South

by Frank Owen

  The light also brought clarity. Now he could see blood leaking through the floorboards and plinking onto the second last step of his staircase. He’d stood in it on his way down and had padded smears of red around the room: the dotted line on a pirate’s treasure map. ‘I,’ Felix told the stains, ‘have run out of fucks to give.’ He would deal with the whole catastrophe tomorrow. Right now he needed a lullaby.

  He climbed off the machine and dressed. His clothes were dry enough: Some days he didn’t mind the damp in the material. It was the odor of tiny, living things: company. When he was fully clothed he sat at the table and sipped from the bottle, went at it real purposeful this time until the battery ran flat again and the light went out.

  But it was too creepy to sit there in the dark with the dead all around him. Spooked, he clambered back on the saddle and spun the bike wheel as fast as he could. The bulb brightened until the little room was light as day, and then he lost his nerve. What if the filament burnt out? Then he’d be fucked. He thought back to when he was a little kid – two or three, maybe, when he still liked to be held and cosseted, before the menfolk got hold of him – and how his mama would rock him and talk to him, the meaning of her words nowhere near as important as the hum of her chest against his ear. He wanted it back. He wanted it all back. But the closest he could manage was the tape and the machine and his own sagging voice. When he judged it safe again, he sat once more at the table, leant back in his chair and flipped the tape over. Felix listened to side B of the recording, this time without the gun to hand, while his heart found its old familiar rhythm.

  ‘That first virus at the frontline wasn’t engineered for longevity. That came later, when Renard woke up to the fact that he could tailor the sicknesses any way he liked. And he liked them to cause the most harm they could, to make us suffer, as it turned out. They kept on giving, like a scorched-earth policy. Yessir, he had a taste for revenge. But that first one was an experiment. It affected the frontline and some miles beyond, and then kind of dissipated in a pretty clear line of dead Southern soldiers. Confined as it was, that virus still turned the South into a land of women and children.

  ‘I don’t recall where I stopped the Jeep or how that day ended, but when I woke I was lying in a patch of vomited army rations, and I cursed myself for the waste that was, but the fever I’d come down with had broken. In the days after that I rejoined the soldiers in a nowhere town. What was its name, now? Hoxie? But then they were all nowhere towns after Renard had his way with them.

  ‘But I found both my brothers in that small group of survivors. That was real funny, wasn’t it? Then it dawned on us that it might not be coincidence. We found that about half of the men who survived shared our surname – cousins of cousins’ children, connections that ran back some way. The rest had Callahan blood in their heritage if we looked close enough, and those that didn’t couldn’t say for sure where they’d came from, and we figured that meant the same thing. Things happen, and those things ain’t always legal.

  ‘The North knew better than to try to claim all the land from Arizona to North Carolina. It was the Wild West out there, still full of Non-Union types who had lost The War but not their resolve. The smug Northern soldiers who camped in our towns brought word of concession talks. They wanted a delegation that would represent each Southern state. The group that they put together over the next months was ridiculous: weak-minded, ceremonial men who’d hidden away instead of defending their homes – cowards who were willing to concede anything you asked. I am proud to say that it was my idea to send a task force along with the delegation. To ensure their safety, don’t you know? Somehow it was granted.

  ‘They chose Des Moines for its centrality. Ten of us were loaded into a bouncy little cargo plane. What do you call that? A quorum? Ten-strong: enough to feel like we had some authority, enough to make a difference.

  ‘The town looked like hell when we got there, all weeds and blistered paint. In the war years it had about fallen to pieces and I saw how much stronger the South had been, back before the virus came. Even poxy little Hoxie had not been left to ruin: the women and children had got to painting and sweeping while the men were away. If it had been a battle to the end, our women and children would’ve come out swinging. We did not give up.

