Skulls & Crossbones

by Andi Marquette

  "If we drag it to the front door, it might keep others out," I said. He was silent a moment. "I don't want to touch it."

  "You already hit it. It didn't move." Hutchins remained still.

  "What's the matter with you?" I bent down over one end of the form and gripped the rags. "You take that end and I'll pull."

  He stooped at last. As I tugged, the cloth ripped in my hands and I staggered back. Cursing, I grabbed hold of what was probably the head and together we dragged the carcass out of the room and to the front door, where we lay it across the entrance so that an intruder would have to trip over it. We were ready now to search upstairs. Hutchins led, using my steel rod to sweep each step in the dark stairwell to check for holes before putting his weight on it. The top floor was small, two bedrooms and a bath, all of which were empty except for what had been left in the toilet by previous travelers. We closed the door behind us and started downstairs, glancing at the body that blocked the foot of the front entrance as we headed back to the kitchen.

  Not a single can of food was left in the cupboards. Hutchins found rice in a box. He poured some into his hand and small black insects crawled out with the grains. He threw the box away in disgust.

  "You should have kept that," I said. "For when we find water."

  "Too infested."

  We settled for the night in the room with the dismantled sofa, hungry.

  "We probably could have eaten the bugs, you know." I turned on my side, adjusting the rucksack under my head. The bare floorboards hurt my bones, and a chill whistled through the baseboard cracks. Hutchins said nothing. After a long time, during which I stared at the night sky through the windows, I heard him sobbing quietly. Not for the first time, I wondered if I too would cry if I had had a wife and child. My mother and brothers went unmourned, as did my failing kinship with anything once alive.

  After a while, the moon was high enough to be visible and I wondered if the storm would miss us. Hutchins no longer wept. I heard his soft, regular breathing. Although he had volunteered for watch, he'd fallen asleep. I sat up. In the thick silence, the scent of snow still blustered through the broken panes, distracting me from the gnawing in my stomach.

  I removed one of my boots and took my foot between my hands, massaging the deadened flesh through the socks. The sole, I knew, would be white as milk, devoid of blood from the capillaries that had spasmed shut. One day soon, it would turn blue.

  I pressed the meager warmth of my palms into my foot and thought about the frozen body that lay across the front door. Again I saw the disturbing form as it had appeared by the table and again I wondered at Hutchins's reluctance to touch it, and at my own momentary aversion. I put my boot back on and got up.

  The entrance area was darker than the other room. At first barely visible against the door, the ragged form lay implacably full of a meaning I could not define. Its contours filled me with dread. I stared at it until I calmed down, then walked back to my rucksack and sat against it. Hutchins was snoring softly, slumped back against the sofa. The sickening thud of the metal pipe as he slammed it against the body came back to me. Over and over, I saw the pipe smashing down on the hardened figure, until I cringed as if it were hitting me.

  I looked at Hutchins. His mouth was open in the vulnerability of sleep. I shoved my rucksack against the wall under one of the windows, where I could see his legs but he couldn't see me. For a while I watched my breath in the moonlight. Then I dozed off .

  I woke with a start. The moonlight was gone, replaced by the subdued luminescence of dense clouds. Except for Hutchins's breathing, all was quiet. Wet drops fell on my face. I brushed snowflakes from my cheek, listened some more, then got up and surveyed the room. Something did not feel right. I reached for the metal rod. "Hutch, wake up." I kicked his feet.

  He woke immediately and thrust his hand to his belt for the hatchet.

  "What?"

  "Think I heard something."

  He got up, and big as he was, he moved more quietly than I with my numb feet. We looked out the windows, then headed toward the front entrance. The body was gone.

  We stared at the spot as if its emptiness were an illusion of the dark. Then the implications hit us, and we both wheeled around. Hutchins peered up the stairwell.

  "You check down here." He started up the stairs, hatchet held up.

  I clutched the steel rod with both hands and started in the dining room, where the high French windows showcased the sky's glower. I stabbed every corner and shadow, poked every cranny in the kitchen, and explored the living room again. Hutchins came down the stairs. "Nothing," he said.

