The World Without Flags

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  The thought of Eric reminds me that I should try to feed him again. I feel a little guilty suddenly that I just leave him in the barn like an animal, but it passes. It’s for the best, I guess. He’s safe. I’m safe. It’s the way it has to be for now. I try to tell myself it has nothing to do about how I feel when I look at him or how horrible he smells. The guilt I feel tells me I’m not entirely successful with this.

  I go through the whole soup making process again, using the last of the deer meat and bread. Tomorrow, I will have to find something else to feed him. Fish soup, I guess. I can boil the fish heads and bones to make a nice base, I think as I cut up the deer and bread. Finally I have a nice soup and go to the barn.

  When I open his stall, I see that Eric is standing in the corner, tangled up in his rope. His face is pressed into the wall of the barn. I put down the mug of soup carefully.

  “Why do you do this?” I ask him as I carefully try to free him from the rope. “I don’t understand why you press your face into things. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “Unh,” Eric says as he turns around. He moves to step forward, but I block him.

  “Stay still,” I say. “This’ll be easier.” I untie the rope from him and then unwind it. When I see that it’s even around his neck, I shiver thinking that he could have hanged himself if he tripped. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” I scold him.

  “Unh,” he says.

  “Yeah, well,” I respond. “I wish you’d just lie down, okay? Just rest.”

  Then I tug him down into a sitting position, which isn’t as difficult as it was the day before. Eric just sits there while I wipe his mouth. I try not to notice the wriggling white worms in the blackness of his mouth. Or the smell of death that surrounds him. As I feed him the best I can, I have to steady him with one hand. The only time he’s really animated is when there’s water around, and I have to be careful he doesn’t scratch me or bite me accidentally. By the time I’m finished, I’m exhausted. Eric sits there with his legs spread out in front of him, covered in slobbered soup.

  “Unh,” he says.

  “You just, just be quiet,” I say, a little out of breath. And more than a little grossed out, to be honest. My dinner is rumbling inside me, and I breathe in deeply to keep it down. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to Eric’s smell.

  After a second of rest, I get the newly-cleaned drooly towel filthy again immediately, wiping Eric’s face clean. I look at the blindfold around his eyes, which is now so dark that I can hardly remember it was originally red. I think about taking it off and washing it, but I can’t bear to think about looking at his eyes. They were blue once. Now I imagine dark holes writhing with worms. I can’t deal with that.

  When I’m done cleaning him, I shut the stall carefully and use the rope to lock it up tight. After what I saw, I’m too afraid to tie him down in the stall. I don’t know what I’d do if Eric hung himself because of some stupid mistake I made. Then I decide to go back to the fire, but I can’t move. I mean, I can, but I don’t. I just stand there, looking over the stall door at the shadow that is Eric. It breaks my heart to leave him. I don’t know how long I stand there, watching him.

  I remember when we first lived on the island. It was so cold that first winter. We didn’t have anything to eat except canned beans, which Eric had found in a nearby house, like four whole cardboard boxes full of canned beans. It was too cold to leave the little shack that Lucia and Eric built. We just huddled together all day and all night. It was such a long winter. At night, Eric would light a candle. We had those for a few years after the end, bright, wax candles, not like the bees wax candles we make now. He sat and read to us every night. I loved those stories. Back then, I didn’t think much of it. I was just excited about the stories, who would live, who would die, who would fall in love, and who would be left alone. But now, when I think of it, I know that Eric did it so that we would survive. He made life bearable. He gave us something to think about other than the gnawing cold, the biting hunger, the numbing boredom of another can of beans. He gave us the prospect of living and enjoying it. We suffered, but we suffered much less than we might have. It makes me tear up a little, thinking of it like this. I’ve never thought of those nights, not like this.

  I open up the stall and go back in. He doesn’t look much like Eric, he doesn’t smell like him, or sound like him. But it’s Eric. My Eric.

  “Come on,” I tell him and tug him to his feet.

  “Unh,” he says as he rises.

