by Ali Shaw
3
Pharmacy
Travelling with Leonard made Adrien feel just like he had on his first day on the road, when he had laboured under the weight of his holdall and rucksack full to bursting. Today he had only a bag of kirin meat on top of what he was used to carrying, but Leonard’s company was a burden all its own. For the first time, Adrien truly appreciated how good he’d had things when it was just the four of them, and how conscientious Hiroko had been as their pace-setter. Now the girl had no time to object when Leonard forced them along at a march. She had to be constantly on her guard against the Alsatian, who never stopped watching Yasuo in her hood or on her shoulder.
Adrien did his best to be terrified of what might happen when they reached the hotel. That at least was a familiar apprehension, far preferable to the many smaller frights in the woods. He tried to focus on it, but seemingly innocuous sights kept tripping his memory. When he saw an ant carrying a flake of leaf, he could at once remember straddling along on six legs. He could remember lugging a giant sheet of green down into a tunnel, taking it as a gift to the chamber of his bloated queen.
He shuddered, and did his best to be terrified of finding the hotel.
Towards evening, Leonard halted them on the edge of a village. It was not for a rest stop or a break for sustenance, but a warning. ‘A lot of bones in this one,’ said Leonard. ‘I came through it on my way. My guess is that people fought each other here, but don’t worry. It must have been a while ago, and all the blood and guts are gone now. It’s just the bones that are left.’
Once, it would have been a sleepy village, all narrow roads and quaint cottages. The skeletons Leonard had warned of were strewn across its main street, although at first they were easy to miss. Beasts and birds had stripped and scattered them, and not a joint remained attached. They crossed what had been the village green in sombre silence, until Leonard gave a gnashed command to his Alsatian and it bounded away as if unleashed. It trotted around among the bones and chose a shoulder blade to pick up and carry in its jaws.
Adrien grimaced at the animal’s behaviour, then was at first relieved to see it drop the bone. Its mouth opened wider and its tongue lolled out as it turned its head sideways, training its nose on something. With a ripple of muscle and fur, it padded in through the empty doorframe of a shop, and Leonard readied his rifle and waited to find out what it had caught scent of. A few seconds later, the Alsatian sent back a vicious bark, followed by a man’s startled shriek. Leonard dashed after his dog, and the others followed suit.
The shop had been the village pharmacy, and the green plastic cross of its signage dangled over its ruin. Amid the rubble knelt an emaciated man in a torn and open shirt, boxer shorts without trousers, and shoes without socks. In a world deprived of washbasins he was nevertheless exceptionally filthy, and his smell stood out above the chemical reek of spilled medicine. It was not the Alsatian that had made him shriek, for he was clawing through the piles of chipped plaster and glass as if he had not even noticed the animal. Neither did he look up at any of them when they entered, only pushed his filthy fingers against the sides of his head and sobbed.
With a sharp whistle from its master, the Alsatian came to heel. ‘Come on,’ said Leonard, and turned to leave the pharmacy.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Hannah.
‘Same place I was a minute ago. The place I was taking you, last time I checked.’
‘Aren’t we going to help him?’
‘Who? This one? He’s far beyond help.’ Leonard pulled his rifle off his shoulder and offered it to Hannah. ‘Unless you want to put him out of his misery.’
Hannah recoiled, but at the same time the kneeling man began to weep, and the tear trails down his cheeks were the only clean parts of his body. Each grimace served better than the last to highlight how hollow his cheeks were, and how sunken his eyes.
Seb raised his voice as he approached. ‘Hello? Hello . . . what are you looking for in here?’
The man’s stare was a loose thing that floated over Seb’s shoulder. ‘Pain-killers.’
‘You’re hurt?’
‘In here,’ the man said, tapping the side of his head. As he did so, his shirt swayed open and showed how pronounced his ribs were.
‘You need to eat something,’ said Seb.
‘Eat and eat,’ said the man.
Leonard rolled his eyes. ‘No time for this, kid. Leave the poor bastard to his digging.’
‘There is time,’ protested Seb. ‘He needs help.’
