The World Without Crows

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  Lucia came and sat next to him. At another time, Eric might have felt any number of things with Lucia so near him. Anxiety, fear, self-loathing, shame. Desire. Now he felt nothing.

  "You know," Lucia said. "I wanted to be a lawyer before all this. I was going to fight for the rights of immigrants. My parents were illegals, you know. They did all those jobs that Americans didn't want to do. They worked hard for us. I was scared for them. What would we do if they got caught and sent back to Mexico? What would we do? I thought if I could be a lawyer, I could change all that. Now it's all gone. No more laws, no more borders. No more family. It's gone. Sometimes I still can't believe it."

  Below them, a gust of wind moved the tops of trees, pushed underneath them, and blew back their hair.

  "What did you want to do?" she asked him. "Before the Vaca Beber?"

  "That time doesn't even seem real anymore."

  "What were you going to do?" she insisted.

  "I don't know," he said. "Maybe computer programming." He didn't care anymore about any of that. It was all nonsense. "You know what I do miss?" he asked. Lucia shook her head. "I miss the way clothes smelled when they came out of the dryer."

  "I hate to think what we smell like now," Lucia said.

  They both smiled then, looking down at their filthy clothes and the abyss beneath them.

  "It's going to be okay," Lucia said. She put her hand on his shoulder. Eric nodded at her.

  "I know," he lied. Lucia squeezed his shoulder and then stood up and walked away. He wondered if she really believed in that lie. There was no way to know if it was going to be all right. Looking back at the forest beneath him, he decided she did not. No. She lied to make him feel better.

  That's what humans do. They lie to make the world a better place.

  _

  At night, Lucia continued talking. Around the campfire she spoke, as Eric stared at the flickering flames. Exhausted, Birdie slept next to him, her arms wrapped around him. Sergio listened to his sister, his eyes sparkling.

  Lucia talked about how quickly the world of humans dissolved around them. It had only been a year since the Vaca B. Already the roads were beginning to crack. Dirt and grass grew in patches on it. Towns and cities, partially burned to the ground, were already succumbing to nature. Swallows nested in houses, raccoons had moved back into the suburbs, deer grazed on what had been golf courses or fields of corn. In another five, ten years, Lucia guessed, the world would be completely changed. In another fifty, it would be like humans never came to this continent, except for the skeletal remains of skyscrapers. It all disappeared so quickly. Vanished.

  "When we get to the island," she continued, "we'll have to start all over again. The food won't last. We have to plan for next year."

  "We'll grow fields of corn," said Sergio. "Whole fields of vegetables. We'll can them for the winter. And Eric and me, we’ll hunt. There'll be plenty to eat, you'll see."

  "It's not going to be that easy, Sergio," she warned her brother. "We need to find seed. There will be others looking for seed too. Even if we do find seed, there'll be a lot to learn. We've never grown so much as a flower, have we?"

  Sergio shrugged. "You're smart, Lucia," he said with supreme confidence. "You'll figure it out."

  "We'll try to find goats and chickens," Lucia continued, ignoring her brother’s last comment. "I can learn to make goat cheese and we'll need the eggs for protein."

  "We'll have horses too," Sergio said.

  "We'll get some solar panels, so we'll have some light, even in the winter."

  "I know what it was," Eric said, his voice low and serious.

  "What was?" Sergio asked.

  "I know what killed Sarah," he said. Sergio and Lucia looked at the flames but didn't say anything. "I've been thinking about it. How did she get the worm? She drank the same water, ate the same food. And then I remembered. She told me once that a good cook tastes the food while they cook it. She was always tasting what she was cooking. That's how she got the Vaca B, tasting the food before it boiled enough to kill the worm. She got the worm cooking for us."

  The discussion ended. Lucia and Sergio crawled into their tent to sleep. Eric stayed up, looking into the fire. He stayed that way a long time.

