by Frank Owen
The stink rose to meet him as he kept digging. The earth began to turn slick and slimy, and he knew he was close. It’s no worse than the mushrooms, he told himself. You just man the fuck up, now.
The face Dyce saw at the bottom of the grave was certainly Garrett’s. His dumbass ponytail had wrapped around his neck, though the cheek skin tags that clung to the skull were too far gone to tell if they were scarred with acne. Dyce sat back on his boot heels and wept.
‘We nearly made it, you asshole. We almost made it right to the end. But we shouldn’t have taken up with the girl in the cave. Should have left then and gone on. Reckon we could’ve outrun those Callahans. Can’t say for sure whether we’d have made it to the coast, or whether we’d be out at sea right now with this storm coming in hot – but we’d have gotten as far as we could. Dad would have been proud, huh? Here you are in a hole and I didn’t even know. Couldn’t bury you myself and I’m sorry, bro. I am so sorry.’
He wiped his face on his filthy sleeve. ‘Can’t say I’d have managed to take your fat-ass corpse all the way to the coast, but I like to think I’d have given it a go. And if that hadn’t worked out I’d have buried you on a hill with a view. That would’ve been nice. It would’ve been something at least.’
Dyce groped in his bag. ‘I brought you a visitor.’ He held up the blackened squirrel and laughed. ‘Only thing around here that’s dirtier than you. Say howdy-do, Mister McCreedy. I was going to bury him with you, but now that I think about it, Ears is all the family I got. So I’m going to hang onto him, if that’s okay.’
Dyce was settling the squirrel beside him when he understood that the drumming he heard was not the sound of his own forlorn and struggling heart.
58
Her horse’s hoofbeats sounded loud even to Vida’s ears. She had come up along the river and through the glade of almond trees, guessing at Dyce’s route as if he had left a scent trail for her to follow like an ant. The star-faced horse was tethered out front, grazing a fresh circle around her post.
The shack. Where else? She thought of Garrett dying there in the dirt where the bay now stood; how she’d shown her naked body to him. She blushed, but she was not sorry. Dyce was kneeling there beside the grave that the old man had dug, brown to the elbows, as if he was wearing gloves. Even from here she could tell that his eyes were zombie-red. He kept wiping them on those filthy sleeves, rubbing the grave dirt in, striping his cheeks. He seemed immune to the stink.
‘Fuck off,’ he said, without turning around.
‘Dyce. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
‘I don’t want to hear it, okay. Just go.’
‘In a minute. But I came to tell you something.’
‘Who else died?’
Vida flinched. At least he didn’t see that. He didn’t see that because he won’t fucking LOOK at you. She sat taller in the saddle. Her back and torso ached.
‘I just want you to know we’re riding north. Felix says the storm will be at its worst this far south. If we head north we might be able to avoid it. Dyce, he reckons this whole place will be flooded. Like something out of the Bible. This weather we’re having? It’s just the leading arm of the system. The next front is going to blow these mountains flat.’
He shrugged.
‘Don’t you want to at least try? The horses, they’ve given us a chance to survive. And the mushrooms too. I mean, imagine what must be in this air already, and we’re still walking and talking – which is more than most.’ She gestured at the grave. ‘But we have to get going now.’
‘Go then.’ His lips were pressed tightly together. ‘Go on.’ He was talking to her as if she was a stray dog he was trying to discourage. What would her mama do?
Vida tried to set her anger aside, hearing the strain in her voice, hating it. ‘You have to come.’
‘I don’t have to do anything.’
‘And what are you going to do then? Just sit there until your phobia turns real and you drown, like the fucking unicorns who missed Noah’s last call?’
Dyce didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t really know.
‘Well?’
‘I was thinking I might, uh, relocate Garrett. Somewhere better. The proper kind of funeral that I never got a chance to do.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dyce! Can’t you smell him? I don’t want to be funny, but he’s ninety per cent worms now. You’re going to need a bucket.’
‘Then I’ll find a fucking bucket.’
‘That’s not a solution.’
