North

by Frank Owen

  ‘Jiminy Cricket!’ The boy slammed on the brakes and the car skidded in slow motion across the blacktop. Felix was yanking at the door handle, trying to get out even before the car had come to a stop. Kurt hit the steering wheel. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack! What is it?’

  Felix had climbed out and was standing on the road, shading his eyes against the last shafts of gold on the horizon, straining to see clear across the field.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ he said to himself.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘What’s that look like to you?’

  Kurt squinted across the top of the car. ‘Uncle Felix, that looks like a giraffe.’

  60

  Vida rested. She was trying to pull Dyce back to shore, but his body was waterlogged. It felt as if something had got hold of him under Maple Lake and would pull him back down into its depths. She couldn’t leave him there with Renard for eternity. She knew she had done her father some damage, though she hadn’t been able to see what. Clawed at his face, mostly, and she hoped it had been enough to drown him properly. She scanned the water but her vision was too blurry. She coughed another mouthful of dirty lake water out of her lungs.

  Oh, Dyce. She knew he was dead. She’d sure as shit carried him enough to know how he felt alive, hadn’t she? She’d carried him out of Felix’s shack and all the way across the little river and up that goddam mountain. And then known the heft of his body moving over hers, the thrust and meat and sigh of him, over all the nights that came after. Why would she give up now?

  But this body in the water: it wasn’t a person anymore. Dyce had become a log, a branch blown from one of the maples into the lake. When she tugged at him again, his shirt billowed up around his face, his arms trailing, but he shifted. She kept dragging his corpse in little bursts, trying not to think of the slime on the back of him. She had to get him back to Ruth – lay them both out neatly together so they could dry and she could look at them properly, her dead, and think what to do.

  I can do this, she told herself. I am the recipe book.

  When she could stand, she tried to take his weight over her shoulders, but he was heavier by double than she remembered. Dyce had changed: grown up or just got fattened up on the Northern diet like a boy in a witch’s cage. There was her ruined leg too. In the water it had been weightless, but here on the flat earth there was no way she could move with speed or dexterity.

  She flopped him down on the patchy ryegrass like a prize fish. He was pale, the color bleached out of him by the violence of his passing. His mouth gaped, his jaw slack. Why did people compare death and sleep? Vida wondered. They were nowhere near the same. It was only then that she saw the gash in his head. There was no blood, just meat cleaved cleanly open, then shards of bone and the pink-gray jelly of his brain. Around the lips of the wound were hair and splinters and rust mixed together, like someone was making a new man from the leftover parts.

  She couldn’t bear that. She leant in and arranged a clump of Dyce’s wet hair over the wound. The hair hardly covered the split, but he looked better. More familiar. She could get closer to kiss him now, one last time on the lips.

  The smell drove her back. The mushrooms! Would she ever be free of them? Instead of his sweat and sweetness, Dyce smelt of caves deep under the earth, of dirt in a predator’s claws. Vida breathed through her mouth and lay down next to him, determined to stay with him until she was certain the last warmth from his core had risen to his skin’s surface and floated over them both into the air. Then he was truly cold, and Vida felt the heat from her own insides being drawn into him, and the clouds move over the sun. She got up slowly, favoring her good leg, and made her way to the table where the picnic basket still gaped. Ruth was lying with her head on the wood like a drowsy schoolgirl on a Friday afternoon. Vida sat beside her and held the stiffening hand between her own. She could allow herself this.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mama. You know that, don’t you? For everything. But especially for this. Even now you were helping me, weren’t you? The way you always do. I couldn’t have held him under, not if you hadn’t dosed him with that poison first. He was strong, wasn’t he, Mama? He was old, but he was wily and so damn strong. He was always too strong. I see it. You couldn’t fight him on your own, and I couldn’t, either. It was always going to take two of us.’

  Ruth didn’t answer. Her eyes were rolled up in their sockets like a holy painting of a saint at the stake. Vida felt her own tears burning stripes down her cheeks. She watched them plop neatly onto the table and then mingle with the drizzle that was moving in over Maple Lake.

