The World Without Crows

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  The blue sign had white letters:

  Maine, The Way Life Should Be.

  Eric's eyes did not open.

  _

  When Lucia pulled off the road onto Route 26, she looked and soon found a suitable house. She drove up the long, curling gravel road to the farmhouse. Taking the only weapon she had found, a tire iron, she crept into the farmhouse.

  It had been ransacked, but it was totally empty of Zombies.

  Lucia found a bedroom on the second floor and dragged down the mattress. As gently as she could, she pulled Eric out of the truck, brought him into the house, and put him stomach down on the mattress. His back was an angry map of a red chain of mountains, swollen, purple and oozing blood.

  Birdie stood over him, sniffling and crying. "Is he going to die?" she asked her. "Is he, Lucia? Is he going to die?"

  Lucia wanted to answer her, but Birdie was no ordinary girl. They had been through too much together. She couldn't lie to her about this. She couldn't say it was all going to be all right.

  _

  Lucia checked her rear view mirror. No Carl Doyle, not yet. He had followed them after they had fled Daniel Sullivan, but somewhere he had turned off, bringing the pursuit with him. She hadn't seen him since. Now, without Eric to stop him, Lucia knew he was dangerous to both her and Birdie. To Doyle, they were traitors, savages, darkies. And they had no weapons to defend themselves.

  It was dangerous to enter Bethel, but she had no choice. Eric needed medication or he would die of infection. She didn't know what she would do without Eric. She had lost Sergio and that was too much to bear already. She left Birdie to care for Eric, swung up into the truck, and headed for the town.

  Bethel was a small town in a rolling valley. Mountains rose in the distance, their heads shaved with ski slopes. Clapboard houses lined the streets of Bethel where, before the Vaca B, ski tourists once walked the streets. Now Lucia crept into the empty town slowly.

  She hadn't gone far when she saw Carl Doyle.

  _

  Doyle stumbled around his Rover, which was half inside the pharmacy, covered with glass. Lucia had parked the truck far down the street and slowly approached to watch Doyle.

  As she crouched silently behind a car, Doyle leaned against the Land Rover and put his head on the roof. He stayed that way for so long, Lucia thought he might be dying right before her eyes. Yet he picked up his head, said something she couldn't hear and then opened the door to the Rover and climbed in. A second later, he pulled the Rover out of the pharmacy and screeched out of Bethel, toward western Maine.

  Lucia waited until she was sure Doyle would not return before she went into the pharmacy. Lying in the glass where Doyle must have struck it was a Zombie, looking more like a skeleton than a human. Lucia stepped over it, crunching through the glass and into the pharmacy.

  It was another instance of Doyle saving them. If the Zombie was cracked, Lucia would have been at its mercy. As she searched the shelves of the mostly empty pharmacy, she thought about Doyle.

  He had saved Eric. If he had not attacked when he did, Lucia doubted he could have lived through many more lashes. One moment the whip had been raised, the next the man with the cowboy hat and boots had been dead, shot through the right eye. The whip fell before he did. Then the crowd had erupted into shouts and cries of terror. Gunfire ripped through them, and, as people dropped in the street, Lucia grabbed Birdie and ran to Eric. In the chaos of Carl Doyle's onslaught, as he fired into the crowd from some distant rooftop, Lucia had dragged Eric into a truck. That was the escape. Without Doyle, Lucia would have spent her life with Daniel Sullivan. She shuddered. She would not think of him again. Never again.

  Lucia could find no serious antibiotics in the pharmacy. Almost everything was gone. In the end, all she found was a tube of antibacterial salve, a container of aspirin, and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She also found the skeleton of a child, with many of its bones missing. It looked like it had been torn apart by dogs.

  She was about to leave when she heard the knocking.

  _

  The sound came from underneath a trap door behind the counter of the pharmacy. The door was chained shut with a bright steel padlock. Lucia stood over it. The faint noise continued.