  _

  Leaving the forest, Sergio took point. He scouted ahead. Binoculars slung around his neck, he would stride ahead to a look out point, crouch in the bushes and scan around them. Sometimes he would climb a tree, and from far above, he would study the landscape. It seemed to Eric that they spent most of their time waiting, watching.

  When they came to a road (Route 287, Sergio informed them), he swung up into a towering pine tree. He stayed up there a long time, the rest of them waiting. Then he came down, landed in the pine needles at his feet and clapped his hands together. "All clear," he said.

  So they continued.

  _

  With the absence of Sarah, they cooked together. The food was tasteless. At night, they slept away from the fire. It was too hot now to sleep near it. Summer was high among them. Taking out his battered calendar, Eric saw it was July 10th. The trees were full and green, and the hot weather dried the paths they walked to dust and crackling leaves. Without human noise to distract them, no trucks or cars or jet planes in the air, no sirens or car horns, they listened to bird song, to crickets, to the whir of beetle wing in the summer air. It was surprising how loud it became.

  Eric couldn't sleep. The buzz of insects filled the air. He crawled out of his tent and sat by the smoldering fire. Slowly he became aware of a squeaking, clicking sound, and shadows flitting through the darkness. The bats were out and they were feeding. He'd always been afraid of bats. Their tiny mouths filled with gnawing, sharp teeth.

  Not anymore. The sound was gentle now, even playful, as they swooped in and out of the horde of insects. He sat in the darkness and watched the shadows of bats streak across the night.

  _

  They had just climbed to the top of a ridge when Sergio came to them, waving his hands in a downward motion, like a large bird trying to take flight. Eric was puzzled, until he felt a tug by Lucia at his side. Eric ducked down and then, following Lucia's lead, got down on his stomach. Lucia was to his right and Birdie buried her head in his left side. Lucia's hair had swept into his face, and Eric, blushing, brushed it away. If Lucia noticed, she said nothing.

  Sergio dove beside them. Wordlessly he pointed at a road running south of them. His face was pale as he handed Eric the binoculars.

  At first, he saw nothing. Then there was a flash, and it came into focus quickly.

  It was the Land Rover. Eric could see the dark figure of Carl Doyle inside.

  "What is it?" hissed Lucia. Eric handed her the binoculars. Lucia made a coughing sound when she saw him. Distantly they heard the Land Rover pass. For a few moments, they said nothing. Vaguely leaf-shaped patches of sunlight, piercing through the canopy of leaves overhead, swooped over their bodies like golden birds.

  _

  "Why don't you grow up and be a man!" cried Sergio angrily. "We have to kill him!" They sat at the campfire. Eric didn't respond, but continued to pick at his food. Sergio was red with anger. "It'll be easy," he said, obviously trying to remain calm. He slid closer to Eric. "All we have to do is set some trap for his Land Rover. You see how he drives. He'll hit it fast and bam!" Sergio slapped his hands together. "If he's still alive, we'll just shoot him." When Eric said nothing, Sergio put his hand on his shoulder. "I'll shoot him, Eric, you don't have to."

  Eric shrugged Sergio's hand off his shoulder. "No," he said.

  Sergio frowned and then shot up and angrily kicked some leaves toward the forest.

  "Sergio, tranquilo," Lucia said.

  "What?" Sergio asked. "Why? This guy is following us. He's already killed John Martin. Who's next? Why're we letting this crazy bastard live?" Sergio finished this with an appeal to his sister in rapid Spanish. Lucia shook her head.

  "No, Sergio," she said. "We're a group now. We ha
ve to do things together. If Eric agrees, I'll help."

  Sergio turned to Eric with a pleading look, but Eric wouldn't look up from his dinner. Sergio kicked some leaves toward him in fury and frustration. "What's wrong with you?" he asked. "What kind of man are you?" He stalked off into the forest.

  "I'm sorry," Lucia said to him in a small voice. She stood up to follow her brother into the darkness.

  When the two were gone, Birdie came and sat next to him. She put her small hand in his. Eric looked at the tangle of her hair. It was full of twigs and broken leaves like a bird's nest. "Come here," he said to her. He began picking her hair clean. While he worked, Birdie hummed a tune that Eric did not recognize.

