Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

Laura slept next to him, gray with ash, still mostly buried in it. The contents of the backpack were strewn out in front of her from when she’d rummaged through it: the tent, a couple of unfolded T-shirts, the packets of ramen. Eddie ran his hands over it all.

  A sudden fear overtook him.

  He hadn’t packed the knife.

  Laura’s knees had poked through the ash—two islands of skin. Ash was in her hair. Her face was streaked with it. Eddie could see the dark spot in front of her arms where the water had released from the jug on impact.

  Soon, it would be light enough for them to be seen from above.

  The can of wasp spray was almost empty.

  They had to move right away.

  “Laura,” he said.

  When he touched her shoulder, she slumped to the side and her arms rolled out of the ash, which had clotted on her wrists.

  Eddie’s hands shook; his fingers refused to bend. He tried to touch her, but only bumped his hands against her shoulder. Beneath her, like an artifact, was the black handle of the knife.

  It was covered in bloody smudges.

  There were sounds. Low mewling noises. An animal in the woods, maybe. He would lie there and wait for it to come—he would wait to be ripped apart.

  He heard the sounds again.

  They were sounds that he was making.

  He draped his body over hers, and her head moved sickeningly beneath his chest, her jawbone digging into his ribs. His face pressed into the ash beside her and he breathed it in. He could die this way, too, simply by breathing—he would drown himself in the ash.

  But he couldn’t do it. He lifted his face and scraped his tongue with his fingernails and spat.

  He picked up the knife. The heaviness shocked him, the length of the blade, its sharpness. It seemed only an instrument of terrible violence, and it trembled in his hand.

  His girl. Oh, God. His wife.

  Beneath smears of gray, veins still branched along his own wrists. He touched the blade to one of the raised channels but couldn’t make himself push. He moved it to the bulge of flesh beneath his thumb, sliding it diagonally across. A thin edge of skin lifted up as easily as the corner of a page, and a bulb of blood emerged.

  He touched the blade back to his wrist and closed his eyes. She’d sliced where she knew the blood would run. Would one cut be enough? Or would he feel the pain, and then have to cut again?

  His arms were weak. He could barely raise them.

  If only he could cry. His face was hot, but his throat was clear. He could breathe. The air was the same air, and he dug into the ash around her, piling it up to her neck. When he got to her head, he stopped. He couldn’t bury her face. Her eyes were closed.

  “Talk to me,” he whispered. “Laura.”

  He reached to wipe the ash from her cheek. Her head wouldn’t stay still—it lolled back, a terrible weight atop her neck.

  When the water came back, her body would wash downstream. Until then, it would swell in the heat like all the rest. He held the knife. How many times had he sharpened it on a rod when he could have been pounding it dull with a hammer?

  It was too late to think about that.

  Her head was out of the ash, but not by very much. No one would see it. If this was her grave, it was almost hidden. The sky was yellow and hot. He could feel it burning up the skin on his face and arms. His neck was moist again, and he cursed it. He was not yet close to dying.

  He held the knife in both hands, like a sword he would drive into the ground. He wouldn’t allow her body to swell. He would keep her down beneath the ash. He closed his eyes and pressed the tip into the mound of her chest, leaning until it twisted in and sunk.

  “Oh, God,” he cried.

  He pulled it out and forced himself to lean down on it again and again. He wanted to feel as if the blade were forcing its way between his own ribs—for each incision to be an incision through his own flesh and lungs.

  But he felt nothing but the heat of the day. The work of stabbing his wife was only making it hotter. He held the knife in front of him—a dull reflective silver—and tried to find his veins again, but couldn’t. He couldn’t even look. Steve McCarthy had said his systems would shut down, but his thirst hadn’t even stopped. That would be the sign—when the thirst went away.

  In front of him was the boy. He stood along the bank where the ash hadn’t piled.

  “Stay there,” Eddie said.

  The boy stood very still. He seemed held there by the weak filament of Eddie’s gaze. Then he started to turn.

