by Oliver Higgs
When Echo’s face isn’t blank, it’s pained. My ear is numb by now, my arm manageable, but her pain refuses to fade. The day passes, my muscles ache, and at night Echo lies six feet away and cries quietly to herself. I can’t help but feel bad now, so I tell myself Lectric would still be here without her. I have to justify the pain I’ve caused her. My mind takes itself to court over the matter, but the jury frowns at me, because beneath it all I know it’s not really her fault. When she’s sleeping, I take our only blanket and drape it over her.
The next day, nothing’s changed. When we speak at all, it’s with eminent politeness. If I try to help with anything, she insists on doing it herself, no matter how much it pains her. When I cook the bit of meat we wrapped yesterday, she shakes her head slowly, saying she’s not hungry. She can’t be anything but starving.
“Don’t be stupid,” I say.
She gives me a look that threatens to shatter the silence with thunder … then nothing. What can I do? We get back on the road. By my calculations, we’re still two hundred miles south of the z-line, yet around noon …
We see our first roamer.
It’s a new experience for me. Echo has seen them in abandoned towns west of Foundry, but I’ve never been down that way. I’ve heard a lot of talk about plague-walkers from travelers in Farmington, but I suspect half of it was lies and nonsense. Toyota has spoken of it too, though he was never been big on details.
Echo sees it first.
“Stop,” she whispers. The fear in her voice compels me to obey. She’s looking west. The land is still largely scrub-desert, though taller plants grow here and there. Houses are few and far between. Everything else is rubble and dust. At first, I can’t see why she’s called a halt.
Then I notice something moving out near the horizon. A man. A desert hermit. Yet something’s wrong with him.
“Roamer,” Echo whispers, and my blood turns cold. It’s one thing to hear tales from strangers over a hearth in the safety of your village. It’s something else entirely to see a thing with your own eyes–to know that it’s there, right there, and you could touch it if you dared.
Slowly, I retrieve my spyglass. Even through the lens, it’s too far to make out the face. The body is hunched forward. It doesn’t shuffle as I imagined. Rather, it lifts its feet high with each step in a kind of slow, awkward march. Its body jerks unsteadily forward, struggling for balance, like a poorly programmed automaton.
Strangely, I’m almost let down. From here, it doesn’t look particularly frightening. These things helped kill the World Before? How? It’s only the stories and Echo’s caution that keep the fear in me. Through the spyglass, I watch the roamer rip a plant out of the ground. The plant goes into its mouth. It’s torn apart, devoured.
“I thought they only eat people,” I say.
“They bite people. They eat everything. If they ate everybody they bit, the plague would’ve never spread. There’d be no new biters.”
“Oh. Right,” I say stupidly.
“We have to go that way,” Echo says, pointing east, away from the roamer.
“Can it even see us from here?”
“If we can see it, it can see us. We don’t want that thing coming after us.”
“It doesn’t look that bad.”
We turn east regardless, heading off the road, and Echo isn’t satisfied until the roamer is out of sight. Near New Sea, we head north again, drifting slowly back west toward Big Road, where the going is easier. Echo becomes more withdrawn than ever. She says nothing at all, except when we hit a particularly large bump, eliciting an involuntary moan. Her face is always pained. She tries to sleep as much as she can. She’s asleep when we hit the town.
It’s more rubble than town. Only one house still stands. The windows are all broken, but it appears someone made repairs to the roof and doors at some point. That makes me wary. I stop in a patch of shrubs on the edge of the area and watch for a while, just in case. Echo wakes up. I caution her for quiet. When there’s no sign of life, I decide to move in.
“Stay here. I’ll check things out,” I say.
“No!”
“I’ll just be a minute,” I say, pulling loose. I leave her the machine-pistol. It’s only got four bullets left, but that’s better than nothing. The crossbow I keep with me, loaded and ready.