  Was there a rhythm to the knocking? The question coursed through her. Were Zombies capable of rhythm or had someone locked innocent people down there? She opened her mouth to call down through the door, but then shut it quickly. What if it was a cracked Zombie and the sound of her voice drove it crazy? What if it burst through the door? What if this door was not the only way it could get out? She had only a tire iron to protect her.

  The sound continued.

  What if it was a human, like her, like Eric, like Birdie? A survivor imprisoned by some sick, twisted person like Carl Doyle. The knock came again and she swallowed. If she could tell if there was a rhythm to the sound, maybe it would be different.

  She crouched down. Her heart thudded in her chest. The knocking sound continued. Lucia bent down closer. If she could hear a rhythm or maybe a groan from inside, some indication that it was Zombie or human, she would know whether to open the door or not. She trembled and bent down even further until, finally, her ear touched the cold metal of the door.

  The knock came again. She listened, holding her breath, trying to separate the sound of her own heartbeat from the silence throbbing below the trap door. She closed her eyes.

  Immediately, as if he had been waiting for her, her brother came to her.

  "Lucia," Sergio said. “No seas tonta.” His voice was solemn with the power of the dead.

  Lucia leapt away from the trap door with a soundless cry, blinking. She could still hear the knocking sound, but she scrambled away and leapt out the pharmacy window.

  She did not look back.

  _

  Lucia had never sewn anything before. She took out the needle and the two pieces of cloth and began to practice. Her first try would not be on Eric's skin.

  Birdie sat beside her, watching her quietly.

  "Puta!" she cried and sucked her finger.

  "Use this," Birdie said, and passed her a thimble.

  "Oh, is that what that's for?" Lucia smiled at her.

  Trying to remember her mother, Lucia bent over the cloth. Her mother had always tried to get her to learn, but she had been dismissive. She was going to be a lawyer. Yes, her mother said, yes, good, but even lawyers lose buttons. "Mother," she had groaned. "Don't be so old fashioned." She always talked to her mother in English when she wanted to make that point.

  "No," Birdie said, watching her. "Smaller stitches. It'll cinch up if you do it like that."

  Lucia nodded her head and began again. It would be one thing to sew this cloth, another to pierce living skin. For an instant, her breath caught inside her, and she felt on the verge of screaming. But she caught herself by focusing on Birdie. She pushed the needle through the cloth and pulled the thread all the way through.

  Sergio was dead.

  The thought came to her like that. Sometimes there was no reason to it, just a flash of horrible knowledge, trailing misery and grief like a comet's tail. There had been no chance to sew his wound. Just a single gunshot had done it. He had bled to death within minutes. No last words, no chance to tell him it was okay, to tell him she loved him. He just died. He was just gone.

  Her hands shook.

  There was not even time to grieve.

  Lucia turned away from the cloth and taking the needle and thread in her hand, she began searching Eric's back. There wasn't time to practice long. The wounds glistened with blood. She felt sick for a second and had a moment of severe, crippling doubt. She could not do this. She couldn't even sew a button. Then she felt Birdie's hand on her shoulder, and Lucia took a deep breath.

  She must do this.

  "All right," she said. "All right."

  She chose the most serious wound, a great ugly canyon that cut from his shoulder blade down to the middle of his back. Starting a
t the end nearest the shoulder blade, she took his skin between her fingers and pressed it together. Blood and clear liquid oozed up between the skin. Eric's breathing was uneven, but otherwise, he did not move or make a sound. Lucia took the bright needle in her hand. Eric's flesh was soft and warm between her fingers. Closing her eyes, she muttered a quick prayer to Mother Mary, and then, in one movement, stuck the needle through the flesh. Eric groaned but did not awaken. Pulling the dark thread through, Lucia turned the needle back and stuck it through Eric's flesh again. This time his back twitched and his left arm rose a little.

  "Hold him down," Lucia ordered Birdie.

  With only a whimper of protest, Birdie moved to Eric's left side and pressed down on his arm.

  "Try not to let him move, Birdie," Lucia said to her. "He could hurt himself."