  ‘But I can’t do this next bit on my own, Mama. It’s too hard. I’m not ready.’ She waited for some acknowledging kick from her abdomen, but the baby lay quiet. ‘I thought I would have you to help me, the way you did all those girls who came to you over the years. All the lost ones. But now it’s me who’s too far gone, Mama. I need you now. I don’t know what to do. And it’s not fair!’

  The rain was coming in harder now. As Vida wept with frustration, she felt it cool as grief on her face. Everywhere the leaves and shoots and grasses were drinking, taking in their fill, as if she hadn’t lost everyone she had ever loved.

  ‘Mama, you know what else? You were right. You remember at the beginning? You said he wasn’t the one. Now I wish I’d never met him.’

  The rage was slow to kindle, but it moved in increments up to her chest, and by the time it got to her gullet, the tears had dried up.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Mama. You get what you get, and you don’t get upset. But it’s true. None of this would have happened if I’d said no to his dumb brother, and to him, and to everything that came after that. Maybe then you’d still be here, and it would just be us two, same as it ever was.’

  The anger was delicious. Vida felt its hot metal against her palate, and it made her legs move so that she was able, at last, to think clearly.

  She got up and went back to the truck, Renard’s fancy Jaguar parked beside it. How had Buddy done it? She tried to send her mind back to all those hours in the pickup, and then Dyce’s careful explanations on the way to the lake too, but the memory kept clouding over with pain and loss; it was as if her brain was partitioned, and she had to peer over the walls that divided its parts.

  She got in and started the truck’s engine. She managed to reverse it out slowly, trundling along the stone wall to a gap in line with the boat ramp. The truck bucked a little over the uneven slipway, and for a sick moment she thought she had driven over Dyce’s body.

  Impossible. But she got out to check, just in case. Stranger things had happened. She got back in and eased the vehicle off and along the riverbank, parking it right between the two bodies. She turned the engine off and wiped her palms on her thighs. Her hands kept slipping.

  She began with Ruth, in a kind of fireman’s lift half over her shoulder, and limped with her in bursts over to the truck bed. Her mother’s feet dragged as if she was drunk, reluctant to make the journey up the greasy slope. Vida rested and wiped the sweat and the rain from her forehead. The drizzle wasn’t letting up. At least if anyone was watching, they would have a hard time making out what she was doing.

  Vida froze.

  The sniper. She didn’t know if he was really gone, did she? Would he hang around?

  Slowly she laid Ruth all the way down, then stretched and got her breath back. So be it. She had no choice. Out here she was a clear target. If anyone really wanted to pick her off, they had had enough time to do it already. Her heart was thudding in her ears, her blood drumming so that she wanted to pass out. She still had to go back for Dyce. She was dreading it.

  Dyce was more difficult to maneuver than Ruth had been: it was incredible how much healthy flesh he’d managed to pack back on in the short time she’d known him. She took a deep breath, then hooked her hands under his armpits and tried to drag him up the greasy slope. She managed it in small, dismaying stretches, her leg one long, hollow ache. The
stitches kept feeling as though they would pull loose with the strain, until she stood, panting and shaking with effort, and regarded her dead family.

  She had heaved them onto the truck bed, but they looked uncomfortable, twisted back against the corrugated metal. She rearranged them so that they lay neatly, but even as she was moving their limbs she thought of Stringbeard and his cursed family back in Fieldstone. They had lain together so tidily, the dead woman and all her little ones in their eternal beds. Vida hurried back to fetch Renard’s checked cloth. She unfurled it and let it fall damply over them, and then she tucked the edges in under their bodies so it wouldn’t blow loose when she drove away. There. Now she was ready.

  Still shivering, she got back into the driver’s seat and turned the truck around to follow her own slick tracks back to the parking lot. It didn’t matter if she hit a tree, as long as it was gentle. She’d be able to recover from that. She drove at a snail’s pace around the entire rim of the lake – past the grass triangle and the low-slung trees, past the white clapboard church with its crooked gravestones like rotten teeth, a one-woman funeral cortège – and then on toward the highway. Luck was on her side.

