South

by Frank Owen

  ‘Alright,’ Tye told her. ‘But it’s a shame we didn’t get to know one another a little earlier. I like me the black-haired ladies.’

  He inspected her. What was it, exactly, that went out when a person passed on? Some light inside them that was burning, and then wasn’t. He had killed a few people in his time – men and women, both – and he had never been able to put his finger on it.

  ‘But I’m going to keep trying,’ Tye said. ‘Yes, indeed. Old Hawk-Eye never been a quitter.’

  He squinted down at her chest. No bra and nice titties too. But there was something else hard under there, making a bump when there should be none.

  Tye slid his hand under the bodice of the dress, and when he came to the soft dead nipples he twisted them. You heard stories about muscles moving, nerves and gases powering the cold machines of corpses, but there was no response.

  The vial was made of glass. He lifted it out from the soaked material. The cork stopper was still in place. Whatever it was, it had survived the death struggle, and had been precious enough for her to keep close to her heart.

  Tye unstoppered the little bottle and sniffed it. Not too close, now.

  Whatever was inside was yellowing, with a skin on top like custard: sweetish, going sour. His roiling stomach had subsided, but now it turned over again. Tye put his head to the side and tried to retch, but the Mars Bar was stubborn and he could only heave drily, his chest hitching like a dog’s.

  He went back a way and sat down again. ‘Don’t be a hero, asshole,’ he told himself. ‘You just set here a bit.’

  The idea of real coffee came upon him and he dedicated himself to the finding and brewing of it. Then, when it was ready, he grew ashamed: the smell always sent him back to the Concession talks and that nice Northern lady, Renard’s wife, and how she had tried to show them hospitality.

  But it was better not to waste good coffee. He didn’t know when he would see it again. The girl lay damp and unmoving in the sun, and Tye wondered if the dead got sunburnt. He raised his metal camping mug to her. ‘Something to remember you by.’

  It was later, when he had drunk his coffee black and scalding that Tye figured that the stuff in the vial might be milk. He shrugged. It was not his business. Like an ant he busied himself with moving the scouts’ housekeeping equipment into the hills where he’d slept, and he found a spot that would make a good hiding place. He ended up burying it all in a crevice, under rocks and dirt, pirate-style. Then he looked around for a marker, something that would help him remember the place when he came back this way. He memorized the shape of the hill – evenly curved with two cottonwoods side by side near the summit – as well as the bald patches of slope where rocks and rain prevented the grasses from taking hold. He’d lost a couple of decent things this way, hiding them away and then forgetting exactly where. A man got real specific when his survival depended on the recovery of equipment. Hills could look the same after a while, and trees too, even to the most experienced huntsman. It was no good building a cairn or setting up a pattern of stones: that kind of beacon only attracted passersby. Tye walked back to the camp, turning occasionally to see the hill from a different angle, memorizing what it looked like from the treeline.

  He took up the horses’ prints and followed them. Whoever had stolen them had been smart enough to take the animals through the shallows to cover their tracks, but Tye had time. He walked the shores looking for where the hoof prints reappeared in the mud, and then headed west. It took a couple of hours, but it was pretty clear where they went.

  At the crest above The Mouth, he laid low, crouching into the grass. The place seemed secure, inside a perimeter wall that ran along the cup of the valley and up as far as it could go into the hills on either side, where it met the rocky cliff face. Outside the walls was an old church. Some way off was a dark shape, a man swathed so that his arms were invisible, dangling by his neck from a tree. Even from where he hid Tye could tell he was long gone, turning slow. A poncho. That’s what he was wearing.

  Tye switched his attention back to The Mouth. Inside the settlement people were moving around and there, as plain as day, were the two horses tethered outside a building, eating hay.

  Tye crept back, staying low, and hiked up around the settlement to continue his reconnaissance – all the way along the cliffs to its top edge, the V where the two valley walls met. The perimeter fence continued here, but it looked weathered: the poles were roped together with string and cloth and the support pillars, which had once been dug deep into the ground, had been exposed by rain. Tye knew how it was: you couldn’t be everywhere at once, and there was always a weak spot.

