the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  “I tried to help,” says the girl, almost proudly. “I unlocked the door where he was. And he didn’t know where your medicines were but I did. I told him.”

  Lee doesn’t say anything.

  The girl seems finished with the subject. She crouch-walks to the duffel and unzips it and starts digging a little. Her back is to Lee. When she turns around, she’s holding a handful of bottles and a clamshell blister pack and the asthma inhaler. One of the cough syrups is crimped under her arm.

  “Can I keep these?” the girl asks.

  Lee looks at her for a moment—this scarecrow child—and then she nods. “Sure,” she says.

  The girl seems to smile; the mask rides higher on her face, and her eyes thin out. She squats and sits cross-legged with the drugs in her lap, and then she starts going over them like they’re birthday gifts.

  The mask is still riding high. “I’m glad he got these to you before they took him,” the girl says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before they took him back,” says the girl.

  Lee is staring now. “So he was taken? He’s there?”

  The child isn’t even making eye contact. She’s reading prescription labels. Murmuring.

  “Hey.” Lee snaps her fingers a few times. “Is he in the Makoa?”

  The girl looks up. “Sorry. I think so. They took him back. I saw them through the trees.” She shrugs. “There wasn’t anything else I could do for him,” she says. She returns her attention to her lap. She opens the clamshell pack and starts unfolding the instructional insert.

  In the early evening they take time to build a beach fire on the sand near the treeline. A shallow pit with a ring of sedimentary stones. Dry driftwood and ravenala limbs and dead leaves that the child casts over the top like adornments, the final touch. Lee uses the engine oil and the lighter, and within a few seconds the whole thing is ablaze, churning, but it quickly settles into a low burn. They sit on opposite sides of the ring. Lee tells the child that she needs to be ready to run, but if they have to run, not to run back to the shelter. The first instinct is always to go directly home, but don’t do that. Run to the truck, Lee tells her. That’s the rally point.

  They sit together awhile. There is the guttering sound of the banked fire between them. Wood cracking. The surf rolling over and crashing down and spilling, reaching ashore all the way to the wrackline twenty yards downslope from them. The girl has gone heavy-lidded. Swaying lightly. The mask is riding high again.

  It’s become clear that she’s already taken one of the drugs from the duffel, something with an opiate effect—hydrocodone possibly—or maybe the cough syrup was the kind with codeine in it. What does it matter. Whatever it was that she took, the child is sedated now—barely present. Lee gets up and comes around the fire ring to sit next to her, and the girl looks up and blinks a couple of exaggerated blinks but doesn’t say anything.

  They share the rice and chicken from the wrapped foil, and even in the state she’s in, the child is hungry enough that she readily eats. Afterward they pass the water bottle back and forth once and then Lee caps it.

  The child leans into her. She’s not certain whether it’s out of fatigue or a need for comfort, or perhaps the child has simply fallen unconscious, but Lee allows it, whatever the reason. She puts an arm around the girl, the arm with the wounds. The child’s face rests against Lee’s shoulder, and when it presses in, the mask starts to ride up, pushing the grey fabric up over the child’s eyes.

  “You don’t have to wear that,” Lee says quietly. “You can take it off if you want.”

  The girl startles a little at the sound of a voice but then her body sinks back. “I do have to,” she says. “I have to.” She is slurring her words even more than normal.

  “I’m not sick,” Lee says.

  The girl tries to nod. “I know you don’t think you are.”

  Lee pauses for a few beats, then continues. “But even if I was, I don’t think it would help you.”

  The girl lifts her head from Lee’s shoulder. The mask is still askew, blocking half her vision. “It’s not for that,” she says, slurring. She cups the mask in both hands and lifts it clear of her mouth and nose. Allowing full view of her face in the cast of firelight. “He makes us cover up the things he did,” she says.

  The girl fades quickly after that. Her head is falling to her chest, jerking back and falling again. Eyes closed. Lee gets to her feet and starts pitching handfuls of sand onto the remains of the fire. When the glow is gone, she gathers up the supplies they brought with them. She keeps one hand free, available, for the gun.

