South

by Frank Owen

  And Dyce did. He just didn’t believe it. Garrett repeated things because he thought that reinforcing them would make them come true. Sometimes they did. Like calling their cousin Larry ‘Lard-Ass’ until he ate his own weight in unhappiness. But they weren’t kids anymore. This was different.

  This mattered.

  ‘There’s a reason we’re passing fewer and fewer settlements the closer we get to the sea.’ The moisture in the sea air made it double deadly, wind or no wind. Humidity kept those tiny killers alive. The first waves of viruses had driven people steadily southwards: folks saw the southern coast as the best place to set up camp – furthest from the source of the plagues, close to the bounty of the ocean.

  How wrong they were.

  ‘Yeah. Can’t figure a way of getting to the sea without going near the coast. Let me know when you crack that one.’

  ‘Plus we don’t have a boat.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

  ‘I’m not so hot at swimming, Garrett.’ Mainly because you nearly drowned me one summer, you asshole, he thought. Garrett had held him casually under the brown water of Tumblesom Lake until Dyce had thought his head would burst, like the old Scout song about Running Bear and Little White Dove, pulled down by the raging river and ending up in the Happy Hunting Ground. Dyce hadn’t been able to get rid of that song, even as he felt his lungs emptying themselves. That ballad had been etched into the grooves of their dad’s most enduring LP. When all the others were lost or broken or scratched to hell, there was always ol’ Running Bear drowning in a river.

  I did pass out, he told himself. I passed out and a mermaid saved me. One of the older girls, Dillon’s sister, had dragged him onto the jetty, her undersized costume pulling tight against her breasts. The water was unfriendly ever after. Dyce had cheated death and he knew not to take another chance.

  ‘You’re going to have to get good at it.’

  Dyce fell back quiet. He heard Garrett laying out his kit on the cold floor of the cave: the rusty iron needle; the thread made of long grass or maybe gut; the fresh-skinned pelt of their last meal. Waste not, want not, Garrett liked to say, but Dyce thought that he just enjoyed killing things.

  He’d seen the striped woodrat before and after it had served its purpose; though half a mouse hardly gave back the calories spent on the catching and cooking and chewing, it did offer a tiny, delicate skin. Dyce had often watched Garrett sewing in the daylight: his brother knew what he was doing. He had challenged himself to work at the same craft without being able to see his hands. In the dark he would have to be more careful, Dyce thought. No more injuries than they absolutely had to have. There was no anti-tetanus shot.

  Dyce imagined each step. Garrett would fold the woodrat skin so that it was inside out. He would sew tiny, blind loops in a neat row from the neck, along its stomach, right to the asshole. Then he would sew up the slits that ran from the belly sutures outward to the feet, all the while stroking with his greasy thumbs for lumps and errors.

  Next, Garrett would rub the woodrat between his palms to soften the fibers of its skin until it was warm and smooth. He would pull the creature in on itself, like righting a used sock, so that the fur was on the outside. If he’d had the skull, he would have inserted it so that it would sit in its proper place in the head – eye socket matched to eye hole. It really was that simple.

  But this rodent was too small for the boys to spare its skull. They had eaten every bit of it, bones and all, and kept it down, too. Dyce had counted himself grateful for his dad’s survival lessons. They’d hated them, but when the electricity finally stopped for good, they were a distraction from the blank TV. With the woodrat’s skull already cooked soft, chewed and swallowed down, Garrett would have to search around his feet for a pointed stone and feed it into the face of his creature at the chin. Eventually, if he did it right and didn’t break the fragile skin, the stone’s point would reach the woodrat’s nose and voilà! Mickey would have a face again.

  Dyce heard the scraping and scooping that meant that Garrett was gathering handfuls of sand and funneling them into the limp sack of the body. You had to fill it tightly from the neck down, make sure that the granules reached the insides of the legs.

  The final stitches were always the hardest, and Garrett would take his time on these, sewing from the chin to the gullet. When he was done, he held the rodent upside down over his open hand, waiting for a trickle of sand, then feel for the guilty holes.

