by Brian Hodge
“Will he just fart it out?” she asked.
He looked her in the eye a moment, and immediately she knew, no, it wasn’t that easy. Nothing about this was that easy. “You shouldn’t hear about this.”
“I want to know.”
“I’m going to have to poke him soon. Through the side of the belly. I’ve just been trying to work up nerve to do it.”
“Poke him with what? Do you need me to sneak you a knife?”
“No, don’t get yourself mixed up in my troubles any more than you already are.” He turned, a cumbersome move, and pointed deeper into the woods. “I found a tree that fell not long ago, trunk still green, all split apart. There’s a long, jagged shank sticking out level with the ground, and I worked on it with a rock to sharpen it up more. That should do.”
She imagined him jogging sideways, building up enough speed to ram Tom Harkin sideways onto this skewer. He must have noticed the look on her face.
“If I don’t, Tom’s apt to swell up until he bursts on his own, and that’ll be worse. It’s the only way to ease off the pressure.”
She nodded, solemn. That’s when the ugly part of all this would truly begin. That’s when Tom Harkin would start turning inside out. That’s when the Rot would really take hold.
“Somebody told me this didn’t have to mean a death sentence. That there’s been some people survive it,” she said.
“Who told you that?”
“Daniel Hunsicker,” she said, then instantly wished she hadn’t.
“You stay clear of him, promise me.” Her father looked like he could boil water just by staring at it. “Him and any of that trash he hangs out with. Anything he thinks he’s got to say to you, you tell him to come out and find me and say it to this ugly head looking over my shoulder, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”
“Daddy,” she said sharply.
“Well, what are they going to do, tie another corpse on the front of me?”
“I promise, okay? I promise. Anyway, what he said, about it not having to be a death sentence, I didn’t believe it at first. But then I got to talking to Miles McGee. You know how he is about books. He’s worse than me, even.”
“As if such a thing was possible,” her father said, and sounded like his old warm self.
Miles McGee was a year older than she was, and most of his life had been the closest thing she had to a big brother, although now he was starting to look at her differently. Which she liked and didn’t like, at the same time. Wanting things to stay the way they were, knowing nothing ever did.
“Miles has this book he says came from that sheriff building some of them explored a couple years ago. Not a book, exactly, but a manual? I guess they had to keep it handy after the Day the Sun Roared. It’s about how to deal with a bunch of dead people after a disaster. It says you don’t have to hurry up and bury everybody in a big grave, because dead bodies don’t actually spread disease. People think they do, but they don’t.”
It was the one thing that genuinely felt like betting their hopes on, and Melody watched her father’s face to see how he reacted. If this news was as amazing as it sounded. For a while he just watched a beetle trundling across the forest floor, slow slow slow, like it wasn’t going to get wherever it had to be before winter came on.
“This is different,” he finally said. “No matter how careful you try to move with something like this on you … these straps, they rub you raw. Right through the shirt, they rub you raw. It makes it easy for an infection to get started. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“It poisons the blood. Now do you understand?”
There was no good answer to this, so she just held herself tight.
“It means don’t get your hopes up. It means every time you come out here, we’ve got to treat it like it’s the last. Because there’s probably going to come a day when you’re going to stand at the edge of these woods and call for me and I’m not going to answer. Maybe it’s because I can’t. Or I don’t want you to see what it’s come to. Or it’s because while I still could, I went too deep into the woods to hear you. You’ve got to be ready for that, do you understand?”
Under her sweater, she pinched the thin skin of her belly hard enough to leave a bruise, because it was easier to deal with that than trying to imagine such a day. It was easier to stop herself from crying over the one thing than it was the other.
He seemed at peace now, resigned to whatever might happen, and in these moments when it was quiet, she would listen and wonder what her father heard in the night. If anything. Maybe he was too old to hear it, or not yet old enough. Maybe she was too, even at not quite fourteen. But there were those who said the woods whispered, or something inside them did, something that only the very young or the very old seemed able to hear.
And maybe those closest to death.
“I’m going to help you,” she said. “Somehow, I will.”
“I heard that Linda Gallenkamp’s dog is about to have pups,” he said. “Why don’t you check with her about taking one off her hands?”
Was he not even paying attention? “I don’t want one of Linda’s pups. I want Patches back.”
“I know.”
“Just like I want you back. And if I can’t have Patches, I’ll settle for you.” She stopped and, in spite of everything, had to laugh, because so did he. “That didn’t come out right.”
“Not much ever does,” he said, then seemed to wish he could take it back.
“I’m going to help,” she insisted again, and that settled it.
When it was time to go, she wasn’t ready to give up the woods yet, because she wanted her own time to pause and listen. She took the long way home, keeping inside the trees deep enough that she couldn’t see the back wall of the village, still plenty of leaves on the limbs in the way. They no longer blazed with the colors she loved best, though. All the reds and oranges and yellows were muted now, and dull. Even the woods felt like they were dying.
