The World Without Crows

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  One showed two orange people under a yellow sun, holding hands, one small with curling orange hair, the other large with an expansive round face, like a pumpkin. They had smiles so large they escaped the confines of the face and twirled into the atmosphere. Shoots of copper grass grew under their feet. Innocently, the figures faced the viewer, naked with orange emotion. Behind them was a copper tree with yellow leaves.

  Good Prince Billy was right, Sergio and Lucia wanted to stay, but he was the one who would have to live with leaving her. He would have to live with it for the rest of his life. He stared at the drawing and willed his hands to crumple it, to tear it, to throw it from him. He tried telling himself that Birdie was dead, that now the lives of two people depended on him realizing that fact. Dealing with it. He wanted to prove it by destroying Birdie’s drawing. He tried to will his hands to move, to clutch the paper, but nothing happened. He could not do it.

  In the end, he put the drawing back in Birdie's backpack, which he packed carefully in his own.

  He would start forgetting her tomorrow. Tomorrow he would begin their new life as Mustangs. Tomorrow he would make the dreadful decision.

  Tonight he would not abandon her.

  _

  Eric awoke to screams. Leaping to his feet, he blinked, his heart thudding with fear. Gunshots. He heard one, two, and then several more. Eric pulled on his pants so fast, he nearly fell over. Lucia and Sergio were at his side at the next moment.

  "What's happening?" Lucia cried.

  "Come on!" Eric grabbed his backpack. "Get your things!"

  People were flashing by the hall outside, crying and shouting. Eric ran to the window to see the chaos of people outside. The flash of gunfire. There was a dead body on the lawn. Eric could see figures running through the street. He saw one man running away, wearing a green sports jersey. It said McHale 32 on it.

  "What's happening?" Lucia asked. He just shook his head.

  Outside he saw the Good Prince standing with several men with a shotgun in her hand. She was yelling, but in the chaos, he couldn't tell what she was saying. Then one word rose from the crowd, repeated throughout.

  "It's the Minutemen!" Sergio cried.

  As Eric watched, he saw Good Prince Billy rise up with the shotgun. A deafening blast filled the air, and a man wearing a Red Sox jersey collapsed like he was made of water. Another truck came to a screeching halt in front of the church, and men in green or red jerseys began leaping from the truck. Gunfire erupted all around them.

  Eric pulled on his backpack and then turned away from the window. "Let's go!" he cried, but Sergio and Lucia remained staring out the window, stunned. "Let's go!" Eric tugged Sergio back so that he fell. He scrambled to his feet without a word of complaint.

  Running into the church, they pelted down the stairs and then further into the church. Soon they stood before Carl Doyle's room.

  "What're we doing?" Lucia cried as Eric threw open the door.

  "Grab those keys," Eric said to Sergio. Then he turned to Lucia. "We're getting out of here."

  Carl Doyle was already on his feet.

  "Eric, my boy!" he boomed, his arms wide. "I knew you would return! Rotten business, I hear." He pointed up toward the sound of gunfire.

  "Eric, no!" Lucia cried.

  But Eric was fumbling with the lock already. The chains fell from Doyle and he made a rumbling sound that might have been a sigh or a laugh. Eric looked up at Doyle’s bloodstained face. "Get us out of here," he said.

  Doyle nodded at him severely, and then clasped him by both shoulders. He gave him a shake. "You're a fine boy," he said with a wink. "A fine boy."

  Then, turning toward the door, he roared, and ran up the stairs. "Wahoo Mohammed!” he cried.

  _

  "Eric!" Lucia cried when Doyle vanished. "What're you doing?" Sergio was cursing in Spanish.

  "Getting us out of here," Eric answered. "Hurry, we don't have much time."

  The three pelted up the stairs. Above them they heard gunfire mixed with the booming voice of Carl Doyle. When they reached the main door of the church, they saw Carl Doyle standing on the lawn. Somehow he already had a shotgun, and was firing one shot after another toward a group of Minutemen who had taken refuge behind a truck. "You goddamn savages!" Doyle boomed as he shot.

