A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  We’re scavengers now, Mary thought, as they made their way through the debris to the highway where Silver and the dogs waited. This is how we’ll live. If we live. Like jackals at a carcass, we’ll live off the remains of a dead civilization. Her cold-numbed feet dragged, her fingers ached, and with every breath of chill air, she felt her internal temperature sink a fraction of a degree.

  Rachel leaned wearily against Silver’s flank. “Mary, we’d better get home. Let’s head for the beach. The tide should be out, and it’ll be easier going that way.”

  Mary wanted to object that they couldn’t go home yet. They hadn’t found any survivors. And there must be survivors in Shiloh. Somewhere. But she knew, as Rachel did, that if they didn’t get out of this enervating cold, they might not be able to count themselves among the survivors much longer. Tomorrow, the next day, they would, they must try again.

  With the aid of a car fender, they mounted Silver and at the next cross street turned west. Burned houses marked the way, and Mary was convinced that the somber sentinels would continue all the way to the sea. It was then that she saw, emerging out of the fog of snow, an open area surrounded by trees and shrubs untouched by fire. The deep green of azalea and rhododendron leaves under the snow was pathetically bright, and in the midst of this unravaged island stood a church: an old, white clapboard, picture-postcard church. Mary stared at it, expecting it to disappear, a phantom of her hope.

  But it didn’t disappear. It took on substance with Silver’s every step forward.

  “Rachel, do you see it?”

  “I see it. That’s the old Community Church.”

  At the back of the building a brick chimney rose above the ridgepole. There was no smoke coming from it. And yet—Mary focused on the space above the chimney. Yes, a wavering of the tree branches behind it. Heat waves.

  “The chimney! Rachel, there’s heat—a stove, something! Someone’s in there! This is where the survivors came!” She couldn’t wait for Silver’s slow gait to bring them closer. She slid off the mare’s back and ran toward the church, shouting, the dogs running with her, barking as if they shared her joy.

  “Mary! Mary, wait!”

  Mary didn’t hear Rachel, not until she caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Mary, if there is anyone in there, we don’t know who it might be!”

  With an effort, Mary tore her gaze away from the church to look at Rachel. “What?”

  “We don’t know who’s in there. It could be Rovers.”

  Mary took an aching breath. Rachel was right. She looked up at the chimney, at the wavering air above it. But someone was in there.

  They walked slowly toward the church, Rachel ordering the dogs to heel, her rifle ready in her hands. Mary listened intently, but the only sound was the rasp of their breathing. They were thirty feet from the entrance when one of the double doors swung open.

  Rachel snapped, “Mary, hold the dogs!” and stood with her rifle raised, aimed at the door.

  Mary knelt and grasped Shadow and Sparky’s collars, stared at the door, at what came out of it.

  A dog. A big, tawny dog, German shepherd in his lineage.

  He was carrying something in his mouth. He gazed at them with amber eyes, a ridge of hair rising on his shoulders, and for seconds the tension was borne out in silence.

  Until Mary recognized what the shepherd held in his mouth.

  A hand. A human hand.

  And she screamed.

  As if that sound were a cue, six more dogs scrambled, snarling, out of the door. The shepherd dropped his burden, baring a serrated arsenal of teeth as he led the attack, snow exploding under his paws. Sparky and Shadow barked and lunged against their collars, but Mary held on when her only impulse was to run. She flinched at the crash of the rifle. Rachel only fired into the air, but the shepherd stopped, then bolted into the trees south of the church, his pack at his heels. Neither Sparky nor Shadow stopped barking until the last dog had disappeared.

  Rachel knelt by Mary and said shakily, “You can let go of them now.”

  Mary loosed her rigid hold on the dogs’ collars. “It’s like something out of a Russian folktale—the wolf pack chasing the troika.”

  Rachel stroked Sparky’s head. “Dogs are only a few thousand years removed from wolves. They both survive by packing. Where’s Silver?”

