by Taylor Brown
He shoveled broken earth back over the grave, and it was done. But there was nothing to be done about the pond. Not soon. The backhoe had drained funds to nil. So in the migratory season Winston kept vigil, anchoring himself in a lawn chair for days, his back to the shore. In his hands a 12-gauge shotgun, birdshot extracted from the shells. When the imperial V passed overhead, white as glory, he defended them, firing warning shots, blanks, like an antiaircraft gunner if warring men could be dissuaded so easily.
But swans, they heeded, and no more fell victim to the mire.
SIN-EATERS
They told him the day he turned thirteen. That was the age they’d chosen, in some long ago. It didn’t make for a very good birthday. Not in the ordinary sense, at least. Because there was only one gift, if you could call it that.
Few would.
Afterwards, Gilead walked out into the full glare of the winter sun. The trees were bare, and black, their upper branches rimed with a silver glint of frost. He sucked the cold air deep into him, until it burned. Then exhaled slowly, visibly, watching his breath curl away like smoke.
So strange. To be thirteen, a boy one day and this the next. This new thing. Not what you thought you were. Something more, something less. He looked at his hands. The palms were white, with pink creases at the folds. He closed them, opened them. He looked at the sky. A distant spiral of carrion birds, black-flecked against the white sky. A mile off. Two. He lowered his head and started walking toward them.
He could feel the others, shadowing him through the woods. A wide wedge of them. Quiet, quiet. Stepping when he stepped, stopping when he stopped. They had to make sure of course. That this boy had it in him. That he could be one of them.
He followed a path, dark-trod through the snow. Most of it new-fallen, unmarked, wind-piled against the naked trees. But this path, it had been walked before him. The black earth muddled with the snow, boot-printed, a path like spilled ink zigzagging through the trees. The prints, they only pointed in one direction.
Could he do it?
The question burned in his mind.
He’d better.
The wind came up out of the north, a cold blast of it skirling through the trees. He looked up. Saw the naked branches clattering high above him, antlers of crazed beasts fighting for dominance, rule.
He swallowed. Looked at his boots. They kept stepping, as if of their own accord. Something driving them. He could feel the swell of it at his back, like a tide. He wanted to stop. Tried to. Thought: stop. But nothing happened. His boots kept stepping.
The trees broke, a great plain of snow shone before him. On it, they waited for him. Furred riders on smoking horses. Ten of them, bearded, with assault rifles slung across their backs. The hunting party. Between them the butcher station, the bloody draw of high-circling ravens. And, before this, the man.
In Town, you never questioned what you were eating. It was meat. Loin or round, flank or shoulder. Often ground, always deboned. You never thought, never questioned.
The man was kneeling in the snow. He was not old, though his face was. Dark circles, sunken cheeks. Hunger. But his eyes were piercing and clear, like an owl’s. He was not afraid.
There was not enough game, they’d told him. To feed them all. There had been in the beginning, in the years just following the Eruption, but a decade of nearly ceaseless winter had thinned the stocks. The domestics had all died out. Cattle and chickens, pigs and goats. Little to feed them.
But outlanders, they had plenty of those.
The man was in his longjohns. His hair was wild and knotted. A necklace of boar tusks hung under his throat. He was barefoot. His possessions lay piled in a box several feet away. Boots and coat, backpack, groundcloth, a rudimentary bow. These things would be redistributed in Town.
They handed Gilead the rifle. An M-14, a round already chambered. It was heavy in his hands, ceremonial. All wood and steel. Nothing like the carbines he’d used on the range.
He could feel the eyes upon him. He shouldered the rifle.
Only a few were chosen. Those who were thought to have the requisite character. Who could bear the truth. Guard it. Better not for the entire population to know. No one knew what that might do to their society. Their Town. So it had been decided: only the smallest circle would know. Those who had to.
The hunters.
Or, among themselves: sin-eaters.
Those who knew, so no one else would.
