North

by Frank Owen

  ‘But rational,’ she told the baby as she turned the wheel, ‘isn’t high on my list right now.’ She had gone past sleep, into some grainy, shadowed place that made her brain itch.

  Fort Wayne turned out to be the worst-hit. Against her wishes, Vida was forced to slow down: the place was a mess of bodies. The viruses unleashed from the factory must have been more ferocious than the ones that had just drifted south on the wind over Indiana. There must have been survivors somewhere down there, the way there were everywhere, against the odds, but here, hours after whatever had happened, every single person was dead, the hand of God smiting a citadel.

  She cursed as she maneuvered the truck. People had been taken while they were driving, even, making the roads nearly impassable. Cars had crashed left and right off the street, into shop fronts and street lights and bus shelters, and it couldn’t have been too long ago, either. That was the most terrible part. Engines were still ticking. There were piles of them, Vida realized as she wove her way through the wrecks, trying not to throw up: heaps of people. The Lincoln Bank Tower looked like the long-promised city of Atlantis, rising bone-white from a sea of corpses. They had fallen where they’d been walking, the commuters who had been getting off a double-decker spilt like dominoes out of the bus’s doors, which kept trying to close on them, opening over and over with a steady pneumatic hiss in the stillness. If she got out and touched their faces, they would still be warm.

  The rain was soaking her cargo now, and Vida had to stop to think properly. She needed covers. Shrouds. Something to protect Ruth and Dyce from the elements. She drove on slowly, the idea ticking over, until she came to a Home Depot. She parked the truck.

  The electrics were still working; it was always weird to see what survived after the humans that operated them had gone. As Vida limped close to the glass doors, the sensors kicked in and they opened for her. She walked the aisles, massaging the muscles in her thigh, thinking back to the first place they’d stopped when Buddy had picked them up, all that time ago – back when she and Dyce had thought the North was paradise instead of purgatory. She had learnt a thing or two about freedom since then. It meant deciding what you could take responsibility for.

  Like her family. That she was prepared to do. Fuck everything else.

  There. Those curtains would do it. That felt right. Velvet drapes, heavy and creamy-white. To reach them she had to step back over a dead couple who’d been looking at shower curtains they would never take home. The man’s face was pressed down against the linoleum, but the woman looked up into the lights in the roof, her dead eyes reflecting the strip tubes, her handbag spewing lipstick and tissues and furred sticks of gum like space garbage.

  Vida nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she told them. ‘I’ll be needing those too. They’re perfect. Thank you.’ She bundled the drapes and the couple’s plastic curtains up into her arms. She had hobbled halfway across the store before she made her way back. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she told the couple, and coughed. They hadn’t moved.

  Back at the truck, Vida threw both sets of curtains onto the flatbed and hauled herself up after them, ignoring her complaining leg. It would stiffen soon, and then she’d really be fucked. She still had a lot of work to do.

  She bent to wrap Ruth, beginning with the creamy velvet, and then laying the plastic shower curtain over the cocoon.

  She moved on to Dyce, swaddling him in the thick drape. She was tucking it neatly around his ruptured head when she saw the little black speckles dotting his chin like stubble.

  ‘Oh, look at that. I’m so sorry, baby,’ she told him. ‘I’ll try to go slower over the muddy bits, but there’s only so much I can do, what with the rain and everything. You understand, don’t you?’ She licked a thumb and tried to wipe the black dots away.

  They wouldn’t budge.

  She peered at them, but they clung, obstinate, as if they were splinters embedded in his flesh. Another weirdness in a day of weirdness, on top of weird weeks and months and years.

  But she had to get going. She wasn’t feeling great herself. Her throat was definitely worse, and the cough was persistent. She dragged the velvet over Dyce’s peppery skin and covered him. Then she did the same with the shower curtain. There was such relief in keeping them both warm and waterproof.

  ‘Shit. I forgot some things.’

