by Steven Novak
He told me to shut up.
The remainder of the day was uneventful. We walked and walked some more. At one point we made our way through the remains of a small town, crumbling buildings flanking the road, bloodstained concrete under our feet. Everything was charred, stained with soot and gun power, the faraway scent of ash clinging to the breeze. I found them interesting in a way, the remains. Peculiar. I never knew the world before things went bad, can’t honestly say I understood it. None of it made sense. Nothing seemed to go together. Everything was labeled. Using bits of information Father and Mother let slip over the years, I tried to imagine what the buildings might have looked like before they were burned to the ground, how tall they were, what they were used for. Can’t say I ever really succeeded. How could I? My only frame of reference was confusing images of golden-haired girls in lockets alongside childish flights of fancy. It was pointless, silly, all the stupid labels and comforts, all the beds. Everything important and easy was gone, turned to ash. In the end it didn’t matter, none of it. They didn’t matter, not any more. Blueeyes never paid any more attention to it than he needed to. If he didn’t care about what he’d lost, why should I care about what I never had?
The sun went down. The howlers came out. Same as always.
In the morning we ate—nibbled really—and took to the road once again. Early into the trip we encountered a small pack of gimps. There were five of them plodding through the remains of a roofless building, scratching at the walls, jaws halfheartedly chewing the air. We could have walked right past them. They might not have noticed us at all if Blueeyes hadn’t whistled. The moment he did, dead eyes lit up, feet shuffled in our direction.
I don’t know why he did it. When I tried to ask, I stuttered. “Wh-what’re you…?” It didn’t make sense. Why did he want to get their attention? They were coming right at us, bent fingers grabbing at nothing.
Blueeyes retrieved his knife, placed his hand on my shoulder. “Wait here.”
In the years since, I’ve learned that gimps are most dangerous in large numbers and when they catch you off guard, especially in tight spaces. Blueeyes already knew this. He already knew everything. The moaning corpses bearing down on us were spread apart, spaced awkwardly, attacking as individuals rather than a horde. They didn’t stand a chance. Blueeyes dispatched them with ease. His breathing never changed. He never stuttered or second-guessed. He never broke a sweat. He moved and murdered, and when he was done he did it all again. It seemed so easy for him, second nature; he almost looked bored. It was over in less than a minute. Blueeyes used one of their tattered shirts to wipe the blood from his knife and hands before returning to my side. He passed by and headed to the road.
“You have to hit the brain.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all morning.
“What?”
“The brain…only thing that kills them, all of them: gimps, howlers, even the biters. Anything else and they’ll just keep coming.”
I nodded.
He stopped and turned to me, glaring from above, making me feel small. “Understand?”
I nodded again.
“No, tell me you understand. I need to hear you say it.”
“I understand.” When my answer still wasn’t enough, I added, “I promise.”
It was his turn to nod.
We were on the outskirts of town when Blueeyes spotted the house. It was small, unassuming. The roof was just barely holding together, a half-collapsed wall in the rear. At first glance there was nothing particularly special about it, nothing that made it stand out from the homes on either side or the ones we’d passed by all day. If I hadn’t noticed a glimmer of light shining through a partially boarded window along the side, we might never have stopped.
I grabbed Blueeyes’ jacket, tugged, and pointed. “What’s that?”
His hand went to his knife, body tensed. He hunched over, grabbed my wrist, pulled me behind the remains of nearby wall, and shoved me to my knees. When he peeked over the top of the stone, I peeked too. Beams of light flickered behind the boards crisscrossing the window. They flickered again, crooked shadows in dying grass. Someone was inside. Someone was moving.
“Who is it?”
Blueeyes didn’t answer.
“Do they belong to Bloodboots?”
“Who?”
“The compound. Travis?”
He shook his head, eyes locked on the house and the flickering light. “I don’t know. No, probably not. The way it’s boarded up…place has been here a while.”
I heard faint noises, chatter from inside, something resembling laughter. There was a fence in the backyard, crudely cut sections of chain-link, scraps of unmatched wood. It didn’t seem very sturdy. A stiff wind could have knocked it over. The ground inside the fence was nothing but mud, thick, sloppy, maybe two feet deep.
In the center of the mud were people.
There were three of them, a man and a woman and someone I couldn’t quite make out. They were old, older than Blueeyes, older than Mother or Father. Their arms and legs were pulled behind them and bound together, filthy rags wedged in their mouths, knotted behind their heads. They looked dead. What little I could see of their faces was caked in filth, bodies encased in grime. Again I pulled on Blueeyes’ jacket.
He brushed my hand away. “I see them.”
The back door of the house swung open and slammed against the exterior wall, rusted hinges squeaking. Yellow light cascaded into the yard, bathing the hogtied pair. I swear I saw one of them twitch, but couldn’t be sure. A man stepped onto the porch, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and breathed smoke. He was gangly with long dark hair, knotted and pulled into a ponytail. His skin was like leather, wrinkled and stiff, caked in filth. Blueeyes put his hand on my head and gently pushed me down, out of view. When his hand was gone, I popped back up. The man on the porch craned his head up, closed his eyes, and inhaled the night. When he was done, he flicked his still-lit cigarette at the bodies in the mud. It bounced off the woman, ambers exploding against her forehead. Her eyes opened. Her body jerked. I could hear her sobbing.
