White Horse

by Alex Adams

  “I’m your therapist, Zoe. Tell me.”

  “Because I’m scared.”

  “What scares you?”

  “What’s inside.”

  “What do you think is inside?”

  “Something that takes away hope. I can’t let that happen. I need to hope. I need to have hope.”

  He stands, pulls his T-shirt over his head, tosses it on the chair. When he reaches out to me, I take his hand and let him pull me close so that my back presses up against his hard planes. His fingers pinch my nipple, hard, so that I wince and moan at the same time. His breath is hot against my ear. It sets my blood to boil.

  “I need you to wake up, baby.”

  “But I want you.”

  “Baby, wake up. Now.”

  Invisible fingers drag me from my dream. With a gasp, I go from there to here. Clean, bright light pours through the colored glass, wrapping everything in a rainbow. The rain has stopped.

  “Hello, sunshine,” I say.

  Irini is at the doors, her ear pressed against the seam. The colors dance upon her shiny scars. Her forehead has that telltale crinkle. I go to her side, shucking off what’s left of sleep.

  “What?” I mouth.

  Her eyes meet mine. “Someone is out there.”

  I’m not surprised. When he would come was my only question.

  Irini watches me arm myself. Cleaver. Baker’s peel. I’m a homeless ninja hopped up on pregnancy hormones.

  “You can’t.”

  “I am.” Her lack of understanding doesn’t stop me from explaining. “This way I control it. My terms. In the open.”

  Foolish. Furious. Forced into a corner. Fucking tired of it. All those things are me. I own them as I stomp into the blazing light. For a moment I’m blind and helpless. Slowly the burn fades. My pupils do their job, get real small, while the dot on the horizon swells.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” I tell him.

  “And yet, America, I am here.”

  “I killed you. I watched you die.”

  “You watched me hold my breath until you scampered away like a coward. You are a failure in everything.”

  “Come on, asshole. You and me. Right here.”

  I must look a sight, ripe and round in the middle, bones jutting through my skin everywhere but there. Even a steady supply of chocolate hasn’t fattened this calf. My baby is taking all I can ingest, but that’s as it should be. Mothers go without so their children can have. Although I haven’t read all the right books, I still know that.

  The Swiss is as ragged as the rest of us, a scarecrow with an attitude. Not like Nick’s confident, relaxed swagger, but more like he made it up one day after inspecting himself in the mirror. Ah, yes. That’s who I want to be. There’s nothing organic about the Swiss. I see that now.

  He stares at me with an obscene fascination.

  “I can’t wait to cut you, neck to navel, America. Slice you open like a melon.”

  “Like you did to Lisa?”

  We circle each other. Perpetual motion.

  “No. You I will keep alive. At least long enough so that thing inside you can breathe on its own. Then I’ll cut it, too, piece by wretched piece.”

  “There’s something men never quite understand about women.”

  “What is that?”

  “The most dangerous place in the world is between us and the things we love.”

  “Like shoes and jewelry and shallow pleasures?”

  “Like people.” My words are shrapnel right in his face. “Stuff doesn’t matter. Only people.”

  “That thing which grows in your womb is not a person. It’s an abomination— of God, of medicine, of science.”

  His words play me like a cheap violin. The notes are there but the melody is off, the tone hollow and thin.

  “My child is fine.”

  “You don’t know. Not for certain. Don’t you lie awake and wonder, Am I going to give birth to a monster? You’ve seen them out there. We saw them together, did we not? Creatures of mutant flesh and bone, like that creature in Delphi. It was a kindness what I did to her.”

  “Who the hell are you that you can just walk in and dish out this … kindness?”

  He reaches behind. Pulls out the gun he stole from the Italian soldier.

