by Anthology
Nerves, she told herself—born from too many nights where the pale ones fought to scratch their way into her sleeping place. Nearly twelve months now, and no sign. Instead of rising, she pulled the covers tight, delayed fumbling about for a candle, worried stumbling to the latrine would wake—
With a start she felt the mattress beside her, expecting Rennie’s weight—the impression of his body, the warmth of his feet touching hers—and found nothing. Sitting up, she cursed. Moonlight filtered through the cracked-open door.
Swallowing panic, she reached for her blue jeans. Stupid, falling asleep so deeply. What had she been thinking? An extra glass of wine—again? Heart racing, she slid into her sneakers, noticing the clever kid had used a chair to reach the locks.
Pulling on a T-shirt, she rushed from the portico, searching the sprawling grounds for any sign of him. In the night, he could easily tumble into the nearby ravine. Or worse.
Don’t even go there, she told herself, and glanced for his small head darting behind the rows of dried-out boxwoods. Across the gardens, the Alhambra’s battlements had provided the best sanctuary for them since the castle in Bordeaux—undamaged during the fallout, a city of supplies within walking distance, and a view for miles—yet after so many months she had allowed complacency to settle in.
Stifling the desire to call out, she hurtled over a turnstile and rushed past the dilapidated ticket counter, toward the royal complex, where tourists had once congregated. Rennie loved the older part of the Moorish fortress, where the tiny birds darted about tessellated columns and its pool reflected the moon. As she took to the gravel pathway, a throaty clicking echoed high against the rising walls and turrets.
No, she thought. Not now.
With a gasp, she broke into a frantic sprint.
***
Rennie smiled in the moonbeams, craning his neck to study the swallows, twisting and slicing between pillars. Long tails, split in two. The birds, so gallant in flight, darted from stilted arches where their nests clung to intricate mosaics. He had seen few animals outside the ones in books and magazines read to him at bedtime. Most beasts stalled at the point of death, like people. But not birds. He didn’t know why, but he liked to imagine that the swallows went to someplace better. He liked that idea very much.
She startled him, stumbling through a row of dead shrubs at a full tear, skidding on the path, glancing wildly about the walls where the Nasrid structures met the older stone citadel. Her anxiousness confused him. Was he in trouble?
“Stupid,” she said, repeating herself as she jerked him off his feet. He fought to keep pace as they rushed past the parapets. Across the deep gorge, he caught a glimpse of the city’s ruined buildings. From below, the rushing sounds of the river. Río, she called it. Río Darro. Once, when they had walked the highways, she called such things rivières.
“What did I do?” he asked.
“Shhh!”
“What’s happening?”
“Must’ve followed us home,” she said, panting. “That means they’re hunting in the city. Pray it’s a loner.”
They rushed deeper into the fortress, through pillared halls where disturbed swallows darted about their heads. She pulled to a stop in the middle of an overrun courtyard, bent down, and brushed the hair from his face. Her eyes sparkled in the darkness. “You can feel it, right?” she asked. “In your head? Tell me you can feel it.”
“Yes, I—I think I can.”
She shook him. “Tell me!”
“Yes,” he replied. Scared.
“Good. Quickly now.”
As they ran he glanced behind, expecting to see a gaunt face trailing in the corridor, naked, loping on all fours, blind gaze seeking, bloodied mouth opened wide, blackened claws reaching for his flesh. A cry escaped his lips. He could feel the thing toying with his mind, coaxing him—begging him to call out. Pleading, so sweetly.
Wanting to consume him.
He stumbled and she lifted him—his legs circled her waist, his arms her neck—as the beast’s awful clicking filled the hallway. Echolocating, she called it.
“Just like when we play,” she said, huffing. “Blank slate, okay? No feelings.”
She set him on the gravel of an open-air square—Court of the Lions—glancing about as swallows flitted above. “I’ll draw it away,” she explained, winded as she placed her heavy knife onto his palm. “Get in that room and go silent, play hide-and-seek. Can you? For me?”
Tears rimmed his lids as she removed the pistol from her belt. Hands quivering as she checked the clip. The way she kept glancing at the tiled roofs frightened him. She noticed his tears and bent over. “Quiet as a mouse in the grass at night. I need to know you can.”