  I take him by the hand and lead him back to the fire. It’s almost completely dark out now. Eric is walking strangely, bringing his knees too far up. He looks like he’s marching. It’s kind of funny, so I laugh a little.

  “Calm down there, soldier,” I tell him as I stop him by the fire. Then I stand behind him and push the back of his knees with my own knees. It’s something us kids used to do to each other as a joke, especially the boys. I don’t know why I just thought of it. It makes Eric slump down and then I guide him as gently as I can into a sitting position. I have to drag him back a little when his boots almost end up in the fire.

  “Unh,” Eric says. His jaw yawns open and he lifts one shoulder like he’s going to shrug but the shoulder just stays up in the air. “Unh,” he says again.

  Then I get the book from the backpack , the book that Eric was reading, The Left Hand of Darkness. The one I took without knowing why. Now I think I know why. I flip through the pages and come to the bookmark where Eric had stopped reading, a good fifty pages in. This is where he stopped reading. I’m suddenly overcome with emotion. If he dies, he’ll never finish his book. It kills me. I take a deep breath.

  “How about we start at the beginning?” I ask.

  “Unh,” Eric says.

  I turn to the opening page, and, by firelight, in a low voice, I begin to read.

  69

  Our second day at the farm is even better than the first. I wake up late in the morning and have a breakfast of fried fish and cold fiddleheads. Even though I still ache for a handful of salt, the breakfast is delicious. I boil a kettle of water and then pour it over the fish bones and trout heads. I boil it for a while and then pour out the broth into the aluminum mug. I add some mashed fiddleheads and stir it up. It doesn’t look too appetizing. Looks like fish guts to me, but there’s not much I can do about that. Besides, Eric doesn’t care.

  I get Eric from the stall and bring him to the fire. Then, as the sun gets hotter around us, I feed him three mugs of the fish/fiddleheads soup stuff. I wonder how much of it actually gets in his stomach, he makes such a mess, but I don’t have much control over that. After I wipe him down with his drooly towel, I let him sit out in the sun to dry off. I try not to look at him too much, but I can’t ignore that he isn’t looking good. His face is hardly recognizable, all sharp angles and bones and beard. His whole body looks skeletal, and his clothes hang from him like rags. He attracts a constant cloud of flies. But I try to ignore all that. I read him a few pages from his book before I put him back into the stall and head down to the brook to fish.

  The fishing is just as good. Today I have even more time, so I leisurely fish up and down the brook until I have eight, fine brook trout. I’m feeling so rich with luxuries that I throw back a ninth, just because it’s a little too small. I watch its sinuous black body vanish back into the brook. Watching it, I can’t help but get a little sentimental. We’re a lot alike, after all, both survivors. Then I go around a tree and, with my jackknife, I clean the fish who weren’t quite as lucky today.

  When I get back to the farmhouse, I decide to bring Bandit down to the brook to drink and get him out of the sun. After checking on Eric, who is sitting stone still in his stall, I grab our backpack and head back to the brook, leading Bandit. When we get there, I watch Bandit drink greedily and feel a little guilty for not bringing him down here sooner. “I’m doing the best I can,” I tell the horse. Bandit ignores me and keeps drinking. Watching him drink the unboiled water, I hop
e horses can’t get the Worm.

  Pulling off the backpack, I dig around for Eric’s papers. I thought earlier, while I was fishing, that maybe some of these papers were letters that he exchanged with Good Prince Billy. For years when Randy the Vandal would return from trading, he’d bring letters to Eric. I knew they were from several people in different communities, but I never asked him about it and he never said anything. He’d just sit in the cabin by the stove and read them and then sit and stare at the wall so intensely, I could hear his mind grinding away, thinking. I never thought to ask him about it. Maybe there’s some information here, in these letters, that can help us.

  The first couple letters are from people I don’t know. Some guy named Burt and a woman, Jenni. The letters are filled with news about crops that work and don’t work, troubles in their community, an interesting attempt to form a court, but nothing that could help us. The third letter is from Good Prince Billy. She signs it “Good Prince.” I wish there was a date on it, something to give me an idea of how old it is, but there isn’t. She talks about her community. Lots of names I don’t recognize. Some speculation about various other groups that I don’t know. A passing mention of the Gearheads. All in all, pretty disappointing.

