by Don Reardon
John didn’t argue.
The bone-thin man opened up the top of the can, thawed the chicken, can and all, in a pot of water, and began preparing the meal. The girl and the old woman rested on the bed, and John sat quietly, just watching. It felt good to be somewhere safe and warm.
John pointed to the computer. “That work?”
“You mean is it connected to the world wide weird? No. If you need it to type a letter or something like that, it will work like a charm. With my batteries and the mills, and the solar panels I have on the roof of the old house, I’ve got plenty of juice. Everything but a hot shower. Totally off the grid.”
He pulled out the chicken and dropped it on a cutting board. Then he dumped the juice from the can into a pot. John was glad to see this. He didn’t want any part of the canned chicken going to waste.
Red glanced toward the bed. He leaned over to John and whispered, “You look like you could use a pick-me-up?” He opened a cupboard and pulled a nearly empty bottle of gin out from behind some pots. He poured a finger’s worth into two small glasses and handed John one.
“To the last of the real people,” he said, gesturing to the women on the bed.
They brought the glasses together with a soft clink and John took a small mouthful and just let it burn. The bitter taste of pine needles and juniper berries reminded him of the mountains and the old woman’s tundra tea. Not his usual choice for a drink, but under the circumstances, he’d drink cooking wine.
He swallowed and held the glass to his nose and inhaled deeply.
“Thanks. I needed this,” John said.
“I wish I could tell you there’s more where that came from, but what you see here is the last of it. I should have learned how to make blueberry wine or something. Too late for that now, I guess.”
He cut the chicken and then poured some rice and water into one pot, and in another dropped the meat in and dumped curry powder, dried lemongrass, and some other spices. “I won’t make it too spicy,” he said. “Yup’iks tend not to like stuff that’s too hot. Lukewarm and bland is the standard fare. That or fermented. Which I suppose is spice all its own.”
He covered the pot and turned a chair backward and straddled it. Then he stood up and turned the chair around and sat down in it. Then he stood up again, took the bottle back out, and poured the last of the gin.
“Your first question is where is the cavalry, right? Why didn’t anyone come for us?”
John nodded. “Something like that,” he said.
“First-year or second-year teacher in the Bush?”
“First. Going on a second, I guess.”
Red nodded and took a sip. He stopped and watched the surveillance monitor.
“Let me warn you that I am a certified conspiracy nut, so take what you will from what I’m about to tell you. Won’t say I saw this shitstorm coming, but as you can see with your own two eyes, I was as prepared as anyone could ever hope to be. Didn’t expect the government to do anything to help me. Didn’t want the government to help me. So naturally, I’m suspicious. I’m paranoid. I’m your standard survival nut. With that said, I got a sneaking suspicion the feds are responsible. And if they didn’t create the sickness themselves, they sure didn’t do anything to stop the slaughter.” He took another sip and sat for a moment.
“Why would anyone want this to happen?” John asked, incredulous.
Red shook his head. “You’re a teacher. Figure it out. Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Government-sponsored sterilization? The smallpox- and measles-infected blankets given to the Sioux? Sarin gas bomb testing in interior Alaska? Nuke detonations in the Aleutian chain? I could go on and on. This here? This could just be another big government romp in the Arctic sandbox.”
John swirled his gin and took another sip. “I know enough history. And the proof is where, behind the grassy knoll?”
“Proof? My wife worked for the hospital. Heard from her, read some of her work materials, and did my own research. The Alaska bird flu plan was available to anyone with a mind to read it. There was one key line that I remember. Haven’t been able to forget it, in fact. The plan had these assumptions about who would survive the flu. It said, ‘Most people who have access to clean water, food, sanitation, fuel, and nursing and medical care while they are sick will survive.’”
“That wasn’t even the case for most of the people out here before this all happened,” John said. “There was a plan? They knew the flu would strike here? No. No way. Not possible. Why didn’t anyone know about it? I was a teacher. I would have been told something. What to do. How to prepare. The school district would have informed us.”
“Sure as shit there was a plan! Read it myself. Wish I had it for you to see now. You’d see the hole in it, plain as day. This isn’t Monday-morning quarterbacking, either, John. The scientists only factored in the sickness. Apparently there was little to no consideration taken for the culture, the close living quarters, or the remote location. If they had ever hoped to actually stop the flu and help people here, they would have allotted a few more doses of Tamiflu. They would have initiated practice drills. The estimated infection rate was fifty percent, with only a three or four percent mortality rate, but that wasn’t factoring lack of sanitation, heat, food sources, or adequate medical attention.”
John felt light-headed. He stood up, sat down, quickly stood back up again. He steadied himself against the counter. He lifted the lid, set it aside, and watched the curry boil. He took a deep breath and returned to his chair.
Red stirred the pot, put the lid back on, and continued. “Or, you know, maybe that was all factored in, thus your answer to why no one came to save the day.”
“So what exactly are you saying?” John asked.
“In case you didn’t figure it out, if this disease is natural, southwestern Alaska is the perfect area for one hundred percent quarantine. That’s if this was natural. If it wasn’t, well that’s another beast.”
