by Steven Novak
He pulled the hood over his head. “Not safe here. Have to keep moving.”
When he held out his hand, I took it.
5.
The trip to the new housing development was quiet. Trips were always quiet with Blueeyes, but this was a different sort of quiet, quieter than quiet. After a bit of searching, he found a relatively secure house where we found a relatively secure room and settled in for the night. Blueeyes told me to sleep, said it was best, claimed I needed to be fresh for the next day. I couldn’t sleep. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. There were minutes here and there where I approached something vaguely resembling sleep. I waded in and out of consciousness, curled into a fetal position, listening to the howlers in the distance. Mostly, I watched my traveling companion, peeking through half-closed eyes, unsure of what to make of him. The way he’d killed those gimps… I didn’t think it was possible. It shouldn’t have been possible. In spite of my unease, I felt safe around him. I couldn’t explain it. I guess it didn’t make much sense. For a while, he cleaned his knife, fingernails chipping dried blood, using his shirt to dust away what remained. When he finished cleaning, he stood at the window, just staring. Every time a howler moaned, his muscles tensed. Even when he was relaxed, he was never really relaxed. He was coiled, twitchy, always ready to strike, ready for anything. When he was finished staring, he moved to the corner of the room, dropped to his rear, and pulled his legs to his chest. For a long time he didn’t move. He didn’t scratch his beard, or stretch his legs, or mumble. He barely breathed. He just sat.
Briefly he closed his eyes.
“Go to sleep.”
No, he wasn’t sleeping. He caught me peeking.
“I-I can’t.” It wasn’t a lie. “The noises…I-I can’t…the noise, it bothers me.”
He sighed, shook his head just enough for me to notice. “Would have thought you’d be used to that by now.” He glanced up briefly, his face hidden in shadow. “We have a long way to go tomorrow, can’t stop. If we don’t keep moving they’ll catch up to us. If they catch up to us…forget it.”
I sat up, crossed my legs, brushed the hair from my eyes, and pinned it behind my ear. I didn’t want to sleep. Sleeping was pointless. Blueeyes never slept. “Why are they after us?”
He shook his head again, then paused, fingers twiddling at the hole in the leg of his pants. He almost seemed nervous when he spoke to me, at least as nervous as he could be. “They’re not after us, they’re after me.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“Is it because you let the howlers loose at the compound?”
“That didn’t help.”
“Because you stole me?”
“Probably.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. Go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can.”
“I tried.”
“Try harder.”
He didn’t seem so nervous anymore; he seemed annoyed. I should have stopped, left it at that. I should have closed my eyes and gone to sleep. I didn’t. “What else?”
“Because of your father.”
Once again he’d managed to shut me up. I stopped asking questions, stopped breathing. My chest tightened, throat locked, mouth dry.
Blueeyes looked at me. His expression seemed familiar, the same as that first time I saw him in the compound. “Your father…I was there, in the compound, when he came knocking.”
Suddenly I was the one unable to blink.
Once he started, he didn’t stop. That was his way. He never spoke unless prodded. He also never wasted his words. “I’d only been there a week, maybe two. A week more and I would have been dinner. I let my guard down, got caught. Stupid. Wasn’t paying attention. I’m not sure what he said to piss them off, your father, but he said something. Or not, I don’t know. Maybe Travis was just having a bad day. Whatever he did, it rubbed that asshole the wrong way. Your old man tried to reason with them, tried his damndest…didn’t matter.”
I didn’t want him to continue, but I started him down this road. It was my fault. He almost never talked. I forced him to talk and he was talking, and he wouldn’t shut up. His brow narrowed, lips tightened. Once he was looking right at me, refusing to look away.
“You don’t need to know the details…wouldn’t serve a purpose. Your father seemed like a good man, I guess, the sort of man who believed there were others like him left in the world. There aren’t. Nothing left but monsters anymore.” He paused. “Maybe that’s all there ever were.”