  She tilted the rear-view mirror, pointing it backward and down. She could only just see Dyce’s foot through the tiny rear windows.

  ‘Dyce,’ she said, ‘I got something to tell you. Don’t laugh, but I’ve never seen the sea. But it sounded good when Garrett said it, didn’t it? It’ll be the right place to lay you down, both of you, so you can keep each other company, up on a hill with a view of the water. You might even run into ole Garrett there, come to think of it. He’ll be cursing and setting up his boat, ready to sail off for somewhere new.’ She wiped her nose on her shirt. ‘Sounds like a good idea. A new start. Me, I’m thinking I’ll head east. Mama, maybe I’ll find the same coast that looks across to where you came from. Africa. Wouldn’t that be a blast? I can taste the coconuts already. Pineapples. Melons. All of it. From one fruit salad to another. What do you say?’

  She listened to the inhuman voice of the engine. Go on, it seemed to say, just get away from here. It doesn’t matter where, as long as you hit the coast before they start to smell.

  She shivered again. She searched the dashboard for the heater and found the knob that showed waves of heat like water. It still worked. She turned it up and set the fan to high speed. Her toes and ankles tingled and ached as the numbness began to lift. The ventilation in the car was mixing with the warmer air that was filtering in from outside now that the rain had stopped. She hung her head outside the window as she drove the slippery roads, sniffing at the freshness like a dog. She would never get tired of doing it: the freedom was too new to take for granted.

  When she finally rolled the pickup into Lemont, it was the smell that first told her that something was wrong. She came to a stop on the outskirts before she gathered herself enough to go on through.

  The bodies were strewn everywhere, surprised by their own endings: in the streets, on the lawns, some lying heavy on the railway track that ran parallel with the main road. She stopped the car beside a woman lying in the gutter, her face rotted in like a Halloween pumpkin forgotten on a porch.

  ‘It’s happening,’ Vida said, but there was no one to hear her. ‘It’s fucking happening again.’

  The engine stalled.

  61

  Kurt turned off to Des Moines, retracing the route from the night before. Even at the outskirts they saw the dirty smoke lazily twisting. The Capitol Building was ruined, the dome collapsed in on itself in jagged black shards against the haze. Kurt parked the cabriolet as close as he could.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ Felix said. ‘We ain’t got all day. And you don’t know what’s still in there. What’s infectious.’

  Dumbass boy wasn’t even going to find the cat, was he? If Linus was under there he would be a small charred skeleton. Kurt would smell him by the singed fur, like a voodoo poppet. Was he going to bring that little kitty corpse out with him? Felix hoped not.

  ‘We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,’ he told himself. Damn. It was times like these he wished he still smoked.

  He waited in the car and Kurt kept looking over the hot clumps of rubble. He should have worn gloves, he told himself, but he only stopped when his hands sizzled.

  ‘Give it up,’ Felix called from the car window.

  He was right, but that didn’t make it hurt less. Kurt picked his way back to the car and got in. He turned his boot over. ‘See that?’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘Rubber’s melting.’

  ‘You happy now? No cat survived that.’

  Kurt said nothing. He turned on the engine and they drove across the Des Moines river bridge, the struts rattling. You just couldn’t tell with this little fucker, Felix thought, and not for the first time. Other people, you knew when they were pissed off or sad or celebrating. But with Kurt, the highs and lows were hard to tell apart. He was a Callahan all right. And more.

  ‘Hey, now. Wait a minute. Stop the car.’

  He had quick reflexes, at least. The body of a man was laid out on a concrete piling where there was a nice view of the water. And beside it was a striped furry bundle. Alive. Felix nudged Kurt.

  The boy got out as fast as he could. He jumped the roadside barrier and jogged over. Then he crouched down, trying to make himself unthreatening.

  ‘Hey there. Hey, kitty. Hey, Linus. It’s me, boy.’

