Savages

by Christina Bergling

  “How does one get a Z-shaped war wound?”

  “Well, clearly I was attacked by what used to be Zorro. Some habits never die!”

  He slashed a Z into the air with a nearby stick. They both laughed; I rolled my eyes.

  “I have my own war wounds,” he said as his laughter died out. “Not from this war though.”

  “Afghanistan?” Uriah asked.

  “Nah, Iraq.” He lifted his right pant leg to reveal the warbled, welted flesh spotted with tufts of leg hair that I had seen and silently questioned since the first time I saw him bathe. “IED,” he said curtly.

  Then they were quiet, momentarily sullen. Why was he telling him this? He had never told me this in all our days and survivals. I had seen the scars, and he had told me nothing. Yet here he was confessing his entire buried life to this stranger. Was he going to tell him all about his dead wife, the one tidbit I had extracted in all our wanderings?

  “Family?” he asked Uriah, smiling again and looking down at the can in his hands.

  Now he was asking for stories of the last world, actually digging up the pasts he insisted on entombing. I felt my chest tighten. I could feel my irritation tingling in my hands. He never cared what I had lost.

  “No, no. I was a bachelor,” Uriah said. “A single career man. You?”

  “No. Too many deployments, you know.” Now was his turn to lie.

  “Just an ex-husband,” I said shortly.

  “Ah, maybe it is the single who survive these days. Quite the reversal. Hard to tell with most of the others, you know. They are no conversationalists. But then who is this baby?” I hated how he looked at the child, the way his eyes seemed to lick his lips. “Yours?”

  “Yes,” I answered by reaction.

  “Ah, love on the road,” he laughed. “So humanity marches on. He could be the beginning of the repopulation,” he said, lifting his beer.

  I heard the two empty cans hit the flame as they tossed their empties; then they cracked the second round. My very blood begged for just a taste of the numbness I remembered, especially with the twisting pressure blooming in my chest the longer they talked. I could not get comfortable. I could not settle into my skin around him; I could not smile. My eyes lingered on the ground as he shared all I had always wanted to know with this outsider.

  “You remember how it was before it happened?” he said. His tongue wagged loosely in his head now. “Everything was about the goddamned apocalypse. Every movie was about zombies; there were reality shows about doomsday preppers. It’s like we knew.”

  Drunken philosopher. My road prophet. The longer they talked, the more I felt like I was with two strangers.

  “I don’t think the fixation was all about the apocalypse, though,” I finally chimed in. I could not let them wander away completely without me. “I think it always was more an examination of what happens to people when society breaks down, without civilization, what we become in those more natural circumstances. I guess no one figured we’d go this far, though.”

  My words broke upon him, but he did not move or react. As always. Then he shook his head for a moment, seemed to find himself again. He didn’t acknowledge what I said; he didn’t grant me conversation. He just continued on with Uriah as if I was not there at all.

  “So you’ve been coming from the west?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I started in the west, obviously,” Uriah replied. “West is cannibal country, though. You been through Vegas yet? Nothing but a crater. People scurrying around it naked, like ants. Terrifying bug-eyed, gangly creatures. Long ago, back when there were others who spoke, I heard they bury their kills in a mass grave in the center of the crater, where The Strip used to be. Guess you can’t be surprised that a place like that went to hell. But I’ve been all over in these years, running, migrating, searching. They don’t speak anywhere anymore. In the south, they just grunt. Like animals. Crawling around on all fours. The zombies.”

  He smiled at Uriah’s manners and his willingness to blather on about the different subtypes of savages, but something in Uriah’s every word made me bristle. Something in the way he smiled at me out of the corner of his eye made my very guts flinch.

  “North,” Uriah said. “I’m heading north. Maybe where Canada used to be.”

  “You’ve got a long road ahead of you that way,” he said solemnly.

