by Noah Mann
“Here, let me,” Elaine said, reaching for the brownie bar, only to have it, too, snatched away by the child. “I’ll just open it for you. Promise. You can have it right back.”
For a moment the child considered the offer. The assurance. Belief, trust, both must have been alien concepts to one so young. To one who’d known so much horror, so much pain, so much deprivation in their young life.
But, in this instance, she chose to believe, to trust, and let Elaine take the brownie bar and unwrap it for her. When its chocolaty contents was revealed, the little girl let out a breath, a quiet gasp, as if she couldn’t believe what she was actually seeing. She leaned a bit forward, nose twitching as she sampled the scent of the treat.
“Go ahead,” Elaine said. “It tastes wonderful.”
The girl reached out and took the brownie bar, free of its wrapper now. She brought it to her lips and bit a small chunk off of one corner, chewing it slowly, the look of wonder, the look of joy upon her face a sight to behold. Another bite followed, then another, and another, the girl gorging herself on the sweet taste. When she’d finished it she grabbed the open MRE package from Elaine and dropped to her knees, dumping the contents and dropping the finger bone.
“I’ll help you with these, too,” Elaine told the child, and began opening the remaining packages.
Beef stew. Corn. The powdered drink that Elaine mixed in water the girl retrieved from bottles in the kitchen. I followed the child and returned to the dining area with a large gallon jug of water, passing it to Neil. He took a long drink, then I did, the container finally making its way to Elaine. She took only a small sip, already sharing the orange-flavored beverage with the little girl.
“Elaine...”
She looked up to me.
“Anything she knows might help us,” I said.
Elaine understood. She looked to the child, devouring the meal she’d been given.
“What’s your name?” Elaine asked.
The little girl looked to her as she chewed and answered with a mouth full of stew.
“I don’t have a name.”
Elaine considered the child’s answer. We all did. If there was a reason for the response it wasn’t clear to me, nor did it appear to be for my friends.
“My name’s Elaine. You must have a name like that.”
But the little girl only shook her head and continued to eat. Elaine thought for a moment, then modified her approach.
“Did you ever have a name?”
The little girl stared at Elaine, then nodded.
“What name did you use to have?” Elaine asked her.
“Emma.”
“Emma,” Elaine repeated, smiling. “It starts with an E just like my name.”
The little girl who had once been Emma kept eating, spooning corn into her mouth from the open package.
“But I can’t be her anymore,” Emma said. “Daddy said we can’t be who we were. We can’t have names. We have to be nobody.”
Elaine didn’t react to what the child had shared. She looked to Neil and me. Wondering. Disturbed.
“Can I call you Emma right now?” I asked. “Just for a little bit while we talk?”
Emma thought for a few seconds, then nodded.
“Emma, were their other people here besides you and your daddy?” I asked.
“For a while,” Emma answered.
“Do you know what happened to them?” I asked.
Elaine grimaced slightly. I could be probing into an area with realities the little girl might have repressed, or that she might have been shielded from to some degree. Bringing those to the surface entailed chancing an element of cruelty. But we needed information. Intelligence. Answers.
“The funny men made them go,” Emma said.
“Who were the funny men?” I pressed gently.
Emma ate the last of the corn. Elaine unwrapped a piece of hard candy from the MRE and the little girl slipped it into her mouth.
“They were funny,” Emma said.
“Funny how?” Elaine joined the questioning.
“They talked funny.”
Talked funny...
I looked to Neil. He and I were thinking the same thing.
“Did the funny men put up the flag down by the stores?” Neil asked.
Emma nodded, confirming what the pieces of this particular puzzle were pointing to.
“The French,” Neil said.
“You said the funny men made the people go,” Elaine recounted. “How did they make them go?”
Emma raised both her hands into the air, as if surrendering.
“The funny men had a lot of guns and they made the people walk away like this.”
The bones...
Were the countless skeletal remains we’d trudged across all that was left of the people who’d once inhabited this town? That seemed a logical supposition.
The ‘why’ of it all was a different question altogether.
“When they made the people leave,” I began, “did you hear anything after that?”
Emma nodded, the gesture coming in slow-motion, as if born of a dark, disturbing recollection.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“Eric...”
Elaine knew where I was going with this. It might be unnecessary, I knew. But I wanted to know for certain. I needed to know. The depth and breadth of depravity, of viciousness, mattered. Someday, somewhere, we might come across more men who spoke funny. Men who would indiscriminately obliterate my refuge from the air. Men who would murder a town of innocence. Men who would strafe a highway packed with human beings fleeing Denver after the Red Signal. If we did come upon these men again, I wanted there to be no doubt in my mind, no hesitation, when the choice was presented to any of us whether to show the mercy, or to mete out the justice that was so rightly deserved.
“I heard shooting,” Emma told us. “That’s when daddy said we had to hide better.”
He’d protected her. Sacrificed pieces of his own body to sustain her. And now the man who most certainly was her father was gone.
“Where were you hiding?” Elaine asked.
“We were in a room under a building. Then daddy made us go to the hole in the hill.”
