by G X Todd
‘Who did that to her?’
Pilgrim squinted up the road in the direction the car had come from, then up at Lacey. The sky was rapidly growing lighter; the sun would be creeping over the horizon soon. In the dawning light, Lacey’s skin looked pale, almost translucent. Pilgrim thought that, if he were to look long enough, he would see the tiny blue mapping of her veins appear in her cheeks and temples, like little roads leading to her brain.
He looked up the road again, wondering what was waiting for them there.
Someone we probably don’t want to meet.
The toothless girl coughed; a thick gurgling as if phlegm had caught in the back of her throat. A pained grimace crossed her face. Without opening her eyes, she held a hand up and gripped Pilgrim’s wrist. It was a strong grip – he saw how her knuckles were yellow-white, the bones desperately sharp under the thin paper of her skin. Her thumb pressed into his palm.
She tried to say something, but the word was unintelligible, just a mess of wet syllables.
‘What did she say?’ Lacey said, kneeling down opposite him.
The girl’s hand tightened on his wrist and drew his hand up to her throat. Again, she tried to talk, blood bubbling up between her lips. More rubies.
Pilgrim bent his head closer, tilting his ear towards her mouth.
The gurgle grew lower, wispier, the girl’s breath becoming ragged, a pressure bearing down on her lungs. Pilgrim knew they were filling up with blood. He grew very still when she whispered a name.
Christopher? asked Voice. What does she mean, ‘Christopher’?
He was given no time to answer because she spoke again. Another word.
‘What’s she saying?’ Lacey asked.
‘Sounded like . . . Defender.’ Pilgrim omitted the name for now.
‘Defender?’
What’s going on? Do we know her? The questions were directed like arrow-bolts.
‘Or maybe defend her,’ Pilgrim added.
‘We need to help her.’ Lacey’s face was filled with anguish. She looked at him as if he were made of magic, could mend the broken mess on the inside of the girl’s body, could magic all the bad stuff out of the world. Didn’t she comprehend by now that most things in this world were unfixable?
The dying girl’s grip loosened on his wrist, and he felt his palm come to rest on her chest, fingers touching the hollow of her throat. He looked down. The girl’s eyes were open and staring at him. The tiniest of breaths passed between her lips, but she continued to stare, her eyes dark brown pools, the whites very white. He knew she saw him. Her pupils were pinpricks latched on to his face, recognition burning in them. Her mouth moved and, although no sound came out, he saw the shape of the words on her lips.
Defend her.
Her eyes lost their focus little by little, the pupils dilating, and then she was staring right through him at the dawning sky high above their heads, as if she could see where she was going and was pleased she was leaving him and all his kind behind in the dust.
After a minute or so Pilgrim stood up. He felt staggeringly tall. The dead girl seemed like she was twenty feet below, the world elongating around him, stretching out his legs and torso, his feet rapidly shrinking away into the distance, the kid’s body now the size of a sleeping baby.
Distantly, he heard Voice. Who is she? Does she know us? She seemed to know us.
He could feel Voice’s burning desire to study the girl’s face, but Pilgrim looked away. He didn’t want there to be any recognition. What good would that do him? She’s dead, and everything she knew was dead along with her.
I think we must know her, Voice said uncertainly.
Did they? He wasn’t sure any more. There were parts of him, holes in his memory, that were great sucking chasms, and that was how he liked it. The less he remembered, the less pain his memories caused him and the less time he spent mourning for things that were beyond his reach. He didn’t want to remember. He could almost hear the rattling of all those chains on all those chests in the dark depths of all those deep oceans. Forgetting was his gift to himself, and he wouldn’t relinquish it. It was the only thing that kept him sane.
Voice roiled in exasperation. You and your cheesecloth brain!
Lacey remained kneeling at the girl’s side. She seemed far away. Small and inconsequential. She was speaking, but the sound was muffled, like it was coming from a badly tuned-in radio. Pilgrim gripped the sides of his head and took two deep breaths.
Voice’s ire dampened and shifted to concern. You OK, compadre?
Pilgrim grunted and dropped his hands. The dead girl’s message bothered him. He didn’t know how, or for what purpose, but the words she had spoken meant something. The car could have crashed ten miles up the road, on a strip of highway where there were no witnesses to hear her last words. Pilgrim knew that often a dying person would say ‘please’ or ‘help’ as their life drained away – he knew this because he had been present at a number of people’s deaths – but this girl hadn’t said either of those things. She had said, ‘Defend her’. And ‘defend her’, or ‘defender’, somehow meant something. Something specific to him. She had found him to tell him this. Why else was she here?
She must mean Lacey, Voice said. There’s something different about her. You knew it from the start, don’t pretend like you didn’t. I noticed how you saw the glow in her fingers. It wasn’t a mirage.
Pilgrim refused to acknowledge what Voice was talking about.
Don’t be so damn pig-headed!
Lacey heard no voice, of this Pilgrim was certain. He knew how to spot the signs, and she had none of them. But there was something different about her, Voice was right. She had a gulf hiding within, a space that seemed ready and waiting to be filled. It scared him, how wide open and vulnerable she was; he was scared for her, and he didn’t know why. All he did know was that he had no interest in being anyone’s protector.
