I wait a long time, and it never comes back up. It’s strange for me, like the whale is some glimpse of hope, and I feel as if we aren’t totally alone anymore. I wonder if the whale minds the rain, or even notices it at all, and if all this that has happened to the human veneer matters one bit to it. No, it hasn’t even noticed we’re here. I have the compulsion to call to it, grab the oar and paddle out to it. Like it will know we need its help. And it will take us down into the rain sea and be a submarine for us. Carrying us south, straight to Leadville, no stops. It can probably have us there by the morning. I wait a long time for the whale to come back, until it’s almost dark. As tired as Russell seems all the time lately, I feel like I have more energy. Like now that everything is so close to death, I am constantly energized. He used to make fun of me because I sleep in. He says it’s like wasting your life, sleeping in. Sleep is for the dead, he says. But since Rapid City, I probably could have done without sleep altogether. And when I do sleep, it doesn’t do much for me. It usually brings me to some warm, dry place, like Philadelphia was, and Pittsburg, and for a time even Indianapolis. But those years are gone forever. And I always wake up, angry and depressed that we ever left there. But I have always trusted Russell’s judgment, more than my own or anyone else’s. He had said that there was a place where it wasn’t raining. Some people said, and he tended to believe them, that some countries are completely dry. But they can’t help anybody else. It used to be our country that helped everyone else he said. And when it came to the time after the rain, once people learned it wasn’t going to stop, and the veneer started to erode, and people started to starve, and lose power, and die, and get lost in mile long bodyjams that floated west, no one place that is dry can afford to do anything but help itself. That’s why we don’t hear about a rescue. But we can’t worry about the other countries, Russell says. The other places where it isn’t raining. Only Leadville.
And once it became clear that Philadelphia was getting bad, and the east coast was all too low, and we had to start moving west, we would never be able to turn back. Just stay on the move, seeking elevation. When Russell said we couldn’t stay in Philadelphia anymore, I accepted it without question. Even though we could still walk most of the streets there. And then again, when it happened in Pittsburg, I knew he was right. But in Indianapolis I fought him. Things didn’t seem bad there yet, it seemed dumb to move, but he said we had to go. We’d only been there two years. The rain didn’t seem to be taking as much then. But he’d said he knew we’d be in trouble in another year if we stayed.
And you never hear about how those places are doing after you leave them. They’re just gone, like they weren’t real, fading memories of a drier, warmer past, forsaken for the sake of faith, as Russell had called it. That’s what my dreams are. The memories of those decisions that I question now. The roofs over our head, the food in the cabinet, the streets to run through, the other normal people to talk to. The mistake of moving on when it isn’t that bad.
The sky is telling me that it’s almost night now, as the sun smear dips to my left, making some of the gray endless mass of clouds glow red and pink. The whale has forsaken us too. He doesn’t need to help, for what connection does he have to the veneer? What favor does he owe people like us? Even still, I can’t force myself to go back in just yet. The sight of its body, now the memory of its body, eases my mind. The same ease it had moving through the death pool all around us. I need it to come back, just so I can see it again, be filled with its grace, its lack of concern, its playfulness. I strain my eyes looking for it over the canvas of brown, imagining it will come back. I think about Russell and his wife and his daughter. I wonder if this is how he feels about them. I wonder if because he said forever to them, and had meant it, if now he feels like I do about the whale not coming back. It doesn’t make any logical sense that it will return, but I cling to the idea anyway. I look out over the muddled horizon for the whale, but instead, I see a boat. I think it’s a boat. I move down to the water, and all at once it’s like the fear from before has jumped back into me, but twice as strong, because after I double check, and triple check, I realize it really is a boat. I tell myself it’s a different boat, but I know it’s not. It’s the same one. It’s the one I’ve seen for days now trailing us in the open water. And it’s moving toward our rock of mud. I almost run back up to the tent, but I know that if I go in the water again, I might not come back up. I slowly climb up the rocks, onto the mud, walking between the little streams leading down to the sea so they don’t send me flying down along with the rain into the brown.
I open the tent flap. Russell’s still sleeping, but he’s rolled over onto his other side, facing the tent flap now. It sounds like he’s not even breathing, and the double fear of that and the face eaters launches me across to him. I grab him violently on his arm. He wakes up right away, like he isn’t even sick one bit.
