Terence wipes the knife off on his leg, leaving a line of black munie blood on his pants. “Ten seconds more and we would have been dead. I owe you.”
“You already owe me,” I tell him.
He smiles. Then he turns toward the door. “And Graham.”
Graham checks his gun. “What?”
“Thanks.”
He looks like he's about to say something, to argue, to fight the way his instinct tells him to, but he stops himself. Instead he says nothing and nods.
The sunlight coming through the door behind him changes. A munie appears, a female running too fast to do anything about. She must have heard Graham's gun voices. I hear Rachel shout to warn him but it's too late- the munie jumps for him, her face wild, her teeth out, and Graham only has time to realize what is about to happen. His face becomes soft, calm. I hear him breathe out one, final time before her teeth reach his neck.
Terence screams as Graham falls to the floor.
**
Crouched over his body, the female munie croaks at us with stained mouth. With a better look at her I can see her badly damaged face. The nose is broken, the eyes circled with bruises, and suddenly I realize a terrible thing. A thing I don't want to believe, but I have to because it's the truth, as hard as the truth can be, as much as it hurts the stomach.
I know this munie.
The broken nose, the bruised eyes, I gave them to her when I threw the machine at her. The last time I saw that face was a few days ago, just before I jumped from the tall building, fell through the open glass and landed in the plants and birds inside.
If I had given her the death, Graham would still be here.
Seeing the three of us, Terence and Rachel with knives, me with claws, she knows she can't attack us all at once so she croaks her way to the door, never taking her eyes from us, never looking away. She slips out of the building with us chasing her into the sunlight, Terence screaming all the way.
What's left of the real people stand in the center of the street, eleven or twelve of them holding each other up. Boyd. Kate. Neil is with Tommy and Vanessa, checking their eyes. Doc wraps his shirt around Werner's leg while Werner swears he's fine and Cruz tells him to let Doc do it. They turn to see the female running down the stairs in front of us and prepare for an attack by huddling together, back to back. They have no more guns, only their cut and tired hands.
The munie sees a fight she can't win. She starts to run away, down the street, but then she stops. Child appears from the middle of the group, some blood on her but otherwise safe, and sniffs at the bright air.
“Mother?” Child's face is open, her eyes wide. I'm about to tell her not to call me that when I see she isn't looking at me. Her eyes are down the street, on the female stopped and staring back at her.
I understand what she's really looking at.
Terence pushes past me, his face serious and sad and angry and so many other things as he walks toward the female with his knife. I grab him by the arm and tell him to stop.
“Stay out of this,” he warns.
“You can't give her the death.”
“The hell I can't. You saw what she did.” He points to the building with the knife.
“She's Child's mother.”
Terence looks at Child, seeing the look on her face. Then he looks at the female, and he knows my words are the truth.
“Come.” The female croaks for Child to join her, waving her over with dirty claws. Child stays where she is as if her feet are part of the street. She looks from me to her mother to me again. I've never seen her so confused. So lost.
Terence swallows, the face behind his mask wet. “I...I can't let her go. She has to die for what she did.”
“I'll do it. For Child, for Graham. You're not a hunter, a giver of the death like me. Let me do it.”
Terence looks at the knife in his hand. In his eyes are pictures- of Graham falling, of the female, of using the knife, of revenge, of anger, of death, of all the dark things that make the world, and as I watch him I see him push those things away, let them go from his eyes like a beast from a trap to fill up the knife.
He holds the knife out for me to take. I take it.
A few steps toward the female she starts to croak, moving low to the ground with her teeth out. Terence joins the group and tells them Graham has found the death. A few of them say the God's name and pull him closer. Child moves away from them.
“Child,” I say, “is this your real mother?”
She nods.
“I only wanted to help you. You can go with her if you want, she can keep you safe. Safer than me.” I give her a chance to say something, but she doesn't. “You have to choose, Child. Choose what's good for you. Choose what you want.”
“Wa-a-a-a-ant,” the female echoes.
As she looks from me to the female I can see on her face how much it hurts her. “Go with her,” I say. “I won't be angry with you.”
The city is quiet in a way I haven't heard before. Maybe the gun voices gave the fear to the beasts that nest in it, pushing the legged ones into holes and the winged ones into the sky, but it feels like the city itself is waiting to hear her answer, to hear Child's small voice, to know what will happen to me and to her and to the mother who reaches for her with wanting hands.
Even the real people don't make a sound.
“Child choose,” she finally says, and my breath has gone quiet.
In this moment, as I watch Child's lips open to let out those words, I'm filled with the strangest feeling. In so many ways I'm the wrong choice. I was the one who put Child in danger by attacking her with the axe and sending her down the mountain with only silvery tape to hold herself together. I made her a target. I came back to give the death to the Largest and then I took her away and put her in one danger after the other- hungry munies, cave beasts, gator beasts, real people, guns, moats, buildings, fire, and so much bastard water she nearly found the death from it. Her real mother has only tried to search for her, track her down and bring her back, and for that I threw a machine at her and dropped her child from a window. As much as I know, she's done only right for Child, and I've done only wrong.