Tiny Lacey, a long way down by his feet, stood up, and with that movement the world righted itself on a quick, sucking zoom, the edges shuddering out of focus.
Pilgrim blinked at her, life-size and standing before him.
‘What do we do?’ she asked.
‘Do?’
‘About her.’ She nodded down at the now normal-sized dead girl.
He didn’t understand her question. ‘There’s nothing to do. She’s dead.’
‘So we just leave her here?’
He looked down at the body again. The rubies of blood on the girl’s lips had already begun to dry.
Ruby, he thought.
Ruby? Voice’s feelers were creeping through his mind, tendrils whispering among his thoughts like spun cobwebs, searching, searching.
Pilgrim’s eyes flinched away from the dead girl, and he shut down his train of thought.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, turning on his heel and looking east as he started back up the dirt track.
Lacey didn’t immediately follow. Pilgrim sensed she was taking an extra few seconds to gain some sort of closure, maybe apologise to the girl for not being able to help her more, apologise for the mutilations inflicted on her. But, like Pilgrim had said, she was dead, and any apologies were a salve for their own souls and not hers.
You can’t hide from yourself for ever, Voice said.
He could, but that was no concern of Voice’s.
Entering the barn, Pilgrim found that Alex had already packed up their gear. She was finishing kicking the fire flat before picking up her pack and, limping around the open passenger door, slinging it on to the back seat. She paused when she saw him standing there, but the pause lasted barely a second and then she was moving again, coming back to pick up Lacey’s scarf.
We should get off the highway, Voice said. It’s too dangerous to be travelling on it. Not while we have the girls with us.
The car had been going at least fifty when it flipped. And the road had been empty of any other vehicles. Which meant the girl wasn’t being closely followed. And yet, even when the car los
t control, she hadn’t reduced her speed, hadn’t tried to stop. She had been running, and whatever she had been running from had her too terrified to slow down.
Pilgrim went over to his bike and closed the latches on the panniers, getting ready to leave.
Lacey entered the barn. She stood silhouetted just inside the doorway, the rising sun flaring hot and bright behind her. Within the hour the temperature outside would be over eighty. In another four, it’d be hitting a hundred.
In one hand, something flashed, catching the first rays of sunlight.
‘What’s that you have?’ Alex asked.
Lacey stepped forward and lifted the item, showing it to the woman. It was some sort of small medallion threaded on to a fine silver chain.
‘I found it. On the girl.’
Alex went over to her.
Pilgrim kicked his bike off its stand and leaned into the handlebars, rolling the heavy machine across the dusty floor to the barn door. He passed by Alex and Lacey. Alex held the medallion cupped in her palm. He didn’t need to see the coin to know a man was depicted on it with a staff in one hand and a child on his back.
A St Christopher, Voice said, understanding dawning.
‘It’s a St Christopher pendant,’ Alex told the girl. ‘It’s supposed to keep you safe when you’re travelling.’
‘Like a good-luck charm?’
Alex nodded and passed the necklace back. ‘Exactly like a good-luck charm.’
They both flinched when Pilgrim kicked the barn door open. He wheeled his bike outside, addressing them over his shoulder. ‘I’ll siphon any fuel left in the wrecked car. It won’t take long. We’re leaving.’ He slung a leg over the saddle, fired the engine to life and threw up a cloud of dust from his back tyre when he yanked on the throttle.
I thought we were getting off the highway.
‘We will.’
When?
‘Soon.’
How soon?
‘When I’m good and ready.’
A few seconds of silence.
You’re making a mistake.
Pilgrim didn’t answer.
We’re heading in exactly the same direction that girl back there was running from. You’re asking for trouble if you keep going.
Pilgrim glanced over his shoulder. The car remained a steady truck’s length behind him. Like the night before, he couldn’t see the two occupants behind the windshield, but this time it was the sun glaring off the glass that hid them from view and not the silver reach of the moon. It was for the best, anyway. He’d already had his fill of the accusing glares Lacey had been throwing his way ever since they’d left the dead girl out under the sun. It’s funny how she seemed fine with the idea of leaving the strangled woman trussed up in the hotel room but leaving the dead girl somehow rankled with her.
It’s because it’s a girl not much older than her. Could’ve just as easily been her back there you were leaving.
Vicksburg was another full day’s driving. Longer if they left the highway; they were still three hundred miles short of crossing the border into Louisiana. Already the mix of adrenalin and lack of sleep was affecting him. A strange, tingling fatigue buzzed through his shoulders, making them weigh heavy, and he was finding it hard to focus on the road, the centre line weaving and blurring into two. Yet his heartbeat raced, a constant butterfly-fluttering at his pulse points. He knew he wouldn’t be able to ride for much longer.
The sputter from his engine solved his quandary. He twisted the throttle a little, and the bike surged weakly forward but then fell back, his speed decreasing slowly until the engine gave a final handful of coughs and cut out altogether. He pulled in the clutch and coasted, the silence so unfamiliar after the constant drone of the engine that he found himself humming, a low, monotonous tone, as though he were mimicking the noise of the engine.