“What’s up Tan?” he says. Hearing my name makes me feel like I’m suddenly awake again, like the whale never happened, the trip I took down into the sea with it. I try to choke out the words, but I can’t. I feel paralyzed, like I’m going to fall down and start crying. It’s a combination of the fact that he’s okay and the fact that we’re going to die anyway. He sits upright, concern gripping his gaunt face.
“Tanner!” he says, angry, desperate to know what’s happening. He’s awake, and he seems fine. I point outside the tent and finally mutter, “They’re coming.”
But he’s not fine. He goes to stand on his knees, like he’s always done at the first sign of danger when we stay in the tent, but he grunts and sits back down.
“What is it?” I say, panicked.
“I’m just dizzy, give me a second,” he moans. Then he reaches into his pocket, and it takes him forever but he finally takes out his knife and tries to stand on his knees again. He falls a little bit but I grab him, hold him upright until he can find his strength. It seems like he won’t find it though, and I know the boat is getting closer. It’s not so dark that they won’t see where our canoe is tied up on the bank.
“How close?” he says, weathered, but ready to move. I tell him a couple hundred feet. He starts to walk on his knees to the tent flap, and as always, I get behind him, waiting for his direction. I’ve never had to take charge, and I don’t want to start now. He’ll tell me what to do—either we run, or we stand our ground. But I don’t know how we can stand our ground, and I don’t know where we can row to. We’ll be on dark water if we row out there now. And we’ll have to backtrack north to find a patch of land to escape onto. And before all that we’ll have to flip the canoe because it’s half sunken.
Russell opens the flap and peers out, and then he steps out and stands up. I follow after him, locking my eyes right onto the sea. The boat is a lot closer now, or maybe I didn’t call it right, and it hadn’t been hundreds of feet away. I can see the blue plastic of their body suits. One of the men is limp, the other rowing. That must be what we looked like, with me at the oar.
“They’re low,” Russell says. I see what he means—the edge of their boat is perilously close to the water line, because the limp guy isn’t bailing. They’re moving slow, taking on rain, and it looks like they might sink before they reach us.
“What should we do?” I say, because it’s taking way too long for Russell to decide. He’s thinking slower than usual. He usually has a plan by now. He has them ahead of time. But he just looks out there, judging something silently to himself. I push into his chest, out of fright, out of having no words to express my need for him to make the call—to tell me to break the tent down again and tip our canoe over to empty out the water. But he always tips the canoe at the first sight of danger, because I usually can’t handle the weight by myself. But he isn’t moving yet. I squeeze him.
“Russell, I’m scared,” I say. The storm had hit us so fast in the Sea Queen Marie that I hadn’t had time to register my fright. It was just one minute we were okay, and the next, we were fighting for the rafts, a
nd then we were knocked around for two hours in swells that rose as tall as houses. But ever since we’ve been in Wyoming, and the face eaters started showing up everywhere, I notice my fear more. Maybe it’s related to the sinking feeling I get in my stomach now, that we are forever beyond all the warm and dry places in the world, forever beyond the veneer. And in the total dreariness of the place, I start more and more to fixate upon ideas. Like the idea of Russell and me being together forever. Maybe even in the idea, now separated from everything else, that I love him. And he might never know it. Love, the word, hasn’t passed his lips since Philadelphia. I think it stopped after his family died. He’s never told me he loves me. But the love is in me now, and alive, and it drives the fear of death to a pulsing and horrible swelling inside my chest—I don’t want to lose him, and I don’t want to die. Even if the rain doesn’t ever stop, I don’t want us to end. I tell him I need him again. “Russell, what are we gonna do?” I say.
“They’re too low,” he says. He leaves me, pushes me off of him, and walks down to the water’s edge. I follow right after him and wait, hoping he’ll tell me what the plan is. He just stares, and I look too. They’re waists are level with the water.
“Can they make it?” I say. They’re so close. Russell doesn’t say anything, but he kneels down for a minute, like something’s wrong. I kneel next to him, put my arm on his back, rubbing it, but he just keeps looking at the mud. He’s not even checking the water anymore. I ask if he’s okay, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s breathing really loud again, like the short walk to the water was too much for him. They see us I tell him, but he already knows that. My hope that they might miss, get swept in the wrong direction, or not see us altogether evaporates.