  Silver had retreated to the street, and Rachel had to go retrieve her. The mare wasn’t anxious to approach the church, nodding her head nervously and pulling at the reins. Mary waited for Rachel, then together they approached the door, but a few paces short of it stopped, and Mary stared at the hand in the snow. A cracked arm bone was attached to it, hung with black-red, frayed muscle. Meat. Mary felt a painful surge in her stomach.

  Rachel only glanced at the hand. “The dogs were probably scavenging in the church. You won’t find anyone alive in there.”

  “But the chimney, the heat . . .”

  “Well, there’s the basement. The door is around at the back. Fellowship Hall, one of the hottest gambling spots in town.” Then when Mary looked at her blankly, she sighed. “Bingo. Mary, don’t you think if anyone was alive in there—”

  “No! Fellowship Hall. That’s where they’ll be!” And Mary turned away from the doubt in Rachel’s eyes, set off around the side of the church, kicking through the drifted snow, only vaguely aware that Rachel was following her. At the back of the church under a portico, she found the entrance to Fellowship Hall. She pounded and yelled, jerked at the doorknob, and finally the ice that sealed the door gave way.

  A landing, a short flight of stairs leading down into a pocket of dimness. “There’s another door, Rachel. Come on!”

  The survivors would be here. It made such perfect sense. A big room, underground, where they’d be safe from radiation, where it would be easy to keep warm. They must have some sort of nonelectric stove. Mary reached for the doorknob, but Rachel was shouting at her. “Can’t you smell that?”

  Mary couldn’t even hear her. She flung the door open and was three steps into the room before the smell hit her, as palpable as a blow: the sticky, foul smell of death. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, tried not to breathe, but her pounding heart demanded more air, forced her to inhale the hideous stink.

  A cavernous room with a low, beamed ceiling, the only light a pale glow from a propane stove near the door. Rows of folding tables had been put to use as beds. This had been a makeshift hospital. And now it was a charnel house, the table beds occupied by corpses shrouded in bloody, vomit-stained blankets. Her eyes fixed on the bodies nearest the light, on tumid faces smeared with the blood of uncontrollable hemorrhages, on gray skin speckled with red petechiae. The light faded into darkness a short distance from its source, but it was enough to delineate this chamber of horrors. It was enough, as the heat from the stove was enough to maintain the temperature at a level that sustained the processes of decay.

  “Lassa.” Rachel’s voice was muffled by her hand. “Oh, damn, they all died of Lassa. Mary, let’s get out of here!”

  Mary turned, lunged for the door, ran into Rachel, who had suddenly stopped, staring at the body of a man lying near the door where the glow of the stove lighted his bloated caricature of a face. He was fully dressed; he had apparently simply fallen there.

  Rachel whispered, “Reverend Gillis. This was his church.”

  Somehow, it intensified the horror to know this corpse had had a name. Mary looked into his swollen face and saw a tiny, flickering movement in his eyelids. “Rachel, he—he’s alive! Look at his eyes!”

  Rachel was trying to pull Mary toward the door. “He’s not alive. That’s only maggots.”

  Mary staggered, felt darkness closing in like fetid water. She stumbled out the door and up the steps, fell and crashed against the risers, heard panting cries that didn’t stop until she reached the o
uter door, until she sank to her knees and vomited in the snow.

  When the spasms stopped, her ears were ringing, shadows hovered at the edges of her vision. She took a handful of snow and let it melt in her mouth, spat it out. Finally she looked around, saw Rachel sitting on her heels, back braced against one of the columns supporting the portico, Shadow and Sparky crouched on either side of her, panting out clouds of vapor, ears flat against their heads. Rachel was pale, her eyes haunted. She asked, “Are you all right?”

  Mary nodded. She couldn’t seem to form even the simple word yes. She clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.

  Rachel rose. “I found the propane tank. The one that supplies the stove.” She gestured toward a white mound near the door. The snow had been brushed off the top to reveal a silvery surface bisected by a riveted seam.