Elaine thought on the words for an instant, some understanding coming.
“You mean a cave?”
Emma shrugged. The specifics of description might mean nothing to her. The cave, maybe a mine, had simply been a place of some safety.
“When did you come back into town?” Elaine asked.
“When daddy said all the funny men were gone.”
Emma looked away from Elaine, to the doorway, the yard and street beyond visible, tricycle in the middle of the road, body sprawled on darkened earth.
“Is daddy dead?”
Elaine looked up to me, and to Neil, the realities of this situation one we had never considered. One that never should have had to be considered. There were many things truly terrible in the world as it was now. This was that in spades.
“Yes,” I said. “He is.”
Emma was quiet for a few seconds, and then she began to sing again.
“There they go. Here they go. Go go go.”
Without warning, as she finished the simple nonsense verse, she bolted, sprinting down the hallway, disappearing into a room. We ran after her, myself in the lead, Elaine and Neil right behind as we dashed into the room.
But she wasn’t there. Several small holes had been cut through the walls, making openings between the spaces.
“I hear her,” Elaine said.
The scampering sound rose, from another room down the hall. We ran towards that, only to come upon another space with more holes broken through the lathe and plaster, exposing narrow openings between wall studs. Just large enough for a child to pass through.
“What is she doing?” Elaine wondered aloud.
More sounds. From deeper into the house. We followed, quickly, Neil moving a bit too fast and jamming his injured shoulder
against an armoire just inside the rearmost bedroom in the house. He cried out in pain, cursing as we searched the room, more holes made here, one of which was covered by a thick rug that had been nailed to the wall. The corner of it was moving, flapping back just a bit to reveal what was beyond.
Outside.
“She’s out,” I said.
We backtracked quickly, splitting up, Elaine grabbing her pack and finding the back door with Neil as I ran through the front. We circled the house outside, meeting between it and the neighbor’s.
“Where did she go?” Elaine asked, worried.
I shook my head, at a loss. Neil let his Benelli hang by its sling and kept a hand pressed to the quick bandage job I’d done on his shoulder. The bleeding had been slowed considerably, if not stopped completely.
“We’ve got to find her,” Elaine said.
“Elaine...”
She whipped toward me, agitated.
“What? Do you want to leave her here? I killed her father. Who does she have? Who?”
“You killed him to save me,” Neil reminded her.
“He would have killed us all if he’d had the chance,” I added.
But our attempted words of comfort, our justification of her very necessary act of self-defense, fell on deaf ears.
“She’s just a child,” Elaine said. “Her father probably told her to hide if anything happened to him.”
I couldn’t argue with that likelihood. Nor could I fail to understand the rise of protectiveness Elaine was displaying. It might’ve been simply because we were dealing with the welfare of a child. Of an innocent.
Or it could have been some transference happening. The little girl might be playing stand-in for a brother lost to distance and to what the blight had wrought.
“She could be anywhere,” I told her.
“We can’t search the whole damn town,” Neil added.
Elaine glared at us both.
“Like hell we can’t,” she said, then stalked off, jogging between the houses, up the street, searching.
Neil and I looked to each other. There was no point in trying to stop her. We both knew that. We also knew, in more practical terms, that we had to get moving. To keep moving. The cold, hard truth was that the lives of many, many more than a single little child, depended upon us fulfilling the mission we’d set out upon.
“We can give her a few minutes,” I told Neil.
He rolled his wounded shoulder and nodded, though not in any gesture of complete acceptance. More acquiescence to an inconvenient fact.
“If she has that to do, there’s something I want to do,” Neil said.
He headed up to the sidewalk and turned right. I followed, watching him as he walked toward the main street through town. The very road we’d come in on. I glanced behind and saw Elaine coming out of one house and rushing into another, calling out to little girl again and again. I could have helped her, but something told me that she wanted none. That she needed to run herself into the ground trying to find the child in some sort of self-flagellation. Punishment undeserved, but still sought.
I followed Neil, reaching the main street as he crossed it. He stopped in front of the small hardware store, at the base of the pole where the faded French flag flew, and looked up at it. I stopped across the narrow avenue and watched as he slung his Benelli and took a knife from his belt. With a fluid motion he brought the blade to the thin and fraying rope that secured the foreign banner and sliced it. The flag fluttered as it fell slowly to the dusty street, landing in a compact pile right behind Neil. I crossed to join him as he put his knife back in its scabbard.
“If I had one of ours I’d fly it right now,” he said.
I understood, though to some that quiet flourish of patriotism would seem not only archaic, but misplaced. To those, any expression of respect, of loyalty to the nation, was perverse, considering the wholesale abandonment of the citizenry.
What those people, what many people failed to understand, even before the blight, was that love of country was not predicated on agreeing with the actions of those who governed it. They couldn’t comprehend, and couldn’t internalize, the simple belief that America was not just a place, it was an idea. And an ideal. To Neil, and to me, neither the idea nor the ideal had perished. Not yet.
