The World Without Flags

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  I imagine the scene in Cairo. In my mind, I see them unwrapping the plastic oatcakes, eating them without knowing the poison they contain, the poison Randy fed to them. A day later, they start to get sick. First one, then another, then a dozen. The fear turns to panic when the sick begin to cry tears of blood. The panic turns to rage when the first die. The rage turns to violence when they have to kill the first one that turns. The village blames Eric and they blame Pest for bringing him. Pest is no idiot, he hides in the church. He goes down into the basement and barricades the doors. The people of Cairo try to get in. They bash at the door.

  What happens next, I can’t imagine. I can. I can imagine it, but I won’t.

  If they’re dead, all of this has been for nothing. All of this was meaningless suffering. I can’t think of that. I won’t even imagine it.

  It is best to keep running, to lose myself in fatigue and pain and the constant rhythm of my feet striking ground. If I stop, I will think, and if I think too much, I will lose my mind.

  It is better to run.

  144

  I run for hours. I hit my pace about an hour into the run. I don’t feel my legs at all or my arms. I feel as light as the air around me. I’ve always been skinny, I know that, but now, after all I’ve been through, I am not much more than bones and long, thin muscle. It is as if I’m floating through the forest, not running. I leap and duck and jump over and under branch, without losing my rhythm, without losing this weightless feeling I have. There is pain. In my legs. My lungs. Sometimes my feet. But the pain is removed from me, somehow distant, at arm’s length, not outside myself exactly, but a curiosity. It is a pain that is almost theoretical. I recognize it as mine, but it’s not a part of me somehow.

  For hours I run in the rhythm. The pounding of my feet. The beating of my heart. The slow intake and outtake of breath. The feeling I could go forever, effortless as a cloud.

  The rhythm of it all, the lightness of my entire being, they make it impossible for thoughts to connect to me. My mind is too slippery for thoughts to grasp. They just slip away before I can understand them. After a few hours, even the images in my mind become inexact, muted, like something bleached by the sun. My memories cannot haunt me. My thoughts cannot disturb me or shove me into despair. They are slow, feeble things that cannot exist long enough to solidify, that do not have the strength to latch onto my mind and demand attention.

  I am grateful for the run. I am grateful to be alive.

  145

  I run until the evening gets too dark and then I continue south and west on a road I find, running by the light of the moon. If I see lights, I tell myself, I will go back to the woods and hide. But there is no light, there are no pursuers, or if there are, they are not here. I continue running in the opalescent light.

  In the calm of the road, when I don’t have to keep constant awareness of my surroundings or get knocked down by a branch or tripped up by a fallen tree, my thoughts find root in me. I begin to dream as I run. Images, faces, conversations, they brush by me or pass through me. Anxieties come fearfully , stopping my heart, and then blur by me. Nothing is constant.

  I feel like I’m running out of my own life. Running straight into a strange land where I am newborn, empty of history, ambivalent as the night sky.

  146

  There is the rhythm of my feet. The pounding earth under me. Sometimes it is not I who moves, but the earth itself, rising up to hit my feet and then bouncing away from me. We are two beings caught together, I realize. We need each other.

  147

  I see them dead. Burned and left on a heap of other bodies. Eric and Pest both.

  I see them alive. Sheltering together under the church.

  “You can make it,” my father tells me. I turn to him as I run, but his face begins to break apart as if he was smoke and fog. My mother sings to me. I can feel Lucia’s hands in my hair, braiding them, speaking to me in a language I am only beginning to understand. My mother sings. I see Artemis climb from the wood pile where they burned her. Her hair is smoking, but she brushes the ashes off her dress and then bounds over to me and hugs me. I smell her burning hair. I see Eric, his face pressed into the corner, in his cell under the church. He is dark and covered with filth. Anxiety reaches out to me sometimes with its skeletal hands. The coldness tells me that if I don’t run, if I don’t reach them, they’ll die. They need my help. They need me.

  But when my heart cries out in pain, I know it is I who need them.