  The next page is folded. I can tell it’s old because the paper is yellow and brittle at the edges. The letter makes me hopeful because I’m looking for information about the Worm and the older the letter, the more likely it is that they will be talking about it. When I open it, I’m stunned.

  It’s an old drawing. It shows two people under a blazing orange sun. They have smiles that reach out of their heads, twirling into the page like their joy cannot be contained. There’s a big man with a large head and a smaller person with curly hair. It’s my drawing. I did this many years ago with the crayons that Eric scavenged on our way across a dangerous landscape, during the Worm. Eric kept it all these years. Drawing was the only thing that made me calm and relaxed and happy after the collapse of everything. Eric knew that. He always made sure I had crayons. Always. I study the drawing and then shake my head. I don’t have time for this. I wipe away a couple tears, annoying things, and then tuck the drawing behind the other letters.

  “Come on, Birdie,” I say. “Focus.”

  But it’s hard. I flip to the next letter and the next. There’s just not much in the letters that would help us. Most of it is about how to manage farms and keep people happy and focused. Lots of it is just worrying about winter. Once in a while there’s a mention of the Stars or the Gearheads and in one letter the Good Prince mentions Carl Doyle. That was the man I shot, the one who was trying to kill Eric. The man who owned that old Land Rover. But it’s just a quick mention, it doesn’t help us. After I go through all the letters, I look down at them with disappointment. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe some details about the people that the Good Prince had helped get over the Worm, maybe just a few tidbits about how she accomplished that little feat. But there’s not much about the Worm. It’s as if everyone was trying to forget that it even happened. They just talked about whatever was happening in their lives as they struggled to learn how to run a farm and a community at the same time. I guess I understand, but I’m frustrated. I feel like throwing the letters into the brook. But I contain myself.

  Instead I fold them up carefully. They’re Eric’s. He kept them for a reason, and I’m not going to throw them away. I tuck the letters under one arm and grab up the trout with the other and then begin to walk back to the farm.

  That’s when I see the smoke.

  70

  I’m running full tilt back to the barn, my heart racing in me much faster than my legs can go. Eric’s papers flutter behind me. I know the smoke is much farther away than the barn, but where there’s smoke, there’s bandits. They could be headed our way. My mind conjures up images of them finding Eric. They won’t hesitate to kill him. Not for one moment. There won’t be any amount of begging I can do to keep Eric alive. The thought pushes me forward. I’m flying over the fields, faster than I’ve ever run.

  When I race up the hill to the barn, I can see plainly that I was right to run. From the north, with the column of smoke behind them, there’s a small gang of bandits, some on horses, dragging a couple carts with them. They’re headed toward us. I have to get Eric out of here! Dashing to the barn, I throw open the doors.

  But I’m too late.

  Inside the barn, their guns pointed toward me, are three ragged-looking bandits. I can tell they’ve been waiting for me. They have sneers on their faces, happy to have caught me in their little trap. Putting up my hands, I look toward Eric’s stall and see him standing with his face in the corner. I’m scared, but I’m relieved to see that they haven’t killed him, not yet. My heart is pattering in me as I try to think through the surge of fear. I’m not sure why they haven’t shot the both of us.

  “Look at this!” one laughs. “We hit the goddamn motherlode with this one!” He laughs again, looking over to his companions. “We got a little nigger girl too!”

  The others laugh.

  I freeze. I’ve heard that word before. Nigger. I’ve heard it. I’ve read it. But I’ve never heard it like this before. So naked, so full of derision, hate. I’ve never had it pointed at me, never felt it directed at me. Until you’ve heard it like this, until you’ve felt it, raw and putrid, crawling around your skin, you can’t know. You can’t know what it does to you. It feels like being stripped naked in front of a laughing crowd. It feels like being beaten in public. It feels like being locked up in a filthy cage. In my mind, I imagine wrestling a gun from one of their hands, pointing it at the bandit’s face and drilling a hole through his head. But I can’t do that. I have to think. A move like that will kill us both.

