the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  Just a few minutes earlier she’d been sitting somewhere close in the dark and whispering to him. Her crisp, lilted wordplay. In another life altogether it could have been a beautiful thing. Within earshot of the water, lying together in the woodland of an islet secluded somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The sound of his wife’s balmy voice airing underneath a natural canopy.

  She’d been explaining the difference between dawn and sunrise, of all things. The concepts are similar but they’re not precisely the same. She told him that dawn is defined as the first coming of visible light—even the dimmest and greyest still counts as dawn in the technical sense. Determining when light appears is somewhat subjective to the viewer, of course, but you get the idea. Sunrise, on the other hand, is different. Sunrise is when the sun’s leading edge, its brightness, is actually visible above the horizon. Do you understand? They’re not the same, she said. Right now what we really need is dawn, some kind of faint light to navigate by. It doesn’t have to be anything with actual warmth.

  She’d told him to focus. Let’s just make it to dawn, she said. Don’t worry. The duration between dawn and sunrise depends on latitude. And this is an equatorial region, so the duration between the two should only be a matter of a few minutes in the worst case.

  He’s starting to believe that it’s an animal, and not a human, in the woods. Something predatory, low-slung. The way it mills around the groundcover and pauses every so often, as though reorienting itself or lifting its damp snout to the wind, sampling the loamy air, trying to catch a scent. Its feral-sounding respiration.

  More than likely it’s one of the fossa, out foraging and skulking about on the resort grounds. They’ve been getting more and more brazen over the weeks, the fossa. Coming up from La Sielve into the Trap, as though they sensed a vacuum and, with it, took the opportunity to make a claim for themselves. The entire Trap is empty now except for the fossa; they’re absolutely everywhere—padding in and out of the sundry shops through their shattered glass doors—watching everything, taking it all in. Patrolling the abandoned cobblestone roadways like sentries.

  In a matter of days after the outbreak, the fossa had marked the Trap as new territory. By day they lounged in the shade on the white steps of the park fountain, lazily watching the surround, dozing off. Occasionally sending the submissive omegas out on forays into the woods nearby. But by night the pack came to life. Right away, they took to slaughtering the Trap’s population of indri lemurs, the ones that had been tamed over the years by hotel guests handing out dry dog food purchased from peddlers, $5 per ziploc baggie. Feedings in the Trap had been going on for decades—at the hotel they even had a brochure about them—but then the pack of fossa arrived, and all of the indri were gone from the Trap within a week.

  After that, a few fossa started raiding the tattered encampments of human survivors, encampments much like their own, in fact. Scavenging. He recently saw a male—sinewy and tail-lashing and lithe—nosing through an empty dome tent set back in the trees near the hotel tennis courts. He remembers the way it looked at him. The brown-yellow eyes luminous against its black fur.

  It’s gotten close to the culvert now, the thing tracking them. Twenty-five yards. That’s his best estimate, but it might be fewer than that. Twenty, even fifteen maybe. Metrics have become more difficult to gauge since the Collapse—that series of unthinkable moments over the last twelve weeks. In that short period of time, the distance between any two points has become congested with the various harbingers of end-times. More quickly than you ever would have thought possible. Carnivores freely loping in the roadways. The outlying buildings and the bordering rosewood groves of Resort Lavelha consumed by a series of fires. Heaps of abandoned items, instantly valueless in the new economy of weaponry and survival rations. Everywhere, the ragged grey wanderers. Pacing the once-white terraces and pavilions and covered walkways of the hotel exterior, all of them embroiled in their various stages of disease and psychosis. Stumbling past the scores of the dead. In such a short time, there are already so many. Their ravaged corpses twisted into unyielding postures like cast figures.

  Slowly he turns his body over on the soil of the burrow so he’s prone on his belly, and she falls into position next to him, at his shoulder. Automatic, wordless. Survival has become a nagging kind of habit. He looks over at her, and she is close enough now that he can see her shivering, her eyes wide through the masking filth. Her gaunt, haggard face. She blinks a few times as if to focus, then she wipes her face with the back of the same hand that carries a squared-off butcher’s cleaver. One hole in the blade’s corner with a loop of twine laced through so she can carry it on a belt. She looks at him and nods. For the thousandth time, I am ready for the next thing. Together they stare out from underneath the swath of fallen ravenala limbs covering them.

  In the wild you’ll often hear the sounds of the lost, others like you. Their limping passage. Their words, many of which will be spoken in languages you won’t understand at all, or only barely, from school maybe. You’ll occasionally hear their howling screams and the awful commissions that evoke those screams, and your instinct will be to listen intently to every sound, trying to determine whether it’s coming from a friend or a foe, but you can’t waste energy in the wild dwelling too long on whatever you hear. The specifics. Chasing foolishly after the particulars of a sound, which in the end is nothing but the propagation of aimless waves through a medium.

