He stood frozen for a long time, like a memorial statue, until my neck strained from craning up to watch him. Then his elbow betrayed him. He jerked. I heard myself gasp quietly. He didn’t even attempt to catch himself. He just allowed his limbs to fold and collapse until he stuttered against the bark and slid rigidly to the ground.
He flopped down on his back in the sound of tumbling gear. His arms and legs toppled beside him until he was as flat as a corpse. I had never seen him lay down except to sleep. He rarely sat; his arms were always engaged, hands always to purpose. Yet there he was, lifeless and breathing.
I knew what was happening to him; I knew what he was doing. A part of him nestled deep against his heart was falling away to crawl into the soil with Xavier—that part of him that loved the child too much to leave him alone in the ground. That piece was dying, committing suicide. It would leave a gaping wound that I had thrice in my own soul. I knew the darkness that was welling up in his chest. I mopped the tears from my cheeks and went to lay down in it beside him.
He did not look at me as I shifted to parallel him; I knew that he could not. Aside from the pull of the pain across my puffed, welted, and wet face, he was tumbling deep from behind those eyes. I eased down with him, flat on my back, and watched the leaves move as my eyes lost focus and tears continued to burn tracks down my cheeks. I strove hard to think of nothing at all.
“You were right,” he finally said. Darkness consumed the sky above us. His voice tangled in his throat.
“No,” I said without moving. “I wasn’t.”
I heard him shift as he finally heaved his head up from the dirt, breath whisking out from between his dry lips. He rolled onto his side, turned toward me. I felt his fingers press into my chin as he gently guided my face from the sky.
His sunglasses were off. I did not often see his eyes. I looked into them even less. Something about that connection was intimidating. They were blue, dark around the pupil and pale at the edges. They were swimming in unconsummated tears as he just stared into me for a moment. I could feel those eyes in the pit of my stomach, pressing against my very core.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I couldn’t say anything.
His eyes wavered. He was looking at my mouth. I thought I saw his teeth tug barely at his bottom lip. The sunlight had completely diffused out of the sky as it pressed down upon us.
“We stay with him tonight,” I said, looking down and stumbling on my words.
I dragged myself to my feet and reached down to collect him up. His hand found mine and held it as we moved. We lay on either side of the little grave. He draped his sword over me now as his other hand kept mine and we tried to sleep with him between us one last time.
11
Again, I cried for days as we walked. Just as I had three times before and every day spent grieving them.
Again, he led, and I followed.
He silently offered me more of his canteen to replenish dehydrating tears. We didn’t speak. He walked, and I wept. We had lost together. Not as Dante and I had lost together but as close as I could get with dead sons. It was not like killing together; it was not survival. It was crawling down into the same hole to wrap up in the same pain. I realized it wasn’t the fight that bonded soldiers; it was the fallen.
The cutlass dangled heavy in my hand. I let it slip in my fingertips until he heard it bouncing on the dirt. He stopped and turned to me, lifting the blade and carefully resting it against my shoulder. He let a calloused finger graze the tears from my cheek. Then we walked on.
“North?” I asked.
“We’ve been north. Plus, we wouldn’t make it far before winter hit. We continue west.”
“We can’t go west. You heard him.”
“We have to go west. It’s all that’s left.”
There was nothing west. I knew it. There was nothing anywhere. I didn’t know I could lose anymore, yet somehow I was still granted the horrific privilege. New horrors every day.
I kept seeing Uriah’s face and that fucking twisted smile. My skin continued to crawl at the thought of it. I tried to focus on how satisfying it was to watch that stupid head fall off his body, neck planted in the dirt.
“Z? For what? Fucking zombies?” I knew we were both thinking it.
“No. Anything with a pulse that wants to eat other humans is nothing but a cannibal.”
“You think they were like him? Evolved savages, like you called it?”
“No. Not one of them said a word. None of them were smart enough to win.”
“Neither was he.”
“You saw through him. These were not the savages we’ve seen, but they were not him, either.”
“A whole fucking spectrum now. Lucky us.”
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just have a conversation. I couldn’t just keep marching on. I could feel my face writhing as another wave of pain crawled up my body. As the tears began to burst out of my eyes, I turned and just stormed away, walked fast and hard without looking up, without any direction. I found a tree and pressed my forehead into it until I felt the bark threaten to pierce my skin.
I hadn’t heard him follow me. He stopped. I heard him breathe out slowly, heavily. I felt his hand lightly touch my shoulder, and he turned me to him.
He had never touched me. He had restrained me in role-play as he trained me to fight in the desert; he had snatched my hand or arm to drag me as we ran; he had fumbled at me before collapsing after Uriah’s beers. He had never touched me for sake of physical contact or comfort. With his hand still on my shoulder, he looked at me. He had never actually looked at me before, never maintained eye contact long enough to connect with me. Even at Xavier’s grave when the pain blinded us. He had never really seen me.
I stood frozen, confused, staring back at him. What was that foreign look? Was it good-bye? Was this my mercy killing at last? Could his buried savage look at me so sweetly?