Gilead breathed in, slow. Exhaled, slow. He tried to aim. He tried to keep the barrel from shaking.
In the distance, movement. At the treeline. A bark, high-pitched. A dog. Now more of them. They moved in and among the trees, of a color, like a single gray beast. More barks and whines.
The lead hunter—Vichy— shifted in his saddle.
“He was running himself a pack of dogs,” he said. “We tried to get them too, couldn’t get close enough.” He leaned and spat. “Don’t mind them.”
Gilead nodded. He looked back at the man. Tears had begun streaming down his cheeks. His face glistened. But he didn’t beg, didn’t make a sound. He rose taller on his knees, and listened a last time to the howling of his dogs.
Gilead aimed for the man’s heart. He closed his eyes. He pulled the trigger.
***
That night, a feast. In the great hall. In his honor. There was the potato vodka the men drank from pewter shot glasses, neat. Clear fire. There was a stew of turnips, radishes, beets, cabbage. Crops that could subsist in this climate, in the Town’s cold frames and cloches. And there was meat.
He sat at the long bench now, with the other hunters. All the Town was there. The girls smiled differently at him, even the older ones. Something wicked in their eyes, in what they offered him. A promise. Everyone knew that the hunters ate the best.
There were many hands on his back, his shoulders, and many glasses of the clear stuff. Many mouthfuls of the meaty stew, and a place at the table set especially for him.
Before the night was over, he stumbled out of the great hall, to the latrine. The torches that lit his path had gone liquid on him, double-forked tongues of flame. He knelt and retched into the mess pit. Retched and retched again. The hunters stood in the doorway, laughing. Telling him it happened to everybody.
They thought it was the vodka.
***
There were two kinds of sin-eaters. There were the quiet ones. Those who did their job as if they were laying brick, hoeing a garden. No drama. Nothing in their eyes. Perhaps a sad hang in the look of their faces, like old priests. They never forgot. They simply stowed it away somewhere, in the deep of them, where it affected them slowly, inexorably.
And then there were the others. The ones who enjoyed it. Who wore the big cavalry mustaches, the leather riding spats, and always had a new killing device. A blood-grooved lance, a smoothbore pistol loaded with shot. Their cheeks would be red-flushed after the kill, their eyes lit with something. Desire. They were always the best hunters.
Vichy was leader. He was one of the old ones, the sad ones. But there was no mutiny among the men. It was no easy thing to swallow, this thing they did. To break down, metabolize into something you could live with. One handled it how he could.
All of them were brave.
In the outlands, where they rode, there was no law. And they were not the only ones who were armed. Plenty of others had stockpiled in the years before the Eruption. In cellars and attics, underground bunkers. Something felt in the blood perhaps, the psychic nearing of an edge. Now there were roving bands of them, hungry. Desperate. Some of them fully devolved. Strange perversions of men, with tattooed faces and necklaces of dried organs. Tongues, ears, worse. So little had survived the snow of ash, months long, and the years of winter that followed. Before long, nothing to eat.
Gilead kept the M-14. It was so heavy. They said it would make him strong. He rode a painted pony, Camo, because she was gray and white. Truly a good combination in the wintering lands they rode. He killed others. Most w
ould have done him the same. They were dragged back to the outland camp on skied travoises, for butchering. The women who cooked in Town prepared only the vegetables. The hunters handled the meat. In the early days, people asked and were told it was wild boar. Something few had eaten prior to the Eruption. After a time, they quit asking.
When the hunters were lucky, they got something else. A doe, a boar. A raccoon or family of squirrels.
They weren’t lucky often.
It was said that, in the days before, there was so much meat that people had been fat. Gilead couldn’t hardly believe it.
***
Autumn, not that it mattered. The seasons hardly changed. They were riding a ridge that overlooked a small mountain valley. The trees on the ridge were dead, blighted. Some beetle that had flourished in this new world. It was spooky to Gilead. You could feel their death. So strange for some-thing to die and stay standing. Just hollowed out, rotted, groaning in the wind.
