White Horse

by Alex Adams

  He returns near sunset with more things. Baby things. Clothes and diapers and cream to prevent tiny cheeks from chafing. Things I haven’t had time to think about because I was so focused on surviving.

  He holds up a dress, yellow, sprinkled with white flowers. “What do you think?”

  The words stick to the walls of my throat. All I can do is look away.

  He brings food. Cold meat from cans, a combination of pigs’ lips and assholes and whatever other remnants were lying around the processing plant. Cold vegetables, also from cans, with labels I can’t read. Depicted on these slips of sticky paper are families smiling so cheerfully, they can’t be real. Who smiles like that? Nobody I’ve known in this new life. I slurp down the juice after I’m done chewing the chunks. For dessert he has tiny chocolate cakes wrapped in plastic. I eat these greedily, licking the plastic clean when I’m done. I’m a shameless and wanton eater. I don’t care what he thinks of my manners. When all that’s left is the taste of chocolate in my mouth, I ask about Irini.

  “Did you find her?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “She was probably eaten by animals. Or worse.”

  “Or she escaped.”

  “Unlikely. Not with a wound such as that,” he says. “How is my baby?”

  “My baby is fine.”

  “May I?” He holds out his hand as if to touch me. Suddenly polite.

  “Touch us and I’ll cut you.” Cold. Calm. Truthful.

  He laughs like I’m kidding.

  “I thought for certain your womb was empty, like that stupid girl’s.”

  “When are we leaving?”

  “Soon,” he says.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “My baby.”

  I won’t let him take my baby. I won’t. Never. I’d die first, and that’s what he wants. A plan. I need a plan. I have to get away now before it’s too late and I’m dead and my child is his.

  Where are you, Nick? Why won’t you come and save us, you bastard? I came this far for you. Just come the rest of the way for us. Please.

  The thought is unfair but I can’t control it; Nick has no way of knowing we’re here. The thing bobs around in my head like a speech balloon in a comic. It’s not supposed to be this way—for any of us. But as people used to say in the old days, when there were enough of us to create and perpetuate slang: It is what it is. And that’s what I have to work with.

  He leaves just after dawn. Gone again to get things for a child that isn’t his. This time he cuffs me to the single leg that holds up a tabletop in this tiny room below the deck. He empties my backpack onto the carpet, picking out anything I might use as a weapon. Good-bye, nail clippers, tweezers, and an old dressmaker’s pin that’s been rusting in a side pocket for maybe ten years. He locks the cabin’s door. I know he’s worried Irini isn’t dead, despite his protests and his faux certainty. Nothing is certain anymore—not even tomorrow. I wouldn’t even put money on the sun setting this evening.

  I’m on the floor of a boat surrounded by everything I have in this world: old clothes, maps, and Nick’s letter. What can I do?

  The carpet peels away easily enough. I don’t pull up much, just enough to figure out how the table’s attached to the floor. Bolts. They’re on as tight as tight can be.

  What do I have? A big fat nothing.

  Pain cuts across my back. I change positions, lie back, breathe deep. Junior rolls with me. I stare up at the underside of the table. It’s crafted from cheap fiberboard that flakes when I scrape my fingernail over it. There’s a lot number scrawled on there. Or maybe some secret code meant for someone long dead.

  When I see it, I wonder how I didn’t see it sooner. Whether it’s pregnancy or malnutrition or exhaustion, my mind isn’t as sharp as it once was. But I do see it now, I do, and hope unfurls her tiny wings. The tabletop is held in place by four shiny silver screws that run through a T-shaped bracket. Hope goes through its rapid life cycle, dies as quickly as it was born. There’s no way the cuffs will fit over the bracket. It and the table leg are one solid piece.

  I am doomed. The Swiss will take my child.

  Why don’t you come for us, Nick?

  Now is all the time I have left. I can’t die without reading Nick’s letter.

  I dreamed of the letter last night.

  Again?

  I nod.

  The exact same letter?

  Always the same.