But still. Still I want the little one to choose me.
Child's bare foot comes up from the street, shaking slightly in the sunlight. When it comes back down again it's not in the same place she took it from- it's closer to me. Doing this makes me learn something about my face. That even with all that has happened, all that I've changed and all the pain I've taken and the death I've seen, it can still smile.
The female doesn't. Her eyebrows wrinkle in, and her mouth opens wide to let out a roar. Child jumps from the fear and runs into the city. The female runs after her with anger in her eyes. As I chase after them I tell the real people to get back to the base and wait for us.
“We can help,” Boyd calls out.
No, I tell him.
She's mine.
**
The two of them are fast and it makes it hard to keep up. Buildings around us change from apartments to longer, wider ones and the streets become more open, more broken from the green things pushing through. As I fall behind breathing heavy air, Child disappears into the trees that have taken back this part of the city, a part which already had trees in the real times and that gave them a head start. The female disappears in after her. I try my best to push the panic away and run even faster.
Less than a minute and I'm into the wood myself, surprised by how much sound comes to me. A family of winged beasts has made nest here, not the soft kind with soft bodies that chirp and sing, these are the ones that crawl with shiny wings and too many eyes, the buzzing and screaming and chewing kind. The noise is so loud I can't hear Child or the female running in front of me anymore and so I'm not sure which way to run. It's not until I pick up a faint scent and follow it that I find their trail. I follow it out the other side of the trees, pull the sticky homes of eight-legged beasts from my face and squint into the sun.
Across a distance of fallen street I spot a great building, one I know well but haven't seen in a long time. To the right, the movement of the female slipping between cars, looking for Child.
A sound behind me: the crack of dry wood under foot.
I'm being hunted.
I turn quickly to face the hunter, stop the attack and give it back. I find the wide eyes of Child staring up at me.
“Child hide,” she says. I grab her tight and squeeze her. By the hardness of her muscles she didn't expect it. Not sure of what to say, I let her go.
“We have to get you from here before she realizes what you've done.”
She points. “Late.” The female is looking back our way with blood on her mind. Past her, more Munies hunt between the buildings but they have their eyes aimed somewhere else. I can't fight the female in open ground or they'll notice us, and we can't go the way we came and expect her not to track us.
She has to be dealt with. But not here.
**
Up the stairs we enter the great building, pushing until the rust breaks and the door swings open into the big, tall room. The smell of nests and mess meets us inside, the smell of beasts and death and dust. Child hisses at the curved face-teeth of the long-nosed beast standing over us until I calm her and tell her it isn't real, not anymore, that she should expect that from this place- plenty of strange things that have found the death and made to look like they'll attack.
“They called this a museum,” I tell her, looking at the bench facing the long-nosed beast as we go by it. I don't want to think about the last time I sat on it.
Through the halls we run past rooms full of fake real people from other places, past things behind glass from a world that's gone- pictures and weapons and clothes, shiny rocks and strange machines. We hear a sound from far behind and knows it's the female pushing open the door to join us, so we enter a room of skeletons, and we make a plan.
The female crawls through the door sniffing at our trail with her broken nose. She stops when she sees the skeleton in the middle of the room, the great lizard beast as big as a bus with Child standing inside the empty place of its chest, trapped like a beast in a hunter's cage.
“Help,” Child says.
The female turns her head on its side to listen to the room. She doesn't trust what she sees.
“Help Child.”
A low croak in the female's throat- she smells me in the air. Before she can figure out where I am I let go of the winged skeleton that hangs from the ceiling and drop down on her. Her body folds to the floor under my weight. I bring Terence's knife down on her, but before I can sink it in she throws me off her back and my head impacts the glass box, the tall one I climbed to reach the winged skeleton.
Lights explode behind my eyes.
**
They open back up to a swirling picture- the female reaching into the lizard skeleton. She can't squeeze her body through so she swipes at Child and yells for her to come with, but Child pushes against the far side and does everything to avoid her claws and stay away from her.
My eyes close again.
**
Open.
The lizard beast is empty, no Child, no female. Try to sit up but the room is like bastard water crashing and pulling me in different directions. It takes a few tries to fight the pull but I manage to sit up. Some seconds have to pass before I'm able to get to my knees, then my feet.
The smaller lizard skeletons charge me and back away, charge and back away but I ignore them and find the scent of munies in the dust, the foot marks that lead out the other side of the room. Child left in a hurry with the female behind her. I have to find them before the female catches her because if she does, and she's as angry as she looked, Child might not leave this place.