John set his glass down on the table and stood back up. He paced the small tank. He tried to not let thoughts of Anna’s death mingle with his anger.
“First off,” Red continued, “this is the biggest goddamn waterfowl refuge in the world, and the people rely on the birds for food. This wasn’t a case of if the flu hit, it was when. And would H5N1 make the jump to people and mutate? Would it go pandemic on the tundra, spread across Alaska and northern Canada and then down to the States? But then that raises the question, What if they knew this would happen? Worse yet, what if some small group of rogue pharmaceutical scientists manufactured the sickness and brought the bug here themselves?”
“Honestly? I think you’re completely full of shit. Delusional. Out of your gourd,” John said. “Our government wouldn’t knowingly let so many suffer, Red. Ever.”
“No?” Red laughed. “Quarantining this area makes perfect sense, man. You kill two birds with one stone. You keep the pandemic from mainstream society and you find a simple solution to people draining taxpayer dollars. Those same people who sit on vast gold and petroleum reserves, I might add. Of course, what do I know? Could be the feds infected the region with this bug to create an anti-virus from the sole survivors like you and me. Or, it might just be the end.”
“You’re crazy,” John said.
“Been called worse, my friend, been called a helluva lot worse.”
John picked up his glass and took another sip while Red stirred the pot. The sweet aroma of curry and chicken filled the small room. Movement on the video screen caught Red’s eye. He set the lid back on the pot and gestured for John to join him in front of the screen.
John rose, half expecting to see the old woman’s hunter racing on his skis toward the tank.
“Damn,” Red whispered. “Here comes company.”
ANNA STOOD POUNDING against the door with her heavy mittens. He opened the door to find her bundled up in her down parka, with a grin that threatened to swallow her face. She insisted he visit a house for the Slaviq celebrations.
“At least one house,” she said. “It’s so fun. Festive. There’s food and singing and this amazing feeling. They bring in this big star and spin it and sing. It’s this incredible feeling of family and friends and community. I’ve never felt this before. You’ve got to try it. Just once. Plus, the next starring is at Carl’s. He wants you there.”
“One? You realize it’s eleven thirty at night?” he asked.
“I know! It’s like time doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist. That’s part of what is so cool. It’s the whole village. Come on.”
He pulled on his boots, hat, and jacket. “I don’t know if I can stomach her beaver stew right now,” he said.
“Carl saved some of the oranges that Santa and the soldiers brought, and someone told me Carrie had muskoxen meat from her brother’s family on the coast. That sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Florida oranges and prehistoric meat! Hurry! If we get there early we won’t have to stand in the porch.”
They scurried down the steps and along the snow-covered boardwalk toward Carl’s house. The gusting wind at their backs seemed to push them, and John didn’t look forward to trudging back with the blowing ice crystals cutting at his face. The blasts made a low, barely audible whistle as they walked between and around the houses. Ahead, he could see people filing into Carl’s little home.
“If it gets to be too much, I’m out,” he said as they reached the front steps.
The men shook hands and nodded and smiled as they entered. Many of the women hugged Anna, as if she hadn’t spent the whole evening with them at another house. The place was packed with people standing against the walls, and some sitting on the floor. The chairs and couch and beds, every available place to sit in the house held a warm body.
John took a deep breath and tried to relax.
Carl waved him over.
“Hey! Glad you came, buddy. Let me find you a chair.”
“It’s okay, I can stand.”
“No way, you’re my guest of honour. Here.” Carl spotted an empty yellow five-gallon bucket beneath the kitchen table. He pulled the bucket out, flipped it over, and slid it up to the table. “There you go! Sit with the elders.”
John smiled in appreciation and looked around the table at the five old men.
“Hello. I’m John.”
The men nodded and two of them introduced themselves. Then they pointed to the other men, introduced them, and explained that they didn’t speak kass’aq. John turned his eyes to the spread of food on the table in front of him. Pots and large yellow and green plastic bowls covered the entire table and each of them was filled to the top with stew, soup, dried fish, cut-up oranges, and variations of akutaq. He glanced around at the elders, short, thin old men he’d never seen up close before.
Wrinkles covered their faces with dark lines and endless crevices, contour maps of history, weather, hunting. He wanted to tell them he wasn’t just another outsider but that his grandmother had been Native, maybe even Yup’ik. He wanted to question them. Listen to them. Hear their stories. And apologize all at once. Instead, he sat there. Dumb.
More people filed in. And still more.
He worried Carl’s small house would collapse. He thought he could almost feel the thin plywood floor and the joists protesting the weight. Anna sat in a corner, a snotty-nosed toddler sitting in her lap, sucking on an orange peel and running his hand down her cheek, as if testing the softness of her pale flesh. She caught John’s glance and winked.
The singing began as another group filed in, and for a brief moment a pretty younger woman caught his attention. She looked straight at him and almost through him with whitish eyes. He glanced away, not wanting to stare, and then back and she was gone in the crowd. A man entered carrying a star on a wooden spinner covered with shiny red Christmas garland. The contraption looked like an oversized pinwheel, complete with sparkles and a stick to hold it up.