  Satisfied with his findings, he made his way back down to the river, and sat himself down. Out came the pencil and a precious piece of paper: Renard had better appreciate it. Tye sketched a rough map of The Mouth and its surroundings, with arrows designating the vulnerable point up top.

  He made a note saying that the cliffs were too steep to traverse, but they were ideal for riflemen. It was not as delicately worded as the first message. It didn’t need to be. Tye had begun it by describing the state of the scouts, one with his throat slashed, the other’s neck broken like a doll. He thought under the circumstances that a little poetic license was apt.

  Tye called the harrier to him, and rolled the map as small as it would go. She accepted the canister and the note safely inside it. Tye sent her off again, north. If all went as it should, there would be no more assessing now – just an army, come to do what it should have done a week back. His job was done.

  Tye sat back and considered returning to Glenvale. He packed up all he could comfortably carry and set off. But when he’d walked that way for a few minutes, the sun flashing hot on his neck, he felt his stomach tightening into a knot again at the thought of the actual return. He turned east and slowed his pace, taking turns watching the birds in the trees and the beetles underfoot, until he was all the way back at the lake. He could do with the company.

  ‘You know, I think I might do some more fishing,’ he told Ester. ‘See what else the river brings me. Reckon I earned it.’ Her dead eyes stared up at the firmament, but he knew that she agreed with him.

  44

  When Vida and Dyce were shown to the entrance of the mine, Julia was already there, waiting for them, though the risen sun still lay hidden behind the easternmost hill. She’d been given new clothes too, trousers and a shirt, and for the first time they saw the pouched flesh of her abdomen that spoke of the lost baby.

  ‘Where’s Ester?’ she asked. She was hard to read, thought Vida. Like her sister. You couldn’t tell if she was pleased or weeping that Ester wasn’t there to bully her and order her around.

  Vida told her the story she’d concocted – about their synchronized attack, and how one of the scouts had got a shot off clean through Ester’s skull.

  ‘She didn’t suffer,’ she added. Don’t make it worse.

  Dyce waited a couple of beats and took over. ‘And you?’ he asked Julia. ‘You were next in line after Ester, right?’

  She jutted her chin out. ‘The guy in the poncho killed himself. You all said he would do that, remember? Hanged himself from that tree about an hour after you left. So it was me or the other two, and they said they weren’t taking pregnant women – ’cause that was two places.’ She pulled a face.

  Vida saw now that she’d helped them sell the lie. It was true that the rocking man had probably wanted to die, but he surely didn’t want to kill himself – otherwise he’d have done it instead of holing up at the church. Maybe that was what Ester had been whispering to them before she left. One last murderous message: Eliminate the competition. Vida pictured the three women, floating over to the man where he sat in his sorrow against the wall. They held splintered planks hidden behind their backs, ready to beat the ghost out of him before they strung him up.

  Ed arrived, smiling. He was carrying a fat burner that hung on a rope. He made a show of lighting it with a flint and scraper. The
flame was uncertain, and the burner dripped. Dyce had to look away: it was too much like the body that was dangling under the tree outside the town walls.

  Ed ushered the new recruits busily to the mine entrance, and now that they were close Vida and Dyce saw how wooden railway sleepers held up the roof of the tunnel. Men and women were moving in and out in an orderly fashion, swathed like mummies, toting tools and lanterns. Ed rested a foot on an upturned bucket like Napoleon, and addressed Dyce and Vida and Julia in the voice he used for show.

  ‘Hi ho, hi ho, everybody. It’s Show and Tell today – best part of my job. Course, you understand how I hate leaving the others outside, but our town is only so big, copes with only so many folk. A hundred and fifty, to be exact. Doesn’t work too good with a hundred and forty-seven; doesn’t work at all at a hundred and fifty-one. And, folks, don’t ask how we found that out!’ Ed chuckled, wet and false, his tiny eyes retreating.

