by Milam, Khel
Remnants of clothing were lying like a bridge between them, and not far from them on the opposite side of the clearing, a dirty, white skull peeked through the gloom, a ragged hole just visible on the top of it.
He moved slowly into the clearing behind her, surveyed the scene and gave a short, hard laugh. Shouldering the crossbow, he picked up a stick and began taunting the dead.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
She nocked an arrow without responding.
He gaped at the bow in her hands and dropped the stick, reaching for the crossbow. “Put it down. Now.”
She lowered the bow and stared at him flatly. “Let me release them from their misery.”
“They’re not miserable. They’re dead.”
“The dead condemned to walk the earth have always been miserable.”
His lips pulled back with a dismissive sort of disgust, but bowing in an exaggerated, permissive way he stepped aside.
She paused for a moment, gazing at the children, her expression somber. She wiped her hand across her eyes, and then against her thigh and loosed an arrow at the little corpse bound to the tree, and then another at the larger one trapped on the ground. Both collapsed with a sudden, abrupt lifelessness, like puppets when their strings are cut.
He re-slung the crossbow over his back, surveying the sad tableau once more with something akin to bored disdain and pointed at the child on the tree. “That little kid must’ve got bit first, and then it bit that pile of clothes, who must’ve eaten the other kid. And then clothes-one got taken out by the crypt keeper over there, who offed himself to top it all off.” He snorted, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t have happened if they’d just shot that first damn kid in the head to begin with.”
She was staring at the child on the tree. The rain caught in her lashes as it sluiced down her face and streamed through the creases of her poncho to the ground. “Maybe it’s not that easy to shoot your kid in the head.”
“He didn’t have a problem blowing away his wife.”
“What makes you think the suicide was the husband?”
“’Cause women don’t have the balls to shoot themselves in the head.”
“But women don’t usually have the strength to tie knots strong enough to last this long.”
He shrugged and swept his dripping hair from his forehead and went over to the skeleton and knelt down beside it, rooting in the detritus surrounding it.
Still looking at the smaller child tied to the tree, she watched the water carve channels through the dust-turned-clay of its skull. She slowly pulled her arrows from each child’s head. The voids left behind were like deep gouges in blocks of modeling clay.
Chortling, he brandished a dirt-encrusted gun. He checked the clip and cursed, punching the ground and pawing through the leaves, failing to uncover anything but the yellow fabric of a collapsed tent. “Fucking figures there’d be no bullets.”
Her eyes inscrutable, she watched him through the rain as he rummaged through the dead family’s possessions on the far side of the clearing.
His back to her, he crawled halfway into the tent, whooting and exclaiming every so often as he shoved the cans and bottles lying inside it into dirty plastic bags. “This much food, they must’ve croaked right after it happened.” He laughed. “God bless dumb-asses.”
“Dumb? Or merciful?”
“Same difference.”
She stared at him a moment longer then looked away, scanning the clearing. She glanced at her wrist and at the dogs beside her and at the cat behind her and slipped backwards into the woods. Her footsteps were quieted by the soft soles of her boots and the sound of the snapping twigs was drowned out by the rain.
He called to her. The silence stretched out. Cursing, he struggled as he extracted himself from the tent’s rain-heavy fabric. Once free, he rocked back on his ankles with a clumsy sort of haste, reaching out, steadying himself, as he peered over his shoulder.
Scrambling to his feet and whirling around, he surveyed the entire circumference of the campsite with the rain pounding down upon him, his expression harried and anxious, like that of a chess player staring at the board, realizing the game has been lost, but still grasping for some winning move.
She was gone.
He cursed again, balling his fists. He raised his elbows, pressing them tight against his head, and berated himself. He stalked around the clearing, scouring the ground with his eyes. The wet leaves were smooth and plastered to the ground, leaving no trace that he or anyone else had trod upon them.
He yanked the bags from the tent and ran to where they had entered the campsite, slipping over the ground’s oily surface. Encumbered by the overstuffed bags, he fell twice, hard, and cried out with an impotent sort of rage as their contents spilled out around him. “Where the fuck are you going to go? There’s nowhere to go, goddamn it.”
He re-stuffed his bags and clambered off the ground and broke through the undergrowth bordering the clearing. And with the rain flooding his eyes, he glared into the woods. The only things ahead of him were trees. And rain.
Hesitating a moment longer, he looked around, exhaled and plunged into the thicket in the direction they had been heading before stopping at the camp. His heavy bags caught and snagged on the bramble as he swung them wide, clearing a path.
• • •
There were no arrows in front of him or to either side and the arrow behind him had disappeared into the brush. Red-faced and panting, he set his bags down and exercised his elbows, clenching his fists open and closed.
Standing there alone in the woods in the rain, he shook his head and stared down at his hands as he massaged his palms. When he looked up, the rage in his eyes had been replaced with disgust. He turned in each direction, cursing under his breath at her and himself and the rain.
Then, sighing, he picked up his bags and resumed pushing his way through the scrub, angling sharply to his right.