  148

  I reach familiar roads. Houses I’ve seen before, as if in a dream. I see myself in the landscape now, hiding with Pest. I see myself hiding, slouching, pulling Eric along with me. I follow roads and paths without realizing what I’m doing. I’m too exhausted to realize what I am doing. I am just moving, just running, just putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes they are with me. Mostly I am alone, in a blurring world.

  Then I feel a spinning emptiness. I’ve fallen.

  I get up and the world sways.

  Then I smell grass and I feel leaves in my hair.

  My breathing seems so loud.

  I think I am crying.

  149

  A noise awakens me, a rumbling roar, a sound I have not heard for many years. An engine. I blink awake into a cutting sunlight. My whole body throbs with exhaustion and pain. I sit up, groaning.

  Below me, from the ridge where I collapsed the night before, I see Cairo and the broken asphalt road leading up to it. At first, I see nothing, and then I rub my eyes. Soldiers and trucks are moving toward the town. The roaring sound that woke me up is not just trucks. It’s a tank, rolling slowly up the hill toward the town, its diesel engine howling and grinding like a furious beast, its heavy steel tracks tearing up the earth as it moves toward the flimsy gate. The whole column moves slowly toward Cairo.

  I stand up, blinking in the morning sun, shading my eyes, trying to see into the town, to the church. From this distance, I can’t see a thing.

  Suddenly the world explodes with a boom so loud that I stumble back and fall on my backside in surprise. The tank just blew the steel gates inward with one shattering blast! Smoke curls up from the massive barrel of the tank. The soldiers cheer and I notice in the back, for the first time, an olive-colored jeep. A flag flutters from the back of the jeep: red and white stripes with one star in the corner: the flag of the Stars.

  But that’s not what I’m interested in. In the jeep, I see three people. I recognize one of them from where I sit. It’s Randy. He’s come to destroy the town that he himself infected. I shudder when I realize that I am the only one who knows his plan, knows he is the one who has been spreading the Worm. He’s come for me. I stand up and peer into the town as the soldiers begin to run through the destroyed gates. I know they all think they are doing what’s best for everyone, eradicating the infected.

  If Eric and Pest are still in that town, the Stars will treat them just like anyone else. Afterward, they will burn the town to the ground to be certain they have disinfected the whole place. Looking down at the tiny soldiers pouring into Cairo, I know they think they are protecting people. They don’t realize they’re puppets in Randy’s perverted scheme. I study the town, what little I can see of it through the trees, hoping to see some sign of Eric and Pest. I have to get to them. I have to find a way to get them free. I’ve got no resources, no guns, not even a flask of water.

  I cross my arms and think furiously about what I need to do.

  That’s when I feel cold steel pressed into my back.

  “You move and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”

  150

  I freeze in place and instinctively raise my hands above my head.

  “Turn around,” the voice commands.

  If they kill me, no one will ever know that Randy was just using the war between the Stars and the Gearheads to get what he wanted. If they kill me, Eric will not survive. I feel like my heart has transformed to coal. Slowly I turn, keeping my hands high up in t
he air to keep him from shooting. When I see who it is, I gasp.

  “Sydney!” I cry.

  “Keep your hands up!” he growls. His eyes narrow at me and his grip on his pistol tightens.

  I keep my hands up, but look behind him. “Is Boston here too?” I ask.

  Sydney’s eyes flash darkly. “Nevermind where he is,” he says. Suddenly, there’s the crack and rattle of machine gun fire from the town. I wince, but Sydney keeps his eye focused on me. “We should’ve killed you when we had the chance. Now the whole town is infected because of you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say in a low, calm voice. I need to get through to him, but I can tell by the way he looks at me that I have very little chance of that.

  “I think I do,” Sydney says. He jerks his gun at me. “Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”

  I don’t dare say anything, I’ve lied to him too much in the past. At first, when I turned around and saw Sydney, I thought I was lucky, but now I think I’m very unlucky. He hates me, and Boston probably does too. There’s no way he’s going to believe anything I say. He’s going to need more than words, he’s going to need some kind of evidence, some kind of proof of Randy’s crime. I let him tie my hands behind my back without struggling, fearing that if I say anything, he might just knock me out with his gun rather than listen. Or worse.