She was alive.
Blueeyes grabbed my wrist and pulled me along the wall, away from the house.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer.
I dug my heels into the dirt. “Wait. Where are—where are we going?”
“It’ll be night soon. Need to find shelter.”
When I pulled back, he pulled harder. Using my free hand I tried to pry his fingers loose. They wouldn’t budge. “Aren’t we going to…? I mean, shouldn’t we do something?”
“Not our problem.”
After a while I stopped fighting, stopped trying to get answers from my mute friend. It was pointless. He was too strong. I didn’t know what I would have done anyway, didn’t even know what I expected him to do. I wasn’t sure why I expected it of him to begin with. We didn’t know the people in the mud. We didn’t know how many people were in the house, if they had weapons, or how many weapons they might have. They were strangers, all of them. Everyone was a stranger. Blueeyes was right, he was always right. Right?
It wasn’t long after that we were forced to seek shelter for the night. Night was coming. The clouds roared. The rain began to fall heavy and thick, lightning cracking the sky. Traveling any further would have been silly. Our safe house was cozy, small, and mostly dry. Blueeyes built a small fire, promised to keep it lit as long as he could. He told me to sleep, claimed it was unlikely we’d be bothered, the rain would keep the howlers in for the night. I tried to sleep. I couldn’t. No matter what I did, I couldn’t forget about the people in the mud, the people we’d left behind. The sound of the woman crying, the mud on her face, the tears in her eyes; it was too much. The warmth of the fire didn’t help. The lack of howler cries didn’t make a difference. The fact that I was dry and warm only made it worse. Blueeyes was across the room in a half-rotted chair, staring out the window, fingers lightly tracing the handle of his knife. Light
ning flashed behind him and he lost his detail. Everything went flat. For a moment he was black, a silhouette and nothing more, a hole against the bluish sky.
I lifted my head from the floor and sat up, putting my back against a nearby wall. I felt itchy. Every time I scratched, I itched more. It wasn’t going away. “What’s going to happen to them?”
It took Blueeyes a moment to respond. I think he sighed. “Who?” He knew exactly who I was talking about. I could tell he knew. He was trying to avoid the conversation.
“Those people, at the house. What about the people on the truck with Scarface?”
He wanted me to shut up. “Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Do it anyway.”
I returned to the floor, laid my head against wood, listened to the rain, and tried to forget. I couldn’t. So many cages, I’d seen so many people in cages. With all the awful things in the world, why were people putting other people in cages? I sat up, straightened my back, and steadied my voice. “Tell me.”
Blueeyes’ head sank. Thunder roared and lightning popped. When he turned to face me, half his face was devoured in shadow, blurring into the wall. His eyes narrowed, voice like nails. “The bombs scorched everything…just burned it all away. What they didn’t kill died a slow death. It all just rotted and went away. Nothing grows. Everything that does is poison. There’s nothing left, kid…nothing but us.” He turned to the window. The sky lit up and his features disappeared. “Nothing left but animals and food.”
That was it. That was all he said. It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, and when I finally did, I wished I hadn’t. I remembered the faces of the people in the mud, of the woman on the back of the truck and the way she cried, the way she held her children. I remembered Father.
By the time Blueeyes turned to douse the fire, I was gone.
9.
I didn’t have a plan, anything even coming close to a plan. I’m not completely sure I understood the meaning of the word. All I knew was that I needed do something. It didn’t matter what Blueeyes thought. He was trying to keep me safe, but I didn’t need him to keep me safe, not any more. I had to try. So I ran. The rain pelted my face, saturated my jacket, soaked through my hood and into my hair. I retraced our steps from earlier in the day. I remembered; I’d paid attention. Even in the darkness, even with the rain, I knew where I was and where I needed to go. My legs pumped, feet splashed. At full speed it took me less than ten minutes to reach the house. When I arrived, I ducked behind the stone wall, knees in the mud, shoes sticky with filth. My lungs were on fire, body shivering. The light inside the house had dimmed, barely noticeable through the rain, voices muffled by wind. The people in the mud were still there, tied up, submerged in slop. Near the rear of the fence encasing them was an opening. It was small, too small for an adult but just the right size for me. I closed my eyes, desperately searching for courage. Second thoughts set in, unwanted. A part of me wished I had listened to Blueeyes. What was I going to do, even if I reached the people in the mud, even if I was able to set them free? Then what? The sky boomed and lit up, shaking the ground beneath my feet. Then there was Father. I thought of Father, of the compound and Bloodboots, of what Blueeyes had said. My shivering stopped, hands curling into to fists. I could do it.
I had to do it.
The instant I stood, the back door of the house swung open. I ducked out of sight. A different man than before stepped onto the porch. He was larger, much larger, thick arms and bulbous belly, wild gray-black hair. He pulled a hood over his head, huffed, and plodded into the yard. I could hear the splash of his boots, even over the wind and the rain. Pulling a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door on the far side of the fence and let himself in. With a single hand he snatched one of the people by the legs. It was the old man.
