by DA Chaney
Pushing her arms through the sleeves of the coat, Ed felt slightly comforted by its ability to hide her skinny form. This kind of event was exactly what happened when people thought they could overpower her, knowing she was a woman. There was just a different level of menace when people knew she was female instead of male. They tried to turn her into something she wasn’t. Something she never wanted to be: a girl. To Hell with them all. She was better off when everyone thought she was a boy. She may not be able to fight well, but when it came to her survival, her instincts kicked in to save her. She could hardly ask for more than that.
“Good for nothing old hag.”
Ed flexed her shoulders as she moved toward the door. She needed to find her partner. There was no more time to stand around mulling over this unfortunate set of events. As it was, when she caught up with Brock she’d need to arrange a slightly different story for the telling. “I have to be somewhere. Thanks for the knot on my head, stripping me naked, making me puke, and the teat twisting. On second thought- I hope you rot in Hell, you old hag.”
4
The creature halted within the old tunnel cocking her head, tensing her muscles, and listening. When the dead things came, they always made enough noise that gave them away; dragging and moaning sounds as if they didn’t care someone knew they were coming. Not silent like her kind.
She thought she had heard something ahead of her, but she’d been making too much of her own noise soothing her hungry belly to be sure. She dropped into a crouch, protecting the mound that comprised her middle by pushing it firmly between her thighs. She extended her fingers, spreading them in a curled fashion, prepared for a fight. It occurred to her, that her clan did not know where she was; and she could not call for help without giving herself away to the dead thing. Once they knew a victim was close, they didn’t let up. It was maybe the one trait that she admired about them.
When it crawled into the tunnel, she knew why she hadn’t figured out it was coming much earlier. The dead thing was pulling itself along—mouth agape—with its hands and elbows in the dark. Its lower body was missing. It was an older thing, and it was possible it had been one of her kind with its withered skin mostly missing in clumps. It was hard to tell.
She looked around her and contemplated her means of escape, backtracking being the forethought in her mind. She could return the way she’d come. The path split a long ways back, but it would mean being far out of the place that she wanted to go. Going forward in the tunnel would take her to a place where she could surface to find the four legged things that roamed topside. They were much easier to kill without danger to her condition since they didn’t group up in a defensive attack. She could steal one or two and fill the ache.
She mewled softly in indecision…looking beyond the crawling dead thing to where she wanted to go. She desperately wanted to continue forward, not backwards, but it had its risks. Namely, she could get infected and both her and the beast inside her could wake up dead.
The dead thing hadn’t seemed to notice her. It was unknown how well they could see in the dark. Her vision was perfect in these conditions, and in her mind, she mapped out a route that might let her pass the dead thing without attracting attention. Her body demanded basic satisfaction and had waited long enough for it. She was fully against going back and around to avoid it.
She proceeded carefully moving without noise, hands drawn to attack if the need arose. She alternated between taking a step and stopping; waiting, then moving forward again. The maternal part of her was frightened at this idea, but the hunter part pushed her forward believing with some high degree of certainty that the plan would work. Even though she was alive, the smell of her own body was not as temptingly noticeable as a human’s; and if she made no sound, she might be well on her way to the feast she planned on.
She held her breath in an attempt to block out its odor. It may have been dead a long while, but the smell of the dead was wholly undesirable to her kind—worse yet if it was a fresh one. As she got closer to it, she stopped as it continued to crawl toward her. She let it get close, breathing shallowly as the musk of it unfurled around her.
As it crawled near her, she carefully placed her feet out of the path of its body, stepping cautiously around it as it moved slowly beneath her. All it would take was for it to realize she was there and it could mean her death. She waited and watched. It crawled pitifully, moaning deep with a sucking dry sound that she could not identify followed by the dragging of its body.
Without a thought as to what she was doing, her long nails skewered the dead thing in the back. Stunned at herself for what she had done, she could no longer stop herself from being in the fight that she’d initiated. She didn’t know why she’d done it. Some deep down aversion to what it was, maybe.
Snarling, the dead thing flipped over growling at her, its arms flailing as the teeth sought her skin. The move withdrew her claws from it and she squealed and moved back, swiping out with her fingers. A thicker, putrid smell filled the tunnel as her claws cut into dead flesh and the smell made her choke, gasping for breath through her mouth instead.
The dead thing hooked onto her legs with its cold hands trying to bring her clammy leg to its mouth. It was crying out at her like she was the first meal it had seen in a long time. The desperate sounds made her shiver because they were much like the ones her own body made.
She kicked at it, clawing at the arms until bone was exposed. Chunks of rotted flesh fell from the bone in fatty clumps as she shred through it. But the dead thing did not stop. It lashed out at her with its fingers working on dragging her closer for a taste of her leg. Some blisters broke and oozed while the dead thing seemed to moan in delight at the fresh smell, lapping up the fluid as it spurted out from her leg. She cried out at the fire that erupted as the blisters popped.
Wrapping a protective arm around her swollen belly, the female snarled at the dead thing and began stomping on its head even as it still tried to feast on her. Bone fragmented beneath her feet, shards pushing into the hardened skin of her heel as she continued to strike. Her protective instinct to save the beast inside her unleashed a fury within her and before long the dead thing below her stopped moving.