  ‘Most part of that is food production. We’re a farming community, as I hope you saw from last night’s meal – and wasn’t that a feast? Wasn’t that just the best thing you’ve seen in a long while? Am I right or am I right?’ Ed rubbed his stomach fondly, the way you were meant to do with a buddha, and Vida found herself shuddering. What else was in there, besides food? There was something terrifyingly clownish about him.

  ‘I guess I should have told you all yesterday, but if you hate mushrooms you’re going to be in the deepest bunker of hell in about five minutes, right next to Hitler and that guy who shot John Lennon, and the red-hot seat they’re saving for Renard when he crosses over. This is Mushroom City, and this’ – he pointed at the mine entrance, extending his whole hand, the same way he’d gestured at the sick boy with his parents – ‘is where the magic happens.’

  There was something in his voice: the tone, Dyce thought, of an old-time radio advert, or a western medicine man selling nostrums from a wagon – punching the first syllable of every word and pronouncing every letter, building in exuberance, sentence upon sentence, towards some irresistible climax. Rollup rollup rollup! Buy two bottles of Cod Liver Elixir and I’ll throw in the wart powder for free!

  A thin woman in a headscarf came walking out and seemed to recognize Dyce and Vida. She gave them a conspiratorial smile and said, ‘The Callahan Killers.’ She smelt sweet, like old grass clippings. Only her face and hands were visible from her wrappings, and they were muddy brown, her fingernails caked black, and Vida thought, Oh, God, please don’t let her touch me with those hands. I don’t think I could stand it if she did that.

  Ed set the burner down and adjusted the wick until it burnt steady, making thin ribbons of soot.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘Keep right; pass left. Remember the old rules of the road and you’ll be just fine down here!’

  Vida and Dyce waited for Julia to go first. Better to keep her in sight. She kept close to Ed. They all disappeared into the mouth.

  The mines were darker than Vida had expected. The glow from Ed’s flame seemed to extend only so far, a bauble of light that struggled against the black. It made her wonder whether there were degrees of dark. A candle flame could brighten the whole kitchen back at the old house: the light from it seemed to enliven the space, halo the people sitting at the table, go in search of the undead corners and cracks. This darkness was different, thick and unfriendly, a plague blanket.

  Dyce savored the darkness. He did not take his power for granted: each evening when night came on, he was amazed again that he could see better than during the daylight hours. Where the others were stepping blind, he tried to turn his strength to good, noting the obvious maintenance to the original structure, which was about a century old. It would have been here when the last big storm came. Were the mines used for shelter back then too? It made sense. Where sleepers had splintered or rotted, they’d been replaced with thick logs: birch, cottonwood, pine – wedged into place to keep the soil at bay. The old tracks for the trolleys had been dug up and added to the walls and roof for reinforcement. It felt like an underground tree house, and Dyce had a pang of timesickness for Garrett and the old diversions laid out for him by someone else, the forts and dares and puzzles.

  They descended as they went, and they expected the air to grow colder and less hospitable. Instead it was warmer and more humid. Then the air pockets merged and the temperature evened out. It was constant for the last few feet, uterine.

  They came to a junction. Ed turned left and they saw the yellow-green glow that crept towards them, like a night-light under the door.

  He led them into the chamber itself, lit by a couple of lanterns overhead. In the soft glow the air seemed to move and shimmer, and it shouldn’t have – not this far under the earth, where no air currents stirred except those thrown up by the movement of their bodies.

  But the motes were there, suspended. They twirled, balletic, in the haloed light.

  Vida covered her mouth in the old instinct, and when Dyce saw her he did the same. The rest of the workers were muffled by the cloths they wore like masks.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t bother Ed. He just stood there and gestured at the floor and the wooden boxes there, made from pallets. They were filled to the rim with black mulch, like portable graves.

