Sweetlings

by Lucy Taylor

  The path narrows until we’re skirting the edge of a drop formed when slabs of rock and dirt crumbled away. Jersey leads me down into the rock fall. I’m about to ask where the hell are we going, when, like a gift, the path levels out, and we’re on a stretch of powdery red earth dotted with tiny blue flowers. At our approach, lizards skitter for safety. I wish for my net and my gaff hook. We could eat these.

  Jersey points at the ground. “So what made this?”

  Sand, rocks, some sparse grass: nothing my brain can frame as any recognizable pattern. But Jersey’s seen something, obviously. I crouch on my haunches and study it. Sweeps of sand that look broom-swept, pitted by wind, grass stalks snapped off just below the rim of a rock ledge where—“Something lay up there, sunning itself or waiting for prey—”

  Jersey nods.

  “—and here where the weeds are crushed, it jumped down”—I’m excited now, decoding the message some passing creature has left on the land—“heavy and long-bodied, but—” Confusion nicks at me. “—look how deep the feet punched into the sand.” Now I’m stymied, because the legs are spaced way too far between front and back. I stop relaying my observations to Jersey and try to look with my animal brain, wordless and unburdened by preconceptions. Here’s where the thing struggled its stumpy legs out of the sand and wriggled down the slope we’ve just ascended, leaving behind a broad, serpentine swath punctuated with prints that are clawless and wedge-shaped. Its belly drags the ground like a seal, but no seals ever lived this far south. The tracks continue down to the path we came up on, then descend a steep grade and zigzag out of sight.

  Jersey’s looking at me expectantly.

  “Whatever this is, it’s heavy, with short, strong legs that attach to the body at a weird angle. Going downhill, it folds the legs in and skids on its belly. Almost like—” I snatch up a fistful of flattened grass. Press it to my nose. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Smell.”

  He breathes deep and recoils. “Christ, it smells like…”

  “Old Four Legs. A big one.”

  “Fucking can’t be.”

  Papi’s talk about speeded-up evolution, about the coelacanths being the ancestors of tetrapods bangs around in my brain. “The trilobites came onto the land. Maybe Old Four Legs did, too.”

  We stare at each other.

  “But it’s a fucking fish, Mir. It can’t walk. It can’t breathe air!”

  “Maybe it can. The trils evolved a new type of gills, who’s to say Old Four Legs didn’t do the same? And as far as walking, I’ve seen them waddle on the mudflats from one pool to the next. Their fins work like legs. Like a dog paddling.”

  “But that’s just a few feet. We’re a half mile from the water. I mean, for Old Four Legs to walk here, that would be … totally amazing!” On this last part, his voice lifts, like a switch has been thrown in his brain, flipping it from horror to awe. Is it that easy, I wonder, this psychic sleight of synapse? “Jesus, what if you’re right? What if that’s what made the tracks Watanabi saw in his garden?”

  “Then you probably should have let him keep the gun.”

  Jersey squints toward the horizon, where the sun’s broken through and strikes blinding shafts off the metal flotsam of the debris islands. “We need to get out of here, Mir.”

  “Yeah, before it comes back.”

  “I mean we need to move away. Go inland.”

  “Because we found a weird set of tracks? Because Watanabi’s losing his mind?”

  “Because we don’t want to die! Look, if Old Four Legs was really here, this far from the water, then what else may be coming onto the land? Do we really want to stay and find out? I don’t, and I don’t think you do either. We need to get out.”

  “But how? Where do we go?”

  “We take what we can and walk west in the daylight on the Old Roads. At night we hide. We keep going until we find other people, maybe even some who came from here. We’ll find a place to build a house and grow food.” He wraps an arm around me and whispers into my hair. “We’ll do our part, too. We’ll make babies, lots of them, and help start this world over again! Think of it, Mir, wouldn’t you like that? A new life?”

  In the face of such absurd hope, such blind faith in a benevolent universe, I can think of many objections, but I fall back on the most immediate one: “What about Papi? You want me to leave him?”

  He sighs. “I don’t know. You say he can’t hardly walk. Maybe there’s no other choice.”