  Without pausing, Eric flew out the door. At the corner of his eye, while he ran, he saw a knot of bodies, but didn't see if the Good Prince was one of them. While Carl Doyle screamed, firing into the Minutemen, the three of them raced into the darkness.

  They climbed into the silver Ford Probe. Lucia slammed it into gear and Eric fell into the backseat as the car squealed into the road. As they screeched away, Eric turned and saw more approaching lights, Minutemen reinforcements.

  Within moments, there was only the road and the sound of their breathing. Then the quiet sound of sobbing. Sergio was crying in the front seat. Lucia turned to him and said something in Spanish, but Sergio didn't stop crying.

  The Probe sped north into the darkness.

  Eric saw a green sign, bright from the Probe's headlights, hanging down toward the dark earth. He had to cock his head to the side to read it.

  Welcome to Vermont.

  14

  __________

  Green Mountain National Park

  WHEN THEY REACHED the Green Mountain National Park, they drove the Ford Probe to the edge of an embankment. The three of them pushed it over, and the car bounced down into the forest where it vanished. A pine tree shivered to mark where it hit with a crash. In the silence, Sergio began to weep again, as if the Probe had been a living creature they had killed. Lucia put her arm around her brother.

  "We had to," Eric said, without turning to them. "The Minutemen might be hunting for us. We have to be careful. No more cars. No more people."

  Sergio groaned like he had kicked him.

  "Grow up," Eric spat toward him, offended by his sorrow. Lucia flushed, looking at Eric, but with anger or shame, he didn't know.

  He didn't care. He walked down into the forest and then turned north, toward the interior of the park and ultimately, the island.

  _

  The rolling hills had now given way to the wooded mountains of Vermont. They climbed a steep mountain and camped on an overlook. All they could see was green forest and mountains. Looking over the park, it was easy to imagine a world in which humans had never existed at all. After all, humans had existed for so short a time. For billions of years, the earth had done fine without them, and now, it would continue as if they had never been. To the earth, humans were less than a moment, less than an instant. Just as Eric would forget a single blink in his lifetime, so the earth would forget them. It did not make him sad, though Sergio, looking on the same scene, wept once more. For Eric it was comforting. What was so great about humans anyway? The world had only destroyed itself a few months ago and they were already planning for war.

  Eric realized he was wrong about feeling numb. There was something in him, something terrible but powerful, something that should have frightened him but did not.

  Rage.

  _

  At night, he dreamt of his father. They were in the aluminum boat, floating in the lake in Maine. His father was drinking a can of beer with his feet up. Eric rowed toward the island. The skies were green and shivered like leaves disturbed by the wind.

  "Is that as fast as you can row?" his father asked. He tossed his empty beer into the lake where the red and white can bobbed in the water. "I can't believe you're my son."

  Eric said nothing. He pulled at the oars, but it was like rowing in thick mud. Water dripped off the oars, thick as honey.

  "You'll never get to the island," his father said, disgusted. There was a snap and a hiss as he opened another beer. "Your mother ruined you."

  Eric grunted at the oars, but suddenly they would not budge. The oars felt lodged in stone.

  His father laughed. "Holy shit," he said. "Your mother really screwed you up."

 
; It was only water. Eric heaved and strained against the oars. Suddenly his father shot up and was directly in his face, his hot breath in his face, his face twisted in contempt. "What's wrong with you?"

  Eric woke up sweating, his arms flailing around him, as if he were trying to fly.

  _

  The next day, over the campfire where the water boiled, Eric announced that he didn't want to move today. He wanted to stay at the camp. "I have to think," he said.

  The others didn't argue. They both seemed to have pulled away from him. They found consolation in each other. They stayed close together, speaking only in Spanish. Normally, Eric would have felt lonely and hurt. Now he felt relief. He wanted to be alone.

