by Frank Owen
She poured the thick brown liqueur like malt into their cups. They sipped; it tasted of banana peels and salt and the dirt under her fingernails. Stringbeard was wiping his face again; his eyes were wet, blinking against the creamy yellow threads that had gathered at the lower lids.
‘So what now?’
‘I’m going to rebuild it,’ he said. He twisted a corner of the fabric into a cone and shoved it into his ear, working the cloth around until it hit the sweet spot.
‘Fieldstone?’
‘Yup. It’ll be smaller. And I’ll move it up the slope a bit.’ He examined the muck he had extracted from the ear canal.
Oh, Jesus. If he eats it, I’m going to retch, Vida thought.
‘Well, I wish you all the best.’
He flicked the cloth, cocked his head. ‘You could stay.’
‘It sounds nice, but I can’t.’
‘I’d like you to stay.’
His hands were beginning to shake again, and she reached out secretly for the stick.
‘I’d like to stay, very much.’
‘Then stay.’
‘My mother is sick. She’s—’
Vida had not finished speaking when he launched himself over the bar. Stringbeard’s crazy weight fell on top of her and held her down, her hands pinned to the floorboards.
‘Shh-shh-shh,’ he was saying, his hot breath puffing down into her face. Vida kept struggling, kneeing his ribs and kicking her boot heels against the butchery meat of his back and sides.
He ignored the strikes.
The string of mucous had come loose from the corner of his eye. It dangled low over her face, the fungus of his beard prickling her neck.
Stringbeard blinked, deliberate, and the strand fell slickly onto her cheek, the corner of it touching her lips. So quickly, and it was done. ‘I’m keeping an eye on you, baby,’ he panted, and then he let go of her hands.
Vida bucked to throw him off. She scrubbed her sleeve across her face. He watched her like a lover, then stood up and walked across the room to the doorway.
‘My invitation stands,’ he said.
He hopped down onto the burnt earth beyond.
Vida grabbed a bottle from the shelf, pulled the stopper from its neck and poured the booze into her mouth, gargling against pestilence. She spat it out on the floor as soon as the saliva rushed to mingle with it, diluting the alcohol. The roof of her mouth blistered on the fifth gulp, but Vida kept going. She only stopped when she got to the end of the bottle.
9
Vida waited a minute or so but Stringbeard had disappeared. Probably gone to piss out the gallon of booze he had drunk, she thought. She needed to go herself.
Vida threw her stick over the counter and followed it, her knees and elbows taking most of her weight. I’ll pay for that tomorrow. She was remarkably unscathed, considering the last few months of her existence. From the outside there was almost no way to tell that she and everyone she knew were working their way through the End Times, edging towards some reckoning. The survivors weren’t always the ones you thought.
Vida wanted to run, get as far away from this place and that man as she could, but there was a reason she was here at all. Meds, meds, meds. Where were they? No one made camp without a stash for emergencies. Her boots clacked dully over the boards of the barn, sending up little puffs of sawdust as she went, so that at any moment Vida expected a fiddle and banjo to start up behind her, a frilled chorus of good-time girls to burst out of a room backstage, poised for leg-waving and giggles. If only this was a musical, she thought. Wouldn’t that be a dream worth waking up from?
At the first doorway she pulled the pale curtain back, but the room seemed to be for storage. There were sheets draped over chairs, the shapes underneath like upturned woven baskets, or a piano again, something that required human intervention to make it sing. If she wasn’t careful, Vida told herself, she was going to come over all sentimental. Save it, sister.
The next room was empty, and it began to register with her that searching for a bathroom was pretty pointless, considering the sorts of acts she had been performing outside for a while now.
‘A girl can dream, can’t she?’ Vida breathed to herself as she went on. ‘Does a bear shit in the woods? Yup, yup, yup. And so do I. Desperate times, friends and neighbors. Desperate fucking times.’
The third room, of course, was a bedroom. A dormitory, maybe. At least it looked that way to Vida from where she stood in the doorway, hesitating at the boundary.
