North

by Frank Owen

  ‘So I took out some insurance. I stole one of his precious goddam syringes. Worth a thousand years’ salary in dollars and more because of what it could do. He called it the cure-all, the bastard. For all the viruses there ever were, or ever would be. You believe that?

  ‘And I took one, baby! Me. Little low-down Ruthie, all the way from Africa, stealing fire from the gods. And it wasn’t even difficult. I took it the night I left and I kept it until the morning you were born. I injected you the same day, and the way you cried – well, I’ve delivered hundreds in my time, but I never heard a baby cry that way, and I hope never to hear it again. Vida, you cried like I broke your newborn heart. Your arm swelled up like a balloon, and it was shiny and purple for two weeks. People were going to think I was beating you. It went back to normal eventually, but you never cried after that – like the reservoir was empty. I don’t think you ever trusted me again. But you know what? It was worth it. I’m not sorry, Vida. You are alive and you are here with me.’

  Ruth sighed again. She had thought she would feel lighter after her confession. She stroked her daughter’s arm where it lay, smooth and cooling, on the sheet.

  ‘Sometimes I see your father in you, baby. I see him. Renard. It doesn’t scare me. It just tells me that you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be okay. You’re too smart and too strong to give up. You got the best of both of us. That’s why I called you Vida. I called you Life. And you’ve still got a lot of living in you. Isn’t that right?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She lifted the bottle and watched a couple of bubbles springing to the surface like a hypodermic. She swallowed a mouthful, and then another.

  When she set the bottle back down, Vida’s eyelids were flickering.

  31

  In the morning, there were mushrooms. The new growths drew everyone in the Capitol Building to the makeshift labs, where people stood shoulder to shoulder, Northern and Southern, and exclaimed over the animal remains with their precious cargo. Like a cookery lesson they were laid out in the hosts: the red-eared slider, pared open like fruit, its shell the bowl in which the mushrooms had budded.

  Next to it was the splayed rat, its mouth a rictus, polka-dotted with spheres.

  And a jar of plain rice, topped with fresh white golf balls – all of them the offspring of those mushrooms below the Mouth.

  There were already volunteers – two young men and a woman, the one who’d greeted Felix when he’d crawled up the ladder. So where was Adams? Why was he not around to officiate at the most important part?

  Word spread that something was happening, and the members of the Resistance began to gather in the House of Representatives, crowding the central stage as though it were a concert or a revival. Then the three volunteers came up, each carefully carrying a cup of water.

  Ah. Felix saw that it was Buddy who would take command in Adams’s absence.

  Still wearing his baseball cap, the little man went up on stage and stood behind the bench. On it were three plates from the kitchen, and on each was a single mushroom, one from each substrate donor. He positioned the volunteers in front of the bench and they copied his gestures, like it was a marriage ceremony or a play.

  ‘Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,’ muttered Felix, but the audience was too intent to pay him any notice.

  One by one the volunteers stepped forward and poured their cups of water out onto the floor. Over the dark stains at their feet, they repeated after Buddy: ‘By this action, I declare that I volunteer for this test. It is out of my own free will that I risk my health and life, for the good of us all.’

  Slowly, ceremoniously, Buddy took a mushroom and placed it in each set of cupped hands. It had been a while since Felix had considered himself a believer, but even he saw the thread of church running through it all, them with their self-help Eucharist.

  But maybe that was how it all started, in the way-back. Maybe this was something people had been doing since the beginning. You had to eat to live. It started out as cannibalism and turned into vampirism; it was co-opted and transformed, and a man found himself sitting at a table with his twelve good friends, partaking of their last communal supper.

  Well, He’d risen again, hadn’t He? ‘Praise Jesus and pass the fungus,’ said Felix, and smiled at his neighbor. What sad-asses they all were! Why would anyone want to survive? There was no way life would ever be anything like the way it had been even twenty years ago – and this was the side that had won!

