by Schow, Ryan
This would make sense.
“I think the troops are getting restless,” she tells me. “And a few of them need to pee.”
“So let them pee.”
“Nasr has to go number two,” she whispers.
“You’re at the big kid table, Adeline. It’s okay to say the kid has to take a dump. In my book, if it’s pee-pee time, then it’s time to squeeze out some fecal sausage, too. Let him do his thing.”
Rolling her eyes, she says, “Really?”
“You know me, I get like this sometimes when, you know…”
Something in her changes, softens, doesn’t seem so mad at me. “You’re going crazy in your head a bit right now, aren’t you?” Adeline asks softly, leaning close enough to me that others won’t hear her. Yet they all hear her…
“I am,” I admit.
“We’ll be okay,” she says.
“Are you sure?” I ask, more sensitive now. “Because I know you didn’t want to do this.”
“It was inevitable,” she says.
As we’re all standing there in front of the truck, a woman is walking down the other side of the freeway, pushing a grocery cart. She’s wearing a dirty blouse, old underwear, and a nasty pair of tennis shoes. She sees us, stops, then crosses over the dirt to the other side of the highway on the other side of the truck.
Now we can’t see her, but we can hear her coming.
Then the cart stops and we hold our collective breaths. Eliana pulls out a gun. We’re not even sure if it’s loaded, if anyone has anything left but the round in the rifle Eliana almost lost.
Then we hear a skidding, scraping sound. It’s the woman crawling under the truck toward us. She peeks her head out and we see bloodshot eyes and hair that looks like it’s been run through dirt and stagnant water. On her chin is either a spot of hair, or a brown smudge—I can’t say for sure at this point. The more she crawls out from under the truck, the more of her we see. But that’s not the worst of it. What’s bad, what has us all reeling, is the baby she has with her.
It’s like an old prune, shriveled, lifeless. This little creature, it’s dressed in a butter yellow dress that’s stained and a bit ragged.
“My baby an’ I are hungry,” she says, getting to her feet. Her knees are scraped and bleeding. She doesn’t seem to notice. “We need some water, too. Something you can spare us, anything.”
She’s wearing a designer blouse, a pair of oversized white(ish) underwear, black socks with holes in them. Half her body looks sunburnt, especially her right arm. She’s not small, but she’s not big either. Judging by the gathering of extra skin around the insides of her thighs, she was probably a rotund woman who’s now losing weight way too fast.
But all that thigh meat just puddling down the inside of her legs…it’s not enough to stop me from thinking of the child. She’s now holding it by the wrist, like a five year old carrying her favorite doll.
Adeline starts to cry. I turn and fire her a look. In a survival-of-the-fittest world, sympathy will cost you everything. Cruelty, however, seems too much.
“If we give you a bottle of water, will you be on your way?” Eliana asks.
Relief washes over her face as she stands there, seemingly unaware of her uncomfortable state of undress. The blouse is short, her underwear are stained and all I can see is that desperate, yet slightly eased smile on her face. It’s like something you’d read about in a Stephen King novel.
“We could use something to eat, too,” she says.
“Don’t press your luck,” Ice grumbles. I was about to say the same thing.
“We can spare a bar,” Brooklyn says.
“No we can’t,” Carolina replies, abnormally aggressive. Where Carolina is from, she has to know need far more than us once indulgent Americans.
“She’s hungry,” Brooklyn argues.
“I am,” the woman replies.
“One day you’ll be hungry, too,” Adeline tells her, the crying spell short and measured. “And then you’ll be thinking about that bar you gave away to the woman you didn’t know.”
“My name is Mary Anne, like on Gilligan’s Island.”
“Even if your name was Marilyn Monroe, you wouldn’t be getting that bar,” I say. “It would be best to appreciate our generosity while you still have it.”
“But my baby,” she pleads.
“Your baby is dead,” Nasr says, garnering a sour look from his older sister, Nyanath.
