I knew I was softly crying, though it didn’t matter. A day had not gone by without tears gracing my cheeks since the first of the horrors started washing up on our life. My eyes and face were anesthetized, immune. As if what I felt mattered anymore.
The counting returned, the slow breathing. My mind lapped back up on the shore of the real. I could feel the present reality by the suicidal drone humming in my bones. I mopped up my face on my sleeve and pulled my shit together.
We would need supplies.
4
Breathe. One…two…three…
I grounded myself back on that matted carpet, reinforced the tangibility of the walls around me, tethered myself to the reality of the moment. I slowly crept up the wall, pressing my back hard as I inched to standing. I let my fingertips trail the drywall, reading the horrors in the Braille of the texture.
I would trudge forward; I would follow his lead—as always.
With a kitchen like theirs, I knew these quasi preppers were organized. But did they turn before the new addition? Did they care for this child as the humans they were or the animals we dismembered? I took small baby steps toward his swaddling closet then stood staring into it.
Four…five…six…seven…
The closet was dark. I had to lean down to peer at the empty shelves. Another couple of blankets lay crumpled in the back of the floor. I clawed them out and slung them over my shoulder. Nothing else. I turned to explore the bedrooms we had yet to case.
I imagined the mother, whichever body pieces she happened to be, had been breastfeeding him. I could not see a filthy, growling savage leaned over a camp stove, warming up formula. But I couldn’t see any of these savages, or whatever they were, caring for an infant. They hadn’t eaten him; that was something.
The stench of the first room nearly knocked me backward out of the doorframe. In a blur of watery vision, I saw the shit smeared on the walls from the adjoining bathroom, filth gradually taking over the house. I stumbled back, coughing and heaving, wondering why in the fuck they didn’t just shit and piss outside.
Eight…nine…ten…
Fuck this stupid excuse for a world.
One more bedroom. I could do this.
I walked more cautiously still, leaning back to guard my nose. I pressed one finger against my nostrils, hoping the smell of my own dirty flesh would wash out the particles. The door creaked softly as I swung it open.
No stench.
No shit.
Thank God.
The light broke through the mangled blinds still clinging to the one window. Twisted shadows carved up the blank walls. A couple of mattresses lay heaped and soiled in the corner. I let my fingers find the handle of my cutlass as I eased in toward the closet. The doors hung crooked off their tracks. Dirty handprints decorated the edges. Different sizes, different shapes, smears. Finger paintings on my own stainless steel fridge, dangling by strawberry magnets, flashed through my mind. As I shook the image loose, my hand flinched on my weapon.
One…two…three…
I stepped forward and put my head into the closet. The floor was piled with the skeletons of metal hangers. A couple baseball bats and large sticks stood in one corner. And that was it—fucking nothing. For all their preparation for the end of the world, they sure as hell weren’t prepared for anything now. Definitely not for him.
Neither were we.
I let a breath escape my lips as I pressed my hand to the wall outside the closet before retreating.
I found him standing in the center of the communal yard still cradling the infant. His back was to me as he swayed side to side, looking down at the now sleeping bundle. From the back of my brain, I heard Dante’s low voice spilling out of the nursery. “Rock-a-bye… And goodnight…”
I had never seen him distracted, never seen him with his guard down. I could run up behind him and put my cutlass through his throat before he had time to drop the baby. I didn’t know what he looked like with his eyes not scanning and processing. They were locked on that child, a familiar silhouette framed only by fallout and destruction.
I lingered in the doorframe hesitantly with my nails picking at the vinyl. Then I took one more breath before I dropped down from the house onto the stiff grass and announced my return.
“Nothing,” I said as I walked toward him.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. I couldn’t take him with that child.
“They were gone by the time he came then,” he replied.
“Yeah, so it would seem.”
“We’ll have to raid the store again. Lucky we snagged that formula.”
“Lucky we found food for us.”
“We’ll hit another store. On our way out of town.”
“Are we leaving tonight?”
“For the best I think. Don’t want to risk there being any others nearby.”
“Because he’s going to make noise.”
“Yes.”
“Where are we headed?”
“West, still.”
“Westward, ho.” I turned to start walking back through the first house. “I’m not carrying it.”
And I kept walking. I grabbed one of the bug out bags and fled the joined prepper-houses-gone-wild. I chased our path out of ghostly suburbia, and I heard his footsteps falling in step behind me.
My heart pounded in my ears; the entire world throbbed. My vision began to blur deeper around the edges. I could almost see the sound of my banging pulse. Colors became more vivid; the light brighter. My senses were on painful edge. I locked my head forward, refused even to turn enough to grant the child my peripherals, yet my mind’s eye was staring at it. My brain was utterly fixated on the tiny body.
I pursed my lips tightly and forced my breath out hard between them. I knew he could hear the erratic sound, but it was the only thing keeping me in my skin at that moment—my skin that was ablaze, my flesh that felt foreign and confining, my mind that was twisting inward against me.
