by G X Todd
He had often thought of this world as a veil. That he and every lost soul who wandered it were merely wraiths, and that the abandoned cities they haunted, and all the open plains in between, were superimposed over the real world, a world bustling with life, the cities loud and forever in motion, the honks of horns and the shouts of hot-dog vendors and the rumbling of a thousand wheels all travelling in a starburst of directions. The reality he lived in was a dying veneer laid over the old, vibrant one.
Pilgrim drifted through this world, barely causing a ripple, his presence unnoticed and, most days, unneeded. He was good at being a ghost. Sometimes he thought it was what he’d been born for.
As the sun started its slow descent towards the horizon at their backs, the truck’s shadow stretched out, much like its own wraith. Pilgrim looked down at the fuel gauge and knew they would be chugging on fumes by the time they hit Vicksburg’s outskirts. He knew it wouldn’t get them to Lacey’s sister’s house, the same way he knew that driving through the town’s streets this time would attract unwanted attention and lead to Bad Things. He didn’t know how he knew this, but intuition was all he had, and to ignore it would be foolish. They would walk the final miles and worry about finding a ride later.
A sign approached, and Pilgrim asked what it said.
Vicksburg was ten miles away, Lacey told him.
The trees became a continuous barricade that flanked the highway and made it impossible to see anything but rolling grey road. Spanish moss began to appear in the trees, first only in thin weaves, but soon it thickened and weighed down the boughs as though a million industrious spiders had spun their webs, uncaring of how they smothered the drooping branches. Knitted gossamer strands blew in the wind. It was a haunting sight to see all those trees so overwhelmed by the thread-like interweaving plant, but it was merely a sign of nature, of one species staking its claim over another in the absence of anything to prevent it.
‘My grams wasn’t well when she died,’ Lacey said.
Pilgrim glanced over at her, her words unexpected after the long silence, but she kept her face turned away so he couldn’t read her expression. He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, ‘What happened to her?’
Her shoulder hopped up and down in a small shrug. ‘She didn’t know who I was some days. Other days, it was like she was sixteen again, giggling like a kid. Those were the best. She was happy when she was sixteen. She met Grandpa the day after her birthday, and they were married by the time she turned nineteen. Just like Mama. Just like Karey. I guess that means I’ve got three more years to find my one true love. If I want to keep up the family tradition, that is.’ He saw the corner of her mouth lift in a smile, but it was more an automatic twitch than one that was felt.
He listened to the low thrum of the wheels, the odd tick of stones and gravel pinging off the truck’s undercarriage. ‘It must have been hard, looking after her,’ he said at last.
Again that shrug. ‘Yeah, sometimes. But she looked after me for twelve years, so it was no big deal.’ She paused, her lips twisting as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. ‘One night I woke up to find her standing over me. She had a knife in her hand. It took me an hour to talk her into handing it over to me. I thought she was going to kill me. Thing is’ – she slid her gaze over to him for the first time since she had begun talking – ‘I think she heard things. I caught her talking to herself sometimes, arguing, mostly. Another time, I found her hidden in the cupboard under the stairs. She’d stuffed herself into this tiny space: you should have seen it – I’d have struggled to fit in there. I spent ages searching for her, calling out, thinking she’d somehow wandered off. But she never answered me. Never made a peep. I only found her by accident. She was all scrunched up, her head twisted at this weird angle, and she stared up at me with this look of utter terror on her face. I think she was hiding because she was scared of what she might do.’
‘Do? You mean hurt you?’
She dropped her eyes and turned away again, as if the power of speech had left her.
Pilgrim stopped the truck. He turned in his seat and pulled Lacey around by her shoulders to face him. ‘Do you trust me?’
The girl looked deep into his eyes. She nodded.
‘Good. You’re not going crazy,’ he told her. ‘I swear to you.’
Her eyes welled with tears. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ he stressed. ‘I’m absolutely sure. Hearing a voice isn’t always a bad thing.’
