised the gun and Adams held out his hands, palms spread.

  ‘Are you retarded? Did you fuck with the machines? Whose side are you on?’

  ‘Sir, I am done with sides.’

  Adams shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re on, son, but it’s fucking with your head. I’m going to go on over to the window, now, because I hear something bad is happening out there.’

  Kurt gave him credit: Adams was as good as his word.

  ‘What the holy fuck!’

  Kurt nodded. That was about the size of it. He had pumped every single virus in storage, old and new, out into the atmosphere, and Renard’s soldiers had no protective gear. They were still too far away for Adams to see the blood and the vomit and the shit that covered the street, but he could tell that the army had stopped. The living were scurrying like ants under a magnifying glass – then they each curled up, twitching. Some of them lay still already; the rest would follow soonish.

  ‘You did this? You’re crazy.’ Adams’s voice broke. He sounded as if he was going to cry, and for a moment Kurt pitied him.

  ‘I did it for the pronghorns.’

  ‘You’ve gone absolutely insane! This wasn’t the plan!’

  ‘Who cares?’ Kurt said. ‘I’m glad I did. One day maybe someone will write FUCK KURT on a wall. But I hope not. I hope that no one remembers me. And I really hope no one remembers Renard. Let everything he wanted die with him. He’ll hate that, won’t he? Being forgotten. Whoever arrives next, when the air is clear again – I hope they do better than we did.’

  ‘You fucking moron! There were good people out there. You think you can just kill everyone and start again?’

  ‘Listen carefully now, because I am getting a little tired of the yapping.’ Kurt beckoned. ‘Come in close. That’s right. Now hear me: There are not enough good people. No one did a fucking thing to stop Renard at any step of the way. And it was a long road, old man. You know it. Your Resistance just fucked it up for everybody else because you waited too long. If you’re really looking for someone to blame, blame yourself. You did this.’

  Adams stepped even closer and gripped Kurt’s free arm, ignoring the gun.

  ‘But we could still stop this, right? We could pump the . . . the anti-viral shit right into the water, same as he did. These folk here are done, but maybe the people out on the west coast . . . we could save some.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Kurt said. ‘It’s possible. And that’s why I got to shoot you.’

  Adams smiled, and it hurt him. ‘You got another think coming, my friend. You ever actually fire that gun we gave you?’

  Kurt narrowed his eyes, and Adams went on. ‘I’m pretty sure you were supposed to go into battle with a dud weapon and be shot early on in the action. We never trusted you. You or your Uncle Fuckwad. Turns out we were right on the money.’

  Kurt pulled the trigger and it clicked, but there was no satisfying report.

  Adams raised his own arm. There was a gun in his hand now.

  ‘This one works,’ he said.

  But the boy was too quick for him. Trained in the Callahan wasteland of the South, he was more animal than human as he leapt and brought Adams down. He drew back the multi-tool and managed to puncture Adams in the chest three times before the man twisted away from him.

  Kurt went for the windpipe next, but Adams had lived a long time. He turned his head to the side and Kurt grabbed at his face, his fingers sliding in through the plaster, deep into the man’s mouth.

  Adams gurgled and bit down. The bones in Kurt’s fingers crunched between the rotting molars. Kurt howled and brought the multi-tool down one last time, straight into Adams’s skull. The preacher shook in his death throes as if he was trying to buck the boy, and then he lay still. The blood seeped thick and slow from the tool protruding from his forehead.

  Kurt pulled his hand back out of Adams’s mouth. His ring finger had stayed behind, but he was never going to need it. The pinky and middle fingers hung limp and bloody; he wiped them absently on his blouse.

  58

  Dyce had found a hiding place just along the lake shore, where he’d crashed in through the foliage. He lay down in the mild maple leaves and edged forward until he had a distinct view of Ruth and Vida sitting on the bench. They were craning their necks to see where he’d set up camp, and he hoped they stopped that pretty soon. What they didn’t know was that their voices carried across the still water.

  Dyce tried to line them up in the cross-hairs. The angle was too low: the slope of the bank had him pointing at the water weed. He thought about Ester and her drowning, weeks back now but always with him, the bleeding evil she took with her. He shook his head to clear it. The leaves he lay on were damper and colder than he’d guessed, and the slow seep of dew rose to meet his clammy skin. It didn’t matter. This was it. Today was the day.

  He wriggled, searching for a likely stick or stone, and found a black rock, rounded on one side and flat on the other. He balanced it in front of him and tried the gun again. Perfect. While he had time to kill, he ran the scope over Vida. He watched her fingers moving on the table as she talked; the breaths that made her breasts push against her shirt. He focused them between the cross-hairs and felt his dick harden beneath him against the mulch.

  ‘Focus, jerkwad,’ he whispered. ‘That’s no lady; that’s my wife-to-be.’ He was hysterical, it was true. For some reason he kept thinking of a silly little ditty he’d heard some Northerners singing in the way-back – Northerners, or Southern traitors, or maybe even Garrett, because it was the sort of thing his big blond brother was given to saying before he found true love.

  Here’s to the girl with the bright red SHOES!

  She smokes your cigarettes and drinks your BOOZE.

  She’s got no cherry but that’s no SIN,

  ’Cause she’s still got the BOX that the cherry came IN!

  Let it run, Dyce told himself. Get it out of your head so you can fucking focus on what you’re supposed to be doing here.

  It worked, up to a point: he was spared more earworms. A car was coming, something expensive if he was guessing right, because the engine purred. He wanted to look, but he didn’t dare move. It was Renard, he was sure. It had to be. He waited.

  Christ! Was that him? That gimpy little guy with a picnic basket? Really? Dyce l
ined up the panama hat, just in case. Even if he missed, he’d have another shot in less than two seconds. The motion had become second nature after all that practice loading and unloading. The first shot, if it missed, would just be a marker, that was all. The second, well, it was up to him to bury it deep in Renard’s sick skull. And he could do it. Garrett’s small voice in Dyce was surprised, but it was also pleased. He heard it less now than he used to, but it wasn’t going away.

  From the moment Renard sat down, Dyce wanted to shoot him. Every second that passed, it felt as though he might have missed his only opportunity, that Renard’s invisible men would come up from behind him and kill him where he lay, a moth on a pin. His back crawled with anticipation. But he held off on the shot, watching the man’s red mouth moving, his chuckles and terms of endearment, a slave master gloating over a purchase.

  The wave of revulsion rose in Dyce’s chest. He really wanted to kill Renard, he realized: not just for Ruth and Vida and all the slaughtered innocents. It was a clean, slicing, energizing hatred that would only be relieved by the erasure of this man from the earth.

  Then Ruth slumped suddenly forward and Dyce heard the shot a moment later. His rifle jerked up in surprise, battering his cheekbone, but he hauled it back down as another shot hit Renard in the chest of his white linen suit. Dyce used his scope to retrace the trajectory. On the opposite shore a blue-gray puff of smoke was still rising from the undergrowth, up toward the low branches of the maples.

  He forced himself to breathe through his nose and homed in on the spot. There! A man crouched on one knee, the rifle now aimed at Vida. Dyce strained to make out his face in the shifting dappled light. The man adjusted his position and Dyce saw the cream-colored bandage around his chin, like a cowboy with toothache. It was the man who’d brought the patrolman to the Capitol Building and gotten knocked out for his troubles – silent, invisible, everywhere and nowhere: the Santee henchman who’d sold his soul. Otis.