  She made her way back through the Home Depot doors that didn’t know it was the end of the world. When she came back, she was carrying a green-handled spade and a coil of thin, whippy rope – and she’d found a pen in the pocket of a uniformed employee, and a ledger from a stocktake.

  She got back up on the truck bed, groaning, and started to tie Dyce and her mother down so that they wouldn’t slide out. She was tired of checking whether they were still there as she drove.

  Then she nosed the pickup out toward the edge of the city again. There was a gas station on the fringes, and she pulled onto the cool blue forecourt. MARATHON said the sign, and she murmured the word to herself as she filled the truck with gas.

  ‘That sounds about right.’

  She drove along the empty roads until it got dark. I don’t want to stop, she told herself, coughing. There is nothing for us here in any of these towns. They are just places to get through before we reach the end. There were still lights on in some of the neighborhoods, but she thought they would burn out soon enough and there would be no one to replace the bulbs. Some were flickering even now, flooding living rooms and front porches with useless light. These were the last illuminated moments of America, and Vida knew them for what they were.

  63

  By the time she reached Pittsburgh, Vida had decided to drive on instead of finding somewhere to sleep; she didn’t know if she could take seeing another Fort Wayne, with its pity and horror. But some miles east of the city, her body was aching too much to drive further, stretched and bunched with exhaustion, and the coughing wouldn’t let up. It felt as though she was finally getting sick, for the first time in her life. Her bulletproof armor was wearing thin. She drove back a way along the 22 and, at a sign showing a man in a bed, turned off the road and through a set of enormous metal gates. The front windows were frosted with age and neglect, and the topiary that guarded the entrance had grown woolly a long time ago.

  ‘Okay, Chestnut Ridge Golf Resort,’ she yawned. ‘Show me what you got.’

  Once she was inside the hotel, Vida walked the passages with impunity. No clerk in a button-down shirt or woman in a gray housedress was going to ask her what she was doing here. Chestnut Ridge was closed for business. Or maybe – and this thought made her shiver even worse than she already was – the rooms were occupied: it was just that the guests were embalmed in their rooms forever, lying on a hundred beds like funeral biers.

  She tried a few doors before she found an empty beige room with a view of her pickup in the parking lot, where she could see Ruth and Dyce lying on the truck bed like mummies. She was too tired even to pee. She curled up under the pastel sheets and closed her eyes.

  But it was Renard’s bloodied face she saw against the black, and she kept dozing and coughing, waking to find herself battling the damp bedding. She sat up, shaky, and looked at her fingers. She was certain there were still chunks of his flesh lodged under her nails. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel that they were there.

  She got up and limped to the shower. At least the water was still warm. The water heater would keep cycling on and off until the next doomsday came. She squeezed out the whole tube of shower gel – why wait? – and rubbed at herself until she was foaming white, all the while trying to keep her bad leg out of the blast.

  She inspected the wound casually when she was drying herself. It looked okay. Not great, but the stitches were still holding.

  She looked more closely.

  ‘Fuck.’

  She had judged it too quickly. Up close there were faint spidery lines of infection running up from the wound. Blood poisoning.

  Renard had said that h
er immunity wouldn’t stand up to multiple viruses, and by now the mushrooms had probably worn off. When last had she eaten a dose anyway? Back in Horse Head? That long ago? Shit. No wonder she was feeling sick. She was at zero protection apart from Ruth’s syringe in the way-back – and who knew how long that would hold out? And Dyce – generous, stupid, dead Dyce – had given the last of their precious, precious mushrooms away.

  Vida got dressed, covering up her leg so she didn’t have to look at it. She couldn’t think about all that right now. She just had to press on until she couldn’t press on any longer.

  ‘You get what you get, and you don’t get upset, right, Mama?’

  She looked out of the window. The body in the parking lot was silent.

  She made a brief tour of the resort’s kitchen, and got the makings of a couple of cheese sandwiches together, along with some coffee. She took a stash that would last her a week and made herself a cup as well.

