Survivor Song

by Paul Tremblay

  “Yes.”

  Luis looks at Ramola and blows out a long sigh, puffing out his cheeks, then sends his watery eyes down to the truck bed.

  Josh says, “Yeah. Okay.” His expression freezes, and Ramola wonders again about a possible concussion, or if he’s gone inside himself to check for symptoms. He turns to Luis, who will not look at him, and says, “Guy. This isn’t our movie. This isn’t our story. It’s theirs.”

  Luis shakes his head, wipes his eyes.

  Josh continues, “We should’ve seen it before. I mean, it’s fucking obvious now. You and me aren’t the heroes. We’re the randos, yeah?”

  Luis looks up, then flips the helmet off his head and over the side of the moving truck.

  Ramola cannot help herself. “This is not a movie. And you are both heroes helping Natalie get to the clinic.”

  Josh says, “We tried. This time we tried. That counts for something, right?”

  Ramola doesn’t hear Luis’s response as the truck emerges from the wooded residential area to the end of Bay Road and the commercially developed, strip-malled intersection of streets called Five Corners. To their left and across Route 123, sandwiched between a CVS and Shaw’s supermarket is the Ames Clinic; one building, two floors, not appreciably bigger than a Colonial-style home. A fleet of police cars, blue lights flashing, fill the clinic’s lot and choke Route 123 down to one passable lane. Parked along the building’s front entrance are two coach buses. Gowned clinic staff lead pregnant women and women carrying newborns onto the buses.

  Ramola says, “Oh fucking hell, where are they going?” She hops out of the truck the moment Dan pulls to a stop in front of a police officer holding up an outstretched hand. She opens Natalie’s door, and tells her they have to hurry. Natalie unbuckles herself but is moving in slow motion. Ramola says, “Sorry,” then forcibly tugs the seat buckle out of Natalie’s hand and pulls the belt from under her belly because the auto-recoil is too slow.

  The officer is at the driver’s window, recognizes Dan, and tells them they can’t stay, can’t get help here. By the time Dan is asking, begging really, where they can go, Ramola has Natalie out of the truck and walking away.

  Josh calls out as he runs in front of the women, holding out Natalie’s bag and his backpack. “Take mine, please. I don’t need it. You might.”

  Knowing refusing his pack might result in an argument that slows them down further, Ramola accepts and says, “Thank you.” She says it twice because she can’t bear to say, Good luck, and she leads Natalie away from the truck, toward the clinic.

  Police attempt to stop her, but she does not stop. She shouts her name, medical ID badge held out like a shield. Eventually, one officer leads her and Natalie toward the buses.

  Briefly stopped at a bottleneck, Ramola throws a look behind her. The truck is gone. Luis and Josh are on their bikes and pedaling back down Bay Road.

  Interlude

  You Will Not Feel Me Between Your Teeth

  This is not the end of a fairy tale, nor is it the end of a movie. This is a song.

  * * *

  Natalie’s face is almost blank. There’s only a little bit left of her. Luis doesn’t know the real her, of course, and he realizes this, and within that realization, a horror: there’s only a little bit left of the Natalie he met less than an hour ago. He wonders how much of that Natalie was already a compromised, diminished version. Luis thinks the dimming or leaking away of who you are is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. He is right, but there are many worst things that can happen to anyone.

  Josh gives Ramola his backpack and she thanks him and she leads Natalie away.

  Josh says, “Let’s just go.”

  Luis says, “You first.” He shoulders his pack, swapping out his baseball bat for Josh’s wooden staff.

  They go back the way they came, retracing their paths down Bay Road, back under the canopy of trees where it’s darker and more foreboding. You are not supposed to go back, you can’t go back, and if you attempt a return you will be forever lost. Luis knows this, but they’re doing it anyway.

  They don’t slow at the yellow house and the four dead men in the road. They glide through, the scene already like a memory, one that’s unreliable. Luis doesn’t grieve for the men. If anything, he hoped to find them shambling aimlessly, arms outstretched, mangled faces a comic parody of death, of ridiculous, messy, capricious death, so it would be easier to pretend they are in a zombie movie. He will still pretend.

