South

by Frank Owen

  ‘Christ! What happened to you?’

  Tye shouldered the men into action. ‘You. Get some blankets. You and you. Start boiling some water here.’

  The men began gathering blankets in their arms and looking around for their billy-cans. Tye saw the cousin boy’s stiff face and hardened his heart. They had to learn.

  ‘I want him on hot rocks in five minutes, and when I say I want warm water, I mean boiling. Hot enough to skin him if we need to.’ He jabbed his knife at the boy. ‘Sharpen this and hold it in the flame ’til I tell you I need it. You. Go get my bag and look for yarrow leaves. And a bandage. And a needle and thread. And if there is anyone here saving his moonshine for a better occasion, he’d better think again.’

  Gus’s arrival was a disaster but also a distraction. Soon the whole camp was up and digging holes, collecting rocks, passing Tye what he needed to patch up the big man. Finally, they were doing something together.

  Tye talked as they worked to lay the hot stones in a shallow trench. He made the Callahans cover them over with sand and a blanket, and Gus was helped down onto it.

  ‘Like a Dutch oven, boys. That’s right.’

  He knelt to get a better look at Gus’s neck in the light of the fire. The ragged flesh around the arrow was purple.

  ‘What the fuck is that, anyway?’

  Gus held up a flat hand and gurgled. He strained to sit up and the blood from his ruined mouth dribbled over his lips.

  ‘Give him some water.’

  Gus shook his head and gestured for Tye to come closer, to lean in and listen. Through the mess of his throat came a word, wet with vengeance and thin as cotton.

  ‘Weatherman.’

  ‘What the hell? Where’s Walden, Gus? Where’s your boy got to?’

  He licked his cracked lips, a man in a desert, crawling towards some distant mirage.

  ‘Dead.’ A single tear popped out from below Gus’s eyelid and plinked out, like a boy in a cartoon. Somehow that one teardrop was worse than anything else. Tye wiped its traces away. No tears on a Callahan. It was too late for that.

  ‘Was it Garrett?’

  Gus tried to sit up, and fell back against Tye instead.

  ‘He’s dead, too.’

  There were whoops from some of the surrounding men.

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  Gus was still straining to get his message across.

  ‘Got to get them for me.’

  ‘Who, Gus?’

  ‘The fucking brother. And the girl.’

  Gus slumped backward, unconscious. Tye took his chance and grabbed the metal shaft. He yanked it out and it gave, slurping against the wound. Gus jerked but didn’t come round. Tye gave the weathervane arrow to one of the men, who looked at it in his hands and then set it carefully down like an instrument. He wiped his hands on his jeans.

  ‘Everything! Now!’

  The men looked at each other, but again the boy cousin came forward and handed Tye his knife. Its nicked blade gleamed red from its purification in the flames.

  ‘I said everything!’

  Then Tye worked fast: slitting the sides of the wound and squeezing out all he could so that the blood eventually ran bright and thin. The flesh sizzled and burnt as the nerves and the vessels were sealed by the blade.

  ‘As long as it’s mostly cauterized.’ Tye was talking to himself. The others looked on, useless, apart from the little cousin who knelt like a pageboy at the throne of a pharaoh.

  Tye sluiced out the wound with boiling water. He didn’t look at Gus’s face. It didn’t matter if he came round: Tye wouldn’t stop his surgery. The others would just have to hold him down.

  Gus stayed under in the merciful black.

  Fifteen minutes later, Tye was sewing the wound closed.

  He sat back on his heels and waited, but there was no fresh blood seeping from the stitches. Then he pressed the yarrow leaves against the gash and bandaged it tight.

  ‘Got to keep him warm. If he’s not dead by morning, he’ll make it.’

  Tye turned to where the others had dropped the arrow. He picked it up and inspected it, turning it over in the firelight, rust on rust.

  Only one man still had use for things like this.

  ‘Felix.’