In the meadow below, a broken-down cabin. The roof half-caved, the walls all twisted, the windows rhombic under a burden of unending snow. They had been here before. People—outlanders—liked to hide in it. A welcome shelter after so many days in the open.
Vichy raised his binoculars. Focused them. Squinted a long moment into the lenses.
He sucked his teeth, shook his head.
“Not today.”
He started to turn away.
“Wait!” said one of the others. It was Niles, his face flushed brightly. “Gimme the ’nocs, I think I saw something.”
Vichy handed them over.
“Yeah,” said Niles. “Yeah, I got a breather.”
They put together a raiding party. Three men. The rest would cover them from the high ground of the ridge. Gilead, with the long-range power of his M-14, and his age, was normally selected for the cover team.
“Gilead,” said Vichy. “You’re going.”
He swallowed, nodded. Dismounted. Checked his rifle, unsnapped the catch for his knife. Niles would lead them, Gilead in the rear.
They started down the hill. It was steep. He slipped twice on rocks, unseen underneath the snow, but didn’t fall. He wasn’t afraid, not really. He could feel the guns behind him, above him. He could feel them watching over him.
Niles had this big pistol, nickel-plated. His pinky kept coming off the grip, too excited to stay in place. Gilead could hear him breathing.
They made it to the flat land. They toiled toward the cabin, their boots stoving dark hollows in the snow. They passed an old hay feeder, half-submerged, the crossbars hack-sawed here or there for steers with stuck horns. The unpainted rings were red-rusted, the paint bubbled outward from the cuts.
Gilead trudged on. Feeling safe, safe, safe—and then he didn’t. It was one step, like a gust of wind, and he knew something was wrong. They were ten yards from the cabin, maybe less. The feeling built up in him. Should he say something? He couldn’t.
Could he?
Then he heard the shot. The first one. The man in front of him, Miller, crumpled. He didn’t scream, just fell into himself.
Dead.
That quick.
Then other shots, the snow springing around him like something come alive. He started running. Nowhere to go, no hope but the cabin.
He ran into Niles, who wasn’t running. Who was standing straight-backed, looking for the shooter. Gilead tripped and fell. He looked up at Niles. The man looked down at him, his mouth twisted beneath his mustache.
“Pussy,” he said.
Just then his heart exploded, blasted into a red stain on the snow. Gilead was already up and running, the cabin door hanging slightly ajar. He hit it at full speed, fell crashing into the cabin’s interior. Something caught him on the sharp corner of his hip as he fell. He rolled and came up standing in a dark room. He could see nothing, blinded by the snowy whiteness of a moment before.
“Get down,” she said.
“What?”
“Down!”
He dropped to his haunches. Felt the shot sing over him, terminate in the far wall with a bang.
Now more shots, other rifles. From behind him. The hunting party, fighting back.
“They won’t get him,” she said.
He saw her first in silhouette, a big crash of hair on narrow shoulders. And then she began to emerge out of the darkness. Her pale skin, her green eyes. She was sitting on the bed, a coat pulled up over her bare chest. Her feet were sticking out. The soles were pale and smooth, clean. He’d never seen that.
“You heard of bin Laden?” she said.
“What?”
“Osama bin Laden.”
He was on his hands and knees. He’d dropped his rifle outside.
“Terrorist from before,” he said. “I heard of him.”
“Daddy,” she said. “Daddy was one of them that got him.”
Gilead looked up at her.
“Shit,” he said.
More shots in the distance. It was a big gun, maybe a .308 like his. The shots were cold, consistent. He could almost hear the screams of the hunting party.
“He going to kill me?”
“Probably,” she said. “We know what you do. The lot of you.”
“What we have to,” said Gilead.
She cocked her head. “Don’t we all?”
And then she began telling him what he had to do if he wanted to live.