‘Of course he does. But it’s not the kind any of us can give.’ Leonard pointed to the sky, which was visible in dim rectangles between the rafters. ‘In the meantime, we’ve got at least an hour’s walking left today.’
Adrien cleared his throat and planted his feet. When he spoke up, his voice didn’t sound as unequivocal as he’d have liked, but there was something too pitiful about the man to simply abandon him here. ‘No, Leonard. Walking is over for today. We’re making camp.’
Leonard’s eyes met his for a moment, and were as searching as the thin man’s were vacant. Then he flapped a hand as if tossing something aside. ‘You’re the one who’s desperate to find your wife. If you want to waste your time here, it’s no skin off my nose.’ Then, as he turned to leave the pharmacy, he added over his shoulder, ‘I’ll start a fire, but that man is done for. He’ll be dead before morning, mark my words. Don’t think you’re wasting any of my meat on him.’
It took Adrien and the others some time to convince the man to sit with them. When they had done so, and when the flames began to crackle and come forth from the logs Leonard had piled up, the awful truth became clear that Leonard was right. Something worse than malnutrition was ebbing the man’s strength away, something irreparably broken in his spirit. They gave him one coat to wear and another to blanket his legs, and Seb buttoned up his shirt for him and poured him water, yet even in the fire’s strong light he looked as thin as black ice. For the second night running, Leonard opened his bag of meat and threw some on the flames, but the others had only a few leaves and mushrooms to share. Some of these they placed in the man’s cupped hands, where he regarded them for a while in silence. Then he brought them to his mouth as if they were communion and reached out his tongue to taste them, or so Adrien thought. Instead he retched, a pathetic spray of bile that drizzled his food. After that he simply let the things they’d given him fall between his fingers, and Adrien and his friends shared pitiful expressions. Then Leonard, whose meat had cooked now to his liking, forked it out of the fire and began to gnaw at the hot flesh with a smacking of lips. He tossed another cut to the Alsatian, and when they were both done they licked the grease out of beard and fur alike.
The man cleared his throat and began to speak. ‘They don’t like the fire,’ he said, pronouncing each word as if he were addressing a hall full of people, ‘but they’re jealous of the meat you have.’
Leonard chuckled, and picked a piece of kirin gristle from between his teeth. ‘Told you he was beyond our help.’
The man paid him no heed. ‘The fire is too bright. Night eyes aren’t made for this.’
Leonard waggled a bit of bone at the man. ‘And are these your imaginary friends, that you’re talking about?’
‘No.’
‘Then who?’ asked Seb, with far more concern.
‘Badgers,’ said the man. ‘Stoats. Rooks. Rats. Weasels. Owls. That . . .’ He pointed upwards, at the branches, and for a few brief seconds Adrien saw something moving there. His heart skipped a beat because he thought it might be a whisperer, but then the Alsatian sprang to its feet and growled, and the firelight showed the long glossy fur of an animal of some kind.
‘What was that?’ asked Seb, when it had retreated into shadow.
‘A pine marten, I think,’ said Hannah. ‘That’s a rare sight.’
The Alsatian huffed and sat back down. Meanwhile the man had bowed his head, and his forehead shone with beads of firelit sweat. ‘Meat,’ he said,
and licked his lips. His shoulders heaved and sloped forwards. ‘Meat is all they see.’
‘Do they now?’ chuckled Leonard.
‘Better not to cook it. Better to get your teeth in deep, while the blood’s still hot.’
‘If this is a funny way of asking for some of my steak,’ said Leonard, ‘then bad luck and get your own.’
The man wasn’t listening. ‘It’s gone to find the eggs from the nest. The tastiest eggs with the chicks inside.’
‘Are you talking about the pine marten, now?’ asked Hannah.
‘In the egg it’s so sweet. You float in the slime, and when your mother sits in the nest you get so warm.’ The man wrapped his arms around himself, a weak smile passing over his face. ‘You grow, then. Do all the growing you can in the heat. It makes you want to break out and yell for worms, and you don’t know any better and you don’t know how cruel things are on the outside.’ He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘But when you’re the mother bird, that’s when you know.’
‘You’re a crackpot,’ said Leonard, and yawned.
