We travel more slowly now, because I’m not the only one starving to death. The forest keeps us sheltered from the worst of the blizzards. But I don’t know where we’re going, or if there’s even a destination planned. I hope like hell that we’re not just walking for the sake of walking. But then again a destination is equally scary.
My ankle is slowly starting to heal. It’s taking the longest and causing me the most pain, and there was a point where I thought it would just get worse until it killed me, but finally it’s started to shrink and lose its violent colors.
I’ve tried to escape three times and each time I’ve been caught within minutes. There are too many of them, and no way through. Not when I’m unarmed and slowly starving to death. Medusa has a knife in her belt but she hasn’t raised it to me, not once. Their fists and feet and teeth do enough damage without it.
After nearly a month with the Furies life has become about my stories. I try to keep them up, day and night, but it’s getting so hard. I hardly have the energy to summon my voice, let alone cajole my imagination into working. But when I don’t tell them I feel myself slip toward depression, and that is a gaping dark more frightening than anything they can do to me. Depression, for me, means my whole body shutting down, my entire self becoming too heavy to move, which results in sleep. And right now I can’t afford even a single second of feeling like that. I can’t sleep: it would kill me.
It seems funny sometimes that I’m staving off the illness that has plagued me since I was a child and I’m doing it here, for the first time, during the worst days of my life, purely out of necessity. Maybe everyone who suffers depression ought to be captured by monsters and taught the value of optimism in the most brutal way possible. Asylums could offer it as a health package: Feeling blue? Holiday with zombies – it works a treat!
We’ve left the snow-covered ground and now walk through green and brown forest. Sometimes we find roads to follow, and a few times we’ve found abandoned buildings with nothing much inside them. Old ranger huts, I guess. I wondered for ages why the Furies didn’t take shelter in the pub and gas station we found – they knew the blizzard was coming at that point. But it became clear to me when we found a block of public toilets (yee gods, the smell) and they didn’t take shelter from a rain storm. It’s because they couldn’t all fit within. Back at the pub, there wouldn’t have been room for everyone, so they stayed together and ran for the forest.
Which is actually mind-boggling if you think about it, and I do. The more time I spend in their midst, watching them, the more like a family they seem. Or at least a pack of humanoid animals who care for each other.
But that’s way too difficult to deal with, so I try to keep thinking of them as soulless cannibals. I hold the appalling clarity of Hal’s death in the forefront of my mind. I remember everyone who died in the tunnels as we fled, too old or too young or too feeble to escape. I relive Georgie’s parents getting caught and devoured and Luke lifting the tiny girl with his broken hand and carrying her the entire way across the country.
Luke.
Oh, I think of Luke.
He’s the worst thing about all of this. He is the only reason it sometimes slips into being unbearable. I try so hard not to let him into my heart because with him there the rest is so much uglier, but sometimes, like in this moment tonight, he slips in and takes very firm purchase.
They’ll assume I’m dead, and I hate to think what that will do to him.
My words are love letters to him. When we stop I write them in the snow or the dirt. I tell him even the things I didn’t say aloud when we were together. It seems strange that those things exist, even after a marriage, but they do. I’ve never told him of my childhood. My life in the foster care system. There were abuses I suffered that I would never have burdened him with, that I barely even burdened myself with remembering, but I say them out loud now and astonishingly it’s quite cathartic. I feel ashamed even to be bringing such things into consciousness, but a part of me craves being able to share them with someone or something. Even just to say them aloud once and let them scatter in the wind. The reality I draw closer to each day is that this terrible journey will probably be my last chance.
I haven’t given up, but if I do die out here I want the universe to know I tried to share what I couldn’t share, I tried to offer as much truth as I was capable of. I tried to feel as much, in the end, even if those feelings hurt.
*
Medusa and her gang take me to wash. This is another mystery of the way they live: why are the same six always designated to me? How do they know that? Was there an order given when I was taken? That these five men and Medusa herself would watch over me, no matter what? Or do they feel it, somehow? Also, why do they know I need to wash when they don’t bother with it themselves? Unless they’re only taking me to drink, and letting me do as I wish?
The river is wide where we reach it, wide and fast moving. As we descend to its edge I imagine flinging myself in and being swept away. From this vantage I see my body plunge in and sink beneath the surface, bobbing back up and tumbling downstream. A piece of driftwood, as easily flung about. Even as I imagine this I can see that it’s too cold and too fast; I’d die before I got anywhere near the other bank.
I sink to my haunches and dash the freezing water onto my face and neck. I don’t wash anywhere else because I’d lose too much body heat. But cleaning my face and taking a long drink is the thing I look forward to most in my life now. These moments are my favorite, even more so than when I eat what measly food I find. I feel alive, truly alive.
The others have all taken a drink and now watch me enjoying the water. Medusa is crouched beside me, her awful eyes so shrewd. Something strikes me, some impulse, and I turn to her and offer a handful of water. When she doesn’t move I edge closer. Holding her gaze, I trickle the water over her crown. It slides down her dirty face and she recoils.