  "Same here." I saw the peculiar look on his face and turned to the front door.

  Several inches of snow had fallen and begun drifting onto the porch. There were no footprints leading away from the house.

  "Did we miss a room?" I said.

  "No. No basement."

  "Crawlspace?"

  "How did he get to it?"

  I pushed open the screen door and looked on both sides of the porch,

  which was lit by the peculiar incandescence of snow and clouds reflecting off one another. At left, where the snow reached under the eaves, something had scraped a trail to the side railing, which was nothing but a bunch of rickety stakes that hung in rotted pieces. A strip of blackened cloth, snagged on a wood shard, dangled like a marker. Past the porch, a path trampled into the snow led from the side of the house, ending abruptly about ten feet away. Again, the sense of dread. I turned to Hutchins. "We need to leave."

  "In this snow?" He stared at the aborted path. "We're safer here."

  Inside, we waited for dawn, neither of us sleeping or speaking. Shivering, I pictured steaming cups of Oolong and English Breakfast teas and musky black brews that smelled of earth. The image of the steel pipe crashing down on a frozen form that later crept away filled me with sharp disquiet and a strange longing. The trail had ended in the snow, as if he had simply been lifted to the sky. Conjuring memories of sipping smoky Lapsang Souchong and sweet Darjeelings, brown liquids in white cups, dark and scalding, I used the tea to fight this thing that made no sense in a world that no longer made sense. For a moment, I covered my face with numb fingers and felt my warm breath like steam rising from a ceramic mug. A pain started deep in my chest, and when I took my hands away, I realized I was crying.

  "Damn, you people don't know how to take a hint, do you?" The voice was like butter mixed into warm gravel, throaty in the way of someone who'd smoked too many cigarettes when cigarettes were still available.

  I thought I was dreaming until cold metal butted against my face and my eyes flew open. I was looking up the barrel of the longest rifle I had ever seen.

  The woman with the Afro stood tall and rangy at the other end of the gun. I turned my head a fraction to see where Hutchins was.

  "Don't move," she said. "This piece may look too old and pretty to be real, but it makes good holes, especially up close like this." She squinted at me and slowly moved the mouth of the barrel down to the center of my chest. "What'd you do with it?"

  I couldn't muster a response quickly enough, and she thrust the rifle sharply into my breastbone.

  I grimaced. "I don't understand."

  "Where'd you put it?"

  "Put what?"

  "Aw, come on," she said with a bare hint of a smile in her voice. "You're a very pretty boy and you're probably smarter than you look. I don't know about your friend here—"

  She tipped her head to my right. I stole a glance and thought I saw

  Hutchins sitting upright on the floor with a knife blade being held to his neck.

  "—but I have a feeling about you. So don't prove me wrong, all right, Curly?"

  I swallowed, my throat so dry that the action was mostly a convulsion.

  "So answer my question. The body. Where'd you put the body? Practically the only thing left in this damned place other than the stinkin' sausages upstairs in the bathroom, so don't pretend you don't know what I
'm talkin' about."

  "I don't know what happened to it." In the odd, soft light I thought I saw her glower, and added, "We found it in the dining room. Dragged it to the front door so people would think twice about coming in. When we woke up later it was gone."

  "What do you mean it was gone? Shay, bring that fool over here."

  "Move it," I heard someone else mutter. "On your knees. Come on, come on."

  In a moment Hutchins was next to me, his lank blond hair sweaty with fear even in the cold. The woman making him sweat was pointing a handgun at his face as well as holding a knife to his neck.

  "Please," he whispered.

  "I don't want to hear you," my captor said. "Shay's real quick with that knife. The gun's a backup, but she really likes knives. Get it?"

  Hutchins said nothing, merely blinked his understanding.

  Someone was clumping up the front steps of the house. The door opened and banged shut. The woman who entered the room was much too petite for her heavy footfall.

  "Red, what's going on?" she asked. Her gloves were cut off at the fingers and the woolen hat she removed revealed short hair chopped roughly into spikes.