  The scraggly tabby wasn’t going to come to him: Felix saw that right away. Instead it hissed and backed away, spine arched and ears flat. In frustration Kurt lunged, his bloody left hand out, trying to scare it into his right. But Linus had been here before, and cats learn their lessons. He tried to jump cleanly, but his back claws pedaled and ripped the skin of Kurt’s arm before he leapt from the piling into the fescue. Kurt hunched over and cursed the pain and Felix saw himself; in the early days of the War he’d thought often enough of getting back North-side to search the alleys behind his old block. Dallas, in his dreams, would see him and come running. Felix would have a can of sardines with him and Dallas would sit still to pick them out. Afterwards they would go back to the apartment and he would lick the smell of home back onto his fishy paws.

  Kurt wasn’t giving up. Felix had had enough. It was himself he was angry with. ‘No means no,’ he yelled through the window.

  The boy, empty-handed, turned to him and gave him a look of silvery hate. The old man’s heart dipped. That was stupid. He shouldn’t have said anything.

  Kurt dropped off the platform and set off through the grass, swift as a deer – a pronghorn, thought Felix. He was gone from sight for almost half an hour. Felix settled back to doze in the seat. Fuck it. If today was his day to die, then so be it. He was done trying to set people straight.

  At last Kurt came loping back, defeat in the skew set of his shoulders. Linus was gone for good and Felix felt a surge of joy for the animal. Linus would join up with the other cats of Des Moines, and if he’d learnt anything from Kurt at all, he’d be king of them all.

  The boy swung himself back behind the wheel. ‘He didn’t recognize me,’ he said.

  Felix wanted to tell him straight: Kid, that cat recognized the hell out of you. That’s why he ran like his tail was on fire. But he held himself back.

  ‘He scratched me up pretty bad,’ Kurt went on, showing Felix the blood on his arms.

  ‘Who’s the dead guy?’ Felix asked instead as Kurt started the car.

  ‘That border patrolman – the one who was in the cell. You know,’ said Kurt thoughtfully, ‘there was blood coming out of his skin.’ Felix nodded. ‘No, I mean it was coming out of his pores, like he was sweating. And his teeth were all fallen out. Like popcorn.’

  Felix felt his guts heave. ‘Huh,’ he said.

  Kurt had done that.

  Not Renard. Kurt. The viruses that he’d released were spreading fast and far. Depending on the wind, they might have hit the west coast already. The east coast he was
sure was already given over. There might not be a single person alive on the whole continent besides him and the boy. It would take two canny bullets to bring an end to the era of Columbus. Imagine that.

  ‘You ever learn that Columbus song?’

  Kurt shook his head. Felix warbled the song. He’d not sung nor heard it for decades, but the words were still there.

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two

  Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

  It was a courageous thing to do

  But someone was already here:

  The Inuit and Cherokee,

  The Aztec and Menominee,

  Onondaga and the Cree.

  Columbus sailed across the sea

  But someone was already here.

  ‘Does the radio work?’ Kurt asked. Without waiting for a reply, he leant forward and turned it on. The car was filled with the hiss of static as he searched for a surviving station.

  ‘What? You don’t like my singing?’

  Kurt kept fiddling with the dial, his twisted, bloodied fingers poking out of the makeshift bandage.

  ‘You know there’s no one there now? No deejays or anything. You’re gonna get pre-recorded stuff.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kurt. ‘I just want the weather report.’

  The static stopped. ‘Tomorrow,’ the woman on the radio said, clear and earnest and friendly, ‘will be mild and sunny.’

  62

  Vida got the engine going again, and after that it got easier, because she was leaving the despairing towns behind. She drove and drove, the road endless and flat before her as she headed east through Indiana, coughing and dry-eyed, making for the coast as the sun dropped behind her. It was as good a plan as any, and there was no one else to consult. There were no more tears to cry, either, and her throat was rough with ill use.

  The drive was endless and the weather wasn’t helping. It seemed to turn bad and then clear up some, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. The viruses must be affecting the cloud cover, she thought. She didn’t know how it worked, and she didn’t know if rain made it better or worse. If Felix was here, he could tell her. What she did know was that she didn’t want Dyce and Ruth lying there on the truck bed in the wet and the cold. She knew it wasn’t rational.