  They ride past the white church. Two dead turkeys are in the parking lot. A pillowful of loosened feathers are massed and they rise and fall in the wind, new birds learning to fly.

  Josh’s riding is erratic. He weaves and abruptly jerks his bike at hard angles when the road is clear. He shouts at shadows and he shouts at trees. He lists until Luis calls out his name, then he lists some more. Luis knows Josh will not be Josh for much longer. Perhaps he already isn’t Josh, or the new non-Josh is growing, metastasizing, laying claim. Regardless, Luis will follow Josh and follow him until he cannot lead anymore.

  There is no discussion about going back to their Brockton apartment, the one they’ve lived in for six months, the one with a single bedroom and a futon couch. They’ve been making rent with the help of their haunted parents, who are happy to have the almost-grown-up ghosts of their sons out of juvenile facilities and their court-mandated youth programs, and who are equally happy to have those ghosts out of their houses.

  Luis knows they cannot go home.

  * * *

  What Luis does not know: The virus doesn’t herald the end of the world, or of the United States, or even of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In the coming days, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking points, exacerbated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic, misinformation; a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course, by plain old individual everyday evil. But there will be many heroes, too, including ones who don’t view themselves as such. Dr. Awolesi will be proven correct in her epidemic forecast: the exponentially increased speed with which this rabies virus infects and progresses will aid in its own containment and control. Nine days after Josh and Luis meet Ramola and Natalie a massive pre-exposure vaccination campaign will finally begin in New England for both humans and animals. In concurrence with the quarantine, the vaccination program will be wildly successful and will return the region from the brink of collapse. In the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic [but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died.

  * * *

  Luis follows Josh to Borderland’s satellite entrance, past the gate, onto the mile-long dirt road, an artery into one of the many hearts of the expansive park. The knobs on their tires kick and flip small stones. Josh shout-sings a nursery rhyme as they ride deeper into the park, as they become more alone with themselves. The road cuts a rolling swath through the green and growing. The dead and the dying are in hiding, are not showing their empty stares and rictus grins, but they never remain in hiding for long. The sky is a strip of dark gray, another road.

  The forest yields and the road empties into open fields boasting dry grasses as high as the teens’ waists. Ahead is an empty, historic [as designated by the state] blue house, tilted and randomly placed as though it had tumbled off the side of the narrowing dirt road. To their right is a crooked footpath through the field. Josh wobbles on his bike and falls into the grass next to the park information sign enc
ased in glass and framed in brown wood. Luis dumps his bike next to Josh’s and he helps his feverish friend onto his feet. Josh begins a new rhyme. It is unfamiliar to Luis and he feels ashamed, as though he doesn’t know his friend like he thinks he does. Josh ties his bandanna over his mouth, making a gag. The red cloth peels his lips away from his front teeth, showing the future. Luis takes a coiled rope out of his pack. Josh clasps his hands, as if in prayer, in front of his stomach. Luis wraps and loops the rope around Josh’s wrists just like he saw them [who are them? characters? actors?] do on a famous television show. He ties it all off as best as he can, leaving enough rope for a ten-foot lead. Josh walks and Luis trails behind carrying one end of the rope and the wooden staff.

  Danger skulks undercover in the fields; the tall grass bows and waves, whispering of the epic battle to come. The zombie foxes are the first to attack. The scent of their musk announces their stealthy approach. The zombie raccoons are next. Their snorts and chitters fill the air, broadcasting their immutable intentions. Luis wields the staff expertly, vanquishing the smaller animals using acrobatic parries, focused strikes, and cagey counterthrusts. Despite his limitations, his weakening hold on both physical and mental health, Josh heroically sallies forth, defending with spastic but brutal kicks and double hammer blows. The teens more than endure the tiny terrors, they revel as though there never was and never will be a sweeter time, a greater moment. If not an apotheosis, this is them at their best, and they laugh and they boast and they shout and they live and they know there is no future.