  Describe it for me, Zoe.

  It’s just paper. Dirty. Tattered edges.

  How does it make you feel?

  Terrified. And curious.

  It’s the jar all over again. I have no hammer so my fingers unwrap my fears.

  Baby,

  I have to go. It’s killing me to have to leave you when I’ve only just found you. It’s more than my family: it’s me. I’m sick. It feels like White Horse. I won’t put you at risk. I love you, you know. I hope you feel the same way and I hope you don’t. That would be easier. I’m going to Greece to find my family—or at least I’ll go in that direction and see where it takes me. Live on. Please.

  I love you more than anything in this world.

  Nick

  Bang. Out of nowhere a train comes and knocks my heart and soul right out of my body, leaving a crater where me used to be. There’s no way—Nick can’t be dead.

  No.

  No.

  I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

  There’s not enough heart left in me to conjure up a tear storm. I’m an empty space on the verge of collapsing in on itself like some dead star. I’m a black hole.

  Cold. Calm. A vacuum.

  I fold the things the Swiss scattered on the floor and fit them neatly into my backpack. Nesting. When that chore’s done, I sprawl out on the floor to relieve the ache in my back. The cabinets start to look interesting. I can reach them with my feet. If I slip off my boot, I can use my toes to flip the latches that keep the doors in place while sailing rocky seas, so that’s what I do. The lower cabinets are stuffed with cans of baby formula and water in plastic bottles. My gaze snags on something I’ve seen before, although not in months.

  Nick can’t be gone. I won’t let him. If I do these things, then he isn’t really gone. I can hold death at bay by doing.

  The pain in my back increases as I stretch further, reaching for that holy grail, the mystery of mysteries: a rectangular box made of metal and painted a slick black. The Swiss has carried it with him all this way. And now my curiosity is eating me alive. My toes dip under the handle. White-hot lightning shoots up my thigh. Cramp. I relax the position, wait for the pain to die, then slowly ease the box out of the cabinet until I can reach it with my hand. There’s no lock. Just a silver latch. Strange that he’d be so cavalier about something that clearly holds meaning. It springs apart, almost promiscuous in its ardent action, as though it’s been waiting for this moment and wants me to look inside. The box’s wanting doesn’t save me from the guilt. I don’t like to snoop, but I make an exception for the Swiss. He’d afford me the same courtesy, after all.

  The metal box is filled with photographs. Fading Polaroids, yellowing pictures with curling edges depicting people in fashions that might have swung back into favor again someday. The subjects differ, but they’re all blond, Nordic, lean and fit people. The Swiss’s family, I imagine, for who else could they be?

  My fingers pick through the leaves of his family tree. It’s the strangest thing: all of these photographs, and he’s not in a single frame.

  It made me better. Stronger.

  Faster and faster, I flick through the pictures, searching for clues. What did White Horse do to him? How did he change? Then I’m looking at a grainy photograph from some newspaper or another and my face falls slack like somebody sucked out all the bones. I try to fit the pieces together in some way that makes sense in some universe where everything isn’t wrong.

  George P. Pope and a cool, sleek blond woman. H
e’s grinning at the camera, pompous and proud—even in freeze-frame—while she looks like she’d rather be anywhere but there. Oh, she’s smiling, but it hurts. I know that face. I’ve seen it in the last hundred or so photographs. I’ve seen it in a lab. In an elevator. The pained expression is a repeat, too. Her brother wears it. Or maybe he’s a cousin or a young uncle, but I’m betting he’s a brother— otherwise, why carry all these memories across the world?

  I want photos. I want my memories in print. I want Nick and our child and the children we haven’t had a chance to make yet, and I want to be able to look back at pictures and laugh at the things we did. But that future is gone, snatched away by that egomaniacal prick in the photograph and that bastard who’s coiled in the grass, a snake waiting to take the only thing I have left of the man I love.

  I can’t cry. The pain is so fresh, it’s still steaming. All I can do is sit here like a soulless puppet and rip these photographs to shreds. Ruin them like the world is ruined. Steal the Swiss’s memories like he’s stealing mine.