Deep in my chest, somewhere that used to swell at the sight of my babies, I felt a rotting ache. At my core, my arms begged to comfort the infant, to remember what it felt like to nurture. Yet even the acknowledgement of that instinct had my chest closing and nausea bubbling up along my throat.
I choked it back. I wanted to tear my pack off and rip at my own hair. I wanted to scream and slam my fists against his face. I wanted to curl into a ball and cry hysterically.
I just kept walking. Marching on. One step in front of the other. West. For no fucking reason.
“What should we call him?” he said from behind me. He had waited until my breathing fell calm again.
“No.”
“We can’t call a baby no.”
“We do not name this child. Not when he’s not ours. Not when we killed his parents, his people. Not when he doesn’t have a chance in hell of surviving.”
“Not naming the puppy, eh? He’s a person; people have names. I’ll call him Xavier.”
“Why Xavier?”
“Strong name. Smart, professor-like even.”
“You’re not talking fucking X-Men. You want to name the child after a comic book mutant?”
“Yeah. It’s a legit name. Huh, little Xavier?”
That almost made me smile. Almost. I dropped the anger from my step and allowed him to catch up to me. I still couldn’t look at him as we walked side by side. I kept my cutlass in a tight grip since his hands were occupied. We stepped in silence as the blocks slipped past. My mind raced ahead.
“Do you think they were just like us?” I finally said. “Do you think they were surviving here and we came through and threatened it? Do you think we were their savages?”
“No,” he said with finality. “You saw them on that hill.”
“And I saw that fucking house.”
“What was in the house?”
“A lot of shit.” I paused. “No, I literally mean shit. God, it was smeared everywhere.”
“Yeah, they were animals.”
“
Do you think he’ll be the same as them?”
“No,” he replied again. “Babies are innocent.”
“Spoken like someone who never raised a toddler.” I almost laughed. “We are born little savages to our core. Biting, screaming, stealing savages. Civilization is socialized, practically beaten into us. Our parents spent the better part of a decade getting us there.”
“Xavier is not them. I wouldn’t let him be them.”
I wanted to say we wouldn’t survive long enough to see, but I didn’t have that fight in me today. I felt drained and lifeless now, shambling like a zombie through this apocalypse.
By the time we left the second store, I had found my way to my place behind him again. The miraculous score of a baby carrier liberated his arms. In all our pillaging, I had never noticed that so much baby and children’s supplies had survived because the children had not. He strode on with his head up, aware again and weapons in hand. The child, sated with a cold bottle of formula, snoozed against him.
The town ebbed into our past along with the remnants of civilization. We broke back out onto a patch of undeveloped country. It would be easier to forget the world that was and the traces that remained of it—it always was—until the next haunted ruins, the next empty city. He led us into the sunset like a cliché until we were surrounded by only the world. Then, by the light of dusk, he made us camp.
I watched him awkwardly fumble with the infant on his chest. He attempted to tip sideways to collect wood off the ground, angling and leaning to keep the tiny head in place. He tried to step his feet far apart to lower himself and stabilize his movements. The baby did not cooperate, of course. He thrust his unstable head in the opposite direction, whimpered and whined at every effort. I wanted to see him frustrated; I wanted him to pay for this decision.
I did my part, gathering wood and wrenching open one of our new cans of food, but I would not relieve him of that child. I kept him in the corner of my eye simply to observe his faltering. His inexperience showed and almost made me smile. Almost. It reminded me too much of my own dead husband blundering as a new father. I could see Dante taking a newborn in his arms for the first time under the strange fluorescent lights of the hospital room, juggling the head and the body in a sloppy attempt to keep both supported. The baby made the muted newborn cry as his little fists flailed in the air. Dante bit his lip as he both smiled and frowned. “I got you, little man,” he said to the child. “I’ll figure this out.”
By the time it was dark, I could hear the gentle snore of the child in his lap over the soft popping of the fire. He and I both separately tumbled in and out of entranced thoughts as we finished eating. Physically beside each other, mentally worlds apart.
“Did I ever tell you about my wife?” he said.
I stopped chewing. For a second, the fire just crackled between us as I sat stunned, slack-jawed, and silent. What he had told me, that first night after rescuing me in a bloody heap, was, “We have no pasts. Those lives and those loves are as dead as these things here. Don’t ask about mine. Don’t tell me about yours.”
I snapped out of my startle, reanimated my lips. “No.”
He stopped for a moment, staring quietly in the fire, before sucking in a breath and kind of smiling.
“Amber Lynn. White trash stripper name, right? I met her when I was stationed in Alabama. Sweet southern girl but she kept my ass in check. Had this way of commanding me to do something while making it sound like my idea—some kind of southern Jedi mind trick. She had this hair, long blonde hair that went on for days. Totally cliché. She would sit on the edge of our bed naked, braiding it.”
He hesitated, kind of coughed.
“She was pregnant when it all happened in Colorado. Not terribly far along. We didn’t know what we were having. She knew in her bones it was a girl, though. She was so excited, glowing all over our crappy little house on base.”
And that was all he said. We instantly dropped back into silence again. His rare verbal explosion disappeared into the air. Nothing but the snapping fire he lost himself into again. I wanted to ask what happened, but did it really matter how she died?
