South

by Frank Owen

  ‘Look,’ said Dyce, and stepped towards Ed. A shot went off, cracking against the chapped rafters above their heads. A few splinters of wood fell back down, but nobody ducked. The echoes seemed to come back up from the deeps: a belch, Vida thought. That’s what you get from The Mouth, right? She found herself grinning, a tight grimace that made a rictus of her round face. Dyce wasn’t sure Ed had meant to miss. He and Vida were half-hidden in the shadows beyond the reach of the lantern light: not exactly easy targets.

  ‘Come on, little doggies! Come on by! Get walking!’ called Ed, and he began striking out down the tunnel to chase them along. Dyce took Vida’s arm and pulled her back with him into a watering shaft, out of rifle range.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ed was calling. ‘Keep going.’

  They went on, unwilling, past the main mushroom caverns, and then came to the sign, painted funhouse skulls on chipboard, a cupboard handle still attached, KEEP OUT and DANGER smeared below in mud, or worse. And then, ludicrously, a much neater sign, carefully lettered:

  ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  ‘Just in case you were wondering,’ Vida whispered.

  Why didn’t Ed follow them? He was staying back, still shouting, a little hysterical, she thought. She strained to hear him. ‘You come back up this tunnel and there’ll be someone waiting to shoot you!’

  ‘Julia, probably,’ muttered Dyce.

  They went on, Dyce in front, his eyes noting each leak in the wall, each rusting nail. They had long ago lost the last of the lantern light shed by their pursuers: The Mouth had swallowed them, and they were meant to be digested.

  The shafts went much deeper than Vida had first imagined, and not straight, either. She tensed her shoulders, bracing for some creature to come bounding up from the bowels, a minotaur, some horned man made mad by his imprisonment under the earth.

  Dyce whispered, ‘I know where we’re going. I’ll show you. But you better brace yourself.’

  They knew by the smell that they were close. The air had changed again – thicker, more moist, as if it were licking their faces – and the sweet butchery smell of death hung over all like a gas.

  They had reached the final chamber.

  Vida moved blindly over the threshold. Her boots were sucked into the myriad mushroom bodies on the floor of the cavern, like walking on the moon. She could almost touch the air now. Her lungs felt as if they were turning inside out. Her hand came up against a sudden wall. It was slick with the effluent of hundreds of creatures. The cavern was a crypt, and the stink was unbearable.

  She wiped her hands on her clothes and tried to breathe through her mouth.

  ‘What’s here, Dyce?’ she asked, though she already knew. ‘Tell me what you see. And stay close while you do it. If I let you go I’ll never find you again.’

  He was breathing heavily against the wet. ‘Bodies. Just . . . bodies. Men, women, little kids. Kids! Fucking everywhere. And, Vida: there are mushrooms. Mushrooms just growing out of them.’ He sounded as if he was going to cry, though with wonder or disgust she couldn’t tell. ‘Out of their mouths. Out of their ears and their eyes. Their chests! Like flowers!’

  And then he was crying for real, she could hear.

  ‘Dyce,’ she said gently. ‘Can you tell how, uh, fresh they are? How recently they died?’

  ‘There’s new bodies. I’d say a week old, maybe. And there are older ones too, skeletons, all bunched in groups.’ Arranged, he wanted to say. Like a family photo.

  ‘How many altogether?’

  ‘A hundred, easy. Always groups of three. Like the three little pigs. Or the three bears.’ He choked, then spat.

  ‘Do you want to go back out?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She felt him wiping his face on his sleeve. ‘But that’s not everything.’

  She waited. Let him get to it in his own time.

  ‘They all have their necks broken. Or, or, stabbed. At the back, right there.’ He chopped at her neck in the dark, forensic, and Vida shuddered.

  ‘Jesus! Don’t do that!’

  ‘Between the axis and the atlas.’

  ‘You mean, like a sacrifice?’ She was going to vomit. Only the idea that it would deliquesce here with the remains of the dead and go on to feed the pink-cheeked residents of The Mouth kept the gorge down.