There’s still no sign of life as I approach. The house is as dead as the world that built it. Still, I’m excessively cautious. I worry over every miniscule sound. Finally, after checking in all the windows, I go through the front door. Empty. A few pieces of smashed furniture. A broken TV. Whoever made those repairs is long gone. But wait–what’s this? A coiled rope! It hangs from a hook on the wall. Score one for treasure-hunting.
I’ll take that.
I find a dusty compass in a kitchen drawer as well. With the right ingredients, I know how to make a compass myself, but this one’s old and fancy. It’ll fetch something good from the right trader. There’s nothing else of value. I check one last closet in the kitchen, opening the door and–
A yellow eye bulges in a puce socket, the skull showing through in patches on the right, the other eye missing, the remaining skin taut and dead like melted plastic, the teeth broken and jagged in silver-gray gums; and it’s coming forward, the jaws open and ready, an abomination, a thing that should never have been allowed the grace of motion; and my heart is screaming the same silent scream emanating through that single soulless pupil, and I’m tripping backwards over my own feet, squeezing the crossbow too soon, the bolt is flying and missing and thudding uselessly into the wall, and I’m deader than dead …
And the zombie jerks to a stop.
A chain clinks. There’s a metal collar around its neck. It’s chained to the wall inside the closet. I stare at the thing, mesmerized. Up close, every rotting detail is startlingly clear; this used to be a person? Crom. I scramble to my feet, backing away. My heart is in overdrive. The shakes come into my limbs as the adrenaline lets go. I’m looking around, paranoid: are there others? What kind of asshole chains a zombie inside a closet? Why would anyone do such a thing? I can’t assess. The fear has put me out of my head. I only know I have to get as far away from this house as possible.
I try to close the closet door but the thing’s arms are extended. I would just leave it open but I want my bolt back, and it’s stuck in the wall above. I have to use a broken plank to push the limbs back inside, enough to get the door closed. I yank the bolt out of the wall and waste no time no time leaving.
I’m wheeling Echo down the road in a hurry, looking in all directions, before I can find the words to tell her what happened. She doesn’t say much even then. I can’t convey to her the full importance of what just happened. Or maybe it wasn’t important, but it sure seemed that way at the time. If I’d been a little slower, if the chain had been a little longer, it would’ve had me. I guess Echo was right about that first roamer. Better to keep out of sight if you can.
I’m still thinking about it when we stop for the night. The thing was almost machine-like, an organic robot. There was something silvery and unnatural gleaming in the gums and skull. I don’t know what to make of it. Echo lies down first, away from me again, keeping the blanket. I stay up for a while watching the desert.
At night, I dream it’s Ballard in that closet, and the chain is so long that he chases me into the street. Then Echo is there and she’s glad to see him. She hugs him. She watches placidly when he comes after me, when he sinks his jaws into the soft flesh of my calf.
I wake with a start. Echo is up long enough for me to help her into the wheelbarrow. Then she’s trying unsuccessfully to doze off again. We’re almost out of food and I’ll have to hunt today, but I want to get a little further from that town first. Mostly I’m watching the horizon around us, but when my focus shifts to Echo, I can almost feel her despondence. She exudes it like a physical cloud. Her eyes are glazed and unfocused, her expression rigid. She refuses to eat. Nothing is of interest to her. Everything
’s an unwanted distraction.
Dusk is a few hours away when I mumble something about foraging. Echo looks at me a moment, then nods once. There’s something odd about her reaction, though I can’t say what. I find a relatively hidden place to set up our camp, close to the shore, then head off into the desert alone.
I’ve bagged a single tan desert rat and some edible plants by the time the sun is closing on the horizon. I’m coming up on our spot again when I notice it’s empty. Echo is gone. A powerful dread overtakes me. My insides turn to ice. I know instantly what’s happened. There was another roamer. She’s dead. She’s one of them now. There’s no other explanation.
