Songs of Love & Death

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  I went into the house. Cats scattered under the sagging couch and quilt, while kittens mewed from the box placed in front of the iron-bellied stove. I left the shotgun on the kitchen table, beside the covered bucket of clean water I had pulled from the hand pump earlier that evening, and grabbed a sheet from the line strung across the living room. I started pulling down panties, too, and anything else embarrassing.

  Just in time. Steven trudged inside, breathing hard—dragging that blanket-wrapped body across my floor. He didn’t stop for directions. Just moved toward the couch, one slow inch at a time. A cat peered from beneath the quilt and hissed.

  I helped sling the body on the couch. A foot slipped free of the blanket, still wearing a shoe. The leather had melted into the blackened skin. Steven and I stared at that foot. I wanted to cry—it was the proper thing to do—but except for a hard, sick lump in my throat, my eyes burned dry.

  “What about you?” I asked Steven quietly. “They know you brought him here?”

  “I put the fire out,” he replied, and pulled off his hat with a shaking hand. “Don’t know if I can go home after that.”

  I rubbed his shoulder. “Put the horses in the barn, then take my bed. This’ll be awhile.”

  “Our dad,” he began, and stopped, swallowing hard. Crumpling the hat in his hands. He could not look at me. Just that blackened foot. I stepped between him and the couch, but he did not move until I placed my palm on his chest, pushing him away. He gave me a wild look, haunted. I noticed, for the first time, that he smelled like smoke.

  But I didn’t have to say a word. He turned and walked out the front door, head down, shoulders pinched and hunched. Some of the cats followed him.

  I stayed with the body. Sat down at the bottom of the couch, beside that exposed foot. It took me a long time to peel off the shoe. Longer than it had to. I wanted to vomit every time I touched that warm, burned skin. I peeled and pulled, and finally just cut everything away with a pair of old scissors. Steven passed through only once, from the front door to my bedroom. If he looked, I didn’t know. I ignored him.

  I unrolled the body from the blanket. Worked on all those clothes—and the other shoe. Stripped off what had been hand-sewn pants made of coarse denim, and a shirt of a softer weave. The beard I knew so well was gone. So was that face, except for blackened skin and exposed bone. His mouth was open, twisted into a scream so visceral his lower jaw had unhinged.

  “Stupid,” I whispered to him, rubbing my eyes and running nose. “You had nothing to prove.”

  Same as me. Nothing to prove. Nothing at all.

  I had brought in a knife with the scissors—sterilized in boiling water and wrapped in a clean rag covered in some faded drawing of a black mouse in red pants. I did not want to touch the blade, but I did. I did not want to hold my arm over that open mouth, but I did that, too. Sucked down a deep breath. Steeled myself. Cut open my wrist.

  Nothing big. I wasn’t crazy. But the blood welled up faster than I expected. My vision seemed to fade behind a white cloud, and I almost lay down on that burned body. But I took a couple quick breaths, grit my teeth, and stopped looking at the blood.

  Just that mouth. Just that mouth I held my wrist over. Swallowing all those little drops of my life.

  It took a while. I didn’t want to make a mistake. This was the worst I had ever seen. So bad I began to wonder if this was the end, the last and final straw. Got harder to breathe after that. My throat burned. Cats pawed my legs and took turns in my lap, butting my chin and kneading my thighs with their prickly little claws. One of them licked a charred finger, but didn’t try to chew, so I let that go.

  My wrist throbbed. So did my head, after a time. I kept at it. Until, finally, I noticed a little color around his lips. A hint of pink beneath the blackened skin. I closed my eyes, counting to one hundred. When I looked again, it wasn’t my imagination. Pink skin. Signs of life.

  I pressed my wrist against his burned mouth and felt his lips tighten just a hairsbreadth. Good enough for me. I was exhausted. I didn’t move my wrist, but stretched out on the couch beside him, ignoring the smell and crunch of cooked skin. A cat walked up the length of my hip, while another perched on the cushion above me, licking my hair. Purrs thundered, everywhere.

  And that mouth closed tighter.

  I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  I WOKE CHOKING, water trickling down my throat.