Might as well start wishing for spring, and green. It seemed the only good thing she could count on, if only it weren’t so far away.
* * *
There were the in-between times, too. In between visits, between sleep, between chores, between distractions. That was when Miles McGee found her on the third day, which was just like him—more often than not, he knew right when to show up. He caught her after her turn cleaning out the poultry houses, when she was amenable to most anything that would stall her from going back to what she vowed would only be a temporary home. Which wasn’t all that different from the coops, either, because her grandmother could cluck as bad as the hens.
“Here, I’ve got something for you,” Miles said, and gave her a rectangle of metal and plastic that fit in her hand. “What’s this one, can you tell?”
She looked it over. “I think it’s another one of those music-player things.” It said iPod on the back, on the metal, and she had two of these already, although none of them looked exactly the same. “It’s been two weeks since the last scavenge—where’d you get it?”
“Found it while I was picking corn this morning in the outer field. My guess is one of the raggedy men dropped it while he was stealing a few ears in the night.” Miles spared a contemptuous glance west, in the direction of the cornfield, and beyond it, the raggedies. “Or maybe it was his idea of a trade.”
Everyone hated the raggedies, and Melody supposed she did too, but sometimes she felt she ought to think better of them, because after all, her own family and everybody else here had come from people who were once more like them than not. They must’ve been raggedy too, at one point. They’d just had the good sense to stop here and dig in and call it home.
Strange, though, to think that one of them out there could be so like her now, if this contraption in her hand was any indication. He had to have carried it around in spite of everyone else thinking it was useless junk. Maybe it gave him hope.
“Anyway, now it’s your
s,” Miles said.
She thanked him and had to strain to look him in the eye. He was either too tall for his hips or too skinny for his height, one or the other, and crowned by a mop of curly hair she would’ve given anything, except family, to have on her own head. He knew it, too. Maybe sprouting from her children would be almost as good, and that was what he was counting on.
He tapped the gadget in her hand. “The day you do get one of these things working, I really hope I’m here to see it.”
“Then don’t run off a-scavenging every chance you get,” she told him, her voice lighter than she felt, or maybe for the moment she felt lighter than she realized. Then she headed for home.
The village scavenged once a month or so, volunteers taking to horseback and bringing home whatever they could of the World Ago that could still be of use after all this time. Some liked these trips for the excitement of discovery, others for the chance to get away and see something different. Some, like Miles, wanted to keep going; others saw enough to satisfy them for the rest of their lives.
They plotted their destinations from an old map of what used to be the state the land was once part of. Where they’d scavenged already was like a growing ring around the village, and Melody found it sad to think that there would come a time when they ran out of places to go. What was left would be too distant, keep them away for too many days at a time. There would come a point when they’d picked it all clean, like crows on carrion, leaving nothing but bones.
Melody had gone twice since her father considered her old enough for the rigors of such a trip, and ever since the first one, she’d never looked at the future the same way again.
What drove them out time and again was the belief that you could never have too many farm tools, or too many jars and plates. Sometimes, if it had been stored well, even clothing had survived the decades. This was all fine, but what had captured her imagination were the tools that were of no use to anyone, not since the Day the Sun Roared, because these were the ones it had fried.
By now she had watches that had no way of winding them. Things that played music from your pocket, windows that played pictures in your hand. Thick wands that people used to point at contraptions across the room, and control them. She had a few of the phones they used for talking with people no matter how far away they were, and a couple of the flat slabs that had been called computers and apparently did so much that they ran the world. Until they’d fried.
She’d collected what she could during the scavenging trips she had joined, and Miles and a couple others were diligent about bringing her anything that looked interesting, whatever they were able to carry that wouldn’t interfere with what everyone else considered important.
Books, too, she craved, and Miles was a champ there because he brought her plenty of those as well, and shared what he’d kept for himself. Sometimes it all went together: if there was anything she was determined to do, besides be good and do her chores and not give her father reasons to have the frets, she was resolved to figure out this whole electricity mystery and get something running again.
Sometimes she took the devices apart and couldn’t get them back together again. Other times she cleaned them up, inside and out, so good they looked new, and you’d almost expect one to turn on by itself if you just stared at it hard enough. Except they didn’t have batteries, so she hunted down how to make her own, with small jars and strips of copper and nails and some of the cider vinegar they made from apples. She’d open up some of the gadgets and run wires from the battery to different spots inside them, and a few times coaxed a pale flicker of light across the screens of a couple of them, and once a burst of numbers, but nothing more, although it gave her hope.
It was something she didn’t mind doing in front of her father, because he saw no harm in it, and would sometimes smile as he watched her tinker with this and that. But that was in their own trailer, and now that her father had forgotten not to kill, and she and Jeremy were staying with the parents of the mother she didn’t much remember by now, it was different.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” her grandmother asked that afternoon while watching her scrub at this latest gift from Miles.
