by Brian Hodge
“Why not just kill them? It doesn’t seem like it’d be hard to pick them off with a rifle. They’re not us.”
“We’re still better than that. Or we say we are. Maybe if we repeat it often enough it’ll even be true someday.”
“I’d get bored. If I was them, I’d’ve gotten bored a long time ago and gone home.”
Her grandfather made a humming sound in his throat. “The way they look at it, I’m sure they think they are home.”
Manning the tower was a good job for him, because his eyes were still sharp, and he said he didn’t need much sleep anymore, and anyway, her grandmother snored even if she would deny it with her dying breath, so it was the best way for him to enjoy some peace and quiet at night.
“Do you ever hear them, out there?”
“Not much, and not very often.”
“What about from the other directions?”
“From the woods, you mean?” He sounded perplexed. “No, they don’t seem to creep around that direction, not that anyone’s ever noticed.”
“I don’t mean hearing the raggedies so much as hearing … anything.”
He turned to her, and she imagined his eyes had gone narrow, the way they did when there was more to say and they both knew it. “Anything covers a lot, sweet pea. What are you getting at?”
She told him about the whispers in the woods that seemed only for the ears of the very young and the old. He had to have heard about it, at least. A thing like that couldn’t have just been a story kids told each other. If there actually were such a thing as kids anymore.
“So you’re saying I’m old, then.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t feel old.” He stared east, into the black of the forest night. “Maybe because my ears are pretty good too, same as my eyes. Yeah, you can hear things from out there and not always know what they are. Now, you get a fox squabbling with a raccoon, you know what that is. But other things? They’re not so clear and maybe they do sound like words sometimes.”
“What do you think it is?”
He chewed on that awhile, then looked at Jeremy, still curled in sleep, as his lips murmured something that made it sound like he wasn’t having any fun, wherever he thought he was. Melody reached down to stroke his shoulder, and he settled.
“Maybe it’s like that,” her grandfather said. “Maybe the woods are dreaming.”
She liked the sound of this, even if it made no sense to her. “What could they have to dream of?”
“All their tomorrows and forevers, maybe. And what we are to them now, instead of what we used to be.”
She’d never heard him talk this way, but then, she’d never asked. “What was that?”
“That part of the world, we used to think we were its masters. Maybe we were, maybe we weren’t, but now we for sure aren’t. All we can do is build a wall around a bunch of houses and trailers and one of our fields, and hope that too much of the rest doesn’t creep in, and stays out there with your raggedy men. And as for what we are to it all now … I couldn’t even begin to guess.”
Now she started to reconsider. Maybe she didn’t like the sound of this after all. She’d spent most of her years thinking that her father knew everything there was that was important enough to know, but he hadn’t even known enough to not forget about not killing. And if her grandfather didn’t either, the world seemed like a bigger place, darker and more unknowable than it had seemed already.
“There was a girl I once knew,” he went on. “This was before I took up with your grandmother, so it really was way back. Tara … that was her name. She was another one like me, just old enough to remember what it was like before the Day the Sun Roared. So she knew what things were like before, enough to compare. She had herself some strange ideas.”
He’d loved her—Melody could hear it in his voice, every word. By now she remembered less and less about her mother, who’d died bringing Jeremy into the world, mostly fading moments, and she always wished she could remember more about the kind of woman who would’ve named her daughter Melody. And now, from the tone of her grandfather’s voice, she wished she could’ve known this Tara woman too.
“She had this idea that there was something alive about the world, especially in places like the woods and the prairies and mountains and rivers, and that it was barely hanging on by a thread when the sun had its day. And that after the power lines went dead, we lost hold of those chains and shackles we’d had on the earth, so it was going to start to come back.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I couldn’t say. But nothing I’ve seen since convinces me she was wrong.”
“What happened to her?”
He took some time to prepare himself for this one. Finally, “She was okay as long as we were roaming. But once this place started coming together…” He pointed into the darkness. “She said it called to her. That spot over there at the edge of the north field, where you’ve been going in to meet with your dad? She went in about there. Never came out again.” He seemed to have forgotten his arm was still pointing, hanging in the air until he remembered to put it down again. “Not a week goes by that I don’t expect her to step out again, same as she was then, like nothing’s changed.”
“What would you do if she did?”
This made him laugh. “Ask if she could even recognize who I am anymore.”
He seemed to not want to say anything for a while, so she shared the silence with him, and soothed Jeremy when he needed it. They watched the night beneath the moon and the river of stars, the night in all its shades of darkness, and she’d never known there were so many. But then, she’d never watched like this before.
“See that?” he finally said, pointing in the direction of the woods, only higher, not at the trees, but above them.
It was a light, dim, and where it came from, she didn’t know, but it lingered and grew until it seemed as bright as a lantern, only colder, a cold and fuzzy light. It bobbed along for a bit before she noticed a few others scattered across the horizon, and then the first one sank beyond sight amid the trees. They roved like fireflies in the summer meadows until, one by one, they too drifted out of sight.