“You have your knife?” he finally asks me. I show him it, and try to remember the way to stab that he taught me. You go across, not down. You keep the blade pointed toward your feet, not up to the sky. You swipe, not stab. I rehearse everything. I can’t believe he sounds like I’m actually going to use it.
The silence and rain stay united, until finally, after a long torment, the splashing of oars interferes, and the boat can’t hold any more water. The limp man looks like he’s dead. He isn’t moving, bailing, even opening his eyes. I wonder if he will even try to get off the boat. The other man has a look on his face like the one that died earlier today. His eyes are spread way open, unblinking despite the rain, like he’s had a last shot of adrenaline, the final push before death. Sea water starts spilling over the rail of the boat, and the whole thing tips over. They fall out together with a quiet splash. The limp man doesn’t even try to swim, he just sort of bobs for a bit, and then floats back out into the brown, like a current is dragging him south. The other one knows how to swim and he isn’t too tired to do it.
“He’ll make it,” is all Russell says. He stands back up, holds his knife ready, and looks at me. His face isn’t blank like before on the boat, and in the tent, or even a minute ago when he was kneeling in the mud. He looks concerned, like life’s back in him, a last fight. I stand behind him, scared to death.
“Get next to me,” he says. I obey him immediately. We stand side by side right at the water’s edge. The man makes good time swimming in. But he’s not crying for help like the last man. Finally, he reaches our canoe, where it’s half-submerged, and uses it to hoist himself up for air. He gasps loudly, destroying for a moment the consistency of the rain taps. Then he moves again, back into the water, walking underwater right up to our feet. His hands come onto the bank first, and they find a small rock to cling to. Russell steps up and stomps on his foot. The crushing pain makes the man scream. I cringe, unsure whether or not I should jump in. Then, like the pain brought him back to full strength, the man rises to his feet and ducks his head down way low, and charges at Russell like a bull. The head rams in. Russell stumbles from the blow before he can force his knife forward. The man falls on top of Russell. I finally snap alive and run to them.
I can’t tell who’s screaming. I reach the back of the wet animal and he throws his elbow backward at me as soon as I’m close enough to stab him. White flashing pain stuns me for a second. I can’t focus, I don’t know if Russell is pinned. I hear them grunting, a fight for life between the walking dead. I rise again, feeling undead myself, and try again to save Russell. Only he doesn’t need my help. He stands up all on his own, pushing the man off his chest. The man rolls over, both his hands firmly gripping the handle of a knife. It’s deep in his belly, right in the middle. Russell stabbed him in the gut. He doesn’t even make a sound even though the sight of it hurts my own stomach. It’s like he’s numb to it. And he starts to rise again.
I think I should stand next to Russell but I can’t. I can’t take my eyes off of the face eater. He looks like one of the rotting corpses. His whole face is a beard, a dripping mop, funneling rain onto his gut where the red is streaming out. He doesn’t act fazed by the wound. He looks at Russell, and Russell steps back a couple feet. And then Russell slips when he tries to back up even farther. He falls, hits a mud stream, and rolls down, all the way down, out into the water. The man pauses, both hands still feeling the knife handle, testing it, like he wants to try to loosen it. But he decides to leave it in, and he looks from Russell to me and then back to Russell. Russell doesn’t move in the water. I panic, thinking he hit his head and he can’t breathe. And then the man walks toward me, ignoring the knife sticking out of him, raising his hands toward me, moving in with like giant claws to make sure I don’t escape.
When I was little, and I first learned that I don’t have a real family, and back then some people still had real families, I felt sad. I felt sad for a really long time. I couldn’t remember my mom, or my dad. Russell filled me in with some details about my parents over the years, but I don’t know for sure if he just made them up because he knew I was sad then. He always cares if I’m sad. But Russell is my family, the closest thing to it I’ll ever know. And I turn away from the man coming at me because I can’t take my eyes off Russell, helpless in the brown.