‘Your solutions haven’t been real helpful so far.’
‘Dyce, you can hate me all you like, but if you stay here you’ll die. Ride with us and you can hate me a bit longer.’
‘Only so far north you can go anyway before you hit the border. Then what? I’d rather die with Garrett. A family plot.’ He snorted.
‘Mama reckons she knows a way through. Same way she escaped down South – if they haven’t closed it up.’
‘What happened to “Fuck Renard”? Now you’re running to him for protection?’
‘Survival first. Fuck Renard later.’
Vida got distracted. There was something sitting beside Dyce in the sand, a charred animal, it looked like.
‘Where’d you find Ears?’
‘Went back to The Mouth. Some stuff survived. I got your remedy book, actually. It’s in my saddlebag. You should take it. I don’t want none of your things. Didn’t find your precious photocomic though, if you’re wondering.’
‘I wasn’t wondering. I traded it.’
‘What?’
‘I traded it, back at The Mouth before everything was shot to shit.’
For the first time since they had started talking, he flickered. ‘For what? That was your whole fucking heritage, isn’t that what you said?’ He held up a hand, mock-psychic. ‘Wait. Wait. Let me guess – you traded it for another knife to stab me in the back.’
‘Okay, that’s it. You know what? I actually thought I loved you. You believe that?’ She shook her head, defeated. ‘Now it’s just bullshit self-pity and drama-rama. I don’t know you at all.’
‘Ditto, sister. Sing me that sad song.’
They were quiet, regarding one another in the bitter, honest daylight until the wind did their work for them and swept a gust of grit into their faces. They both ducked their heads into the crooks of their arms. It subsided, a mean little taster of what was ahead.
‘If you change your mind, follow the hoof prints. But the rain’s going to wash them away soon enough, and then it’ll just be you and your bucket of Garrett and the end of the world. Hope that works out for you.’
Vida turned her horse round. She stopped beside Dyce’s bay and took the charred remedy book from the saddlebag. Then she disappeared, back along the stream, through the nut trees and back to Horse Head, as if she was a ghost rider passing through on the wind.
Dyce stood up stiffly and looked at the sky. The dense clouds seemed to be rising higher than they had before; he was smaller and lonelier beneath their mindless weight.
He made up his mind. Garrett was all he had left. ‘No offence, Ears,’ he told the eyeless squirrel.
Inside the Weatherman’s shack, he found a spade and a zinc tub, two stained bed sheets and a coil of rope. Felix wouldn’t mind. Dyce brought them back and laid them beside Garrett’s grave. He half hoped that Vida would change her mind and come back to ask him again. She’d see the implements – see that he really meant what he’d said about moving his brother – and maybe he’d go with her this time.
But she was taking her time about it. Dyce kept digging in the grave dirt. Where the fuck was he going to take Garrett? He laid one sheet out flat in the dirt and weighed its corners down with rocks. He moved the body piece by piece, like a puzzle or an anatomy lesson, the kind of thing Garrett would’ve loved. Had it only been a week and some days? This was probably the worst stage. No one ought to see someone they loved that way. Dyce began to retch. When it was over he tied his shirt aroun
d his face.
By the end of it Garrett was missing some fingers, but Dyce left them. He couldn’t be on his knees any longer, this close to the green rot and the white squirm. He wrapped the body up. He wound the second sheet over the first. There would be leakage, but that was too bad. He bent the body and, with a terrible squelching, it was squashed into the tub. Dyce set the spade on top and said, ‘Make yourself useful, bro. You look after that for me.’
He tied one end of the rope to the tub’s handle and the other to the saddle of his horse. Then he set Ears on the saddle before him, mounted and began the ride south into the teeth of the storm, his brother scraping on the dirt behind him like a go-kart.
59
It was manageable as long as he imagined the tables turned and Garrett riding into a storm, dragging Dyce behind. It seemed cool when Dyce thought of it that way round, like the dramatic ending to a Technicolor western. He could hear the gravelly voiceover for the trailer: A brother gives his life to bury his kin.