Pulling to the side of the road, he rolled the last few feet and stopped. He sat still, quiet. Blessedly, Voice kept his peace for once – Pilgrim just wanted to breathe and calm his heart rate; he wanted to listen to nothing for a few moments. He didn’t even let the sound of a car door opening behind him disturb his meditation.
‘Everything OK?’ A smoky huskiness still roughened the woman’s voice, but in a day or two it would be back to normal. Possibly the only part of her that ever would be.
He rubbed at the tight muscles in his neck. Moving stiffly, he climbed off the bike and came to stand next to her. A pull tugged at him, a tightness in the bottom of his stomach that wouldn’t ease. It wanted him to turn his head and look up the road, wanted him to sniff the air as if he were some kind of animal scenting its quarry. Instead, he stood very still and stared at his bike. It ticked and pinged as it settled. The tank was covered in dust, the bodywork dented and cracked, and the chain was starting to rust. He was going to miss it. And at that thought he knew he would be leaving it behind whether he liked it or not; there were three of them now, and he couldn’t take their fuel from them.
He pulled his neckerchief down off his face. ‘I’ll ride with you for a while,’ he said.
They set to work unloading his bike.
Alex didn’t look up as she helped empty his panniers. ‘Lacey said the girl back there’d had all her teeth pulled out.’
He grunted softly.
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘Not because they’re the tooth fairy, that’s for sure.’ He went to the car and loaded everything into the trunk.
Alex remained crouched beside his bike. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t making any move to get up. He sighed and traipsed back over to her.
She looked past him to the car, and presumably to the girl who sat in it, before raising her eyes to him. ‘We don’t want to cross paths with whoever did that.’
He nodded, his decision now made. ‘I agree.’ He’d had the notion to travel along this road until he came across someone who could tell him what had happened to the dead girl, and why she was whispering mysterious words to strangers. If he’d been alone he would have surely continued on such a path – his disapprobation still ran hot under his skin – but Voice had been right: to do so while these two girls tagged along would be reckless.
‘We need to get that girl to Vicksburg and her family,’ Alex said.
He knew nothing about any business of family, but he said, ‘Again, I agree.’
‘That should be our main concern.’
‘Yes.’
Alex stood, levering her way up with a quiet groan and a hand braced on one knee. She stared him straight in the eye. ‘You know, I can’t work you out at all.’
He flicked a fly away from his face. ‘No one’s asking you to.’
She was quiet. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but Pilgrim detected a faint softening at the corners of her mouth. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you. I don’t know whether there’s anything other than just you in that stubborn head of yours, and I won’t ask. I don’t expect you’d tell me, anyway, and I don’t expect I’d like the answer even if you did. But I do get the impression you don’t have a whole hell of a lot in this world. Except for maybe that junker over there.’ She jabbed her chin at his bike, but he didn’t look away from her, even though her use of the word ‘junker’ was unfair and offended him a little. He wasn’t sure what point she was trying to make with all this.
‘What I will tell you is that I don’t have much in this world, either,’ she continued. ‘Not any more. All I do have is in that car. Do we understand each other?’
Her car was important to her, and it should be. Any means of transportation was a valuable commodity, and she should do everything in her power to retain it.
I’m not sure that’s what she meant— Voice began.
‘I understand,’ Pilgrim told her.
‘Good. We should get going, then. Unless you like standing out here catching flies?’ She raised her eyebrows, but her non-sequitur confused him. She ended any further conversation by walking past him and going back to the car.
&n
bsp; Pilgrim stood for a while longer, giving his bike a last fond look, and then followed her. The cable and long, rapier-thin antenna that had trailed from the crashed car had connected to a mobile CB radio fastened to the dash. He had liberated both and transferred everything to Alex’s car, mounting the aerial to the roof with its magnetic base. The power plug had slotted neatly into the cigarette lighter. He’d left Lacey fiddling with the dials, roaming through the crackling channels for transmissions. He hadn’t told her what he was specifically looking for – she no doubt thought he wanted her to use it so they could stay away from whoever had hurt the dead girl; any information it might tell them could be useful. The radio’s casing had taken a beating in the crash, the plastic cracked and part of its insides showing, so Pilgrim didn’t hold out much hope of it receiving anything. The static had sounded decidedly garbled when he left the girl fooling with it.
He rechecked the antenna on the car’s roof – its base didn’t budge – and opened the back door. Lacey turned around to look at him as he slid into the back seat. She was wearing the baby-fly sunglasses again. He glimpsed a glint of metal at her throat. The St Christopher.
‘You’re well and truly stuck with us now,’ she said, smirking.
He couldn’t help but smile. It was a weary smile, and it felt strange on his face, as if a mask of sand would crack free from his skin and fall into his lap. The tugging sensation in his gut seemed to lessen now that he was sitting in the car.
‘Who knows, maybe you’ll get to like having us around.’ Lacey arched an eyebrow, almost challenging him to reply, and turned back to the CB. The crackling grew louder for a moment.
‘Heard anything?’ he asked her.
‘Thought I did at one point, but then got nothing but shhfffhhht.’ She added a few crackles and whistles for effect.
‘You tried the channels I told you to?’