He wrapped his arms around me, brought me close to him. I closed my eyes and collapsed into him, yielded myself, surrendered. I pictured them, my three boys, happy and alive, and waiting for me. I smiled and knew he wouldn’t let it hurt that much to get me to the other side.
Yet he just held me. I felt his hand smooth down my hair and his mouth against my scalp. I felt the tension in his muscles as he truly clutched me to him.
“Not that easy, Parker.”
My name.
I hadn’t heard my name in another’s voice in an eternity. The sound of it sent memory charges blasting in my head, stirred an old version of me. I felt myself sobbing against him as darkness fell around us.
12
I woke up flat on my back on the ground as the sun started to pierce the sky. His arm rested across my hips, sword clutched in his hand. He was on his side, still dozing. His bottom lip dangled, and I could hear his breath playing through his teeth. I felt the weight of his arm on my body and thought of Xavier between us. I looked at the vacant scrap of ground and felt my heart contract. I closed my eyes and tried to remember how to forget a child.
The faded farmlands had disappeared behind us. That lonely tree and tiny grave only haunted our memories. Another fallen, another left behind.
My heart wanted to think about Xavier, Dante, Eli, Jordi. My soul wanted to sink out of my body and into the ground with them. There were too many ghosts; we were outnumbered. The feeling of his arm against me, the sound of his breathing pooling in the dirt beside me was all that kept me grounded in the flesh.
I wished I could have rolled over and pressed my face into the warmth of his neck.
“The mountains are coming,” he mumbled.
I rolled my head to look at him. He had not moved; his eyes were still closed; his hand still draped over my body.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. No way around them to get west. Then to the desert again.”
“The desert where we started?”
“No, not exactly. But close. I’m not sure we would have made it had we not stumbl
ed on those prepper rations.”
We both fell silent for a moment, trying to forget what else we had found there. I felt the heat of tears filling my eyes.
“Only problem is the pass,” he said as he finally stirred and sat up.
“How’s that?”
What was this conversation shit? What was this discussing the plan? My voice barely knew how to communicate this much anymore, but I finally didn’t feel so claustrophobic trapped alone in myself. There was no space between us anymore, no silence. There was no point with what we had lost together.
“Smartest course would be to take a road,” he said.
We hadn’t set boots on a road or a street outside of a city since he found me. The point was to avoid any vestiges of civilization unless stocking up on supplies. Stay away, stay hidden. Avoid the savages.
Maybe there wouldn’t be savages scouring a remote mountain pass. It would be less likely than an abandoned four-lane interstate. But I understood the risk: exposed in the open, walking down the skeleton of the societal empire.
“So we risk it,” I said.
What did we really have to lose anymore?
He rolled up onto his feet and stood beside me. I looked up and found his hand waiting for me. It confused me for a moment, those dirty, outstretched fingers wavering in the air beside my face. My own hand remembered the protocol. I let my fingers slide along his calluses as he gripped and pulled me up beside him.
His fingers lingered around mine, as they did when we slept beside Xavier’s grave. He loitered just inside my space, as he did the night Uriah drugged him. Time hesitated in our suspended animation, as it did every time he was near me now. Then he released my fingers, and we just started walking on, as we always did.
Each step brought us higher, inching up in altitude, ramping up in incline. A seemingly endless sea of waving prairie grass began to climb in the distance, aspiring into foothills.
“They aren’t Colorado Rockies, but they are still damn beautiful,” he said as the horizon began ascending in the distance.
Beautiful was a strange and foreign word. For all the sublime images I glimpsed in the wreckage of our wanderings—stepping onto a silent carpet of wildflowers so vibrant I had to squint, heat lightning snaking up into thunderheads over the desert after I buried Dante, a million stars stretched by my tears consuming the sky in the absence of light, the sunlight being split into sharp rays by the remaining shards of once mighty buildings—the sound of that word remained almost mocking of the fallen out world through which we trudged. Yet in these steps along the precursor to continental collision, it did feel appropriate. The Earth rose up high above us, reminding us how insignificant we were, how easily we could be lost and forgotten as these rocks remained unchanged and unaffected. They had witnessed species rise and fall long before our pathetic demise.
“So how do we find this road through the mountain pass?” I asked.
“Ever since Manifest Destiny, there has always been a way west. All the way to the coast. We’ll just have to chase a little civilization, trace the highways out of the next town at a distance until we have to use them to cross. It’s going to get cold. Even though it’s not winter. The altitude.”
“Like hypothermia cold?”
“Unlikely. More just uncomfortable nights.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had a comfortable night.
I felt that altitude gaining on us the farther we moved. Each step had my perpetually fatigued muscles working harder to march me up the increasing slope. Long stale grass and lonely yucca plants bowed to exposed rock and trees. Walking became climbing. For all my following and slaughtering, I did not have mountain lungs. My body insisted I note its many tiny objections.
My chest still felt vacant without him snuggled there. My body had not adjusted to his sudden absence. It had been so hungry to replace the stimulation of motherhood; it was reluctant to release the brief figment I had only just embraced. I felt a hole on and inside my chest. My shoulders felt light without the carrier weighing them. I caught my hand wandering up to rest on his back that was no longer there.