Neil took a few steps toward the flag and kicked it into the gutter. I knew my friend. I knew what he was thinking. In the gutter was where it belonged. Whether the men who’d flown it were mercenaries or invaders, it didn’t matter. This wasn’t their land. It was ours. Period.
I looked behind, back up the side street, and saw Elaine rushing into yet another house, still calling out. Emma. Emma. Emma.
“She lost someone,” Neil said, watching Elaine as I was. “Didn’t she?”
“Something like that,” I said.
More and more I felt that the loss of her younger brother was the driving factor behind this display. He’d been so far away, and had simply been cut off from her, physically and virtually, with no chance, no real hope for reunion. It was as if he’d gone missing among a sea of lost souls.
“Fletch...”
“She’s just gotta work this out,” I told my friend, my attention focused on Elaine in the distance.
“No,” Neil said. “Look.”
I turned to him. He gestured toward the hardware store, through the empty frames where its front windows had been. Shadows obscured most of what the dim interior held.
Most, but not all.
Ten
They were lashed to the wall, long bolts driven through splayed arms, and through bound ankles, heads drooped forward on each crucified corpse.
“You see what they’re wearing?” Neil asked as we walked along the row of them, ten in all, displayed upon a wall like merchandise.
Or warning.
“Black uniforms,” I said.
Or what had been uniforms. Some weathering had begun to tatter the fabric. Wind howling through the broken windows and out the back door, which I could see was flapping lazily in the light breeze.
“Wanna bet they parlez-vouzed when they were alive?”
Neil knew I wouldn’t take that wager. I was in agreement with his suggestion. The flag, the uniform, the child’s description of the funny men. The men who were nailed to the wall here were of the same ilk who’d tried to kill us all at my refuge.
“You think he got them?” Neil wondered, gesturing back out the open front of the store.
I knew who the ‘he’ in question was. The girl’s father. Mr. No Name. And, yes, I did believe that, somehow, he had dispatched this contingent of Frenchmen.
“I’d say so,” I said, pointing to precisely spaced trios of holes on the fronts of their uniform shirts. “More than got them.”
There weren’t just single sets of three punctures on each. There were multiples of that. Twenty-four. Twenty-seven. More on some. He’d gone to town on them, somehow.
“How did he manage this?” I asked.
“Look at the bodies,” Neil said.
I did. More closely than I had before. The corpses, dead and dried, almost mummified in the desiccated air, had been dead for months. Six, maybe. But even in their state of slow decay it was apparent that, before they’d been set upon by the man, starvation had pushed them to the brink of death. Or beyond it. Necks were thin. Hands were withered. Faces were sunken and prematurely skeletal.
“They either couldn’t put up much of a fight,” I suggested. “Or any.”
“This wasn’t an execution,” Neil said. “It was a desecration. It was fury.”
French...
What the hell did their presence here mean? And their presence in Montana? And, presumably, Denver as the blight exploded across the globe?
“I want to know what this all means, Neil.”
My friend nodded, looking up and down the wall of crucified men in black.
“Me, too.”
Eleven
“Emma!”
We left the hardware
store and found Elaine one street over from where she’d started her search, still calling out. Still desperate verging on frantic.
“Emma!”
She hurried into a house, moved noisily throughout it, from room to room, looking in vain, then ran out and stopped, spotting Neil and I where we stood in the middle of the street. For a few seconds she stared at us, and then she walked our way.
“I can’t find her,” Elaine said, the words a mournful admission of failure in her eyes. “She has to be here. Somewhere.”
“She has hiding places,” I said.
“They both did,” Neil added. “More than one to be sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have survived. They would’ve been marched out of town and shot like everyone else.”
Elaine turned away from us, looking up and down the street, to each house, and every abandoned car resting on flattened tires, windows broken out.
“Elaine,” I said, putting my hand to her shoulder. “You’re not going to find her if she doesn’t want to be found.”
Slowly, she turned back toward us. I eased my hand away as she seemed to settle into a bout of deep thought. Deep consideration. Followed by decision.
“Give me your food,” Elaine said, nodding toward the pack on my shoulders. “Your MREs.”
I knew what she was doing. What she was planning to do. By the look in her eyes, the determination raging there, I knew that to protest the folly of her unspoken plan was pointless. But I still had to.
“We need what we have,” I told her. “And we don’t have much.”
Elaine absorbed the truth I’d just spoken to her, then she seized the shoulder strap of my pack and spun me around, unzipping the main compartment and pulling the few remaining MREs out.
“Dammit, Elaine,” Neil cursed at her, beyond frustrated. “We have lives depending on us!”
His coarse plea did nothing to change her mind or deter her actions. She shifted focus to him and waited.
“Why are you doing this?” Neil asked. “She’s as good as de—”
The fast slap across his face ended the morbid certainty he was about to voice. For a moment after the conflict exploded into a flourish of violence, Elaine and Neil did nothing more than stare at each other. He brought no hand to his stinging cheek. She made no more demands. It was as if each was waiting for the other to back away from the invisible line in the sand the other had drawn.