Melody told her, and showed her a few of the other gadgets that seemed to have promise. And wondered for the hundredth time why she and Jeremy had had to come here; why their grandmother couldn’t have packed a bag and stayed with them in their own home. It was like ordering them to surrender all hope from the very beginning.
Her grandmother frowned at the ancient iPod, looking not nearly as indulgent as her father usually did. Her lips seemed to disappear. “Foolishness. You’ll never get any of that working. It’s just old junk not worth the bother of carrying around.”
Melody pointed at a switch on the wall that didn’t do anything and never had. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have lights like they had in the books? You just jiggle that thing and there it is? You wouldn’t like that?”
Her grandmother made a sour-apple face. “What could a light like that show me that a good candle or lantern doesn’t already? There’s nothing there that’s any different.” She shook her head no, a thousand times no, then jabbed a finger at the old dead iPod. “You just leave that alone, if you know what’s good for you. That junk there, that’s how it all starts.”
“How what all starts?”
“You don’t remember the things your grandfather and I do, from when we were little, before the sun set everything right again. You can’t remember, because you weren’t there. So don’t tell me you want to go back to a world you never even belonged to. It was a sick and decadent world back there, and I’m amazed the sun let it go on as long as it did. But it’s over now, and there’s no need to insult the sun by trying to bring all that back.”
“What was so wrong with it?”
She flustered along as if asking where she could possibly begin. “If I was to get started on that, we’d be at it all day, and I still don’t think I could get it across to you in a way you’d accept. Not when your mind’s already made up that there was something better about it.”
“Oh,” Melody said. “I had to be there, right?”
“That’s it exactly. You had to be there.”
And you weren’t, Melody decided. You don’t really remember anything at all. You only pretend to because you never want anything to change.
This made sense, once she thought it through. She didn’t know by how many years, exactly, but her grandmother was a few younger than her grandfather. And he was barely able to remember the World Ago.
“I notice you’re okay with living in this trailer,” Melody said. “If everything from back then was so bad, how come we’re not in a log cabin?”
“The mouth on you,” her grandmother said with a huff and a sigh, but, too, she was grinning a little, until she wasn’t. “Just you watch yourself, playing around with that old junk. Be careful who sees you do it. Most people around here are happy with things the way they are. They won’t want to see the likes of you getting out of hand and forgetting your place.”
“My place? What is my place?” It was worth asking, even if she couldn’t imagine any answer that wouldn’t dismay her, and possibly horrify her.
Her grandmother wouldn’t look at her now, or wasn’t able to say more, and Melody took that as an answer anyway, maybe the worst of all, because her grandmother wasn’t a woman to hold back her opinion on anything.
She decided, just the same, that maybe she’d better take the gadgets back home, to her real home, and find a better hiding spot for them.
* * *
She planned to join her grandfather on the northern watchtower that night, and thought she’d do it alone, except she’d only crept six steps from her bed when Jeremy roused and demanded to know where she was going. This was something new, this refusal of his to sleep unless she was nearby. She couldn’t even sneak away once he was down. It was as if he had a field around him that just knew.
“Take me with you,” he s
aid, small and insistent, his hair sticking every which way hair could stick.
“It’s cold out,” she whispered. “We won’t be out but a minute or two before you’ll be whining to come back here, and I’ve got to see Grandpa longer than that.”
“No, I won’t! I’ll stay as long as you do!”
She scowled and shushed him. “You’ll wake Grandma.”
“So what if I do, it’s your fault.”
“Then get yourself dressed, and get it done before I count to a hundred, because once I do, I’m out the door with or without you.”
He actually needed to 112, but for Jeremy that was still pretty good, then they slipped out into the dark of night, creeping through and around the scattering of homes and kitchen gardens between their grandparents’ place and the northern tower. As soon as they ascended to the top platform, Jeremy curled up on the wood planks next to the cast-iron stove and, bathed in the radiant heat of the fire burning hidden within, promptly dropped back to sleep.
Her grandfather gazed fondly down at the boy, then shifted on his chair and drew his blanket around his shoulders and resumed his vigil with the night. Near his head hung a bell he’d never rung, at least not for anything to do with the raggedy men.
“Have they ever attacked?” she asked. “Ever once even looked like it?”
“Nope,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t tonight, or the next.”
“Why don’t they?” she asked, and wondered if even now, out there far beyond the gate, they were watching, scheming. There were raggedy women too, she thought, had to be, but once someone got raggedy enough it was hard to tell exactly what they were underneath.
“It doesn’t matter how much someone wants to take what you’ve got,” he said. “Most, if they’re not willing to pay with their lives for it, about all they’ll do is look and grumble.”
“Has anybody ever tried to run them off?”
“Many a time. They just scatter. They’re gone before you ever get there. And then, before long, they’re back again.”