  Birdie nodded and pressed down harder.

  Lucia focused on the wound. She tried not to notice the blood on her fingers.

  One stitch down.

  About fifty more to go.

  _

  The first night at the farmhouse Lucia could not sleep. Despite cleaning and bandaging his wounds as best she could, Eric was restless with fever. She didn't know what she could do, but stay by him and cool his forehead with a damp cloth. She had to make sure he didn't roll over in his misery and rip open the wounds she had so carefully cleaned and sewn. In the end, she lost count of the stitches. There were many. The canyons on his back was replaced with the railroad tracks of stitches, as if his skin were a frontier being developed.

  Birdie slept on the couch next to him. She had wanted to curl up next to him on the mattress, but Lucia thought it might aggravate his wounds. Even in the moments when Eric calmed and all was quiet, Lucia did not dare to shut her eyes.

  She knew Sergio was waiting for her in her dreams.

  Inevitably, however, deep in the night, only a few hours from dawn, as the sky outside turned dark blue, Sergio came and sat next to her. Lucia was dreaming.

  "I was always the middle one," Sergio said. His voice, however, had lost all his former fear. He sounded like their father. "No one paid attention to me. You were older, Diego was younger. You don't even have time for me when I'm dead."

  "That's not true, Sergio," Lucia said.

  "I know," he said. "These are your worries, not mine. Do you think I care about any of this? Do you want to know what I thought about, sister? Just before I died?"

  "Yes."

  "Gloria," her brother answered. "We kissed behind the church. She said she'd never felt so much for another person. She said she didn't understand it. She wanted me to stay with her. Gloria was her name, did I tell you that?"

  "Yes," Lucia said.

  "I thought about her in the end," Sergio said. "I belong with her. Not with you. Do you understand?"

  "Yes."

  "That doesn't mean you should forget me, Lucia," he said. Sergio was angry with her. "Don't you dare forget me."

  "I'm sorry, Sergio."

  "Don't forget me like you do everyone else!"

  Lucia jerked awake, crying out. Outside, the sun was rising, brilliant and bright. Eric's breathing was calm and measured. Lucia wept at the sound.

  She knew then Eric was going to live.

  _

  They stayed at the farmhouse for three days, letting Eric's tender wounds heal. Birdie never left his side, and, usually so quiet, she now talked to Eric so much, it was as if all of the things she had never said to him had broken free. Eric listened through a haze of intense pain he tried to hide.

  Lucia spent her days foraging in the local farmhouses for food. There was not much left, but, in a trailer in the woods, she found a stash of canned food and bottled water. Sitting on a chair outside the trailer was a Zombie. He had long ago shrunk down so much that, nearly skeletal and lacking eyes, he could not move. On the ground next to him was a shotgun. He had died guarding his food. When Lucia approached the gun, the Zombie opened and shut its mouth, making a creaking sound like an old wooden door.

  Now they had a shotgun.

  On the third evening, Lucia sat on the porch, watching the fireflies. Their green lights flashed in the evening. She thought about Sergio. Life happened so quickly. Lights in the darkness, winking to brilliant existence and then descending into shadow. She looked up with a start when the porch door slammed.

  Eric stood on the porch, one hand on Birdie's shoulder, who looked up at him with pride.

  "You shouldn't be up, Eric," Lucia said, standing. "You need to rest."

  "Yes," Eric agreed, "but not here." He hobbled forward, unable to keep the pain from his face. He sat down next to her, hissing in air between his teeth.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't find any pain medication," Lucia said.

  Eric ignored the comment. "It's too dangerous to stay here. Carl Doyle is looking for us." Lucia had told him everything about Doyle's assault on Daniel Sullivan, how they had escaped, and how she had seen Doyle crash into a pharmacy window. "We have to keep moving."

  "You're not well, Eric," she said. "You have to rest."