  He was thinking about leaving them.

  _

  There was a freedom to solitude. Eric could feel it, sitting at the crest of a ravine, his legs dangling over the hundred foot drop. He had failed at everything important to him. And those around him suffered for it.

  A gust of wind blew over the forest, tossing the leaves in a great rolling wave, turning the forest into a sea of green. Birds fluttered in the trees above him, chickadees, yellow warblers, and a group of voluble goldfinches. Dark turkey vultures traced lazy, slow circles in the air above.

  Eric tried to think of the future. Why should it matter? For an instant, he detached from his dream of the island. There was another possibility. He could wander. All his life. Like birds, he could move south in the winter, and then return north, moving, always moving, with no place to call home, no goal he could fail to reach. No people he could lose or put in danger. He looked over the mountains of Vermont and saw the wilderness, not as something to pass through, but as his ultimate destination. He could wander.

  The hell with the island.

  _

  During the day, the others gathered food. Sergio fished while Lucia gathered berries.

  She found a patch of blackberries, buzzing with bees under the August sun. While she picked the tender berries that stained her fingers purple, she happened upon a meadow of blueberries. The meadow sloped up the mountain, and, on the other end, Sergio tossed his line into a mountain stream.

  Lucia was picking blueberries when she heard it. Up at the edge of the meadow, a black bear plodded out of the forest. It was aware of her immediately, stopping and sniffing. They looked in each other's direction, Lucia's heart pattering inside her. She was on the edge of panic, thinking of the great, diseased brown bear that Eric had told her about. But just before she cried out to Sergio, the black bear looked away, sat lazily in the midst of the blueberries, and then began licking its paw. Apparently it decided they were no threat.

  Lucia watched the bear, the fear dissipating from her limbs. When she returned to the job of picking berries, she began to weep silently, in gratitude. Toward what, she did not know.

  She never told anyone about the bear.

  _

  Eric spooned the food in his mouth mechanically, thinking of when he was going to tell the others that he was no longer interested in going to the island, that he was no longer interested in being with them. The food was tasteless.

  Sergio and Lucia ate with happiness. Lucia had fried the trout perfectly and covered it with mashed blueberries. They finished with a dessert of blackberries sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Lucia, inspired by their meal, boiled blackberries in water and then ran the mixture through cloth. After adding a sprinkle of sugar, she shared the tea with Sergio, but Eric turned his away with a wave of his hand.

  The meal seemed to revive the brother and sister. Even Sergio, who had been inconsolable since they fled Cairo seemed content. Eric found it distasteful. Were they such creatures of their body that their mood could be radically changed by a decent meal? Did fried fish and crushed fruit bring back Birdie? Did it rid the world of the Vaca B? Did it repopulate the towns and rebuild the scorched cities?

  Finally he could not stand them anymore. He got up without a word and walked away from them, into the darkness of the forest, where he had pitched his tent.

  _

  At breakfast, Eric said he did not want to move again, not yet. In reality, he was finding the right time to make his exit. He had decided he would not even say goodbye. He would simply pack up and leave. He would head south and leave them all behind. He ate the oatmeal that Sergio had mixed with blueberries he had gathered at dawn, thinking of the relief he would feel, free of them.

  "Do you think they're alive?" Sergio asked Eric. When Eric looked up, his eyes were cold. "The people of Cairo?" he prodded when Eric only stared at him.

  "Some of them," Eric said. "The ones who fought are dead. The rest are in Boston by now. They probably burned Cairo to the ground to make a lesson of them." He added this last with cruelty that twisted inside him.

  "You don't know that," Lucia said, disgusted, when Sergio looked away from Eric quickly to hide his pain. Lucia turned to her brother and said something soothing in Spanish.