  Don’t let yourself be taken in. You are only given so much time. And when something unknown is bearing down on you, there is very little to be learned about its identity or its intent by tilting your ear to the wind and listening for the subtleties of cadence. Trying to form an interpretation of stride, of tread, the same way that some people claim to be able to distinguish falsehoods from truth just by listening for tone of voice, for changes in pitch. It doesn’t work that way—not out here. You want it to, but it just doesn’t. Out here, you should assume it’s all falsehood, no matter how the sound carries, no matter the nature of it. Phrases or footfalls, any damn thing that heralds itself. Everything that approaches you is coming with ready teeth.

  With his eyes still fixed on the woods, he finds the satchel in the dirt under a corner of the ratty sheet scavenged from the hotel. The satchel has a black patent leather outer shell; the material still shines, burnished, beneath a layer of dust.

  Inside there are compartments and pockets for the items he used to carry around, such as a laptop or a tablet computer, sometimes both. An occasional file folder. A light windbreaker, lip balm maybe. There is a special sleeve designed to hold a spare battery for a mobile phone—that’s the actual suggested use. When they made this, they thought of everything. Now the pocket holds a single, half-full matchbox, small and leaf-green and branded with a tortoise logo and the name of the hotel restaurant. A wad of dry grass inside so the matches won’t rattle. He reaches into the main body of the satchel and he pulls the battered kitchen knife out by its wooden handle.

  The blade is buried in a makeshift sheath—he made it himself. A few weeks ago during a supply run he found a ten-inch shipping box full of pencils in the daycare room at the resort, emptied the pencils onto the carpet, and tore off one of the lengthwise flaps from the box. Just an ordinary cardboard boxflap. Brown, ten inches by four inches. He held it up vertically against a desktop, centered the point of the knife on the topmost edge, and pushed the blade down into the interior corrugate. Straight, perpendicular. Working it in, careful not to pierce either panel or buckle the structure. When he finished and pulled the knife out again there was a void hollowed out in a perfect acute shape.

  They stare into the dark brake of trees surrounding the culvert and wait in the same way they have countless other times. This is what normal is now. Life has become a gradual process of attrition. The two of them, entrenched behind their sorry stick barricade, holding the thin line with two kitchen utensils. He carries the blade point-forward, like a bayonet, with the handle high and at arm’s length. T
he knife isn’t even half a pound. His hand is trembling as though he’s keeping a heavy weight aloft.

  They wait together and they listen—trying to determine distance only, not identity. His body is braced for something rabid to come bursting through the thicket wall, but even after a long while, nothing comes. The thing in the trees is still moving, resolute, but in time the sounds start to wane, falling off northward. Trailing in the direction of the oceanfront. Whatever is out there coursing deliberately through the woods, fossa or not, has traveled past them. It’s heading out toward the sea and toward the remains of Resort Lavelha. Park closes his eyes and allows himself to breathe audibly.

  chapter five

  The sky is beginning to pale, and from their position in the culvert Park can see the desolate beachfront through gaps in the treeline. Its rows of sunlounger chairs and tent-like canopy shades. Wicker end tables. Everything barren, abandoned. A long skeleton frame racked with sea kayaks and playboats and yellow double-blade paddles. An aluminum valet overrun with lifejackets like bloated treefruit.

  He sheathes the knife. For a while he alternates between watching the waterline and watching the woods on either side of the culvert. Mangroves with root systems that tentacle widely above ground. The tamarind. The palms and the soft ferns. Baobab trees dripping with their overripe gonga, all of it half-eaten by some animal and then left on the vine to molder, ant-covered and fly-ridden. The soft white vanga still nesting, oblivious, in the branches of a neem tree.

  Offshore there is the steady, immutable roll of swells. Their booming resonance and their turnover. Slow and lulling and metronomic. Again and again, the breakers crest to height and spill over against the low shoal, radiating across the sand with a hissing sibilance, and then fall seaward again, skimming off the topmost layer.

  After a time he glances at her, taking in his wife’s worn expression. The matted thickness of her black hair pulled loosely back, the shards of brown leaves and branchlets visible in the braids. She’s been wearing the same outfit since the day they were first chased into the woods from the hotel’s Recreation Annex. A thin red flannel shirt layered over a white tank top. The kind of khaki pants that end below the knee at the calf, a zippered pocket on each leg. New Balance trainers, off-white. The cooking class had required closed-toed, comfortable shoes, so she was fortunate enough to be wearing gym shoes on that morning instead of sandals or flip-flops. The small things can sometimes make a big difference in this life.

  She looks out at the woods through the screen of limbs. Watching in the same way he is, for the same terrible things he is, with the same expectation, with equally haunted, hollow eyes. She’s still gripping the butcher’s cleaver tightly and her knuckles show through the skin. He puts a hand gently on hers. I think we’re good, he says to her. It’s gone. We’re good.

  She doesn’t say anything. She just stares awhile. Clutching that glinting meat hatchet in a tight, mudded fist. The whites of her teeth and eyes in the dark. There is no good, she tells him. Not for us. There’s only being ready for the next bad thing coming.

  They go back to the watch, and not long after, Park sees a pale boy emerge from the trees lining the beachfront. A true wildling, this one. Sunburned, ragged. Dirt and abrasions and bruising and what look to be bite marks all along his arms and wrists, his ankles, anywhere his mouth can reach. They watch him running, shirtless and shoeless, casting himself wildly down the shore toward the warm waters of the guulfo. Barely more than a baby, this lost child. Three, maybe four years old is all. His thin arms and his rounded belly and the raw, unfledged gait. His bare feet are pocking the wet sand like the track of a small animal.