  When he had more light, Garrett would select from his bag a pair of dried juniper berries and position them inside the eye holes. The woodrat needed one for the nose too: the soft, fleshy nub never survived the skinning. Dyce hated the finished animals. They always looked pregnant with death, droopy-headed, seed eyes blank – staring at him from The Other Side. What was the point of them, either? Garrett’s crazy totems.

  Dyce saw him sometimes when he was done with one of his creatures, combing it with his fingers to neaten the fur. It was then that he could see his brother loving someone like Beth Callahan. Had she laid her head softly in his lap? There would be no shotgun wedding, even when everyone could tell Garrett had knocked her up. Used to be you’d plan your life in years. Now it was months and weeks when no one had any right to think they’d see the next blessed, windless summer. Getting pregnant was always going to end that girl, anyway. She was already half-dead when Garrett fell in love with her. There hadn’t been much of her to begin with, and then the hunger and the sicknesses had taken their share.

  But the heart and the dick don’t talk to the brain, do they? Garrett’s heart brought her its flowers and all the frogs he could trap down at the stream and roast over the fire, offerings like chocolates in a box. And his dick wanted somewhere warm and wet, and Bethie was pretty if you imagined meat on her bones. The Callahans, with their badges and their boots, were never going to take kindly to the idea of losing their girl-child. One way or another it was going to end with both of them deep in the dirt. And now that she was gone, the rest of the Callahans were going to make sure Garrett followed poor Bethie just as quick as they could make him.

  But they couldn’t make Garrett sorry. They couldn’t take that away from him. Dyce listened and knew that the work was steadying his older brother and his broken heart. He set the creature aside, and the boys laid themselves down.

  Dyce reckoned about an hour had passed when the phage arrived. And they’d been so careful! He heard Garrett swallow and felt the scrape as if it was in his own throat.

  First the scrapes, then the sweats – the body fighting the virus by red-lining all systems.

  The boys had seen a lot of people infected with a bunch of different phages, some so mild that they passed within a day. Others worse, much worse. Dyce shuddered. He couldn’t help himself.

  Jay Loram had caught something while they were camping near the Colorado River. It killed off his nerves. He couldn’t feel if he needed a pee or if his hand was resting on a hot frying pan, or if his neck was burnt to blisters from a day of walking in the sun. Dyce had seen him bite down on bird shot and shatter two teeth. Jay had spat them out in his hand, bloody and jagged without even a grimace. If you didn’t know about the virus and you came upon his body, you’d think he’d been tortured to death. His legs had been cut and bruised; three toes were missing – their stumps festering. A bone in one finger was sticking up sideways and his mouth was so rotted that there was no color in there, just a black hole, and it stank like a dead dog’s guts. That’s what got him in the end, Dyce thought hysterically. Brush and floss, little nuggets! ’Cause there are no more trips to the dentist! Yeehaa!

  But trips to other places: those abounded. Mrs Fordice had come home from the wood one evening with a temperature so high that people said they could feel her pass by from across the road. She hadn’t recognized her own daughter, wasn’t sure where she was or why she’d been out in the trees in the first place. Mr Fordice had dragged a drinking trough out of the stables and into the courtyard and they put
the old lady in there for the night, changing the warm water for cold every fifteen minutes. In the morning she was dead, her body mottled orange and purple and red like a poisonous snake.

  The external illnesses were pretty bad: they ruptured and melted the skin, made people lose hair or grow scabs.

  But the brain viruses were the purer evil.

  Dyce had known Niccola Drew before she died. They had been at each other’s parties as kids. She had gone early on to work as a cleaner for one of the doctors up near the border and caught something from an organ tray. After her throat, it went right on upstairs to her brain; Do Not Pass Begin. She had started getting her left and right confused – women, right? – and put it down to lack of sleep.

  But then she had started to have memories of things that she knew had never happened – fucking terrifying things, she told Dyce. She knew, rationally, obviously, that her father hadn’t murdered her. But she had kept seeing him standing over her with the bent tennis racquet.