He stared at the gun. The weapon scared him more than the blade, but not as much as the moribund. The undying ones often called to him as he slept, with their dreams of insatiable hunger. He sensed them while passing buildings at day, their thoughts like tendrils seeking emotion, reaching out from their hiding places. Unquenchable. Thankfully unable to brave the streets when the sun shined.
“Hey!” She gripped his shoulders roughly. “Can you?”
He bit his lip. “I—I’ll try.”
“Good. It’ll have no idea you’re there. It’ll hunt me. Okay? Go inside and hide.”
She kissed his forehead and shooed him toward the room. He stared as she rushed around the court’s central basin, the slapping of her sneakers dying away as she slipped beneath the arches and disappeared.
The night sky opened, an emptiness threatening to swallow him whole. He backed into the low-ceilinged chamber, passing geometric patterns woven into the threshold—one tick, two—set the knife down, and curled into a ball beneath the ring of lion statues, hugged his knees, and shut his eyes. Surrounded by marble, his tears turned cold on his cheeks. Hers, the only voice he knew.
Silent as a mouse.
He forced himself to slide deeper into the shadows. Went inward and cleared his mind, purging all thought as she had asked. Anything, for Jeanie.
Blank slate. They’ll never know you’re there.
Rennie had spent one birthday and nearly another here, in the Red Castle, where she told him emirs had once kept their harems and sultans ruled. The cities from before were mostly forgotten. Ruined places passed on the highways, stories told to him at bedtime—Nantes, Toulouse, Madrid. Only her. Jeanie. Her voice. Her warmth.
This was his world, she often told him. Her world—the Seattle across the ocean—died long ago. Her America, where all had been green and happy and grand, with shining buildings reaching to the heavens, moving cars and bustling traffic, schools and laughter, football games, Internet and barbecues. Before the fires, the blizzard, and the undying.
Pulling into a tighter ball, he briefly remembered the warmth of her lips on his forehead. Quickly, he pressed the memory aside, to slip away, into darkness. He went cold, blank slate, like she asked. Close down. Feel nothing.
Go silent.
Go dead.
***
Rennie’s eyes shot open at the sound of wheezing in the doorway. Although he had been taught to wait, to feel her touch before stirring, he risked a peek.
A figure panted in the threshold, its shoulders rising and falling in the gloom. From it, he sensed nothing. A terrible emptiness. No emotion. No…
“Mama?” he asked, his voice quaking.
“Thank God,” she gasped, and stepped forward. Slick gore covered her face and shoulders. Her T-shirt had been ripped in half, exposing a shoulder and a stained bra. Gun shaking in one hand, she reached out with the other to pull him up. She led them quickly toward the gardens, fingers entwined. “We go,” she said, breathless. “Now.”
As they hurried through the courtyards, she limped. Thrilled she had returned, he said nothing as they reached the gardens, fearful of upsetting her. She had not been angry with him for a long time. Their time in the Alhambra had made her softer. He loved it when they played hide-and-seek in the palace’s halls an
d chambers, tag in the Palace of Carlos V.
Inside their small room she wiped his face clean, then hers, lit a candle, and knelt, packing quickly. Two sleeping bags lay on a mattress covered with books, beside a tiny table and desk. He cried as he watched her. There wasn’t enough space in their backpacks for all of his toys. He did not want to leave them. Who would protect them, once he had gone?
“The thing wasn’t a loner,” she told him. “They’ll know where we are. More will follow.”
Eventually, she stopped rolling her sleeping bag and inhaled deeply. Her hands shook. “The Alhambra is not safe. Granada is not safe. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he blubbered.
“Good.”
“Where will we go?”
She shed her shirt, donned another, and kept packing. In the candlelight, deep scratches scored her back, red stains blossoming in her fresh blouse. “Farther into Spain. We’ll find a highway and head south like before. Someplace warmer. Someplace they don’t like. A small town. As defendable as the Alhambra and with clean water.”
“But I don’t want to leave!” he blurted.
