She needs to check the gearbox in the truck bed and also the trailer exterior, which means going outside. She keeps the engine idling, and she lifts the lock button for the driver’s door and takes her time scanning the surroundings again. The liana palm fronds and the sedge grass, their ceaseless motions in the wind, and that’s all—there’s no sign of anything else moving out on the murram. She opens the door and steps down from the cab, leaving it open in case she needs to return at a run.
The first task is to work on releasing the trailer; there’s no reason to drag it behind her everywhere. She goes to the gooseneck assembly and unscrews the coupler before pulling the split cotter pin and dropping it down. She squats low and gets a shoulder under the hitch arm and then straightens, lifting until the linkage point clears the ball mount on the undercarriage. She dumps the entire thing to the side and it thuds on the hardpack, sending a rattle through the trailer frame.
She climbs into the truck bed and opens the gearbox, and the interior is mostly empty, but there are some good things. At the top she finds one of the foil packets of rice and chicken. A water bottle with two inches of liquid left. There are a handful of tools, but only one of them is worth the carrying weight—a two-foot black crowbar. Assorted shirts. She trades her old flannel for one of the button-downs. Toward the bottom of the box she finds a yellow plastic Bic lighter and she shakes it and decides it’s worth holding on to. There is a quart-sized oil bottle that is still almost half full. She takes it and shuts the gearbox lid.
She forces herself to go to the trailer, the box portion—she tries to focus solely on the exterior. There is a twist-lock compartment near the wheel well with a soft-shell equine medkit inside. It’s been pretty well picked over already. She fishes through the remains, and she salvages a few alcohol wipes and a pocket scalpel and two aspirin packets.
Through the gaps in the trailer siding she can see a slant-load water tank mounted inside the box. A capacity somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons. Bone dry, in all likelihood. With the world being what it is, it’s hard to imagine anyone indulging in the luxury of hauling around extra water for their livestock, but she can’t ignore the possibility. She steps onto the ramp and enters the trailer.
The blood on the aluminum flooring has dried enough to hold footprints, to feel tacky. The inner walls are spattered. The ceiling. Only two bodies out of the original eight are still lying there—one man and one woman. The rest must have slid out of the open bay, rag-dolling onto the murram at some point during the drive. As she steps past the two bodies she can’t help but see the crisp, elliptical puncture wounds in groups of four, peppering the distended flesh on their backs and necks, but then she looks away. She approaches the tank and tries the spigot, but nothing comes.
Holding the good things she found, Lee walks back to the truck and climbs in though the open door. She arranges the crowbar and the oil, food and water on the passenger side, then she closes the door and presses the lock button. She brings the aspirin, scalpel, wipes, and lighter out of her pockets and sets them with the rest. She gears the truck into first, and she is about to release the handbrake when she notices movement outside—a lone woman is walking out from the treeline of the woods on the road shoulder. Around twenty feet afield of her.
The woman stands in the road directly in the line of the truck. Her hands are raised. She is wearing a faded blue slit-leg maxi dress; her black hair is long in the wind and there is a painter’s dust mask covering her mouth and nose.
The woman begins to walk slowly, hands above shoulders, toward Lee. No shoes. Bruising up and down her pale arms. Lee guns the engine once, taking the RPMs up into the sixes, and the woman stops. She stands still in the road, and the arms go higher. The hem of her dress is whipping, twisting. Lee drops the stick into neutral and rolls down the window with the hand crank.
She leans out. “I don’t have anything,” she tells the woman.
“I don’t want anything,” the woman says. Her speech is slurred. It’s as though her tongue has grown too thick for her mouth to carry.
“Then move,” Lee says. “I’m leaving.”
“Let me come.”
“No.”
The woman takes a few more paces forward. “I don’t want anything. Just to come.”
Lee guns the engine again but it doesn’t stop the woman this time. Without thinking, Lee reaches back for the handgun and points it loosely toward the woman’s feet.
Seeing the weapon, the woman stops walking. She stands about ten feet from the front bumper. “I won’t ask for anything. Please. I won’t speak.” She goes silent after that.
“Lord,” Lee says. She exhales, shaking her head and staring off into the tree canopy. After a time she looks at the woman.
“Okay,” Lee says. “I’m going to put this away.” She tilts the gun so that the muzzle is toward the sky. “But I need you to understand: I will drive this truck through you. Right through you. Please believe me that if I have to, I will do that. So I need you to stop walking unless I tell you to walk.”
The woman nods. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” Lee sets the gun down on the dash. “Now I want you to look where the truck is headed,” Lee says. “If you want to go to Cãlo, this isn’t your ride.”
“I don’t care where I go,” says the woman.
“You don’t care,” Lee says. Then in a brief moment of panic she looks around the roadway, including behind her in the rearview. “Are you alone?”
“Yes,” the woman says.
Lee pauses, considering the variables she can consider in the time she has. A minute passes, and she waves the woman in.
“Okay. Come on.”
