South

by Frank Owen

  ‘Come on, you old fart. Just got to stick close to the ridge,’ he told himself. ‘Get a couple more readings.’

  The absence of information made him uneasy, but there was also something weirdly exhilarating about being stranded this way. What was the song? The one about not having to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing? Close enough. Weatherman, do your thing. Felix kept his eyes on the distant hills. You could have all the fancy instruments you liked – and he did, the way that men had collected cars in the old days – but the most important thing when you were telling the future was this: know your territory. He said it again, to remind himself. The obvious things were the ones you forgot. Thought you were smart, when what you were was cocky. Look at Walden. Garrett too. Young and tough, and under a bunch of rocks.

  The next box looked as if it was all in order. Felix opened the front and took the readings from the gadgets: thermometer, hydrometer, barometer. The maximum wind speed had been marked on the gauge on the anemometer. Now he reset it and wrote it down, mumbling the numbers to himself so that they didn’t slip his mind. He secured the door with wire again and patted the lid, as though the contraption was an old dog – the homebody breeds from before, when they were still friendly. Felix took a slug of water from the canteen, but didn’t sit. He ached from the digging and a long rest would only make it worse. He dreaded to think what the next morning would bring him.

  Felix kept to his old path that wound up the side of the mountain. He had a view of the valley and his little shack – now the two fresh graves beside it – and of the river and the nut trees and the opposite peak. He’d never gone beyond there. That territory was ghost colony and those poor fuckers could have it.

  He walked on towards the ruined settlement of Glenvale. He’d smelt it burn. In hiding, he’d watched as the straggling survivors found their way across the river and all the way up to the refuge beyond the crest. Now Glenvale was gone – most of it, anyhow – but the ghost colony persevered. The ones that started small had less to lose.

  Felix wasn’t paying close enough attention when the next weather box came into view. It was still there, which was good news. It was only as he stepped into the clearing around the box that he saw the man’s legs protruding from the open side.

  ‘Hey!’

  The legs jerked once in surprise, and then the man pulled himself out from underneath. He struggled up and looked at Felix, blinking too fast against the sunlight. He had a scraggly beard that he had tied with string like a Christmas present, and he was stroking it now, cat-quick. Why did they do that? Felix wondered. It reminded him of Walden’s hair, slicked back and parted. For what? The prom?

  Felix freed his arm from the pack strap and slid the bag around to his chest so that the gun was invisible but in reach.

  ‘You know whose property you’re tampering with there?’

  The man shuffled, as if he couldn’t decide which leg should take his unsteady weight. Drugs, Felix would have said, if this was thirty years ago. But he saw it now for what it was: one of them brain viruses. Fuck. You never knew which way those fuckers were going to jump.

  ‘Yours?’ The man was making an effort to parley.

  ‘You bet your ass it is. Now, what you taken?’

  Stringbeard opened his hand. It shook a little. On the mapped palm lay six rusty nails.

  ‘Alright. You’re going to put those down, right there. Then you’re going to back away. And then you’re going back to wherever you come from. And you better stay clear of these boxes, or I’m coming guns blazing next time. And I mean that.’

  The man rubbed at his eyes, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. ‘Take it easy, old timer. This is a misunderstanding. I’m an honest man. Just out looking for whatever might help me rebuild my place. Needed me some nails and the hardware store is closed.’

  ‘What place?’

  He threw a hand in the direction of the long-distance carnage. ‘Fieldstone.’

  ‘Thought Fieldstone was gutted.’

  ‘Like a trout.’ He grinned, skew, and the beard shifted down an inch. ‘But I’m making it new again. Making it nice for me and my family.’ He wiped his forehead.

  ‘You all okay there? No one sick?’

  ‘Nope. We were the lucky ones – and I’ll tell you what else: we recruit. You ain’t exactly in your prime, but then, who is? We could do with the extra set of hands. How about it?’

  ‘It’s a two-part answer: “No, thanks” and also, “Fuck off”.’

  ‘Look, I reckon if we could sit down and talk, I could change your mind.’

  Felix squinted at the man. The sweat was standing out on his head again, and the eyes were crusty, for sure.

  Stringbeard was starting to inch closer and that made Felix fumble in his bag for the gun. When he pointed it they both saw his trembling, but there was no other way for this to go: he knew the brainworm when he saw it.

  ‘You back the fuck up or I shoot you.’

  Stringbeard didn’t flinch. ‘Wind’s picking up,’ he said mildly.

  The asshole was right. The cups on the anemometer were turning slowly. Felix checked up along the ridge and saw the spruce branches jostling. There wasn’t much time.

  ‘I got shelter,’ Stringbeard was saying. ‘No harm, no foul. When this is all over you can come on back and help me rebuild. My wife will be glad of the company. She don’t get out much. Now come on over here and we can shake on it.’

  Felix shook his head and checked back at the ridge. The spruce was being shaken more violently, like an old man in a coughing fit. The wind was coming fast.

  Stringbeard took his chance and leapt at Felix, a vicious dog who attacks when a man’s attention is elsewhere.

  Felix fired, hardly knowing what to pray for.