“What were they?” she asked.
“How should I know?” her grandfather said. “But my guess is, something you never would’ve seen before the whispers started.”
Tears, she thought after staring at them for a time. That was what they were. Tears of light, falling against the endless void of darkness, with no telling who or what was capable of shedding them.
Here in the village, they had a saying she’d been hearing ever since she could remember: Out of the death of the old, arises the new. It had always made sense before, because people seemed to use it like they were talking about the civilizations of then and now … if in fact civilization was really what they had here.
The saying didn’t have to be wrong, but maybe it was a lot more right than anyone realized, because it also referred to the soul of the world, and what was now possible in it, and everything that was most real and true.
* * *
Soon came the day that when she saw her father, it was so much worse than the time before, she was surprised he was still letting her see him at all. It wasn’t a man on his back anymore. It was past that, past time for thinking of Tom Harkin as a man, even a dead man. He was just a thing now, a putrid thing that hung in and out of his skin and fouled the air around him, along with every part of her father that he touched and smeared and leaked on.
“What’s that you’ve got in your sack?” he asked. His voice was weaker, and his eyes were pinkish, the skin beneath them like puffy red half-moons.
“Nothing much,” she said. “Just some stuff I’m taking into the woods.”
“It looks heavy.”
Seeing him now, it was the first time she had a truly bad feeling about all this since the start of it, and she’d accepted not just what was happening, but the chance for hope. Hope, on its own, didn’t have to sme
ll what she was smelling. She inched closer to where her father was half lying, half squatting before a tree, then realized with a jolt that he’d been using the tree to rub against, like a bear with an itchy back, grinding Tom Harkin away a layer at a time.
“Daddy…?” She reached out to touch his cheek, and it felt as hot as the iron griddle on the wood stove. “Are you going to be okay a little longer?”
He shut his eyes. A thick tear pearled in one corner. “An animal was eating on him last night. I don’t know what. Nothing very big, but I could feel it tugging pretty hard. I couldn’t move. All I could think of was … was how was it going to know where Tom ends and I begin.”
She wouldn’t cry. She would not cry.
“I’m not even sure myself anymore.” Her father’s voice started to break too. “He talks to me now. I know he can’t. I know that. But that doesn’t shut him up.”
“Yeah?” She had no idea whether it was better to humor her father or set him straight. “What does he have to say?”
“I don’t have the heart to tell you,” he said, but she must’ve glared at him severely enough for bringing it up in the first place that he relented. “He says he’ll see me soon. He says we’ll be roaming these woods forever, him and me.”
She sneered at the very idea. “He always was more liar than not.”
Melody scowled at the ghastly head bobbling over her father’s shoulder, its eyes a couple of milky-looking plums and its rotten-breathed mouth open like a cross between a landed fish and a drooling idiot. Would it be cheating if she went back for a knife and cut the head from its neck? Maybe that would quiet him down to her father’s content. Maybe give Daddy something to do, too, like find a hole and throw the ignorant head into it, along with its hateful ideas.
“How’s Jeremy?” he asked.
“Ready to see you again.”
She said it with hope, like there was no doubt in the world this would happen, but it clearly gave her father a pain to hear it.
“Does he even understand one bit of this?”
“He understands dead, enough. He just doesn’t want to have to understand it for you.”
“Tell him…” her father said, then drifted off, all puffy red eyes and skin like sweating cheese. “Tell him I’ve gone to go find your mom, and it’s got to be one or the other. Tell him there’s no going back and forth.”
“If it comes to that,” she said, and grabbed her sack, and before she left she kissed her father on his feverish cheek, the side opposite the rotting head, so it wouldn’t feel so much like they were being watched. She let it linger, so he would remember it awhile longer, and maybe the act would be enough to sustain him another day.
* * *
There were no maps for this, nor anything in any book she’d ever opened, but then, even if she had every book from the World Ago stacked in front of her, she doubted there would be a line in any of them to advise her when she’d gone far enough. Those had all been written for one world, and this was another.
She’d walked and she’d walked, shifting the heavy sack from one arm to the other, and her feet had crunched so many brittle leaves that she no longer heard them, and now, finally, it felt right to stop. It just did. She had to trust that.
Women knew things, knew them without knowing quite how—they just did. Which scared the men sometimes, some of them, so that had to be a good thing. They looked at her like she was a woman now, and that part of it didn’t feel so good, but maybe the time had come to own it anyway, if it meant she would know things too.
It was a stump she’d found, all on her own, as big around as a barrel and leveled across the top from some ancient meeting with a saw. Long enough ago for the wood to look soft and welcoming, with scabs of lichen and a beard of green moss. It was a table now, one more example of the new rising up from the death of the old.
