by Kage Baker
What was it that had thrown me into such uncertainty? Had I, as in the dead art of a dead past, glimpsed in the lines and the contours of his visage the face of a long-lost brother? A long-lost lover? No, nothing as simple or as clever as that. Rather, it was the fact that his hands and arms, his face and skull, had been completely epilated. Like me, he had lost all his hair. Had he been a brother or a lover, it would not have been enough to confuse me. But this, somehow, was.
He came in, he sat. His hat and coat I hung from a hook beside my door. His gloves he paired and smoothed and laid gently over his knee once he had sat. His name was Halber, he claimed.
“And who was it sent you?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
Your leader, he claimed. Who had said that I would adjudicate for him.
“Adjudicate?” I said.
Yes, he claimed, since that was my role in the community, or so he had been told by Rasmus.
I nodded for him to go on.
The story he unraveled was one of the utmost wrongheadedness. He had once, it seemed, so he claimed, owned all of this property, but when the conflagration had come he had traveled quickly and hurriedly to try to throw his body in the path of his parents’ death. He had of course mis-thrown himself; they had died despite him, his mother going mad so that in the end he had had to be the one to kill her, and his father simply having his skin slough off until the bone was showing. Upon which he thought to return, but the world being as it was, he had spent many months just keeping alive, and only now had he begun to manage.
What he wanted, he stated, was not to reclaim his land. He understood well enough the degree to which everything had transformed. All he wanted was to be given a small plot of land and be allowed to farm it, so he could be back in a place that he knew, and to be accepted into the community. He had said this to Rasmus and the council, and they had deliberated for three days as he awaited their decision. At last they had sent him to me, the adjudicator.
Adjudicator, I thought. Well, that’s one name for it.
I thought, too, with sudden insight, Normally they would kill him themselves, and perhaps have done so with others in times past. But because, like me, he is hairless, they have sent him to me. They are frightened.
And this made me think, too, of what they must have thought of me, and why they had chosen to admit me into the community. And I could not but think it was out of fear or because I was already there, and perhaps it was only because there were those among them who believed I was charmed or cursed and could not die. And perhaps soon, once I had done away with Halber and proved that a man like myself could be killed, they would see no reason not to do away with me as well.
“Please tell them,” I said, “that I have thought carefully and have adjudicated in your favor. You shall join us.”
He stood and awkwardly embraced me, an operation I suffered only with great reluctance. And then after gathering his things he departed, leaving me to ponder why I had done what I had done, and what would be its dark consequence.
I was not to wonder long. Late that night I heard shouts and, as I roused myself, a banging had begun at my door. “It’s Halber!” a man was screaming, his screams enough to curdle the blood. “It’s Halb! Let me in!”
And indeed I almost did. I might well have, had I not heard the other voices and sounds that followed, the grunts and indifferent, dull sounds of metal slipping into flesh, and heard the pounding suddenly stop. I climbed onto the bed and looked down through the high window. In the pale moonlight I saw him, dying and staring, being dragged away by the legs. Had it been only a pack of the dead and the dying, I would have perhaps opened the door and commenced to lay about me with my hatchet, as I had done in the past when the dead came for the living. But as it was, seeing that the faces were those of the living, Rasmus’s face among them, I hesitated just long enough to feel that it was too late.
And perhaps it is there that the story should have ended. Perhaps, had I said nothing, done nothing, kept to my house, then my reputation, the myths surrounding me, would have been enough for Rasmus and his council to decide to let me be. Perhaps they would have grudgingly levied a fine, remembered my usefulness in other ways, and life would have gone much as usual, if anything can be described as usual in these days. But we both of us made mistakes that made this impossible.
The mistake I made was in not staying to my house for a few days, deciding instead to tend to my crops, to go about the business that needed to be attended to on my farm. This, under most circumstances, would not be considered a dire mistake. Or, to be frank, in most conditions, even a mistake at all.
Their mistakes were more severe. Tired of dragging the body, they abandoned it in a ditch halfway between my and my neighbor’s farms. And instead of tearing the head free of the corpse and incinerating it, they left the hairless Halber lacerated but more or less intact.
With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts—not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few. I heal, as I said, very quickly—or at least I do now; before the conflagration I did not. There are rumors I cannot die. Not having died, I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors, nor am I curious enough to uncover the truth that I feel compelled to slit my own throat. But from what I have seen of what is happening to Halber, I fear these rumors might well be true, and hardly in the way one would hope.
So, we have reached the day after Halber was hauled away, my door clawed and scratched on the outside, the bloody marks of his dying smeared there and on the threshold. I stare at the door a moment, checking to see whether my hatchet is with me. Outside, there are always things to attend to, things to do to keep the farm going. I do them, wondering all the while when, if ever, the little poultry and livestock remaining in the area will start to breed again and if I will ever be able to afford my own chickens. I irrigate my fields again, just enough, then sit on a stone near the border of the field, and smoke.