  And suddenly, even though my face is dry, I’m sitting in a lake my own body has created. I know what it means: my baby is coming.

  Hard and fast, labor comes. Too fast, maybe. I can’t gauge. I’m choking on sweat and tears, panting, try to get air and some relief from the pain. But with every sweet, sweet breath my body tears another inch.

  Stay inside a little longer, I think.

  But I’m ready.

  It’s not safe out here.

  I want to see the world.

  Oh, baby, there’s no world left to see. Only death.

  What’s death?

  I pray you never know.

  I came for nothing. For a dead man. To deliver my child alone in a boat.

  My daughter arrives in my darkest moment. We cry in tandem.

  In the middle of my delirium, Nick comes.

  She’s perfect, he says.

  Her tiny hand curls around my finger. All her pieces are where they belong. Nothing missing. No extras.

  Not an abomination? I ask of him.

  No. She’s beautiful like her mother.

  I look like hell.

  He laughs. Women. You carried our child; you’ve never been more beautiful to me.

  Are you sure she’s perfect?

  Yes.

  He wants to take her.

  You won’t let him. I know you.

  But I’m tired. So tired. Can I sleep now?

  Not yet, baby. Soon.

  I read your letter. I love you, too, you know.

  This would all be easier if you didn’t.

  There’s no such thing as easy anymore.

  A kiss pressed on her forehead and on mine. His lips are warm. How can imaginary lips be warm?

  This is love, he says. This is all love should be.

  Ether. That’s what woo-woo people call it. Nick fades from sight, and maybe he goes into that ether or maybe my brain’s just flipped a gear, switching me back to sanity. Doesn’t matter. Nick is gone and the Swiss is back and he’s filling up the space that used to hold a locked door. Now I don’t know which is worse, because he’s looking at my baby—my baby—with a covetous expression on his hard-planed face. Thou shalt not covet. I want to kill him where he stands.

  He inches toward me. Us.

  “Give me my baby,” he croons.

  Visceral loathing. Hot, bubbling, seething. I’m a lioness primed to tear the pulse from his throat if he dares to touch what’s mine.

  “What the fuck are you?”

  “Please be calm. You’re crazy.”

  “Because you’re trying to steal my baby,” I spit.

  “My baby.”

  Now he notices that something is different. I’ve redecorated while he was busy hunting and gathering. The things he held dear to him were used as confetti and ticker tape in my rage parade. His gaze travels from piece to piece to the empty box to the newspaper clipping I purposely placed just so on the small table.

  “What did you do?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’re related to George Pope’s wife?”

  “Those … are … my … things. What gives you the right?”

  “What gives you the right to hold me hostage and steal my baby? What gave you the right to use Lisa like some sexual spittoon, to cut her open and murder her? She was just a girl. And the soldier. And the Russian. And Irini. Who died and made you God?”

  “I am God!” he screams. “I am the only God you will ever know.”

  I’m too tired for this fight. “I don’t believe in God anymore. Why should I?”

  My baby lets out a thin cry. Poor girl. Just born and already she’s in the middle of a primitive custody battle. But this one will be different. This one will be to the death.

  “Just let us go,” I say. Quiet. Calm. Alpha female protecting what’s hers.

  He crouches beside us. Holds out his hands. I recoil as much as the handcuffs will allow, but it’s not nearly enough.

  “Give me my baby.”

  “Why? I don’t understand why you even care. Why us?”

  His laugh chills me. “I want your child because it’s born of two parents with immunity to the disease. Your child will survive untouched.”

  The puzzle pieces shift and turn. “You’re looking for a cure.”

  “Don’t be stupid: there is no cure.” He bites each word, spits it in my face. “The dead are gone and they will stay that way. I engineered the disease to endure. I made it. I. Not George. I designed the changes so they would last. Nobody could guess which chromosomes would evolve and turn the host into something completely new. We are all of us abominations. We should be dead.”