  One night she had left her bed, boiled the kettle and scalded the skin off his face while he slept. At least she had the sense to run away, Dyce thought as he rolled over, trying to find a spot in the dirt that his body had already made warm. They had found her hanging by her neck from a tree. There was some kind of heroism in that, wasn’t there? Taking yourself out of the herd before you did any more damage? Garrett definitely thinks so, although I’m not seeing him doing the same, Dyce thought. Nope. That fucker is hanging in there, like his life is so awesome it’s worth saving.

  As if he had heard the thought, Garrett moaned, the sound of someone with their demons right behind them. Or the Callahan marshals, thought Dyce. Which is about the same thing. He tried to see his brother in the darkness. Nothing.

  He crept closer, trying not to touch Garrett accidentally with his bare skin. You never knew how these things were transmitted, and contact was not smart.

  Garrett was drenched and muttering. Dyce thought of Nic Drew and her dead daddy with the skin boiled right off his bones, and he wished he had his whittling knife to hand. What he would do with it, he didn’t rightly know.

  Now his brother had subsided. It sounded as if he was drifting in and out of consciousness. You just had to let them sweat, Dyce knew. The fever was one good way to get rid of a sickness: the burning fried the germs and purged the system.

  And if the fever meant that they were already dying, you couldn’t stop it.

  Garrett lay there beside his woodrat, their bodies heavy and limp.

  Dyce scooted a little ways off and then stretched out his fingers so that he could keep touching Garrett through his shirt. That way he might manage to get a couple of hours of shut-eye. Not enough. Never enough. That was what freedom was, thought Dyce as he closed his eyes again. Freedom from vigilance. Rest.

  The boys’ snores rose softly.

  In the darkness at the rear of the cave, Vida sat up and straightened her legs. She had been hugging her knees for so long that it felt as if they’d turned into a tail.

  5

  The wind had stopped and the cave mouth was bright white with morning sun. It hurt to look out. The rays didn’t reach far: the back of the cave stayed blackly quiet and dank, smelling now of their own bodies, mingled with the older odor of creatures who’d sheltered here before. Stone soup, thought Garrett. Everyone lends their flavor.

  He massaged his neck for raised glands. The virus seemed to have burnt itself out overnight. The salt tablets really did work. He’d dissolved two on the back of his tongue, determined not to gag, and it was worth it now. Rare good news.

  He reached over to Dyce, grabbed a leg and shook it.

  ‘I’ve made flapjacks!’

  He never tired of the joke, Dyce waking up thinking the world was how it was before – and then the disappointment of no flapjacks, not just for breakfast, but ever again.

  But the leg under his palm was thin and strange. Garrett pulled his hand away. Dyce had changed in the darkness, whittled himself into one of his own carved totems. The replacement leg was skinny, and it was very, very stiff, as if its owner had frozen in place. Oh, Jesus, thought Garrett. It’s a body! He died in the night!

  But the fabric was rougher than Dyce’s cargo pants – denim, maybe.

  Garrett shuddered. It was worse than when that crab spider had run up his leg, all the way up his shin, past the knee, up and up till it was hemmed in at the belt line.

  He reached out again in the darkness and this time he found Dyce properly. He shook him and then pulled, half-dragging his sleeping brother towards the cave mouth.

  ‘Jesus, fuck, Garrett!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  He pulled his brother’s sleep-heavy body over the lip of the cave, and vaulted his own ungainly self out after. Dyce lay twisting on the gravel, rubbing his eyes, Garrett looking around for a weapon and wasn’t this always the way? Dyce dreaming, and Garrett on guard. He picked up a twisted stick, burnt black at the end. Better than nothing.

  Behind them in the cave there came a dragging, and Garrett was suddenly sure that out of it would emerge some creature, a moth-balled dragon snuffling irritation at the disturbance of its treasure, slow to anger and impossible to appease.

  The legs in the faded jeans appeared first, then ten splayed fingers, like someone playing a piano. They searched for purchase on the outer wall of the cave and anchored themselves. The boys watched, unable to run, as if they were stuffed with sand.

  A face hauled itself into view, masked cowboy-style with a printed blue handkerchief.

  Then the woman crouched in the dirt, a fighting stance, but held up her empty hands.

  ‘Fuck Renard,’ she said, her voice muffled.