In the gloom she saw that someone had, very carefully, laid out every pair of shoes they could find so that they made a square at the edges of the room, like a fence. They were arranged in twins, all facing inwards towards the myriad single beds and the big bed in the center – high heels, boots, runners and pumps, some like the strappy ones Ruth had tried to make her wear once, long ago. Mary Janes, she had called them, the old name of a forgotten child like a talisman. All the school kids in South Africa still had to wear them, her mother had said, and laughed.
She bent to look more closely at the display, and the smell rose to meet her: sweat and foot dirt, but also something like bacon gone rancid, the old grease congealed no matter how hard you tried to get rid of it. She thought of their backyard barbecue, the grid blackened with all the burnt offerings of the years.
Vida stood up quickly and swung her bag around to search for her handkerchief mask. She still forgot, sometimes. Unbelievable. The cloth was little help for the stink, but some part of her felt safer behind it.
Vida scanned the beds again and this time she saw that there were small shapes lying in them, their coverlets pulled neatly up.
You don’t want to see this, her mind told her. It’s not going to be anything but terrible.
Still she approached the beds. Their faded covers turned out to be old quilts – the kind that rich ladies back in the day had hung on brass rods from their walls: to be looked at, not used. Vida breathed through her mouth and stared.
The small faces that were turned up to hers were mostly bald – their hair burnt clean off, but the skin resisting. It still stretched in places across the glossy bone, the tendons yearning tight towards absolution. The jaws were strung open, and Vida found herself leaning in to look at the dentition, and the real horror of what she was seeing struck her solidly in the chest.
The heads only held milk teeth.
Vida sat down, and then realized how close she was to the dead kids and their agonized smiles. She scrambled away on her hindquarters and shoved the shoes out of the way when they stopped her escape. Her brain ran on. The Tooth Mouse is coming! The Tooth Mouse is coming! How could he stay away from this undefended bonanza?
She let the chorus cycle. Sometimes you had to go with it until your clean self came back.
Her breathing slowed as she worked it out.
This is Stringbeard’s family. He saved them, didn’t he? He took them home and put them to bed, so that they would be safe and sound.
If I had the nerve to get all the way to the big bed in the middle there’d be Missus Stringbeard in all her glory.
But I’d be finding Sleeping Beauty minus her panties. ’Cause that’s what he’s carrying around with him. Even big boys need their blankies.
Indeedy. This was Stringbeard’s Lazarus family.
And he was sure as shit going to come back.
Vida hauled herself to her feet again. She was shaky: maybe the hooch, maybe the shock, or maybe the other. She’d never really been sick, proper sick – but then again no one had ever dripped mucus directly into her mouth. Maybe this was the beginning of Stringbeard’s rage working its way to her brain: these shaking hands, this hollow dread. Vida tested herself, tried to think straight, tried to remember things about her life and about her ma’s. She tried to line them all up in a row, as if doing so would prove something. Dad and The War and the horse and the house, the color of the sitting room curtains and the chip in the enamel toilet, the Sunday waffles and the gray Tuesda
y meatloaf and then no waffles and no meatloaf and no Dad. No anything.
How can you tell if you’re going mad? They always said that the insanity test was a simple one. If you thought you were going crazy, you were probably sane. But folks like Stringbeard, who saw no wrong in what they were doing: those guys were long lost. Gone dogs.
Vida hitched her pack and backed out of the morgue room. Carefully she made her way back to the bar. Was there anything here she could use? Something antiseptic? She took the smallest bottle from the shelf. Some of that juice had burnt. She poked her tongue gingerly at the insides of her cheeks for the raw patches, but it was alright. Vida slid the bottle into her pack. The mouth healed real quick, didn’t it? The cells in the eyes and in the mouth worked twice as hard as the rest of the body. That was what you found when you rubbed your eyes in the morning: that was sleepy dust sprinkled there by some kindly genetic sprite. No matter what you saw the day before, the next morning was your chance to start again.