  I fall to my knees. Hands on my head. See Irini framed in the doorway. She’s holding a large can of something. I can’t make it out. Run mental inventory searching for a match. Pineapple. I think it’s pineapple. I know what she means to do: hit him over the head until his skull mashes to gray-pink pulp. I can’t blame her: he killed her sister. But I can’t let her do it. Her reach is too short. Too much time for him to shoot. She won’t understand, but I have to protect what’s mine. And right now she’s part of what belongs to me. My world-battered family of refugees.

  “Stop.”

  She doesn’t listen. Maybe the English-to-Greek translator fails. Maybe it’s just too slow. Or maybe she doesn’t care, so much does she want him dead. She rushes. Enough time for the Swiss to turn and backhand her with the pistol. Across her scars. The taut, shiny skin splits, bleeds. She tumbles sideways, slumps to the ground clutching her broken face. Physics is no friend to the losers in battle. Momentum carries them where it will.

  He circles around us, the winning dog in this round. Waves the gun at me.

  “Get up. Walk.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The sound of two seething women is silence. Curious, because you’d think we’d be like silver kettles whistling as they reach a rolling boil. Esmeralda glues herself to my side and plods along, slowing when I slow, stopping when I stop—which isn’t often enough.

  “Keep walking,” he says.

  “We need water.”

  A pause. “Okay.”

  Greece’s most precious treasure is never mentioned in the travelogues. Springwater flows from the mountains into faucets dotted over the landscape. They jut from ornate facades of marble and stone. Irini goes first. Then Esmeralda. The Swiss indicates I should fill a bottle for him so I do. Then I drink for my baby and myself. When we’re hydrated, we continue the walk.

  The Swiss took my map back at the church. The places Irini reads from the signs are different from what they should be. I know this from the furtive glances she gives me as she reels off the names. The sun still rises in the east, sets in the west. We are still going north, but on a coastal road that clings to the sea.

  “Why are we taking this road?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I can guess why. He’s worried we’ll encounter Nick or maybe Nick and several someone elses on the way. An ambush. I’d told him so little of my plans, nothing beyond the basics, born of my need to withdraw from the world, pull my resources in to survive, focus on my plan. My intentional isolation has had an expected side effect of the pleasant kind: he is uncertain, so he’s taking a risk calculated with arbitrary data.

  “I thought the Swiss were neutral, not cowards.”

  “I am no coward, America.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “What do you wish to know?”

  “Why take us north? Why not back to Athens?”

  “I want to go home. To Switzerland.”

  “So, why are you here? Italy is closer to Switzerland.”

  “My affairs are not your concern.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve made them mine. If you’re going to kill me, at least tell me what’s going on.”

  “I have business here.”

  My raised eyebrows are wasted on him because he’s behind me. “There’s no business left anywhere.”

  “You know nothing, America.” He reaches forward, nudges Irini’s cheek with the gun. “What happened to her face?”

  “Fire. A childhood accident.”

  “It looks new.”

  “Sunburn,” I say.

  I keep Irini’s secret close and walk.

  She gives thanks later when the Swiss stops to piss on a gas station wall. I squeeze her h
and, sorry I brought her into this, yet selfishly glad I’m not alone.

  Night arrives with all her baggage and none of the melodrama of day. She brings a hostess gift: a small hotel, a plain white vanilla cake hugging the road’s curve. Behind a wrought-iron fence, the swimming pool masquerades as a swamp thing filled with rotting leaves and mold. Esmeralda waits as we traipse inside. The Swiss is at the back. Always at the back with the gun.

  The dead are inside, sprawled out on once-snowy sheets, their final resting places so far from home—wherever home is. Even the breeze can’t carry the smell of this much death out to sea.

  “Take a mattress outside,” the Swiss barks.

  We choose a queen from an empty room. The bed is neatly made and we keep it so until it’s in place where he wants it, butted up snug against the iron fence. I wait for him to demand another but he doesn’t.

  “Is this for us?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “What about you?”

  “Such comforts are for weaklings and women.”

  I almost gag on the words. “Thank you.”

  He laughs cruelly. “You’ll need rest. Soon we’ll be in Vólos.”