  The volunteers held their mushrooms like apples and took a small, symbolic bite. The mushrooms were tiny, and they were soon done, the crowd clapping and whooping its satisfaction and relief. Approval was thick in the air, and Felix needed to get out to escape the suffocation. It was like this building had some sort of fucking power, and it made his head feel light. All that energy had to go somewhere, right? Wasn’t that why humans had first built ziggurats, and pyramids, and domes? Renard’s cult had been displaced and another had arisen within its walls, and as he pushed his way through the happy, sweating people, Felix was still making his mind up about which would do more damage. You couldn’t just coop people up this way like chickens and expect them not to start pecking each other’s eyes out. Some cataclysm was due – the Weatherman could feel it – and he wasn’t waiting around for it to happen.

  Dyce caught the old man by the arm at the top of the stairwell – always the same arm! – and Felix flinched at the pain.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Looking around. Getting my bearings. Seeing which way the wind’s blowing.’

  ‘You get any answers?’

  ‘Just more fucking questions. This place is just plain wrong. You seen Adams anywhere around?’

  Dyce pursed his lips and shrugged, but he let Felix go.

  At the women’s bathroom, Felix turned in. He expected a guard to stop him from lifting the drain plate and climbing down, but security didn’t seem as high a priority as it had been the day before, when the prisoner was taken.

  His back twinged as he slid the metal disk aside. ‘You hang in there,’ he told the vertebrae. ‘Someone around here’s gotta have a spine.’

  Then he descended into the darkness.

  32

  ‘Vida. Vida, baby, come and sit out here with us.’

  Vida knew it was a dream right away, but knowing what it was and doing something about it were not the same thing. She watched it play out, helpless.

  Ruth was in sunglasses, holding a glass of white wine like liquid sunshine. Vida watched the light catch and strobe, and she couldn’t look away. She rubbed her eyes, but the entoptics refused to fade. They overlaid Renard where he sat and beamed at her from his fold-up chair, as if they’d been together all her life.

  And oh, she knew him for her father, though she’d never seen his face. His name, that she’d seen and heard – written on walls in black paint, and yelled out: Fuck Renard! She stared, wanting to eat him with her eyes, notice everything about him, consume the hidden histories.

  For someone who ran the world as she knew it, he was fuzzy and shrunken, not much taller than she was, dark in the same way. In her dream Vida touched her own face, searching for clues, and knew it for his mirror image.

  Renard.

  He was smiling intently at her, as if he was trying to convince her of his kind intentions, but those eyes! Vida shivered in the even sunshine of the dreamland beach. Flat and greedy, the way monsters looked in the old movies, assessing you for lushness and riches.

  Someone tugged at her other hand, breaking the spell, and Vida looked down. The girl standing barefoot in the sand beside her was her daughter, wasn’t she? She had Dyce’s soft eyes and eyelashes, that smoky sweep that hid what he was thinking. But the Afro-puffs – those are mine, thought Vida, and her heart squeezed with love. I gave them to her, the same way my mama gave them to me. My little girl.

  ‘Come on, Mama. I want to swim.’

  Vida turned and saw the sea, the smooth green welcome of it, the new st
art, and knew she couldn’t let the waters close over her head. Not after the river; not after the flood.

  ‘Later, baby, okay? Let’s just sit here a while. You want to make a mermaid? That’s what your daddy liked to do.’

  The two of them sat down on the damp ground and swept the gritty sand over their legs until they were buried in its coolness to their waists. Vida felt Renard’s eyes always on their backs, avid, calculating.

  ‘Finish the story,’ the girl told Ruth.

  ‘Hmm. Where were we?’

  ‘ “Why have not we an immortal soul?” asked the little mermaid. Like that. And don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘Yes, boss lady. “Why have not we an immortal soul?” asked the little mermaid. “I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day, and to have the hope of knowing the happiness of that glorious world above the stars.”’