  18

  Vida didn’t exactly know where the ghost colony was. From what she’d gathered from the Weatherman’s wall maps, it was somewhere north-west, not too far. It was shown as a shaded area ringed with crosses and filled in with those penciled lumps. Not treasure troves, she thought. Graves.

  There was some climbing to do, a narrow river to cross – but that was okay. They had been through worse. It was the last place the Callahans would reckon she was headed, and once she got past that invisible line of crosses and moved into the land of the lazaretto, the Callahans would give up the chase.

  Wouldn’t they?

  No sane person went to a ghost colony, unless they were sick. Or were looking to get sick.

  But outrunning the Callahans was only the second reason she’d paid such close attention to the Weatherman’s maps. A bonus.

  She would find the nearest ghost colony, a petri dish of viruses collected off every wind in the last few months, and she would try to find a compatible virus for her ma. And for Dyce too, of course, because that was her fault. She would carry him to safety if it killed her. Even empty of liquids and solids, he weighed more than that big old zinc tub of water she’d had to drag back to the house once a week. She would suffer to do it, and that was payback.

  That’s just crazy, some part of her said, and Vida wondered whether Stringbeard’s infection had had its effect. I would know, wouldn’t I? I’d be able to feel it in my bones. It was a ludicrous plan, she knew, but it was all she had right now.

  And they had to get a move on. Her eyes grew accustomed to the starlight and the rising quarter-moon shrunk and reflected everywhere. That poem her ma had loved, like it was some vision of heaven: Silver fruit upon silver trees. Vida had never liked it, the idea of bleaching out the daylight colors from everything important. Macabre. Black folks ought to know better. Anyway, nowadays she looked at the moon to see if there was a ring around it. The halo meant bad weather, and that was that. She snorted at herself. Keep walking, Veedles. Got things to do and people to see.

  When the moon had shifted, Vida began to make out the terrain around her. She could navigate around a boulder or a bush instead of crashing into it as she had been doing – choose a new course, like a stream running down a slope, guided by gravity.

  But with her night vision came another distraction. There were shadows all around her that seemed to move as she did, mimicking their pilgrimage. It took all of her will to keep her head down, to blind her eyes to her creaturely imagination, to keep her hands holding onto Dyce, rather than letting go in favor of the flint in her bag.

  Once she was out of sight of the shack, she laid Dyce down in the dirt and felt his forehead. Still hot. He looked at her dully. Moving him had been a bad decision. Vida undid his belt, unbuttoned his cargo pants and worked them off over his welted legs. The material was wet through with urine and Walden’s blood, and streaked white with the contour lines of dried salt around the hems. Vida placed the pants on his chest and threaded the legs under his arms.

  She propped him up, the two of them back to back. She reached round for the cloth handles, which she pulled over her shoulders. It made it easier to carry him, but it would be slow progress, she knew. Alrighty, then. This would be another part of her penance.

  Vida crouched forward and pulled tight on the pants to keep Dyce snug against her back. Then she straightened up as best she could and moved into the darkness. Vida walked and thought of her stepdad’s baseball mantra as he whistled the old tennis ball past her nose, out on the grass.

  Attack the ball, Evert kept telling her.

  Vida had never really grasped his meaning – or the ball. She had always shied away from the thing as if it were an enormous, angry bee. It wasn
’t until later – after Evert had died and she and Ruth were alone again, heading south and having to defend themselves from swindlers and bandits and the crazy ones with brain worms – that she finally understood.

  There was no more baseball.

  There was only survival.

  What Evert had tried to teach her was this: when something’s trying to knock you on your ass, sitting on your heels is a big old welcome sign. Go meet a threat if you want to survive it. Shake its hand. Look it in the eye.

  Vida liked to think that that’s what she’d been doing ever since: honoring him, the kind, ineffectual man who’d stepped in and made a daughter out of her. That’s what she was doing now with this sick kid on her back, wading through the dark, thick as water, as blind as him or her ma, each step also a drag and a heave. But it was progress. Sometimes that was the best you could do.