‘My grammy killed herself,’ she whispered. ‘I found her. In bed. She’d stuffed her bedsheet down her throat.’ The tears spilled over. ‘Why would she do that?’
He squeezed her shoulders; they felt narrow and fragile beneath his hands. ‘I don’t know. No one knows what goes on inside a person’s head. But she’d have never hurt you. She loved you. And she did a fine job of raising you.’
The girl nodded, bit her lip. A tear dropped from her jaw. ‘She did. She was the bravest woman ever. Like my sister. Like Alex.’
Pilgrim ran his finger under her chin, catching a second tear before it could fall. ‘Like you,’ he said. ‘Now, enough with the tears. They make me uncomfortable.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, and smiled, just a little.
Five minutes later and five miles further down the road, Lacey said, ‘You think my niece will like me?’
He blinked, tried hard to keep the frown from his face. ‘Why wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to make a connection with someone you’ve never met before.’
‘You seem to do OK. Look at you and Alex.’
‘It’s not the same. Alex is older.’
He didn’t see what difference that made, but said, ‘I think she’ll just be happy to have someone who cares about her.’ He didn’t mention the low probability of finding her niece alive; he was learning not to share all his thoughts, even without having Alex staring daggers at him. He was pleased that not all his memories were completely lost to him.
‘Yeah,’ Lacey said quietly. ‘Yeah, you’re right. I just . . . I really want her to like me.’
‘She will. If I can like you, anyone can.’
She smirked, and reached over to punch him in the shoulder. ‘Asshole.’
Seven miles later, after crossing the mighty Mississippi River and just as they reached the town’s cemetery, the truck began to cough. And two miles after that, the engine died.
CHAPTER 7
Over eight years had passed since Lacey last stepped foot in Vicksburg. Karey had been seven months pregnant with Addison at the time and, to put it bluntly, she had been puking an awful lot in those final few months before Lacey’s niece was born. Not the standard morning-sickness levels of vomit, either. It was acute nausea and pernicious upchucking (Lacey loved the word ‘pernicious’), and it had gotten to the stage where Karey was having to stick an IV tube in her arm every day to combat dehydration and lack of nutrients and to pump herself full of electrolytes. Grammy worried that Karey wasn’t taking the bed rest the doctor had ordered, so they had come and stayed for two weeks until Karey felt better. Anyway, eight years was a long time between visits, and a lot had changed.
The Boy Scout had lifted Red out of the pickup bed, and Lacey gathered together everything else. There wasn’t much left to loot from Lou’s truck: half a bottle of water, the last two cans of food – one chicken soup, the other alphabet spaghetti – a flashlight, a multi-tool, the walkie-talkie, the shotgun and the rifle, and a handful of extra ammunition for each. That was the grand total of their worldly belongings, other than the clothes on their backs. She tried the radio. It bleeped twice at her when she turned it on.
‘The battery’s dying,’ the Boy Scout told her. ‘Best keep it off for now.’
She switched it back off and watched as he popped the truck’s hood and leaned inside. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Pass me the multi-tool.’ He held a hand out behind him without raising his head.
She
fished it out of her pocket and laid it across his palm, peering over his shoulder while he unfastened the truck’s battery and lifted it out.
‘What’s that for?’
‘A fully charged battery is the beating heart of a vehicle. We’ll need another set of wheels soon if we’re going to get to Alex.’
The mere mention of Alex’s name made Lacey’s chest tighten a little, right over her heart. Too much time had passed since she’d last seen her, and every extra minute spent removing truck batteries or walking to her sister’s house or finding another useable car could be another hour Alex suffered at the hands of Dumont. An image of Alex flashed into Lacey’s mind, the bruises and cuts and the pain marked across her body, and how she’d looked when Dumont was throttling her with his belt, face dark purple, eyes bulging, tongue sticking out. Lacey bit her lip hard enough to reopen the cut on the inside of it, the iron taste of blood sharp and sickly. She passed a shaking hand over her hot eyes.