  Danger crashes through the woods, snapping branches and overturning rocks, impatient for the teens’ arrival, thirsting for their introduction. Blocking the entrance to the forest, a zombie deer greets them with a storm of hooves. The teens’ defense is impregnable, however. The deer soon fatigues, and ultimate, inevitable defeat arrives when her reed-thin foreleg shatters at the dull swipe of the wooden staff. Her epileptic convulsions and contortions communicate a dire warning and judgment: their time was brief, their time is over. In the forest where the path thins into ruts and the branches above overlap like entwined fingers, there is no more gray sky. Something follows the teens from the cover of the opaque brush. Judging by the ruckus and upheaval, perhaps it’s the forest itself stalking them. Josh slows, and staggers more than he walks. Luis urges him on, the rope limp and dead in his hand. The zombie bats appear next, a mini-tornado of wings, claws, and needle-sharp teeth. There are too many bats for Luis to deflect; it would be like fighting rain. Luis freezes up but Josh knocks his friend to the ground and shields him with his body. The bats are left to satisfy themselves with Josh’s skin and blood. They begrudgingly accept the tainted offering, but they do not linger. The teens push deeper into the forest, following the paths they traced and memorized years ago, when their summer adventures and tragedies happened here. They are still kids, of course, but they have already lost their childhood. A zombie coyote as large as a wolf finally crashes through the brush ahead of them. It allows the teens to gape at its glorious all-ness before the attack. In the gray, dulling afternoon light, smothered by the conspiratorial canopy, the animal’s great head appears to be floating disembodied over a mass of dark-brown fur. It has glowing, hot-coal-red eyes, all the better to see them with. As it creeps forward, within pouncing distance, impatient lips reveal an overcrowded mouth and dripping stalactite canines. Its paws don’t pad as much as they gouge, each step scalloping a mini-grave. Close enough, its body now fully seen, brawny muscles flex and ripple. The standoff with the teens lasts only a few seconds, and it lasts a geologic age during which glaciers grind and birth the landscape around them. Then it finally leaps. Josh steps into the arc, taking the brunt. The coyote’s bear-trap jaws snap onto his forearm. There is no grace to this battle. It’s savage and dirty and desperate. Josh, strangely quiet but for heavy breaths and short grunts, knees the animal’s rib cage and stomps on its paws. Luis swings the wooden staff, and he pokes and jabs, but the weapon is ineffectual. He abandons the staff for a heavy stone he raises with two hands and bashes into the side of the coyote’s head, and then the top of its skull. There’s a crack and a uniquely canine whimper; red eyes shrink and dim. The coyote deflates, goes slack, releases Josh, and wobbles down the path on quivering legs, veering into the brush without so much as a ripple or snapped twig.

  Danger lurks inside the teens, thrashing through one’s heart and the other’s mind. In a circular clearing, ringed by boulders and tree stumps, a hub spoked with alternate paths marked by carved wooden trail markers, Josh stops walking. He turns, and he has turned. This is the reveal of Zombie Josh, the zombie teen with red coyote eyes, lips a ragged drawn curtain, foam and saliva fauceting from his gagged mouth. Luis cannot help but stare at his friend’s teeth, as though he’d never really seen them before, seen them for what they can be. Hands still tied together, Zombie Josh rushes at Luis. Thus begins a dance that will last into the night. Luis will not hurt Zombie Josh, even though he’s seen all the movies and knows all the rules. Instead, he will duck and he will dodge and he will sidestep and he will run. He will leapfrog onto the boulders and tree stumps and he will wind around the wooden posts of the park signs, centrifugal force aiding in acceleration and changes of direction. He will use the staff as a pole vault and he will use the staff to deflect, to block, and to steer Zombie Josh away without ever striking him. He will pull and then slacken the rope lead tethered to Zombie Josh’s hands and wrists, puppeteering his friend into an arcing, orbiting trajectory, one that will not intersect with his. Luis’s plan is simple: to outlast. It is in this manner, with the watchers watching from the trees and the shadows that Luis and Zombie Josh dance their shoes to pieces.