  "No, he's probably right," Sergio said quietly. He made a sound that was supposed to be a chuckle, but came out like a choke. "We've come all this way, and it's not the Zombies I'm scared of. It's the people. They're the real disaster.” Sergio shook his head and, standing up, swiftly walked away.

  Lucia turned furiously toward Eric. "Was that really necessary? Don't we have enough bullshit to deal with? Sergio met a girl in Cairo, you know. They kissed, Eric. His first kiss. Can't you give him a little hope?"

  "I'm tired of lying," Eric said. He meant to look at her steadily, but he felt his gaze turn to a glare, and Lucia blinked at him, hurt by his anger. She turned away from him, thinking of something to say, something that would ease his suffering.

  But Eric didn't want that. What hope did any of them have? So what Sergio had his first kiss? The girl he meant to kiss first, she was dead in the street, shot through the eye. The woman who had kissed him first had done so out of grief before she too died. He got up noisily and dumped the rest of his water into the campfire where it hissed angrily, spewing out steam. He walked away, thinking they would be better without him. That night, he thought, while they were sleeping. That night he would leave them.

  Perhaps they would find hope. For him, it could never be.

  _

  Eric stayed away from camp that day. He walked up and down the mountain, once spooking a group of does from their browsing. Their white tails flagged behind them as they leapt away. When he walked back up the mountain, he climbed a tree at the edge of the meadow and watched Sergio fish.

  Eric hadn’t noticed, but Sergio had quietly become accomplished, holding the thin fishing line in his hand, waiting for a bite to electrify the line. He had already caught four trout. He had strung them by the gills with clothesline and, to keep them fresh, immersed the fish in a cool eddy of water. Eric watched until Sergio caught one, crying out as it came flapping free of the brook, amidst the crystals of water droplets. He smacked it hard against a rock and then strung it on the line with the others.

  Watching him, Eric felt the first real pain of leaving them. It would not stop him, he knew that, but it hurt to watch him, a distant, almost nostalgic pain, as if he were already years in the future and remembering this moment.

  _

  When Eric walked back to camp, he stopped abruptly at the edge.

  There was a man at the campfire. He wore a Red Sox jersey.

  Pulling out his pistol, Eric walked toward him. There was little fear. His only emotion was a kind of satisfaction that the man who meant to surprise them when they returned was going to be the one surprised. As a Minuteman, he would be carrying weapons, Eric thought. It was better to shoot first.

  Eric walked forward, aiming his pistol. He had never killed anyone before. This would be his first time. The thought made him scared but resilient. This was something he had to do. He must do it. This was the world they lived in. Eric pointed the gun and was content to see that his hand was not shaking. Once he would have been frightened. No more. If only his father could
see him now.

  He approached softly on the hard ground, his pistol held out before him. He had to be quiet, he had to be close. One shot to the back of the head. Quick. Painless. Humane. But not too close. He stopped about ten feet away. Held out his arm. Aimed.

  "ERIC! NO!" Lucia ran into the campground, waving her arms and screaming.

  She could not make the hard decision. He could. His finger pressed the trigger.

  The man turned toward him.

  Eric's hand went numb an instant before he fired. The pistol dropped to his feet and his mouth hung open.

  "Hello, Eric," the man said weakly.

  It was John Martin.

  _

  All three of them huddled around John Martin who lay now by the fire. Carl Doyle's gunshot had not killed him. All the antibiotics that John had gathered after Brad's death had kept the wound from festering, but in his weakened state, the Vaca B invaded. His eyes were red with blood.

  He breathed heavily by the fire. "I've been searching for you," he said. "Thank God," he said. "Thank God I found you. I'm out of time."

  "Don't talk now, John," Lucia said. "You need to eat." She turned toward Sergio. "Get him some water and food," she ordered. Sergio nodded and dashed away.

  John Martin took a deep, labored breath that rattled in his chest, an ugly sound. "Listen to me," he said. "The truck." He lifted his hand and pointed east. "Birdie," he said.