  "I'm well enough." Eric stood up, grimacing. "You know it's true, Lucia," he told her. "The longer we stay here, the more chance that Doyle will find us. Or someone else." He looked out over the fireflies flashing in the field. "We have to leave tomorrow."

  Lucia said nothing, but watched him walk slowly back into the house.

  Now that the night was her last at the farmhouse, it was far more pretty, far more peaceful. For a long time then, finally, she cried, at first quietly and then in heaving sobs. When she was done, she was so exhausted, she lay out on the bench on the porch and fell into an empty, deep sleep of the kind that she hadn't known in weeks.

  _

  When they reached Grafton Notch State Park, they pulled the truck to the edge of an embankment. Eric was nervous about meeting Carl Doyle or anyone else and insisted they abandon the truck. Lucia tried to argue with him, saying that they were so close, they could be there in hours, but Eric was adamant.

  "It isn't worth the risk," he said. "Trucks are moving targets. We've walked this far, we can walk to the end."

  Lucia finally agreed. Once they unpacked the truck, Lucia put the truck in neutral, and, grunting, they pushed the stubborn truck off the road. When the truck finally bounced down the edge, rolling over once at the bottom, and ending up back on its wheels amid shattered glass, Lucia noticed Eric's t-shirt. It was dark with red slashes of blood.

  They walked up into the pine-filled forest, and, not too far from the road, they made camp.

  After a quick dinner of rice and lentils, Birdie settled down next to Eric with her crayons. Lucia glared at Eric.

  "What?" he asked, after a long time of trying to ignore her.

  "You know what," she said. "Take off your shirt." Eric's eyes narrowed in anger, but Lucia's gaze was not to be questioned.

  Eric gave out a little cry of pain as he peeled the shirt off.

  It was as she feared. "You tore it open," she said, looking at his back.

  Birdie looked up from her crayons with concern. "Are we going to have sew him up again?"

  Eric looked at her with Birdie's question in his eyes.

  "Yes we are," Lucia said to her. "If Eric had rested like I said, we wouldn't have to do this again."

  "Can I try this time?" she asked, setting down her crayons.

  Eric laughed. Then Lucia followed, though the thought of piercing him with a needle again infuriated her. "It hurts when I laugh," Eric said.

  "Good," Lucia said. "I should let her, Eric. I really should."

  "Can I?" Birdie asked, not seeing the humor. "Please?"

  Eric and Lucia laughed again.

  "Stop it," Eric said. "Seriously, it hurts."

  19

  __________

  Mooselookmeguntic Lake

  LUCKILY ERIC ONLY NEEDED a few stitches to close the wound that had re-opened. After caring for Eric's back once more, they walked up a hill to a small clearing near a brook. The
y set up camp to stay until Eric's back wasn't so tender he couldn't move without tearing out the stitches.

  Eric spent his time on his stomach. He had lost all of his materials, his map, his calendar, the book he had taken from Charlie's house, his polyhedral dice, everything that had once linked him to the past world. The loss of the calendar was the worst for him. They had already replaced the map when they found a road map of Maine in the glove compartment of an abandoned car, but even if Eric could find a calendar, how could he know what day it was? Was it still August or had September crept in? With a chill of fear, he realized the time for calendars was over. They would think in seasons from now on. Their plans would be based on temperature, the migrations of birds, the fluctuating color in the leaves of trees.

  His birthday was in August. He was now seventeen, he reflected. But he could no longer be sure what day that was. It was also the end of birthdays.

  Had he been seventeen in the Cave? Ever since he had first been shackled to the steel rebar, he had felt seventy. He couldn't remember being whipped. He only remembered being dragged out into the crowd, and then nothing but a red wall. He thought he had died.

  Instead, he had come alive again in Maine. He was only miles from the island. It didn't seem real. They were going to make it. After all they had been through, after everyone who had died, they were going to make it.

  His heart was a hard thing now, like a stone, polished smooth with suffering and grief. He felt everything from a distance, a careful, considered distance. From this distance, his heart would not allow him to rejoice. In it there still glowed a modicum of doubt.