North

by Frank Owen

  ‘Fucking Adams,’ hissed Dyce. ‘I knew it!’ He looked back desperately at Vida, but she was still fine. There was nothing he could do for the others. Even as he watched, Renard was trying to move, standing to limp away from the picnic table where Ruth lay doubled in on herself.

  More puffs of smoke; more shots – all missed their targets. His strike rate was low because he was going too fast, thought Dyce. He was rattled, and it was counting against him. Dyce couldn’t make the same mistake himself.

  He set Otis in the center of the scope and, compensating for the distance, lifted the rifle so that he was training it on a clump of old-man’s-beard that hung above the marksman. He fired and watched the bullet strike to his left in a splatter of bark, close to Otis but not a hit. The man jumped in alarm, then raised his own gun and scanned the shore for the phantom shooter. Dyce already had another bullet in the chamber just as Otis found him, his hair dark against the green.

  Dyce fired first, and this time Otis fell – injured or dead, he couldn’t tell. He loaded twice more and sent those bullets into the leaves where he figured the man had dropped, just to be sure. Then he stood and ran back along the shore to the spit of land, out to the bench where Ruth lay. She wasn’t moving. He looked for Vida and for Renard, but they had disappeared while he was busy with Otis.

  There was something white on the water. A panama hat.

  Fuck.

  He forced himself to drop the rifle and ran in, wading into the deep water until he could no longer stand. Then he took a lungful of air and dived down into the weedy murk.

  As he swam, he realized there was no panic, no flashback to Garrett holding him under the water at camp. That Dyce was dead along with his brother. There was only room for one thought: Vida and the baby, struggling at the bottom of the lake, eyes popping as they were choked in Renard’s tentacles.

  Dyce’s damaged eyes found their bodies down there on the lake floor. How long had she been under? She still had enough air in her to struggle against her father. Dyce already felt the burn in his chest, but Vida concentrated, unconcerned. Dyce saw her holding Renard around the neck. With the other hand she clawed for grip on the bed of the lake, slipping on rocks and tangling in strands of water weed like hair. The old man was demonic, writhing against her grip. Dyce saw the filaments of blood wafting from his wound into the water, his lips drawn back in a grimace of pain and rage.

  They scrabbled at each other, she determined to hold him down until he drowned, he just as determined to escape – as he always had. Like Mami Wata she would keep him there, down in the depths of the lake, where he belonged.

  With each kick and lunge upward, Renard released a bubble of air, one after the other, his lungs emptying. But Vida had sealed her lips as though she didn’t need to breathe, as though she’d been born underwater. There was a terrible calm focus on her face, the kind Dyce had seen when they’d lain together side by side in the locomotive museum, sweating and entwined.

  When Dyce reached them, the old man was limp, his silvery eyes rolled back. Vida still didn’t know Dyce was there: she couldn’t see him in the dark river. He hovered close, ready to help her struggle back to the clean air of the surface, but he hung back to see where he would be most use. Vida was facing the unconscious Renard, her lips drawn back in a snarl that Dyce had never seen before. She was terrifying. And she didn’t need his help. As Dyce watched in dread, she dug her strong thumbs into her father’s eye sockets as if she would split his head open with her bare hands, let his venom be diluted and swallowed by the water.

  Renard’s eyeballs burst and the pulp lolled and stuck to his cheeks. He looked like he was crying, thought Dyce, before the jelly fragmented in the water and Vida loosened her grip. The optic nerves trailed, swaying with their movements. Renard had been turned into a desperate rock-clinging creature at the mercy of a small, greedy fish: reduced to beak and arms and tentacles, the lights ripped out of his skull.

  Dyce couldn’t stay to watch. His throat was on fire and his own eyes were tight in their sockets. Vida would keep going without him, rip Renard limb from limb, dismantle their history piece by flailing piece. All in a place she was sure no one could see. He abandoned her to her grisly work and kicked up, panicked. Air!

  He turned his head to stare straight up at where he thought the morning sun was, but even with his eyesight the water above stayed murky with plumes of silt. He was further down than he had thought. He had no choice.