The first time I tried to speak, I choked. The second time, I choked again. “Y-you, you saw m-my father?”
Blueeyes didn’t nod. He didn’t need to.
“Did he say—? Did you talk? I mean…d-did he say anything?”
“He said your name. Megan.”
My face cracked, body crumbled. My head fell to my hands and my eyes began to water.
“He said your name, and he said he was sorry.”
6.
When morning came I found myself a bit of food, fastened the topmost button on my jacket, and pulled the hood tight over my head. While I’d cried for Father the night before, I hadn’t cried for long. He wouldn’t have wanted me to. He was gone. I loved him the same as I loved Mother, but they were both gone and they were never coming back. Nothing would change that. Especially not tears.
It was cold that day, so cold I could see my breath. The sky looked different, darker. The clouds were heavy, packed and full, bottoms of dark obsidian. Despite their size, they remained slaves to the wind. They went where it told them to, as quick as it desired. Occasionally, they would roar, angry threats of impending eruption, frustrated with the order of things.
I followed closely behind Blueeyes. We stuck to the road and made good time. There was no chatter when we traveled, no wasted energy or movement. Every step was calculated. Every moment served a purpose. When we found something we thought could be useful, we kept it. When we stumbled across something that served no purpose, we ignored it. Everything was by the book, without deviation. In a world where nothing was predictable, everything was predictable. Blueeyes wouldn’t have had it any other way.
A few hours into the journey we happened on the leftovers of a howler attack. It was impossible to tell exactly how many people had been murdered, devoured. Bits of shredded flesh and fabric clung loosely to crumpled bones and flapped in the breeze. The bodies were torn apart, mauled and licked clean. Slick pools of frozen blood stained the pavement, sprayed in every direction, glistening in the hint of sunlight able to sneak through the clouds. It smelled awful.
Everything always smelled.
At that point in my life I’d never seen a kill so fresh. Whatever happened must have happened the night before. While I was crying, they were dying. While I was mourning the things I’d lost, these people were losing everything. When I looked away, Blueeyes grabbed me by the arm, pulled me closer. He said I should see the kill up close, told me I needed to realize what I was dealing with. From less than a foot away, I looked down on the remains of something that could have been a man or a woman—there was no way of knowing. There was no face to speak of, only skull and crystallized blood, bits of brain. There was someone else lying beside the corpse, a few more piles of half-frozen meat and cartilage a bit further down the road. Everything recognizably human about them had been consumed. The howlers took it all. They had eaten everything, erased the entire group from existence. Ribs were demolished, arms broken in two, chests ripped open and insides scooped out. I saw something I thought might have been a spine. I also saw the pavement underneath.
Blueeyes nudged the remains with his boot and shook his head. “They won’t leave anything. You need to be aware of that.” He looked down at me, face as stern as ever. “You can’t talk to them. You can’t reason with them.
They don’t know what you’re saying. Even if they did, they wouldn’t care. They don’t care how old you are. They don’t care that you’re a girl. They don’t care that you’ve never shot a gun or don’t have any weapons. You’re just food. That’s all that matters. If you cry, you’re easy food. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
For the first time since we’d met, I think he believed me.
When everything that needed to be said was said, we scavenged what we could from the scattered remains of their backpacks and moved on.
“We have to keep moving.” That’s what Blueeyes said. “We can’t stop moving.”
It was a few hours later that we heard the screams, a woman and a man and someone else, further down the road and out of sight. Blueeyes picked me up, ran off the road, and dove into the trees. We dropped to the dirt behind a lump of dead grass and fallen leaves.
His hand went to my mouth, index finger to my lips. “Shhh.”