I remain still, posing no threat. After her initial concern she stops fidgeting and holds as still as I do. Curiosity drives my hand to reach out and touch her cheek. She flinches but doesn’t move away, so I carefully, slowly try to wash her face clean.
She responds by lifting her hand to my cheek and rubbing it the same way I’m rubbing hers. When I move my hand to rinse her dirty hair, she moves hers to mine. Her brown eyes, which have always seemed so utterly devoid of life, are suddenly filled with something I don’t know how to name, something deeply confronting and aching and too much. My hand drops and I turn away. I don’t know why I did that or what I thought it would prove, but all I feel now is dirty.
One of the men grunts a loud warning signal and I react by swiveling to look up the hill. What I should have done was run. No, not even that would have helped.
Something moves in the corner of my eye. A fluid thing. A dream thing. It’s under my foot – I’ve stepped on it. There’s a sharp pain in my little finger and I look down to see the smooth coils of a snake slithering away into the brush. Just like the ones I dreamed of.
A gasp leaves my mouth. There are definite puncture wounds on my finger, which is already swelling. Without thinking I turn, reach for the knife at Medusa’s belt and chop it straight through my finger.
There is a moment of dead silence. Nothing makes a sound, not the river or the wind or the trees or my own breathing. The world has frozen and within this picture I see my pinkie lying in the mud, unattached to my hand.
A low moan erupts from me, a long broken thing.
Pain.
I cry in confusion. I can’t work out what my finger is doing on the ground. There’s so much blood, it saps from my whole body and gushes out of the missing piece.
The Furies – the men – lunge for the finger and I see one of them eat it. A scream erupts from me and I fall onto the bank. The sky above is so gray, it’s always so gray and so huge and it’s spinning and falling and I’m so sick that I retch. Someone is holding my hand and it hurts.
“Don’t,” I sob. “Please.”
But the finger and the mouths and they’re eating it, they’re eating a piece of me over and over and over.
I’ll never survive this, even if I survive it I’ll never survive it.
*
Something happens now. Outside my control, impossible for me to deny, a place from which I will never return. The world as I know it tilts.
I always thought my memory was perfect, or near to it. But it wasn’t: it may have been photographic but it was also selective. It was cleverly, carefully, preservingly selective.
*
No longer.
Chapter 17
February 12th, 2068
Josephine
Luke and I build fences together. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way, and I’m not altogether sure he did either. But the animals need more space, so the farmland must be divided differently, which means new fences have to go up. I’ve been through physical training with a Blood, and this is still the most arduous physical task I’ve ever endured.
Well. No.
That’s not true. But all the things that happened in the north, those are things outside this world. They’re not counted in the normal measurements of a life.
Huge wooden posts go up at specific intervals. Holes are dug deep with enormous drills and the posts are lowered in, then bashed deeper and deeper until they can stand on their own. We layer wire between the posts, which requires pliers and immense arm strength to ensure the tension is taut.
Luke’s faults have never been to do with physical tasks – he takes to this like a fish to water. I find myself watching him sometimes. I’m no longer a person who wants an intimate, lasting connection – or is capable of it – but I’m very much human, very much a woman. Nothing changes that part of our nature. So I watch him and I want him just as I’ve always done. But as much as I would like to have sex with him, I could never put him through that kind of emotional confusion. For him it would ask more than I have to offer.
So we fence. In silence under brilliant skies we hammer poles into the earth and I feel half alive for the first time in so long. It’s where I belong – I’ve known it for months now. Working the land, using my body.
This afternoon is a hot one. We have water bottles on the back of the truck carrying our posts. I head over and take a long drink. As I do, I watch Luke carry the enormous plank of wood and lower it into the ground. His shoulders and back and arms tense with the effort.
I take him a water bottle. He drinks thirstily, wiping sweat and dirt from his brow.
“You’re a lot stronger than you were,” he tells me.
I return his bottle to the truck and head up to the next entry point.
“That sounded like a layered statement, but it wasn’t meant to be.” He smiles. The sun on his tanned face is a warm kiss; he lifts his eyes to it, closes them and shakes his head a little. “It’s just nice to see, is all.”
He’s weaker than I remember him – his time in the lab has affected his muscles and stamina – but I don’t tell him that. He’s already working his way back to normal, and capable of more than most, evidenced by the hulking posts he lumbers around.
“The sun.” He sighs ardently.
My instinct is to keep working, but I’m torn by this unexpected desire for him so I stay where I am, paused at the next point a few meters away.
“The lab was even worse than the tunnels,” he admits. “I think perpetual dark is much better than perpetual light. Fake light, anyway.”
He goes to the truck and lifts another wooden slab over his shoulders. He carries it to me and heaves it into the ground with a grunt. I steady it, using the pliers to attach the wire and bind it in place. Then Luke hammers it lower and lower into the ground.
“Through the crust we go,” he murmurs. “Here it might be about ten miles deep.”
I frown and look at his face.