  Rachel helped Mary to her feet, then took her arm and led her to the street. “Wait here,” she said, and in a few minutes returned with Silver and the dogs. Mary didn’t question her, didn’t speak. Rachel handed her Silver’s reins and a rope looped through both the dogs’ collars. “Hold them for me. Mary? Do you understand?”

  Mary didn’t understand her purpose, but she could still understand the words. Rachel walked toward the church, and Mary gripped the reins and rope, shivering uncontrollably, saw Rachel stop when she had covered half the distance to the church, then raise her rifle and, after a moment, fire. The recoil rocked her back. Mary gasped at the shock of the report, held fast against the animals’ lunging. The propane tank exploded with a dull thump. Orange flames billowed, attacked the white clapboards with a vicious crackling.

  By the time Rachel returned, whorls of flame were fanning out from the center of the explosion, smoke boiling up into the turbid air until the wind caught it, whipped it seaward. The crackle became a roar, and within minutes the back wall of the church shimmered with flames.

  Rachel nodded, her eyes closing. “Ashes to ashes . . .”

  Mary Hope stared into the flames, mesmerized by their shapes. Like the waters of a stream flowing over boulders, they too flowed, always the same and never the same, giving form to processes. Ashes to ashes. Yes, it was fitting; fire was fitting as an end.

  Rachel knelt by the stove and put a piece of wood on the fire as if it were an offering. Mary blinked. She wasn’t looking into the flames of the church. The cast-iron Franklin stove. The basement. The cave.

  She pulled the blanket around her, hands clenched in the rough wool. Her face was hot; the cold crept up her back. She felt the shift of the big, round hassock as Rachel sat down beside her. Rachel said nothing, and the weight of her silence drew Mary’s eyes to her face. The fire gave it a glow of color that was illusory. The truth was in her eyes, where there was no light except the reflected glint of fire.

  Mary turned away, watched the currents of the flames, felt the cold outside scratching at the windows. It infiltrated the earth and the walls of this cave, and only the fire kept it at bay. But the cold was patient; as patient as death.

  Yet it wasn’t cold that killed the people at the church. It was something hovering at the edge of life as it was defined: a virus, invisible as the cold and equally deadly.

  Had anyone at the Federal Emergency Management Agency taken that invisible factor into their calculations when they considered the survivability of a nuclear exchange?

  Mary gazed into the fire, and she had a vision of the heart of this continent: the vast plains where the wind swept unimpeded out of the Arctic. She saw the bombed cities, black cankers of ruin, and she saw the cities, towns, and villages that had not been struck by that terrible, swift lightning. How many were within the fallout plumes? That factor had been calculated. She remembered the maps FEMA had published. On those maps most of the eastern third of the country, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, was blackened by overlapping plumes. How long does it take to die of radiation poisoning? She remembered the columns of figures expressing that horror statistically. That factor FEMA had calculated to the last decimal point. By now it was over for most of the people in the black plumes.

  But in the heart of this continent there was a town that was in the white of the map. A town where tens of thousands of people had survived the war. But how would they survive the invisible armies of disease? Had FEMA calculated that?

  There was a hospital in this town. No lights in its windows now, no electricity to run the miraculous machines, no fuel for the auxiliary generators, no medications after the first onslaught of sick and injured. And there never had been a medication that would cure Lassa.

  And had FEMA calculated the factor of anarchy, of madness: the madness unleashed out of terror and despair, as explosive and as destructive as the bombs? Would that small plains town, untouched by the bombs, still be a burned-out ruin? Yes, she could see the blighted blocks of rubble. Not all of the town had burned. No. There had been a war in its streets, and someone had won. Road gangs, Klan, NRA, American Legion, National Guard, Army, Apies—the lines were vague now. And who would maintain law and order when all that weighed in the scales of justice was survival?

  She saw the town under a dusky, frigid sky, desolately isolated. The communication system that had been the warp and woof of this nation had succumbed to EMP. Electromagnetic pulse, the nemesis FEMA had tried to deny as it had nuclear winter. A few radios were working. They buzzed with static and pleas for help.