“No, no…” she says. “He’s just…not eating a lot right now.”
“He looks like beef jerky,” Nasr tells her.
“Enough!” I turn and tell him.
He shrinks away from me, not understanding what he’s doing to this woman. Then to the plus size underwear model (the apocalypse edition), I say, “She’ll be okay with a little water. But you have to find someplace to stay, maybe get yourself some pants.”
“Some kids took them from me. My pants and underwear. Teenaged boys, but mean. Then they threw rocks at me and told me to run. I had my little Joshua here to look out for, so I ran. I lost my shoes as I ran, but they weren’t walking shoes.”
“At least you got your underwear back,” Kamal says, trying to look on the bright side.
“These aren’t mine.”
Looking down, the stains in front not forcing me to avert my gaze, I see they are men’s underwear. Inside, my stomach turns.
“Where’d you get them?” Veronica asks.
“I saw a guy,” she says.
By now, Orlando is back with a bottle of water. He hands it to her and says, “Good luck to you.”
She nods her head, then gets down and crawls back under the trailer, her knees scraping on the asphalt, a big brown stain flowering in the crotch of her stolen underwear, big holes in the bottom of her socks revealing the bloody soles of her feet.
Alongside her, she drags the dead child. That scratching sound is something I know I’ll hear in my nightmares.
I hold my hands up to my ears until she’s gone.
No one says a word.
When she’s finally gone, I say, “That’s about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” And it’s true. The woman was talking like her little Joshua was still alive.
“Do you think her mind was gone?” Orlando asks.
I give him a big, affirmative nod. Then it gets really quiet. Finally Eliana breaks the trance we’re all in and says, “I have an idea, but I’m not sure anyone’s going to like it.”
On the other side of the big rig, we hear the distinct sounds of Mary Anne pushing her shopping cart onto the asphalt. One of the wheels has that sharp fluttering sound, like it’s wobbling back and forth. I can’t imagine where she’s headed, but she’s on her way with fresh water in her belly and nothing but hell and fairy tales for memories. In that moment, I would have given anything to hear Joshua cry.
But alas, that was a fairy tale of my own.
Chapter Twelve
The sun is settling low into the horizon, and the smoke from distant fires is making for one magnificent sunset. It’s impossible to know what’s burning, or why after all this time, but there has been so much fighting, so much destruction that, for now, it’s anyone’s guess. My assumption is that mobs of people are clashing, that this is the result of man’s war for survival. Looking at a horizon adorned with brilliant oranges, yellows and reds, I can’t help thinking that for all the beauty of this great sunset, things must first be destroyed by fire.
What is the kill count as a result of each and every inferno? How many people are clutching to that last inch of life right now? How many of them will have lost that fight by sunrise?
These are the things I can’t help wondering, the things that keep me up at night.
I rub my head, groaning inside.
“What are you thinking about?” Brooklyn asks me, interrupting my thoughts. I didn’t even hear her come up.
“Just life, I guess,” I say. “Before all this. Who we were as a species.”
As
a species, everything was made easy for us. We didn’t grow our own food, clean our own water, start each and every fire from scratch. For heaven’s sake, we had three ply toilet paper that was quilted for maximum comfort, microwave burritos, enough entertainment to numb our minds to the tough realities of life. If, as a society, we have to wipe our butts with weeds or an old shirt, will we even want to survive?
“We were spoiled,” Brooklyn admits. “I never really thought that, but I think about it now. It’s funny the things you consider when everything is gone.”
I give her a contemplative nod, thinking this decadent life we lived is going to be our downfall. It’s made us weak, dependent, vulnerable.
“Dad, are you okay?” Brooklyn asks.
“Yeah,” I say, coming to. Grazing her cheek with my hand, I say, “I’m just trying to figure things out is all. For starters, this truck is going to be a problem.”