  “No,” Eddie called. “Wait!”

  He ran, and Eddie raised himself from the ash, tumbling through until it was shallower underfoot. The boy picked his way along deep drifts like he knew them by heart. Eddie’s knees bumped together. He wasn’t ready to run yet.

  At the bottom of the spillway, the boy ran across Route 29, to where the park picked up on the other side. Eddie saw the back of his burnt hair as he went down among the boulders following the streambed. There was sand where the pools had been—a streak in each, like a cat’s eye. He felt his chest strain, but forced his legs to follow. When the trail leveled off, the ash was almost gone. There had been a sandy bank there. The boy was getting smaller in the distance and then he was gone.

  “Hey!” Eddie called. “Come back!”

  The trees up the hill were only burnt on the side facing the stream, so that each was two-toned. Near the streambed were blackened shrubs. He kicked one and it collapsed over his shoe. The air was close down there. He sat on a rock and looked at the scrape on his wrist. It hadn’t even bled.

  The knife was back on the trail. He’d left it there. He’d left everything. But when he looked into the woods, she was there, too—she was all around him—and when he pushed his fists into his eyes to dispel the image, she wouldn’t go away.

  He pushed harder, grinding down with his knuckles. He saw her hair—black and straight and moving around her shoulder as she turned her head. He could taste it in his mouth. The hopelessness in his stomach began to spread.

  He hit his fist into his ear, and hit it again until an ache reached down his jaw and his skin went numb.

  He thought of Steve McCarthy, who had talked of taking it slow—how that was the only way to survive. But Steve McCarthy hadn’t really known how long a body could last in the heat without water because he’d been drinking all the while. Steve McCarthy had thought that moving slowly had been the key, but Eddie knew now that the key was moving fast. Eddie could see Steve McCarthy’s shoulder bursting open. He could see the look on his face the moment the jug had dropped from his hand—as if he no longer shared a history with his own arms and legs. Eddie felt it, too. If his body was not his own, then he owed it nothing, depended on it for nothing, and was free. There was nothing to keep him there.

  And so he ran.

  If the boy was up ahead, Eddie would find him.

  He ran and his legs did not give up. He would run until he caught the boy or until the thirst vanished and he could run no more. He was going as fast as he could go with his eyes open, but then a strange revelation arrived. He suspected he could go even faster with them closed.

  It was true.

  Seeing had only been slowing him down. With his eyes closed, the ground turned to air and his body made no sound. He couldn’t feel his legs moving or his jaw aching. He couldn’t feel the flutter in his chest.

  He went until the toe of his shoe clipped an imperfection in the path and he shot forward in the manner of a base runner stealing third. The skin of his palms tore into white strips, and more blood welled beneath. His palms were already bruising, and he felt a healthy, functioning pain taunting him with its throb. He had stores of wretched life left in him.

  If the boy was still ahead of him, he would have to rest, too. Eddie lay down on the rocks and saw above him the great metal underside of the Beltway. He’d already come this far. He remembered running this trail and hearing the groans of big rigs overhead thumping and tap
ering off. All was quiet now, even his heart—though it was beating gently. How many more miles before the trail emptied out and he was walking on the highway? It would be flat up there and maybe he’d see some drivers. Then it was Route 50 and over the bridge, and he’d be just eight miles from Laura’s parents’ house.

  Laura’s parents would treat him like their son, despite the tragedy he was part of. They would grieve for Laura together. She was all they had. But now they’d have him. They’d lost a grandchild in the past and this would be too much for them alone.

  Next to him was a charred stump. It must have been a stump before all the rest was burned because the top was chainsaw-flat. Lying on the stump was a string of colored beads—butterfly shaped, a sorbet orange, green, and pink. Fishing line held it together. A little girl’s bracelet. Someone else had placed it there, unkinked as it was. A lost and found right there in the woods, as though whoever it was had hoped the owner would be walking by and find it. He held it in his palm and ran his thumb over the indentations stamped into the bits of plastic. Then he laid it back down, a scar of color on the dirty wood.