  From them grew millions of mushrooms, luminous against the space-dark earth, an underground forest. Each box held a different kind, Vida could see: big brownish ones with fronds; red-spotted ones that looked poisonous; small white ones, bright as buttons. Others looked like failed experiments – shrunken into warts or cups or human livers, frilled or gilled or phosphorescent. They sprouted in groups, jostling desperate as pimples – Dyce thought of Garrett’s ravaged face – or singly, proud and offish. And they weren’t just horizontal: some were being trained to grow up the poles that reached the cavern’s roof, where the lanterns dangled. And tending them all were the linen-wrapped women of The Mouth, their thin fingers busy weeding in the mulch.

  Ed stopped. ‘You gotta be real careful around some of these ones,’ he said softly. ‘Like the oysters. Can’t even fart too close.’

  He stooped to tweezer out a mushroom the size of his hand, making sure he didn’t bruise its brothers. He held it up to the light of his burner.

  ‘Here is the real secret of The Mouth.’ He paused for effect.

  Vida fidgeted. ‘You grow mushrooms?’

  Ed regarded her. ‘These ones are special.’

  ‘You grow magic mushrooms?’

  He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘All of you. What have you seen here so far, in your time in our beautiful town?’

  ‘You run a tight ship. You were right.’

  Dyce nudged Vida and said, ‘No one’s sick, Ed.’

  ‘Correct! And that, little travelers, is because of these babies. These here ’shrooms are anti-bacterial.’

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ said Vida. ‘But so’s the barberry bush. Why aren’t you growing a crop of those?’

  ‘I said these were special. They’re special because they are anti-bacterial, but they are also anti-viral.’ Ed sucked in a vast lungful of air, then exhaled, his fat man’s titties jiggling and jubilant. ‘You smell that, boys and girls? That there is the smell of life! Suck it in!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, girlie.’ He shook the mushroom at her, its frill trailing over his dirty fingers. ‘The elixir, right here. Food and medicine, all in one. Chinese been doing it for ten thousand years. Why you think they live so long? Now just think about it, what it means for us down here, for everyone in the South. I’ll tell you what it means. No sickness, ever again.’

  They were quiet. A woman smiled weakly at them. Ed saw her and said, ‘Get back to work, Mona. You got quotas.’ She put her head down.

  ‘No one in The Mouth has ever caught a virus in all the years we’ve been a town. And I don’t just mean that no one gets the sniffles. I mean not one virus. The good citizens here are immune to all of them: the whole bang-shoot. Does that impress you folks? It impresses me. And y
ou three, since yesterday’s meal, are lucky enough to be part of it.’

  Ed leant forward and held the mushroom to Julia’s lips. She opened her mouth obediently and took a bite, chewed it and swallowed. ‘Anyone else hungry? I know I am.’ He ate the rest of the mushroom in his hand, not bothering to brush the dirt off.

  ‘How does it work?’ asked Dyce.

  Ed licked his lips, chasing the soft flesh of a fragment. ‘Can’t tell you, buckaroo. We ain’t exactly scientists. This was our lucky find. But you know what? We are going to change history. Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘Not one person’s caught a virus?’

  ‘Not one.’

  Ed let that sink in, then he went on. ‘Dyce and Julia: you’ll be working down here. Women are the pickers; men look after the soil and the beds. There are two other growth chambers like this, and also some smaller ones – nine, all said. You’ll be told where you’re working, but don’t ever go on straight along the tunnel we came in. There’s a point where we’ve stopped maintaining it and the structure from there is . . . unpredictable. You all will know when you’ve gone too far. There’ll be signs. You don’t want to go too far.’

  Dyce and Julia nodded.

  ‘Now you’ve seen the big secret, kids. It’s time to exit Eden. Let’s go. We can walk and talk. So what do you think? With new folks I always want to leave this bit till last, but how can you? It’s fucking amazing. Am I right or am I right? Rest of the town’s just a town, but if you don’t have to worry about viruses no more, that means something, don’t it? It really is a town. We stand a chance to make it the way it’s supposed to be.’

  Ed seemed to want applause, but Vida couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it. He hurried them along the shaft, back outside, talking all the way, and the watery light changed back to the clearer atmosphere of the daytime earth.