I dig the oars in again, and watch the last island grow bigger as we approach it. Russell is useless now. I hear him breathing really loud, like he can’t catch his breath. He coughs a little bit. I’ve been ignoring his cough for the last few days, because I know he won’t take the antibiotics. I’m thinking about forcing them in when he’s asleep. I don’t want the cough to mean what I’ve seen it mean for everyone else—the long fever, the sweating when it’s cold, the in-between period when life and death separate and leave a pale, rolling eye nightmare that trembles through the whole body.
I know we can make it now. The muddy rise is showing itself, the place where I’m going to attempt to land the boat. I’ll need a rocky bank, something to throw the nylon around. This last island looks all mud, like it’s ready to wash into the brown canvas, slowly pushed down by the endless drops.
On the Sea Queen Marie, Cap’n said that the climate has changed too. It isn’t as cold anymore. There is less shielding or something, and despite the constant clouds, the sun is getting through in a worse way than ever before. I’d seen some of the boils on the passengers, the ones who said they’d come up and east from the top of Texas, Amarillo I think. They had come through The Great Plains nine years before getting to Marie, through part of waterspout alley. By now it’s a raging crush of water there, they had warned. Russell took it to heart. We have to avoid the Plains at all costs he said after that, and has continued to say ever since. But the Bighorns are on the edge of the Plains, and I know it. Really close. We can’t drift too far east when we push out for Leadville. We’ll be swept in.
I pick the softest-rising slope on the mud heap and try to put the boat in. The canoe nudges along the underwater hill, then grinds to a halt. Then it rocks back and springs off the mud bank, as if the land is trying to cough us out. I look behind, even though there’s no way they could be following already. There’s nothing out there in the permanent fog, just gray and brown. I don’t know how those face eaters could possibly follow us any farther. I try again and get the canoe lodged in place, and walk over to Russell and start shaking him. Get up, I say, we’re here. He comes to life like a zombie. He grabs the tent, the poles, and takes the nylon. The water in the canoe is too high, but we’re off the sea. The boat will be under water when we wake up tomorrow, but if we tie it up good, it won’t be gone. We can flip it. Keep going.
We didn’t used to live like this. When the electricity was still on, back in Philadelphia, we barely noticed the rain. We lived in an old castle of a building. It was once an Art museum Russell said. Giant columns, rising high above the low lakes surrounding it. Low risk of flash floods. Plenty of food around and in the city. A lot of streets you could still walk through. That was almost eleven years ago.
I remember him taking me to see the bridge. We walked on it. It was called the Walt Whitman, he’d said. It still looked like a bridge then too, but you could see the low-lying building tops under the water, the endless rows of cars, submerged, and the tipped container ships. The ships were important. We went down as close as we could to the docks then, hauling as much food and supplies as fit in our packs. There seemed to be an endless amount of everything then.
Philadelphia had animals too. I saw deer running around, over hills, sliding sometimes, jumping like they couldn’t figure out where to go. Then they all disappeared. Russell said they found a burrow somewhere. I didn’t buy it.
Russell finds a nice jagged rock and loops the nylon rope around it. Then again. Three times in all. But he needs my help to do it. I ask him if he thinks they’ll keep following us.
“If they’re starving,” is all he gets out.
I want to take care of him, but I can’t. He’s kept me safe my whole life. When he was still happy, and believed in God, he would discuss the pieces of humanity, the veneer, he calls it now. Art, music, culture. Politics, governments, wars, history. Charity, rescue organizations, the army.
After the Sea Queen went down, he just called it the veneer, and he never goes into it more than that now—he doesn’t talk about the pieces. For a long time we’d been able to ignore the rumors about the place where it doesn’t rain, the city above the water line. We didn’t need to go there. It comforted me to know it was out there, even though Russell called it a matter of faith. But when we lost the Cap’n and our family on that boat, long after we’d left our homes in Philadelphia and Pittsburg, he said that crew was the last humanity we’ll ever see. I don’t know how he meant that if he really believes we can reach Leadville.