  ‘The ten of us in the escort group were housed near the State Capitol building. We spent our days watching the proceedings under the golden dome. We were presented with a one-way, non-negotiable set of demands – and even if we’d had stronger men representing us, there’d have been nothing they could do against the threat of more viruses. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, and I’ll tell you that at least when Abe Lincoln did it, there was a kind, fair man in charge of proceedings. With Renard we didn’t stand a chance. We figured he wasn’t the head of the beast, but he was the brains of it, for sure. At night we kept plotting what we’d come along to accomplish in the first place – the assassination of Renard. With him gone we might have had a shot at going back to war. If that happened, we might have a chance of winning after all, fair and square. A do-over. Wouldn’t that have been fine?

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. From his time as a saboteur my brother Levi had learnt how to wire a bomb. Getting the pieces for one would be easier than getting our hands on a gun. We began to document Renard’s routine by the minute, planning when and where to plant it to get the most advantage out of the explosion. By the time the surveillance was done, we knew when Renard needed a shit even before he did.

  ‘It was round about here that we first started saying FUCK RENARD. Started as a joke, kind of, and then got gravity and stuck around. A slogan, you call it. “Eff Ar”, guys would say to one another, and crack up. But it was really an affirmation of our resolve. Man, we meant to plug him good! Atomize the fucker. A taste of his medicine, and see how he liked them poisoned apples. And the one who said it most was this dude named McKenzie, as we sat in the kitchen and drank hot sugared water because we had been so pleased to see coffee that it hadn’t lasted the weekend. Bit of a weirdo, but then The War did that to some people. Brought out the worst in them, magnified it, and gave it somewhere to play so that it could do the most damage. Anyway, McKenzie liked birds. Always going on about how in the olden days, if you were fancy-ass, you had a hawk for hunting. All kinds of different birds, actually, depending on your rank. Wanted us to call him Hawk-Eye. Heh, heh. It never took. You got to earn your nickname, else it doesn’t stick.

  ‘The bomb took longer to make than we hoped. We had to make it good, because we only had one try. Each ingredient had to be requested from the Northerners who were our wardens. This week, a can of deodorant. A bottle of Coke. Hair gel. Two weeks later, a toaster. Next month, an extension cable for the tricky toaster.

  ‘We all met in our kitchen the night it was done, our ten-man resistance – and we laid out the plan on the table, the bomb sitting there in the middle like a Christmas pudding. It was not an elegant thing, but it was small and that was all that mattered. McKenzie had volunteered to position the bomb in the cistern of the toilet that only Renard used. The trigger would be linked to the flush handle. Levi talked him through the procedure of installing it, over and over until we were all sick of hearing about ball-floats and stopcocks. We nearly crapped in our pants because right then one of the wardens came in, said Renard’s wife had heard we were out of coffee and so here was some more. We sure did appreciate that. She seemed like a nice lady. The warden didn’t say nothing about the plan on the table. We were all sitting forward with our elbows jammed over it.

  ‘On the day of the blast we did the same stuff we usually did, so that we didn’t raise suspicion. As soon as we heard the explosion, we’d need to get the hell out of there. Our official diplomats had not been let in on the plan. We were sure that they’d be killed for it, and that was the way it had to be. Sacrifices had to be made. War was war. Many more would die in the service of their states.

  ‘We were expecting the
explosion at 11 a.m., or just after – we’d all wandered close to exits, ready to run. But time just ticked on. At 11:32 a.m. I went down a spindly white staircase to the first floor, but the hallways were empty. I checked the bathroom where McKenzie was supposed to set the bomb. It wasn’t in the cistern. We’d surely been found out. Fuck.

  ‘And then the bang came – from next door. The ladies’. The shock of it threw me to the floor. I was covered in grout dust and shards of white tile and, man, those things can slice you like a guillotine. I had the sense to get up and run. The wall that separated the two bathrooms had a hole blown in it, like a cartoon safe, and there were suddenly sirens everywhere, and I heard the security men coming. What a fuck-up.