  Above them the stars were vanishing as the storm moved in.

  _

  Everything they owned was wet. The rain persisted, sometimes in great, thundering gasps of water that blurred the landscape around them, sometimes as a faint mist. Eric had never been so thoroughly wet in his life. Water permeated him and seemed to swell his skin. His clothes were heavy and clung to him, and for the first time, he realized how difficult it was to move in the voluminous clothes he wore. He must have lost a lot of weight, the way the clothes hung from him. His heavy jeans had to be held up with one hand as he walked. His belt was as tight as he could make it.

  They had been lucky with the weather to this point. Now the rain came as if furious at having been denied an outlet all these days. Steadily, slogging through the wet forest, across swollen brooks, they made their miserable way east. All day, they trudged through it, and when night came, they found no respite. They couldn't start a fire and their tents were wet inside and out, as were their sleeping blankets. It was like sleeping inside a sponge.

  The next day was no better. Worse perhaps because they were thirsty. They ate cold beans from the can and finished off what little water they had boiled the last time they had a campfire. They had not planned ahead more than a day with their water supply and that was a mistake. They held their mouths open to the rain, figuring rainwater was safe from the Vaca B, but once it reached the ground, they no longer trusted it. They didn’t even trust the pans they had to be free of the Vaca B, so they couldn’t catch the water. For all the water cascading down the hillsides in gushes, they were parched.

  The only good part of the rain was that in the midst of their suffering, Sergio dropped the subject of Carl Doyle though he often shot an angry look toward Eric, and walked ahead, even shunning his sister's company at times.

  At the end of the third day, the sun finally broke free. The temperature soared. The skies were crystalline clear and blue. Everything was still too wet to build a fire, but they spread out their belongings in the grass to dry. They stripped down to their underwear and stood waiting for their clothes to dry.

  Eric stood bashful, trying to keep from looking at Lucia's long, sleek body, her tiny red panties and her red spotted bra. He couldn't stand tall like Sergio. He stood with his arms in front of him. Birdie stood next to him, watching her clothes on the ground with disturbed fascination. "It's like I've disappeared," she said, pointing at her clothes.

  They all laughed, but Birdie looked at them strangely. "What's so funny?" she asked.

  Eric took her hand. "Nothing," he said. "We're just naked, that's all."

  They all looked at each other.

  Just a couple days of rain had reduced them to this, nakedness and thirst.

  They were such small, pathetic things.

  _

  Perhaps it was the rain.

  The Zombies came out in the afternoon, emerging from the forests in shambling crowds, oblivious to each other, to their surroundings. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. The wetness seemed to bring them nothing but misery. Some of them were on their hands and knees, lapping at puddles. Some scooped great handfuls of wet mud into their mouths and then, bloated, they groaned and kicked and died on the ground.

  The group climbed the trees to avoid them. The Zombies passed by underneath them, moving all in one direction, perhaps by some mysterious sense of water nearby. These Zombies were all old ones, emaciated as skeletons, eyes lost, mouths stretched open, clothes tatters around them. Most of them had long ago torn their hair from their heads. One Zombie, once a woman, was half-naked. One of her breasts was torn open, like it had been gnawed by an animal. Long after they passed, Eric and the rest of them stayed in the trees like nesting birds, reluctant to leave.

  "What happened to us?" Sergio asked, staring after the Zombies. They looked at him, perched in the tree. "What did we do to ourselves?"

  "We didn't do anything," Lucia answered her brother. She sounded angry.

  "We did," Sergio shot back. "You won't admit it, but we did!"

  They climbed down out of the tree. Sergio picked up a stone and threw it viciously at a tree where it careened off, making a loud knocking sound.

  "Stop it," Lucia said to him. "Stop being such a child."

  "I'm not a child!" Sergio spat back. "How can you say that to me, after the things I've seen! After the things we've all seen! Look at her!" He pointed at Birdie who stared at them unblinking. "Do you think she's a child anymore! None of us are. There are no children anymore."