Heart hammering from the exertion, the female picked up her mangled foot and stared at the dead thing. Was it a trick? She jabbed at it with her good foot and it didn’t move. The pulpy remains of its head was soaking into the dirt, forming a putrid pile. Cocking her head, she nudged it again but this time with a long nail.
It took some time to realize that she’d put a stop to the dead thing for good. Then relief and satisfaction coursed through her. Grunting and gyrating to her own beat she made a circle around the dead thing in the tunnel celebrating her joy. She ignored her stinging feet as she released her urine and cackled in the darkness with delight.
She must get back to her clan soon and tell them what she’d discovered. Surely one of her kind had stopped a dead thing before, but she did not know of it. Usually the dead things won out merely because they would not die. This time…she had lived and it had died. There were no words in her mind that described the glory that she felt. For a moment, in a dreary life of one who dwelled underground and hunted to live, today was a very good day.
Suppressing her joyous victory she stopped to listen. No other sounds echoed from the tunnel, but she took a moment to let the quiet wash over her. She’d gotten lucky. Sometimes there was more than one of them and she hadn’t paid attention. She couldn’t wait to let the clan know what she’d discovered. Squash heads!
Limping and holding an arm over her growling belly, she moved forward hissing at the truly dead thing in a heap on the dirt tunnel. Now that the danger had passed, her young told her that it did not want to wait any longer.
Yes, she would need to tell her clan what happened. But first, she needed to find food. A picture of the four legged animal came to her mind and she smiled a vile toothy smile and moved forward. Ever so gently.
Ed broke awa
y from the small cluster of homes, pulling her soggy cap closer to shield her face as the rain fell. She didn’t want to waste time getting to Brock, but she remembered through the haze in her head that she had a missing dagger. It was possible that she might have forgotten about losing it given her state of mind, but when she was dressing she’d patted her hips instinctively for dagger pockets.
Craters of water gathered in mud slicked pools making the trip back to the cemetery slippery. Reaching the far edge of it, she went about trying to retrace her steps as best as she could remember from four nights ago, slipping in the oversized boots along the way. They turned out to be about two sizes too large, and despite skidding around in them, she couldn’t complain about the coverage. The material didn’t let a drop of water into them which was a large improvement over the last pair of stiff, cloth ones. The socks, although they were dirty—she could feel loose dirt sliding around in them—kept the boots from rubbing too badly against her feet. Ed figured she’d likely still have some walking sores later until she broke them in, but it was nothing she hadn’t seen before…just likely less painful with the socks to act as a buffer.
The clothes probably belonged to the old woman’s son that she was so fond of that she’d stooped to kidnapping Ed to give her to him. A shudder raced down her spine when she thought of it. If she hadn’t woken up when she did, what would she have woken up to later? If she’d been tied to the bed she might not have had the strength to break free. The subsequent thoughts of her fate passed through her mind.
Guilt wasn’t a factor in the grand inner workings of her emotions. Everything that she owned was gone, taken or lost with the events in the last days and replacements were needed. There was nothing more basic than that. Luckily, nothing she wore was of great concern to her beyond the cap that she favored and essential binding cloth, both of which she was happy to have recovered. It wasn’t her fault that the old woman had popped her on the head, stripped her buck naked, and then stole her clothes. Some women actually got paid for that kind of thing. The being naked part anyway. Who knew what other sick things happened in a whorehouse?
A drop of rain rolled down the bulging collar of the coat and Ed pulled it around closer to her skin. It smelled like wet grass and muddy leaves, which wasn’t a horrible combination given the other smells that she was used to. Reaching inside the coat, she had also found a nice surprise in an inner pocket. A few cheap coins. It wouldn’t buy much of anything, though finding money anytime was better than having none. She’d be able to combine it with her share when she met up with Brock. Assuming her partner in thievery hadn’t spent it all thinking Ed was dead in a ditch somewhere. Ed shivered, blaming it on the weather. Had he come looking for her when she hadn’t shown up? It was a prominent question that she planned on asking first thing.
The graveyard in the light of day was less creepy but no less gloomy in the rain. It looked miserable as puddles filled man-made and natural nooks, holes, footprints, and valleys alike. Making a wide sweep of the grassy area where they’d been, she took special notice of the deep impressions where the cart, Brock, and the men looking to rob them had been. Most of the tracks were submerged in water, but it wasn’t difficult to make out the thin wheel tracks. The cart had moved off in the direction of the sawbones place and it looked like the pack had dispersed as hoped after she’d taken off, making various deep impressions in the ground.
Wandering much more carefully than she’d done on the nights past, Ed found the bush she’d hidden behind. She almost laughed at the crushed way it looked. There was no mistaking that someone had run right through it. The thing was a mangled mess of leaves and thin broken limbs, divided almost exactly in two parts. Too bad she’d been on the receiving end of the kick. Rubbing her side through the coat, she was glad that it was feeling better than the first night she’d received it.