Without returning the look he keeps talking. “Now through the mantle. One thousand, eight hundred miles deep we go. Down and down, through the silicate rocky shell. Next into the liquid layer of the outer core. It’s getting really hot here, and thick. This layer is iron and nickel, it’s hard to move through, like a heavy fog but more dense. It takes us about fifteen thousand miles to pass through. And at last we’ve made it to the inner core. It’s really, really hot here, trust me. As hot as the sun.”
He looks at me now. His eyes in the glare are colorless.
I can feel myself slipping through the earth’s layers. “How do you know?”
“I used to dig.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Anything. Everything.”
And even though it’s cruel to be pulling him on this lead, I find myself asking, “What did you find?”
“A whole lot of dirt,” Luke says. “Dry soil and moist soil, depending where I dug. Sometimes pipes. Sometimes I found tree roots and water and then I found buried dog toys and once even a wrapped up dead rabbit skeleton. My favorite was when I found a beautiful tin box full of treasures.”
“What was in it?”
“Toy soldiers and drawings of robots and a Hardy Boys novel. A letter to the other side of the world. And a wish bone.” He stops and sounds so wistful as he remembers it. “Dave wanted to snap it and make a wish ’cause he thought it would be a thousand times more powerful than a normal one, but I knew we couldn’t snap it. I put it back in the box and buried it again and I thought about it some nights and I made wishes on it anyway. It might still be there now.”
I don’t ask him what his wishes were – that would be taking this even beyond the intimacy we’ve already impeached upon.
“So, in answer to your question, I found nothing,” Luke says, and then he winks. “And everything.” With a smile, he heads back for the next pole and we return to work.
But I can’t help sinking through the earth, through bones and treasures, to all the places I never thought to imagine, too lost in the sky and on the surface levels for it to occur to me.
*
March 1st, 2068
Josephine
I’m on a kitchen shift when Luke enters. He doesn’t greet me personally, but he says a big hello to everyone and then starts pulling things from the pantry.
“Woah, easy there,” Pace chides him. “We barely have enough for these loaves.”
“Then let them eat cake!” he announces. “Seriously though, I’m gonna make a cake.”
“And how do you imagine you’ll do that?”
“Watch the master, my pretty,” he tells her and explodes into work.
I’m a terrible cook so I’m on vegetable peeling duty, but I gotta say I don’t mind because it’s pretty great to have vegetables to peel. Luke sings while he works. I don’t look at him, but the others sing along or giggle. It’s Henrietta’s seventeenth birthday and it occurs to me that maybe her strong and persistent feelings for Luke are starting to be reciprocated.
I try to work out how that makes me feel. I really imagine it, the two of them getting together, first physically and then falling in love. It doesn’t feel good, but then again I don’t really have the energy to acknowledge it feeling bad, either. However jealous it makes me, it pales in comparison to the repulsion I feel when I imagine doing anything about it. That kind of intimacy – even the intimacy of conflict – would be a nightmare.
“We’ve got another birthday girl coming up soon,” Will announces.
It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about me. Jesus, birthdays – who cares.
“And a wedding anniversary!”
Oh no.
My eyes go unwillingly to Luke. He has flour on his face and shrugs flamboyantly. “One year doesn’t count when you’ve been separated for so much of it. We’ll do it later.”
There are a few vocal disagreements to this, but he brings them around.
I finish up on my vegetables and head out, needing to get the hell away from there.
“Hey.” He catches up to me in the tunnel. “I know we’re not doing
an anniversary. I just said that to get them off our backs.”
I nod.
All I can think about is his body in this small, dark tunnel. He takes up so much space, he always has. And his smell is doing something I’m unprepared for.
“Maybe we should tell them properly.”
I blink, not following.
“That we’ve split up,” he clarifies.
“Oh. Yeah, if you want.”
“At least then we won’t get hassled about stuff like this.”
I nod again.
Without warning he reaches up to pluck something from my hair. “Potato skin?” He laughs, then brushes my hair behind my ear. It’s so casual, like it always used to be, and yet so, so not. “Maybe you should get someone to take over my job,” he murmurs. His hand is so hot on my skin. “Or you’ll have dreadlocks to contend with.”
Does he think I care about my hair? “I should shave it off.”
“Yeah, probably.” He smiles flippantly and then bounds back to the kitchen.
I watch him the whole way.
*
March 3rd, 2068
Josephine
“So, happy birthday.”
This lukewarm salutation is proffered by my even more emotionally inept father.
“Thanks.”
I don’t have a room anymore, since I stopped going back to the one I shared with Luke, so mostly I sleep above ground. This also helps to make sure nobody can find me. Alas, Shadow has managed it.
I was sitting quietly on a hill overlooking the farm, minding my own business and not bothering anyone when he appeared in the dark. It must be about 1 a.m., meaning I’ve been twenty-three years old for an hour. The moon is very bright, but it always feels bright out here.
We don’t say anything. I used to be pretty chatty, but even then I found myself lapsing into silences with Shadow. Now we’re at terrible risk of never speaking to each other again.
Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition) Page 23