That is when I begin to hear it, a slow and distant whistle, a soft wind. At first I think nothing of it. But when it persists, I become afflicted with the disease of curiosity.
I stand, trying to ascertain where it is coming from. I follow it in one direction, then another. It slowly becomes louder, just a little louder, just a little louder, a moan now.
It is some time still before I make my way all the way out to the road and follow it a little way down and find him there, Halber, bloody in the ditch, grievously wounded—by all rights he should be dead.
What do I do? One look is enough to tell me he should be dead. I have dealt often enough with the living turned dead to be leery, but he struck me as something different, as a new thing. He was, in any case, too hurt to be moved. I went back to the house, brought back a blanket and some water. I wrapped him in the former and dribbled the latter into his mouth. He was delirious and hardly conscious. He would, it seemed to me, soon be dead.
And so I stayed there beside him, waiting for him to die.
Only he did not die. His body seemed unable to let go but also unable to heal itself, and so he struggled there between life and death. I thought for a moment to kill him, but what if he did heal himself? I wondered. Was he not like me? Would he not eventually heal himself?
In the end I left him and went home to sleep.
That night I dreamt of him, lying there in his ditch, slowly dying but never dead, breathing in his shallow way but breathing despite everything, never stopping. And then, his breathing no less shallow, he managed over the course of long, painful moments to make it to his feet and shuffle forward, like the walking dead. I watched him coming. Later, much later, in my head, I heard a knocking and a dim, inarticulate cry and knew him—suddenly and with, for once, a certain measure of terror—to be knocking on my door.
When I came back the next morning, I found my blanket was gone, stolen. Some creature had eaten most of one of his hands and the finer portion of his face. But
he was still, somehow, alive. And so I slit his throat and watched the blood gurgle out, and then went back to get on with my work.
This seemed to me sufficient, and I must confess that I did not think about him through the course of my day. There were fences to be attended to, wood to be chopped, brush to be cleared. A corner of the field had become too soggy and I found myself cutting a makeshift drainage channel, thinking up its course as I went. By the end of the day I was mud-spattered, my bones and muscles aching.
And still, as the sun set, I found my thoughts returning to Halber. I could not stop myself from going to see him.
There are strange things that happen that I cannot explain, and this is one of them. He was as I had left him, but still alive. His throat, I saw, had filmed over, the veins not reconnecting exactly but blood moving there, pulsing back and forth within the film in a kind of delicate bag of blood and nascent tissue, pus-like. I watched it beat red, then beat pale, in the gap where his throat had been. At that sight I nearly severed his head from his shoulders, but I was too terrified of what would happen inside of me if I removed his head, and somehow, despite this, he still refused to die. So instead I went home and sharpened my hatchet.
What can I say about the night that followed, when I chose to become the one who would judge who lived and who died? I have no apologies for what I did, nor any justification, either. I did it simply because I could think of nothing else to do. I am neither proud of my actions nor regretful.
I sharpened the hatchet until it had a fine and impossible edge, and then in the dark I set out. Perhaps if I had met some of the dying and the afflicted, some of those made vicious and deranged by the conflagration, I would have been satisfied. But the only one I met in my path was Halber, and I gave the fellow a wide berth.
What need is there to pursue in detail what followed next? I did unto Rasmus as might be expected. A single blow of the hatchet and I was through his door. I caught him on his way out of bed as he moved down the hall and went after his gun, the hatchet cutting through his back and ribs and puncturing one lung so that it hissed. He went down in a heap, groaning and breathing out a mist of blood, and I severed first one forearm, then the other, and, as his eyes rolled back, lopped off his head. His wife arose screaming from the bed and rushed to the window and tried to hurl herself through. I struck her on the back of the skull with the cronge of the handle, meaning only to silence her screams, but it was clear from the way she fell and the puddle of blood that soon spread from her head that perhaps I had struck too hard. Then I approached Rasmus again and very delicately, with the sharpest part of the blade, peeled off his face.
The other five who had earlier come with him to see me now suffered the same fate, though I killed them more swiftly, with a single blow, and did not disjoint or decorticate them as I had their leader. There is no need to say more than that, I suppose. In the end, I was sodden with blood and gore, and made my way back to my farmhouse, past the still dying Halber, and slept the sleep of the truly dead.
I awoke to the smell of burning, saw when I burst open the door that they had set my fences afire. My fields, too, had been trampled apart, then the ditch redirected and trenches dug to wash away the topsoil. Had my house not been stone, they would have burnt that, too. I stared at the flames a moment and then, not knowing what else to do, went back to bed.
It was a week before I could bring myself to leave the house. Finally I stripped off my gory clothing, the blood now gone black, and burnt it in the fireplace. Then I took water from the irrigation canal and washed in it and dressed myself in my town clothes and set off for my neighbor’s farm. I do not know what I expected. At the very least I expected, I suppose, for Halber to be dead. But he was still alive, still feebly dying in the ditch. I chose not to get close to him. My neighbor was at his farm, his crops just starting to sprout. When he saw me coming, he rushed inside, came out with his rifle.