  But there was also a hand behind my head and something hard on my lips, and both flashed me back to the bad days. I sat up fighting, heart all thunder. My fist slammed into a hard chest.

  A naked man squatted in front of me, gripping a cup of water in his hand. Scared me for a moment, terrified me, part of me still asleep—but then I took a breath and my vision cleared, and I saw the man. I saw him.

  He was bald, scorched, raw. Not much better than a half-cooked chicken, and certainly uglier. But his eyes were blue and glittering as ice, and I smiled crooked for that cold gaze.

  “Henry.” I wiped water from my mouth, trying not to tremble. “Aren’t you a sight?”

  “Amanda,” he replied. But that was it. Only my name. That other hand of his still held the back of my head. I looked down. My wrist had been bandaged. I saw other things, too, and dragged the quilt from the couch to toss over his hips. His mouth twitched—from bitterness or humor, I couldn’t tell—but he leaned in to kiss me.

  Just my cheek. Slow and deliberate, lingering with our faces pressed close. I slid my arms around his neck and held tight.

  “Don’t make me cry again,” I whispered.

  Henry dragged in a deep breath. “How did I get here?”

  “Steven.”

  He leaned harder against me. “Did anyone see him?”

  “We haven’t talked about what happened. But I’d say yes.” I pulled away, speaking into his shoulder: a patchwork of pink and blackened flesh. “He said you saved lives.”

  “I gave in.” Henry’s fingers tightened in my hair. “I killed.”

  “Monsters.”

  “I killed,” he said again, shivering. “I violated God’s rule.”

  You did what you had to, I wanted to tell him, but those were cheap words compared to what he needed; and that was more than I could give him.

  Bedsprings creaked from the other room. I glanced toward the window. Still dark out, but it had to be close to dawn. I heard birds, and the goats; and farther away, that dog barking. I tried to stand. Henry grabbed my wrist. “You need to rest. What you did last night—”

  “I’m fine,” I lied, blinking heavily to keep my vision straight. “Stay here.”

  But he didn’t. He wrapped the quilt around his hips and limped outside with me, followed by several cats, bounding, twining, pouncing in the grass. Little guards. Cool air felt good on my face, and though Henry did not take my hand, our arms brushed as we walked.

  I had built the rabbit hutch inside the barn. Horses stirred restlessly when we entered, and so did the goats in their dark pen, but the chickens were quiet. I felt all the animals watching as I undid the latch and reached inside for a sleek brown body. The rabbit trembled. So did Henry, when I handed it to him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t watch,” he murmured, but almost in the same breath he bit the rabbit’s throat. It screamed. So did he, but it was a muffled, relieved sound. I looked away. All the other rabbits were huddled together, shaking. I could hear Henry feeding, and it was a wet sucking sound that made my skin crawl and my wrist throb.

  I counted seconds. Counted until they added up to minutes. Then I took another rabbit from the hutch and held it out, head turned. Henry took it from me and walked away. No longer limping. I heard the rabbit scream before he reached the door.

  I did chores. Freshened the water for the goats, brushed the horses down with handfuls of hay and the palms of my hands. Thought, again, about building a pen for some pigs and how much I’d have to trade upriver for several in an upcoming litter I’d heard about in town. I wanted to get set bef
ore winter. Trees needed cutting, too, for firewood. I had been putting that off.

  When I left the barn, I found Henry near the garden, digging a hole just large enough for two dead rabbits. Soil was wet and smelled good, like the tomatoes ripening on the vines. I saw light on the horizon.

  “I’ll finish that,” I said. “You need to get inside.”

  “I need a walk,” he mumbled. I realized he had been weeping. “I don’t want to see Steven.”

  “Too bad.” I crouched, taking his hand. His skin appeared healthier, burn marks, fading. “You may be all he has now. Besides, it’s too close to dawn for a walk. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Stupid,” he echoed, and pulled his hand away. “You should have seen how my dad—how they—looked at me. How they’ll look at Steven now. My fault, Amanda. I was too weak to leave.”