  Just when he thought his lungs would implode, he tried to rear up above the waterline and suck in the sweet air, but he had misjudged where he was. The underside of the jetty was hard and ungiving, and the girder, rusted to a jagged point, smashed hard against his head. Dyce heard the click of his neck and thought: Is that really me?

  He floated face-down in Maple Lake, unable to move his limbs. It was kind of funny, he thought, and he would have laughed. Even the idea of being in the water used to paralyze him. And then the universe had sent him Vida. He’d loved her enough to brave the water three times: after the tunnels under the Mouth, in the river at the Wall between North and South, and here in the lake, where his body bobbed gently on the surface. If only he could roll over!

  But then the urge drained away, replaced by a bright sweetness. It’s amazing, Dyce thought. He felt his eyes rolling up in his head. I can see everything now. All the stories are here: the one about the little mermaid, and the one about Mami Wata, and the one Ruth told me about the underwater villages back home, where the herd boys take their cattle up and down the riverbed, and their drowned bells ring.

  He could hear those bells now. He smiled. He wasn’t alone, because here was his mother, who had given up too easily the first time. She had come to find her own true boy. Under the water she held out her thin arms to him, rocked by the current, her hair spreading out around her face. Behind her his father stood nodding, yes, yes, they would go climbing between the rocks again and his dad would catch him if he fell.

  And Garrett! There he was, his skin made miraculously smooth, standing proud next to Bethie, who was unstitched and whole – and their baby, the boy with the golden hair. Around his fat childish neck he wore the swan pendant.

  The last person who came to welcome Dyce was the mermaid herself. She rose from the water, or from below that, somewhere more ancient than the water. She was a carving made in a cave, a cold-blooded creature with pins for teeth, and she flashed her kindly scales like coins. They covered her from head to toe, those scales, and they also covered the hand that held aloft the faceless, scoured head of Papa Renard.

  ‘Mami Wata,’ murmured Dyce. She had come for him at last.

  59

  When Felix came around, he pushed himself to his feet. The explosives team was dead, heaped together in a pile. One of them, he recognized, was Danni. He’d figured from their exchange in the car that Kurt had liked her some, but still she lay dead, punctured. Felix wobbled there a second, then got his bearing and limped through the doorway and up. His head hurt like hell; he was sure his nose was broken. But it didn’t stop him from peering in through doorways as he went. He saw beakers and vials and long curling tubes covering the tables – not unlike the Capitol Building, now that he thought on it, only cleaner, newer and more hi-tech.

  For a moment he missed his old shack down South in the worst way. He paused and clung to the ladder until the bout of pain and homesickness passed. Funny thing was, while he’d lived there all those years, he’d longed for his apartment in New York with its populated view out over the city, the apartment block opposite and the people in it staring back at you, everyone trying to get a look at the buildings beyond, knowing that together they meant something more than the architecture. He missed Dallas and the drug store across the street. He’d bought a big bottle of kids’ cough syrup there once when the liquor store was too far away. Those were dark days, the ones after his wife left.

  Not as dark as these, though, by Christ!

  In comparison even his old life down S
outh was a little slice of paradise he’d called up from nothing, at the base of that derelict dam wall in godforsaken Colorado. And so what if he’d put his head down and ignored the world around him? Wasn’t that his due? He’d tried to kill Renard once; wasn’t that more than most? It was unbelievable now to imagine his stand of almond trees, and good water five minutes’ walk. He’d even had whiskey and maps and his old exercise bike, the entire place his own, where he could sleep or think or whack off.

  He’d had something real to do too, hadn’t he? Real enough, anyway. When last had someone called him Weatherman? That was one thing Renard had given him, at least. Waking up early to check the weather stations, plotting the next wind – he’d got it down to an art. There were more times than he could count when he’d scampered inside the old shack, closed the door and not a minute later heard the rattle of gravel against the wood and the creak of the roof bolts holding tight to the four walls. They could have just left him alone, couldn’t they? Vida and Dyce and that asshole Garrett. The big storm would have come and he would have gone out to dance naked in the rain until it crushed him and washed his remains downriver, amen. That would have been the way to go. He’d been prepared for that. And yet here he was, thanks to Dyce’s brother, who’d stuck his dick where he shouldn’t have.

