South

by Frank Owen

  ‘After that, I don’t remember much. People died, in The War and because of it. Dad survived a heart attack while we were marching west to bolster the line near Phillipsburg and was sent back to Mom. They were old people. They would die soon, and I think The War had a lot to do with that, even though they weren’t in the fighting hand to hand. In a war, everyone is fighting.

  ‘The Southern frontline had had no real training. It had started out straight and turned jagged pretty quick. We made good ground in Kansas, but the line sagged across Nevada and Utah. Word was that in Kentucky we were doing well too.

  ‘Thank God for Texas. It was slow to join, but six years in we found our forces doubled and our strength tripled. I never knew there were so many guns in the United States: Gatlings, RPGs, assault rifles. We stabilized Nevada and Utah overnight, but we had to make sacrifices. It didn’t help that the men who ran the refineries were the ones who went to fight on the frontline. First rations, then no fuel at all. No cars on the road but the military.

  ‘Then Canada joined the North, and the frontline was in no man’s land while more talks went on. I saw my fortieth come and go. Gabe got shot in the leg but wouldn’t go home. Levi joined the saboteurs: he used to come back from across the frontline with stories of exploding bridges and food trucks driven over cliffs and cables cut, sending whole towns into darkness. It’s amazing how quickly a place turns into a ghost town when the lights go out.

  ‘Over the next years, the fighting dragged on. I don’t know how the South hung on. I guess the stories of the Civil War kept people going – but look how that turned out. And then The War was closing in on twenty years, and the North was hurting. The boys up there had not expected anywhere near such a violent retaliation, and here we were, handing them their asses. We began to push further north, breaking lines that had been entrenched since the very beginning. The soldiers we killed on the way were easy meat: pale and undernourished, ghost fighters.

  ‘We were driving the last of the Northern soldiers from some Nebraskan town when the first wind came. We had no idea what was happening to us. The soldiers we were pushing north stopped as the wind began to blow, and they turned to look at us. I searched for some kind of trap – explosives on the buildings or a car bomb, but we were okay.

  ‘It was the smell that gave it away – a sulfurous whiff that caught at the mucous membranes and made you choke. I thought of mustard gas and Agent Orange and the colorless shit that the Russkies used to knock off journalists, and I fucking knew it was something like that. I felt the scrape in my own gullet and watched as the guys around me turned paler, then greenish, then began to bleed from their orifices, like rats poisoned in a factory.

  ‘Renard.

  ‘They must have let the president’s crazy doctor loose in the laboratory. This was full-scale germ warfare.

  ‘When we figured what it was, we turned and ran as best we could. Men were dropping alongside me as we went, coughing up clumps of their lungs, vomiting blood. I couldn’t stop to help them. The Northern soldiers were scared shitless too. They had the vaccine, I found out afterwards, but no one was sure how well it was going to work.

  ‘I found a Jeep, one that had belonged to a commander. I figured he was dead. I took it and then I drove south as fast as I could. I had to hold the wheel with one hand and steady my wrist with the other, I had the shakes so bad. I still don’t know if it was the virus or the terror.

  ‘When I came to the first uninfected soldiers, I managed to stop the Jeep, and I told them through the sweats to get to shelter.

  ‘I can’t say why I survived that first wind. Some people just did. Something in the genes that makes some of us immune. Or lucky. One in a hundred was the number they put to it, and I was that one. The North had won The War, and Renard had destroyed his own country to do it.’

  The tape buzzed and then stuck, and the play button popped up with a click. Felix took off the damp headphones and then he downed the rest of his drink. Just thinking about that first attack made his throat itch.

  He sighed and stood and felt his clothes for damp again and took them off the line anyway. He’d need to hang them up when he got back. He made a mental note to find a spare pair of trousers and a shirt somewhere – even if they were torn or worn thin as ghosts.

  Once he was dressed in his moist clothes, he hunted in the gloom for the bucket. He found it beside his desk and picked it up with a groan, the hinges of his knees aching with each movement, his hand already burning where the wire handle would etch a red line into the palm on the return journey. Maybe if he made enough trips he could change the lines of fortune lettered there.

  With one hand he climbed up the ladder and through the trapdoor. The room he heaved himself into was a single man’s space – another table, a chair, a couple of shelves. He closed the trapdoor and settled the grass mat neatly back over it. You couldn’t be too careful. He kept going, out onto the step, where he stopped, blinking against the bright morning sun.

  The air was moving, gentle and warm, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The grey hairs on his arms were trying to stand up as the pressure changed. Felix looked out over the stand of nut trees and the stream, and felt that he was doing okay, considering.

  ‘Wind’s coming soon, old man. Better get that water before you’re holed up.’

  He stepped off, into the dirt. There was an old cowboy song he often cued up to keep his mind from wandering down dark passageways, and he sang it now.

  11

  Dyce had kept his illness from Garrett for as long as he could. Now he squatted behind a curl-leaf bush and shook as the shit poured out of him like blood. God! He knew exactly how Garrett would react – as though the death-dealing virus in his brother’s veins was a personal inconvenience; as though Dyce had invited the illness through a weakness of character. Any help he got would be fuelled by disdain. Worse than the disease: it would be torture.