  “Oh, she didn’t like that,” says the bandit on the right. He’s wearing an old, stained leather jacket that’s missing an arm. He smiles widely at me, showing me a mouth full of rancid, brown teeth.

  “Well, I don’t blame her,” the first bandit says. “If I were a nigger, I wouldn’t want to be one either.”

  The others laugh at that. I keep my hands up.

  When they’ve stopped laughing, the first bandit comes forward, stepping out of the shadows toward me. He’s got a lean, dirty face, with thin, cruel eyes. The eyebrow on his right eye is almost totally missing from a scar, and his right eye has a milky color to it. I doubt he sees through it. His good eye shimmers with dark intelligence. This one is dangerous. “Now don’t you move so much as an inch,” he says as he comes closer. “Don’t you budge.” His gun is tense in his hands. I keep as steady as I can, but it’s hard not to shake a little, knowing just the tiniest movement could end your life. “There you go,” he says to me as he gets closer. “There you go.” He’s close enough now so that I smell him, a mixture of smoke and sweat and dried shit. He takes my hands and spins me around. Before I know it, he’s got me down on the ground, tied up.

  With my face pressed to the ground, I watch as they guide Eric out of his stall. The way they do it tells me they know what he is. They’re careful to stay clear of his face and hands, and the way they guide him with gentle tugs tells me they’ve done this before. These aren’t normal bandits, I realize. They know what they’re doing. My mind races. Why would they want to keep an infected person alive? I’m glad they do, it keeps Eric alive a little longer, but the question is disturbing. I try not to think what they want with me alive. I can’t think about that. I have to plan a way to get both of us out of this alive.

  71

  The caravan of assholes is made up of four other bandits plus the three who surprised me. The one with the milky eye seems to be something like the leader. At least people ask him what to do and he tells them. The other four are scraggly, dirty, vicious beasts. Their eyes glitter darkly, without intelligence, just malice and cruel humor. They are like a pack of starving dogs, willing to do anything to survive, and enjoy it when it has to be done. Together they have an attitude that’s hard to describe, like loo
king at the edge of a sharpened blade. These are what people can become, malignant shells, ready to tear at anything that gets in the way of a full stomach or a shot of whiskey. These are the ones who kill as easy as coughing, as naturally as sneezing. These are the ones who laugh at another’s suffering, who revel in perverse joy to see pain in another person. They aren’t human anymore. If Eric and I are going to survive, I have to be very careful. I have to use my head. I have to think.

  I’m not the only captive. Stumbling next to me is a woman around forty. Her face is covered in caked, dark blood. I’m not sure it’s her blood. Her black hair is going grey. She doesn’t look at me when the bandits shove me in line next to her. Both of us are bound at the hands by rough rope that is already biting into my skin. There’s another girl too, on the other side of the older woman. She’s young, younger than me. Her face is streaked with tears, but her eyes are like pits drilled into the dark earth. I look away. I don’t want to know. I don’t.

  The three of us are tied to a cart. The back of the cart is a wooden cage, but so badly made, with such lack of skill, that it looks like it would fall apart in a stiff wind. Inside the cage are two people: one is Eric, who is lying where he fell when they shoved him inside; the other is a young woman who stares out of the wooden slats with dark, bleeding eyes. She has her head turned slightly up, the opposite shoulder down, in a strange contortion. It’s not hard to know that she has the Worm too. Although her hair is filthy, her face is wrecked, and her body has shriveled down to leather over bones, I can still see some prettiness in her, the way you can see the child in a man or woman if you look closely. I glance over at the two other prisoners. Mother? Sister? Was this another family who, like me, had to hide away with their diseased to keep from getting killed? Or is there no relation? Everyone is so filthy, it is hard to tell. That’s the world we live in: so covered in grime and horror that you can’t recognize anyone.