Another room, the glass walls hold fake real people, frozen like pictures. They have long hair and strange heads and they hit each other with rocks, hunt beasts with sticks, make fake fire inside fake caverns. Their clothes are the kinds of rags munies wrap around themselves. After what it's been through, the suit looks the same.
The next room has fish behind the glass. All kinds- big, small, silver, shiny, long teeth. I jump over something red with eight arms and two, black eyes broken up across the floor that fell from its place on the ceiling some time ago. Up ahead, in the room after this one, I hear running and panting. I keep moving.
This room is filled with fish, too, these much bigger, the room taller with long stairs on each side going up to higher places with more glass and more fish. Between these two places hangs the biggest fish of all, its great, toothless mouth stuck open as if it wants to swim down and swallow me up.
Child is halfway up the stairs on the left, the female behind her near the bottom. I have a picture in my head, a plan that might work, so instead of following them up the left stairs I take the ones on the right as fast I can, three at-a-time until I reach the top. Over the great fish I see them on the other side, Child running, the female drooling with wild eyes in her skull, more a hunt now than a want back, so I shout to Child, tell her what to do, where to go. I have the fear that she might not hear me but then she turns suddenly to her right, grabs the railing that looks down on the room below, pulls herself over and jumps.
She clears the first space, avoids the fall to the floor and lands on the great fish with perfect aim. She wastes no time being proud and instead takes two light steps and jumps again, coming my way with arms and legs stretched.
The female already has her hands on the railing on the other side, so I grab the railing on this side and pull myself up. Child almost falls short of making it but she manages to grab on and pull herself over and impact the wall behind me with a hard sound and a small grunt and a thin crack of the glass that holds the fish in.
The female and I lock eyes, both of us crouched on our railings, just before we jump.
As we move through the air at each other, I have a picture in my eyes of the two of us from far away, as if I'm standing back by the door I came through. In the picture the museum is like new again, with real people walking around looking at the fish and talking to each other. Children, mothers, fathers, at the museum together, learning about the world which hasn't ended yet.
In with this crowd is my mother, with me as a child by her side, both of us looking up at the great fish. My mother wears the smile she always wore at the museum. It made her so happy to pass her days here, the way my father passed his at the building with the red couch. I see that my mother's eyes are shiny, the smiling mouth opening.
“Some day,” she says, “I hope this place feels for you the way it does for me.”
“How do you feel?”
She pulls me closer, her hand around my forehead. “Safe.”
The female and I impact.
We fight on the back of the great fish, clawing at each other in a way that means more than hunters and supplies. My hits are to give the death, yes, but also to make her feel the way I did before Child came to me, when I was alone in the trailer with the whole sky pressing down. I want her to know what it was like. I want every scratch in her skin to burn like the fire of days wrapped in the fear and the panic, listening through the metal walls for beasts with blood on their noses and hunger in their bellies. I want her face to be a picture of everything that happened to my mother and father, to me and the world we lived in before it all fell away to the change.
I want her to know pain the way I know it.
Over the shouting and the fumbling and the tearing of the suit, there's a sound like groaning pushing its way into my ears. Even though it can't be the female, and it's too high above us to be the voice of Child, I can't stop the thought that somehow it's important, that we need to stop fighting and pay attention to it. The female doesn't stop, though, either because she doesn't hear it or she's too interested in bringing out my blood to care.
Then: a loud crack. The fish rocks beneath us, the angry body swinging back and forth trying to throw us off. The female digs her claws into
its hard skin and I grab for one of the lines holding it to the ceiling, but when I do this I feel the groan move through the line and into my hand, telling me just how long we have to escape before it's too late.
No time at all.
The line snaps from the ceiling and goes loose in my hand, no longer holding the great fish. The other lines snap, one after the other, and the last picture I see before we fall from our place in the air is the face of the female beneath me, full of the cuts I gave it.
Full of the fear.
**
With the lines cut and swaying beside us we fall through the air, like three winged beasts returning to the earth. There's no sound now- no groaning, no croaking, no snapping, no screaming or ripping or running or breathing, there's only us. Only us and the silence.
Impact gives the death to the silence with the loudest sound I've ever heard. The great fish folds under the female's back and its skin breaks apart in lightning lines the way rock does, showing the great fish to be as fake as the real people that stare out the glass. My body folds with it, back collapsed, arms loose, brought down into the female her face close-up and squinting, and then our bones slam together and I bounce off her with a flash of pain. As I float back into the air I see her eyes and mouth pop open and her chest come up. The skin of it opens and gives birth to metal, the fake skeleton of the great fish pushed through and born into blood. Then I lose the picture of her. She falls away, down into the belly, and I tumble off the side to the hard, cold floor of the museum.
By the time I can move again, coughing dust into the dust, I feel a hand on my back that makes me jump and strike out. But it's Child, checking that I'm okay. She helps me to my feet to see what's left of the great fish.
The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Page 22