  Vida scooped and patted the sand, but there was something of the graveyard about it, and the sun was getting weaker. They would have to go in soon. For the moment she was content to listen. She had heard the story dozens of times when she was little, and Ruth still told it exactly the same way.

  ‘Look at us, Grampa! Look at us!’

  Oh, don’t, Vida thought suddenly. Don’t look at my baby with those hungry eyes.

  ‘ “But if you take away my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what is left for me?”’

  Vida began to struggle out of the sand so that she could turn around and watch Renard, but it was slow going.

  He hadn’t moved out of the chair. Instead, he seemed to have slumped back, and something gluey was dripping through the mesh fabric of the seat, leaking into the sand.

  Vida stood up, whole and unblemished, the sand of her mermaid’s tail pattering like dust in a demolished castle. The ground underneath Renard was stained black now, like oil and blood. No one else had noticed. Ruth was still smiling calmly as she told the story, and the little girl was patting small white shells onto her tail. Vida bent closer.

  Those weren’t shells.

  They were fingernails.

  She sucked in her breath and turned back to face whatever Renard was becoming. His hot eyeballs had gone and Vida looked through the holes they’d left in his skull. The bone man stood creakily, streaming blood and stinking of rot, and tried to take a step toward the girl. In the second that Vida had, she saw that he was hollow: he had been filleted like a deer, strips of flesh flapping around the empty cavity like surgery gone wrong.

  She threw herself at the child and wrestled her from the earth.

  ‘Let’s swim! Let’s swim!’ She tried to turn the girl’s head so she wouldn’t see the thing shambling behind them.

  The sea was a couple of feet away, and they would make it to the water, but Renard kept coming, staggering and determined, powered now by some other evil engine. Ruth stayed in her chair, frozen but for her lips, which kept moving as if she was mouthing an incantation or a recipe. Vida heard the words even as they left her behind.

  ‘Every step she took was as the witch had said it would be. She felt as if she were treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives.’ And then they were in the water up to the girl’s chest, her small round face upturned in worry and delight, their hands held tight against loss as they breasted the growing waves.

  Everything is against us, thought Vida. Where has the sun gone?

  Renard kept coming, the trails of blood spilling into the sea around his legs and then washing out fast toward them like tendrils. He would never let them go.

  It was too deep to stand. ‘Swim!’ Vida said, and she didn’t care now if she sounded panicked. ‘Get on my back, but don’t choke me.’ And they did, the two of them turning and swimming into the sea, ducking the breakers that eventually became swell in the vast and open ocean.

  Vida went on until she couldn’t, and they bobbed in the brine, treading water. Her lungs were on fire and her eyes were blurry and burning. There was no sight of land.

  Exhausted, she flipped them onto their backs. ‘Take deep breaths,’ she told the girl. ‘That way, you float.’ Every now and again she tried to hold the girl up so that her small arms could rest, but it was no good.

  She felt the cold, bloodless water wash over her face. It would be so nice just to let go, she thought. Just to sink to the bottom of the sea. On the ocean floor she would finally see the little mermaid and all her sisters in their gardens of coral, their flowers red as sunset. There she would find the white statue of the prince, and it would be Dyce, and she would kiss his undead face.

  Her little girl would be fine. Wouldn’t she? Didn’t the mermaids have to turn into foam and become daughters of the air?

  She sucked in the salt water until she coughed and began to sink. She tried to push the girl up toward the sunlight.

  And then there came a pale hand diving down through the water.

  It gripped Vida and the girl, and pulled them both up into the good, dry air. Not Renard – this hand still had all its fingernails, even if they had been bitten to the quick. It collared her and hauled her waterlogged weight onto a fiber-glass fishing dinghy, and then went back to retrieve the little girl, who rolled and coughed across her mother.

  It was Garrett, with his goofy smile and his acne scars. It had to be him.