We’re coming, Alex, she thought fiercely. Just hold on, we’re coming for you.
They left the truck’s hood propped open, and Lacey gave the vehicle a last affectionate pat on its fender – she had spent a goodly number of hours in that cab, and it had taken her safely away from Dumont and back into the care of the Boy Scout. Both things she was grateful for.
Lacey had taken the map when the Boy Scout offered it and had plotted a route to Karey’s street, staying away from the main roads as much as possible, sticking close to the river. They had about three miles to walk, which should take a little over an hour.
It’ll take longer with him having to lug Ruby-Red and that battery around.
But, like the Boy Scout said, and despite how much Lacey didn’t like using the poor girl’s body, it was still leverage, and they might need her. Besides, Lacey figured Red would be happy to be useful in any way that might help gain an advantage over Dumont.
So they walked, Lacey in the lead, the Boy Scout bringing up the rear, with Red slung over his shoulder. To the west Lacey could see the light of the setting sun flicker over the Mississippi as if pirates had scattered gold doubloons across its surface. She felt exposed being out in the open and spent a lot of time looking over her shoulder, looking up into the darkened windows of the warehouses they passed, looking up and down alleyways, expecting to hear a shout go up and a pack of wild-eyed and slavering cannibals to charge them, spilling out of the mouths of those same alleyways, whooping and hollering and chasing them down. They were in a warehouse district, though, where the old railway tracks ran parallel to the river, and there wasn’t much around except a huge, once-white grain-storage silo with ‘BUNGE’ on its side and rusting poles and strands of wiring stretching across the road from building to post to building, as if someone had decorated for Christmas but forgotten to add tinsel and lights to all the cabling.
The river was a massively wide stretch of water to the west that had doubled in size since the last time she had been here. There were numerous signs of flooding. Far in the distance, along the river’s banks, she could see submerged piers and shipping docks, only the odd mooring post sticking high out over the water, while the rest of the decking rotted below. The railway yards lay feet deep in murky water, the long-disused tracks visible only as a much darker, double-lined ruler mark beneath the river’s surface.
As they came nearer to the brown-and-white brick train station, they stopped to stare at the classic old building, its Grecian-pillared countenance looking kind of ridiculous stranded up to its knees in the middle of a flood field.
‘I’m guessing the next train is delayed,’ Lacey said.
Toot toot! All aboard the Floodline Express! Tickets free. Inflatable armbands ten dollars.
She laughed. Couldn’t help it. It was funny.
The Boy Scout raised his eyebrows at her, and she quickly swallowed the laughter. She studied the map for a moment then told him Karey’s house lay a few miles inland.
The rest of Vicksburg sat on a bluff, safe from the rising flood-line. The drainage ditches, wooden levee gates and berms had valiantly held back most of the overflowing water, but even from here Lacey could see the cantilever lattice bridge, where freight trains had once crossed the Mississippi, and how close the waterline was to spilling over it.
Further along, after walking the gentle incline of the street for about a mile, the scene opened up again, allowing a better view of the near banks of the Mississippi. Lacey stood silently as the Boy Scout stopped beside her.
There were hundreds of cars, some wedged together as many as five deep, lining the banks. They had all been driven into the water, nose first and en masse. Some vehicles had been swept away, occupants inside, while others had become grounded or packed too tightly for the river’s tide to pull them out.
The cars were now rusted and flaking apart, as much rotting skeletons as the people who’d once driven them.
