South

by Frank Owen

  Pete shepherded Dyce back to camp, showing him the best route and pulling branches aside to let them through. Vida left them and went to find Ruth. She knew the drill by heart: nest the knife in hot coals, boil the water, collect the yarrow and honey.

  Ruth was used to the carnage. Vida watched as she set her mouth and then asked, ‘Trap?’

  They nodded.

  ‘You,’ Ruth shooed Dyce out of the way, ‘go and do something useful.’ She turned to Vida. ‘Same as always. Hand me that hot water.’

  She set about cleaning the wound on the unconscious Sam. This was the beginning of her clinic, step one in garnering trust and giving purpose. A couple of people were gathered, watching as Ruth set the bones back into shape as best she could, but Sam would always walk with a limp. Ruth went on to scrape and cauterize the wound.

  Dyce called Vida aside, still bloody – his hands red up to his elbows like gloves, his boots and the cuffs of his pants too.

  ‘That trap was fresh.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not some old forgotten bear trap. That was set a few days back, max.’

  ‘Callahans?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Fuckers.’

  ‘Not sure if you’re thinking of staying on here but, if you are, I reckon this changes things some. We can’t let these folks suffer for protecting us: can’t let that happen. We leave now for The Mouth and pray it exists. It’ll give us a good few hours before sunset.’

  Vida wanted to argue, or at least challenge Dyce’s authority in making decisions for the both of them, but he was right. She couldn’t stay. There was relief in that, the decision made for her, the guilt of abandoning her mother evaporating into the clouds bulking overhead.

  ‘I’ll get my things.’

  33

  Vida found her mother down beyond the graves. She was shirtless, washing the blood from her hands and face in a bucket filled from the camp’s most reliable water supply – a greenish pond. Vida watched as Ruth scrubbed at her nails with a stick. Vida knew she would have chewed it into a brush, the same way they had cleaned their teeth back home. Ruth’s shirt was hanging over a stand of reeds, streaked with rust-colored stains. When she saw Vida coming, the pack on her daughter’s back seemed to settle its weight between her own shoulders.

  Ruth stood up, dripping, her chest wet in its slip.

  ‘Mama. We haven’t said goodbye to the others.’

  Ruth nodded and dried her hands on her skirt. Even to herself she smelt like chlorophyll and sunlight, a growing thing. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Vida went on. ‘Didn’t want them arguing against us going. Thing is, we need to. It’s not about whether we want it or not, after what happened to Sam. That was deliberate, Mama. The Callahans are bad, pure and simple.’

  Ruth sighed. ‘I know.’

  Vida jigged the pack on her back. Dyce was waiting, with his own new pack. ‘Tell the others we left a little something to show our appreciation.’

  ‘I’m not that little.’

  They both smiled but couldn’t laugh.

  ‘I’m going to come back, Ma, sometime soon, to see you.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting, baby doll.’

  Ruth’s face was wet. She pulled Vida close and hugged her tight, breathing her daughter’s smell, familiar as biscuits. ‘Don’t forget to do your hair.’

  Dyce came down now too, and the women drew apart. He said his goodbyes to Ruth and held her cold hands. Then he walked down the slope. When he got to the line of stones marking the perimeter, he stopped and waited for Vida. Dyce held out his hand. They stepped over together, back out into the wild world.

  They wound their way down the mountain, moving quickly and sticking to the rocky sections in order to avoid having to push through the brush.

  ‘You know, a bear trap’s got to be just about as valuable a thing as you’ll find right now.’

  ‘It cost him to leave it,’ Vida agreed.

  Dyce was right. A metal trap set each night could snare a deer or a porcupine or a jack rabbit: that Tye had left it behind was a statement of intent, a clear and present threat. Vida knew that they wouldn’t shake him that easily. He was enraged that they had escaped him, furious that the detachment of the diseased had driven him away, maddened that he was just about the last of the real Callahans. It was a good thing they were moving along, and from now on they would have to be extra careful.

  ‘Sleep with one eye open,’ Dyce muttered.