Ed still grunted as she kneeled to search beneath the misshapen foliage with her fingertips. Her head throbbed, protesting at her prostrated angle. Sucking in a deep breath, she kept looking. It had to be here. It was the only place left. She didn’t want to think about whether someone had found it lying on the ground and taken it.
Moving her position to the right, she patted her hand against the soggy mud until she felt something hard under the bush and pulled it free so that she could look at it. Releasing her held breath, she closed her eyes for a moment issuing a sigh of relief then slipped the muddy dagger into the coat pocket and climbed to her feet.
Ed set off in the direction of Lock’s Landing, clomping foolishly in the oversized boots, to track Brock down feeling as though for the first time since she stepped from the old woman’s house that she might be getting back on an even keel. Occasionally she would scan the area around her to make sure she wasn’t being followed. The incident with that woman had left her jumpy, and she didn’t want to come face to face with more trouble.
The big knot on her head throbbed under the protection of her cap and the headache felt like it was fit to pushing her brain out of her eyes, but she kept on. At times, she stopped and tipped her swollen face up to the rain to feel the cold droplets against her flushed face. She hated rain, but today it felt good in the way that it always did after she escaped with her life after a sound beating. It happened more often than she would like. The drops felt good against her heated skin, making her forget for a few moments that this time her head had almost been cracked open like an egg.
Thinking of eggs, her stomach growled. Apparently the dirty sock and cabbage garbage flavored stew she’d eaten earlier hadn’t held her appetite for long. Go figure. If her luck was extremely good, maybe Brock was still waiting around for her to show up and she could afford to get some real food.
Of course, there was only one way to find out. Even if it was to assure him that yes she was actually alive. They’d never been in a situation like this before. If he thought she was dead then there was no telling what he’d done in the four days that she hadn’t shown up. She almost couldn’t be sure that she could blame him if he’d moved on, but she had to know for sure. The poor didn’t just leave loose money ends lying around if there was something to be done about it. Ed certainly wasn’t about to start now.
Gaining on the sawbones’ place of business, she recognized the dull sign that held the words “Carver’s” with an engraved picture of a surgical saw on it since most people couldn’t read in the area. There was no mistaking what the sign was for no matter what people could or couldn’t read. Just below it hung a swinging wooden placard with tall letters written on it that she couldn’t understand. Though, looking at the boarded up place she could hazard a guess as to what the extra signage implied: Closed and out of town. Shoulders sagging, she approached the door.
“No, no, no,” she muttered. Then just to try it anyway, she leaned in under the wooden awning, head out of the rain for a moment, and pounded on the door with a balled fist. Carver didn’t keep regular hours like some folks did, he could mostly be found at nighttime, taking body orders. “Come on, ya bugger, open up.”
“He ain’t in.”
Ed spun to view the owner of the frail voice. He was a short, sickly looking boy of about ten, pale around the face, with more white than color in his eyes. Even his freckles were pale against his face when usually a redhead’s freckles were sprinkled around like thick gold flakes. His clothes were soggy, and he coughed into his fist as she looked him over.
She kept her distance. Not because he was sickly. It seemed everyone was always sick with something. You couldn’t bump into someone who didn’t look sickly with all the constant rain. No, she kept her distance because she didn’t trust him not to try and empty her pockets. No matter what little she had in them, the contents were still hers. He had come from the corner of the exterior of the house, where the awning was a bit thicker there. A large dry barrel stood beneath it, presumably from where he’d come from.
“Do you know when he’s going to be back?”
“Day after next at the earlie
st. You missed him by half a day. He wanted me to watch his place for him in case one of you ‘body’ guys showed up. You have one? Can I see it?” His excitement raised a fresh batch of coughing. Ed grunted and shook her head.
“Rats,” he muttered, looking truly saddened. He tipped his eyes up to get a good look at her. “You here to take an order then or something? He didn’t give me no list to give out.”
Again, she shook her head. “Was looking for someone. You know if a guy named Brock stopped by with one a couple of days ago?”
The boy rubbed his earlobe and made a noise in his throat and flipped his hand toward the door. “Big burly guy? With a hand cart?” Then, he rolled his pale eyes up into his head and clucked his tongue. “Sure, I remember the sawbones complaining that some big guy needed to start bringing more of them. Something like that.”
Ed nodded. At least she knew that he had made it here. There’d be no reason to hold a dead body until she showed up. Too much risk and the body wouldn’t be as fresh. “He get paid?” The boy made a face and gestured with his hands. “How do I know, man? I’m just a squirt.”
Ed smiled and shrugged at the boy’s aggrieved tone. “Thanks, kid.”
“You want me to tell him you stopped by?” He jerked a small thumb toward the door. Her gaze followed the motion and then darted back to the boy.
“It’s alright. I’m sure me ‘n Brock will be back with a cart full the day he’s back. No need.” At least, that’s what she hoped would happen. She’d have to find him first and figure out if he had a new plan yet.
“All right, then. Try to stay dry now.” The boy grimaced at the rain as some wind blew drops into his face. Shivering, he wrapped his soggy arms around his waist and went to the barrel. She was right. It’s where he perched, waiting for visitors.