  We both fell silent for a moment. I knew he saw my bloody beaten body, heard me begging him to just let me die when he dragged me back to where I started. There were only graves behind us to the north.

  “Have you ever heard what happened?” He finally asked it, what he always wanted to know.

  “There were many theories at first. You know, before they all died. Everyone had a story from where they were. I heard some sort of degeneration of the brain is causing us to devolve. Virus or biological warfare. Zombies, of course. Then nothing at all, that this was us all along.” He looked at me when he said this. “I’ve found no answers. If anyone knew, they are long dead.”

  He hungrily drank down the information, parched from his isolation with me. Being around someone who cared, who knew anything, animated him. I watched myself being replaced with each word, watched him seduced by the possibility of camaraderie. I shifted awkwardly and out of place, shuffling with the child against me.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked Uriah.

  “Me? My personal opinion? At first, I thought it had to be some disease. There was just no way people were like this, that this was us. But the longer I looked at them, the longer I ran from them. I don’t know. Maybe this is just what we are.” And he looked into my eyes again.

  My spine tried to leap out of my back at that look in his eye. I felt a wave of nausea tease at my throat. The child could feel the change in me; he could read my discomfort and started to fuss. He didn’t feel safe against my tensed muscles and cringing skin. I stood and held him against me, turning and walking away from the fire. I held his tiny body up near my face and hushed him. Suddenly, he felt like my only kindred spirit in this empty night.

  I could still hear them talking.

  “You don’t like that theory?” I heard Uriah ask.

  I knew he hated that theory, rejected it to his very core.

  “There was always savagery.” Uriah continued yammering. “People shooting up elementary schools, people scamming others out of every cent to have more money than they could ever spend. Hell, I made my living selling and sensationalizing it on the news. One that really haunted me was a mother who burned her children alive. Locked them up in their house and just set it on fire. Then she played it off as just an accidental house fire, just a tragedy. She was collecting money from all these charities; the community was rallying around and helping her. Until the investigation concluded. She pled insanity of course. They always did.”

  “One of the worst I remember was when on my second tour in Iraq. We busted this terrorist cell in Baghdad. There was a woman involved, not in charge obviously, but still running things. She was having men in the group rape the women so she could then shame them into blowing themselves up as suicide bombers. She told them it was their only chance to regain any honor.”

  Uriah fell silent for the briefest of moments. I could feel the quiet of the night for an instant. My own uterus cringed as I felt that same crushing sensation in my chest that weighed on me every time I heard just one more awful thing.

  “That is a particularly upsetting one,” Uriah said, sipping at his beer again. “But with all this, what you have to ask yourself, my friend, is were we ever really civilized? Could we call any of that civilized? Or was it something we just told ourselves and pretended at? Sure, we were smart enough to think so, but were we ever truly more than animals underneath it all?”

  “No, I don’t believe it. We’re not them.”

  “We are what we are when no one is looking, and we have always been murderers, thieves, rapists, and animals. It’s not that we became something else; we simply devolved into
what we have always been. Civilization was just a flickering illusion. Turn out the lights long enough and you see what we really are.”

  “Not all of us. You can’t generalize and say all of us. Even if we are born animals like you say, everything else is a choice. We choose to be good.”

  “Which makes being good all the more extraordinary. We just never saw it with all our lighted, dancing distractions. Those who were good are dead, my friend. Survival doesn’t favor the civilized, clearly. It’s too bad the good people didn’t survive. You couldn’t survive this and be a good person. One had to be sacrificed. Tell me, if something threatened those two, would you not turn savage, too?”

  “That’s different. Defense is not savagery.”

  “Semantics, my friend.”

  If he said my friend one more time, I was going to drop the child, sprint over, and tear his head from his scrawny neck. Then how savage would I be to him? Would he execute me for slaughtering his new comrade?