  I shove him so hard he almost falls down. “Your brain must be Blister Rotted if you think I’d do that! Not for you, not for anyone.” I can see the damage my words do, but that isn’t enough. Suddenly I want to hurt him, make him hate me. “I don’t want to make kids with you, either. I don’t want you! You want to leave here so bad, go on and go!”

  Are there tears in his eyes? I’ve never seen Jersey cry, not even when he first wandered into the settlement after his parents were killed, a scared little kid who’d been living off insects, almost starved to death. Shame scorches me. I want to tell him the truth about why I’m really upset, but I can’t find the words, so I watch him walk away and say nothing.

  There’s so much Jersey doesn’t understand.

  If he did, he might not be so fucking optimistic.

  *

  As if to compensate for the supply truck not arriving, the sun beams down like a blessing, and fishing is good for a few days. I gaff a halibut and net two cod that the receding tide’s trapped in the shallows, decide to fire-roast the halibut and store the cod. Behind the house, I slice the smaller fish into strips and lay them out on the drying rack while Papi watches me with the intensity of a man who’s never seen this action performed before, let alone the skinny, wild-haired young woman wielding the knife.

  When I’m done, he beckons me over. “Back’s bad today, Mir. Rub it, please?”

  The fat halibut calls to me, and my stomach is singing an aria, but I nod and lift up his shirt. Force myself not to wince, but he feels my dismay and disgust.

  “How bad?”

  “I can see bone.”

  “Blister Rot?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Truth is I don’t know what this is. It looks like someone branded Papi’s back with a hot iron, creating scarlet ovals that grow larger and more inflamed as they descend his spine. From the centers swell white, bulbous protrusions that at first I took to be herniating vertebrae, but when I poke one with the tip of my finger, it feels spongy and blood fills the depression. Papi moans.

  “Hurts like six circles of hell.”

  “You want the Dilaudid?”

  His shoulder muscles clench. “Used the last of it weeks ago.”

  “Shit.”

  Around here, pain meds of any kind can be traded for food, so the loss of the Dilaudid is a blow. Nothing to do for it, though. I fetch the next best thing, an antiseptic salve, which I rub into the worst of the wounds. As my hands slide over one of the protrusions, I can feel its smooth elasticity, how it bends like connective tissue, meaty and amniotic.

  An alien ontogeny, as Papi would say.

  “You need a doctor to see this. A real doctor, not Bella Ludlow with her vitamin shots and horse tranquilizers. Maybe we ought to think about going inland. I hear the settlements there have doctors.”

  “Does the boy tell you this?”

  “His name’s Jersey. Yeah, he thinks it could be better inland.”

  “I don’t care what he thinks. What do you think?”

  “I know five more people who left last week and others are talking about it. The supply truck still hasn’t come. What are we supposed to do? Everyone who can leave is leaving.”

  Including Jersey. I haven’t seen him since the day he talked about making babies with me, and I screamed at him. Now the obvious is starting to hit me: he probably did just what I told him to do. He packed up and left.

  I’m beginning to wonder if I made a dreadful mistake.

  “A
nd these grand settlements,” Papi says, “has anyone seen them? Described them? I’ll bet they not only have doctors, but dentists, too, eh, orthodontists, surgeons even! And gigantic grocery stores with shelves full of meat and fresh fruit and ice cold drinks in flavors you can’t imagine! You never saw those stores, but they existed. Lots of things existed, Mir, but now it’s all gone. That world drowned before you were born.”

  I listen numbly to his tirade. He is my father, the only family I have, this man whose once-powerful physique is now twisted into a grotesque parody of itself. It takes all my courage to respond, “I know the world you remember isn’t going to come back. I still think we should take our chances and go inland.”

  “And how do we do that, Mir? I wheel myself hundreds of miles in the chair? You and the boy going to carry me?”

  Since my fight with Jersey, I’ve been thinking about this. “The Road People make carts for their horses to pull. I could build a cart. Steal a horse. Maybe even find a vehicle that runs. There’s rumors of a black market car lot in an airplane hangar north of Blacksburg—it’s just a couple days’ hike, I could—”

  “There are no hidden car lots!” His voice thunders over me, strafing my nerves and igniting the terror I try so hard to ignore. “And if there ever were, the cars are rusted out heaps of junk! There’re no settlements! The people that go inland, do they ever come back? Do you ever hear from them again! For all we know, there is no inland!” He gestures toward the cliff’s edge, where the path drops like a suicide into the sea. “Understand this, Mir. This is my home, this is where I belong. I’m ill. Stay with me. At least until the end. Promise you won’t leave me.”