  Garrett could hear the violent turning of his brother’s stomach from where he stood.

  ‘Damn it, Dyce!’

  When Dyce emerged, his skin was a grayish yellow. He stumbled back across the gravel to Garrett.

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong with your eyes?’

  ‘Can’t see so well.’

  ‘No shit. Looks like they’re bleeding.’

  Dyce was trying not to rub at the prickling. The log, he kept thinking. The log in your own eye.

  ‘Let’s just go.’

  Garrett set off in front, shaking his head, and Dyce followed, doing his best to keep up with the red blur of his brother that snaked over the sand at his feet. Every now and then there was only the shadow: there were no insects or boot steps or cussing.

  And the darkness, creeping in from the corners of his vision.

  The shadow. The shadow. Follow the fucking shadow, the way you always do!

  But then it was gone and Dyce’s world was given to blood-red and all the way over to black.

  He woke because Garrett was dragging him, holding under his arms and pulling him over the dirt to the shade of a ponderosa pine. There was gravel in his mouth from the way he’d landed on his face. His teeth crunched when he clenched his jaw, experimental. Jay Loram, thought Dyce. Jay Loram, slow down. Save a space for me.

  ‘You ought to leave. Just go. Callahans don’t give a shit about me.’

  ‘I’ll leave you when I leave you. I don’t need an invitation.’

  ‘First shelter we find, leave me there.’

  ‘You think I won’t leave you? When the time comes, I’m gone. You can stop with that just-leave-me shit. I’m not buying.’

  Garrett went off a little ways. He scrambled up a rock and looked back along the ridge. In the distance he could still see the black speck of Fieldstone, its charcoal rubbing, its erasure.

  But no Callahan marshals just yet.

  You close, you fuckers? You just biding your time?

  Garrett took Vida’s gun from his pocket and rested it on the rock beside him. He reached down
deep into his bag and pulled out a pair of loose bullets. He’d done a swap with a woman in Glenvale – dead goose he’d found under a tree traded for two bullets and a prairie bonnet he’d given to Beth as a joke.

  The bullets were too small for the chambers. Garrett tried closing the gun. At least it held them tight, kept them from rattling. There was no telling what would happen when he pulled the trigger, but it made him feel better to have a loaded gun on his hip.

  He kept scanning the brush. From far away the shack was camouflaged by a stand of flowering almond trees, but Garrett spotted it anyway, half hidden in the shadow of the crumbling dam that spanned the dry river gorge. Pre-War, for sure.

  And it was out of the wind.

  He looked back at Dyce where he lay under the bush. He wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  ‘You wait here, little brother. Pilgrim’s going to inspect that shack.’

  Dyce moaned in his fever dream.

  As Garrett moved through the trees, their pale blossoms brushed against his face, and he thought, It’s spring. God damn it! It’s spring and we’re still here! There was some victory in that.

  The surrounds were clear of the prickly weeds that grew on open ground. Out front there was also a hitching post, though the horse it had once tethered was long dead.

  Garrett thought back to the last live horse he could remember seeing, maybe four years back on the outskirts of Bitterspring. Miserable old mustang mare long past her riding years, and yet there, pressing down on her ancient spine was an enormous woman – too fat to walk more than a barn-length on her own.

  And that was not the last they saw of the pair. No, sir. A month later, he and Dyce had come across them in the open desert, the mare unburdened at last, collapsed in on herself and decomposing – and her owner too, just out in the middle of nowhere. Garrett wanted to think that it was the horse’s idea to walk and walk until the gates of heaven opened. Heaven, or the other place.

  He sent his hand over the smooth planed wood, unable to stop himself. Garrett had always liked the way horse poles had looked, circles grazed down to the dirt like well-tended graves. As it became clearer that all the horses would die, the foliage returned. The old poles were hidden, the bones carried off by coyotes.

  They couldn’t say what wiped out the horses: virus, probably – a side effect of something intended for humans, or else deliberately sent by Renard to kneecap travel. Containment. Getting anywhere was real slow going. He and Dyce would’ve been at the coast over a week ago on horseback. Fuck Renard for that too.

  It was as if the entire geography of the continent had changed overnight. With horses you could have ridden the banks of the Yampa clean out of Colorado if you wanted. Not anymore. The universe had shrunk all the way down to the size of a tennis ball. Hiking two days in any direction was about as far as anyone got before the wind came or their rations ran out.

  And further than that you needed some strong motivation. Suicide or dementia, most often.

  Or Callahans.

  Garrett wished he’d taken a horse and ridden up to see the border wall when you still could. He and Dyce had wanted to see it just to know it was real. Paint a dick on it. But there’d been no real reason to go – no reason to risk their lives and the horses’ too, just for sightseeing. That was old-world thinking, from a time when cars criss-crossed the landscape at a hundred miles an hour, their bellies full of cheap gas, their drivers headed wherever the notion took them. Now The Wall was out of reach, same way the coast seemed to be. It was just an impossibly long way to go on foot. If they were to make it, they’d have to walk clean off the map to get there, further than anyone had been since the horses reared up and fell over. But when Dyce asked, as he often did, Garrett packed away the fears and reservations, because that was what adults did. What’s a bit of walking, anyway? Good for the heart and double good for the soul. Just one foot in front of the other till we hit the beach.