I used to ask him, “Won’t it be too hot there?” I’d heard the horror stories about the heat for years. No, he’d replied. That was way south, past Texas. The equator. And I’d been relieved. I never thought we’d see ice though. Now I’m not so sure how relieved it makes me feel.
I have to help Russell up the mud bank. There are barely any trees on this island. Our tent will have to be naked. He sits down and puts the tent and the poles on the ground. I look at him and I want to scream. I want to demand that he tell me what’s wrong with him. But I don’t want to hear about the infection, the bad antibiotics.
I work as quickly as I can getting the tent up. I’ve done it so many times that I could do it in the pitch black. Russell doesn’t even get the plastic food sack out of the canoe. I have to go down.
I walk slowly, carefully to the edge of the bank. I feel like I can see the underwater valley below, descending for thousands of feet to some dark graveyard where millions of skeletons decompose, disperse like dissolved salt. I’m almost to the boat when I slip. One foot tries to steady the mistake of the other, but it doesn’t work, because this island is all mud. Barely any rock for grip.
I stick my hand out to break my fall and smack my shoulder into the ground, then tumble down toward the water. Freezing needles stab me as I realize water is rushing over me. I’m in the water. I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t even pull myself to the surface. But then I find the ground again, it’s still there. I stand up, already numb. I don’t feel the cold at all anymore. I just pull the nylon line to draw the canoe, grab the bail buckets and the plastic bag, then let the canoe drift back out into the brown.
Up until Indianapolis, we didn’t have to worry about exposure. In Pittsburg, we didn’t even wrap ourselves in plastic. I remember looking at my hands then, and seeing them start to prune. I remember wondering for the first time if the texture of my skin would ever return to normal. I don’t care if I look like shit, except to Russell. And I don’t want my skin to slide off. I’m always better about keeping my plastic on than him. He is stupid like that sometimes, like he’s invincible.
He used to talk about the exposure—how it will get colder as we go west. He said even in the warm waters though, if we get stuck in them, we’d become hypothermic. The human body is 98 degrees. The warmest water we’ll see, he said, will be around 70 degrees. That temperature will suck the life right out of us in a few hours. Walking back to him, I wonder what the temperature of the water is here. Maybe 50? And we don’t have anything to make a fire with, and a week ahead on the flat brown sea. If there is a Poseidon god, I think it’s time to ask him that the brown stays flat. I can take medium rain. Even heavy rain. If there are no waves.
I walk back to Russell. He hasn’t gone inside the tent yet. Just lying in the mud. I kneel next to him and study his face, and notice the sinking feeling in my stomach is coming back. He looks like he’s sleeping, but his breathing is slowed. I put my hand on his forehead, like he’s done so many times for me. But I’m no good at it, and I can’t tell if he’s too hot. His eyes look sunken, and his skin is soggy. He’s not even leaning away from the rain.
“Russell,” I say, trying not to let my stirring anxiety show. I glance over at the sea, realizing that if the face eaters appear out there, we’re not running anywhere. I reach into my pocket, careful not to punch another hole in the plastic glove, and feel for my knife. He has one too. But his won’t be any good to us if he keeps acting like this. No boats
are out on the water. Maybe they’ve given up. Maybe that run across the last rock was the last of their strength. Maybe they decided to just eat each other.
“C’mon, let’s get inside.” I nudge him. He doesn’t respond. I really start to worry, and I can’t help but let it show in my voice. “Russell! Get the fuck in the tent!”
Usually he gets excited when I use bad language. He always tells me never to curse, because it’s a way to keep ourselves close to the veneer. But sometimes I need to know he’s alive, still feeling, and I curse to get a reaction from him. He never smiles about it, but he always reminds me not to do it. Over the last few months though, he’s barely protested at all. I almost think he’d let me have sex with someone for food now if we had another chance. It’s like he’s not caring as much anymore about me, or anything, just Leadville.