  I bury my face in his long hair, weeping into the tangles, breathing in his scent like it’s food.

  And I promise. God help me, I promise.

  He exhales mightily. When he finally speaks, it’s in a low, entranced whisper. I have to lean close to his face just to hear. “I dreamed last night about the trilobites. I was in the sea looking for food. Suddenly they were all around me, hundreds of them, rich and moist and succulent. I began to grab them and gobble them as fast as I could. Ambrosial they were. Like plump strawberries dripping with nectar. I called them my sweetlings and each one I ate, I thanked it for giving me its life.”

  A shiver rivers its way across his shoulders. “It was a glorious dream, but when I woke up I was so hungry.” He reaches back and clamps a hand around my fingers, which are greasy with ointment and the seepage from his sores. “I’m so hungry, Mir. All the time.”

  A chill prickles my neck like the ticktock of trilobite legs.

  “I’ll bring the halibut. You can have all of it. I’m not hungry.”

  “No, not that burnt, dead thing. Bring me a trilobite. I want to eat something alive!”

  Using the tongs, I catch the biggest tril in the tank, but I don’t stay to watch him eat it.

  That night I sleep in the cove where Jersey and I used to meet, at the end of the steep and crumbling sandstone path.

  *

  Still no sign of Jersey. I tell myself it’s not as if he hasn’t disappeared before—he’s got a wandering soul and no family to hold him back—but this time I feel like it’s for real. He’s gone, and I don’t blame him.

  In his absence, I fish every morning and then roam around town, see who’s committed to staying, who’s thinking of moving on. I determine that hunger must make people thick in the head, because each day the same dismal vigil continues. Diehards and the terminally stupid languish in the afternoon bake, some of them strangers, people drawn here by the apparently un-dashable hope that supplies are actually coming.

  A trio of Sea Rats—vagabonds who live on jerry-rigged boats and scavenge the debris islands for items to trade—sprawl lumpen and moribund on a tarp. The breeze buffets the woman’s long hair back from her face, enough for me to see something’s wrong. She has no ears. I shudder with revulsion and give the Rats a wide berth.

  I’m heading down to the water when I spot Jersey snoozing in a puddle of shade and feel a gust of something joyful and wild, like that first and only time in my life I drank a cold can of Quench, how its icy fizziness tickled my gums and flowed down my throat like drinkable starlight.

  So how do I show my delight at seeing him? I kick him awake, yelling, “Where the fuck have you been? I thought you were gone!”

  I guess he understands the affection behind my outburst, though, because he grins and gets up, gives me a kiss.

  I was right, it turns out. He did leave. Packed a rucksack and headed west, then changed his mind and turned back. Part of me exults because I know he came back for me. Another part wishes he’d kept going.

  We trudge up Drunk Dog Lane, a muddy side street where abandoned houses list tipsily into the waterlogged earth and swaybacked roofs are pasted an inch deep in gull shit. We pass a sailboat with snapped rigging, port side down in the muck. Jersey is still talking, but all I’m aware of is the heat of him, the odors and essences that swirl off his electric brown skin.

  When he presses me against the hull of the boat, I don’t resist. Then we’re kissing and grinding, and I’m licking the salt off his beautiful neck. Suddenly he slides his hands under my hair, pushing it away from my face, his thumbs sinking into the clefts of my gills, caressing the delicate skin flaps. I sink into languor. The pleasure is primal, like someone plucking a harp inside my skin, the vibrations spreading out into—

  “Shit, what the fuck!” He jumps back the way I once saw him do when a dog he was petting suddenly bit him. “What are you, deformed?”

  I feel frozen, mute with horror at what I’ve allowed to happen.

  “Behind your ears, what’ve you got there? Let me see!” He laughs nervously and reaches a hand out, but I can’t let him touch me again. Not now. Not after I’ve seen the shock on his face, like I’ve tricked him by appearing to be normal, when the truth is I’m like some sort of mutant fish or a two-headed lamb.