I used to talk him up to anyone I met. The other boys, girls, older men, women, it didn’t matter. He was the toughest guy around. Who is he? they’d ask me. I never called him Dad once, always just Russell. He’s Russell I’d say, like they were idiots for not knowing that. Back then he was stocky, but he was tall and stocky. Enormous really. A bear of a man. Six foot three. Maybe two hundred and seventy five pounds. I was always safe when he was around. He’d beaten the shit out of a boy once who’d tried to get me to go home with him. Russell told me that boy had no intention of taking me to his house. He’d been about my age, and I was more curious than anything—I’d never really had a friend my age. He was after my body, Russell said. For food or sex, it didn’t matter. Though things were relatively calm in Philadelphia, and Pittsburg even, and the rain didn’t mean yet what it means now, the reports of cannibalism had already started. Despite those warmer, dryer times, people hadn’t seen the reason to wait, when it was necessary to survive, to eat other people. Society crumbled so fast, Russell says, that it makes the veneer disappear in many before the environment dictates that it has to. Some had different caveats about eating human flesh—they only do it in near-death situations, only if the person is already dead from natural causes, only if it is the thigh muscle, or the bicep, or the breast. Most of those rules about eating human flesh faded by the time we reached Chicago. By Rapid City, all the caveats were gone—and now it’s just the face eaters. Some of them I’ve seen, the ones who hunt in packs, have pieces of their faces missing, and other parts too Russell says, but those missing chunks are concealed under the plastic suits. Russell told me that they’d just as soon cut a block from each other’s arms for a meal than risk the rain some nights. I had thought it was bullshit. But then I saw the bodies—large sections missing, bones with teeth marks, faces with the serrated punctures of canines and molars. Until Rapid City, we were once removed from the face eaters, all the cannibals, because we played it safe.
We stuck to the high rises, where food was more plentiful. We stuck to the Sea Queen Marie. We stuck to the towers and the skylines and the towns on mountain tops. It was in the backcountry you ran into the face eaters, Russell told me then. We avoided backcountry like the plague. But after Rapid City, and even long before that, the cannibals weren’t the minority anymore. If a body floated by in the rain that hadn’t been dead for more than a day, it simply meant another day of life for someone else. But we’ve managed to make it this far without doing it. It’s one of the last pieces of the veneer Russell will talk about. That we don’t eat other people. The veneer was so strong before the rain, he says, that no one ate people. I can’t imagine that. We’re just another food source, like any other animal out there.
The man steps carefully on the mud, then again, moving toward me his food source and ignoring Russell in the water. He’ll eat every part of me raw is all I can think as he comes. But I hear water splashing, and movement at the bank—it’s Russell. I watch him trample up the mudslide on his hands and knees, weaponless, but seething. The face eater halts and turns to Russell as Russell barrels into his legs. I charge at him too. I see the knife handle sticking out of his stomach and grab it and push as hard as I can, wedging it deeper in. It slides in, like his skin has no measure of resistance anymore, like he’s one big sponge soaked in red water, and the whole handle disappears inside him. He falls, almost on Russell. He misses and rolls off to the side. I run to him even though I think he’s dead now, and my fear disappears, and I stomp on his face like it’s a big spider. I do it over and over again until I slip. Mud smacks my mouth and I bite my lip. I taste the blood, very different from the rain. I stand back up immediately, expecting to have to continue, but the man is dead. I walk over top of him and look down at him. His eyes are still wild, and they’re still wide open. He looks just like he did when he was coming after me. But all the other life has gone out of him. And maybe it’s traveled somewhere else, like Russell used to say happens, but I don’t think so. I pause at my instinct, which screams that I roll him down into the water. The pause comes because for a moment I think that he’s food. We don’t have any food, not much. Not enough for the trip to Leadville. It’s five hundred some miles to Leadville. It’s a wasteland out here. But I can’t look at Russell, can’t bear to ask him. I know he’ll refuse. I follow my gut and kick the man, then get down in the mud on my knees, rain smacking my back, and push. I grunt, and I cry, and I push him down into the water. He floats away some, then his body drifts back toward the bank, like the gravity of our living bodies is pulling him toward us, because our bodies need him for nourishment. But then he is sucked away, captured by the same current that took his friend. He disappears before I realize I haven’t heard Russell move.
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