  ‘Ain’t that how all trouble starts?’ Felix told himself. From Adam in the Garden, all the way down.

  When Felix stepped into the control room, it didn’t take him long to gauge the situation.

  ‘What have you done?’ he said, but he knew already.

  Kurt had gone and done what he’d said he would. He’d poisoned the whole world – or at least as far as he could reach. Adams lay there too, dead and bled out, the gun still in his hand.

  As Felix watched, the boy picked up a brick and smashed it into the control panel, sending knobs and switches and splashes of blood from his mangled fingers flying – making sure there’d be no way to undo his handiwork. When he turned to see Felix, it was the old man who got the bigger fright: Kurt was crying, and now that it was too late, Felix finally understood.

  Kurt had no idea why he did the things he did. He was doing only what he had been programmed to do from the day he came out squalling between his mama’s bloodied thighs. Some people were just born that way: empty of feeling. They spent their lives trying to make everyone around them the same way – to drive the humanity from them by force.

  And some started out all right and then turned bad, made that way by the things they saw when they were too small to know better. Kurt hadn’t stood a chance in that fucked-up family. He was a virus, thought Felix, and there was only one cure.

  And you know what that makes you, don’t you, you motherfucker?

  The host.

  Felix had held and protected the boy, ushered him right into the heart of the Resistance. So now he had to live with what he had let happen.

  Evil grows, he thought. No. It flourishes – that was the word. Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.

  And I wasn’t even a very good man.

  Kurt came and threw his arms around him, and Felix had no choice but to hug him back. The swan pendant on its cord was slung over the boy’s shoulder. It was a beautiful thing, Felix thought, delicately carved. Upside-down, if you looked at it the right way, it was a mermaid too.

  He took it gently between his fingers and felt the strength of it. It would hold. He could strangle the boy with it. He could grip it and twist it and pin Kurt down. He could end the sickness. He held onto the cord.

  But if he was ever going to do it, he should’ve done it an hour ago – outside the factory, there on the lip of the parking garage. There was no point now. When the mushrooms wore off in a few weeks, they’d all be dead anyway.

  He let the necklace go and watched his own tears plink down onto Norma’s blouse. They were stuck with one another.

  Kurt stayed close to him and helped him down the rickety stairwell again. All the while Felix tried to find some place for the blame – someone to take responsibility for the dead world they’d walk out into in a minute. It wasn’t just Kurt. They had all bartered the smallpox blankets.

  The two survivors stepped out of the factory through the hole that the bomb had made, into the combat zone. The fighting was over, but the earth it had covered was still hot. Felix sniffed the air. There were no ghosts, not the way there were down South: every battlefield there was still soaked with the blood of the fallen, and it would never evaporate. Here there was only silence. The high Northern clouds raced across the sky, but the sun was warm when it shone through.

  ‘You have any idea where you’re headed?’ Felix asked Kurt.

  ‘Not really,’ said Kurt. The flash and rigidity had gone out of him, Felix saw. Purged. He had let his mangled hand dangle down. The fingers dripped a dotted line of blood in a boundary. ‘Thought I might tag along with you, Uncle Felix. Ain’t you beholden to me? Family duty and all that?’

  Felix frowned. ‘I just want to say, so as you know, that the mushrooms are gone. All of them.’ He didn’t know if it was true or not, but he didn’t want the boy going looking. ‘So if that’s the reason you’re hanging around, get rid of that notion. We each got two, maybe three weeks till they wear off. Not a bang. A whimper, as the man said. ’Sides, you don’t want to spend your last days following after an old fart like me. You should take a car, see the Grand Canyon, see New York – try to imagine it the way it once was. All I’m doing is heading back South. I’m going to find my old shack and then get very, very drunk. See if I can stay that way until the Lord calls my name. Call it my retirement plan.’ He grinned, and Kurt looked at his old dog’s teeth, the skin tight over his bones.