  When I’m tied up, Sydney tugs at my arm and starts to lead me away down into the forest. I look back over my shoulder, my heart throbbing, hoping to see some sign in the streets of Cairo that Eric and Pest are alive. I can’t see anything through the trees.

  Sydney shoves me forward. “Come on, move it.” We move forward into the shadow of the forest. I turn away from Cairo. My mind races. I have to think, have to focus on my problem. Eric needs me.

  “This isn’t what you think,” I say to Sydney as we move through the forest.

  I feel his gun press into my back painfully. “Keep talking,” he says.

  I don’t.

  151

  I’m hugging a tree, handcuffed. Sydney has disappeared, after giving me a particularly evil glare. I’m at the edge of a camp, looking down at my current worry: Doctor Bragg. Sydney handcuffed me next to him, to “make me watch what I had caused,” he told me, right before he disappeared in the woods toward Cairo. The doctor is in a horrible fever, his face drenched with sweat, his hair in wet tangles around his face. The Worm hit him fast, and now it’s raging through his body. He shivers and trembles and moans. I don’t feel sorry for him. No one should.

  Other than Doctor Bragg laid out on a blanket, there’s a couple tents, a circle of stones around a sputtering camp fire, and the only thing that gives me some comfort, Tangerine, Randy’s horse. I imagine everyone else is in the town. I can hear the sporadic gunfire, the rolling thunder of the tank, the distant cries and shouts. When I look up, I see the dark smoke through the trees, proof that they’re setting Cairo on fire, razing it to the ground. I don’t know what Randy has told them, but I can’t imagine it’s anything good.

  I have to get out of these handcuffs. Whenever I look up at the smoke, I imagine Eric and Pest caught in the fire, choking on smoke, knowing that if they leave, if they run out into the streets, they’ll be gunned down like the rest. I have to do something, I don’t know what, but something. Anything.

  I remember suddenly what Norman once told me, talking about the difference between animals. “You see,” he told me, “a fox or a racoon will stay in a trap, but a wolf, a wolf will chew off its own leg to escape.” I don’t think I can chew off my own arm. But I look at my wrist, already a little bloody from pulling on the handcuffs, and I wish it would just split apart on its own. I’d rather go through life with one hand than die here. Because I can only imagine that Sydney has gone to get someone else who will probably bring Randy. Randy needs me dead.

  And then there’s Eric. He needs me, I know it. If I can’t get free, he’ll die.

  I tug at the cuffs, but they only cut deeper into my wrists. Finally, I stop and push my face against the rough bark of the tree. Pine, I think. Pine. The softest wood, Eric told me. But it’s hard enough to keep me here, chained up like a criminal.

  Suddenly there’s a wild, high pitched scream. At first I think it’s me, calling out in frustration and fear.

  Then I see things are much worse than I thought. It’s Doctor Bragg. His body is arced up, every muscle in his body tensed. A dark foam comes from his mouth and blood oozes from his eyes. My blood turns cold as ice. Doctor Bragg is not going to die easily.

  He’s going to crack.

  152

  Frantically, I tug at my handcuffs. I hardly feel the pain as I pull, the blood welling up around the cuffs. Doctor Bragg’s stiff body convulses again. Soon he will rise up, cracked, crazed, ready to tear apart the first living thing he encounters: me. I thrash against my cuffs, hoping that the blood will lubricate my wrists, allowing me to slip free and run away. But Sydney, probably still enraged that I had tricked and lied to them, made the cuffs too tight for that. Even if I broke my wrist, I don’t think I would come free.

  My desperation makes me scream. “Help!” I yell. “Help me!” No one comes.

  Doctor Bragg howls into air, his scream ending in a long gurgle as the sound emerges from the black foam surging from his mouth.

  My heart beating rapidly, I know I have to try. I have to try to bite off my own hand. I look down at my wrist and sob. Do it! Don’t think about it! You don’t have time to think! Just do it! I sob again, but this time I don’t think. I move my head down to my wrist and open my mouth. I taste blood as I put my mouth around my wrist. My teeth press down.