Lee keeps the handgun in her lap as she drives, and the woman sits silently. The supplies Lee foraged from the gearbox and the trailer are on the bench seat between them. There is the sound of the engine block, the truck tires churring over the aggregate of the roughshod murram. Gravel popping, fragments caroming off the undercarriage. Rhythmic. The wind winnowing the tamarind trees. Before long Lee finds herself starting to nod off behind the wheel—her chin falling to her chest.
The woman says something, and Lee’s head snaps up.
Lee looks over at her, blinking. “What?”
“I can take over,” the woman says. It comes out muffled from under the mask.
“No,” Lee says. “I’m all right. Sorry.”
She keeps driving. After a long time the woman says, “You can talk if it helps.”
Lee looks over at her. This is nothing but a child, really. Just a girl, possibly twenty years old, but probably not even that.
“What’s your name?” Lee asks her.
The girl pauses. She half-shrugs. “Hanna,” she says.
Lee talks to the girl for the rest of the drive into Lavelha. Going on and on, much more than she ought to. Not about anything too substantive—mostly she talks about the means of survival over the past months. How she’s managed to stay breathing for this long. She tells the girl about the supply runs into the outlying buildings of the hotel, about her scrapes with the fossa cats, and about the things she’s forced herself to eat, things she never thought she could possibly stomach. She tells the girl about the shelter in the culvert, the inside and the outside, but for some reason she never mentions that her husband was there also, that he was a part of every survival story she has to tell.
After a time the girl asks, “Can I please lay down,” and this might be the longest string of words she’s put together the entire drive.
Lee looks over at her. Tall and reedy and angular in the oversized dress. Nothing about the child seems at all threatening. Lee nods. “Okay,” she says.
The girl starts to gather up the supplies between them on the bench seat, one at a time, and place each item on the floor mat. The food, the oil, the water bottle, the crowbar. She starts to pick up the rest but Lee stops her.
“In there,” Lee says. She points to the glove box.
The gi
rl nods. She puts the last of the items away in the glove box, and then she takes off her seatbelt and shifts onto her left hip, bringing her legs up onto the seat, curled under. She lies down on her left side, face-forward, and she rests her head carefully on Lee’s right thigh. Making herself small and fetal. Still wearing the dust mask over her mouth. The girl’s long, sable hair spills down over the side of the seat, and the ends brush the floor.
Lee’s first instinct is to strip her leg out from under the child. To recoil from her. But she doesn’t pull away, and as soon as she gets past the shock of the proximity, she decides there’s no real harm to it. She relaxes her leg, trying to soften it. She takes the gun from her lap and rests it up on the dash.
The child sleeps all the way to the junction that leads to the Trap. The point in the road where you have a choice—go on toward the hotel proper, or park your vehicle on the roadside and take a rugged, uncut footpath through the woods to the public beachfront. Lee slows the truck and pulls off to the shoulder. There are a few cars still parked here, and they’ve been completely gutted down to their skeletal frames.
Lee shakes the girl’s shoulder. “We’re here,” she says, and it sounds ridiculous the moment it leaves her mouth. We’re here. She’s talking to this stranger as though they’re on a family trip and she’s announcing their arrival. We’re here. And where exactly is here? And how is it any different, any better, than the place we just left behind?
The girl stirs, opening her dark eyes, and she sits up slowly. She blinks and looks around. It must be sometime in the early afternoon, maybe two or three o’clock, and the sun is streaming through the glass of the passenger window, bathing her, and backed by the light this girl could be any girl—just a normal teenage child—waking in the middle of the day, back before everything in the good world burst into fragments. For a moment you can almost ignore the white mask and the bruises and the under-eye circles and the torn fabric. The bones boiling up to the skin’s surface. You almost can. But then the girl shifts her head and there is a change in the way the light falls on her, and then you understand that you can’t define normal by remembering what the world used to be. You have to look at what’s in front of you. This is normal. This is what a child looks like in the world now, the way it is.
“This is your stop,” Lee says. She shuts down the truck.
“Can I come with you?” the girl asks.
Lee is ready for the question; she considered it carefully over the last hour. “For tonight, yes,” she says. “Tomorrow, I need to move on.”
“Okay,” says the girl.
Lee opens the driver’s door and steps down, scanning the treeline on both sides of the murram. “I need to put the truck somewhere for the night,” she says. She points vaguely to the woods. “Drive it in as deep as it will go. Cover it up. That’s what I’m thinking.”
The girl gets out on the passenger side. She looks around and after a time she nods.
Together they find a shallow break in the understory of the woods and they set to work on clearing more space. The girl uses her bare hands. She’s stronger than she looks; this isn’t her first time performing manual labor, you can tell just by watching her movements. The way she grips onto low-hanging branches and bears down with her body weight and the wood flexes and splinters. Afterward the girl gathers armfuls of heavy downfall from the leaf litter. Load after load. For her part, Lee uses the bevel of the crowbar to chisel away at the larger limbs until they’re weak enough for the girl to pull loose and drag away.