  * * *

  If Josh had his druthers, were still capable of having druthers, they would’ve made it to a giant calved boulder called Split Rock. Josh has succumbed to physical exhaustion and the late stages of the virus. He is sitting on the ground in the clearing, half-propped against an oblong, couch-sized boulder. His eyes are closed. His breathing is arrhythmic and shallow.

  They didn’t make it, but they are home.

  Luis’s eyes are open wide, light-starved in the dark. His breathing is even and controlled. Luis is crouched next to his near comatose friend. Luis wonders where Ramola and Natalie are. He wonders how long ago Natalie ceased being herself. He wants to think that he and Josh did something good today, something that, if it doesn’t balance the cosmic ledger for the irredeemable sin of their past, it at least tilts the scale back toward their favor. But then he remembers the last time he saw Natalie’s face, and he fears their help might’ve been too late, might’ve been for nothing.

  The irredeemable sin of their past: the inexplicable [even now, especially now] complicity in a brutal beating resulting in the death of an old man, and the silence after, and the terrible price of that silence: the disappearance and death of their best friend.

  We will not intrude on Luis here, not for much longer. His past, particularly his regrets and recriminations, belong to him. We know enough and we will never know enough to understand what he will do next anyway.

  Luis slips his hands under Josh’s head and unties the gag. The sopping-wet bandanna slides easily out of his slack mouth. Luis drops it to the ground. He does not wipe away or clean the crusting foam from Josh’s lips. Josh coughs once, a dusty memory of a functioning body. Luis rolls up his right sleeve. He cannot see his own smooth, unblemished skin in the dark. It’s hard to believe it gets this dark every night. Placing a thumb on Josh’s chin, Luis pulls down the lower jaw, opening the mouth. He takes his thumb away. Josh’s face and body tremors, but he doesn’t wake and his mouth stays open. Luis places the soft underside of his forearm into Josh’s mouth, the inside of which is as hot and damp as a sauna. Luis positions his left palm under Josh’s chin and pushes, closing the mouth, forcing his friend’s teeth against his skin. It hurts, but he doesn’t know if the teeth have broken through yet. He pushes harder and Josh convulses, perhaps be
cause the body’s main airway is being blocked. There’s still a spark of life within the engine. His jaws contract once, and hard. The pain is an electrical storm, and stars explode in Luis’s vision. He retracts his arm. When he finds the dark holes in his skin, he wipes the area with his fingers, mixing the saliva and blood together. Luis sits with his back against the rock, shoulder to shoulder with his friend. He initially planned to run and rampage through the forest like the monster he will become, but he doesn’t want to leave Josh alone, even if he’s already gone.

  Luis has sweat through his clothes and he shivers as the temperature continues to drop. His teeth chatter. He hugs his knees into his chest, trying to keep warm. His wounded forearm throbs with his heartbeats. The times between Josh’s shallow breaths expand until the final, infinite time. Luis is then left alone to listen to the forest’s night sounds he’s never really heard before, a beautiful and sorrowful secret he will not have the privilege of carrying for very long. Luis closes his eyes, leans into his friend, and waits for the fire to burn through his head.

  III.

  Do You Become a Rose Tree, and I the Rose Upon It

  Rams

  Police cars slowly creep away, their drivers unsure of direction and purpose beyond clearing a path for the buses to roll out of the clinic’s parking lot.

  A brown-haired, middle-aged clinician wears a white lab coat over jeans and a dark-blue button-down shirt. She holds a clipboard against her chest. Without an introduction she says, “We’ve been holding the buses for you, but we weren’t going to hold them for much longer”; an offhand accusation, attributing the irresponsibility of their lateness to Ramola. It’s not fair, and it feeds the roots of a forest of shame, sadness, and rage that she is not able to save Natalie.