Someone led a prayer to bless and keep the troops overseas safe, and then a man began to spin the star and everyone started to sing.
The song, a Yup’ik version of “Silent Night,” caught him off guard. He looked over to Anna again, and she was singing too. Smiling and singing. He took a deep breath and tried to relax a little. Tried to feel the spirit of the season. An atmosphere of joy and excitement was building in Carl’s diminutive house, and he could feel it. It was that or claustrophobia about to kick in with the warm crush of bodies. For once he just went with it and tried as best he could to join in the song.
FOR ONCE HE UNDERSTOOD the girl’s sensitivity to smell. They made camp beneath the riverbank a quarter mile from the fish camp where he’d shot the men, but the horrible smoke was still there, lingering. He rubbed snow in his nostrils and wondered if the girl could smell it on him. In his clothes. On his breath. In his mind.
When he shut his eyes he was again behind the smokehouse door and one man emerged, then another, and another. And he shot them all. The girl’s screams echoed in his ears and mixed with the gunshots.
He hadn’t said anything about what he saw in the smokehouse or how many men he’d killed. He knew the girl was formulating her nightly questions, and when the first one came he breathed a sigh of relief.
“How old were you when you first, you know? Did it?” the girl asked.
He understood she was doing this for him, asking inane questions and then answering them in her own way.
She rolled over and spoke to the back of his head, the campfire at her own back. He couldn’t tell if she was still playing with her grass weaving. The wind changed direction, blowing their campfire smoke toward them. He coughed and wiped at the smell of burnt flesh somehow in his nose again.
“I don’t count the first time,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about or even think about that. Later on, you know. I almost tried it. Seems like everyone I knew had humped before. They would go out at night right before the village curfew and do it in empty steam baths, in those covered porches, or even under the school. Sometimes if everyone was at open gym or bingo games, the boys would try make me go to their house. I thought maybe if I let someone be with me they would maybe want to be my boyfriend. My cousin told me I would find someone to love me that way. I was too scared, though. I didn’t want to be blind and pregnant and alone, you know?”
He sat up and stared out into the dark back toward the fish camp. He imagined the men he’d left in the snow slowly coming back to life. A finger or two moving at first. Eyelids fluttering. Maybe he hadn’t killed them after all.
“So,” she continued, “if you don’t count what my uncle did, I’m still one, I guess. A virgin. Probably going to die that way now, too. Never got to love someone.”
The men’s eyes were open. Lips moving.
He sank back into his sleeping bag and turned over on his back. Above them, the sky swirled dark with clouds. She was trying so hard to help him leave the smokehouse behind.
“You’ve got a long life ahead of you. There will be love for you someday,” he said.
The first of the men sat upright. Then the next.
“Was your wife? You know, when you married her?” she asked.
“Sex and love, the two are different. Don’t equate the two. No more. Please. No more questions. I can’t deal with them right now. I know you’re trying … just not tonight,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Sorry for snapping. Let’s sleep, okay?”
“Will you ever again?” she asked.
He turned away from her and took a small handful of snow, balled it up, and put in on his dry tongue.
The men back at the fish camp crawled to their feet.
Someone had relit the fire inside the smokehouse.
“Will you?” she asked.
They stumbled down the bank.
Axes and knives in hand.
“I was fifteen,” he said, “in a small little dome tent in a backyard in the summer. Her parents were at church. It was nothing special. I
don’t even remember her name.
”
“I want it to be special,” she said.
“It will be,” he said, as he fought a vision of the four hungry corpses lurching through the dark toward their camp.
29
The figure on the screen staggered down the road toward Red’s shelter, drunk or sick, or both. Rayna and the old woman were still resting on the bed, and Red checked the clip in the assault rifle as well as the revolver John hadn’t noticed in a black nylon holster strapped to his skinny pale ankle. The bullet check seemed to be as much for show as anything, that or Red really needed to make sure he was ready for a firefight.
“Should just shoot the poor bastard to put him out of his misery,” Red said.
“Is he drunk?” John asked.
“I doubt it. My bet is that the only booze left within a thousand or so miles is right there in our glasses. He’s either delirious from hunger, or the bug. Or all three.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Nothing. There are people who have survived by any means necessary. The living dead, that’s what I’ve called ’em. I avoid them and if they give me any shit, I put them down. I would hope someone would do the same for me.”
John nodded. “The girl calls them outcasts,” he whispered. “A group of them we encountered were cannibals.”
“Like I said, any means necessary.”
John nodded his head in the direction of the sleeping girl. “She claims she can smell them,” he whispered.
“You know as well as I that you can see it in a person’s eyes. The eyes change when you kill a man, and they change again when your reasons for killing ain’t right.”
John leaned in closer to the screen. The person stopped, turned in circles, and then faced their direction.
“Does this camera zoom in?” John asked.
Red flipped a switch on the small control panel beside the screen and brought the image in closer. “It doesn’t zoom,” he said, “but it can pull the picture in digitally. How’s that?”