  The woman with the Afro gave her a big smile, incongruous in the surroundings. "I'm trying to find out what happened to our mascot."

  "Why don't we just go?" The petite woman walked up to Red and put a hand on her back. "We got the diesel. That's what we came back for." Red's gaze softened and her voice grew huskier. "You're right. I was just having some fun here."

  The woman who was holding the knife to Hutchins said, "You guys go." Her pale skin and pinkish eyes looked sickly, especially under the too-sparse cornrows she had attempted. "I'll get rid of them and join you in a minute."

  Red looked down at the floor and shook her head. "No, no, no. See, that's just what we're not gonna do. Shay, we don't kill people indiscriminately. If I keep having trouble with you on that, you're gonna find your ass over the side of the ship. Got that? Or maybe you'd like to reconsider now, before we set sail?"

  Shay made a conciliatory motion with her head. "Fine," she said through slightly clenched teeth. "We'll leave them here."

  "Actually," Red said, gripping the petite woman's hand while still keeping the rifle muzzle against the middle of my chest, "what do you say, Vic? I was thinking—we have some women on board who still like boys. We can bring these two with us. Or at least this one." She nodded at me. "Help keep the morale high."

  "What if I don't want to go?" The words flew out of my mouth before I could consider that they might earn me a couple of bullets in the heart. But Red only sighed and said, "Well, maybe you don't have a choice, see? Look, what are you going to do? You've been roaming like everybody else, what, six, seven, eight months now? You see anything different? You see anything better? You're still alive—for now. But there's plenty of people who'd kill you for that knapsack, or for your foul-smelling clothes, or because they've lost their minds. Like all those folks out there whipping themselves and spraying their blood all over out of some misguided penance because they think we brought this all on ourselves. You know as well as I do that in their crazy brains, if you're not penitent, then you're guilty, and you know what they'll do to you."

  One thing I hated was an extremist—and to me, all thugs were extremist—who sounded reasonable. They were usually good at contorting logic into something that seemed sensible. That this woman called Red and her friends were thugs of some sort, I had no doubt. But I was still a coward, preferring to die whatever death was considered natural these days than to die by an assailant's weapon. "Why should we trust you?" I said in a small voice. "I've already spared you twice." She looked at me hard. "Why should you trust us?" She continued staring at me. "Who says we trust you?"

  Unable to read her eyes, I waited a long moment before turning and venturing, "Hutch?" Maybe agreeing now and escaping later were the only real options.

  "You don't even know where," he said thickly, his Adam's apple bobbing furiously against the knife blade.

  I turned back to Red.

  "Maybe I'm not making myself clear," she said, and suddenly I realized she might be a lot older than I'd thought. Her teeth were stained and her lips cracked, but what tipped me to her age were the prominent veins in the hands gripping the rifle.

  "I'm extending a time-honored tradition to you," she said. "I'm asking

  if you and your friend would like to go with us, not as captives, but as part of our crew. We're sailing south, because whatever else we find, at least the weather's got to be better. And we are resourceful. You may call what we do plunder, but let's face it, it's no more than what you do on a small scale. No more than what anybody does to stay alive. We take care of our little community. And you can be part of it."

  "I'm not going," Hutch said.

  I looked deeply into Red's bloodshot eyes. The early morning light in the room was good now. I could see that her jeans and puff y jacket were dirty and her skin ashy, but she was still a good-looking woman under all that hair. "Then you come, Curly," she said.

  "I can't just leave him." Was this woman insane, inviting a stranger on board their ship? Even if the issue of trust was reduced to taking a calculated risk, how did she know I wasn't diseased?

  As if she had read my mind, she said, "If you were really sick, you'd both be dead by now. You're still young and relatively strong. We could use that." She thought a moment. Then she turned to Shay and instructed, "Lash him."

  Before I could understand what she meant, I saw quick movement from the corner of my eye and then Hutch slumped to the floor. Something hit my forehead hard and I sat, stunned, as if I'd walked into a pole. Then I, too, went down.