“Hurry up, you son of a bitch!” The voice came from inside the house.
The hogtied man barely seemed aware of his predicament. His eyes were far away, limbs awkwardly bent, probably broken. The woman in the mud beside him screamed into her gag, contorting her body, desperately trying to squirm loose. Bigbelly didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, she didn’t exist, as if she wasn’t yelling and crying, begging for him to stop. Bigbelly dragged the old man through the mud like a satchel, face bruised, head wet with blood. When they reached the porch, his head banged off the stairs, opened a cut, leaving a trail of crimson behind. They entered the house. The door slammed shut. They were gone.
What I did next I did without thinking. I didn’t want to think about anything anymore. Thinking was stupid.
I hopped over the wall and charged into the yard. I kept my eyes on the fence, on the crying woman inside. Nothing existed but the fence, the fence and only the fence. When I hit the mud, I stopped. It was thicker than I’d thought. Each step was worse than the last. I sank to my knees, then my thighs. It didn’t want me to move, devoured my legs and held me in place. When my boot came off, swallowed by the muck, I gritted my teeth and continued forward. I didn’t need it anyway. I’d worry about it later. It’s what Blueeyes would have done. When I reached the opening in the fence, I dropped to my chest, my chin leaving trails in the muck. It took me a while to reach the woman in the center. By the time I did, I was coated in mud, so heavy, so tired. When I tried to stand, I fell backward. The old woman noticed me and her eyes went wide, lit with a mixture of confusion and excitement. I dove for the rope binding her limbs, jittery fingers working the knot. Thunder clapped and my heart stopped. I leapt backward, thinking it was the door to the house. It wasn’t. I returned to the knot. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t budge. The rope was partially frozen, encased in crystallized mud, slippery, difficult to hold. Out of frustration I whacked it with my fist. When that did nothing, I whacked it again. I moved to her head, attempting to loosen the gag in her mouth. The fabric was frozen to her face, solid and cracked; it was like trying to untie an icicle. It was no use. It wasn’t working. No matter what I did, it wasn’t working. She could sense my frustration. When I let go of the frozen gag, she shook her head, imploring me to continue, eyes red with tears. My legs hurt, my arms were sore, and I couldn’t feel my fingers. Suddenly I was crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I turned my head from her, unable to handle the disappointment in her eyes, unwilling to show her the shame in mine.
With my eyes closed, I leaned to her ear, “I-I-I’m sorr-sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She shook, begging with incoherent muffles, pleading with every ounce of herself.
Again the thunder cracked. When I breathed, I saw my breath, watched it float from my body and evaporate, taken by the night. My body went limp. I was done. I’d failed. I was useless. My head fell to her shoulder, slid into her neck. “I-I-I’m….I ju-jus-just…sor…” She never stopped begging, twitching in the mud and shaking her head. Even covered in grime, she smelled so familiar, so female. She reminded me of Mother.
That only made it worse.
Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder, long fingers, firm grip. It pushed me from the old woman, slid me backward across the mud. It was Blueeyes. His knife went to the rope binding the old woman’s limbs, chipped away the ice and sliced through. The moment she was free, she slammed the undersides of her fists into his chest, which caught Blueeyes by surprise. When he tried to grab her, she slipped through his fingers. She was soaking wet, greased up, faster than she looked.
She lunged forward, hopped to her feet, and slid the gag over her head. “Edward!” She screeched so loud it hurt my ears. The people in the house had to have heard her. Everything heard her.
Arms waving, the old woman barreled forward, rain pelting off her face, stiff limbs stomping through mud. She didn’t bother to stop for the fence. I’m not sure she even noticed it. When she hit the steel it bent under her weight, twisted and popped. The entire structure crumpled. Rough welds cracked. Jagged ends tore into her skin, caught the fabric of her shirt, nearly tearing it away. She was caught. A few years prior, I’d seen
a gimp caught in barbwire fence on the side of the road. It moaned and squirmed and reached for Father’s arm when we passed by. It accomplished nothing, only made things worse. The old woman had become that gimp. She didn’t care and she never stopped screaming. Even face down in the mud, even when the fence had ensnarled her completely, slicing into her skin and tearing her to pieces, she never stopped screaming.
Blueeyes pushed me face-first into the filth. “Stay down! No matter what, you stay down!”
The back door opened. Bigbelly stepped out. He was holding a shotgun. His eyes immediately went to the old woman. “Motherfuc—”
I felt the gunshot in my ears, so incredibly loud it rattled my brain. The old woman’s chest exploded. Her back erupted. Blood and bone and bits of charred meat sprayed backward, sprayed everywhere. Something chunky landed in my hair. Something slimy bounced off my back. Her body jerked backward, bent awkwardly over the fallen fence, and hung limp. Before Bigbelly could fire again, Blueeyes was on him. He lunged forward and knocked the weapon from the larger man’s hand while burying his knife wrist-deep in his bloated midsection. Before Bigbelly could react, he stabbed again. Blueeyes held him upright while stabbing and shoving him back into the open door.
