the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  Lee pulls her legs in and curls into a crouched position, her feet under her. She picks up the padlock, clicking the U-shackle closed and threading her middle and ring fingers through the gap. She makes a tight fist around the lock body. In her other hand, she gathers the chain, leaving a good amount of length.

  The fossa are gathering, forging forward—absent a direct challenge, they take every inch of space they’re allowed—driven frantic by the iron scent of blood. Bristling and slavering. There could be five or six of them, by her count. Without a clear view it’s difficult to be certain, but the final tally barely matters—one or six, it’s all the same. The choice of exit options is plain either way, and she isn’t going to spend what little time they have left presenting the pros and cons to the woman, so she sidles up beside her and crouches shoulder-to-shoulder at the mouth of the shelter.

  “Are you able to run,” Lee whispers.

  Her words don’t seem to register; the woman continues to stare at the wall breach. She offers no sign of an answer, affirmative or negative.

  “There is a man near here,” Lee says. “Close. When he sees us he will come for us. You’ll have to move as quickly as you can, do you understand?” The woman doesn’t answer, and without thinking Lee reaches over and tilts the woman’s face so that their eyes meet. “You have to try to move fast. I won’t leave you, but you have to try for me.”

  Together they storm from the shelter and plunge into the neem thicket. Lee crouches down and pulls the woman to her. Pulse clicking. She scans through the trees, trying to orient herself—she knows this is the Makoa grounds but doesn’t know where—and it doesn’t take long to understand that this is a cul-de-sac, its far end, and there is only one route forward.

  The man is there, waiting, seated on a shaded bench in a small, open rotunda about twenty yards afield of them. But the man isn’t watching. He isn’t even looking in the direction of the shelter; he’s busy working on nursing an injury to his lower leg. The blood blooming on the white bandage is visible even from this distance as he rewraps the knee. Lee doesn’t wait. She drops the chain and takes the woman’s wrist, and they burst from the stand of trees into the blinding sun.

  She half-drags the sick woman by the arm across the untamed sedge grass, and in her peripheral vision she can see the man rising—starting his rabid pursuit of them. Even injured, he moves frighteningly quickly. She hears the guttural roar of his voice at her back, and she urges the woman to hurry, to maintain the pace she sets, but the woman is hobbling gracelessly on her rheumatic legs.

  They are fast approaching one of the exterior doors to the Makoa building, a door that will take them to a hall that cuts clean through the structure, leading to the open space of the Lavelha grounds, and if they can make it that far, then it will only be a short time before they can disappear entirely into the sielve of the islet. The entrance is close now, maybe a hundred feet, and Lee is shouting to the woman that they’re almost there, to keep going, and the woman does, staggering, salivating in long ropes from her open mouth. But as they are about to step up onto the rear patio, there is a bright ping sound and a wet snap and the woman falls hard. She is writhing, soundless, in the coarse grass. A barbed spring-trap is closed over her ankle.

  There isn’t time; Lee squats and brings the woman up to a seated position and then lifts her. Shouldering her skeletal frame—seventy, eighty pounds at the most. Lee steps onto the patio and charges toward the door, and when she glances back she can see the man on approach, roaring, and a trail of the woman’s dark blood drizzled across the bleached concrete behind them.

  Still carrying the woman, Lee opens the door and enters the dark corridor and walks, teeth clenched, toward the opposite end. Plodding heavily, straining under the added weight. Halfway through, her legs start to tire, to stiffen, and behind her she hears the far door open and carom sharply off the wall bumper. The man is in the hall with them now. The sound of his voice screaming out words in a language Lee doesn’t understand. Echoing, redoubling. She makes her way to the exit, turns around and backs into the push-bar, carrying the woman through to the outside.

  chapter twenty

  They spend the entire night awake, in hiding. Staring out wide-eyed, terrified, from underneath a cover of leaf litter in a rosewood grove somewhere on the hotel grounds. Lee had walked as far as she could walk, alternating the woman from one shoulder to the other, and then she’d chosen the safest place she could find and she’d buckled and fallen.

  The man has deployed his ragged legion of the sick to canvass the area, to pursue them. Every once in a while Lee can see one of the lost souls—listless and mechanical—pushing through the trees not far from their position. Staggering heedlessly through the underbrush. She and the woman watch, quiet and motionless as they wait for the hunters to wander on to the next place.

  During one of the lulls in the night, Lee manages to remove the spring-trap from the woman’s ankle. She uproots the wickedly barbed prongs, unhinges the lever arms, and tosses the mechanism aside. She tends to the wound as best as she can, given the circumstances—given that there is no real way to get anything truly clean any longer. No way to swathe her, to put the pieces of the woman together again. Lee tries. She plasters over the holes with strips of soiled fabric. But in the end, all she can really offer is a way to slow the descent, not do anything curative.