But there was no thrumming soundtrack – just the low growl of the wind and the scrape of the metal following him. He thought that it was only the steady gait of the horse that was keeping him sane. You needed that distraction, when the rest was darkness – some small thing to cling to. Dyce had had enough practice in shutting things out: he’d done it when his mom died and his dad went after her. Think about something else. Count the trees. Sing all the lines of a song. There must be something happy you remember.
But he kept coming back to the same question. It ran underneath the sorrow and the fear, a curious water table.
What would Vida have traded for her magazine?
Not a gun; not food; not clothes; not medicine. ‘It makes no sense, Ears,’ Dyce said softly. Vida had held onto that photocomic her entire life, and then all of a sudden she had let it go, as if it was a pair of jeans she had outgrown. ‘It would be like Garrett trading you, Ears. Not that anyone wants a stuffed squirrel – no offence – but you know what I mean.’ Garrett would’ve died of starvation rather than trade the squirrel. Same went for Vida and her magazine.
When Dyce finally looked up, snapped out of his dull-eyed contemplation, he was in amongst the ponderosas again, at the top slope of The Mouth. Their smell was so sweet and kind that for a moment it took the edge right off the doubled-up corpse behind him. His horse had walked there on her own, without prompting, the only path she knew.
When the rain began to fall, the drops were as big as marbles. They exploded in the dirt. He had a couple of minutes before it all went to hell.
Dyce climbed off the horse, slow and stiff – he probably wouldn’t be able to lift his arms in the morning – and wrapped her reins around a pine. He made his way down into the scorched town again. The fire-warm debris was sizzling lazily as the rain fell, the festive rankness resisting being dampened. Dyce pulled his mask up and tried to ignore the fallen dead around him, the creatures tearing into their bodies without hindrance. The high stink of barbecued flesh made it feel like the day after the world’s biggest Labor Day picnic.
He would find the spot where he’d discovered Ears and the remedy book and just keep looking, Dyce reckoned. He and Vida had not planned to leave The Mouth, and neither of them had been able to take their belongings, so whatever Vida had traded her magazine for would still be there.
He lifted the fallen sheets of tin and began sifting through the dampening ash and soot with his fingers. The rain was coming harder now, and it would turn the ground to paste. It was soaking right through Dyce’s shirt and he shivered as he scratched around, more desperate as the minutes ticked on. True night was coming: there would be more critters come to the buffet. The lean ones might even take Julia.
But then, there in the dirt, being washed clean by the rain, he saw something unfamiliar – the flat brass nub of a machine head.
As the rain began to gush in earnest down his collar, Dyce picked up the cog. He fingered the tiny teeth and the perfect hole through which the string had slotted. He kept feeling. He eventually found three more, the remnant metal and wood fragments of an instrument. It looked like a kind of mandolin. Vida had traded her photocomic for the one thing Dyce had always wanted – music.
He took all the treasures. He could carve the neck and body someday, but the machine heads themselves were rare things.
‘Going to just squirrel those away,’ he told Ears, smiling. ‘Get it? Squirrel?’ Dyce made a face and straightened up. ‘No time for small talk. Isn’t that what Garrett would say? You got to move. So move.’
Dyce fought his way up the slope of the main street, back to the bay. The rain had begun in earnest. Somewhere up there the Lord God was mopping the floors of his holy house, and the water bucketed down. The town had not been made for times of deluge, and the road itself began to crumble and dissolve as he went, frighteningly fast. Dyce had thought he would have time to get away safely to higher ground – but any longer and it would be like being back underground. He felt icy as he pictured what the mushroom mines would look like as they flooded – and they would, soon enough, as the water table rose to meet the waves coming down, the earth already saturated. All those shallow graves coughing out their wet insides!
As Dyce reached his stamping horse the first corpse rushed by them, as if the dead woman was on her way to somewhere else and had to keep the appointment. Dyce guessed she was, wasn’t she? Going to meet her maker, same as he would if they didn’t make a move out of the water’s stream.