Getting down on the asphalt on all fours, I sneak a look under the big rig’s trailer to the road ahead. About a hundred yards up, a two-seater Cessna has crashed on the highway. The plane is half hanging off the interstate, tail up, like a cat in heat with its butt in the air. Standing up, I walk to the back end of the trailer, hop up on the metal guardrail and have a look around. The first thing I see is the carcass on the road. The second thing I see is the carrion birds feeding on it.
“Look at the brave winged rodents,” I say, more to myself than the other three in the car.
“What did you say?” Eliana asks from behind me.
“Nothing,” I reply.
“He’s having a moment,” Brooklyn says.
Further up the freeway, I spot a pack of walkers headed this way. Survivors, wanderers, the mentally diminished. These truly are the living dead. People rambling along with no purpose, too weary to stop, not even looking for food or shelter, their sanity whisked away by the terrors of this new, dark reality.
When I look at people like this—and we’ve seen them for days now—I try to make myself feel something. Sadly, I feel nothing. I try convincing myself I still have a heart, a functioning soul, some sense of decency, or morality at the very least, but it doesn’t work.
Climbing down off the railing, I’m thinking these walking lobotomies might be my future. The future of me.
If my family dies, will I wander the streets, eyes blank, mouth hanging open, my flesh clinging to my bones as I drag myself everywhere, nowhere, stopping only to fall down and die?
Will they do the same if I die first?
I look at my wife, then turn my attention to Isadoro. He looks like he’s taking this in stride, and it pisses me off. He killed our father, was shot by our brother, then left for dead as he crawled into a house to burn to death. And that was before he moved to Juarez. After all that’s happened to him, is he just a shell now? So far removed from life that true emotion will never really dig into him?
Is he the lucky one?
“Does any of this even bother you?” I ask him.
He frowns, then says, “Of course it does. But it is what it is, right? It’s not like we’re going to put any of this back in the bottle.”
“Yes, but…”
“Tighten up that spine, brother,” he says. “We have a long way to go.”
“What’s going on with you?” Adeline asks, her hand rubbing small circles on my back.
“My mind is a jumble right now,” I tell her.
“How so?”
Turning to Orlando, I ask, “What happened to that woman?” Seeing that I’m talking to him, he focusses on me, his eyes widening a bit. “I’m talking about the redhead who burnt our home down.”
The redhead who got her head caved in on our street while we were liberating Demon’s camp.
Veronica looks away. Orlando looks down.
“Answer your father,” Adeline says.
Now everyone’s listening.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Orlando replies, defiant.
“That was my fault,” Draven says, stepping forward. He’s still got those thunderheads gathering over him, and in the dying light of day, he looks a bit malevolent.
“I’m not talking to you,” I tell him. He pipes down, shoves his hands in his pockets and looks away.
“I said I have an idea,” Eliana says.
I hold up my hand, silence her. Something in me is loosening, letting go. Then, after a moment, Orlando says, “I used the slingshot on her. Phillip and Draven hit her with rocks, too, but I…I think one of my rocks…that was what…did what it did to her eye, and her teeth.”
“That woman came there with murder on her mind,” Eliana interjects. “She tried to burn us to death. Even though we weren’t there, she set the houses on fire.”
“I hit her in the back with the porcupine stick,” Chase says. “That’s what I call it. It’s because of all the nails.”
“You did that?” I ask.
“Draven did, too,” Brooklyn says, disgust in her tone. “He bashed her brains in.”
Ah, Draven. The neighbor I never knew. He looks like a soy boy, pretty for a guy, incapable of such tyranny. But after hearing this…no wonder Brooklyn kept her distance.
Is she afraid of him? I see her let go every so often, but then she pulls away realizing she let her guard down.
Regardless of what happened, Draven is now with us. He’s one of us. Both him and Eliana. And Ice? He’s a little scary himself. It has me wondering, what is my brother capable of? What are all of us capable of? Are we all just killers now?
Are we all just savages?