  They walked on together, past the bodies and the razor wire and the chunks of concrete, slow enough to understand, but fast enough not to care too deeply. At the road, they stopped. A stranger lay across the center line like a drunken watchman, his cheek against the asphalt. Some time ago the blood had leaked out of him through his mouth. Kurt bent down and tore a strip from his T-shirt, and wrapped his hand in it, tight as he could.

  ‘You know the story of Job? That’s us, right there,’ said Felix, jutting his chin at the man’s forlorn corpse. ‘That’s us in three weeks. Maybe even less ’cause of how many viruses are up in the air right this minute. Thanks to you. Hell, that might be us tomorrow morning. You even know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Don’t you have no dreams at all?’

  The only reliable dream Kurt could call up was the one where he and Bethie were walking down beside the stream, near where he’d killed the good dog Mason. It was fall, and the leaves were stirring in the breeze. Some, shaken loose, were coming down like confetti all around them. She’d stopped and taken his hand and held it against her breast. Then she’d let it go and snaked her hand down into his trousers. It was him she wanted: only him and all of him, and that made Kurt feel just fine.

  He wasn’t going to find her in New York or the Grand Canyon, he knew that. Bethie was gone and soon there’d be no one else around either, if the viruses did what they were supposed to do. Felix was all he had.

  ‘I think I’ll hang around, if that’s okay. I’m real sorry about hitting you in the nose,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could stop past Des Moines on the way.’

  ‘Son, why d’you want to go back to that shithole?’

  Kurt shrugged, defensive. ‘The cat. He’s mine, in a roundabout way. Not a lot of things I can say that about. He belongs with me.’

  Felix frowned but said nothing. He knew how it was. Dallas.

  ‘Okay. But I’m warning you: when we get back to the shack, you’re sleeping upstairs, unless the downstairs has been washed away. If that’s happened, then I’ll sleep upstairs and you’ll sleep in a bush somewhere. I got a nice stand of almond trees, boy. You better believe it. But before that, we’re going to stop for some booze – enough to kill us. And not that rotgut we used to drink down South, neither. I�
�m talking old-school booze. Proper bourbon, with a label and an honest list of ingredients, and a nice picture of a bird. There’ll be a couple of liquor stores between here and home, and we’re going to clean them out.’

  Kurt nodded. He didn’t much care one way or the other. Drinking was what old men did to forget, and he wanted to remember. Bethie, mostly.

  ‘Also, we’re going to take that shitty Toyota of yours into Chicago and we’ll find the best car there is – a Porsche or a Ferrari or something – and you’re going to drive it till its nose is right up against Renard’s motherfucking Wall. And then we’ll plough through it. We’ll find a way. We got in, didn’t we? We can find a way out. And, Kurt: one more thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You drive too slow I’ll goddam shoot you, you got that? I don’t care who your daddy was.’

  Kurt hiccuped a laugh. ‘Deal.’

  The two Callahans found the Toyota, the pronghorn trophy lopsided but still attached. They drove up and out of the underground parking, and into the city. Chicago was lined with bodies laid out where they had collapsed, puppets with their strings snipped. They had to roll up the windows because the smell was starting again, but this time it only made Felix tired. There was a finite measure of horror in him, and that cup had been sipped dry. Kurt drove slowly through the city and the old man made himself remember what it looked like, the landscape of the ruined, though they’d seen it all before. This was the end of something that had begun long ago, wasn’t it? For every dead Northern man, woman and child, there was a grave the same size down South. Not retribution, he thought. There was no such thing, anyway. A clean slate, rather. Anything could happen now. Any fucking thing at all.

  They swapped cars in Chicago, for a canary-yellow VW cabriolet, and headed south-west on the 630. It was almost evening when Felix suddenly sat straight up in the passenger seat and yelled for Kurt to stop.