  The rabbits were still warm, but hollow, flattened. Drops of blood coated their throats. I dropped them into the hole Henry had dug and pushed dirt over their bodies.

  “Staying was harder than leaving,” I said, but that was all. The house door creaked open, somewhere out of sight, then banged shut. Henry tensed. I backed away. I doubt he noticed. Too busy watching his brother, who strode down the path toward us—just a shadow in the predawn light, shoulders hunched, hands shoved deep in his pockets, hat tilted low over his eyes.

  I left them alone. Went back to the house for my shotgun and a coat, and then headed down to the fence. Looking for monsters.

  Cats followed me.

  THE LAND HAD been in the family a long time. Long enough for stories to be passed down, stories that never changed except for the weather, or the animal, or the person: stories involving my kin, who were neighbors and friends to the Plain People. Or the Amish, as my mother had called them, respectfully.

  She was dead now, gone a couple years. She and my father had both survived the Big Death, though cancer and infection finally killed them. Mundane, compared to what had destroyed most everyone else: a plague that struck cities, a virus that killed in hours or days. My brother was lost that way—gone to college in Chicago, which didn’t exist anymore. It was for him that I didn’t like hearing stories about the Big Death, though some refugee survivors seemed to get kicks from the attention they received when telling the tale. Blood in the streets, and riots, and the government quarantining the cities and suburbs with tanks and barricades, and guns. No burials for the millions dead, no burials for the cities.

  Just the forests that had grown up around them. An unnatural growth, some said. Cities of the dead, swallowed by trees. And, in the intervening years, other strange things. Unnatural visitations.

  But folks didn’t like to tell those stories. Plague was easier to swallow than magic.

  The fence around my land was made of wood planks instead of strung barbed wire. Maybe my great-grandfather had built the thing, or his father—I didn’t know for sure—just that it was older than living memory, and had been tended and mended over the last hundred years by people who knew what they were doing; so many times over, there probably wasn’t much original wood left in the damn thing.

  It was a good fence. And I’d made my own additions.

  Still dark out. Skies clearing, revealing stars. I checked the gate at the end of the driveway. Couldn’t see much on the other side, except for a splash of something dark on the gravel. Blood, maybe. No body. Dragged away into the woods with Pete-Pete’s bones. I undid the lock, crossed over. Shotgun held carefully. Cats walked with me, but didn’t hiss or flatten their ears. Just watched the shadows beyond the road, in the trees. I didn’t hear anything except for birds.

  “Hiding from the light,” said a quiet voice behind me. I didn’t flinch. One of the cats had glanced over its shoulder, which was warning enough.

  Henry stepped close, still naked except for the quilt. I said, “You should be in the house.”

  “I have time. Not safe here, all by yourself.”

  “Got an army.” I held up my gun and glanced at the cats. “Steven?”

  He said nothing. Just took a few jolting steps toward the woods. I grabbed him, afraid of what he would do. He didn’t fight me, but the tension was thick in his arm. I pretended not to see the sharp tips of his teeth as he pulled back his lips to scent the air.

  “They’re in there,” he said, his voice husky. “I tasted their blood last night.”

  I tightened my grip, both on his arm and the shotgun. Cats twined around our legs. “Did you like it?”

  Henry looked at me. “Yes.”

  “It’s not a sin,” I said, “to be yourself. You told me that.”

  “Before I was turned into this.” He touched his mouth, pressing his thumb against a sharp tooth. “I was called a demon last night. Dad put the torch to me himself, and I didn’t stop him. I kept hoping he would stop first.”

  I squeezed his arm. “Come on. Before the sun rises.”

  “I have time,” he said again, but gently, holding my gaze. “Please, let’s walk.”

  So we did. On the dangerous side of the fence, outside the border of the land; my cornfields, and the potatoes, and the long rows of spinach, green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I didn’t have a rabbit problem. Cats strolled along the rails and through the tall grass, which soaked the bottoms of my jeans. Henry did not notice the wet, or chill. He watched the forest, and the sky, and my face.

  “Stop,” I said, and knelt to examine a weather-beaten post. It was hard to see. I had no batteries for the flashlights stored in the cellar, but I had traded for some butane lighters some years back, and those still worked. I slipped one from my pocket, flipped the switch. A little flame appeared. I needed it for only a moment.