The man covered his face with his hands, but stared out wide-eyed between his fingers. ‘You can hardly bear to watch,’ he hissed, ‘but how can you look away? You sat on those eggs day after day and you felt those little ones nudging in their shells.’
‘Someone find him a chick to cuddle up to,’ laughed Leonard, ‘if that will only shut him up.’
The man stared into the fire, but not even the flames’ roaring yellow could colour his face. He rubbed at his stomach, and looked even more hungry than before. ‘And then you watch the marten climb the branches, all dark and slippery as oil, and it eats those eggs you tended, without a care in the world. There’s blood running red out of the shells, and all you can do is watch and sing.’
‘Things die,’ said Leonard. ‘Deal with it. If you can’t you’re good as dead yourself.’
‘But they taste so good!’ said the man, again clutching his belly. ‘They taste divine! Little balls of meat with a kick in them, and if you get there just after the mother bird’s been sitting you can drink the syrup warm and sticky.’
Leonard stood up and swept his foot into the burning logs of the fire. A cloud of sparks and smoke erupted at the sick man, and he squealed and flapped at the air. Ash and embers spun around him, and Seb sprang to his feet and shouted, ‘Leonard!’ with unconcealed fury.
‘Relax,’ said Leonard, sitting back down. The ash dispersed and the embers blinked out, and the man was left sweating and rubbing fire dust from his eyes. Nevertheless he had stopped his rambling. ‘Thank you,’ he said, after a minute.
‘Pleasure,’ said Leonard.
Meanwhile, Adrien had been listening with a horrible sense of familiarity. ‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asked quietly, to which the man did not respond. He seemed lost, too deep, in his own broken thoughts.
The night arrived swiftly, assisted by a pall of cloud that deepened the sunset’s purple to a velvety black. Leonard lay down and slept, his arm around the neck of his dog and its whiskers nuzzling his jaw. Hiroko, Seb and Hannah nodded off one by one, but the man from the pharmacy didn’t seem to tire, sitting upright and deathly still while the firelight stretched his clammy skin ever tighter across his bones.
When the others were all sleeping, Adrien sidled around the fire and sat down beside him. ‘That stuff you said about the chicks, the meat, the mother bird . . . all that stuff . . . you said it like . . . like you knew it.’
The man didn’t answer, only stared into the flames.
Adrien lowered his voice. ‘You said it like you’d been it.’
The fire spat and shot up orange, but still the man did not stir.
‘I saw,’ said Adrien carefully, ‘a tree shaped like a throne, standing in the forest where there’d been only ordinary trees before. Something was sitting on it, some kind of creature with many legs. And surrounding it there were . . . whisperers, I call them, hundreds of little things made out of twigs and leaves. And then, the next time I saw it, the creature had left the throne, and it was in the canopy, and it . . .’
Suddenly the man began to talk. ‘It came down through the branches towards me, step by step, and I couldn’t move. It had a mouth in the middle of it, like an octopus’s mouth. I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t help it, and then . . . I don’t know if I passed out. I don’t know if I stayed awake. I looked inside and saw . . .’
‘. . . the forest,’ said Adrien. ‘You saw a vision of the forest.’
For the first time, the man’s eyes lost some of their glaze. They finally met Adrien’s own. ‘I didn’t ask for it.’
‘Me neither,’ said Adrien. ‘I have no idea why it showed itself to me.’
‘I think the vision is a test,’ said the man.
‘A test? What do you mean?’
‘A question.’ The man looked back into the fire, although his eyes wouldn’t stay still. Their pupils danced like flies newly hatched over water. ‘I said I give up, there’s your answer. I said I fail it.’
‘What was the test?’ asked Adrien, fearing he would lose him again. ‘What was the question?’
The man’s hand shot out and grabbed Adrien’s. Its fingers were ice-cold, and at first all Adrien wanted to do was snatch back his own from its clutches.
‘Can I keep you?’ asked the man. Then, without letting go of Adrien’s hand, he began to sob. Adrien let him cling on, even though he could tell that the man’s mind was already slipping back into its delirious state. ‘It’s okay,’ whispered Adrien, and although he wished he could get more answers, he hadn’t the heart to unsettle him further. ‘It’s going to be okay.’