  “Get away from me!”

  I dodge his questing fingers and bolt. He yells, “Wait! Stop!” and runs after me, which only spurs me to put on more speed. I dash through the slop and run-off from two collapsed houses and vault a fence into a field where the footing is firmer. Behind me, he’s yelling, “Sorry, I’m sorry!” but I don’t stop.

  I sprint through an oak grove and down an embankment that levels out into a boggy wetland full of sea oats and sedge. Running here is sloppy and exhausting, but at least Jersey’s no longer behind me. A game trail leads me onto high, solid ground. From here, I can see a thinning portion of the Old Road where it emerges from the underbrush, and I put on a last burst of speed. Then I see what’s blocking the way and halt dead in my tracks.

  I was wrong about the supply truck. It did come. A two-and-a-half-ton M35 army truck, forest green like its surroundings, is stopped in the road. Cautiously I approach it, expecting to find the driver slaughtered and the truck’s contents ransacked, but there’s no one around and no evidence of looting.

  I haul myself into the cab, where a hand-carved pipe fragrant with herbs rests on a complicated-looking control panel. A plastic clamshell on the console overflows with sunflower seeds. No blood, no signs of violence.

  I pocket the seeds, hop down from the truck, and go into tracking mode. Where the macadam crumbles away, faint scuff marks are visible, a left boot heel in need of repair. The driver walked a few paces north, paused, probably looking around to make sure he was alone, then jumped down into a gully thick with ferns and skunk cabbage. Here he deposited a stinking pile, much of it composed of undigested sunflower seed hulls, and wiped his ass with a hand full of weeds. Didn’t bother to cover his scat. Stood again, zipping up probably.

  Then something goes wrong—coming up out of the gully, he stumbles and pitches forward, almost falls. Catches himself, seems to panic. Zigzags back toward the truck, then pivots hard and sideswipes a tree, blood and bits of skin scraped off on the bark. Now he’s running full tilt—a tall man, long strides—plun
ging deeper into the trees. Blood-spattered bushes, foliage trampled. The guy’s strong, he’s still on his feet, but much heavier now, boot prints an inch deep in the soil—something’s riding his back!—bleeding him out as he lurches, arms pinwheeling to judge from the snapped twigs overhead, toward a dense, thorny hedge.

  Which is where I skid to a stop. A lower leg, partially skinless, protrudes from the thicket—the rest of the body it helped propel on this last, desperate race is now a red mound not dissimilar in shape to what he just left in the gully. I’m debating whether to come closer, when I realize the hedge is dotted with fat purple berries, juicy-looking enough to make my mouth water in spite of the circumstances. Unlike anything I’ve seen. Then two of the berries roll sideways. Two more pop up to my left.

  With bloodiest intent, Old Four Legs is looking at me.

  Five sets of eyes. A fucking tribe of coelacanths, land-savvy and vicious. Their tiny, fatty brains sizing me up.

  I expect them to be slow and ungainly, but when they charge, their gait is horrifyingly fluid and fast, a reptilian scuttle on fleshy, lobed legs. I run for the one place of protection, the truck, as two more erupt from the underbrush, flanking me, and I can taste my own death, black and bitter.

  I don’t dare look back, but behind me surges the ungodly din of massive bodies smashing through underbrush, the obscene suction of stump legs pumping through muck, the vile, oily reek of their hides. Then a chaotic blur in my peripheral vision, bloody jaws leering and a scaled, blue-gray body launching itself at my legs—ripping pain as teeth snag my ankle and I leap for my life, skidding on sodden leaves, and, oh Christ, which way is the truck?

  There’s a crack and an explosion of green. Another, and the closest Old Four Legs jerks erect, its belly unzipped, internal sludge gushing. The third bullet almost plows a row down my skull—is Jersey trying to save me or kill me?

  He bounds into view, aiming Watanabi’s Glock in every direction at once, pumped with all the mad zeal you’d expect of someone in this situation who’s never fired a gun in his life. No matter, the coelacanths want no more of this shit. They dive into the underbrush as smoothly as if they were slithering into a kelp bed.