  “It looks fine,” Henry murmured.

  “You always say that,” I replied, and held out my finger to him. He hesitated—and then nipped it, ever so carefully, on the sharp point of his tooth. I felt nothing except a nick of pain, and maybe sadness, or comfort, or affection—love—but nothing as storybooks said I should feel; no shiver, no lust, no mind-meld. I had done my research in the library, which still stood in town, governed by three crones who lived there and guarded the books. I had read fiction, and myths, and looked at pictures on the backs of movies that couldn’t be played anymore. But in the end, none of it meant much. Problems just had to be lived through.

  I smeared a spot of my blood on the fencepost and said a prayer. Nothing big. It was the feeling behind the words that mattered, and I prayed for safety and light, and protection. I prayed to keep the monsters out.

  We moved on. A hundred feet later, stopped again. I repeated the ritual. Weak spots. No way to tell just from looking, but I knew, in my blood, in my heart.

  “They got through last night,” Henry said, watching me carefully. “Past the fence to the front door. That’s what started it. I was in the barn, cleaning the stalls. I heard Mom scream.”

  “I’m sorry.” I glanced at the sky—lighter now, dawn chasing stars. Sun would soon be rising. “I’ll swing around the farm today and see if I can’t shore up the line without your folks seeing me.”

  “Take Steven with you.”

  I shook my head, patting the tabby rubbing against my shins. “Won’t do that. If they try and hurt him—”

  “Then we’ll know. It’s important, Amanda.”

  I started walking. “Have him talk to me about it. His choice. No pressure from you.”

  Henry stayed where he was, clutching the quilt in one hand. His broad shoulders were almost free of burned skin; and so were his arms, thick with muscle. He had been teethed on hard labor, and it showed.

  But Henry was a good-looking man when he wasn’t burned alive; and it hurt to feel him staring at me. Staring at me like I wanted to be stared at—with hunger, and trust, and that old sadness that sometimes I couldn’t bear.

  I looked away, just for a moment. One of the cats meowed.

  When I turned back he was gone.

  NO ONE KNEW, of course. About the blood on the fence. Prior
to last night, no one had known about Henry’s affliction, either. Just Steven and me.

  Small town. Caught on the border of a government-registered Enclave, one of hundreds scattered across the former United States. Not many official types ever came around, except a couple times a year with fresh medicines and other odds and ends—military caravans, powered by gas. No one else had fuel. Might be some in the quarantined cities, but I couldn’t think of anyone who would go there. The virus might still be active. Waiting in the bones.

  Twenty years, waiting. Little or no manufacturing in all that time; no currency, no airplanes, no television or postal service, or ice cream from the freezer; or all the little things I had taken for granted as a kid and could hardly remember. Just stories now. Lives that were and would never be again. The past, gone unmissed.

  Maybe it was for the best. Survivors of the Big Death had to make do with leftovers. Farming experience was more valuable than guns. So was living without electricity and plumbing. Which meant—to the dismay of some—that Amish, and folks like them, now held the real power. Government was encouraging them to spread out, establish new agricultural communities—from Atlantic to Pacific. Nothing asked for in return, though it had created an odd dynamic. I’d heard accusations of favoritism in business dealings, complaints about cold shoulders and standoffishness. Other things, too—bitter and sour.

  But not all communities were the same, and if you were a good neighbor, the Plain People were good to you. Even if, when you knew them too well, they had their own problems. Religion was no cure for dysfunction.

  I rode in the wagon beside Steven. Brought my shotgun—unloaded in case anyone checked. Shells were in my pockets. Knives, hidden inside my boots. We weren’t the only ones on the road, which had been one of those two-lane highways back in the old days. Still a highway, just not for cars—which rusted at the side of the road. Relics of another age. None had been dumped in the fields. Plenty of land, maybe, but it all needed to be used to grow food. Vast vegetable gardens and grazing cattle surrounded several battered trailer homes. Little kids playing outside waved to us, and went back to chasing the dog.