***
He would never forget what happened next. What she revealed beneath the covers. What she’d been hiding. A baby, cradled, wide-eyed and quiet despite the violence outdoors. She’d been nursing him. He had blue eyes, round and big in his face, and skin the color of milk.
Gilead had never seen one. Procreation was strictly prohibited in Town. They just didn’t have the resources. The young ones, like him, born in the time before, were allowed. But new births, no. Naturally there were accidents, and these were buried in a plot with the other dead. Inside the Town walls, of course, where scavengers couldn’t reach them.
The little one looked at him. Not curious, really. Just waiting, as if the nature of this man would soon be revealed. His mother pulled a walky-talky from somewhere beneath the covers. Gilead had seen the devices before, with the floppy antennae. Vichy had one, for emergency communications with Town. But they never used it. The batteries were too scarce.
She worked a small crank on the side, holding the baby in her other arm. She held it to her ear, heard static, then began to key the transmit button in some kind of precise pattern. It took only a few seconds, and she was done.
“You can go,” she said. “Just remember: you don’t do as agreed...” She made her hand into a gun and pointed it at him. “Zap,” she said.
He swallowed and walked out the door.
The shots had died off. He saw the men on the ridge, crouching behind trees and dead horses. It was a long walk, and he felt like he was going to be shot every second of it. He retrieved his rifle. It was lying next to Niles. The man’s eyes were open, staring dumbly into the white and feature-less sky.
Camo hadn’t been shot. She was watching him as he crawled over the crest of the ridge. Many of the others hadn’t been so lucky. But none of the other men had been hit.
“The fuck is down there?” said Tway. He was one of the younger hunters, ambitious and mean.
Gilead looked at him, the others.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Bullshit,” said Tway. “Somebody was protecting whoever’s down there. Whoever or whatever.”
Gilead leaned and spat, a discolored clot in the snow.
“Nothing, I said. You wanna go down there and have a look yourself?”
Tway and the others, they looked at him, the cabin, the corpses staining the snow. The silence was eerie, just a hint of wind sighing through the trees.
No, no one wanted to have a look.
***
That night, he couldn’t quit thinking of the little one. That big head, that little body. So much like a little man. It made
sense, that being what he was. But the eyes. So open and round. Not squinting like everyone else’s, like they didn’t want to fully see the world that lay before them. He’d seen eyes like that somewhere before. That clear, that blue. Where? Then he remembered, and he tried not to think about it.
He was glad for the midnight bell. He crept out of his room through the window. He lived in the building with the other hunters, like a clubhouse. He couldn’t have them hearing him on this errand.
In the distance, thunder. That was lucky. It would cover him. The streets were deserted, but he kept to the shadows. He was glad to be out of his room. He’d started to thinking of that first kill—the blue-eyed man—and the ones after. Sometimes it got into his head like that, like a fever, and he couldn’t get it out. He thought it must be normal, because he’d always thought of himself as normal. But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like something else.
The lights were out in the infirmary. There was a big room in the front, where they housed the patients. He crept around back. That door was locked. But he knew the room where they kept the meds. The window was dark. It wasn’t barred. Meds were valuable, of course. They couldn’t be reproduced. But no one stole them, not in Town. Theft meant exile, and nobody risked that.
He found a broken chunk of brick. He took out the shirt he’d brought just for this. He wrapped one in the other, and waited for the thunder. He threw the brick through the window. Then listened: nothing. He reached through, careful of the remaining shards, and undid the latch. He lifted the window and crawled through.
The silence was haunting. He could almost hear the echo of daytime life. Perhaps just the pulse of blood in his own ears. He found the right cabinet, opened the satchel he’d brought. He was breathing hard now. He thought he heard something in the hall. Had he? He hurried. He lit matches to see the labels in the dark. This one, that one. She’d been very specific.
Something in the hall again, a scrape. Like someone trying to move quietly in the dark. The last one, it had to be in here somewhere. He couldn’t find it. He had to get out. He could hardly breathe. He swept the remainings into his satchel, the bottles he hadn’t checked.