I glance at Adeline and she’s staring at Orlando, most likely wondering what this is going to do to him. She turns those big, terrified eyes on me. Her expression is sudden desperation. The slight tremor in the skin beneath her eye might even be fear.
“Not to move off this truly uplifting conversation Fire started,” Eliana says, “but I’m thinking we should burn the trailer and make camp here for the night.”
“That’s your big plan?” Draven asks.
“It’s not ideal,” Eliana answers, “but it’s better than all of us standing around here with our peckers in our hands crying about the past.”
This jackknifed rig is a wall of metal and rubber we can’t get through. There’s no real way to turn around at this hour, not with nightfall upon us. So naturally Eliana wants to burn it.
It’s a decent idea.
To Eliana’s suggestion, Draven says, “Before we go with that, does anyone have any ideas on how to get this rig out of here, or should we backtrack?”
“If we backtrack, we lose time and fuel,” Ice says, “and we put ourselves at risk of an ambush.”
“Backtracking sucks,” I add.
Ice scoots under the trailer, goes to the other side, then comes back. “Other than a dead woman in the road, a downed Cessna and several abandoned vehicles, it’s pretty clear ahead.”
Without waiting for a response, Ice starts looking around the rig.
“What are you looking for, Uncle Ice?” Orlando asks.
“Chains maybe, something big enough to attach to the trailer’s axle. If we can hook the axle behind the wheel, maybe we can attach it to the Barracuda or the bus and pull it back, giving us a way to sneak between the back bumper and the guard rail.”
Under the last of the light, Ice proves to be unlucky.
There are no chains.
“Burn it,” Eliana says again. “Or we can just stare at it all night and hope it burns itself.”
“It’s going to get cold tonight,” Ice adds.
“We could siphon some gas from one of the cars up there, do exactly what Eliana says and torch this thing,” I say. “Maybe in the morning, we can push through what’s left of it.”
“It’s too dark to siphon any gas,” Xavier says. “We can do that in the morning.”
“What about cargo?” I ask.
We get the keys from the driver, who’s shot dead in the seat, the stink so bad I all but fall out of the truck and try n
ot to puke.
“Keys,” Eliana says, snapping her fingers while tears and snot are gathering in my eyes and nose.
I hand her the keys.
“Man up,” she mutters to me. “This is embarrassing.”
I flip her off, then spit one last time and wipe my eyes. Catching up to her, Eliana is blindly feeling around in back of what looks like a mostly empty trailer.
“There are only a few crates back here,” Eliana finally says from deep in the trailer. It’s so dark no one can see her. “Someone toss me a lighter.”
Orlando runs back to the bus, then returns a moment later. He shoves a lighter down the metal flooring of the trailer so Eliana can track it by sound. A second later, there’s a flick of the lighter’s wheel against the flint and a small flame appears.
“Looks like it’s just a bunch of computer electronics,” she says, disappointed. “Nothing usable.”
“Being empty will make it quicker and less toxic to burn through,” Ice says. “But it won’t burn for long.”
“We’ll use it for heat tonight,” Eliana suggests, tromping through the darkness toward them. “But that means we’ll be burning the tires, too. That’s going to stink.”
“We could sleep in it,” Orlando adds.
I don’t look at my son, not because his suggestion is undeserving of a reply, but because I’ve already thought of this. Churning through the possibilities in my mind, I say. “We were going to stop for the night anyway, so we might as well burn it. Let it stay busy while we sleep. Tomorrow, we can uncouple it from the rig, then hopefully move it and push through.”
“You think that will work, Dad?” Brooklyn asks.
“If not, it’s not like we’re on a schedule anyway,” I say, shrugging my shoulders. “I just didn’t want to use our gas as fuel to burn this thing.”
“There are plenty of resources for gas right now,” Eliana says. “But tonight, we need fire.”
By the time we exhaust ten good gallons of gas and set the truck on fire, Adeline is telling me the worst news ever.