  I knew I wasn’t good; I was already dead. I had died twice in Chicago and once more somewhere in the desert. There was no goodness left in me when I watched the life fade from a baby’s eyes that looked just like mine. I wouldn’t have wanted to see what this world would have made my boys. I didn’t know why he insisted I was like him; he always thought I was something more than what I was. Maybe that’s why he kept me alive and kept me close all this time. Some imagined glimmer of hope. There were only so many times I could tell him what I was. He saw what he wanted.

  He clung to his humanity, clung to me as evidence of it. I was a walking, breathing reminder that he could still be selfless, he could still care. That obligation held me close to him in a cold, sterile binding. What he felt, I could never really tell. It didn’t matter. Survivors only felt guilt, fear, and regret anymore. Anything else was a memory in those buried pasts. I wasn’t me to him; I was what he needed me to be to remember himself. I let him sacrifice the truth of me a little—tax on the debt I owed him.

  “But you can’t dispute the elegance in the nature of it,” Uriah said, his irritating voice snatching me back from my thoughts. “The sheer fucking brilliance of Mother Nature. The only thing that could finally start to kill us off was us. The evolutionary poetry of it.”

  Their words had emotions smashing around inside me, colliding with my cells. I rocked away from their babbling until the light from the fire began to fail and the edge of shadows curled around my boots. I looked down at the baby’s face I could not see in the dark and let my finger trace his cheek. If it got dark enough, if I closed my eyes tight enough, maybe he could be Jordi or Eli just for a second. Maybe I could be the mother that did not fail them just for a breath. His crying subsided as I looked up into a sky full of stars that I never saw through city lights.

  The crunching of footsteps brought me back. I recognized his shape against the small flames behind him. I could make out Uriah still seated on the same rock. I bounced the child out of habit until he reached me. He stood so close to me, wavering, that I had to look up at him. His features were a mystery in the dark.

  “What’s with you tonight?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just calming him.”

  “Why did you lie to him?”

  “I don’t know. Something about him.”

  “He’s the first we’ve met. You’re just on edge.”

  “Maybe. It’s strange, being around another. Just doesn’t feel right.”

  “He’s proof that it’s not just us. We can’t walk away from that.”

  “What are we going to do? Adopt him, too?”

  “We’re just talking now. But we might want to go with him, find those others.”

  “There’s just something not right about him. Something about the way he looks…” I stopped myself.

  He took another step forward. The alcohol changed him; he lingered. His chest bumped into my shoulder as he swayed in his own boots.

  “You know I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said softly, down into my neck. I felt his hand rise up along my back but then heard it fall back alongside his body.

  I looked up into the black of his face, arms still wrapped around the child.

  “He needs to sleep,” I said. “I think you need to sleep, too.”

  “Okay, Amber,” he slurred.

  I tried to not let his wife’s name cut me in half. I tried to just breathe past it until it fell out of the moment. I had to take care of him and the child. I knew somewhere deep in my guts that I had to keep them close to me tonight.

  “Uriah!” I called, not looking away from his rocking form. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

  “All right,” he hollered from the fire. “Good night!”

  Good night. Such foreign and forgotten pleasantries.

  He was walking sideways when I slid my arm under his and guided him. I felt his body weight swaying against me as I tried to balance him and the child. I led us until I felt safe, far enough away. When I stopped, he wobbled to his knees. I slid the coat from his shoulders and wrapped the baby up and placed him gently on the ground.

  As I set the child on the dirt, I felt his hand at my hip. He guided me to my knees beside him. In the dimmest light, I could make out a lazy smile across his lips. His fingers stumbled along my cheek, and his exhales plumed alcohol against my face. I held my breath, waited. Then his body lurched to the side. I clutched his arm and leaned back to counter his fall. Struggling and shaking, I eased him to the ground beside the child.

  “Thank you,” he kind of laughed.

  I heard him turn to his side. His weapon scraped the dirt as he drug it up and around the baby, draping his arm over the sleeping body.