  The boy patters shin-deep into the wash and then he starts to stomp. Kicking a spray, splashing through. The child is smiling, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, ghoulish, God have mercy on what remains of him. He leaps and lands hard with both feet down, sending plumes roostertailing on all sides. Soaking his body over. He jumps that way again and again, and the water that surrounds him looks viscous and black and stygian like something that would flow in the underworld, something requiring paid passage. At its banks, the castaway ghost of a child taken in the middle of play, stripped abruptly from the living earth. It’s as though someone forgot to place a toll coin on the tongue of the child’s vacated body before it was given over to the cold ground.

  The boy fashions his own game of Escape. He charges the sea as it recedes and then he wheels around and tears off in the opposite direction as the next wave comes—dodging the water like it’s acid or maybe lava—back and forth, again and again. During one of these yawing circuits he falls belly-first into the water and he quickly gets back up again and then scampers upshore with his mouth open, cackle-screaming, squealing like he’s gone mindless. The brown strands of his hair are slicked down against his skull, the liquid runneling off of him. Chin thrust forward, arms back. His pitched voice. The boy is young enough still that his body instinctively translates joy into sheer decibels, even at the end.

  Park wants badly to go to the child—to leave this hole in the earth and rush over to stand a useless vigil with this wraith of a boy. Gather him in a towel. See to it that he has a warm place to lie between them. Shoulder to shoulder. Ration the water three ways from now on. Let the child’s last days be those where he is at least cared for.

  Having the boy to look after would be good for the two of them—the boy would give them a reason to keep running. A defensible purpose behind this constant, harried flight to the next hiding place underneath the ground, out of view. People need something to live for other than the basic maintenance of their physical bodies, and people say it has to be something greater or bigger than yourself, but that isn’t right. It doesn’t have to be. A simple distraction will often serve just fine.

  The boy is collecting seawater in his cupped hands. He is climbing the beach and pitching the water into a fist-sized hole in the sand as though he’s banking something of value. Over and over. His bowlegged strides and the sagging bloat of his diaper. Back and forth. Making dozens of these small transfers, each one equally as important as the previous. An agenda of simple reallocation. His feet are riddling the sand with prints from the waterline all the way up to the dry berm, and the hole is no closer to being full than it was when he started.

  After a time the boy has saved all he can save. He stops running and stands in the surf with his legs spread at shoulder width. His too-wide eyes and his constant, grimacing smile. He bends at the knees and he goes down into a full squat, staring at the water as though searching for something important.

  The boy reaches into the wash with one of his hands and starts dredging around. Water up to the middle of his forearm. In time he lifts out a single small white cowry pinched in between his fingers, dripping. The smooth and lustrous pearl shell with its slit-like aperture. The boy studies the shell like it’s the rarest of finds, and for a moment he looks like a normal boy again. He holds it up to eye-level, appraising. After a time he places the shell into his mouth as though it’s a pill and he swallows it whole, and then he reaches in again, finds another cowry shell, and repeats.

  Park closes his eyes against the boy’s suffering. This baby boy. The obscenity of the fact that a boy is abandoned and sick and feeding on scavenge taken out of the wet sand. His complete insensibility to his own coming apart, his slow winding down, and the coming apart and the slow winding down of the world around him. It’s true what they say: most of the time you know so little that you don’t even know the things you don’t know. You couldn’t make a proper list if you took a lifetime trying.

  Park doesn’t open his eyes again until he’s sure the boy is out of his sightline. He looks over at Lee, next to him. She doesn’t say anything. She just watches, weary, through the culvert opening. Dead-faced. It’s as though she doesn’t even register the child at all.

  After a time Park speaks quietly to her. He hadn’t planned to.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says. His voice comes o
ut hoarsely.

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  For some reason he’s feeling lightheaded. They haven’t eaten in a few days. “Do you know what to do?” he asks.

  Lee looks at him. A blend of concern and annoyance. “Do about what.”

  Park nods once in the direction of the boy.

  Lee doesn’t respond. She exhales once and then rubs her face, and when she’s done with that, she inches forward and lifts aside one of the boughs that covers the opening, and she looks up at the sky. There is a wan light across her face. A spall of a moon is still visible overhead. “I think we should go,” she says finally. “That’s what I think.”

  “Go where?”

  “Just go,” she says. “Move on.”

  Lee rests the bough back in its place and shifts into a kneeling position. She pauses a moment, wincing. She takes a few deep breaths, and when she’s ready, she slowly unbuckles her belt and threads the end of it through the loop of twine on the cleaver’s blade. She rebuckles the belt, letting the cleaver hang, swinging, and then she starts to roll up the hotel sheet. Park goes back to watching through the opening.

  About halfway through packing up the shelter, she pauses. He can feel her staring at him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, and he can tell that she’s using her gentlest tone, the one that helps him do the thing she needs him to, whatever it is.