Except if you were part of the Lazarus family.
Oh, get over it, she told herself. Enough! They aren’t the first dead and they won’t be the last. Now get the hell out of here unless you want to end up the same.
The field outside was quiet. Vida stepped down from the doorway. She crouched and ran in stretches, as if the burnt grass would shield her from the predator she was sure would follow.
But there was only silence. She wasn’t sure what was worse.
She had to find the boys again, no matter how much Dyce had deteriorated. Find them and stay with them this time. It was better to stick together. She’d go on with them toward the coast, maybe find a deserted and crumbling pre-war city and hope to find Ma’s medicine there. What did she call it? Some African word. Muti.
And besides, she owed Dyce some nursing duty. It was the least she could do, having some experience of the sickness as it ate its way through her mama’s flesh, sending her incontinent, then blind, then floppy as a corpse – all her life’s achievements melting into a steady stream of effluent as she lay in her tormenting blankets the same as Lady Lazarus: the joy and the learning and the courage come to nothing at last. It was the least Vida could do, considering that it was her fault Dyce was sick at all.
Then she wondered whether her ma was even still alive, whether leaving her alone in the house had been a terrible mistake. What if she’d died already?
She should go back.
Yes, go back and be with her.
But what use was there in going back just to sit by her bedside and watch her liquefy? Vida had set out for medicine and she’d return with medicine, even if she had to hike back through the night and risk the wind. Come back with the goods or don’t come back at all.
Vida passed over the remains of the Fieldstone gate and looked back up at the dirty stream, sullied by ash. Stringbeard didn’t seem to be following her, thank God. Probably playing house with his ghost family. Vida snorted with a terrible laughter like vomit, and put her hand over her mouth to stop its exit.
It wasn’t difficult, in the end, to find Dyce and Garrett’s tracks – they were punctuated now with rancid black shits.
Dyce was deteriorating fast.
With a trail this obvious, so were Garrett’s odds of escaping the Callahans.
10
Felix felt the cuffs of his wet shirt again, then looked over at the pencil-scratched chart he’d pinned to the wall with a shingle tack. The wind would pick up soon. He weighed the time between his clothes being dry enough to wear and the enforced hibernation the coming breeze would bring. An hour, maybe. He’d give his pants half that time to dry a little more: the other half he’d need for a slow walk to the stream outside to fetch more water – slowly, legs wide apart to keep his pants from chafing his thin skin. Like a cowboy. Felix snorted.
For now though, there was still power in the battery, and rather than let the ancient cells leak their energy into the atmosphere, he’d make the most of them. Felix sat back down at the table with the gun and his drink. He settled the headphones over the shells of his ears and pressed play. The story was the same as it always was.
‘We voted at the New Freemason Lodge on North Porter. That building had no windows: can you believe it, Future Felix? Smelt like paint and wet concrete. We took one car from home, me and my brothers all squashed in the back. The car wasn’t built for that many grown men, but it made sense to go together. Dad let Mom drive, and he played tour guide, pointing out everything that had changed in the town since I’d been away. And I’d been away a while – twenty years, I reckon. I was thirty-nine years old. As hard as my dad tried to say otherwise, I didn’t see that much had changed.
‘At the lodge they made us wait outside in a line in the wind. They let us in one by one. We all put our crosses next to NON-UNIFICATION. And that was that. It was over. We went for breakfast – pancakes at The Road House while Dad went on about the architecture of the lodge and my brothers tried to pick up the waitress, like they were twenty instead of closing in on fifty. Mom stared at the menu for ages and then ordered what she always did – hard scrambled eggs on white. They didn’t get out much.
‘The results were supposed to come in on the weekend, but it came and went and no one heard any word. Another week passed. My return ticket to New York expired. The thing was, I couldn’t stand sleeping in my old room. It had not been touched, except for one thing: the dog had been using my bed. Mom had washed the sheets but there were black hairs everywhere, the smell of Dixie’s piss in the foam mattress.