“Not another step,” he said.
I stopped. “Do you think your gun can stop me?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but if you come any closer we shall find out.”
“I have no grudge against you,” I said. “I only want those who destroyed my crops.”
“Then you want me,” he said. “You want all of us, the community.”
“But why?”
“Can you possibly ask?”
And I suppose in good conscience I could not, though I thought my neighbor had at least a right to know why I had done what I had done. So I sat on the ground and kept my hand far away from the hatchet and, rifle trained on me, recounted to him, just as l have recounted to you, all that had occurred.
When I was finished, he shook his head. “We have all been through much,” he said, “and you have made us go through more. None of us are perfect men, but you are less perfect than most.”
Then he gestured with his gun. “Come with me,” he said.
He led me back to the road and toward my farm, to the place in the ditch where the dying man was to be found.
“Is this the man you meant?” he asked. “A man who when he was alive he was not hairless but in fact replete with hair. Please,” he said, “go away and do not come back.”
But I could not see it. Indeed, to me he still appeared as hairless as a baby and, though dying, still alive. I wondered to myself as to what my neighbor was trying to do to me. Had he not had his gun trained upon me, I would have turned upon him and laid into him with my hatchet. Instead, I simply turned away from him and returned to my house.
Where I have been ever since. I do not know if what is wrong is wrong with me or wrong with the world. Perhaps there is a little of both. I find it difficult to face the man dying in the ditch, and it is clear that my neighbors and I no longer live in altogether the same worlds.
It seems strange to think that after all this, after my years of dissolution and then the hard years after the conflagration, I might die here alone, might slowly starve to death. Assuming it is true that I can in fact die.
I will make do as long as I can and then when my straits are indeed dire I shall leave my house and beg mercy from my neighbors. Perhaps they will show mercy, even if only out of fear, or perhaps they will kill me. Either way, it cannot be but a relief.
As for now, though, I shall sit here and write and very slowly starve, waiting part in anticipation and part in fear for the moment when the dying man who so greatly resembles me shall drag himself to his feet and leave his ditch and come again to knock at my door.
This time I shall be ready for him. This time I shall know what to do.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen works of fiction, most recently Immobility (Tor, 2012) and Windeye (Coffee House Press, 2012). His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s Award for Best Horror Novel of 2009, his story collection The Wavering Knife won an International Horror Guild Award, and his novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he works at the university on which Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University is based.
Robotic “bugs” that devour metal—and anything else that happens to come between them and their meal, including human flesh and bone—have left portions of the Earth relatively unscathed or at least somewhat recovered. But in the devastated zones that are still infested, various micro-cultures have arisen.
A STORY, WITH BEANS
Steven Gould
Kimball crouched in the shade of the mesquite trees, which, because of the spring, were trees instead of their usual ground-hugging scrub. He was answering a question asked by one of the sunburned tourists, who was sprawled by the water, leaning against his expensive carbon-framed backpack.
“It takes about a foot of dirt,” Kimball said. “I mean, if there isn’t anything electrical going on. Then you’ll need more, depending on the current levels and the strength of the EMF. You may need to be underground a good ten feet otherwise.
“But it’s a foot, minimum. Once saw a noob find
a silver dollar that he’d dug up at one of the old truck stops west of Albuquerque. ‘Throw it away!’ we yelled at him. Why did he think they replaced his fillings before he entered the territory? But he said it was a rare coin and worth a fortune. The idiot swallowed it.
“We could have buried him. Kept his face clear but put a good foot of dirt over him. That could’ve worked, but there were bugs right there, eating those massive hydraulic cylinders buried in the concrete floor of the maintenance bays, the ones that drove the lifts.
“We scattered. He ran, too, but they were all around and they rose up like bees and then he stepped on one and it was all over. They went for the coin like it was a chewy caramel center.”
There were three college-aged tourists—two men and a girl—a pair of Pueblo khaki-dressed mounted territorial rangers that Kimball knew, and Mendez, the spring keeper. There was also a camel caravan camped below the spring, where the livestock were allowed to drink from the runoff, but the drovers, after filling their water bags, stayed close to their camels.
There were predators out here, both animal and human.
“What happened to the noob?” the tourist asked.
“He swallowed the coin. It was in his abdomen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Christ, Robert,” the girl said. “Didn’t you listen to the entrance briefing? He died. The bugs would just go right through him, to the metal. There aren’t any trauma centers out here, you know?”
One of the rangers, silent until now, said, “That’s right, miss.” He slid the sleeve of his khaki shirt up displaying a scarred furrow across the top of his forearm. “Bug did this. Was helping to dig a new kiva at Pojoaque and didn’t see I’d uncovered the base of an old metal fencepost. Not until the pain hit. There weren’t many bugs around, but they came buzzing after that first one tasted steel and broadcast the call. I was able to roll away, under the incoming ones.”