  “Come on,” Lee says. She nudges the girl gently with a foot. “We need to get back.” Lee glances up at the sky. “I can’t carry you, sweetheart, you have to get up.”

  The girl opens her eyes. “You shouldn’t go,” she murmurs.

  “We have to. We can’t stay out here.”

  “No,” says the girl. “I mean the Makoa. You shouldn’t.” The child’s eyes are half-lidded but the gaze is fixed on another place. Head swaying. “I know you’re thinking of it.”

  Lee doesn’t say anything.

  The girl goes on. “Think of him as gone,” she says. “Because he is.”

  Lee ignores her. She hooks her free hand under the girl’s thin arm and tries pulling her up. “Come on. Stand,” she says. Her tone is starting to harden. “Stand. We have to go. I can’t do this for you.”

  The girl finally struggles to her feet. Unsteady but upright. She looks at Lee. “Where your husband is, you wouldn’t like being there,” she says.

  “Walk. I’ll leave you if you don’t. I’m done begging.”

  The child doesn’t budge from where she stands. “I know you want to go. I know you’re thinking of it.”

  Lee lets go of the girl. She shakes out her hand and exhales, long and hard, trying to calm herself. She glances up at the sky again, at the gathering storm, and she closes her eyes. The child is wrong about her. Everything the child said, it’s all wrong. That’s the problem. The child is describing how she should feel and what she should think, but the child is wrong. Up to this point, when Lee thought about her husband, when she imagined where he was—far away, unable to drag her along on his descent—she felt relieved.

  It’s raining by the time they make their way back to the culvert. Not a hard fall. Not the cutting kind. But it’s enough to dampen their clothes, which is enough to blot out the effect of the fire and send a gnawing chill through them. They huddle together in the dark under a few of the work shirts and trade a few words, and it’s clear that the child’s mind has sharpened somewhat since the beach. Something about the temperature—or maybe the forced movement from there to here—has brought some semblance of a spirit back into her wireframe body.

  The child starts shivering. The mask is fixed in its place again. “Sorry about before,” she says. She is staring out the shelter opening, but nothing outside is visible in the dark.

  “Don’t be,” Lee says. “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t like talking about that. Or thinking about it.”

  Lee nods. “You don’t have to, Hanna. It’s okay,” she says.

  The child falls silent after that, and there is nothing but the sound of rainfall through the canopy crowns, the steady pelting of the exposed corrugate steel above their heads. Rainwater is gathering at the top lip of the shelter opening; it spills thinly over the rough-cut edge. They’ve set up the plastic bottle between two stones underneath to collect whatever can be collected. The distilled harvest. More containers would be a welcome blessing right now—more empty things that don’t have to stay empty, things that can be taken and filled again—but as things stand, they’re going to have to drink as much as their stomachs can hold and then put the bottle back outside and wait.

  It’s nearly filled. Lee gets onto her feet and loosely re-wraps the girl before going to the opening and retrieving the bottle. She takes it back and sits, and the girl makes space. Together t
hey finish the water, passing it back and forth, and when Lee starts to stand to replace the bottle, the child stops her. She takes the bottle from Lee’s hand.

  “I’ll do it,” says the girl.

  They share two more bottles before the rain lets up. Afterward they both lie back, and it’s only moments before the child’s breathing steadies—turns rhythmic. Muffled through the mask filter. Lee listens to the girl and stares up at the unyielding black, the point near the culvert ceiling where the ambient light streaming in from outside abruptly ends. Her eyes are wide. She is trying her best to consider what to do next, how to handle the dawn coming, but the whole notion of planning, truly planning—sending her mind off to track the winding spoors of ideas and variables—feels foreign to her after so much time spent purely running. It feels foolish, using energy to think about how to leverage resources, how to apply them, when there are none. Survive—that has always been the next thing, the only plan. Her hands are crossed on top of the gun grip, and the gun is resting on top of her belly, pointed out.