I could see her in my mind, this Amber Lynn. I envisioned her as stereotyped as she sounded. The long blonde hair cascading down her back, streaked with meticulous highlights to make her all the blonder. Tanning bed bronzed skin, feigning a sun-kissed summer. She would be thin and coyly sexual, allowing glimpses of her stomach to flirt between her shirt and the top of her pants. She would always be sufficiently made up, even for the grocery store, like a proper southern woman. Perpetually adorned with something shiny. I could almost hear a soft southern drawl slipping out from between full glossed lips.
Now the quiet felt awkward, painful, his wound left gaping between us with the imagination of her ghost trailing through my brain. I felt like I should reciprocate his disclosure, shift the subject from his dead to mine. I did not want to leave him exposed and alone between us, yet my mind no longer functioned conversationally. I could not access the past logically; I could not tell a narrative story. My past had been shattered and only existed in tortuous flashes among my memory. I could only dive headlong into a forgotten moment.
“I used to lie beside him, running my finger along this faint scar on his chest,” I started. “It wasn’t from anything exciting like getting knifed by a fleeing suspect. Just a minor training accident at the academy. ‘I definitely tell people it was on the job,’ he would always say. He said, ‘You should have seen the size of this perp, I say.’ We would just lay there laughing in our bed.”
I lay there in that bed for a moment, feeling the sweet heat of his skin against my cheek, remembering how it felt to laugh. The way my shoulder would rock into his ribs as I giggled, the way my face stretched happily into a smile and I could feel my cheeks bunch up against my eyes. I want to bask in that perfect second just an instant longer before returning to the darkness with the fire moving between us.
Now that I had started, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to plummet recklessly into a million moments’ stories and wallow in their echo. I wanted to conjure all the ghosts to come and hold me close against where we were, what we had done.
“Jordi,” I almost choked on his name. I stopped for a moment and pressed my fist to my lips, willing away the menacing tears. “Jordi, my oldest, would walk beside Dante like an exquisite miniature. His broad shoulders and stocky strut scaled down and duplicated. Jordi took Dante’s finger in his hand; they looked at each other grinning and swaggered on.”
I smiled at the image of my perfect boys. My eyes dropped out of focus and let the picture swell over me. Again, for just a second.
“And Eli,” I continued. I vomited up the past I had kept locked behind my teeth all these quiet months. “My sweet boy finally had some of me. Jordi looked just like daddy, but Eli had my eyes. My eyes looking back at me. He clung to me, always touching me for reassurance. He would run off and play then circle back to me, returning to base and pressing his forehead into my cheek before toddling off again.”
I breathed out. I had said it; I had named them. I had acknowledged that dead and buried life for the first time in however many days, months, years. A part of me felt relieved, yet part of me opened up and bled again. I wanted to wrap myself up in their memories, but just the flash of them was already suffocating me.
He sat quietly in front of the flames with the sleeping baby folded in his lap. He had one hand on the child and the other holding up his chin. He stared vacantly into the flames, but I knew he had heard me. I knew he was filing away my words, analyzing them slowly. When I looked at the dozing bundle, I felt a flare of that betrayal, that outright anger at his decision. Yet even in my waning rage, I still wanted him. That familiar urge always rose from the ashes.
As the embers died and withered between us, twirling in our stillness, he gathered the infant in his arms and stood. I knew our routine; I knew it was time to find the softest patch of earth and try
to steal sleep away from our nightmares.
We slept in the dirt with his body between us, just as I had done twice before. With another man. With other babies. He wrapped the child in his coat, placed his arm over the bundle, sword in hand. I eased tentatively beside them and lay rigidly against the ground. I knew I had to stay next to them; I knew that was our routine and it was expected, yet it had my body tensing and tightening.
As I lay there fighting the swell of maternal memories wafting from my very cells, the tiny hand found me. The sensation of the small touch caught my breath; I stopped breathing and could not move. My nerves stunned me. The child craved motherly flesh and the security it meant. I tried to pull away at first, tried to recoil into myself without being heard. Yet the child was relentless. He clung to my finger as he sucked his fist, and I wanted to die.
5
I awoke with the child’s face nestled against my chest; his small skull fit perfectly under my chin and along my neck. I found my arm draped over him, cradling him into me. When my faculties sharpened and brought the world back into focus, I leapt away from the tiny snoozing body. He felt me startle away from the infant and lifted his head, saw me retreating sloppily as he kept his armed hand across the child.
The baby started to cry.
“Hey, hey.” He spoke to me calmly, lifting a reassuring hand, like you would to a spooked horse.
I gathered all my limbs into my body and slammed my head against my knees, finding safety in the darkness. My heartbeat began to throb through my nerves and my ears again. If my eyes had been open, I was sure my vision would have been closing in on me. I knew the panic was painted all over me, evident in my flailing movements and frenzied breathing. I would have been embarrassed at my blatant display of emotional weakness if I had the capacity to give a single fuck. In this instant, it was a fight to cling to the island of sanity left in the sea of my mind.
Savages Page 3