  And Dyce, right there beside him, just as he was always meant to be. Behind them both, perched on the edge, was a scrawny woman who must be Bethie. She was cradling a baby. When she saw Vida studying her, she held the bundle out for approval.

  ‘Vida.’ Dyce smiled at her, and even in her half-dead state, Vida felt the lift of her heart at the warm sound of his voice. ‘It’s finally happening. We’re off across the ocean to see what’s on the other side. What do you think of that? You coming?’

  But when she tried to speak, only water rushed out of her mouth, endlessly.

  Vida woke, spluttering. She lay and coughed and coughed, as if she was trying to rid herself of the thing in her chest that wanted to take her down with it.

  It was dark here. She sat up and felt something in her stomach twinge. She pulled the sheet away so she could get a look at her leg, but there was no light. It felt tight – laced up, like a boot. She ran a hand down from her thigh to her ankle and felt the prickle of tied-off sutures like cactus spines. The flesh on either side was hot and raised, but that death smell – the smell of Renard, the secret smell that had attended her since they were in the plane’s fuselage – was gone.

  Ruth had fixed her, hadn’t she? Her mother had sewn her, stitched her back into the story of her life. It hurt like nothing she had ever known before, and tomorrow it would start to itch like a brainworm, but for now, the bone-deep pain was receding like the tide.

  She shuddered. That weird dream, with all of them on the sand, untying the blood knots of family.

  She lay back down and tried to separate the dreams from the hard truth. She’d heard everything Ruth had said, but the words had drifted into her mind and settled in a messy heap that muddled space and time. Now she tried to sort them, picking up each sentence to examine the science of it.

  One. She was pregnant.

  That she could live with: she had chosen it for herself whether she had known it or not at the time.

  Two. Renard was her father.

  And she couldn’t live with that.

  33

  Felix was exhausted by the time he was up and out of the sewer. He sat for a moment with his back against the dumpster and caught his breath, staring up at the rectangle of gray sky. It was cold out here and he’d had no time to go back for his jacket; inside, the dome buzzed with its own paranoid warmth, and it made a man forget what conditions were like outside.

  He stood slowly and retraced his steps to where the old De Luxe was parked, its guilty vanilla stink still strong. He wanted to get out of the city, back to where there were trees and grass, something real enough to touch.

  The keys were still there.
Maybe leaving keys in ignitions was a sign of the trust and timidity of the Northerners, Felix thought. Or maybe the police were just quick and brutal. It didn’t matter. He pumped the gas a few times before he turned the key. The car coughed but the engine rumbled. He backed it away from the building and headed back in the direction he thought was westward, looking for a road that would take him away from the shattered glass and sheer cliffs of concrete.

  It wasn’t easy. Some roads were blocked by rubble, others by the shells of cars. It was clear that these had been deliberately placed. The Resistance was making sure there was only a single route in and out: no one could happen upon the Capitol Building by chance. He tried to remember the way Adams had come in – the road signs and the buildings – and he found it, the maze that allowed a car-wide gap between burnt-out buses and chunks of concrete. He stopped the car a moment to memorize his position. He looked up at the broken spire of a church, and a billboard hanging askew from the side of a block of shops: IMPROVED FORMU, the writing said before it bled into the hair of a grinning woman. The left part of her face had peeled off, like she’d been scalped.

  Felix drove on again, swerving around debris, searching for a sign that would point him to a bigger road, but straight away he had to jam on the brakes.

  Up ahead was a white car, with a pronghorn buck strapped to the bonnet.

  It looked abandoned.

  He eased the De Luxe forward cautiously and parked parallel to the buck, then got out. It was a few days dead, its leg bones shattered, probably hit on a highway. That happened a lot. Road sense wasn’t big either side of the Wall.

  But despite its age, someone had been eating from it. There was a ragged cut along its stomach where the deep organs had been raided.

  ‘Now that don’t seem like a real Northern thing to do, does it?’ Felix muttered. He inspected it from all sides and then scanned the streets.