In a panic, I follow a set of tracks from the camp. They lead toward New Sea. I haven’t gone far when I hit the top of the slope leading down toward the water … and spot her. She’s on the ground, dragging herself toward the water. I look for the roamer. I look for blood, for a bite-mark, for signs of a struggle. There’s nothing but a fallen stick.
Confusion. Relief. She’s not one of them? What the hell is she doing? I jog down the slope. She has apparently hobbled most of the way here, leaning on the stick, then either fell or abandoned her support. She’s reached the sand at the bottom and is cutting a slow, wormlike path toward the ocean.
“Echo?”
She crawls faster. She can only use one arm and one leg, so “faster” is a relative term. I stand over her.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.
“Go away, Tristan.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Leave me alone. I don’t want to be a burden anymore.”
“So … you’re … going to crawl into New Sea?”
She doesn’t answer. Apparently this is her plan. For a moment, I just watch her, baffled. I don’t know what to say.
“Echo. Stop.”
“No,” she says.
Well, I tried. Ludicrously, the phrase pops into my head.
“You can’t crawl into the ocean,” I say.
But apparently she can, because she’s almost there. The water washes over her hand, up to her shoulders, wetting her shirt. There’s a flutter of panic: will she actually do this? I curse and get down and physically grab her, yielding a tight pinch in my wounded bicep.
“Let me go!” she yells. I only grabbed her to pause for time, so we could talk, but then we’re in an unintelligible scuffle, and I’m on my knees in the water, and somehow she ends up in a sitting position and my arms are around her. She has no real chance to overpower me. Her shoulders fall and she slumps against me, defeated. She’s crying again, but this cry isn’t like the others. Despite being almost silent, it’s one of the worst sounds I’ve ever heard. It comes from deep inside, shaking her whole body.
“You’re better off without me,” she says, though it comes out in a high-pitched blur.
“No. I need you.”
“No, you don’t. You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me. All I do is slow us down.”
She’s right too–about both parts. In her current state, I’d probably be better off on my own. In the Library, I liked being alone. No one to worry about. No one to argue with. No one to talk to at all, in fact, except Letric … No one to lie beside on cold nights.
She makes a feeble attempt to move forward again.
“Annabel, don’t.”
“Don’t you dare call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“No, it’s not! I’m going to die anyway, you know. As soon as we hit more roamers, you’ll have to leave me. I can’t run. Face it, Tristan. It’s better this way. Just go.”
I can’t think of a response, so we just sit there for a time. I want to apologize for what I said the other night, but I don’t know how. The words won’t take shape. Crispin would’ve known what to say. He’d always been the peacekeeper among us, calm and cautious. He could see through people’s words to their needs, even at that age.
And then I’m talking about Crispin and Berkley and my grandfather’s store. Words are just coming out. Echo calms by degrees, rocking slightly. When I pause, she mentions Hailey, a younger girl she’d played with who’d been sickly and often stayed at home. I’d all but forgotten her, but she and Annabel had been good friends. It feels good to mention Farmington, to know it had been real once. We talk until the moon comes up. Then there’s a pause.
“It’s never going to go away,” Echo whispers.
She means the pain. She’s in constant pain. And she could be right, for all I know. Some wounds never heal. How would I feel if I knew I might be in pain for the rest of my life? How long before I crawled into the sea? Good thing I took the machine-pistol to hunt. Then again, I don’t think she would’ve used that. She doesn’t want to die. She just can’t live like this anymore.
“It’ll get better,” I say.
“No, it won’t.”
“We’ll look for medicine.”
She shakes her head. I’m not surprised. I can’t even convince myself.
“Will you just come back to camp?” I ask.
“What’s the point, Tristan?”
“Look, I don’t know, but there’s got to be something better than this. Something more. You can’t just give up. What about Haven?”
Silence.
“Fine. Screw it, let’s go into New Sea,” I say.
She gives me a look.
“What? Why not? Let’s go.”
I stand up and walk into the water.
“Tristan.”