  ‘We always do,’ Vida said. If you only knew the half of it.

  The two of them walked on, ears pricked and eyes on the distant trees. As soon as the gentle movements turned into swaying, they would have to find shelter again: the old story. It was a kind of relief for Dyce, who had always been the one walking with his head up, scanning the rim of the horizon while Garrett plodded along, face to the ground, oblivious to the small deaths that stalked them everywhere.

  The wind kept steady over the next two hours – strong enough to ruffle their clothes and make the little hairs on their arms stand up, but not hard enough to make them scuttle for safety and lose precious traveling time. It was a fine line, less science than art. As they went, Vida felt her heart beating in its abiding rhythm. She was ready, she told herself, for whatever was coming next.

  ‘You ever think about horses?’ asked Dyce. He was; he always was. He was thinking about them right now while his shins were scraped to shit on the thorns, even through his cargos.

  ‘Jesus. All the time. We’re going to a place that no one we know has ever seen, and you know what? It’s probably fifteen fucking miles away. I’ve got to stop thinking of distance like we still have horses. Drives me nuts. With horses we could be to The Mouth and back in time for breakfast, instead of this shit.’ Vida gestured at the ground around them and Dyce knew what she meant – the proximity to the sharp end of nature, the obstacles and nuisances a car or a horse once smoothed over. ‘The whole world might as well be sixty miles square, for fuck’s sake. I guess that’s what makes Garrett’s coast trip so, so—’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘I was going for “romantic”.’

  ‘Definitely stupid. Though, since it’s Garrett’s dream, that kind of goes without saying.’

  Dyce smiled at her, and she saw the love and frustration. She felt the same way about Mama.

  Over the next rise they saw the first signs of human settlement in the area. The track changed from its wild growth; more bare spots turned up, and eventually they found at their feet an asphalt road, cracked all along its edges, grasses growing through it like a skeleton. In the distance there were the concrete uprights and faded orange roofs of an old town – long abandoned, they guessed.

  The towns were the first places that people had quit. The concentration of sick, especially in the early days, meant that contracting two or three viruses was more likely than not. Back then no one had understood where they were coming from, or what they would do, and people went out to meet their deaths from the mumps and the common cold. No one Vida knew had been as lucky as Dyce and Ma. It had been a massacre.

  The highways had posed the same problem because they were the obvious arteries along which the sick and the well both travelled – and so they too had been abandoned and left for the animals and the self-seeding herbage to reclaim.

  Now Vida dropped her pack and lay down on the double yellow center line. The asphalt was hot on her back, but she’d missed roads – all the places they could take you that were worth going. They had been important, hadn’t they? The connections across the whole continent. As a child she’d often imagined that – the road outside their house as a continuous thread that reached out like a handshake, as branched with possibilities as the tree of life. She had always thought that there would be millions of people at the other end. Now the roads, without cars to drive on them, had grown longer, pointing to every horizon you could never reach on foot, stretched thin and connected only with each other. Some, if
you followed them, simply vanished underfoot – crumbled and weathered as you watched. Others had been swallowed by foliage. Still others had been dug up, the black goo extracted and used as wind-proofing for houses that her ma said were like the shanty towns back home.

  Dyce laid his pack beside Vida and sat down.

  ‘You know, Garrett used to dare me to lie in the road like that. Trick was to time it between cars, lay down and count – one Mississippi, two Mississippi – real slow, until you heard the rumble and absolutely had to get up, had to get to the curb.’

  ‘He ever do it himself?’

  ‘Once that I remember, ’cause it was hard to forget. He was eight. Can you believe it? Laid himself down and just waited, hands behind his head like he was making a real big show of it, you know? Casual. The cars saw him and had to stop since he’s sprawled out half in each lane. Then this man and this woman start shouting to him to get the hell up and quit being so stupid, and Garrett just lies there. He got to four hundred and thirty-three Mississippi, four hundred and thirty-four Mississippi until the man literally drags him to the curb by his collar.’