  She raised the paper cup in a toast to herself. ‘Cheers to the queers. Applause to the whores. May prostitutes flourish and fuck be a household word.’ She sipped and then muttered, ‘Gone but not forgotten, Stringbeard, you asshole.’

  There wasn’t a whole lot to pack up. Back in the room, Vida made sure the recipe book was safe in her bag, where she always kept it, nestled up beside Ears McCreedy, then went out to the pickup. She couldn’t bring herself to eat just yet, but the coffee was going down a treat as she reversed the truck out of the parking lot and in a big loop back onto the highway. The coughing even seemed to relent some, though her leg was feeling heavier and heavier as she drove, hot and prosthetic with infection. She knew it was going to be bad.

  As the long, lonely night came on, she felt the landscape change. The nose of the truck began dipping down and the signs in her headlights told her that she was crossing the Appalachians, dropping toward the sea. But as for the scenery itself, she saw none of it. The passing city lights were flickering out. All of the world that mattered was in her headlights. She drove on in a half-sleep, automatically turning the wheel to keep aligned with the painted road, occasionally shifting lanes to pass cars, stopped dead. The sun must have been rising, because she felt its warmth creeping over her forearms and settling on the hairs there. The world she saw in the new light was not one she recognized. The plants and trees she was used to were replaced by others, shorter mostly, with darker leaves. The air had a new taste here too, thick with moisture and the hint of salt. It was the smell of progress. She took a bite of a sandwich and cracked a window to let the fresh air wake her. It worked some.

  The sun was full over the horizon when Vida wiped her nose and noticed that the back of her hand was smeared crimson. She looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the line of blood trickling from her nose: she had smeared it across her cheek. She swallowed. The soft walls of her throat were like pincushions.

  She wiped her hand and her face on her shirt and drove on, faster, fully awake for the first time since she had lain on the cold steps of the Capitol Building with Dyce. She’d been planning on digging two graves, but maybe she’d have to make three. That was okay, wasn’t it? She’d put herself in the middle one. Lie down, because she was tired. That was just fine. They’d all be together, at last. Ruth and Dyce and Vida and the baby. They could all go looking for Garrett and Bethie and their little one, and Everett. A family vacation: yours, mine and ours.

  She raced eastward, hardly noticing that the landscape was turning sandy and scrubby. She knew by the number of boats parked in driveways that she was approaching the coast. She was so close! In her imaginings it was always a pristine, powdery stretch of sand and sea, but now that she was really here, she found that it was disappointingly ordinary, built up, house beyond house until the roads simply gave way to the thin strip of sand. What was the point of that?

  She slowed the truck. There were blurry signs that ordered NO CARS BEYOND THIS POINT. It took a minute for Vida to understand that the signs were clear. It was she who was blurry. She drove on. Warning signs were for a different time. For yesterday and all the days before it. The truck bucked over a concrete lip and the tires spun in the dry sand.

  But there it was, finally.

  The sea.

  64

  She turned off the engine. Of course she’d seen pictures, and she’d been told what it looked like, but still, it was nothing like she’d imagined. It was just water – endless gray-blue water, restless with waves. It cared nothing for her and her hundred troubles, and those weren’t going away just because she had arrived at her destination.

  Far out there was a fishing boat, taken by the current – its captain and crew long dead now. It looked so very tiny against the vast depths. It rose and fell behind distant walls of swell, and then it was gone.

  Vida got out and felt the sand with her palm. The air was thick here, wet through and heavy with salt and spray. She thought it would be bracing and restorative, salve for her ragged throat, but it was just making her cough even more.

  ‘We’re here,’ she said to the bodies in the back. ‘The weather could be better, but we’re here. Now, I’m going to do what I came here to do, and I hope that’s okay. I want you to know that I’m going to do my best for you. If you have any preferences, now is the time to tell me.’