  Lee lies that way for a long time, and when the dawn light finally comes—first visible light, not actual sunrise—she turns to the child and puts a hand on her shoulder. She moves her gently.

  The child stirs. She opens her eyes. “What’s wrong.”

  “We’re okay,” Lee says. “Everything’s fine. But I need you.”

  The girl pushes herself into a seated position. “Okay.”

  “It isn’t fair to ask,” Lee says, “and I’m sorry. But I need you to tell me about the Makoa.”

  Before she can even get out the words, the girl starts shaking her head side to side.

  “Not about what happened to you,” Lee says. “Not that. I mean the people. The routines. Where valuables were kept, how to get in the door. Those things.”

  “So you’re going.”

  Lee shrugs. Then she shakes her head as though admonishing herself.

  “Why?” the girl asks.

  Lee doesn’t have a good and ready answer for why. Nothing that will sound good to someone so young.

  “I owe it to him,” Lee says. “It’s what we agreed to.”

  The child nods at that, knowingly, as though they’re operating on the same plane, and then there’s silence between them. Lee allows it to be what it is; she waits. She doesn’t want to rush anything.

  After a time the child says, “Do I have to go?” and her tone is completely resigned, yielding. Lead me to the next thing. The next place, the next task. Lead me.

  It’s unexpected, the question.

  “No, you don’t have to go,” Lee says. “You can’t, in fact. I need you to stay.”

  “In here?” she asks. She seems to brighten at the idea of it.

  Lee smiles. “Think of all this as yours,” she says.

  The girl looks around the shelter and the mask rises. She’s nodding slowly. “Okay,” she says. “But what else will still be here?”

  Lee doesn’t understand her at first. “You mean what am I taking with me?” she asks. The child nods, and Lee thinks about it.

  “I can leave you the water bottle and the things for the fire. The bedding,” Lee says. She goes to her pockets and takes out the plastic scalpel and the screwdriver and passes them to the girl. “You’re going to have to figure all this out. Food, water, everything. I don’t have anything else I can give you.”

  The girl’s hands have started twisting together, warring. “What about the bag,” she asks.

  “What about it?”

  “Are you taking it?”

  Lee pauses. She understands now; she knows where this is headed. “I need to. I may have to trade.”

  The girl’s hands haven’t stopped moving. “Yeah,” she says. “But can I go through it again first?”

  Lee eventually convinces the child to tell her about the compound. To edit herself out of the Makoa story, and to talk instead about its inhabitants, its workflow. Its structure, the codespeak. Vulnerabilities and strengths. The child does the best she can, saying what she remembers, pretending that she was nothing but an embedded observer rather than a participant. She tries her best. But in the end, it’s all just scraps, and after an hour Lee decides it has to be good enough. She readies herself to leave, to follow through on this threadbare plan of hers.

  Lee starts by trading clothing with the child. A shirt in exchange for the long dress. Then she turns her back while the child takes off the mask and ties a strip of flannel cloth in its place.

  Lee puts the dress on over her white tank and cargo pants, and then she straps the girl’s mask around her own neck. The cup, the part that covers the face, is around back at the nape of her neck, under her hair. The elastic is tight against her throat. She hikes up the long dress and secures the gun in the waistband of her pants, and with the fabric still gathered over one arm, she hooks the gooseneck of the crowbar through a belt loop at her hip and lets the hem fall. She checks her skin; the bite mark doesn’t look too bad. She stretches out her hamstrings and her calves. While she does all of these things, the child has already moved on—she is seated in the dirt, combing through the contents of the duffel.

  Once the child has found whatever she needs, Lee takes the bag and slings the strap over her shoulder. As she’s leaving the shelter, crouched in the opening, half in and half out, the child stops her. Still sitting there on the dirt floor. A half-circle of twenty kinds of medicine in front of her.

  “Block me in,” the child says. “Make it look like no one’s here.”

  chapter sixteen

  Post-rain, the dense understory of the sielve is lush and humming—rampantly verdant. The avarice of growth, the bristling reach. Sunlight is streaming through cracks in the canopy, and there is the humid air of the surround, the scent of damp loam and the water beading on everything, gradually sliding off.