We snaked around trees, weaving our way upwards. The sky peeked down at us from between piney branches, sun winking among the shadows. Then the trees broke. The ground leveled to birth a clearing, small and isolated.
“Is that a lake?” I said.
“Yeah. A little one.”
“I need a bath.” I tried not to conjure up visions of a warm, frothy bubble bath with candles, wine after the boys had been fighting me the entire day, and Dante downstairs wrestling them into exhaustion. I just wanted to be clean, to wash the film from my skin.
“Gonna be cold.” He almost laughed at me.
“Do you remember the last time I had a bath?”
“Uh, the last time we saw a river. Weeks before that town. River wasn’t that clean, either.”
“Exactly. This even looks clean. I think I’ll brave the cold.”
The world smelled clean up here where the air was thin, where the wall of pine trees enveloped us. I could see in his demeanor that he was home, the way his body language spoke to the environment, the composition of the Earth around him in a familiar tongue. I could see wanting this mountain to be my home, right beside this lake, where we could pretend the world below us did not exist.
I slowly stripped off all my layers—dirt, dried blood, regret—and left them piled at my feet. I felt the air embrace every part of me, and for the briefest of moments, I felt free, reborn. The tempered liberation of being naked.
My body was not what it was in my other life. What had once been rounded hips and a gentle belly had disintegrated into leaned and stretched flesh. My bones jutted out from the pale and dirty skin; my muscles strung tightly between knobby joints. Emaciated was a word that played in my mind as I let my eyes actually wander the foreign landscape of my own form for the first time since I had a mirror in my safe little home.
I had always hated my body. Since adolescence, I stood before my reflection, wrinkling my nose as I took handfuls of skin wherever I could. My stomach was too soft; my legs were too short; my hair was too wavy; my face was not symmetrical enough. Now I longed for the stubby legs I remembered, for the healthy belly I despised, for the hydrated skin at which I relentlessly picked. I never appreciated the beauty Dante saw in me, and now it was as dead as he was. I was the walking corpse of that woman.
I fully envisioned my old body, my true skin one last time. I permitted myself to remember the way Dante would smile and wet his lips when I came out of the shower naked and dripping.
I took tentative, naked steps across the ground until I felt the damp shore beneath the soles of my feet then the bite of the crisp water. The cold was abrupt, abrasive yet somehow welcome. The longer I wriggled my toes against the cool temptation of paralysis, the more my skin relaxed into the sensation, embraced the temperature. As the water pooled around my ankles and I felt the clean chill climb my legs, I looked back at him. Just join me. Just touch me. He looked down and purposefully trudged off to accomplish something. I let sliding steps on the slippery lake bottom guide me to the deep; then I let the water consume me. I felt revitalized as the shock of the cold resonated through my entire skeleton.
As I floated aimlessly, breasts and knees teasing the surface, I did not think; I did not remember. I only mused at stray clouds meandering across the forgotten sky. The water started to feel comforting, and the air licked my wet exposed flesh into chills.
Couldn’t I drown right here? Couldn’t it end just this easily? Peaceful for once.
When my skin started to sag waterlogged from my bones, I dragged myself back to the parched shore. He had returned and continued to busy himself. I stood at the water’s edge. And waited. Water snaked down my bare flesh as the wind licked me into goose bumps. And I waited. I felt my skin tighten and contract. I heard the water splatter from the unkempt ends of my hair. I felt droplets chasing the curve of my hips.
I waited u
ntil he looked at me; then I just stared at him. React. See me.
My catatonia was making him uncomfortable. He dropped my gaze and tried to fumble back to whatever fake task only to find my naked stare still lingering. I was beginning to air dry. For once, he didn’t want to face me; for once, he didn’t want to confront me. For once, I intimidated him somehow. Yet I could not keep retreating. I could not keep wrestling my hungry flesh. This time, I waited.
Finally, he stood, eyes to the ground. He reached down and flipped one of the meager blankets I had clawed out of Xavier’s swaddling closet. He stepped slowly until he was square in front of me and, without looking up, wrapped me in the blanket. Slowly, meticulously, he draped the fabric over my shoulders and pulled it around me.
My eyes burned into his face, but he refused to meet them. He hesitated there before me, with his fingers still tangled in the edges of the cloth. His chin twitched up then recoiled. Then he did look at me. One long, heavy look as he leaned into me.
I felt his breath on my face as my eyes fluttered shut. Then he was gone. I heard his steps crunching away as I held the blanket naked, wet, and alone.
Rejection was a punch in the chest. I felt all the air leave my body as I was left gasping for it. I was stunned, keeping my eyes closed for a long time so I did not have to see his back as he walked away from me. I don’t know what I expected in all those times I fantasized about consummating my desire, yet this reaction left me hollow and aching.
I pulled the blanket tighter around myself, felt the dirty fabric destroying my momentarily clean skin. I surrendered and shrank down to the ground.
I was dressed and already had a small fire burning not far from the water when he wandered back out of the trees. I coiled tightly around myself, hugging my knees into my chest, resting my chin on them. I did not look at him when he approached. I felt the anger stretched thinly over my face; I felt the rejection burrowing into my chest.
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