  ‘It was only later, when I was alone and on the run, that I heard that Renard’s wife had been the one killed. I was in a diner, trying to get a last good steak-and-fries dinner down me before I had to go back to the other side. I banged on the table with my fists and swore so loud that the waitress came by and asked me to leave. I did, and I went without paying, too – which was a good thing since I had no money. Killing Renard was one thing, but taking out an innocent like his wife was something else. We had given him a reason to persecute us. The concession talks were ruined. It was the end of the South and all it stood for: freedom and independence. I remember praying for the Rapture out there on the pavement in front of Hank’s or Frank’s or whatever it was called, but the good Lord was looking the other way.

  ‘I did not know for sure what happened to Gabe and Levi, but I had to assume they were dead. I assumed the whole quorum had been wiped out. So much for our brief. But there was some good news too, in amongst the bad – a glimmer, anyway. The North had no way to track me. I hitchhiked west, hoping to cross back over the border into Kansas and work my way back to Norman. Check up on my folks, gather myself and decide what to do next.

  ‘I kept going west, trusting my own shitty sense of direction and distance, trying to factor in the speeds of trucks I’d slept on so’s I could tell how many more days to keep going. I never felt I was far enough. Maybe it had something to do with being on the run, the feeling that someone was going to catch up with me, but by the time I turned south I’d overshot Kansas by about eight hundred miles. I found myself in Colorado without the energy or the inclination to fix my mistake. I hunkered down and waited for Renard to retaliate.

  ‘And, boy, did he ever! It came real swift. First they rebuilt The Wall so that it was truly impenetrable, like a fortress in a fairytale. The North wanted it to last for ever. I knew what it was costing them to construct it. And while that was going up, the new viruses started coming.

  ‘But these ones floated. They rode the wind like those seed-pods that need travel to pollinate. The sicknesses came right the way across the Southern states. And people were caught short, the same way they must have been in 1918 when the Spanish ’flu took them out. Now it wasn’t just the soldiers in the frontline: Americans everywhere in the South died by the millions. In a couple of days the land stank with the rotting, as if something had changed at its deepest level, like the Devil had been uncovered and was working his way up from hell.

  ‘I started tracking the weather then, writing notes in my journal, trying to stay one step ahead. And that’s also when McKenzie found me. Don’t ask me how. Against my judgment, I took him in. Veterans got to stick together, right? He seemed like a changed man. Contrite. Said he’d fucked up majorly, said he needed to put it right. I bought it. He’d been collecting frontline survivors – Callahans, mostly – and been putting together some kind of law enforcement, so the South could restore order, how he put it. What he proposed made sense: it was a troubled time. All the usual supports had fallen away, and people were turning on each other. And I don’t just mean the usual – looting, rape and pillage, and all that happy crappy. I mean cannibalism in some places, ordinary folks getting murdered for what they had. And not just killed – tortured before they died. It was a bad time, and I got roped in. I am ashamed to say it.

  ‘McKenzie took it into his head that he would be leader of the fiercesome Callahans. He actually dropped his surname and took ours. Tye McKenzie became Tye Callahan. My mistake was to trust him again, to think that by changing his name and putting on a sad face, he’d changed. He hadn’t. He fucking hadn’t. He was still Wrong Toilet McKenzie.’

  Felix let the tape run on, into the sound of his old self fumbling for the stop button and then the hiss of blank tape turning. He got up from the table and stepped cautiously on the sticky floor to his bed. He lay on his bottom sheet and stared up at the wood boards above. He thought, as he often did, how different the world would be if old Hawk-Eye McKenzie had found the right toilet.

  17

  The Callahans were hungry. They’d left Glenvale fuelled by anger and inspired by the old clan leader’s call to arms, but those emotions had ebbed as the night grew darker and colder. They were hardly prepared for a long journey, and some had turned back when they saw the sun setting with no sign of Garrett. ‘Better to go on home and fetch supplies than to freeze to death out here,’ they’d told each other. Tye had watched them go, his harrier perched on his forearm. He had said nothing, but marked each traitor man. He would deal with them later.