• • •
The drone of the rain still drowned out all other sounds, but the spaces between the scrubby pines had begun to widen as more and more of them were replaced by gangly, young live oaks. His bags weighed down his arms and pulled at his elbows, and their handles cut into his hands. He stopped and let them fall to the ground and surveyed the area around him.
He flicked the water from his brow and squinted at a flash of blue fading in and out in the distance. He stared hard at it then snatched up his bags, his face victorious and eager, and began walking towards it. And as he closed the distance between himself and the blue feathers of an upturned arrow’s fletching, the rain began to slacken.
3
The rain had stopped and steam was rising from the ground now, mingling with the sunlight between the trees. A dog was alone ahead of him, tethered to something, straining against the weight of it, and barking at him with a rapid, intense mixture of anger and alarm.
• • •
The unearthly sound of wild turkeys calling to each other filled the air around her. A tom, some fifty yards ahead, was staring at her, its tail—red and amber and white-tipped—fanned-out behind it like a war bonnet. The bird held up its turquoise head, proud and defiant, and the sunlight glinted off the blue and copper iridescence of its chest feathers.
Standing side-on to the turkey she nocked an arrow, breathing with a slow, quiet deliberateness, gauging the distance as if there was nothing else in the world but her and the turkey and the space between them. She raised her bow and inhaled deeply, exhaled, and loosed the arrow.
The shot was creditable, knocking the bird back and sending the heavy, dull hens skittering upwards through the branches with unexpected lightness and grace.
As he sank to the ground, the tom regarded her for a long moment then his head dropped to his chest, resting on it as if sleeping, and his body slumped to the side, motionless.
With the mastiff rising to follow, she walked towards the turkey without haste, her expression pained, almost as if ashamed. And balancing t
he bow awkwardly over her shoulder, she knelt down beside the bird and ran her hand over its head. She lifted it off the ground and hugged it tight against her chest, locking her arms under its wings.
She turned her head at the sudden sound of a dog barking and started running towards the noise, the mastiff bounding off ahead of her. She struggled to keep hold of the turkey and clear of the bow knocking against her legs as she ran.
The agitated barking grew increasingly louder. When she reached the dog, she stopped dead, almost losing her grip on the bird.
The man was standing over the mutt with a stick raised high above its head as it struggled to reach him, fighting to pull free of its leash tied to her backpack. The man’s hair hung lank over his eyes, and his shirt, soaked through with sweat and rain, clung to him beneath the crossbow.
She faltered, leaning back, away from him.
Without lowering the stick, he shifted his attention from the mutt to her. Then his eyes widened and he began scrambling backwards waving the stick in front of him like a sword as the mastiff rushed towards him.
The mastiff planted its forelegs in the ground and grasped the stick between its jaws, shaking its head back and forth with a large, powerful, sweeping motion, and wrested the stick from his hand.
She ran to her backpack and loosed the mutt and it sprinted towards the man.
He stumbled back and fell against the base of the tree behind him, cowering in a ball under the mastiff snarling on top of him, and shying away from the mutt’s teeth jabbing at him.
“Call’em off!” His arms were wrapped around his head and his chin was pressed into his chest, muffling his voice. “I could’ve killed that mutt, but I didn’t. Anybody else would’ve. Then taken the pack and gone after you.” He was almost crying now with a desperate sort of rage. “I could’ve done it, but I didn’t. Call’em off goddamn it!”
She knelt beside her pack eyeing him as she disassembled the bow with quick, practiced movements and placed the pieces in a case beside her. She shoved the case into her backpack and stood up, pulling it on. For a moment, she stared at him pinned to the ground by the dogs, her eyes narrowed and her mouth set, then she shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and glanced down at her wrist. She lifted the turkey and called to the cat and began moving off.
“Get’em off me! Come on, you can’t leave me like this! Call’em off, come on! Just please! I’m not going to do anything to you. I swear.” He was struggling to force his voice down. “You want some of this food? I’ll give you some. I’ll give you a whole freaking bag. You’ll be set for days.”
She kept walking. “I don’t eat grave goods.”
The mutt turned to follow first. The mastiff, its eyes on her back, hesitated, whining. It looked down at the man then back at her, then released him, jogging after her.
“What the hell does that mean?” He sat up, grunting, and examined his arms and legs. Looking up after her, alarm spread across his face. “You can’t ditch me.” He pulled himself off of the ground and frowned slightly at his bags before hauling them up. “Are you saying you don’t eat food if it belonged to dead people? If so, you must go hungry a lot. Leaving it back there would’ve been nothing but a stupid waste of perfectly good food. What in the hell were they going to do with it? It’s not like they needed it or something. They didn’t even want it.”
“How do you know?” She was still moving forward.
“’Cause they eat people, not canned goods.”
“I don’t know what they eat. I don’t even know if they eat anything at all.”
“Sure as hell looks like they’re eating something when they’re taking a chunk out of somebody’s neck.” He started to limp after her.
She stopped and turned back to face him, shifting the turkey’s weight in her arms. “But the chunk is all they take and they don’t seem to need it any more than they need canned goods. They keep going whether they get it or not.”