‘Of course I tried to call New York, ask my landlord to check on the shop, but there was no answer. I tried Mrs Bishop too. Both lines were dead, like there was a blackout. There had been a couple of those that summer. Makes a city panic when that happens. People get crazy: rapes, all kinds of stealing. I tried them again every hour, but I think I knew there was something real bad going on. I could hear my money being burnt, my TVs carried off by looters.
‘Eleven days after the vote, I tried Mrs Bishop again, for the thousandth time, and got a pre-recorded message saying that the Northern states had all voted for Unification: it was all set to happen. That was all there was. Our votes hadn’t meant jack-shit. It was like they were always going to do it.
‘I had never thought that war was romantic. That’s for little kids with their action men and their pop guns. It was different for my brothers. They opened their safes and searched the attic and the cellar, stacking up the weapons they’d hoarded over the years. It’s amazing what people can accumulate.
‘At dinner Dad ranted. It was always about the South and its history and culture and struggle. He used to say it real quiet, “Those fuckers up north”, and Mom let him get away with that language, because it was true. “Those fuckers up north just want to get their hands on what we got, but we’ll show them.”
‘It was true, I guess. They did want what we had the oil, for sure – but most of what they wanted was our say in how America conducted itself. For some time there’d been this idea that America could do much more for the world and for itself without the bullshit of dealing with all fifty states. You know that story? The man married to forty-nine wives who’s trying to build a garden shed? After everyone has their say, it takes thirty years before the shed is built – and the kicker is it’s not even a shed in the end. It’s an outdoor shower with gold taps and no running water. Northern states seemed to buy into the idea: it was sold to them pretty hard. But the South was never going to go for it – maybe we just kinda liked the idea of an outdoor shower with gold taps instead of another fucking shed. Bear in mind that back then there were more garden sheds on the continent than people.
‘And we all had our theories about what the North was going to do with all that power, anyway. Colonize Russia. Declare war on China. Fuck up Mexico once and for all. Finish the job they’d started on Africa.
‘And how’s this? To fight the North, the South needed to do exactly what we voted against: we had to unify. Some of the more ra
dical radio stations broadcast a plan, set out by a collection of governors and town mayors. It was really happening.
‘We drove north in convoy, a stream of buses filled with men of all ages, armed and ready. I was in a yellow school bus with my brothers and my dad. Gabe gave me a handgun, and Levi tried to make me handle a shotgun. I rode with the guns across my lap. I thought they would burn if I touched them, but when I did they were cold. Some of the others were trying to get up the spirit to sing songs, to take our minds off where we were going, and what we were going to do. But when I looked outside it was the same – dark and drab and dry – except that there were already fewer vehicles on the roads. People were beginning to understand that fuel was a problem.
‘We traveled for forty-eight hours, day and night, clean out of Oklahoma and into Kansas. In those eleven days of silence, the northern states had set up a frontline that ran from coast to coast – through California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia. If you think that’s quick, remember Berlin. The chain-link goes up first, and then they start tearing up the streets. The concrete comes later, but by then it’s too late. All you really need is some men with guns and a taste for killing, and the fear does the rest.
‘On the morning of the third day, the school bus stopped. And there it was. In the distance, running across the road, was the barbed wire and the concrete blocks. Behind them were police cars and men kneeling to rest their rifles on the barriers, aiming them right at us. Two weeks earlier, I’d been selling Emersons and Magnavoxes and Zeniths to these very people. I stepped off that bus and found a trench to bunk down in, and I knew that I would never see New York again. Goodbye, Empire State Building and the A-train. Goodbye, pretzels and muggings and Son of Sam. Goodbye, Dallas, you furry ever-loving fuck.
‘I suppose you can judge the length of a war by how long it takes for the first shot to be fired. We were Americans. How could we kill one another? No one pulled a trigger for a full two years: it was all posturing and positioning and failed negotiations. That’s when I heard Renard’s name for the first time, this doctor who was treating the president for whatever the fuck.