  ‘It sure looks like that.’

  ‘Dyce.’ She breathed in, unwilling. ‘I think the reason these mushrooms are special is because they’re grown in human bodies – people who’ve survived some sickness. Maybe they take on the properties of the disease. You know, like homoeopathy: the hair of the dog and all that. Then, once you eat them, you’re immune to whatever it is. Or maybe everything, if they’re anti-viral and anti-bacterial, both. I’m not sure, exactly. Mama would know. But maybe Ed isn’t exaggerating. Maybe the mushrooms really are the elixir.’

  ‘And maybe sometimes there aren’t enough sick people to be vectors.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘Sometimes they need to sacrifice the healthy ones too.’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ She pictured Ed with a cleaver, up to his elbows in gore. And then she did vomit: she couldn’t help it.

  Dyce let her finish. Then he grabbed her and held her.

  ‘I’m going to get us out of here, I promise.’

  Vida scrubbed at her face. ‘How, exactly?’

  ‘These old mines always had another exit. Disaster management, you know?’

  She nodded. It made sense.

  ‘You ready?’

  He led Vida out of the chamber and back into the tunnel. The air was cleaner – she felt it – but the stink would never go away. It was lodged in her sinuses, osmosed into her clothes, a new and permanent part of her.

  ‘Wait here,’ Dyce said, and he helped her to sit.

  He started taking off his shirt. Then he buttoned it up like a knapsack and tied the flapping armholes closed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘When we get back to Horse Head, we’re going to take a picnic with us.’

  Vida smiled. And then she pictured Dyce going back alone into the dark, seeing what she’d been spared, so that he could harvest the bright white eyes of the newly dead.

  She retched again, but her stomach was empty.

  50

  Dyce led them down and down into the guts of the mines. He had made Vida tuck two fingers into his belt at the hip and wedge them there between the cloth and skin, the good human contact her anchor. He let her know when there was a step up or down, or a stony stream to cross. Her boots would never be clean, Vida thought, no matter how much she washed them afterwards.

  The deep structure was not in good shape, but Dyce didn’t tell her that. From the look of it, the walls had calcified: nowhere did the roof seem as if it would come crashing around their heads. The warmth of the mushroom farms was long gone, and they shivered in the cool and neutral air meant for creatures other than them. They went on, it seemed, forever, stumbling in a terrible limbo that was neither torture nor comfort.

  ‘You feel that?’

  Vida hadn’t.

  ‘Underneath. It’s getting damp again.’

  It was true: the dry earth beneath their boots was surrendering to mud. It was deepening as they went, until they were sloshing through winter melt, ankle-high.

  Dyce tried not to think about quicksand – all the stories Garrett had told to scare the bejesus out of him when they were kids. Don’t panic, he told himself. The ones who panic are the ones who go under.

  Vida pulled on his belt. ‘Wait. I want to tie my laces. I won’t be able to take it if I leave my boots behind.’ He stopped, and she bent down and reassured herself. She had her doubts about another exit. Dyce had seemed so confident, and it was something to do. But – really – what did he know about a hundred-year-old copper mine? He was a kid.

  They got going again.

  ‘You ever have to hide in a mine when the wind came?’ she asked, testing.

  ‘Yeah, s
ure. Three days, once, with Garrett and this other guy we were travelling with. Old Jay Loram – you know, The Man Who Lost His Nerve.’

  ‘How long back?’

  ‘Long time. There were still horses. Not ours. Ours were dead, but Jay still had his, an old gray mare, like the song.’

  Vida knew what he was doing, talking just to take her mind off the dark and the water at their calves, now, and the way the air seemed to be changing too. It was definitely harder to breathe, and she could hear the inhalation of his lungs as he spoke and splashed through the muddy water, could hear what it was costing him to sound normal.