A few seconds later we heard engines, two of them. Through a pile of dead branches I watched as a truck pulled into view. It was filthy, the exterior covered in dents, paint chipping, windows coated in a layer of soot. Haphazardly built onto the back of the wheezing, steel beast was a cage. Inside the cage were people. A dark-haired man with a graying beard that hung to his belt beat on the bars, pulling and punching, screaming while struggling to keep his balance. Behind him a woman cradled two children, their heads buried in her chest, skinny arms crisscrossed at her waist. I couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. Whatever they were, they were scared. The woman’s fingers spread across the backs of their heads, intertwined with masses of matted hair. When the truck came to a sudden stop, the screaming man stumbled, fell forward, awkwardly landed on his face. When he popped up again, his nose was bleeding, crimson staining the whiskers below his nose. A second vehicle pulled behind the first. It was larger, louder, reinforced with pieces of scavenged metal, tires wrapped in chain. When it stopped, a mass of black smoke belched from the rear. The engine popped and I jumped. Blueeyes wrapped his arms around me, held me still and put his hand over my mouth.
I jumped again when the driver door opened. Scarface stepped out.
I never wanted to see him again. A part of me actually believed I wouldn’t.
Wishful thinking.
The man in the cage kicked the bars and tried to wedge his head in the space between, barking like a trapped animal. “You son of a bitch! You can’t do this! I have a family! You can’t do this! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be! We shouldn’t be living like this!” When Scarface was close enough, the bearded man lunged forward, tried to snag his shirt.
It didn’t work.
Scarface caught his arm, pinned it back against the cage, and used the crowbar in his freehand to smash the back of the man’s hand. His wife screamed something unintelligible, smothered her children to her chest. Her hands went to their ears in a desperate attempt to keep them from hearing their father scream. Every time the crowbar connected with bone, the bearded man roared. Every time he roared, Scarface hit him harder. When Scarface finally released him from his grip, the man’s hand was a mauled mess of meat, blood, and pulverized bone. He stumbled back, hand at his chest, cradling the demolished appendage.
Scarface tapped the cage with the crowbar. When he spoke, his voice was measured, calm. “Stop screaming.” I think I saw him smile.
The bearded man didn’t stop.
Scarface repeated himself. “Shut up.”
Instead of stopping, the screaming got louder.
The window on the truck rolled down, a head popped out, a toothless mouth barked. “We can’t have him screaming like that! Howlers will hear that shit from miles away! Shut that son of a bitch up!”
Scarface wacked the bars again, this time with a bit more force. “Shut up! You better shut the fuck up right now, old man! This is your last warning!”
I’m not sure if the bearded man didn’t hear him, didn’t care, or was unable to stop. In the end I suppose it didn’t matter. His wife let go of her children, tugged at his shirt, begging him to stop. He didn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen. What happened next happened quickly. Scarface retrieved a gun from the holster on his hip, pointed it at the bearded man and fired. His chest exploded. A mass of crinkly gray hair parted and a spray of blood shot forth. The bearded man crumpled like paper, body went limp, legs turned to rubber. He collapsed, folded, hunched forward and rolled to his side. With a single gunshot, it was over.
Just like that, he was gone.
I’d never seen anyone die. I’d seen an awful lot in my years, but I’d never seen someone die, not like that, not murdered, not so close. My body reacted independent of my brain. It did exactly what I didn’t want it to do, exactly what Blueeyes was hoping to avoid. I bit down on my traveling companion’s hand, tasted blood. Suddenly I was standing. Suddenly I was screaming. It was stupid. It was childish. Mother would have been disappointed; father would have shaken his head. Blueeyes tried to pull me back down, tried to minimize the damage. It was too little. It was too late. Scarface turned, looked right at me. Our eyes met.
So stupid.