  The dress is soaked through, clinging, by the time Lee reaches the murram, the thick mud crossing. She uses markers to find the right treeline break. She spends a while standing on the shoulder, looking up and down the road, before she gets to work digging out the pickup. She dumps the criss-crossing limbs off to one side and hauls away armloads of loose brush until a path is clear. She gets in the cab. She starts the engine and pulls out onto the road.

  This route will take her through the heart of the Trap, and she knows that, but this is the only viable choice for her. Fossa be damned. The alternative is the ocean route—her husband’s route. And while she’s probably stronger at the paddle now than he ever was, she doesn’t want to deal with the exposure of the open cockpit, the variable of the surf threatening to pull her from the drawstring catch, to force her under. Sending her body ragdolling into a jagged rock face. It’s too much to account for. At least this way she’s bounded by the closed walls of a steel chassis and the roaring engine block in front of her.

  The plan of approach is basic from this point. She’ll barrel forward and through. She won’t stop for anything until she pulls up to the front lobby of the Lavelha.

  Soon the murram turns to ragged cobblestone, and the woods on both shoulders thin out as the sielve gives way. There are signs for small sundry markets. Shops that used to peddle beachwear or Mirasai craftworks or shaved ice with natural syrups or some combination of all of these. An eatery that sold fresh-caught fish wrapped in raphia leaves, and another that sold steaks made from the livestock that used to graze on the islet’s southern pasturelands. Maybe they still do, who knows.

  Everything, everywhere, has been looted—broken and overturned. Some of the interiors are burnt-out to black. In the middle of the road are the remains of a street cart that used to sell dog kibble so tourists could feed the local lemur population. All along the sidewalks are decaying bodies.

  Lee steers the truck around the obstacles—going maybe fifteen miles per hour at most—and soon she sees the signs for the town center. The small, open plaza with the park fountain built on a five-step pedestal. As she approaches the plaza she presses on the accelerato
r and the truck gets up to thirty-five and when it does, she immediately turns the key and cuts the engine off. Letting the vehicle travel on inertia alone. The only sound is the tires burring over the roughshod cobble road.

  In a few moments the truck rolls in view of the fountain, and she can see the fossa—scores of them—on the steps. They are already standing, already alert, and some are pacing. God damn them. Somehow they heard, somehow they know. All of them are staring directly at the truck.

  Without warning, they charge—nearly the entire pack. Forty, fifty of them. A few stay near the fountain, stalking up the stairs and down the stairs, over and over—maybe their role is to hang back and stay close to the young—but the rest are tearing toward the main road to intercept the vehicle. A black wave. Ears flattened, bodies low-slung.

  Lee turns the key frantically to restart the truck, and when the engine finally catches she pops the clutch trying to accelerate, to peel away, but she releases the pedal too fast and the engine stalls. The truck is limping forward, helpless. Twenty miles per hour, then fifteen. She turns the wheel to swing around a heap of broken lumber and then she tries the key again and the engine fires up. She gives it gas and forces herself to ease gradually off the clutch, and the gearbox catches. The truck starts to pull away, but then there is the sound of a thudding impact on the driver’s side door. Then another. Bone and flesh against steel. The fossa are hurling their bodies against the outer paneling, and the cab starts to pitch side to side.

  Within seconds the fossa swarm every part of the chassis. The sound of claws skittering across the metal truck bed liner. The roof of the cab. Lee slams down on the accelerator, and the truck is careening ahead at forty, then forty-five, then fifty, and she’s swerving around the debris in the roadway. The window glass behind her shatters inward. One of the fossa, a large male, leaps onto the hood and the momentum carries its heavy body broadside into the windshield and it’s like a black eclipse; she can’t see a thing. Something large gets itself tangled in the drive train of the undercarriage, and the truck yaws precipitously to the left, going up on one set of wheels, and it teeters for a second and then tips onto its side, the metal scraping against stone, and the truck slides to a hard stop.