Melody opened her sack and pulled out the first thing to fill her hand, a phone that hadn’t carried a voice for decades, and she set it in the middle of the stump. She groped in the bag for the one thing that, more than any other, made it so heavy, and came out with a rock the size of a flattened potato. At first she’d thought to use a brick for this, but no, what if they didn’t like that—the square edges of it, the man-madeness of it. The stone was rounded and smooth, as only a river could leave it. They would know what it was.
She held the stone high, then brought it down on the phone, and it hurt almost as much as if she’d smashed her own hand.
“Do you see this?” she called out to whatever would listen. “This is for you! They call it a sacrifice.”
She loaded up another one from the bag—a camera, she thought it was called—and it came apart into more pieces than she would ever know how to put back together.
“These mean something to me! But I figure you’d be just as happy if they never work again. The way my grandpa talks, every one of them was like another link in the chains that held you down.”
Melody pulverized another that was nearly all window, until fragments of green plastic rattled out of its mangled shell. It hadn’t even mattered that it never worked—this one just felt especially good under her fingers.
“Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but either way, they still mean a lot to me.” Her chest was hitching with the refusal to cry at the surrender of it all. “But I’m giving them to you. If it’s your world now, then maybe you’ll like them this way better. There’s still one thing I love more than these, and what they mean, and I don’t want to have to give my father up. I don’t want to see him follow that asshole Tom Harkin into the earth too. Not if there’s the least chance.”
She battered and she smashed, and despite the perfectly good reasons for it, still, it felt like killing some better future before she’d had a chance to enjoy even the tiniest taste of it.
“All you’ve got to do is spare my daddy from the Rot,” she begged whatever might have paused to hear. “Because he’s got to protect me. I need him between me and those other men, and he’s all I’ve got that can do it. All you’ve got to do is help him keep well enough to live through this. The … the microbes in him, they’re more a part of your world than ours. Tell them to leave him alone. They’ll listen. They have to listen…”
It had never seemed any clearer than it did now: the people and the forces that meant to destroy would always win, always come out on top over the ones that wanted to build. The world and everything in it was just geared that way, made to fail, made to fall. The most you could do was draw your line in the dirt and hunker down behind it and keep the worst on the other side of the line where it belonged, and try your best to stop it from crossing over for one more day.
She smashed until her sack was empty and there was nothing left, then she took handfuls of pieces that were still on the stump and threw them into the air and let them fall where they may. Then she sat down in the middle of them and screamed until her lungs ached, and shucked her sweater to go bare armed, and used a piece of the rubble to scratch at her skin because she remembered a story about some man that God was tormenting who sat around scraping himself with a chunk of broken pottery. It had turned out all right for him in the end. Do a thing like that, and they had to know you were sincere.
Then that drama, too, played itself out, and she had no idea how long she’d stayed out here, just knew that the sun was nowhere near where it had been when she’d started. Treetops swayed and leaves rustled and birds called in the distance and the blood dried and she was spent, utterly spent, and doubted she could stand and run even if a bear ambled up and mistook her for lunch.
She might not even much mind.
Maybe this was how prayers got answered now. The bad still happened, but the Powers’ idea of kindness was hollowing you out so you didn’t feel it anymore.
And when, at last, she heard the footsteps, she thought there it was, the bear, right on cue … but on second thought it seemed like any bear worth his teeth would either be a lot louder or a lot quieter. You’d hea
r him coming a mile away or never hear him at all. These were just footsteps, and not even quite right. More like the idea of footsteps that someone was putting in her mind.
Because, if you were all kinds of wise, that’s what you’d do to set a girl at ease when you came up on her, and there was something about you that wasn’t quite human, and not animal, vegetable, or mineral, either.
Melody peered up at her from the forest floor, afraid to blink. There was something about the woman, if a woman this truly was, that wasn’t wholly there, yet was more there than just there. Like stained glass, Melody decided after a few moments. She’d been in a church before, on the scavenging trips, a real church from the World Ago. It had been a sunny day, and she’d never seen such brilliant colors in her life. Saints and shepherds, green grass and blue skies, even the reddest fires of Hell, lit by the shining sun … yet she knew one flung rock could put an end to any of them.
The delicate clarity was like that all over again, Melody and the sun and this woman-thing in between, either filtering some of the light through her or throwing off some of her own. Neither option was particularly comforting, when you got down to it.
“All right,” she said, looking Melody up and down, and the mess she’d made of herself. “If you want it this badly, all right.”
“Just … just like that?”
“It’s never just like that.”
Melody stared, because there was something about her that was familiar, even if she couldn’t say what or how or why. But she too was a woman now, Melody had to remind herself, and women knew things.
“Is your name Tara?” she asked. “Or did it used to be?”
But no, that wasn’t possible. How long had it been since her grandfather had watched his one true love walk into the woods and never come out again? That woman, she would’ve been young then, not much older than Melody was now. This woman, while she wasn’t as young as all that, wasn’t old, either.
“No, that couldn’t be,” Melody said. Still, the way her grandfather had spoken of Tara had made her seem so familiar. “That just … No.”