After a short time they’ve cleared enough room and Lee backs the truck in. They camouflage the chassis with everything the girl collected. They gather the supplies and start the long hike to the beachfront.
chapter fifteen
When they come to the culvert they stop twenty yards afield, and Lee tells the girl to wait in a grove of tamarind. She takes out the handgun. Keeping it pointed to the ground, she steps quietly to the culvert opening. She aims the muzzle forward and ducks down and pushes in. Sweeping from end to end, wall to wall.
There’s no one inside—the truth is that she didn’t really anticipate otherwise. She lowers the gun. On the culvert floor, on the side that used to be hers, there is a bag. A zippered sport duffel.
It’s unsettling to her, the sight of something so intact and new—unblemished and brightly colored—in the otherwise empty grey space. She approaches the bag slowly, hunched over. She kneels and returns the gun to her waistband at the small of her back, and then she unzips the main body. She spreads the two sides apart.
The interior is filled with foil blister packs and plastic bottles with screw caps, more than a hundred of them. A medicine for every conceivable ailment and all of the most common insecurities. A balance of off-the-shelf and prescription. Tablets, primarily, but when she digs a little she finds an asthma inhaler and two cough syrups, the kind for kids. There is even a syringe of epinephrine in a snap-lid case.
Lee zips the bag closed and straightens up as much as the ceiling allows. She rubs her face, looking out through the culvert opening at the light filtered by the tree canopy, and she thinks about what the duffel means. This cache of medicine, its singular presence in this dark place. The reason it was left here for her, and the message it was meant to send.
There’s no question that her husband brought the meds, no question, which means he did exactly what he told her he would do—he held himself together for long enough to make his way to the hotel, to their suite. And when he couldn’t find the drugs that belonged to her, he made his way back here with everyone else’s, whatever he could put his hands on, by the looks of the bag. It’s as though he went through and scoured every single room in the Makoa. It’s a hell of a haul, almost inconceivable for these threadbare times. And when he came to the culvert and found that she was gone, he decided to leave it all behind, everything he worked for, directly on the spot where she used to lie.
There’s no evidence that he stayed in the shelter for even a single night. By all appearances, he just dropped the bag here and left. Which means he could be anywhere by now—he could still be close, and he could be looking for her, either because he thinks she needs him or because he’s figured out what she did, how it was a lie that sent him on his way.
After a while, Hanna ducks into the culvert and immediately stops short, staring at Lee. Her wide eyes over the curve of the mask.
“Stop it,” says Hanna. “You shouldn’t do that.”
Lee tries to answer the child, but she can’t speak—her mouth won’t respond. It feels as though the hinges in her jaw are locked, and she quickly realizes the reason: her teeth are engaged, latched onto the flesh of her own forearm. Embedded, parasite-like. She manages to unlock her jaw and release her flesh and then she gags, spitting out her own blood. The punctures on her skin are welling red, running over.
The girl watches her passively. “You didn’t know what you were doing, did you.”
Lee spits another time and then wipes her mouth. She bends down, bracing her hands on her knees. She shakes her head.
“That’s normal,” the girl says. “It starts that way.”
“I’m not sick.”
The girl nods. “It’s normal to think that,” she says.
The girl returns to the grove and brings everything salvaged from the truck back to the culvert. Extra work shirts that will serve as bedding. The meager food and water, the tools, the oil, the assorted odds and ends. There isn’t much inventory—it only takes the girl one trip to deliver—and by the time Hanna finishes arranging everything, the place doesn’t look much different than it did empty.
Lee sits down and swabs her arm with one of the alcohol wipes while the girl lectures, going on about the sickness. She talks with certainty about the progression, the way that the healthy transform into the infirm, each at his own individual pace. She lists the commonalities, the typical presentation, the symptoms that eventually manifest themselves in every single one of the infected. Self-consumptio
n. The implacable reduction of every degree of freedom in the body. A loss of connectedness. It may take time, the girl says, but these things happen. To all of them, these things come about.
“Seems like you know all there is to know,” Lee says. She takes one more pass at her skin and tosses the spent pad into the dirt outside the opening.
The girl hesitates. “I’ve seen a lot of sick people, up close. I’ve watched them,” she says. “I didn’t want to, but I had to.”
“Why?” Lee says. “Where the hell were you?”
The girl doesn’t answer that—she looks around, aimless, at the interior of the culvert, focusing on nothing. Eventually her eyes settle on the floor at the far end, and her expression abruptly changes.
“How did you get that,” the girl asks. She sounds terrified.
“Get what?”
“The bag,” says the girl. She points to the duffel.
The child explains that she’s been living with the bag’s owner ever since the islet fell—she doesn’t have any idea how long it’s been. The man kept her and around ten other women as workers in the Makoa building, and over time he had the place transformed into a kind of compound. She thinks he’s probably ex-military, but she isn’t sure. After a short time explaining how things were, the girl doesn’t want to talk about her time in the Makoa anymore.
She tells Lee that another man came to the compound recently looking for medicine. Not the bad man. A different one. It was about a week ago, and the man didn’t want any medicine for himself; he wanted to find it for his wife. Are you the wife, the girl asks. Yes, Lee tells her. I am the wife.
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