“What?” Turning, ankle-deep.
“Just stop.”
“I thought we were gonna do this.”
She sighs heavily, rolling her eyes, dropping her chin, defeated.
“Let’s go back to camp,” she mutters.
She leans on me for the walk back. When we’re there, I gather kindling for a fire. It’s a risk, but what isn’t? At this point neither of us much care, and there’s a good amount of old wood and dead plants available. Plus, our clothes are wet, and there’s a chill in the night air.
“Crom. You know how long it took these pants to dry last time?” I say to myself; they’re wet from our struggle on the shore.
“Crom?” Echo repeats, giving me a weird look.
“It’s from Conan.”
She just looks more confused.
“You don’t know Conan?”
I have to explain about the graphic novels in the Library.
“Here, look,” I say.
I take Volume Seven from my pack. We sit close and read it together. This is how books were meant to be read: by the light of a flickering fire. It’s a little harder to see, but it does something to your imagination. Echo absorbs everything without comment. She’s not into it like I am, but she’s attentive, grateful for any new distraction. A closeness hangs between us now, and I’m glad she’s talking to me again, even if she’s not technically saying much. We go through more than half the book, slowly, before the fire dies down and it’s time to sleep.
“I’ll keep watch a while,” I say.
She doesn’t protest, just lies down with her head on the pack. I put the blanket over her and scatter the remnants of the fire. I’m tired, but it can’t hurt to watch for roamers. I can’t sleep yet anyway. For once, I’m more worried about the future than the present. What if her pain really doesn’t go away? How’s she going to live like this? What if we come upon a pack of plague-walkers, and I can’t wheel her away fast enough? What will I do?
We’ve got to turn west, I decide. We can’t risk going further north. I’m still thinking about it an hour when I finally drift off to sleep.
When I wake up, Echo is still asleep, Lectric is still dead, and there’s an old man sitting on a twisted log just beyond the ashes of our fire. There’s a pistol on his hip and a rifle slung across his back. Startled, I reach for my crossbow–but it’s gone.
Chapter 9.
My mind can’t even piece together a proper expletive. I have to convince myself this isn’t part
of a dream. The man sits stolidly on the log as if nothing is out of the ordinary. He’s rolling a cigarette between his fingers.
His face is a thing of the desert: brown and leathery, wrinkled like an old jacket, black eyes glittering with hidden vitality. A layer of dust covers most of his face, except where a pair of goggles have kept it away. The goggles now hang loose around his neck, half-hidden by a stout white beard. Equally white hair peaks out beneath a dusty, wide-brimmed hat. A beaten brown duster and black gloves protect his skin.
The pistol on the man’s hip looks to be a white plasteel, plasma-hybrid weapon, secured in an old-fashioned holster. The rifle on his back is as long and slender as a sword. When I can notice anything else, it’s the four-wheeled ATV some distance behind him. There’s a small two-wheeled extension attached to the rear, and strapped into a harness on the platform is, obscenely, a large pink sow. The animal must weigh two hundred pounds. What’s more, the sow is wearing goggles.
I’m so baffled by the man’s presence–how didn’t I hear the ATV?–let alone the pig, that after the instinctive grasp for the crossbow, all I can do is stare. Nearby, Echo senses a change. She comes gasping awake, blinking in shock.
“Believe I’ll have my rope back,” the man says, still fiddling with the cigarette. His voice is encased in gravel. I recall my newly acquired rope. Is this who chained the roamer in the closet then?
“In the pack,” I say.
He nods but makes no move toward it. His fingers pause as he looks up and considers the two of us.
“You’m ain’t much more than whelps,” he observes.
His focus goes back to the cigarette, which he finishes and seals expertly yet holds without lighting. I stare at him, unsure of what to say or do.
“Seen two wolves ride this way few days back. You’m their prey?” he asks, a little smile edging into the corners of his mouth.
Two wolves? Oh. Cabal and his companion. I nod.