  ‘Called her Half Price, cause she definitely wasn’t what she used to be. Had a limp. Not a horse for riding. Then again, towards the end, not many were. So she took the packs, Garrett’s and mine too – which was why Garrett could stand to travel with Talky Jay in the first place.’

  Vida made a noise to show she was listening. Dyce stopped to choose between two tunnels. Left.

  ‘Ever tried to get a horse into a cave? Jeez. Turned from a donkey into a mustang, then into a fucking mountain lion. Like we were trying to make her eat a hot coal. Not a way we’d ever get her in, and the wind was coming. Garrett and me, we quit trying, and Jay saw he had to leave her outside. Ended up that he had to tie her there and hope she was still there when we got back, however long it took. He was crying like a baby while he did it.’

  ‘And was she still there?’

  ‘Some of her was. Looked like all sorts of somethings got her.’

  ‘God. Don’t you have a happy story?’

  Dyce was quiet, but at least it had worked – kept Vida from noticing how tight her throat was, like sucking through a straw.

  The water reached to their knees now, and it was Dyce’s turn to feel a flush of panic. How much further until they were swimming? What would he do then? Turn to Vida and confess his worst fear? I know I’m your only chance, baby, but the thing is – I’m a scaredy-cat! He knew how to swim, but that wasn’t the problem. He pictured Garrett laughing at him. The thrashing, the desperation, the flashbacks would sink him. Dyce searched for the words to prepare Vida for the worst case. It wasn’t fair to her. But fair wasn’t getting a lot of action these days, was it?

  ‘Vida. I have to tell you something, just so you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m fucking terrified of deep water. Soon as I can’t touch the bottom, I’m useless.’

  She yanked him back by his belt. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Paralyzing phobia is what it is. It’s not that uncommon. And stop yanking. You nearly cut me in half.’

  ‘Is that why you let me cross the lake, that day with Ester?’

  ‘Hey, you offered. I wasn’t going to argue.’

  He could hear her head shaking in disbelief, even in the dark.

  ‘So I’m a coward. Can we get going?’

  They went on.

  ‘Dyce.’ This time Vida grabbed at the back of his shirt. ‘Is it changing? Going uphill, maybe? Is that possible?’

  It was.

  Praise Jesus. It was! The water level was beginning to drop as the tunnel curved up. Vida could feel her panting ease a little as the oxygen circulated slowly around their thirsty faces. And it was getting lighter! Vida felt her irises adapting.

  But as it went up, the shaft also narrowed. They went from being able to walk upright single file to having to crouch pretty quick, unless they wanted to brain themselves. Dyce could see that they’d have to crawl the last bit. But he could also smell the exit ahead. That was what counted – the sweet night air and the promise of the vault of sky. You could endure anything if you knew the end was in sight.

  Vida saw it first, crouched low against the merciful dry dirt – the glimmer of light that her eyes had been craving.

  Except it wasn’t moonlight.

  It was moving, flickering orange, crackling and fork-tongued – a camp fire, for sure.

  And there were voices, two men talking. Dyce shushed Vida, though there was no need. He lay on his stomach and wriggled forward to get a better look.

  The escape tunnel looked unprofessional, as if it had been dug by thieves, a channel through which they could access the main network, pillage copper from the rich green seams during the midnight hours or, better yet, he thought, hold up unsuspecting miners for whatever they’d found. That’s what I would have done. That was a century ago, though, and the exit had been covered over partway by the dead and leafless bush at the head of a talus. Below it, rock debris sloped down a couple of feet and then evened out into grassland, mostly flat, birches here and there.

  They’d crawled through the mountain that protected The Mouth and come out less than a mile away on the other side.

  The men sat directly below Dyce. If he squirmed just a little way out, his legs still in the opening like a rat in the jaws of a python, he could see them properly.

  For a second, Dyce thought that the scouts they’d killed had risen from their graves. These two were dressed identically – the gray-blue bull denim shirts, the pleated pants with the double stripe of black, the shiny brown boots that had never felt a mile of real walking.

