South

by Frank Owen

  When Dyce got back up into the saddle, the bay wouldn’t move. She seemed ready to lie down and die where she stood. Dyce kicked his heels into her sides, and she flinched and twisted her neck to curl her lips back at him, but she wouldn’t walk.

  Dyce dismounted. He went over to a birch tree and snapped off a thin branch midway up, stripping the leaves with his hand as if he was about to weave a basket.

  He got back on the bay and whipped her with the crop. This time she moved on down the slope, wading slow through the water. Dyce’s throat was thick with self-loathing.

  When she stopped responding to the whips on her flanks, he began whipping her around the ears. That seemed to fill her with a flash of new energy, some final rage. The mare pushed on for an hour before that stopped working. Dyce couldn’t bring himself to try anything else.

  He got off and sloshed round to stroke her muzzle and to apologize once more, but she hung her head and would not look at him. He had to leave her where she’d stopped, standing fetlock-deep in the water. Dyce thought about dragging her out of harm’s way, but she might nip him if he tried to interfere with her again. He hoped that she would have the sense to move out of the rising stream.

  He took his meager belongings from the saddle bags, and made sure of Ears. He waded on out of the water and up the steep, slippery incline. It was hard going: little waterfalls were gushing over the ridge above him, and the climb was almost vertical – a ladder leading to some unknown heaven. How had the other horses managed the ascent? He set his feet into the shallow ledges, and prayed as he climbed. Whether it was to God or Garrett he couldn’t tell.

  At the top he heaved himself over and lay there, panting. It was rocky, lichen had turned to grease in the wet. He looked back down into the valley, and saw that it was an angry mess of foam and water. His horse was gone.

  Dyce went around to what he judged to be the north side of the hill. He looked out, following the trail of the horses with his eyes as far as he could.

  And there, the specks of gray through the sheets of rain, he saw them, milling about.

  And running east to west beside them, all the way to the horizon, was the tall concrete wall that was causing their hesitation.

  The border.

  It was real.

  Dyce had never thought to see it in person and up close. He had thought it would be more impressive, like a space station. He supposed it was, the sheer size. But even he could see that where the horses stood, there was a gap – a break in the continuous slab. An artery of water ran through the border wall there. The North Platte, Dyce knew. Once a steady tributary, it was now a muscling river of white and brown. Great coils of razor wire spanned the gap like knotted hair, but the water had risen high enough so that it was submerged in the very middle. Now and again the debris rushed past and through, or caught and lodged there, immovable.

  Dyce watched as people began, one by one, to lead their horses into the water, pulling them until they swam, and then both rider and horse were swept north toward the submerged wire fangs. He strained to see further, scanning the distant river banks for survivors, but he could see none. Fuck!

  He had to get there before they all went through without him, like the crippled boy in the Pied Piper story.

  Dyce set off at a jog that turned instantly into sliding down the hill, bruising and cutting himself on the rocks as he went. He tried to stick to the series of poles that still stuck out of the swelling waters, markers for a road once upon a time. Sometimes the water gave way to the relative smooth of the crumbling asphalt, otherwise he waded when the water level rose.

  When he reached the spot where he’d seen the group, they had disappeared from the banks.

  But they were not gone.

  Swirling in the middle of the river were the dark bodies of the horses, writhing, almost all of them. They had been caught by their flailing hooves on the blades of the wire, as they were meant to be, and they twisted and shrieked, sucked under by the flow of water and then released to catch their breath. Dyce had to put his hands over his ears.

  There were people caught there with them, caught up in the branches of broken trees, or submerged with panic. From what Dyce could make out, some were dead, though most had made it across. He couldn’t look away. His horror was mitigated when he saw an arm in a familiar shirt, waving helplessly.

  When she came up for air, Dyce knew that Vida – his mermaid, his Amazon – was trapped. She had stood the best chance of anyone of getting across the river. He tucked Ears into his belt and the brass machine heads into his pocket where they clinked like coins, and then he pushed himself into the chilly brown water. It swept him off his feet.

  A ponderosa trunk came barreling past and he shook the water out of his eyes to see more branches racing along the surface like alligators. Dyce ducked under – and found himself in the dark, muffled wet of his nightmares.

  He felt the panic squeezing his chest, the needles and pins that always began in his feet and hands and would turn him immobile. He fought the urge to take a breath. On the river bank he had forgotten: it was only Vida he’d considered – Vida dying, Vida sucking in the dark water around her while he watched. But now the horror was here. He was in its watery, suffocating heart.

  He felt debris sharp around his legs, tentacles or hands – Garrett’s hands! – pulling him deeper underwater. He would die in the cold black depths and be with his brother for ever, bullied into the afterlife.

  Dyce thought of Vida, and struggled towards her: the night in The Mouth when they had danced. The way he had twirled her, she with her loving, drunken arms around his neck.

  But Garrett’s hands were there instead, holding him down in the past, under the tea-stained memorial waters of Tumbelsom Lake. Dyce tried to pry the tentacle-fingers off his body, thrashing at the water, trying to think of Vida, Vida, here and now, the way that the drops of water had glistened as they slid off her, like scales.

  The ghostly fingers gave up at last and floated loose, dissolving in the water to reconstitute themselves with the rest of poor Garrett where he lay fingerless in his Viking tub-ship.

  Dyce surged to the surface and gasped for precious air as the current swept him into one of the dead horses caught on the wire. He grappled with it – Vida Vida Vida – and then caught hold of the strands of its tail.

  She was so close!

  She floated on her back next to him, her head under the water, her arms limp.

  Dyce steadied himself against the flow and kept hold of the horse’s tail. He dived down as far as he could, his eyes wide against the water.