  What business do you have there, you bastard?

  Irini and I share handcuffs and a bed: the Swiss takes no chances. Nick doesn’t come to me that night. I’m too far gone, too wrapped up in crisp sheets with my head pressed into the softest pillow I’ve ever known. I hope he forgives me.

  “Are you ladies in trouble?” the Russian asks. He’s dressed in swimming trunks and introduces himself as “Me, I am Ivan.” For a man in a dead society, he looks well. Healthy. Nourished, but still too lean.

  The gun muzzle is hard against my spine.

  I smile and hope it doesn’t falter. “We’re fine. Thank you for asking.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To see family up past Vólos. Do you know it?”

  He scratches his head. Glances over his shoulder. “Yes, is that way.”

  “How—”

  My head explodes, eardrum stretches to its thin limits. Ivan doesn’t have enough time to register surprise as the slug punches its way through his right eye. He slumps to the ground, perennially helpful and friendly. Forever Russian.

  Hands over my ears, I yell at the shooter. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What? He was only trying to help. What’s your malfunction?”

  The Swiss steps around me, nudges Ivan with his boot.

  “Walk.”

  “Vólos,” Irini reads, although the first letter looks like a B. In the middle of the name someone has pitched a crude tent—an A without its supporting bar. There’s no hallelujah chorus to herald the city’s appearance or our arrival. It juts out above the dusty shimmer, a geometric concrete maze. Take me as I am or leave me, it says. I care not. Perhaps I’m painting the city with my own subjectivity, slopping gobs of doubt on the boxy apartment buildings with their abandoned balconies. My own fears make the city glower. The empty tavernas lining the promenade scoff as if to say, People, they think they can endure? They who are so small? The ships and boats sinking in the harbor are reruns of Piraeus. Here they sit a little lower in the water as though they’re exhausted from fighting both gravity and salt. The Argo waits on its pillar for Argonauts who will never sail again.

  It’s a strange thing to claim kinship with objects crafted from steel, but there’s a heaviness in my bones that’s mirrored in their submission to the sea. Although, in essence, metals are born of the earth and our bodies become earth when we’re finished with them, so perhaps there is some common ancestor. Some people are more resilient than others, some metals as pliable as flesh.

  So lost am I in my thoughts that I hear the Swiss’s words, but they don’t register.

  “What?”

  He prods me with the gun. “I said we are stopping here.”

  For supplies, I assume, or maybe for respite. “Right here?”

  “No. There.”

  My gaze travels the length of his gun all the way to the wasteland of marine vessels. Amidst the sinking ships and loose slips, some boats prevail. Small wooden fishing boats, mostly, painted cheerful colors like you’d see on a postcard. Wish you were here. Glad you’re not.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He moves so he’s standing right in front of us, lifts the weapon, shoots Irini. Blood flows. There’s so much. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that she’s a gushing fountain of brilliant scarlet. She falls into my arms and I sink to the ground with her, try to find the hole. There it is, buried an inch below her rib cage. It’s a tiny thing, I think as I press my hand to the wound. So tiny I can’t even shove my finger inside to plug the leak like the little Dutch boy did the dike.

  Sounds of things scuttling away from where we are. Still human enough to be scared of the gun. Or animal enough to shy from loud noises.

  My jaw is spring-loaded with tension. It’s all I can do not to leap up and tear his throat open with my teeth like some crazed animal. But that’s what he’s done to me: pushed me to the desperate edge as though he wants to measure how much I can lose before my sanity snaps into jagged pieces.

  “What more do you want?” It hurts to speak. My teeth ache from the tension. “What else?”

  “Your baby.”

  Hate fills me until I’m radiating pure loathing. It’s a wonder it doesn’t take corporeal form and slay him.

  “So many people caught White Horse. Why couldn’t you have been one of them?”

  He looks at me. “I did.”

  Surprise hits me like an automobile. “What did it do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. It changes everyone who doesn’t die from it. What did it do?”