  I collapsed with a sigh onto my back beside them. I could hear them both breathing in the dark next to me. I listened to make sure I heard nothing else before my mind slipped off the edge of consciousness.

  9

  I woke up to screaming, baby screaming. For the briefest of moments, my half-sleeping brain held me in bed with Dante snoring beside me as cries echoed down the hall from the nursery. Then I felt the dirt under my cheek and remembered where I was.

  I instinctively reached for the bundle. It was nothing but a crumpled coat. His arm was still over it as he snored passed out—a heavy, lazy, drug-induced breathing.

  By the breaking dawn, I could see Uriah struggling, shushing and trying to wrangle the irate infant. I could make out the wild look in his eyes and the desperation on his face. Must make it quiet. He tried to wrap his arms around the child, yet the babe fought with every fiber of its little being. He squirmed and screamed and bucked. Uriah’s inexperienced hands fumbled and failed to get a grip on the tiny body enough to flee with him.

  I could read the panic in his face; then, in an instant, it changed. He almost snarled, and aggression extended out through his movements. He lowered the babe to the ground, practically dropped him to the dirt, then began clawing at the ground around him for something. I was already sprinting. Before I even saw him grasp the rock, I was on top of him. I dove at him and turned my face to avoid colliding with his. I let my chest deliver the brunt of the impact into his shoulder and send him flying back away from the baby.

  The child was still squalling beside him as I tackled him. Our bodies flopped onto the dirt; I heard the breath rush out of his body as my weight slammed against him. Dust flew up around us in a cloud. He reacted like an overturned turtle, arms and legs shooting out sloppily. I kept my body rigid, concentrated on keeping him incapacitated, on punishing him. He pushed and kicked until he writhed out from under me and forced himself upright.

  He came at me in a flurry of limbs and snorts, untrained and unfocused. He grunted and threw a blur of careless punches. I could have rolled my eyes at his incompetent attempt. I breathed calmly and dodged the impacts, turned his momentum against him. My fury brought me clarity, unleashed my training. He lunged in desperately to grab me. His eyes were wide and wild, his fingers pathetically anxious. I took hold of his arm and
contorted it until it folded against him, wrestling him down to the ground. I kept thinking, he’s one of them.

  He continued his inept fight, bucking and snarling. I moved on top of him and crawled up his body until I could firmly press my shin into his throat. I deprived him of the air required for his wasted exertion. I knelt and pushed until his fingers clawed at and dug into my thigh, trying to lift me. Then I reached to the ground beside us and took his rock high in my hand.

  “No,” he said from behind me.

  I whirled around, still pressing my weight into Uriah’s neck until I could hear him choke. He squinted and staggered as if hungover and shuffled to scoop up the shrieking baby, sword dangling amongst his fingers.

  “He was going to kill Xavier,” I said heatedly. It was the first time I had said the child’s name. “He’s one of them.”

  I saw lucidity flash in his eyes. His posture straightened as he calmly rose up in himself.

  “Take him,” he said.

  I let the rock roll from my fingertips and dug my leg into Uriah’s neck again as I stood, wrapping the baby close in my arms. He was wailing, still panicked, thrashing his tiny body and groping at me with inarticulate hands. I curled my body around him and attempted to envelope him back into some illusion of safety. He pressed his hot cheek firmly against my chest as he sucked at his thumb so hard I could hear it.

  When I looked up, he was standing over Uriah. He dragged him up from his back and to his knees.

  “You’re just like them,” he snarled. “You’re one of them.”

  “We’re all them, my friend.”

  Uriah coughed and rubbed at his throat. His demeanor had changed. Everything I saw in his eyes lay out wide in the open, poured out over for him to finally see. His prim composure was abandoned, and his body regressed to a more primal stance, shoulders rising and rounding, head sinking. He knelt there, before the sword, calm and snickering. He mocked him with his eyes now.

  “She knows.” Uriah nodded at me, stared directly into my eyes then turned back up to him.