  At some point close to dawn, the woman begins screaming. Sustained, almost as if the sound is driven by will rather than by breath. No words riding on it. Just a single, unwavering timbre and pitch.

  Lee tries to quiet her, to make her understand that their very lives depend on silence, but the woman doesn’t stop—it doesn’t look like she could if she wanted to. The sound erupts from her open mouth and continues, sirenic, until the sick are summoned by it.

  They come in droves—scores of them, shambling toward the sound like a compulsion. Bearing down on them, honing in. The horde crashes headlong through the dense understory, and Lee throws the woman’s arm over her shoulder and hoists her to standing.

  She half-walks, half-carries the woman, still screaming, through the trees and across the grounds toward the beachfront. At some point along the way, the woman goes silent on her own, and together they stagger down the rough-hewn timber staircase onto the sand with its assemblage of corpses, and they push through, plunging into the treeline and down a steep ravine that opens onto a narrow shoal. They crouch down low behind a heap of branches with the sea at their backs as Lee watches for the approaching hunt.

  When a few minutes go by with no sign of their pursuers, Lee starts pulling tree limbs from the pile, vainly searching for some form of defense. She pauses to scan the high ridgeline every few moments as she hefts each branch, getting a feel for the mass, the weight distribution. She casts them to the side if they aren’t swing-worthy. She tests six or seven, and nothing good is coming from it. The woman is standing nearby, looking lost, watching the tide.

  Lee selects a few more limbs from the stack, rejecting them all, and as the branches shift she sees that something is buried underneath, something broad and long. A blue-green color, with yellow detail. The woman turns to watch as Lee tears the remaining limbs away and tosses them behind her, and at the bottom of the pile is a sea kayak—ten feet long, meant for one rider only. A double-blade paddle and a life vest in the cockpit.

  Lee examines it for as long as she can before the sick erupt from the woods and begin sliding down the steep embankment to the gravel bar. Their wide, protruding eyes. Lee looks around frantically, and there isn’t any other clear option, so she takes hold of the bungee deck-rigging and starts to drag the kayak into the shallows. Swashing through. The sound of the keel ridge grating the seabed. She calls the woman to her and the woman plods, stiff-legged, into the surf.

  The water is to the level of her waist as Lee grasps the double blade and pushes the kayak to sea. Heading anywhere but here. At her back, the sick are plunging headlong into the surf, heedless of anything b
ut the goal assigned. Eyes forward. Falling, getting back up, falling again.

  Lee pauses to tether the paddle to the deck and then she slides the life vest on, buckling it and cinching the front straps before threading the base strap between her legs and securing it. She hoists the woman into the cockpit seat and starts to push the craft forward again, and when the water reaches chest level, Lee climbs onto the deck coaming and straddles it, facing her.

  The kayak drifts where the current takes it, a good mile out. There’s nothing here other than the movement of terns and gulls overhead, soundless, and the pane of the ocean. From the east, Lee sees the sun cresting over one of the black cliff faces of the islet, and it reminds her of the time she tried to explain the term sunrise to her husband, what it really means, how it differs from dawn. Words are important. Their proper usage—it matters. But that day she hadn’t been able to use her own words well enough to reach him, or maybe she had, and the problem was that he’d gotten lost in the syntax, the diction. Maybe he was too far gone by that point—too fixed, too set in the sickness—to hear anything at all. It’s so difficult to be certain in the wild.

  Once in a while, she and Park used to talk about trying to row a tandem all the way to the mainland—the entire five hundred miles of the empty stretch. Twenty days out on the water, that’s how long they figured it would take at the time, but back then they had always assumed that there would be two healthy sets of hands working the blades, and that there would be provisions, at least something, to sustain them. Twenty days, that’s what they thought. Back then, Lee told him she didn’t think they could pull it off, and that staying where they were would be a better choice, but the truth was that she couldn’t risk being groundless and stranded alone with him for that long. Not with his sickness advancing the way it was.

  The woman hasn’t moved since they pushed off from the shoreline. She is seated in the cockpit and her ravaged hands are dead in her lap. Her face looks as peaceful as it can probably look. At this distance—there is only a foot’s worth of space separating them, at most—everything that has been etched onto the woman’s frame is visible. The love and damage, both. Self-applied and otherwise. The woman’s back is straight and her bearing, her presence, is surprisingly strong.

  Lee takes up the paddle in both hands. With two riders on board, the craft is unbalanced, unstable, and she knows that at any moment it could capsize—the structure wasn’t designed for this configuration—but for now it’s holding. Lee starts to cut into the water with the blades, one side, then the other. Slow and steady. Mid-stroke she notices that her forearms are itching terribly. Across from her, the woman looks on with her lidless eyes.

  about the author

  Jonathan R. Miller is the author of two previous novels, Three-cent and Delivery. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife and daughter.

  www.jonathanrmiller.com