  At least they were even: the Callahans had nothing to help them along, either. The men were older, mostly. Older and slower, but with more to grieve. Garrett imagined the popping of their knees as they hunkered around night fires, their faces grimy and concentrated, identical.

  Now that he was up close, Garrett saw that the shack was small: a lone wooden step and a hardwood door. Someone was looking after it, though. The door was patched around its edges with rags and string to keep the wind out. There were spots of new mud covering the unseen cracks.

  Garrett reached for the handle and stopped. Somewhere there was distant singing, like an angel’s chorus or a radio station, but then the sound resolved itself into a man’s voice, ancient, crackly as a scratched record.

  He stepped back from the door and looked around for a hiding place, then slid behind a cottonwood stump.

  The voice, nearer:

  Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,

  Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.

  Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,

  Roses to deaden the sods as they fall.

  Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly,

  And give a wild whoop as you carry me along.

  And in the grave throw me and roll the sod o’er me,

  For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.

  The man limped from the thicket of blossoming almonds. He was carrying a pail that sloshed and spilled with each slow step. Garrett watched his approach. The man stopped on the step and turned back and scanned the clearing as though he felt the eyes on him. His clothes seemed dark and damp, full dry only at the sun-warmed shoulders. He wore no mask. For an old fellow that was usually one giant step closer to winding up dead – but he didn’t seem concerned.

  He took a notebook and a pencil stub from his back pocket, and wrote something down. He took one last deep breath, turned and opened the door, and was gone like the White Rabbit.

  Garrett stepped out, unsure why he’d hidden. It had seemed in the moment like the safe thing to do. He had no back-up, no watchful Dyce expecting him to meet obstacles head-on. He stood in the man’s dusty footprints and looked back along his path, trying to see where he’d come from, and instead he saw the breeze whisking its way over the distant hilltop, the grasses blown flat as though a giant comb was being pulled through them. The spruces bowed and shook. Fuck. That was Dyce’s job – to watch for the wind, for the rising signs. Garrett had grown lazy, too used to the watchdog. He looked up the hill again, to where he’d left his brother.

  He’d never get up there and down again before the full force of the wind hit. Dyce would die in it, and that was a stupid way to go. Garrett squinted against the light.

  Along the ridge there was coming a dark shape, swift and agile, two-footed.

  It was heading straight for his brother’s body. Garrett wanted to shout but could not, caught between two fearful unknowns.

  But there was no real decision to be made. He took off at a run through the stand of trees between them, willing his arms to pump the air into his flattened, ungrateful lungs.

  Now the person was bending over Dyce.

  Too late! Too late! Too late!

  Garrett tripped over a tree root and went sprawling. He slapped at the hard earth.

  The person turned to look at him in surprise from where she was pulling Dyce up.

  ‘Vida!’

  ‘The shack!’

  She was going to try to fling Dyce over her back like a fireman. Like Wonder Woman, thought Garrett. He wanted to laugh. He got to his feet and went to help her as she struggled to load Dyce onto her own frame. And she had done it too. She had turned her back on him and was stumbling down the slope towards the shack. Every now and again Dyce’s boots dragged and bumped on the ground and she had to shift his bony weight. Not Wonder Woman. A wasp pulling at a wolf spider.

  Garrett caught up with her and held her arm and said, ‘Let me get him.’ She began to argue, but Garrett had two decades of brotherly authority behind him, and she saw that it was no
use. She allowed him to drag Dyce over and sling him across his own shoulder.

  ‘Get the door!’

  They could hear the wind now like rushing water. It hit the valley floor and stirred up a wall of dust, the hand of God sweeping the sinful aside like the old-time song.

  Vida twisted the handle and slammed her shoulder into the door. It opened and Garrett blundered forward and fell into the interior, spilling his brother onto the floor. Vida caught a last glimpse of the dust storm, angry undead fingers of dirt grabbing for them. She got the door closed as the grit hit, peppering the wood like buckshot.

  12

  Garrett flinched in anticipation of a blade or a rifle in the ribs, the welcome he expected from the old man.

  But there was nothing: just the blackness and the whistle of the wind shoving at the walls and trying the door. Little pig! Little pig!

  Garrett reached and felt around for Dyce’s body and untied his ripe face mask to let him breathe.

  ‘Sorry for the intrusion,’ Garrett spoke into the darkness, just in case. He made his voice gruff and threatening. There’d be the tch of a match on flint at any moment, and a candle to light up the space, and wouldn’t that be a relief?

  But it didn’t come. No reply, neither. Just a faint tinkling, every now and again, coming from outside. It unnerved Garrett. Where are you, old man?

  ‘Who you talking to?’ It was Vida, struggling to catch her breath.

  ‘An old man. Saw him come in here.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. Must have gone into the other shack. So many fucking shacks around.’

  Vida felt the front pocket of her pack for a book of matches. Two left. She’d gotten so good at using her flint for fires that she’d not used these last matches in over a year. She knew what the cardboard said: