by Paula Guran
So I did just that: I yanked her up to her feet and got us moving again, despite her exhaustion.
You smell them first, long before you see them. It’s a mixed blessing—scent is a fickle sense to have to rely on. The stink of decaying meat keeps you on your toes but you can’t tell what direction it’s coming from. You could walk right into the ghoul and not know it. They don’t make much noise. They never talk or cough or sneeze.
I had him in my nose for most of the afternoon, on and off. Once I thought I saw him but it was only slacks, a whole line of them on the crest of a hill. They walked in single file, the one in front missing most of the flesh from his skull. Just red-shot eyes rolling in a blank skull. Their clothes, filthy and torn, still kept the colors of the old time. Some of those colors never fade. In red and blue and purple T-shirts and dresses they looked almost merry up there, silhouetted against the setting sun. They walked without looking to the side, without knowing where they headed. This is their world now and they’re safe within it as long as the don’t get too close to the Stores. I kept the girl down, hidden under a berry bush until they were gone just to take care.
In the middle of an overgrown housing development I hauled Winona over the splintered remains of a picket fence and into a house that had only been partly burned down, most of its roof missing but the walls solid as when they were put up. The stink of the ghoul was everywhere—he couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away, even if he was upwind. Inside I held the door closed by shoving furniture up against it. It was the best I could do short of boarding us in and that’s never a good idea. I let the girl collapse on an old water-stained sofa and searched the place. Green saplings grew through the floorboards of the living room while old pictures, still bright and fresh, lined the stairway to the upstairs. Smiling people out in the sunshine, boats on clean water. The frames of the pictures were riddled with wormcast and some had rotted away altogether.
Night came down, early as it does in October. The girl refused to sleep on any of the house’s beds they were so infested with bugs. Instead she wanted to stay up and talk. I sat in one corner of an upstairs room under a hole in the roof, the spring-lance across my knees and listened, too tired to shut her up properly.
“My children will be managers,” she told me, at some length. “Great men, great warriors and they will finally rid the land of the monsters. That is the destiny of my line. The story was told often around our fires.”
I shifted slightly—the carpet under me was damp. “Is that why you’re going so far away? To have babies?”
She nodded readily and gave me a smile that could have sold toothpaste in the old time. “To be wed to the General Manager of Home Depot and to bear his heirs.”
“The big man’s tired of fucking his first cousins,” I guessed. “Makes sense. They’ve got bad skin out that way ‘cause it’s too close to the old chemical plants. Me, I never gave much thought to a baby. Just one more corpse to walk the earth in the end.”
“That’s doom talk, and it’s not allowed at WalMart,” she scolded me. She played with a DVD case she’d found in the entertainment center, the card insert showing a man dressed like a bat. She opened and closed the plastic with a snap, over and over again, snap snap, snap snap. A good sound of well-made pieces fitting together perfectly. Everything sounded like that in the old time. “It’s not just about babies, anyway. This will be a strategic alliance, uniting two Exits and drawing borders for future conquests to come. I imagine you have no use for politics—”
“Shush,” I told her. I’d heard something downstairs. She kept prattling on for a minute till she saw that I meant it. The sound came again. Wood screeching on wood. Furniture scraping on a hardwood floor. The ghoul was testing my barricade.
They can smell you, just like you can smell them, and they don’t need to rest. You can’t hide for long.
A chest of drawers squealed and crashed as it fell over. A chair tumbled away from the door. I lifted the windowsill as quietly as I could and gestured for Winona to go on, out onto the roof. The second-floor window let out onto a slope of rotten shingles that skidded out from under her and she wouldn’t let go of the sill.
I crawled over her and carefully slipped my way down to the gutter so I could look over the edge. The ghoul looked up at the same time and we made eye contact. He had on the loose gray pants of a wild man, stained now with deer blood. Most of his hair had fallen out and something had eaten his lips, leaving ragged skin that failed to cover his crooked teeth. His eyelids were gone too, giving him the look of a bloody death’s head.
I skittered back onto the roof. Below I heard him redouble his efforts, slamming a bookshelf to the side. He would be through the door soon. Winona started screaming. “Kill it! It’s right there! Just kill it!”
It was an eight foot drop to the ground. There were some scraggly bushes down there to break my fall but I landed badly and lost a fraction of a second jumping back up to my feet. By that time the ghoul had turned to face me, slaver running out of the hole in his face. I could see the blotchy sores on his gray skin, I could hear his teeth grinding together in anticipation.
“Do your job!” Winona howled. Her fingers couldn’t hold her on the slope of the roof and suddenly she was sliding, falling on the loose shingles. I had been one step ahead of her—bringing the spring-lance around to line up my shot I was a breath’s span away from firing when she called me. I managed to ignore the distraction of her falling off the roof. The dead man didn’t—he swung his head up and to the side, looking for the source of the noise.
The spring-lance connected with his head, but not in the right place. The coffee can slid back, triggering a latch, and the lethal spike clanged out of the sheath and into his flesh. His jawbone exploded inside his fragile skin, yellow teeth flying from his mouth to clatter on the ground. The blow knocked him backward and off his feet but it had failed to penetrate his brain.
I jumped back and looked up at the roof. Winona had fallen into the gutter, which had bent but not broken. I only caught half a glimpse of her—a pale shape hanging in the darkness. Meanwhile the ghoul was recovering from my attack. The spring-lance was useless until I could crank back the spring.
He stood up, clutching at the place where his jawbone had been. His eyes focused on me with horrible slowness.
“Winona!” I shouted. “You stay there and be quiet!”
The ghoul started in to charge me, his head down, his broken fingernails stretched out to grab and tear my clothes and my skin. I turned around and headed into the woods, running as fast as my legs could carry me.
The dead are slow. You can outrun them, for a while.
“Come on, girl! Winona! Show yourself!”
She wasn’t there when I got back. Which was the bad news. I couldn’t find any blood or torn clothes, either, meaning the ghoul didn’t get her. That could be very bad news. It could mean she’d run off on her own. I doubted it.
It took me most of the night to outrun the ghoul. He was a tough character, real strong, but none of them are ever as fast as a living person. If you don’t exhaust yourself with sprinting, if you don’t trip on an old curb and break your leg, you can escape them. It’s how I’ve stayed alive so long.
I lead him in a wide loop through the subdivision, up cracked streets and through backyards full of play sets rusted down to twisted scrap. I could hear him behind me, smell him too, but I kept my eyes on my feet. I could step on an abandoned toy or even an old lawnmower lost in the high grass and it would be over. I could trip over an exposed cable or pipe. I could run right into a tree and give myself a concussion.
You have to not panic, is all. I kept my heading and I kept moving. Well before dawn his stench was just a memory in my nose, a last whiff of corruption that lingered on me well past the time I’d lost him. I circled back, made a wide circuit around the row houses in case he caught smell of me again. Eventually I wound up right where I started, ready to resume my travels.
Except Winon
a was gone. I tore the house apart looking for her, turned over every decaying mattress, broke open every closet and scared a few mice for my trouble. I looked all around the yard, constantly aware that the ghoul was still nearby. I searched the nearby houses.
Three doors down I found the remains of a campfire on what had been somebody’s front lawn, a time ago. I found some old cans, emptied and licked clean. I found flat places in the grass where wild folk had laid out in the night.
I felt the ashes of the fire and they were still warm. I still had a chance, then. At least as long as the General Manager of the Home Depot didn’t mind receiving my cargo slightly used.
It’s not hard to find the villages of the wild folk on a calm day, even though they move from time to time, even though they are little more than tent towns and colorless and small. You look for smoke, is all, and it’s something my grandfather taught me. You get to a high place, say the top of an old commercial building or you climb on top of a bent old power pylon and you look across the land. If you don’t squint too hard you’ll see them, the columns of smoke. Thin gray pencil lines rising in the air.
I tracked them down through a low defile that ran parallel to an old state highway. I moved quietly but I didn’t waste time. I could hear them before long but I trailed behind, keeping my distance. I waited for them to camp and then I waited for the sun to sink over the hills. Only then did I move in.
There were maybe seventy of them, a fair-sized encampment and far more than I could take on with just my two arms. There were children with them, some as young as five. The wild folk have their babies in the woods and raise them where they can. Very few survive to puberty. It’s why they keep their women pregnant at all times, and why they’re constantly looking for new breeding stock.
I saw them like pinkish ghosts in the falling light, their undyed clothing and their pale skin moving between the trees like inverted shadows. I saw their fires and their animal-hide tents stretched over battered old aluminum poles. I saw their pet slack.
Every band of wild folk has one. A dead man, usually an ancestor, who they keep and feed. Some are simple totems, rallying points for the tribe. Some are valued because they can do tricks. I watched this one work his single gimmick over and over. The wild folk would bring him scraps of paper, bits and ends they had found in the old houses. The slack had a plastic pen wired to his hand. A girl of maybe ten years would fill it with ink from time to time as the slack signed his name, over and over. Who could say what dim chunk of his rotting brain, what curl of gray matter was left to him, that let him do that. He looked quite happy to sign and sign away, his fleshless face turned upward in a pure and innocent smile, his tattered body jiggling with the joy of it.
Every time he finished a signature the wild folk would laugh and cheer. It was something of the old world, something they might remember doing themselves. It was a thing of power, every name an incantation. I don’t suppose it matters why. It was a good trick, for a slack, and entertainment is what you make of it out on the road.
I gave them an hour of darkness—just long enough to have their dinner ready—and then I stepped out of the shadows and into the light. I made myself known with a loud, warbling screech and threw my lance down before me.
Every eye in the encampment turned my way. Every hand reached for a weapon. Yet my intentions could not be more clear. I had dealings with the wild folk before, many a time, whether or not I knew any of this band. Their lives are unlike the life of the Stores. They don’t hold to so many rules. But they still have a few, and I knew them, and how to make them work for me.
“I want some dinner, and I want some information,” I said. I held my arms outstretched the way a ghoul might. In this case I was showing them I was unarmed.
The leader of the band came to me then. He was nearly my age—ripe, for a wild man—and some kind of fungal infection lined his cheeks and forehead with angry ridges. Muscles crawled across his chest and shoulders like vines pulled taut. He wore drawstring pants and shoes of fine deer hide. The top of a human skull, sawed away just above the eye sockets, perched atop his unwashed hair.
“You come to join us, Roadie? You come to be a friend to the dead?” he asked. He didn’t look happy but he didn’t look like he wanted to kill me, either.
“Not hardly. I’ve come for dinner, like I said.”
He nodded. He’d be willing to feed me, in exchange for my leaving them alone.
I went on. “And I’ve come to be told where the girl is. The girl with hair like gold and eyes like old glass bottles. I’ll be taking her with me.”
His eyes narrowed. He moved sideways, scuttling around me, looking me over. He wanted to know if I had any real weapons on me. Say a pistol, or even a zip gun. Say a knife in a hidden sheath. He glanced at the spring-lance at my feet but it was well out of my reach.
“Finder’s, keepers,” he said, finally, when he was sure I was defenseless. He had a hatchet in his own hand, a steel thing at least half made of rust. It wouldn’t keep an edge any more but it would do just fine for bashing in my face. “She’s weak, but she can birth some babies for us. We won’t be giving her up.” He looked me up and down again but this time it was my breasts and my crotch he sized up. “Maybe you want to make a trade? Maybe you want to come be our babymaker?”
“Not hardly,” I said again.
His brothers, his cousins, his uncles came out of the tents then or stepped up from their campfires or ghosted in out of the woods. They had spears and knives in their hands. Some of them wore leather thongs around their throats, tight as chokers, with finger bones dangling from them. That marked them as killers, as those who had fought before. They came close, close enough to strike me, but not close enough that I could touch them. They knew this kind of entertainment all too well. There was no chance of me taking them. I was a tough thing, all muscle and sinew, and stronger by far than any wild folk, fed up better on Store food, trained by hard life on the road. Against their leader, maybe, or maybe even him and his best two champions, maybe. But there were just too many of them.
“Roadies are too smart for this kind of aggro,” the leader said. “Too smart to come in here and start something they can’t finish.” He was figuring out my game, and far too soon. “You playing at something, Roadie?”
I shrugged my shoulders elaborately. “You won’t give her back, then. All right.” I took my water bottle from my belt and showed it to him. He turned away and spat. He wouldn’t drink my water. It might be poisoned.
I shrugged again. I had to draw this out a little longer. Slowly, as if to assure them of my good intentions, I unscrewed the cap from my water bottle. Slowly I lifted the bottle, as if to drink.
Then the wind changed and a familiar smell lit up my nose and I smiled. I turned over the bottle and rabbit’s blood spilled out on the ground.
Behind me, come looming out of the shadows, the ghoul appeared, his broken mouth black and wide as a cave as if he would swallow the wild folk whole. I’d been teasing and taunting and coaxing him along all day and finally he had caught up. He smelled the blood and the hunger in him must have spiked. He came shambling for me—for the leader—for anything warm.
In the confusion I grabbed up my lance and slipped past their leader. I dodged around a cook fire and tore open the flap of the first tent I found. Inside a huddle of children looked up at me, terrified.
I’d brought death down on them, maybe. I didn’t waste time on guilt. The next three tents I found were empty. Behind me the leader and his extended family were whooping with fear and running every way, their weapons up, their hands raised. The ghoul would lunge at one of them, then another. They would dance away from him, yelping like dogs. He stumbled like a drunkard from one body to the next.
I tripped over the slack in the middle of the encampment. He looked up at me and raised his pen hand, perhaps wanting another piece of paper. Endless copies of his signature littered the ground about his feet. My skin rumpled, my stomach flipped at the nearnes
s of him, this harmless dead man. Reflexively I raised the spring-lance. But no. If I took the girl and ran this band of wild folk might forget me, after a time of seeking revenge. If I did in their pet slack, however, they would chase me like furies. I pushed past him and headed for the next tent.
Winona stepped out of it before I even arrived. Her hair hung loose around her face, piled in careless hummocks like the yellow grass revealed by the melting snows of spring. Her eyes saw me and I saw in them a hurt that went beyond blame. A hurt that needed healing of a kind I could not offer. She was stark naked, her little body smeared with dirt and ash and paint. I knew what that meant.
They had tied her feet and hands together with leather cord. She could shuffle forward but not walk with any speed. I didn’t have the time to free her so I grabbed her up over my shoulder and I ran into the darkness, leaving the camp in chaos behind.
We hid in a tree, our exhausted bodies draped over the branches, and spent the night not sleeping, but listening for any sound, and smelling, our noses twitched, even as we dozed.
The next day I brought her back toward the Turnpike. We passed through the overgrown asphalt of an old school parking lot, climbing over places where the pavement had cracked like the top of a loaf of bread. The brick building loomed over us in silent decay, its windows broken, its doors standing open to let us look in on empty rooms full of dirt and dead leaves.
“They kept a dead man among them,” Winona said to me as we climbed an endless on-ramp to the Pike. “They kept him like a milking cow, like a treasure.”
It was the first thing she’d said to me since I left her in the abandoned house. I considered what to say long and hard. “They are the friends of the dead. It’s why you call them wild.”
“This much I knew, yes. That when one of them dies, they are left uncleansed. No relative will strike the sacred blow.”
Which is what they call it in the Stores. The Final Duty of Kinship. The Sacred Blow. Which amounts to taking a sledgehammer to the brains of your loved ones when they pass. It’s a necessary thing. I did for my grandfather, didn’t I? I’m no wild folk savage. Still. I never saw it like some holy thing, as Winona’s people did. I saw it as a sadness, a sharp sadness on the world.