  We were already in the back of the truck when I came to with a slight headache. Red was sitting next to me, and we were sharing a drop cloth as blanket. Hutchins was in the other corner, awake and looking miserable as Shay hovered near him with a restless expression on her face.

  Red leaned over me and peered into my eyes. For some reason, I didn't feel afraid.

  "I think you'll be okay," she said. "I never hit as hard as Shay unless I mean it." She cast a dark glance toward the other corner.

  The truck was jiggling through ruts in a road that ran along small abandoned storefronts on one side and a marina where sailboats sat in dry dock in their shrink-wrapped covers and canvas cocoons, some of which had come loose and were flapping in the wind. I hadn't realized we were this close to water, and recognized the smell I had taken yesterday to be rain or the approaching snow.

  Red reached behind her and pulled out an open can of peanuts. "Here,"

  she said.

  I looked at them suspiciously.

  "They're not poisoned." She dropped a small amount into her palm and tossed them in her mouth. "Like you have anything to lose." As she chewed she inhaled deeply, as if dragging on a cigarette.

  I took the can. The first couple of nuts to hit my tongue made my salivary glands fire up so quickly they hurt. At that moment, I didn't care if the peanuts were tainted. At least I wouldn't die hungry.

  "Where'd you get these?" I asked, appalled that my first question was about food and not about where Hutchins and I were being taken. "You'd be surprised," she replied in a confidential voice, "how many people out there still have things. They have food, still have some water, some fuel. Not too much anymore—a lot of them have been killed for their things. We don't do that." She lowered her eyes and threw a look at Shay. "We just help them share what they have. With us."

  "Where—?"

  "You're coming to see our boat. You might still change your mind. Notice you're not tied up."

  My hand stopped halfway to my mouth. "Why?"

  She shifted under the tarp and faced me. The faint odor of old perspiration clung to her jacket. "I could have killed you three times already. This last time I broke a time-honored tradition. When you said no, you didn't want to come with us, that's when I should have let Shay be happy. You remind me of my little broth
er, except I don't have a little brother and if I did, he wouldn't look at all like you. What's your name?"

  "Jonathan."

  She smiled, and I saw where a tooth was missing from the side of her mouth. "Jonathan. I might still call you Curly, though."

  I used my sleeve to wipe peanut crumbs from my mouth. "Would we really have to be—" I paused, unable to get the words out because of the peanuts, I thought, but then realizing the words themselves were so distasteful as to get stuck on the way out. "Se—sex slaves?"

  The smile turned almost shy. "Whatever you and the girls decide."

  "You know, some of the women are going to object violently to this," Shay flung from the other side. "To them being on board. I'd think long and hard about this if I were you, Red."

  Red sat up. "Violently? That what you just said, Shay? That supposed to have an implied threat? Let's not forget who needs who here. I kick you off this truck, and you'll be dry-heaving and sweating ice in no time. You'll be shaking so hard, whatever stubs you got left in your mouth are gonna crack into dust. And those are the nice symptoms."

  Shay spat out the back of the truck, the spittle flying short and landing on the rear cargo door. "It's inevitable, anyway, isn't it?"

  "You need us, girl. We got some of the last stash you're gonna come across

  in a long time." Red's voice softened slightly. "Wouldn't you rather not be by yourself?"

  Shay looked away, her face stony.

  Red turned and banged on the cab's rear window. "Let's go! What is taking so long to get there? A couple of freakin' miles, Goddammit!"

  I glanced at Hutchins. He was steeped in his own misery, eyes screwed shut, lips moving slightly as if quivering or maybe praying. The truck veered sharply right and made a steep descent toward the water. Once on board the boat, Hutchins and I—or maybe just I—would be captive, whether we considered ourselves captive or not. And what if Red decided to sell us when we arrived wherever we were going? Or what if she could be trusted but our presence incited a mutiny?

  Every one of my fingers was now numb. How much longer could I walk on numb feet without stumbling and breaking a bone? How much longer before an infection set in that I would be unable to fight because there was no blood in my extremities? The lure of warmer weather was beginning to call me. In my grave hunger and fatigue, I could almost hear the song in my ears.