  Then I hear a whicker and I look up, my mouth on my wrist. It’s Tangerine, looking toward Doctor Bragg and tossing her head. Her eyes are large and dark with fear.

  When Doctor Bragg makes another low cry, his body tensing, Tangerine turns to one side, tossing her head. Then I see it. She’s still saddled, and, strapped to her saddle is a knife. Not any knife. MY knife, the one Eric always told to keep sharpened. Randy must’ve taken it from me when he knocked me out and kept it for himself. I need that knife. I need Tangerine.

  Closing my eyes, I swallow. Tangerine never comes to me.

  I breathe calmly. Then, cupping my hands, I purse my lips, and make kissing noises.

  Tangerine freezes like she’s stunned.

  I have to be careful not to spook her. Or I’m dead.

  I hold my cupped hands higher and make kissing noises. “Come on, now,” I coax her. I cluck my tongue like Randy. “Come on, now, come get some food,” I tell her. Tangerine whickers and takes a step forward doubtfully.

  I snap my tongue and then say, “Come on, now, girl, don’t be scared.” I hold up my hands as if I’m cradling a handful of maple sugar cubes. “Get some sugar, girl.”

  Tangerine tosses her head one more time before she comes forward, sniffing toward my hand. Gently, as she moves forward, I rotate around the tree, forcing the horse to come closer, around the tree, the saddle brushing up against the bark of the pine.

  “Good girl,” I say.

  Doctor Bragg gives out another inhuman scream, and Tangerine bolts, galloping away into the forest. I don’t watch her go.

  Instead, I watch as Doctor Bragg leaps up from his bed, his eyes dark with blood, dark, thick foam coursing from his mouth. His dark eyes fix on me and his features contort into a gray perversion of a human face. He screams again and then sprints toward me, arms pinwheeling unnaturally around him.

  I rotate around the trunk to keep the tree between us. Then, as he hits the tree, snarling like an animal, I step around and, using what little space I have, I thrust out. Doctor Bragg stands up straight as if confused. The animal madness drops from his face and he collapses, my knife embedded in his right eye up to hilt.

  153

  Out of breath, I collapse against the pine tree. As I try to focus, I feel the pain come again from my wrists, a burning, pulsing pain. With my eyes close, I c
an still taste my own blood in my mouth and I feel sick thinking I was so desperate, I was going to try to bite through my own wrist. The thought makes chills of fear go through me like a wave.

  I push myself away from the tree, listening to the sound of the chain on my handcuffs clinking together. I hear the wind through the trees, the distant crackle of gunfire in Cairo, the sound of my feet in the dry pine needles. I have to get free. I have to find Eric, get him far away from Randy, far away from the Stars, far away from everything. Where he can be safe.

  If I’m going to do that, I need to get out of these handcuffs.

  I rotate around the tree and then crouch down over Doctor Bragg’s body. He’s fallen with his head against the tree trunk, staring with dead eyes into the forest. I grasp my knife and then tug. I can’t get it free the first time, but on the second pull, it comes free, bringing a stinking, dark gore with it. Worms writhe along the blade and shivering with revulsion, I wipe it on the front of the Doctor’s shirt before I rotate away, putting the tree between the body and I.

  With the knife in my hand, I feel more in charge. I always feel a little better with a knife in my hand. I only have one idea and it’s not nice to think about. I don’t have to cut off my whole hand. Just a part of it, the part below the pinky finger. Just slice off enough so that I can pull it out of the handcuffs. Just a little slice. My stomach turns and I hear myself sob.

  “Don’t start, Birdie, damn it,” I tell myself. I breathe quickly, trying to gather the courage to do the only thing I can think of doing, the only thing that will save me and Eric. I sob again without wanting to. It sounds like someone else. I realize that tears are coming down my face. I breathe in and out quickly and then pull at my left hand. I look where the skin bunches against steel, where it keeps the cuffs from sliding off. Trembling, I close my eyes. I don’t have time for this. I breathe. They could come back at any moment, and that would be the end.