  The bullet hit Stringbeard in the chest, right through the soft flesh of his lungs and heart, and out again at the other side.

  Felix turned and ran back along the path, the wind a ghost dog biting at him, pulling at his clothes for purchase. As he loped he pulled the face mask up over his mouth. He took two paces and then he stopped.

  The cloth was wet on his lips.

  He yanked it off and held it up. The pale fabric was spattered red with the wind-swept blood of the man lying dead behind him in the clearing.

  29

  The next morning, Vida woke with Dyce’s sleep-warm arms around her. Ruth was up already, sitting and poking at the smudged gray embers of the fire. Vida wriggled free from Dyce’s hold and went to join her, and the two of them idly threw kindling on the undecided flames so that the leftover porcupine soup would serve them another meal.

  ‘Hello, baby,’ said Ma. Her mother’s speech was labored and a little slurred, but it was her own true voice, not just the hunger, and Vida had missed it. She smiled. Though her ma had been there for a couple of days, listening and then looking through those wet, red eyes, she had only really just arrived. Maybe disease was a kind of near-death experience. You faced yourself and tried to talk your demons down.

  ‘How you feeling, Ma?’

  ‘Tired. Sore. Better.’ Ruth smiled back.

  ‘Nothing porcupine soup couldn’t fix, then.’

  They regarded the pot. Vida tested the liquid, but it was still night-cool.

  Ruth nudged her daughter gently with her elbow. ‘And you too, you know, not just the soup. Thank you.’

  ‘Just call me Porcupine Girl. I could get a suit.’

  ‘And I could sew you a cape. Some sequins on the quills.’

  ‘It would be hard to run, though.’

  Ruth snorted, then winced and clutched her stomach. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  Their weak laughter dried up. Vida laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. Ruth smelt alright again too, her own sweaty cloak of illness untied from her throat. She stroked Vida’s head.

  ‘Your braids are getting real fuzzy,’ she said. ‘I can redo them for you sometime.’

  ‘It takes too long,
Mama.’

  ‘How are you?’

  Vida shrugged, adolescent. ‘Doing good.’ She knew Ruth wasn’t asking that, exactly. She looked quickly at Dyce, then back at her mother. ‘I been better.’

  ‘You like that boy?’

  Vida burrowed her chin into the collar of her shirt, embarrassed, unsure.

  ‘Vida. I been blind, not stupid.’

  Vida poked at the reluctant fire. The bottom of the soup pot was only lukewarm, but she dished the food up anyway, for something to do.

  ‘Ma, I got something to run by you.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Pete – some people – asked if I’d stay in here in the camp, set up some way to know who has what sickness. Work out how to combine them the way I did for you and Dyce. I told him I was just lucky, and that you were the real medicine lady. I told him they should ask you.’

  Her mother sipped at the soup and pulled a face. ‘Is this them asking?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘And what you think of that?’

  Another shallow shrug. ‘I don’t know. It might work.’

  ‘What’s your Plan B, then? Back to the house?’

  ‘I don’t think I can, Ma.’ The full force of what she was saying suddenly hit Vida. She set her own soup down. That part of her life was well and truly gone, the old ties to childhood severed by disease and the dying men who came after them.

  ‘Why not? The house still standing? The garden left, at least?’

  ‘Callahans gonna come after me and Allerdyce, Ma. They not ever going to give up. You should have seen that Tye and his bird. Don’t know what options that exactly leaves us.’

  Ma looked at the cup in her hands, her lips pressed together. Vida knew that look: love and disapproval in equal measure.

  ‘Would you stay here, Ma? For now? Try to help out? They need a proper nurse, someone who knows the plants real well.’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’d like to stay. Helping’s what I know best and they’ve been very kind. Then again, I’m getting on. Suppose that’s a reason for and a reason against. Need to do some thinking, I guess.’

  ‘We’ll go for a walk around after breakfast if you can manage. Show you the place.’

  Vida poured the last of the broth into a billy-can and rested it back on the duller coals.

  When Dyce woke, Vida and her ma were two tiny figures walking slowly among the graves. He knew what each would be thinking: how neat each plot was kept, how carefully tended. Maybe it took death to make people realize they were human.

  Dyce moved closer to the fire. There was a warm mug waiting there for him. He smiled when he saw the garnish floating on the surface: a bright-yellow yarrow flower.

  He hadn’t seen the woman heading down the slope to the graveyard until she was almost upon him. She looked weak, and there were white patches of scalp showing through her blond hair, but she was intent, a leprous milkmaid carrying a scratched-up bucket.

  ‘Morning! Hey, there! Excuse me?’

  ‘Morning.’ She stopped.

  Dyce didn’t recognize her: a newbie. Up close he saw she had welts criss-crossing her arms and neck. He tried not to stare at the bald patches on her head.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  She nodded, wary.

  ‘Where you come from?’

  She cocked her damaged head. Was she mute?

  ‘Your settlement. Which settlement were you at? I mean, before you came here?’

  ‘Eel Ridge.’

  ‘You see anyone on your way? A guy? About so high? Dark hair? Maybe walking like he was hurting?’

  She shook her head. Jesus! She looks like whatever she survived nearly killed her, thought Dyce. Like she belongs in a mental asylum.