  His arms and legs were sore, but his vision was clearer than before. He got up and ran with his eyes open this time, and another bit of color bloomed in front of him. Thirty feet ahead of him a flower was poking from the ash. He stopped and put his hand on his knees. The flower’s redness was evidence of something.

  As he approached, though, the shape of it changed. It wasn’t a flower, after all. It was the frill of a little shirt. A girl was there, her hair clumped up. Her cheek was coated in a film of soot. Eddie touched it, and in the track his finger left, the skin was swollen pink. The rest of her body was covered in dirt and ash. Two men were down ahead of her, but all their color was gone. One looked at the sky, his eyeballs dead and bulging.

  Eddie walked around them and kept on going. After a while, the thirst arrived again and started spreading. Laura’s parents were on a well, and if their power was out, then her father had surely rigged a system to get the water to the surface. That was a man who wouldn’t let his wife go thirsty; Eddie was sure. He admired Laura’s father: whatever his hands could build, he built it for his family.

  Through the trees, Eddie watched the sky slide down like a patch of oil. It was amber at the horizon. Black shadows swam through the limbs and gave the impression of people running. Every few minutes, he stopped and stood still, looking around him, but there was no one there.

  The ash was thinner, and he could see the trail again where it curved along the bank. The ground was soft and brownish gray. The shadows in the trees looked like children. He saw them running, but didn’t believe he really saw them. It was just the amber light playing through the branches.

  Soon, he stopped to take a piss.

  “Ha!” he said, shouting at his zipper like a madman.

  But nothing came out. He unclenched the muscle in his groin, and a warmth spread between his legs. He thought maybe he’d wet himself, but when he felt there, he was dry. His fingers tingled, but that was okay; his headache was okay, too. His headache protected him from the heat.

  Another child streaked across his vision. It was just a shadow in the trees, but Eddie called out. Steve McCarthy had told him to sit and rest—that if he sat and rested the feeling would come back into his legs. But Steve McCarthy was a liar, and Eddie didn’t have time to sit and rest. His window was closing. He needed to get to the bridge. He needed to get to Laura’s parents’ house.

  He ran on wobbling legs, trying to ignore the children in the trees. One of them was gray and thronged with streaks of light, which blinded him, and then there was a single child, running. Eddie left the trail and followed him up into the tree line.

  “Come back here!” he called.

  The ash was heavy there, up to his shins. But higher on the ridge, the trees were trees again, unburned. They had a rotted, hollow look. The boy looked over his shoulder and zigzagged gleefully, as if Eddie had wandered into a game of tag.

  “Stop!” he called. His voice was harsh. The boy turned and stood where he was.

  Eddie kept his arms at his sides, as though any sudden movement would spook him. The boy’s left hand was palsied and twitched at his hip in the manner of a gunslinger’s. His hair still stood on end, his shirt the same color as his arms and neck, the cloth so tattered it looked like rotting skin.

  Eddie tried to hold him with the sternness of his voice. “Where are your parents?” he called.

  The boy clutched his arms at the elbows across his chest.

  Eddie didn’t move. “Why aren’t you at home?”

  The boy looked at him with muted eyes.

  Eddie tried to walk, but his legs wouldn’t follow. He pitched forward, and the boy ran. Eddie watched from where he’d fallen. There were dead leaves in his face so dry his chin made a powder of them against the earth.

  “Wait,” he called. The boy grew fainter in the woods, and Eddie squinted hard, hoping to find traces of motion that he could connect together into a path.

  There was a sound that may have been branches breaking, but may have been no sound at all. He heard only his breath and then a buzzing.

  When he opened his eyes, the buzzing was gone. The woods were silent, but the sky had changed color. The amber at the edges was darker, and overhead was gray. He rolled onto his side and grabbed his thighs to get his legs beneath him. He leaned into the trunk of a skinny tree, and as he pushed himself up, the trunk broke like wafer candy. It was a tall tree and the upper branches whizzed through the air far away from him. The headache was gone. He could stand. He started slowly, but soon he could walk and then he could run again.