“We’ll find someplace safe, okay? Somewhere you can—”
Her hands fell onto her lap and she cried, an uncontrolled sobbing that rattled her body, scaring him. Frightened, he went to her, arms out, hugging her like she would him.
“So sorry,” she muttered. “My fault.”
After a few moments, she squeezed back. “We’ll find a town with a bullring,” she said, and smoothed his shoulder-length hair. “You’ll like that. They have them in southern Spain. In Andalucía.”
“A bullring? Like in my book? The bull who won’t fight? The one who smells flowers?”
In the flickering light, she smiled warmly and wiped away his tears. “Like Ferdinand, yes. But you’re going to have to listen until we get there, okay? Keep listening until we find a new home. You’ll have to be patient. Think you can do that?”
He nodded and knelt, wanting to make her happy, filling his small pack with his clothes. “Will I see a bull?”
She placed a hand on his small shoulder and squeezed. Her flesh stuck to his, coated in moribund blood. “We’ll keep walking. Look for survivors. Like we always do.”
“Moving on?”
Her smile, sweet. Even with sadness in her gaze. “Yes, Rennie. On and on.”
After securing the door, she pulled her small watercolor painting from the wall, the old one of Paris’s Left Bank, with its sad clown dancing before the Seine, and slid the frayed canvas into her bag.
Grabbing the candle, she reached for her tattered tour book of Spain. She always kept it within arm’s reach, and studied its maps often. She loved books. He did, too. Loved listening to her voice when she read to him at night.
“Sleep now,” she said, and leaned back. “We have a few hours until dawn. At the first hint of sun I’ll wake you.”
“You and me?”
She smiled as she set the pistol on her lap. “Always. Now get some rest, kiddo. We have a lot of walking ahead of us.”
WEEKS LATER
Parched and beaten by the midday sun, Jeanie paused on the cracked highway and gripped Rennie’s shoulder harder than she should have. More black silt blew in a gust before settling on the road. With each step she grew more anxious about their dwindling water supply—they were down to two bottles—and worried over how badly she had miscalculated the number of miles between towns.
Epic fail, she thought. My fault.
They had ambled down the southbound lanes of the A45 for a day and a half, after their bicycle’s tires gave out on the A92. Rennie liked bike travel better—as Jeanie pedaled he rode on the pannier, gripping her waist, smiling into the wind. Now two toes poked from his right tennis shoe. The left one was frayed badly at the tip and heel, close to losing its battle.
Undoing the cloth from his face, he squinted through the whipping dust. The plastic sheet stitched to his hood unraveled, fluttering in the breeze. “Mama?”
She answered his stare with a raised finger. Lifting his sunglasses, he glanced toward the horizon.
Heat rose from the highway, bisecting the blackened Spanish plains. The fires had been bad here. Worst he had seen. Nonstop loess and biting dust. The silt fell in the beginning, Jeanie had told him, when fireballs rained from the skies. Ejecta. By-products of the endgame, when something either struck the earth or woke up after being buried beneath its surface, spreading darkness from the unspeakable ground zero in Brazil.
Four lanes dipped into the mountains of the south. Beyond the peaks, the city of Málaga and the Mediterranean. Waves, she said, as far as one could see. Farther south, they might even spot the tip of Morocco across the strait, if the coastline had not been too ravaged by the tsunamis.
Rennie followed her finger. The feet of the mountains were bright beneath the sunlight, but the hills fell under the shade of an approaching cloud bank. Coming in fast. Dark.
Full of rain.
She squeezed his shoulder and indicated a road parallel to the highway. Past a row of disintegrated stumps—palms trees, once—a burned-out villa sat behind a wire fence. Within the ruins, a storehouse. No windows. Corrugated metal walls. Large sliding doors, wide open.
“What if one of them is inside?” he asked, blinking nervously.
“We risk it,” she replied. The sulfurous, acidic rain would burn their skin and eyes. They had to find shelter. Now. When thunder boomed, a resonant crack rolling across the billows, she pushed him from behind.
Shadows consumed the highway as they hurried over the guardrail, racing against the rains, rushing past two words painted on a concrete wall.
HOSTAL. AUTOSERVICIO.