I grab his wrist, then bring it close to his other, and start to pull him to the tent flap. He finally rolls his eyes open, watches me, and apologizes. I don’t want to hear it, so I just keep pulling him toward the tent. But he’s too heavy. At first he sort of slides across the mud, and it’s only a few feet away, but now it’s too much. Even though he’s a skeleton, I can’t move his body. If he doesn’t start moving on his own, he’s going to stay out in the rain. I realize that with a panic and do something irrational. I start shaking him as hard as I can.
“C’mon you heavy bastard,” I say, my voice quavering. It’s as if he recognizes who I am again. Maybe the terror I’m sounding like. And he starts to crawl to the tent. I push his butt behind him until he’s in and get inside after him. I close the tent flap. He lies down on the mush, and I lie next to him. Above our heads, the splotches of the rain appear and disappear, a hundred times a second, each time in a different place. The canvas is leaking in two spots, a steady drip. One of the drips is right in the center of the tent, the other by the tent flap. I roll him on his side, getting him as close to the far wall of the tent as I can. The drone on the roof makes the rain sound hard, loud, like it’s on heavy. I start again with panic, wondering if it is turning heavy, if maybe a gale is blowing up, but I stop myself—it’s just being in the tent. I’ve been in the tent hundreds of times. Not this tent. We picked this one up in Rapid City. But the sound always gets louder in the tent, the rain always feels like it’s on heavy when we’re inside.
I try to talk to him again, and he still isn’t responding. I realize his face is pressed into the mud from how I rolled him. I pull him back and make sure he’s on his back. He smiles at me.
“You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” I say, feeling the weight of the world slide away at the sight of his smile.
“I just need some sleep,” he says, and then the smile disappears. He’s out. I push myself down into the mud, turn him against the wall of the tent, and press my stomach against his back and butt. I push in close, as close as I can. Usually he’s really warm. Some nights, when we first started staying in the tent a lot, in Chicago, he was too warm. I had to stay on the other side of the tent because of how much heat his body put out. He told me to stay close anyway, that when we were sleeping the temperature might drop suddenly. But I couldn’t. He was too hot. I would wake up sweating every time and have to disentangle myself from his body. Sometimes he wrapped me up, really right, so I couldn’t get out. I used to hate that. And sometimes, I really didn’t mind. But ever since Sioux Falls, I can’t stay far from him in the tent for more than a minute. The second we set it up, he goes right to sleep. No conversation. And I get right on him, right away. But now he doesn’t feel like he used to. It’s like he’s taking all the heat from me instead of giving it. And I’m happy to give it to him, as long as he doesn’t get sick on me. I tell him he’s not allowed to get sick. He agrees.
Sometimes, when we talked about the veneer of humanity, and he still seemed to enjoy indulging in the idea of it, he would bring up love. He’d mention a girl he used to know. She had been his girlfriend. He said they wanted to get married, but they could never get the money up. He said he regretted that they’d never just settled for a cheap wedding. I didn’t really know what a wedding was, and he told me it used to be a giant waste of money. But it was part of the veneer, and so he had tried to save up for it. She died before they could get married though. They had a kid too. He doesn’t talk about that at all. A picture fell out of his jacket once in Pittsburg, and he wouldn’t even tell me who it was. After the Sea Queen Marie went down, and we survived by the hand of god, as he put it, he admitted that it was his daughter. He’d wanted to get married most for her. But more than just for her. He said he really loved his lady. We were soul mates, he had said. That one took a lot of explaining. I got out of it that two people pretended like they’d be together forever. He said forever was one of the veneer ideas, easy to embrace when you don’t have to struggle through the rain for food, higher ground, warmth, a dry place to lay down.
It sounded really silly to me. But part of me is jealous. It sounds like something I am sure I will never have. Love. Soul mate. Wedding. A baby. And then I start to feel the attraction to him. I start to take all those things he has said and place them on him and me. But he won’t talk about any of it with me. Just Leadville.
She didn’t drown, his daughter. It was that there were no hospitals around to take her. They’d all been abandoned. There were militia hospitals. But they couldn’t do anything. Bad antibiotics. Now he won’t touch them. Says the rain’s gotten to them all. I don’t think that’s the real reason he doesn’t take them.