Before I knew what was happening, Blueeyes scooped me up, pulled me to his side, and ran. I was like baggage in his arms, useless baggage, dead weight bobbing wildly, limbs flailing as we hurried into the forest. Scarface screamed something; someone responded with a louder scream. A bullet whizzed past my head, hit the bark of a tree beside me, shot splinters into my hair. Another pelted the dirt at Blueeyes’ feet, threw it back in my face. Within seconds they were all around us, hitting everything, a violent rain of steel laying waste to the forest. One of them tore through Blueeyes’ shoulder. He jerked forward, nearly losing his grip on me. Despite the injury, he never stopped moving, or ducking, or jumping. Blueeyes moved with incredible precision, as if he’d lived in the forest his entire life, knew every fallen tree or oversized rock. Yet, no matter how fast he ran, I still heard the voices, heard Scarface. He was following us. He wasn’t giving up. When we came upon an old brick wall, Blueeyes hopped over it. He ducked into an abandoned cabin, hustled through a living room and a kitchen, and out the back door. We passed a shed, then returned to the thick of the forest. The gunshots began to disappear. The voices faded away. Blueeyes kept moving, over a small hill and down the other side, sliding, struggling to remain on his feet, to keep from letting me slip from his arms. It wasn’t until we reached a cliff that he stopped. There was nowhere left to run.
Still dangling from his side, I gazed over the edge of the gargantuan ravine impeding our progress. It was massive, at least two hundred feet of jagged rock leading nowhere but down, a barely noticeable river at the bottom. Climbing was impossible, heading back into the forest even more so.
Blueeyes lowered me to the ground. “Shit.” We were trapped.
“Dead end, asshole.” Scarface stepped from the trees, massive chest heaving, struggling to catch his breath, gun in hand.
The sound of his voice stabbed me in the chest, sent a chill across my body and into my legs. Blueeyes turned to face him. He placed his hand on my shoulder, slowly maneuvered me behind him, transforming himself into a human shield. His fingers coiled into fists, cold knuckles cracked.
Again Scarface smiled. “Heh.”
His eyes moved from me to Blueeyes and his smile disappeared. He readjusted the grip on his gun. “Travis has been looking for you two since the howler incident…sort of obsessed. He wants you alive. Personally, I don’t give a shit. Either way, you’re coming with me.”
When Blueeyes spoke, he growled. “Not going anywhere.”
Scarface lifted his gun and pointed it in our direction. Steel clicked. “Wasn’t giving you an option, Hoss.”
In a single movement, Blueeyes retrieved his knife, dropped his shoulders, and barreled forward. The gun fired. A bullet tore through his arm, sent his knife flying. I dropped to the grass, covered my head. Before Scarface could get off anothe
r round their bodies collided, meshed into a grunting, snarling heap of violence. They hit the ground, bounced off a rock and rolled. Scarface yelled. Blueeyes snarled. A cloud of dirt engulfed them. Blueeyes punched and Scarface punched back. The moment Blueeyes was on top, he dropped his elbow to Scarface’s nose. Bone shattered, cartilage turned to dust. A fountain of blood spewed forward. When Scarface was on top, he kneed Blueeyes in the groin, butted him with his bloody forehead, tried to stick his thumb in his eye. His fingers went to Blueeyes’ mouth, ripping at his cheek, pinning his head to the dirt. In the distance I heard voices, lots of voices getting closer. Blueeyes heard them too. Somehow he reversed position, ended up on Scarface’s chest. He had the advantage. There wasn’t much time. He didn’t hesitate.
He never hesitated.
One after another, his fists pummeled Scarface’s head until they were soaked in blood, until his own skin began to peel away and flap in the breeze. I could hear the thuds, every one of them, hollow and deep, squishy. When his fists became useless, Blueeyes used elbows. It wasn’t long before Scarface stopped struggling. His hands fell to the dirt. His eyes rolled back into his head, blood seeping from meaty wounds, cascading down the sides of his face, soaking the soil. Instead of growling he gurgled crimson, limbs limp, neck wobbly. When a bullet pelted the ground beside him, Blueeyes looked up from his fallen foe.
There was a man at the tree line, rifle in hand, nozzle still smoking. He was struggling to reload. He put his hand to his mouth and whistled for his companions. “Over here!”