Halfway to the fence, the rain fell, engulfing them with its stench of sulfur. Rennie sobbed as she wrenched the wire upward. He wiggled beneath, coughing against the biting air, panicking when his backpack snagged.
“Hurry, kiddo.”
As he pulled free, she slipped under and hauled him to his feet. Raindrops blistered their skin as they ran. She pulled her pistol free as they neared the storehouse, alert for movement or the famished plea of a moribund, begging them to enter.
“Go flat,” she commanded.
He swallowed his fears as he hustled behind her, the droplets singeing his arms and necks, scorching his cheeks. Wherever the rain bit him, the top layer of skin would flake off before nightfall. Because of it, they would cough for weeks.
***
Daylight faded as night arrived, its incoming mist enough to sting Rennie’s eyes. Inside the warehouse his toys lay at his shoes—limbless action figures, a plastic motorcycle, a deck of playing cards—yet he remained fixated on Jeanie.
She sat near the doorway, staring into the rain, her handgun in her lap. He coughed as he spooned from their last can of food. She insisted he eat the tangy-smelling fruit. Shapes in clear gel. Scent of cinnamon. Old fat.
For two nights the downpour had drummed on the roof, keeping sleep at bay. Grime coated them both, stringing and clumping her hair. She usually brushed his, but their weeks on the highways had left it bunching in places. At least the warehouse sat empty, without attic or basement for the undying to cluster. They were twice lucky. The monsters would not brave the rains.
“They used to ask me how old you were,” she said, smiling as he approached. “People on the roads, so amazed to see a baby. Not the French so much as the Spaniards. Oh, they loved seeing a child. Never another, young as you. Thankfully, most spoke English. My Spanish sucks.” She grimaced and held her side. “Stopped seeing them the year the sun came back.”
She used the barrel of her pistol to move the hair from her cheek. Rennie set the tin on the floor and pulled his knees to his chest. In her lap, the crumpled clown painting. Faceup. Dotted with raindrops.
“You were so sick that winter,” she went on, “colicky and teething at the same time. Jesus, that fever. Scared me so much, how you kept heating up. Sometimes I wonder if we should
have stayed in Paris. If we should ever have tried to run.”
She placed her gun into her waistband, set the painting on the damp floor, and stood. “It’s high time I taught you something.”
She pulled out her pocketknife and the cell phone. He had discovered the mobile device in one of the vehicles when the rains stalled briefly yesterday morning. Thankfully these interiors had been free of corpses, although the vehicles held no water and none of the seats were leather. When times got rough, they could strip the leather to eat.
As he watched, she stacked pieces of a broken crate over a pile of dry wood shavings. Removing the back of the phone, she slapped the battery onto her hand.
“After you make the tinder, drive the blade into the teeth of the battery, here. See the metal connections? Drive straight in.” She pressed the blade into the battery and twisted. Sparks flew. Smoke sputtered. “Quickly now, mix the chemicals and create fire. They burn fast, so no wasting time.”
Without pausing she blew, set the sparking battery to the shavings, and leaned close. When the fire took, she sat back. They stared at the flames for a moment, together, until she dropped the spent battery. Her skin looked gray in the light. “Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ll find more of these batteries than you’ll ever need. More damn phones around than people.” She reached for the painting. “Carry as many as you can find. And make sure not to breathe the smoke, okay? It’s bad for you.”
He nodded.
“God, where the hell is everyone? Nobody for months. Not one person.” She turned to the ceiling, sighed, and shook her head. “Sorry, kiddo, I’m just tired. Get some sleep. As soon as the rain stops, I’ll wake you. We’ll have to risk a city.”
“But you said Málaga is days away.”
“You’re right, Málaga is too far. But we don’t have enough water. As soon as we can, we change highways, head west to Antequera.” She folded the canvas, slid it into her pocket, and led Ren to his sleeping area. “It’ll take us a day, maybe two. After that, there is another town. That’s our destination. An old town, ancient. Before the Spanish claimed it, Moors lived there. Before the Moors, Visigoths. Before the Visigoths, Romans, and before them, Phoenicians. Can’t get much older than that. If I can find enough food there, we should be able to defend it.”