  ‘He sure knew how to win dumbass competitions.’

  ‘World champ.’

  Dyce opened his bag and found his share of the locusts. He crunched one in his mouth and swallowed its spines along with a swig of water. He made a face. ‘You know what I would really like?’

  Vida blinked sleepily. ‘What?’

  ‘If I never had to eat another one of these fucking insects again in my life.’

  Vida snorted. Dyce waited, and then he said, ‘You know I’m hoping we don’t find Garrett, right?’

  She lay quiet, shading her eyes from the sun with her arm.

  ‘I figure if we find him, it’ll just be his body, you know? He’s had a week’s head start. If he’s been lucky then he’s long gone. I just want to hear that someone saw him come by.’

  ‘There’s a lot of open spaces, Dyce, ’specially down this way. If he was half smart then he’d keep his head down, try not get himself noticed.’

  ‘Yeah. Still. He’s kind of hard to miss.’ They were silent, picturing Garrett’s wide shoulders, the scars on his ruddy cheeks.

  Vida rolled to her side and looked at Dyce.

  ‘When last did you spend a night in a pre-war town? Come on, cowboy. My treat.’

  34

  The other thing about towns that it took people a long time to realize was that they were petri dishes – no one’s fault, just because of how they were made. The metal and the glass and the plastic and painted walls created an easy living for the viruses that blew in, Vida had come to learn. The risk was higher when things were wet and warm, but what the viruses loved best of all was a cold metal surface, out in the open. Go figure. Right now it was neither warm nor wet. She had factored that all in, and thought that Dyce had too. They were getting real good about protecting themselves against disease; they’d sure as hell had enough hours of practice.

  ‘We’ll stay on the edge of town, right? We need to be able to see the leaves.’

  ‘Yeah. Not long till dark, anyways. Okay, soldier. If the wind comes now, where are we holing up?’ Dyce asked, testing.

  Vida led the way past a row of shops, their glass fronts shattered, anything useful long ago stripped and stolen. She stopped at an open manhole and looked down into the bowels of the town’s storm water system. Vida shook her head. Too murky, too damp – and a whole lot of bacteria waiting to jump. They went on.

  ‘We’ll get to The Mouth tomorrow, I think,’ said Dyce. ‘Shouldn’t be much further.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘We need a story. They’ll ask.’

  ‘I’m a nurse and you’re a—?’

  ‘Carpenter.’

  ‘Nice. Like Jesus’s mama and daddy.’

  ‘And we’ll have to be husband and wife – better chance they’ll take us both. Dyce and Vida Jackson.’

  ‘You mean Washington,’ Vida told him. He shook his head but said nothing. ‘Here we are.’

  She pointed to a broad building with a neatly lettered sign on the frontage: Narrow Gauge Locomotive Museum. The door was still intact; the walls too, mostly. It was the best they would do. They needed to sit down and gather themselves.

  ‘We’ll stay in here, right? But before we set up camp I want to show you something.’

  ‘What?’ He cocked an eyebrow.

  ‘A surprise. Come.’

  Vida took a side street that led back into the bleached heart of the lonely town. The carcasses of cars here and there lay scattered, like white bones picked clean in the desert. Or dinosaurs, thought Vida, caught in the tar pits.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘What about the wind?’

  ‘We’ll be quick.’

  Dyce followed, but he was thinking, This is the same way I followed Garrett. Vida was making for the center line of the road, skirting the few rusted cars.

  ‘Really. What you looking for?’

  ‘Relax. You’ll see. My treat, remember?’

  Down a second street, lined with dead oaks, she found the place – an old cinema with the ticket booth out front, the glass splintered as if someone had tried to get in. Inside the foyer there were peeling posters, the glue holding fast. Their edges were torn and scratched away, as if a boy with a screwdriver had been at them. Between the jagged white gouges they could make out faces: old film stars, long dead. Rats, thought Dyce. They like paper, don’t they?

  ‘Looks like Nicholas Cage is on.’

  ‘Not a fan.’

  ‘Not even Wild at Heart?’