  She coughed into her fist again and began to drive the truck along the beach, looking for a sand dune that would give her a view far across the water. There was only one, and that was distant, a pyramid above the flat expanse of sand. She drove slowly, her chest hurting when she breathed, coaxing the pickup along. ‘Don’t want to get stuck now, do we? We’ve come this far.’

  At the dune, she backed the truck up the slope as far as she could. She got out and took the spade with her, and then made her way slowly to the top, sliding back a couple of inches with each step, her leg pulsing with sick pain whenever she put weight on it. A few more yards, then she could rest.

  When she got to the top, she sat down, her breath harsh in the damp air. Digging would be difficult. Where the sand met the thick undergrowth, the plants were all twisted secretly together: goldenrod, bladdernut, white doll’s daisy, panic grass.

  But here she was. She began to scoop the soft, dry sand away, pushing her fingers between the roots.

  Even when she took up the spade, the ground kept working against her. She sweated, struggling to sever the plants that kept the dune from washing down into the endless sea. She was going too slowly. The first grave, the one she figured would be for her mother, was going to take more than an hour. She sat down again to rest her dumb leg, panting and trying to fight the nausea.

  ‘Not the first grave I dug for you, Mama,’ she called down to the body on the truck. ‘Just think how lucky you are. Someone loves you enough to bury you twice. Remember that? The one that fooled Dyce and Garrett into taking me along? I sure hope this is the last one. That was a nicer grave, but this one has a better view.’

  Even as she rested, the sweat kept coming. Her attention kept dragging back to her leg, where she was sure the poison was radiating under her skin: she could feel it colonizing her flesh. She rolled up her pants leg. The skin’s surface was discolored in patches, red and black pockmarks with jagged edges that itched even as they spread between inspections. She drew back in disgust. It was like her body didn’t belong to her anymore. But she didn’t have time to work out what was happening to her. She had to finish digging before she was too weak to do anything at all.

  She made herself get up again. ‘Small bites,’ she said. ‘That’s how you eat an elephant, right?’ She started on Dyce’s grave, but the effort only made the nausea worse, as if her body was trying to turn itself inside out. Eventually she gave in to it, leaning over the handle of the spade and letting the acid chunks jerk up from her guts. The little blobs of rancid cheese spattered on the gravesite, gone to waste.

  ‘Happy now?’ she asked the baby. ‘That was for you. How are we going to save our strength if you won’t let me eat?’ She wiped her mou
th and her hand came away dirt-streaked and bloody again. Her nose was back to bleeding, the thin walls of her arteries blasted through by the sickness and the hard work and the pregnancy.

  How deep did the graves have to be anyway? What predators would there be on the beach? A couple of little critters, maybe. Vida had no idea. There were predators everywhere in latitudes they didn’t belong: the end of the world had turned out to be pretty good for some. Things were out of whack for everyone, furred or horned or feathered. Even the plants had seen opportunity and shifted beyond their natural zones, ready to take up the spaces that the people left behind.

  She felt a bit better. Emptying her stomach seemed to have helped, or maybe she was getting used to the work. Her head seemed clearer, and when she started again, Dyce’s grave went quicker. It helped when she breathed in time with the ocean, its soft, insistent roar erasing some of the throttling sadness and regret. It was the sort of thing she’d have to teach herself for later, for when the baby came.

  Oh God! Even if she lived, she would be by herself for that too!

  ‘Small bites, I said,’ she reprimanded herself, before the bad feeling overwhelmed her. ‘Just fucking do what needs to be done, and save the wailing for later.’

  Now the midday sun was making her dizzy, but she kept digging. The blood from her nose dripped softly, endlessly onto the thirsty sand as she made a start on her own resting place. When she wanted to stop, she told herself that it wasn’t about her. They were all waiting. That third hole would be for her and her baby – but only after everyone else had their own shelter. It wasn’t as deep as the others, but that was too bad. Let whatever came snuffling around the graves take her first.