  Dyce swapped a look with his brother. Garrett recognized the phrase, the mantra of the resistance – the not-so-secret password pledging allegiance to the South. But the revolt had come and gone years back, the war of another generation. The way things were now was the way they had been since the boys were just kids. The old phrases came back to him as he stared at the grimy woman: Aegroto dum anima est, spes est. The only Latin their dad had gotten a handle on, that’s what he had carved into the back of the bathroom door. He thought it was funny: while they suffered through the cramps and the diarrhea, they could consider the famous words. While there’s life, there’s hope. And of course Garrett hated it; hated that he had to read it every day, sometimes twice, sometimes nearly fifty times. What the fuck did some Roman prick know about it? Try a new virus on every wind. How about that, Cicero? Try churning out Hallmark cards when everyone you know is dead and you’re shitting your soul out of your ass. Fucker.

  The woman reached round the back of her head and began untying her mask. The ashes from the cave had streaked her cheeks like camouflage. There was a patch of white flakes on her braids that made her look like a skunk. No, thought Garrett. A woodrat. She looked thirty-something. Too old for me, thought Garrett. But not bad shape.

  He held the blunt tip of the stick towards her, uncertain.

  ‘Hey, now. No harm done,’ she said. ‘In fact, you owe me. I could have—’ She drew a long brown finger across her neck. ‘Found this cave before you last evening. I didn’t think it was, ah, smart to show myself right away.’

  Garrett prodded the air, his cheeks red under the little scars. He was twenty-four but his voice still sometimes jumped, and he hated it. ‘Where’s your partner? Who’re you travelling with?’

  ‘You can lower the big stick, sunshine. No partner. Least, I used to have, till last week. My ma. Our house is just along this ridge.’

  Dyce, ever the conversationalist: ‘Where’s she now?’

  The woman looked down. ‘Snake-bite. Buried her a couple of days back.’

  ‘What kind of snake?’ Garrett, testing.

  ‘Rattler.’

  ‘You sick?’

  ‘Nothing bad. Little cough, but it seems to have blown over.’

  ‘So why’re you out here?’ asked Dyce, getting to his feet. He brush
ed the gravel from his hair.

  ‘Need to get to the next town now, don’t I? Can’t be staying in the death house. Life goes on.’

  The boys were silent, wondering how much harder it must be to travel on your own, hiding from everyone. Another rhyme everyone knew off by heart: If you’re alone, don’t come home. Two or more and you’re in the door. Loners were trouble: escapees or crazies or carriers so sick they had been expelled from the southern towns. Sometimes, if they were organized, they gathered in ghostly camps, like lepers.

  ‘Where’s your stuff?’

  She was definitely twitchy. ‘Back home. I was just checking out the best route to Fieldstone. Day-pack’s back there in the Taj Mahal.’ She jerked her thumb at the cave. ‘I didn’t exactly have time to pack up.’

  Again, the boys and their look.

  ‘Looks like you need some travelers to be vouching for you,’ said Garrett.

  ‘Looks like.’

  ‘We can vouch.’

  Vida’s eyebrows shot up. Oh-oh, here it comes, she thought. Now we parley in the saloon.

  ‘Just need two things,’ Garrett said. He looked over to Dyce. ‘Three things, actually.’

  He’s enjoying this, Vida thought. He really is.

  Garrett held up his index finger. ‘First, I need to see your ma’s grave. Can’t be vouching for some runaway thief, or killer, or contagious outcast. Need to see that your story holds up.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Next, I need a weapon. Some grayhounds after this rabbit. You got a gun?’

  ‘Only an old pistol at the house. No bullets, mind. It’s yours if you’ll take it. What else?’

  ‘A clean pair of panties for my brother.’

  Vida’s mouth stretched wide in a smile. It felt strange, the muscles creaking with disuse.

  Dyce kicked a clod of dirt at Garrett. ‘Yeah. Let’s stand around chatting up strange women a little longer, dickwad. I’m beginning to see eye to eye with the Callahans.’

  Garrett’s face fell. ‘Shit, yeah. Let’s move.’

  ‘Woah, there,’ said Vida. ‘You got Callahans after you?’