  The narrow river she’d seen on the map appeared to her first as a distant, wet hum. It grew louder until she felt the smooth, round stones of the bank underfoot, making her ankles roll. She did not hesitate at its edge: there was nothing to gain from waiting or looking for a more suitable crossing.

  Though the winter ice had melted, the water took longer to accept the new season. The cold made her suck the air in through her teeth with every step, the water rising from her shins, to her knees, then her hips. She felt Dyce start awake at its touch, his breath puffing out, a drowned sailor startling at the siren who had taken him below.

  ‘Easy, Allerdyce,’ Vida said, just as she’d done for Garrett. ‘Stay with me back there. Better give your brother some time alone with his woman. Might not want to see what he and Beth are doing outside them pearly gates.’

  Dyce fell still and Vida felt something warm run down the small of her back, scorching hot in contrast to the bloodless chill of the river. She was instantly glad they were in the water, both for his pride and for her chances of getting his disease. Vida waited for the smell, but it didn’t come. She kept wading, her thighs pushing through the water like blades. Times like these she felt superhuman.

  The opposite riverbank was also stony, and beyond that, the land began to climb. Vida pressed on, her legs burning with each sloping step. The stars above faded behind the silhouettes of trees; she smelt the fresh acid of pine. Underfoot the needles were soft and slippery. Sometimes she slid backwards, dropping Dyce so that he rolled gently up against the trunk of a tree and she had to re-truss him and step more carefully. There was a forest soundtrack now too – howls and growls and scuttling. The trees made tall dancing shadows, every one of them a black bear raised up on his hind legs, or a mountain lion midlunge.

  Vida had been caught out in the dark a few times in her life, misjudging the time it would take to get home, or misremembering where a shelter had been – but those times she’d only been out an hour after sundown, long before the night hunters began prowling. The deep night was something else: soon it would mount to a carnival of screeching and scratching.

  Once there was a soft padding beside her, something large and stealthy walking along in step with her. The end, when it came, would contain no time for her to make sparks from her flint. Not being able to see was the worst part. At least if you saw your end-time coming, you had a chance to prepare yourself. How bad had it been for Dyce, who could still not see three feet before him? Little brother Allerdyce, who didn’t know yet that Garrett was dead?

  When her fears overcame her, Vida lowered Dyce to the ground. She felt around for a stick and, just as her stepdad had taught her, she swung the bat in the dark. It connected with a pine trunk and the brittle wood of her bat shattered. Rotten shards rained on her. She gathered Dyce again and pulled him on, the haunting gone, or more distant than before.

  Vida limped on, and prayed for morning light.

  When it did come, she sat exhausted, too tired to arrange Dyce more comfortably where he lay and slept off his sickness, and she saw she was not twenty paces from the crest of the climb. There are times when we are closer than we think, she told herself. Halle-fucking-lujah. Above her, along the ridge, was the tall pole – a pants-leg windsock hanging limp. Vida let herself cry then.

  She wiped her face and scanned the hill below her in the growing dawn. She’d come a long way. The dam wall was a speck of black, the river a trickle. That was where the Callahans would come from, when they did. She looked in her bag for the dried turkey meat, not caring that it was stringy and old: it was a change from the bitter crunch of locusts.

  As she chewed, she examined the pole again. There were no instruments attached to this one. The last outpost. The ghost colony could not be far now – just beyond the ring of the old man’s weather stations. She gave herself over to lying in the warmth for a few precious minutes. The first rays of sun seemed to stroke her skin, maternal.

  Vida leant over and inspected Dyce’s face. His skin was gray. She had not been vigilant in checking him in the night. He could have died. She might well have dragged a corpse over a mountain.

  Vida steeled herself and felt his cheek. It was warm. She held his head and tried to get him to drink some water again, but this time it dribbled out of his mouth and into the dirt. She kept watch over Dyce with one eye as the forest through which she’d battled transformed in stages from cool shadow to the vivid, hot green of anxious life.