“That kid on the ground back there had more than a chunk taken out of him.”
“But I don’t think it’s because they were hungrier or anything. I think it’s just a function of how long it takes for us to lose our sense of self from a given wound. You know? Like how long it takes for us to lose our purpose for being after we’ve been bitten. And since belly wounds, like the one the kid back there had, take longer to do that than neck wounds do, they took more of him.”
“You lose a lot more than your ‘purpose for being’ when you’re dead.”
“But they don’t really leave us dead. Just kind of pointless.”
He stared at her as if he was not quite certain she was joking or not. “I’m pretty sure when they kill you, you’re dead.”
“Well, obviously not, since you can still die later.”
“So if you’re not dead, what the hell are you, then?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted the turkey’s weight in her arms again and turned away from him. “Soulless maybe? Maybe that’s the whole point.”
As she walked away, his eyes cast about after her. He blinked. “Seriously, how much farther do you plan to walk?”
• • •
He caught up to where she and the dogs were resting in the shade of a live oak and dropped his bags on the ground. Rolling his shoulders back, he exhaled loudly. He shook the heavy dampness from his shirt and watched as she glanced first at a disk attached to her jeans and then at the band around her wrist. He looked around, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face petulant and beaded with sweat. “It takes an hour to go five feet waiting for that damn cat every five minutes.”
“Well, it’s a good thing, then, that no one has to be anywhere anymore, or worry about being late ever again.” She met his gaze with eyes that were not altogether benign. “So I’m free now to take as long as I like getting to wherever it is I end up for whatever reason I want.”
“Yeah, well, you sure check your watch a lot for somebody with all the time in the world.”
“It’s not a watch.”
“So, what is it?”
“A compass.”
“And that thing?” He gestured at her waist.
“A pedometer.”
“A pedometer?”
“It tells you how far you’ve come.”
“Yeah, I know what it does. You sure as hell act like you have to be somewhere.”
She smiled slightly at the tail picking its way towards them. “Not having to be somewhere doesn’t mean you have nowhere to go.” She bent down and slid her arms under the turkey’s wings, embracing it and lifting it off the ground, and she and the animals continued on.
He waited, shaking out his arms and staring after them, then he reached for his bags. “We better be running out of steps soon. Just saying.”
4
The oak hammock had opened up. The pines and underbrush were gone now—the mature live oaks having pushed out everything between them but the palmetto at the bases of their trunks. Through the broadening canopy, wide swaths of sky were visible and the full moon, faint in the hot afternoon light, could be seen between the clouds stretched into long, thin ribbons by the breeze.
He tramped along behind her with one eye on the mutt nosing along in front of him and the other on the mastiff ambling at her side. “It was stupid to tie that mutt to your pack to guard it back there. With that pack left out in the open like that, it was just asking to be taken. That dog was a sitting duck.”
“I didn’t tie him to my pack to guard it. I did it to keep him from rushing the birds.”
“It was still a good way to get him killed.”
“Most people who come across a strange dog in the woods try to put it at ease, not hit it with a stick.”
His face flushed. “Not if they want what the dog’s guarding, they don’t. And even if they don’t go after the dog, nothing’s stopping them from waiting around for you.”
“Maybe, but most people who won’t risk going after the dog, probably won’t wait around to go after its owner eithe
r.” She came to a halt and looked down at the mutt and was silent for a moment. “But you’re right. I put him in danger. I risked his life for a meal.”
He hesitated as if confused. “Well, I mean, you got to eat.” Then he shrugged. “And if it comes down to you and somebody else, you got to pick you every time. Especially if it’s a dog.”
“No.” Her eyes met his. “You don’t.”
“I don’t know how you’ve lasted this long, if you really believe that. You got to do whatever it takes to survive now.” He glared at the ground. “Whatever it takes.” There was a tiny pause before he looked up again. “People’d kill you for that turkey. They’d kill you for that pack. They’d kill you for the dogs if they needed to. They’d even kill you just to make sure you didn’t kill them first.” He nodded to himself, his eyes focused inward. “So, yeah, you got to do whatever you got to do. That’s just how it is now. Things have changed.”
“No, they haven’t. People used to kill each other for cutting them off in traffic and texting during movies.” A smile played at the corner of her mouth. “If anything, people have mellowed out a bit these days.”
He gaped down at her. “What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s ‘mellow’ now. Only an idiot wouldn’t know that everything’s changed.”
“Nothing’s changed. Except that the dead don’t die. And no one knows or cares what day it is.”
Disbelief and revulsion swept across his face. “Joke about it all you want, but good people, decent people, lie, cheat, steal, and kill now. They do things now they’d never’ve done in a million years back then.” His expression was strange, almost secretive. “Things they got to do to survive ’cause everything’s changed. Everything.”
“There’s no such thing as good people and bad people. There are just intellectually honest ones and intellectually dishonest ones.”
He shook his head. “That sounds like something Lex Luthor’d say to Superman right before he blew up the fucking world.”