  He ran in the direction the boy had disappeared, watching the ground to see where he’d disturbed it. His own feet left deep imprints among the leaves, but it was as if the boy had floated over them.

  It was strange the way his energy left him—like a plug had been pulled at the base of his spine, all of it draining out. He imagined the boy in front of him, the way he’d looked over his shoulder devilishly—as if he’d been the one to pull the plug when Eddie wasn’t looking.

  First the sky above him went blurry and then he doubled over and couldn’t lift himself up. He stumbled through the woods, his eyes so heavy he almost didn’t see the refrigerator on the ground in front of him. He almost ran right into it. It was on its side, as white as a box of light. Four legs hung over it. Above the legs, two bodies sat.

  The boy came out from behind the refrigerator and stood next to the two men’s legs. He grinned at Eddie, as though he’d won by getting there first.

  “Keep going where you’re going, pal,” one of the men said. He was shirtless and wore a heavy metal chain around his neck, the kind a bike messenger might use to lock up in the city, except a cross hung from it. The other man reached over the edge of the fridge and twisted the handle of the samurai sword that leaned against it.

  Behind them, tarps were tied to the trees and Eddie could make out bodies lying beneath them on blankets. The tarps were brown and green and red, and strung at different angles like the rooftops of a far-off arid city.

  The boy walked back and forth, catlike, between the legs of the two men, running his hand along the metal of the fridge. They didn’t pay him any mind.

  When the man with the chain bent over, the chain stayed motionless against his chest. Eddie stepped closer. It was a tattoo of a chain and a cross. The other got off the fridge and held the samurai sword. He addressed the tip to Eddie.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Eddie’s throat was too dry to speak. The air hurt going in. He clutched at it with his hands as though he were choking.

  The one with the tattoo tapped a knuckle next to where he sat on the metal door of the refrigerator. “This isn’t for you,” he said. “It’s for us and the women.”

  Eddie pushed hard with his stomach muscles and made a squeaking sound. The effort forced him to sit, and he looked up at them from the ground. />
  “We got an arrangement with the moms,” the tattooed one said.

  “Nothing left for you,” said the other. “Go back the way you came.”

  “Gary …” the tattooed one said.

  “What? He’s a dead man. Look at him. It’s too sad.”

  He propped the sword against the side of the refrigerator and raised a canteen to his lips, tilting his head back. The canteen was green and wide, with a cap connected by a bendable plastic strip. Eddie had had one just like it when he was young. He used to play “lost soldier,” hacking at trees with a pocketknife. The memory was strong enough to drop the walls from where he sat—so that he was nine years old again, deep in the woods behind his parents’ house.

  The two men stood up and Gary opened the refrigerator door, bending the upper half of his body into it. When he came up he was bear-hugging a watercooler jug against his chest. He leaned it on the side of the refrigerator and took off the cap.

  “Give it here,” he said, and the other man held the canteen. “Hold still,” he said. He touched the lip of the jug to the lip of the canteen and poured out two pulses of water.

  Eddie clutched his throat again and rasped. He skidded forward on one butt cheek, and then the other. The backs of his legs pounded silently against the earth.

  “Get up. Get out of here,” Gary said. “This isn’t for you.”

  “You don’t just get precious things for free,” the tattooed one said. “Supply and demand. Get it?”

  “If there’s no supply,” Gary said, “you don’t get to demand it.”

  “And he works for a bank.”

  “Used to work.”

  “Yeah, used to. What do you do now, then?”

  “This.”

  “Right. This.”

  They seemed to have forgotten Eddie for the moment, talking as they were.

  He moved closer, legs out in front of him, trying to use his hands but his hands weren’t responding. They flopped on limp wrists when he pushed them on the ground.

  “What is this?” Gary said, his voice going high. “Go die somewhere.”

  “Gary …”

  “He should have gone with the rest of them.”