  Vida sat up again and focused on the dam below. Come on, you fuckers. I’m waiting for you.

  And there, like ants, she saw them coming, a swarm descending on the Weatherman’s shack.

  Better get going, Veedles. Them Callahans never been dawdlers.

  She stood to gather her burdens and looked hard at the marks behind her in the dirt.

  She could not tell what they were, at first. She stepped past Dyce and loped down a few paces, close to the ground. There they were: the prints of her own leather-soled boots, and behind them the two parallel gouges of Dyce’s heels like train tracks.

  But alongside and sometimes crossing over were another set.

  Not bear or lion or coyote or dog.

  Barefoot and human.

  Terror energized her.

  She sprinted for Dyce and lifted him again onto her back, half-slapping, half-dragging.

  ‘Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!’

  19

  Tye Callahan woke before sunrise. He pulled his arm from beneath his blanket and reached for his harrier. She arched her neck at the interruption, but was where he had expected her to be – perched above him on the log.

  He removed her leather cap, and she flew up into the predawn dark towards the dimming stars. He watched her go as he always did. Up there she would feel the air thinning, stop flapping and spread her wings to circle in a wide arc, the Callahan camp with its ember markers the axle on which she turned. Then she would spiral outward, testing her feathers for changes in pressure, for any distant and gathering wind.

  With no sign of it, she folded her wings and plummeted back to Tye for her reward. Today it was a quarter of dried perch spine and a paper-thin dorsal fin, edged with transparent flesh. She ripped into her breakfast, harness jingling, as Tye woke his men.

  ‘Ten minutes and we’re moving,’ he called into the black.

  He went to check on Gus. The huge man was still breathing: shallow, though. Looking at him, Tye doubted his own prophecy about his being well if he survived the night. Gus needed to drink and to eat, and who knew how much sustenance he’d manage to slip past that gash before infection settled in?

  Tye picked out the two men most eager to return to Glenvale, those who had grumbled most about spending the night in the open, and tasked them with stretchering Gus back.

  ‘You wanted to turn back. Now’s your chance,’ he said. Initially he’d imagined a stiffer punishment, but carrying Gus back would do just fine. It wouldn’t be easy considering the terrain they’d covered. To round it off, Tye added another motivation.

  ‘If he’s dead before he reaches Glenvale . . .’ He trailed off, letting the thought hang. The two gaun
t Callahan faces had been staring at him, and now they dropped. There was every chance Gus would die anyway: he didn’t look as if he’d hang onto his ghost till sundown.

  Tye grinned. ‘Now take off your shirts.’

  ‘Hey, now. What do you want them for?’

  ‘You boys got to make a stretcher, don’t you?’

  They scurried. The two men began searching the nearby foliage for long poles for the litter, harrying each other to work faster. They stripped a couple of saplings, and then Tye made them thread the poles through the sleeves of both shirts. The two looked at their work in dismay, not daring to object for fear of being made to stay when their freedom was so close at hand. The shirts would have to be sacrificed. They thought, but did not say, that if the big man really did get too heavy, they could resign themselves to Tye’s punishment – dump Gus in the woods and skedaddle. The coyotes would finish the job. The critters would think it was Christmas come early.

  They heaved Gus onto the stretcher, and he stayed on, like Tutankhamen heaved upright in his sarcophagus by treasure hunters. And then off they went, the two stretcher-bearers at the head, each hauling at one pole, the end of the travois scraping in the dirt as it went. They would leave a trail a mile wide, but who was checking? Tye watched them go and thought that they made such terrible woodsmen that they deserved to die. But they probably wouldn’t – not unless stupidity was contagious.

  He rolled his blanket and tied it tight at the top of his pack. The others were industrious, strapping the char-bottomed billy-cans onto packs, kicking dirt over the dying coals, rolling and folding and stretching, a chorus of spines clicking and joints popping. White men on the move, thought Tye in disgust. You could tell it over in the next county. Shee-yit. Renard could probably hear it wherever he was, holed up in his compound over the border.