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’ He tried to think of other things to ask her before she took off on her slow, blank journey to find water.

  ‘Long shot, I know, but you heard of any, uh, settlements between here and the coast?’

  She laughed, a little choking sound low in her thin throat. ‘Where you wanna go? We’re at the edge of the world here, you know that?’

  ‘Well, now. That’s not strictly true.’

  She set her empty bucket down, then changed her mind and picked it up again.

  ‘I did hear talk of one. But I never been there, myself.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘The Mouth. Weird name, huh?’

  ‘You know if anyone arrived here from The Mouth in the last week? I just want to ask if they’ve seen my brother. I could do with some news.’

  The woman leaned in closer, confiding, and Dyce had to force himself not to retreat.

  ‘The Mouth, they say, don’t expel their sick folks.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘I heard that’s ’cause they got no sick folks.’

  Dyce looked carefully at her. She went on.

  ‘Sounds too good to be true, right? But people want to believe these things.’

  ‘I know I do.’ Dyce pretended cheeriness. ‘Tell me there’s a man selling ice cream sundaes and I’m first in line!’

  The woman gave him another one of her looks and left Dyce to sip at his breakfast. The marrow fat sat congealed on the surface, rich and rancid.

  ‘The Mouth,’ he said, trying the name out as he chewed on the yarrow flower.

  30

  Felix crouched on the leeward slope, coughing. The phlegm that he hawked up lay streaked with red when it landed in the dirt. His cloth mask was long gone, blown away and caught on the bones of a chokecherry bush, a blood-spattered flag of surrender.

  The same wind kept blasting him with grit and the invisible poison it hurled along. Felix knew he was in more trouble than he could handle. This was it: cold Mister Death was coming, and not a horse in sight, neither. So much for the apocalypse. The end, when it came, was always going to be an anti-climax.

  He laughed and then coughed. He took the Llama Danton off his belt and checked the bullets in the magazine. He’d done it that morning already, but he needed to make sure they’d all moved up one the way they were supposed to. The first time would have to pay for the rest: he wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull the trigger twice.

  The bullets sat neat and ready, tarnished but not so bad they were unusable. The rusted spring had worked, hadn’t it? It would fire. The gun still smelt the way it had years back: the tang of powder, the bite of hot metal against the soft webbing of your palm. These were the objects worth saving, the ones made in the forge of men’s dread and understanding, the things that gave you options.

  He practiced, holding the gun to his temple, and looked out across the valley. Not a bad view to have etched on your corneas till the beetles came. Or the dogs, more like. Whatever had already happened – and whatever else lay ahead – the pines still cascaded down the opposite slope and the river was a bright line of mercury in the sunlight. The almond trees he had worked for still danced as the wind pushed at them. They resisted. He had put down the same dogged roots. The shack was the only home he had.

  But for fuck’s sake. A virus was a whole other world: a kingdom of disease. Even if it wasn’t the kind that made straight for your brain, a man’s gut made him do strange things. Most of all, the sickness made him a sitting duck. Felix lowered the gun and swallowed hard to test his throat. It was definitely coming, but there was time. His body had always let him down – night cramps, headaches, shin splints and torn tendons – but its large-scale disintegration wasn’t right. He would sit at his table as he’d always thought he would, close his eyes and end it there, before somebody else did it for him in a way he couldn’t imagine.

  Felix set off down the slope, making for home, staggering and unsteady against the rude shoving of the wind. He fell twice, and both times he grazed and cut his arms on the loose shale: downhill was worse than up. Wasn’t that always the way?

  At his shack door he stopped and turned round, making a circle as he took in his last view of the world. Then he’d had
enough. He hobbled inside and shut the door on it.

  He found the bottle of liquor on the sideboard in the dim coolness and took two big swigs that burnt his throat. Even taking into account his eyes having to adjust, the place was too dark: he would have to power her up one last time. He climbed up onto the bike and turned the cogs until the light grew strong enough to see his possessions.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Sun shines out of my ass. Yes, it does!’

  But it wasn’t funny. He had to spend his last few minutes in his right mind. Felix pedaled and as he went he looked closely at each book and map and instrument as if it were a museum exhibit. Things sure got gravity, didn’t they? Time went by and they meant something to you but nobody else. He got off the bike and patted the sweaty seat. Then he picked up his brass sextant, heavy and precise, alchemical. ‘I am the master of my fate,’ he intoned. ‘I am the captain of my soul.’

  He set it down and moved on to the tape player. How many times had he listened to the recitation of his history?

  ‘Once more can’t hurt, now, can it?’

  The player whirred acquiescence, and then the sound of his own name made him shiver. ‘Felix,’ said his past self, the smartass, ‘I hope you’ve still got the balls to have that gun on the table.’

  The gun.

  Where had he put it? He had been outside. Then in here. On the bike, right? Felix squinted into the shadowed corners. What had he done with it? He let the tape play on as he searched for the weapon.

  Not in the bag or on the sideboard where he’d fetched something. What had he gone to get? The bottle.

  He went upstairs and checked. Nothing. Then he went out front of the shack and stood shading his watering, panicky eyes against the empty landscape.