  Sergio shrugged on his backpack and stalked away.

  They followed him wordlessly.

  _

  In a storm-swollen stream, nearly a hundred Zombies had succeeded in drowning themselves. The stream was so choked with bodies that the water was dammed, and a shallow pond had risen behind them.

  The air stank in the heat of the clear sun. Flies buzzed in dark clouds above them. The group, covering their mouth, walked downstream and crossed the trickling stream.

  They didn't speak of it.

  _

  The cabin was in the middle of nowhere. Shingled and painted deep brown, it crouched nervously in a small clearing in the forest.

  Zombies walked around it listlessly. The four of them looked down on it with concern.

  They were running out of food.

  "I don't like it," Sergio said. "All those Zombies, man. There's bound to be some pendejos around here." Pendejos was Sergio's term for cracked Zombies. "I'm telling you, man, there's pendejos around."

  "We need food," said Eric simply. There was no argument against that.

  There were four Zombies that they could see. There were more inside, they saw them moving past the windows from time to time. The four Zombies outside were harmless. One sat in the yard. A little girl once, now her skeletal frame picked up handfuls of dirt and let them fall before the caves that were her eyes. Another walked around a snowmobile, again and again. His footsteps had dug down a path around it. The third and fourth both walked around the field surrounding the house, with no apparent purpose.

  They went back to their camp and formed a plan. Sergio would stay outside the cabin, watching with his binoculars while Lucia and Eric went inside and ransacked the house for food. Birdie would wait for their return at the campsite.

  To the Zombies, they seemed invisible. Nervously clutching at their weapons, the three of them crept up to the door and opened it.

  Inside were several Zombies. They didn't even look toward them when the door opened. Men and women, young and old, it was difficult to know. Their skin was like leather. They stood in the small cabin and did not move. The room was stagnant with their stench. Covering their mouths, the three moved gingerly about them. In the corner, one of them began to make wheezing, coughing noises, splattering a black, worm-filled ooze upon the wall. Eric shut his eyes from the sight, despite himself.

  In the kitchen, they opened the cupboards, and began to pull down cans of food without even looking at what it was. It didn't matter.

  They had almost filled their bags when the shooting began.

  _

  Eric, Sergio, and Lucia huddled together in the dug out, dirt basement of the cabin. Sergio had found it when the shooting started, and they had all dove down the dark hole and shut the trap door behind them
. They were in near darkness. Above them the shots continued.

  When the door to the cabin crashed open, Eric gripped his fists together and closed his eyes. Above him, a man cried out and then the guns rang out again, this time impossibly loud. The shooting seemed to go on forever. When it stopped, finally, and the ringing in Eric's ears began to quiet, there were voices in the cabin.

  "We're not here to shoot Zombies," one voice said.

  "We're supposed to be recruiting," said another.

  "Fuck that, you pussies," said a third. "If I see dirty fucking Zombies, I'm going to kill dirty fucking Zombies. That's how it is."

  "We're supposed to be recruiting," someone repeated. "We need more Minutemen. We’re wasting all our ammunition on this bullshit. I didn't come all this way to do this."

  "This isn't what the President sent us out here to do."

  "All right, stop your fucking whining. Goddamn pussies."

  Above them, the men walked. They heard the cupboards open and shut. Motionless, they waited. Even after the men left and they heard engines driving away, they stayed motionless for a long time.

  The only sound was the rancid blood dripping through the floor boards.

  _

  The Zombies were cut apart on the floor of the house. The gunfire had torn their bodies apart. They were only body parts now in lakes of black, putrid blood. Stepping over them, the three made their way to the door. Suddenly Eric slipped. He landed on the torn torso of a Zombie, like hitting a cold sponge. The rancid corpse burst apart beneath him. White worms wriggled through its flesh. Pouncing to his feet, Eric gave out a gasp of disgust, and then bolted out the door, wiping his bloody hands on his clothes.