  “It made me stronger. Better. I can hold my breath longer. Heal faster.”

  If I had it in me, I’d laugh at the delicious irony. “Do you hate your own kind? Is that it? The abomination hates his own.”

  No more answers. He just curls those steel-cabled fingers around my forearm and pulls until Irini slips away.

  “Go,” she says.

  “Come on,” he says to me.

  “Why? Why shoot her?”

  “Fewer mouths to feed.”

  “I hate you.”

  “This is not school. Life is not a popularity contest. Power wins.”

  He drags me. My boots scrape across the concrete. I sag, make myself deadweight, flail. Anything to inconvenience him. He wants me alive. He needs me alive. That means there’s still some luck left to push.

  “I’m going to kill you. First chance I get,” I say.

  “I believe you. But you will not get a chance.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He slaps me. Hot, angry tears fill my eyes. I don’t want them to, but my body has other plans.

  “Your friend will be dead soon. Look.” He grabs my chin, makes me look at her. She’s sitting in a crimson pool. Steam rises from the blood in serpentine curls. I have a crazy thought that if I could press that hot concrete to her wound, it would seal her shut.

  “Don’t you dare die,” I tell her.

  The Swiss laughs. “You cannot save anyone. Not England. Not this creature. Not yourself.”

  “Don’t die,” I say over and over, all the way up the gangplank onto an abandoned yacht. In a game of rock, paper, scissors, fiberglass beats metal. Man-made outliving earth-made once again.

  One half of the handcuffs encircles my wrist, the other snaps around the rail. My captor unloads Esmeralda’s cargo and stows it belowdecks.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going home with my child. To build a new Switzerland.”

  But not me. He’ll cast me overboard the moment I outlive my purpose. I wonder if he means to let me live long enough to be a wet nurse to my own baby?

  Irini isn’t visible from here, so I twist around until I can see her, ignoring the metal biting into my skin. I’m with you, I want to tell her. I don’t want you to die
alone. I’m so sorry.

  My face is hot and wet; I can’t tell where the sweat ends and the tears begin.

  The Swiss leaves, taking Esmeralda with him. She tags along dutifully.

  “Don’t you hurt her.” My lips are dry and cracked and it hurts to speak. The skin splits and bleeds the more animated I become. He says nothing, just keeps on leaving. I know he’ll be back, because I have what he wants.

  It’s just me and Irini now, or maybe it’s me and Irini’s ghost. Is she still alive? I can’t tell. The sun sears my retinas until I’m seeing in dot matrix. I bow my head, try to shield my face from the relentless rays. My sunburn has sunburn. If I’m not careful, I’ll wind up with an infection. I almost laugh, because on a scale of one to catastrophe, bacteria rates somewhere in the negatives.

  I don’t realize I’ve been asleep until the Swiss’s yelling jerks me awake. He’s pacing the promenade, waving his gun, ranting in his own tongue. Using my hand as a shield, I start looking for the source of his anger.

  Irini. She’s gone. All that’s left of her is a browning stain. The sun and the thirsty concrete have sucked away the moisture. But there’s no evidence of the woman who bled so they could drink. My body shivers as I contemplate what might have happened. Did something drag her away? If so, how close did I come to being consumed in my sleep? Or did she escape? No, not possible: her injury was fatal. There’s no way. There’s just no way. But a little voice reminds me that the rules of biology are different now. Things exist now that didn’t before.

  The Swiss slides the gangplank into place. The boat shakes under his footfalls.

  “Where is she?” His veins are like engorged worms under his pink skin.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “How could you not? Were you not right here?” He jabs the air with his finger.

  “I … was … asleep.”

  “Stupid bitch.”

  The boat shakes and heaves again. He returns dragging a bulging tarp. This he stashes down below with the other supplies.

  “I’m going to find her,” he says. “If she is not dead already, I am going to kill her properly.”

  TWENTY-THREE