The man wept and stared into the flames. The fire sent up sparks. He and Adrien held hands in silence for a long time, until at last the man reached into his pocket and showed Adrien a piece of paper. On the paper was a photograph of a woman. ‘My wife,’ said the man, almost inaudibly.
‘Is she . . . gone?’
The man didn’t reply.
Adrien reached into his pocket and retrieved his photo of Michelle. Looking at her wedding day smile brought a hint of happiness to the man’s own face. ‘Good,’ he whispered, and closed his eyes.
An hour or so later, having held Adrien’s hand all that time, the man died. The fire had lowered, the clouds had sealed the night, and when the man’s hand slipped out from his grip, Adrien thought at first that he’d nodded off. His head bowed and came to rest on Adrien’s shoulder, but only once Adrien had lifted it and lowered him onto his back did he realise that he was not breathing.
Adrien froze, full of sudden fear. The man’s borrowed coats, and even his own shirt, looked many sizes too big for him. Adrien tried to steady his shaking arms by folding them tight, but he only managed to press his heartbeat into double time. He looked to his slumbering companions and noticed that Yasuo’s eyes were open. The fox’s tail flicked to one side and stroked Hiroko’s cheek, and she sat up slowly as if rising to sleepwalk.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked Adrien.
Adrien gestured to the dead man’s face, the fire’s half harrowed and the other half blotted out by the night. ‘He . . . he just died. I mean . . . just like that.’
Hiroko’s eyes were glazed from dreaming, and she seemed undaunted by the man’s lifeless body. ‘He’d seen the same things you have,’ she suggested.
‘Maybe.’
‘I heard you talking before I fell asleep.’
‘It certainly sounded like he had.’
She nodded. ‘Are you going to end up like him?’
Adrien folded his arms around himself. ‘No idea. Watch this space.’
Hiroko chuckled, and although it was only a brief sound it was so musical and carefree that it made Adrien flinch.
‘I hardly think,’ he said, ‘that now is an appropriate time for laughter. This poor man has just died.’
Hiroko was unrepentant. ‘You aren’t going to end up like him.’
‘Says who?’
Yasuo purred and hooked his claws into the fabric of Hiroko’s hoodie. She helped him up onto her shoulder, where he licked her jaw and then turned his gaze back on Adrien. Above them the thinning leaves whispered, like a chant for the recently departed. Adrien looked up for a sight of some creeping or waddling whisperer, but there were only sticks and brown fronds.
‘It’s what I like about you,’ said Hiroko.
He looked back at her and the firelight painted her almost as orange as Yasuo. ‘Whatever can you mean?’
‘You’re a survivor.’
Adrien couldn’t help but smile at that ridiculous compliment. ‘I’m not. Really I’m not. God knows how you’ve come to that conclusion, when you’ve spent all this time with me.’
‘I’ve watched you change. You’re stronger now. Not so fat.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But what I really mean is inside,’ she said, touching one grubby forefinger to her breastbone. ‘That’s where you survive. You go down really easily, but when you hit the bottom you somehow cope. After a while, you find a way back up again.’
‘Is that how you define a survivor? Some kind of bottom feeder?’
‘It’s one kind,’ shrugged Hiroko.
‘I wish I was . . . I don’t know, the other kind. The big and strong kind.’
‘Stop wishing that. Carter used to say it’s survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest. He called it survival of the apt.’
Adrien was about to retort that he’d never felt much aptitude for anything, when one of the logs burst in the fire. As the sparks whirled out of the timber the light stretched and warped the shape of the glade they were in. The mud in Hiroko’s hair and the dirt trails along her arms and neck looked crimson in that light. Adrien supposed there might be blood in those stains as much as old soil, and not for the first time the girl seemed strange and bestial to him. He tried to imagine her mentor Carter, but when he pictured the woodsman it was Zach who he saw, dead as they’d found him. Then he remembered all the other non-survivors: his neighbour Mrs Howell; Diane eaten by wolves; this poor man beside him. He feared it would not be long before he too would be counted among them.