  The razor wire was wrapped around Vida’s boot. He grabbed it like a stinging nettle and it slashed his hand. Dyce let go of the horse to pull with both hands at her leg.

  The razor wire tore loose from the bottom of the river and they were free, sent tumbling in slow motion further and further from The Wall.

  Then they were caught in an eddy and the water seemed to flatten, forgiving. Vida surfaced, coughing and coughing, her eyes closed so she didn’t have to face the burning. Dyce kicked against the current, trying to haul her weight to the bank.

  He stumbled in the sudden shallows and dragged her up onto the ground that sucked at their streaming boots. They lay there, whipped by the wind, bleeding and frozen, on Northern soil.

  61

  They lay dazzled, and Dyce thought: this is like the night at the locomotive museum. All I want to do now is go to sleep.

  And then he thought: we have to find shelter.

  If the Weatherman’s predictions were right, the worst of the storm was still coming – the mighty fist at the end of the arm that was swinging up across the southern lands, tearing trees up by their roots: the opposite of Creation. Renard himself could not have ordered a better way to clear the countryside of the last few pockets of stubborn resistance.

  Dyce lifted his head and looked through the rain to see if he could see any of the other survivors, but there was no one on their side of the r
iver. He scanned the opposite bank and made out a group, maybe half of the hundred or so folk that had started out. He strained to see if Ruth was among them, but they were just shapes muddled together, indistinguishable.

  Dyce pulled Vida up beside him and she opened her eyes.

  He was real.

  He’d come back for her.

  She smiled and tried to snuggle into him and fall back under.

  He shook her. ‘No sleeping, princess. We’re not safe yet. We’ve got to get further north.’

  She was still grinning. ‘You came.’

  ‘I changed my mind. I went back to The Mouth. Found what you’d traded your magazine for.’

  Dyce took the machine heads from his pocket and held them out for her to see – the remnants of the mandolin.

  ‘I was going to give it to you after work that day, but you were so tired.’

  He wanted to take her face between his hands but he was too tired.

  ‘Best gift I ever got – if you don’t count the stuffed skunk’s butt that Garrett got me for my birthday.’

  Vida laughed and winced. She looked down. Her boot was gone. It had protected her leg from the worst of the lacerations, but still the skin hung in red and white ribbons.

  ‘That’s going to be your first set of scars,’ Dyce pointed out.

  ‘You think?’

  They took a moment to think back on the last week, with all its hurts and tribulations.

  ‘If we’re going, you’ll have to help me,’ she told Dyce, and held out her arms.

  ‘Payback.’

  He lifted her in fits and starts, and they began to hobble up the slope through the last of the shrubs that hung onto the muddy dirt by their root tips. The rain was so hard they could barely see in front of them. They were in the North and they couldn’t tell to look at it.

  ‘Strangers in a strange land,’ muttered Vida.

  Still the filthy water came rising. They walked as best they could, a three-legged race to higher ground.

  When they reached a tar road, Vida wanted to get down on her bleeding knees and kiss it. They kept walking, trying to keep to the midline, barely visible. At least they didn’t have to wade. Dyce knew when he took his boots off that there would be fungus growing there, like the trench-foot soldiers got a century ago.

  And then there came a sound through the static of the rain and the wind: a sound neither of them had heard in years and had not thought ever to hear again – the loud, sharp honk of a driver behind the wheel.

  They turned to see a pair of glowing headlights. The Jeep pulled up alongside them, displacing the waves of water with its huge tires as it came. A door was flung open. They peered into the warm, dry cabin, lit by actual electricity, and it took them a full minute to understand what the driver was yelling at them: ‘Get in! Get in!’

  Dyce lunged forward and dragged Vida with him, up onto the polyester seats in the back. He leant across her limp body and closed the door, tugging hard against the wind. The car smelt of French fries, and his mouth began to water.

  ‘You folks not get the evacuation notice?’ asked the man from the driver’s seat. He was someone’s dad, wearing a red baseball cap with HASH HOUSE HARRIERS stenciled on it.

  Dyce and Vida, dripping and dumbstruck, could only look at him as the Jeep ploughed on like a tractor through the flood.

  ‘Good thing I found you, unless it was suicide you were aiming at. Reckon I’m the last one crazy enough to be driving in this. Where you folks from, anyway?’

  Dyce wavered, grappling for an answer. The dashboard of lights and gauges was mesmerizing; the wipers were making him dizzy.

  ‘Bozeman, in what used to be Montana.’

  The driver slapped his knee. ‘Shoot! Terrible time to take a vacation, kids.’

  He leant forward and pulled a flask up from the passenger footwell. He handed it back over his shoulder.

  ‘Hot chocolate. The lid’s a cup.’

  Dyce took the flask. He unscrewed the top and poured some out for Vida, trying not to spill.

  She coughed at the sweetness of it on her first sip, and then drank it down in one go.

  Dyce tried it next – thick and sweet as childhood. He wanted to cry.

  And over the hiss of rain and the sloshing of water around the tires, Dyce heard something else, like the harps of heaven: country music on the radio. He leant forward. He didn’t want to miss a note.

  Vida watched him for a while in the darkness, but the passing phantom lights of the water-logged homesteads kept catching the corner of her eye. She reached for the cup again and emptied it. Then she took Dyce’s hand to hold him in the present, make sure they were in the here and now, together.

  The North!

  She had always thought that the old rage would swallow her if she ever set foot over the border, but now that they were here, it was a deep weariness that had settled in its place.

  The North.

  She was ready – for whatever territory emerged once the waters had fled, peeled back like the skin from an apple, the landscape nude and new, stretched out before them.