‘Why do you think they did it?’ she asked quietly, staring down at all those cars. ‘My grammy said it was like when Princess Diana died in Britain. Did you hear about that? You’d be old enough to, I reckon. She said thousands of people lined the streets, crying and wailing like it was their own mother who’d been killed. But it was just some woman they’d never even met. They only knew her through TV interviews and newspapers articles. Grammy said they all went crazy, as if some contagious disease had swept through everyone, except it was made up of hysteria and senselessness.’ Lacey shook her head; it was so disturbing to think that people could be affected so easily and in such vast numbers. ‘Her story about what happened here would change whenever I asked. Mostly, she said gas or chemicals did it. That they’d been released in the big cities by terrorists. That was her favourite one – that terrorists did it – but she’d tell me anything to stop me bugging her with questions, I think, to stop me wanting to go anywhere near other people who could hurt me. She worried about me a lot.’
‘She was right to worry,’ the Boy Scout said.
‘She never mentioned any voices, though,’ she murmured. ‘Why do you think they did it?’ she asked again.
He didn’t answer straight away, and when she looked at him she found him staring not at the river, with its collection of rotting metal carcasses, but at the sky high above their heads.
‘We had our chance,’ he said, so quietly Lacey didn’t think he was even talking to her. ‘I think our time was up, and we were the only ones who didn’t realise it.’
She frowned, confused. ‘But we’re still here. How can our time have been up?’
His eyes left the sky, falling back to Earth to where she stood. He gave a small, tired smile. ‘We always have been slow to catch on.’
At the next junction, Lacey put their backs to the river and led them east, the sidewalk ascending in a steeper incline. A few raindrops spattered on the map with a muted rap-rap-rap. She glanced up at the darkening sky, could see the twinkling stars where rainclouds had left the heavens clear in ragged patches.
A raindrop got her slap-bang in the eye. She squeezed it shut and rubbed it with a fist and turned to look back at the Boy Scout. ‘Can you believe it? As soon as we’re out of the truck, it decides to rain.’
He didn’t appear all that troubled by the chance of a downpour. All he said was ‘Let’s hurry. It’s not safe being outside.’
She led them up to the top of the street and took a right. Within fifteen minutes they were deep in a residential area. They saw only two living things other than themselves, the first a mangy-looking dog, its fur so thin Lacey could see the pink skin beneath; it trotted across a street that bisected the one they travelled on and paused when it sensed their presence, its shining eyes regarding them silently for a few seconds, the fading light reflecting like lamps in its pupils, and then it turned away and continued on, disappearing around the corner of a single-storey, white-and-yellow clapboard house. The second living thing was a man, or what had once been a man. Now he was a sack of skin and sharp bones, of hunger and desperation. His eyes
were lamps, too, but they didn’t shine with an inward luminescence like the dog’s but with a wild glow that made Lacey think he would leap on them if they’d been closer. Leap on them and start tearing at their faces with his teeth.
All three of them (four, if you counted Red) stood still and watched each other, not one word passing between them. And then the man made a strange growling noise in the back of his throat and gave an angry shake of his head, more a tic than any sort of human gesture. The man hit himself in the temple, a sharp blow with the heel of his hand, and dismissed them by turning away and stepping into the shadows of a doorway, the darkness reaching out to hide him.
A dangerous animal, Voice said quietly.
Lacey didn’t think he was referring to the dog.
The Boy Scout gently nudged her from behind, wordlessly urging her to move on. Now that she was so near, for reasons she didn’t want to think about too closely, she wanted to dawdle a little longer, even at the risk of having her face gnawed off by a hunger-ravaged wild man.
Ten minutes later, the murmuring of approaching voices had them halting in their tracks. The Boy Scout hissed at her to get off the sidewalk, and she hurried into the nearest yard, hunkering down behind a strand of tall, white-flowered bushes. Hydrangea, she thought, and had the vague notion her grammy would be proud of her for knowing that. A light, sweet scent came from the flowers.
As the Boy Scout crouched awkwardly next to her, Red draped over his back, Lacey glanced over her shoulder at the black eyes of the house’s windows, feeling more vulnerable than she had since she’d been reunited with the Boy Scout. The glass in them was perfectly black, as if they weren’t windows at all but gaping chasms leading to a place where no light existed and everyone was blind and pale-skinned and cold. So very, very cold.