  No one in this town could answer those pleas. Burned buildings marked out the grid of vacant streets. No vehicles moved, no one walked in those streets, nothing lived in any of the places where people had gathered to seek help and comfort.

  There were still some survivors crouching in storm cellars or basements. They had survived cold, disease, and anarchy. But they would not survive hunger—not when the last of their stored or scavenged food was gone, when they looked out of their caves and saw nothing but snow and ice for a thousand miles in every direction.

  And Mary saw this town replicated ten-thousandfold around the world. A world enshrouded in death.

  No. Perhaps not an entire world. The southern hemisphere might be spared some of the devastation. But no southern nation would survive without catastrophic disruptions in their climate, their food and energy supply systems, their economic and social structures. And would they survive Lassa? Mary remembered a newscaster coolly reporting at least a week before the End that two million people had died of Lassa in Australia and five million in South Africa.

  I guess we deserved it. We treated this lovely planet so negligently, we treated each other so cruelly.

  We deserved it.

  “No, we didn’t deserve it. There were billions of people who never did anything in their lives to deserve what happened to them.”

  Rachel’s words roused Mary, bewildered her because she didn’t realize she’d said anything aloud. She wondered how much of what she’d been thinking she had spoken. She said nothing more now.

  Rachel sat hunched in her down jacket, hands spread in front of her to catch the heat. Shadow nuzzled her knee for reassurance, but she had none to offer. She said, “We’ll have to move one of the wood stoves into the garage, or we’ll lose all the rabbits and chickens.”

  Mary closed her eyes, and she was surprised that the first sound to emerge from her mouth was an approximation of a laugh.

  “Of course, we’re going to lose them, Rachel. Sooner or later we’re going to lose . . .” Everything. We’re going to lose us. Sooner or later.

  The wind, the voice of the cold, echoed its dirge in the chimney. Eventually Rachel spoke again.

  “Strange, isn’t it? I left for Shiloh this morning with very little hope. I came home with very little hope. You left with a great deal of hope and came home with none.”

  Mary pressed her hands to her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t get enough breath.

  “Why? Why should I sti
ll have any hope? Hope for what? This is what they call nuclear winter, the winter of our ultimate discontent. The last winter because it will never end! This is—so why . . . why . . . ?”

  I want to cry, she thought as the words poured out like sand from a rusted cup. I want to cry, but I can’t even do that. Dry. All dried up and shriveled inside, dead already. Brain dead. Soul dead.

  Rachel was watching her. Mary could feel that, but she stared into the fire, and at this moment she felt detached from herself, from Rachel. She looked down, as if from a distance, on the two of them in a beleaguered island of warmth and light in the chill darkness. And Rachel said, “I’ve been thinking about what separates homo sapiens from its animal cousins.”

  Mary didn’t attempt a response to that. She listened from far away to the sounds of the words.

  Rachel said, “I’ve been told that animals can’t imagine. Yet they dream. Isn’t a dream imaginary? I’ve been told that animals can’t imagine their own deaths, so they don’t dread death. It’s easier to believe that, I suppose, if you have to kill animals. Or if you take pleasure in killing them. But if that were true, the gazelle would just stand quietly while the lion breaks its neck. No, when it comes to death, what separates us from our cousins isn’t the capacity to imagine and dread it. The difference is choice.”

  Mary looked around at her, returned to herself, willing eyes and mind into focus. Rachel was regarding her with a gaze shadowed with sorrow, but there was no recognition of defeat in it. “Choice is the measure of our humanity, Mary. Death is inevitable, but until it becomes imminent, we still have a choice. We can choose to die, or we can choose to live. I can’t give you any reason why you should go on hoping or living, or why I should. The time may come when I’ll know, one way or the other. But I’m not ready to surrender yet. And you’re wrong about one thing: this winter will end. I’ve read the TTAPS report. I don’t know what kind of spring will follow, or whether we can survive until spring comes. But I intend to find out. That’s my choice.”