The thunder cracked above them and the star-faced horse reared against the fright. He took hold of the reins and tried to speak gently.
Then Dyce just stood. There was no point in trying to get out of the rain. He was as wet in his clothes as he had been the day he was born.
And so was Garrett.
He knelt beside the tub. Inside it the skinned corpse of his brother seemed to be hugging its knees.
‘Bro,’ Dyce told him. ‘What should we do? This ain’t exactly what I had planned.’
Garrett was even less help than Ears McCreedy.
Dyce wiped his face but it was useless. He couldn’t think.
‘I can’t drag you through this. You know that, right? It just ain’t going to happen.’ The rain poured over them, living and dead, in impersonal sheets – a strange and silent flood, determined to wipe the human plague from the face of the earth.
‘So I’m sorry. I really am.’ He lifted the spade out of the tub and set it down: he wouldn’t be needing it.
‘I’m going to have to leave you now. If you love something, set it free, right?’ Dyce wanted to stroke his brother’s hair, something like that, but he could think of nothing that didn’t fill him with nausea.
‘You know, I’m always going to be asking, what would Garrett do?’ Dyce laughed, and his chest hitched. ‘Maybe I ought to make myself a bracelet or something.’ He wondered what had happened to the swan pendant that had gone to poor Bethie Callahan, and then checked himself.
‘So. Goodbye. I’ll see you on the other side, okay?’
He touched the collar of Garrett’s old shirt – the only place on his brother’s body that wasn’t covered in gore – and then he untied the rope from the handle of the tub. Dyce coiled it again and sloshed back to the horse. The water was up to his calves. It was about all he could take before full panic set in. He slotted the rope into the saddle bag and then he climbed up on his horse again, thinking that his coccyx was never going to be the same. He turned the bay. She set her ears back against the solid rain, and they began the ride north, her forelegs cleaving the waters without the tub to drag her backwards. At the fence line, he looked back.
The tub looked as if it had grown claws. It was moving like a palanquin as the water rose above the gravel and dirt and gradually launched it on the ripples. Garrett would be carried down through the new river in the trees, a Viking buried at sea.
60
Without the sun to judge, Dyce felt night come on fast. He was glad to be able to see in
the rumbling dark. ‘My special superpower,’ he told the bay and patted her sodden neck. She seemed eager to run too, even after the torturous exertion of the day.
When they got into Horse Head, it was empty. Here too the rain had washed some of the graves open. A couple of bodies sloshed around in the thin, churning mud. Dyce knew none of them. Still, it was hard to watch as the torrents tugged at the corpses. You never got used to it. They looked to be clawing at their throats for breath, as if they were suffocating.
Higher up, Dyce found the tracks of the other horses, long gone, a deep muddy groove that would harden into a new canyon. He set the bay’s feet into the trench and held tight. When they galloped down into the valleys they would lose the tracks under the rising water, and Dyce had to keep his bearings and search the upslope for the trail. Like connecting the dots, he thought, or those construction kits Garrett had when we were little.
Horse and man rode through the night, Dyce half asleep in the saddle, following the path that Sam was probably leading the others along, his sick eyes their compass in the dark. The horse ran when she could, but she had been tired at the outset. Even the flashes of lightning at their backs could not stop her from slowing to a drunken walk. The changes of pace would wake Dyce each time: he would see the storm catching them and jab his heels into the horse’s ribs. Each time she whinnied in protest – I’m trying! I’m trying! – and picked up her pace. It seemed to Dyce as if he spent his days apologizing.
There was no rising sun in the east. The dark lifted by degrees. There was still no sign of Vida and the others out front.
The storm seemed to hover at his back. Dyce must have ridden for days, hoping that he’d crest the next rise and see the others. His tired horse gained no ground on them that he could see.
Near noon on the eighth day, Dyce stopped again on a grassy hilltop, which he had done as often as he could afford to let his horse crop. This time she wouldn’t, turning her elegant nose away. She drank from a puddle, her eyes cloudy, and Dyce let her stand where she was, frightened and exhausted.