  The remaining Callahans, foolhardy or determined, had chosen to camp below the ridge for its shelter. There the trees were thick around them, big junipers ringing the outside, tight-knit shrubs and weeds closer in against the wind. They lay curled around the campfires, five or six men to each, turning now and again like sausages on a rotisserie, sizzling with discomfort and resentment. At first the flames had seemed to give them courage, and they had only ridiculed the deserters, calling them cowards and wet blankets.

  But now, lying in the gathering dark, spooning with the coals, then turning and thawing out their backs and buttocks while their noses and cheeks and knees turned rictus-stiff, they imagined those who’d returned and wished they could trade places.

  Tye let them talk, listening to the bitterness. He knew that it served no purpose unless a man could harness that ill-feeling. Like tonguing a mouth blister, the warrior Callahans imagined the others back in the softer life of Glenvale – hot water for a bath, and a plate of dried catfish stew, saved for a special occasion. And then balm for the soul, too, just as important: a warm wife and a cup of poor-man’s bourbon. Tye kept one eye on each man and boy as he mentally placed them in the family hierarchy. Orientation, he told himself. Got to see which way the land lies.

  Night was the worst time to be out in the open, but they had no choice. Pet dogs had turned their backs on domesticity years ago, ever since food became scarce. Now they roamed like wolves, scarred and skinny and scared of nothing, hunting in desperate packs to bring down rabbits and deer and bigger animals too. The men were used to the occasional howls; wolves or dogs, it didn’t matter anymore. Bears and mountain lions also came out, along with snakes and owls and coyotes – the inedible carnivores. Most of them were healthy enough on the outside: the viruses didn’t seem to be cutting down the animal population none, the way they did with the humans. But every now and again you came across a creature infected by an illness that made it fearless or fierce or just plain contagious. There were stories of starving men who had trapped a wolf or a lion and then found its flesh infected by another fevered critter it had swallowed down. The effects didn’t show on most meat-eaters, but the well was poisoned, sure enough. Like dying of thirst on a raft in the middle of an ocean. Payback, Tye guessed, for all that other business back in the day. Ebola. HIV. Bird fucking flu. He stroked the harrier’s head and she rested against him, her body slight beneath her feathers.

  Kurt, one of Bethie’s towheaded little cousins, came up now from his place at the cooking fire. He held up a bowl to Tye, who laughed. The boy had managed to snare a jackrabbit as well as a tortoise somewhere along the way. He must have seared them on the coals and distributed their meat to some of the older Callahans, because they were chewing, and the
grumbling had died down. Tye saw that Kurt was using the tortoise’s upturned shell as the bowl. A pair of charred, gristly ears poked up out of it.

  Slow and steady don’t win the race no more. But neither does fast and nimble.

  Tye nodded at the boy and took some of the meat for himself. Then he chose a femur for his bird. She snatched it and began crunching it in her beak. For a moment the others were silent, reminded of her wildness. The harrier ignored the men, cracking the bone clean through to get at the marrow, her tongue the gray-pink of an alien.

  The howls came again, and the men reached automatically for the weapons that lay always close to hand. So it was that Gus Callahan had sixteen rifles aimed at him as he stumbled out of the dark toward the fires. One red hand was clamped to his neck and he was croaking as he breathed, gargling like a clogged cistern.

  ‘Lower those goddamn guns. It’s Gus,’ said Tye in disgust.

  One by one the rifle barrels dropped. The others sank back with the relief that it was a man, not a rabid cougar, or worse – a ghost maybe, from one of the colonies where the sick gathered to rot and die.

  Gus was staggering closer, crazy for companionship. He couldn’t walk straight.

  ‘Let him down. He’s hurt.’

  The Callahans all got a good, long look at his face in the firelight. A metal spike was poking out between his fingers at his neck, like an Indian arrow or Halloween mask. But it was no act. Gus’s shirt was black with blood; against it he was pale as a ghost, his essentials leaking from him out onto the ground, as if they were determined to find a river and make their way down to the sea.