  ‘Not even after the end of the world. If we’re going to pretend we’re at the movies, then we’re going to be in separate theaters.’

  ‘Okey-dokey.’

  Vida stepped into the open space that had been the screening room. The seats were gone, leaving their concrete steps punched with the brackets that had held the springs and stuffing. The pocked gray walls sported the same graffiti you saw everywhere in the South: hairy penises, nicknames and arrowed hearts, and Fuck Renard. The roof of the place was clean gone too, along with the curtains and carpet and canvas screen. Vida took a seat on a step in the middle of the room, feeling the sky slowly purpling above. No breeze yet. Balmy, even, the way dusk sometimes felt, the single moment before the day switched over completely into the night. Dyce joined her and sat down, heavy and tired, setting his pack beside him.

  ‘This a date?’

  ‘What was the last film you saw at a cinema?’ Vida asked.

  ‘Terminator. And you?’

  ‘Never saw one, only ever had TV.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were up near the border, I ever tell you that? It was worse up that way. My ma defected from the North while she was pregnant with me, crossed the border, and that’s where we stayed.’

  ‘I think that’s the first thing you’ve told me, other than the usual.’

  They were quiet, watching the screen as though the show would start in seconds, the numbers projected over the scribbles like a countdown for a rocket, then the cigarette adverts, and a girl on a yacht, her long blonde hair flowing back in the kindly wind.

  Dyce glanced at Vida. Her hair was never going to be smooth, but he liked it that way – antennae. It got springier as the moisture levels increased in the air. He wanted to twine his fingers in the escaped curls at her temples.

  ‘Your mom ever tell you what it was like Otherside?’

  What he really wanted to say was, Who are you? What’re you like when you’re not being all cowgirl? And, baby, can I trust you with my life?

  Vida shrugged. ‘Not much. My mama worked in the labs, started as a midwife and rose in the ranks.’

  ‘She ever work with Renard?’

  ‘They all did, back then. Before it got weird.’

  ‘Before he turned into the evil physician and wormed his way into the White House, you mean.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘
The usual. Grew up trying to stay alive.’

  ‘What did you do for fun?’

  Vida laughed. ‘Fun ain’t what it used to be. Same as you, I reckon: keep alive, catch a mouse, dodge the wind.’

  ‘I carve. One day I’ll make an instrument. It’s the one thing I do that I don’t have to do. Suppose that’s what I mean by fun.’

  Vida thought for a second.

  ‘Photocomics. Remember them?’ Vida sighed. ‘Man, I loved those things.’

  ‘That smell, right? And the weird masks and things.’

  ‘My mama was young when she came over from South Africa. She brought the photocomics and cartoons with her – suppose that’s where I got the bug. Ever heard of True Africa? Or Staffrider? The underground stuff.’

  Dyce shook his head. ‘Only Archie and Disney, DC and the Marvel guys and all that. And then, ah, Bettie Page. Thank you, Garrett.’

  ‘Yeah, I loved those too, but they were kind of old even then. We had our own comics in South Africa: Samson the Lionheart. Chunky Charlie. Even Mighty Man, though the evil guys there were communists. But it was the photocomics that were really big. Those were my favorite. There was this one, Mami Wata – a white lady, half snake. It came from up north, I think. West Coast. But she’s all over the continent, in the stories from just about every country. And Mama brought a whole stack of the magazines with her when she came. I guess she wanted something to remind her of home. Like she was ever going to forget.’

  ‘So why did she come to America in the first place?’

  ‘Had to, I think. She doesn’t really talk about it. But there was this guy who ran a paper – Wilson Someone. I think she was in love with him. Anyway, he got on the wrong side of the South African government. They gave him an exit visa and no return, and Mama tagged along.’

  ‘Kicked him out? For what?’

  ‘Pick something. For things pretty much like what we’re doing now. Ebony and ivory. You and me sitting here was against the law not that long ago. Can you believe it? Mama didn’t want to get her head splattered in a jail cell.’

  ‘But that was before you were born, right?’