  But these were different men – one tall and lazy, the other short and dark and mustached, his clothes a size too small. Dyce marked him as the one to avoid. Men who paid that much attention to the way they looked usually had something to hide.

  ‘You don’t need to stay up. It’s my shift.’

  ‘Couple of hours till morning. No use going to lie down now. Can’t ever sleep the night before. Don’t know how he does it.’ He jerked a chin over at their leader’s tent, where Malison’s gentle snores told his men all they needed to know.

  ‘Know what you mean. Only so much staring at the roof of a tent a man can do.’

  ‘The first three minutes are riveting.’

  He snorted. ‘Where you from, anyways?’

  ‘Bozeman, in what used to be Montana. You?’

  ‘The capital. Never heard of Bozeman.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  The tall man stood and stretched, then sat down again.

  ‘What’s the deal with this place tomorrow?’

  ‘The Mouth. Heard they found themselves a vaccine or something. And it don’t seem right the scouts never came back, does it?’

  ‘Those weren’t field men. Christ. Send a couple of cartographers off into wild country like this and it was bound to happen.’

  ‘Still, can’t have Northerners killed out here. Sends the wrong message.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The chubby tanned man leant over to his pack and found a sachet. He bit the corner off and spat it out on the ground.

  ‘Jello. You want some?’

  The tall one shook his head and raised his hand. They were quiet, staring vacant into the flames, the way you were meant to.

  ‘It’s not tomorrow – it’s the day after that’s giving me the heebies. The next stop after The Mouth.’

  ‘We doing two towns?’

  ‘Next one’s not a town. What they call a ghost colony down here – just sick folks, like a hospice. You know, where they go to die. Nasty.’

  ‘So why the fuck send us?’

  ‘Speed things up, I guess, since we’re all the way down here anyways and it’s just around the corner. Supposed to be hiding someone who’s been fucking with Renard. Local law can’t get in there.’

  ‘He killing the sick now? What are we – Nazis?’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Yeah. Okay. Still, though.’

  Dyce watched, keeping low. How the hell were two men going to take on the entire settlement of The Mouth?

  Unless there were more than two.

  Dyce held a hand up in front of his eyes to block the glare of the firelight that flared out, bleaching his night vision.

  And there beyond the men, he saw the army, bedded down silently for the night in the pale tents under the birch trees. Now that he knew to search for them Dyce
saw the horses, drowsing on their feet. He did a quick calculation. At least fifty tents by the stream that he could see. But there would be others hidden behind those or obscured by bushes. So, a hundred soldiers, with a hundred mounts – and Horse Head in their sights.

  Fuck.

  51

  Back in the tunnel, Dyce gave her the bad news.

  ‘Out of the fucking frying pan,’ Vida whispered. ‘Shit! We got to get back to warn Mama.’

  ‘We got one full day, I reckon. But even if we make it back there before the horses, it’ll only be by minutes at best. It’s not enough time.’

  ‘We could steal one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have a better idea, and it’ll save us trying to wriggle out of this hole in full view of a hundred men with guns.’

  ‘Okay, Hannibal. Lay it out.’

  ‘You think these soldiers are going to ride into battle tomorrow carrying their tents and their mess kits and their canteens? No way. Just rifles and ammunition, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘So if we lie low here till morning – till after they charge off to The Mouth – we’ll have that whole camp mostly to ourselves. Couple of camp followers, maybe, but we can probably take them. It’ll be like stopping time. We’ll just walk right into every single tent.’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And poison everything.’

  ‘Jesus! Kill them all? Who are you? Renard?’

  ‘Those plants you suggested to the poncho guy at the church, we can find them around here, right?’

  ‘In my sleep. But that’s not the point. You can’t just go around wiping people out like that.’

  In the thin light of the tunnel Dyce’s eyes were flat and hard. Ears McCreedy, she thought. That’s who he looks like. Fuck. I always thought I was the hardcore one.

  ‘Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as the hands and feet of Renard.’

  ‘That’s a slippery fucking slope.’