  I want to beat him, pound him with my fists, but what strength I have left is all in my mind.

  “You and Pope. You did this to all of us.”

  “You don’t know anything, America. You are a stupid woman. You cleaned floors and the shit from mouse cages. I am a scientist. A doctor. I want a child. Me, who will never have my own. Me, who gave up my womanhood to the disease. I became a man against my will. George took everything from me. My work. My chance for children. He owes me this!”

  The laughter explodes from my mouth, fire and ice in the same breath. Pain slices through me but I don’t care. If this whole thing wasn’t a tragedy, I’d wager I was in a soap opera. The mustache-twirling villain is a real girl. The Blue Fairy was a trickster.

  “You’re the woman in the photographs?”

  It all makes sense now, what Lisa said about the Swiss not being like other men, his constant misogyny, the overtly masculine movements that often seemed rehearsed in front of a cheval mirror. Somehow the genetic lottery machine dug around in the barrel until it pulled out an X chromosome and gnawed off one of its legs.

  “I was before I became sick. I was George Preston Pope’s wife for fifteen years! He was a cold, cruel man, something I never fully comprehended until he made me sick against my will. We needed to test on humans, so he injected me. Not himself—me. I knew then he cared nothing for me— only business, money, his reputation as a great man. He owes me a child.”

  I laugh like this is the best joke ever told. Stand-up comedians would have killed for this kind of comedy black gold. I throw Nick’s letter in his face like it’s a brick. “Read it.”

  “Do not laugh at me. Give me my baby.”

  “Read it!” I scream, until my lungs ache from the word rush. “Read the letter.”

  He scans the page. A transformation happens. A devolution of rock to sagging flesh. A hopeless body sublimating. He sits for a time amidst the wreckage of his past and future.

  “I do not understand.”

  Who’s a stupid woman now? I want to say, but can’t. I’m still human, still a person. I still have compassion, however misguided. No matter what happens, my humanity stands. Even if I don’t live through the night. Kill him? Oh yes, I can, but I can’t mock him—her—for what he’s become.

  “Nick died. He got sick with you
r disease and he died. So you see, she could still get White Horse, could still get sick, die, or turn into some awful thing. As you keep saying: an abomination.”

  “No.” Disbelieving.

  “Yes.”

  “No. This cannot be.”

  “It is.”

  Nothing.

  “And now we both have to deal with it. You made this bed, you and your husband. Now we all have to sleep in it. Even you.”

  “Shut up,” he says. “Listen.”

  But I’ve already heard it. Something approaches. Night has come while we were busy fighting, and along with it those that dwell in the city’s secret places.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Not the screaming. No. The vociferous noises of angry humans shoo away weak things. Yell, and a creature that believes itself to be weaker— either by size, constitution, or pecking order—will scurry away lest the brunt be turned on it. Even in concrete jungles, such laws of nature persist. It’s why they haven’t come sooner. They’ve been crouched behind doors and dumpsters, evaluating our weaknesses, trying to determine which rung on the evolutionary ladder we occupy.

  The dynamic only changes when variables alter: when there are more of them than there are of us; when they believe we’re wounded or weakened; when we have something that will ensure their survival.

  No, two adults yelling has not awakened the shadow things and brought them here; it’s the crying of my newborn.

  “Silence the child.” He locks the cabin door. Peers into the darkness. A scared thing. Now I see for myself what my mind glossed over before. All those weeks, I looked without seeing. So plain to me now, the slightly feminine movements that are nigh on impossible to erase: a hip tilt; a hair tuck; the telltale sway in an unguarded moment.

  I hold my girl to me, jiggle her in a way I hope is comforting, but she’s only warming up for her debut performance. Even my breast cannot divert her from her song.

  “I said silence.”

  “You’d make a lousy mother.”

  “Look at yourself. Are you a paragon of motherhood? You are handcuffed to a table after chasing a dead man across the world like some common slut. If he had wanted you, he would have brought you with him to care for him as he died.”