I push into him, begging in my mind that the warmth return, that his warmth come into me, like it was always there before. Too hot. But it doesn’t. And I lie awake thinking, watching the drab nothing above the tent, noticing that it is darkening by degrees outside. At first I think it’s getting dark too fast, and I remember the charcoal black sky of the hurricane that sank us. But it’s not, it’s getting dark at normal speed. And the rain is on medium. I calm myself back down.
I know that if the face eaters left ten minutes after we did, and guess right about which mudslide we crawled up onto, they’ll be arriving any minute now. We’ll be easy prey inside the tent. We won’t even hear their footsteps. But our normal guard duty where we take turns on watch is out—it has been for the past few nights. And I don’t have the energy to watch the water right now. I can’t leave Russell. I hope they miss us, find the wrong island. I try to recall how many other islands are around this one, how many they’ll have to choose from. Two, three? Really only one though. One that’s big enough to set up a tent on. Maybe they’re dead. Drowned now for real this time, the last two. I don’t remember the bandits ever being this persistent, not even in South Dakota. Something’s different here in Wyoming.
Just to be safe, I take out my knife, and I accidentally hit Russell with it as I put it into my fist while trying to stay as nestled into him as possible. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t moan. He just breathes, real soft like, which at least is better than how he sounded on the boat. Some people can get sick real fast, he’d told me. One minute they’re in top shape, and the next they’re near to a coma, and before the night is out, they die. That’s just the way it is in the rain, he says. But not him.
I start to wonder if maybe Russell is my soul mate. He says he’s my dad’s age, as if my dad is alive or something, and he never tells me I’m pretty. But I know he watches me. I see him watching. At least I used to. When I’m walking away, and I turn back, he’s there, not even smiling, just looking at me like an animal. But I’m not scared, and I know it’s something besides watching out for my safety. I started doing it on purpose, walking away and turning back, just to make sure he is watching. But he doesn’t act interested. It’s like I’m his kid. He doesn’t want to be my soul mate. And for some reason, he keeps taking care of me. I asked him once if he leaves me, would he get to Leadville faster. He didn’t even answer. I thought he couldn’t say it, because it was true, and what was the point in bringing it up. But that night, when we were cuddl
ed together in the tent, and he still had the warmth, he told me that he’d die without me. I made a mistake then. I asked him if we’d be together forever. I know it was veneer. Pointless. Unhelpful of me to bring it up. “Will you always be with me?” I asked him after he admitted he needed my help to make it to Leadville. He said yes for some reason. I said “Forever?” He said yes. It sounded like he meant it. I squeezed him, wanting him so bad.
I push my hands up along his back, into his stomach, wrapping tightly to him like some kind of cub. Then I reach up and feel his face again. I put my fingers against his lips, and wait for the breath. It rolls out slow. A small rush of warmth, and I know he’s still with me. Then I go up to his forehead, and feel it again, but I only feel the cold wet of his dripping hair. I can’t tell if he’s burning up. That’s when I hear something other than the rain. It sounds like someone’s splashing in the water outside. We didn’t pitch the tent very far from the water. It sounds very close. I shake Russell and ask him if he heard that. He doesn’t reply. I’m scared, and think for sure that it’s the face eaters. They have to have found us. But I don’t think I can fend off two of them with my knife. I take it into my hand. It’s only about six inches long. I don’t even know if I can hit one of them, and if I do, I don’t think I’ll kill him. I don’t want to go to the tent flap to look outside and check. I think I’d rather let them come kill us, end the rain forever. But that fear subsides as I continue to listen because I don’t hear any more sounds. And then I hear something again, a bigger splash. I know it’s them. They’ve found us, and they’re trying to land on the banks. Maybe they’ll just cut away our canoe and push on, head back north where there’re more peaks. But I know they won’t. They need to eat. We have hardtack, and our bodies. That’s what they’re after.
The Rain Page 3