The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  “People.” It’s the first thing she can say.

  “What?” Petrolio grabs her free arm hard.

  “He’s alive.” Dark silence, pressure against Estajfan’s wrists and legs. He can’t move. He’s hurt. Around him, the reek of bodies that haven’t been washed.

  “Heather,” Petrolio says, and she opens her eyes.

  “He’s in a truck,” she says. “There are people with him. I think they’re heading this way, but I’m not sure.” She grabs Petrolio’s hand. “We’ll find him. I can help you find him. But we have to go down.”

  “Estajfan chose to go down.” A new voice behind them. They stiffen in surprise, then turn to see a mountain centaur, tall and stern. Behind him, others in the trees. How long have they been watching? “Centaurs do not belong off the mountain. No one is to go down except for the human.”

  “I’m not abandoning my brother!” Petrolio cries, his eyes wild.

  The centaur only watches him. “Then you make the same choice he made,” he says. “And the mountain will dismiss you too.”

  Aura offers a hand to Heather, who takes it and scrambles up onto Aura’s back. She wraps her arms around Aura’s slender torso, then buries her face in Aura’s hair.

  Then Aura’s hooves leave the ground, and they are running.

  * * *

  When they reach the bottom of the mountain, Aura pauses for the tiniest of seconds.

  “Where is he?” Aura shouts back to her. “Where do we need to go?”

  The warm smell of metal; the tang of fear and fire inside her mouth. He still can’t move, but they are moving. Heading north, toward the mountains. She was right.

  “They’re on the road,” Heather says. “Turn south, and we’ll meet them.”

  They run for what feels like hours—through the dawn and into the morning. When the road is blocked by sudden mounds of tangled vines—a buried car or two or three—Aura leaps over them, Heather clutching hard in panic, Petrolio at their heels.

  As they get closer to Estajfan, a wave of pain rises behind Heather’s eyes. She can feel him moving against his restraints, his fingers curling, his body flexing, getting ready.

  The humans don’t see it. They have no idea.

  18

  Snug on the bed in their townhouse, nestled between Tasha and Annie, Elyse is weak, but alive. They feed her carefully—canned beans, rice, tuna—until colour comes back into her face. The day slides into night. They sleep. They wake. They sleep again and dream.

  “What happened?” she asks them, when the night has turned to day again. “What happened, outside, with the flowers?”

  They tell her what they know, which isn’t much. The scream. The long standoff with Annie.

  When they get to the part about the grief and the despair, Elyse nods. “I was ready to give up,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for the coughing, I’d just be another body on the street. The breathing was the only thing that saved me.” She told them about this when she’d recovered enough to speak—the scream of the flowers rising around her just before she reached their townhouse, the panic that had driven her to the house next door, which was closer, and then the default mechanism that had kicked in, the thing she knew to do when the air overwhelmed her, when breathing was hard. She’d learned it as a child. It went even deeper, now, than madness.

  Breathe in until her lungs were three-quarters full. Then hold. Then out. Breathe in. Then hold. Then out.

  Again. Again. Again.

  Thinking back on it now, she manages a wry chuckle. “My banged-up lungs kept me alive, I guess. That’s definitely a first. What saved the two of you?”

  Tasha hears the brief whisper of wings. “I’d been around the flowers all winter,” she says. “The greenhouse—I went there alone. It made me”—and she thinks back to those moments, her knees against the dirt—“delirious. Mad. I don’t know. I felt the grief then too. But the more I went to the greenhouse, the less it affected me. Like I was becoming immune.”

  Elyse looks over at Annie. “Was it the same for you?”

  Annie flushes, clears her throat. “I wasn’t immune, or whatever you want to call it. If it hadn’t been for Tasha”—she swallows hard, looks at her hands—“I don’t know what would have happened.”

  Silence settles over them, broken by Elyse’s ragged lungs. “Maybe Tasha was your breathing,” she says. “The thing that kept you afloat—the way that the rhythm of my breathing saved me.”

  They sit with this, all of them, for a moment. Annie is the one who asks it first. “Do you think this means that other people survived too?”

  “I hope so,” Tasha says.

  There is only one way to find out for sure. They do not talk about this, not yet.

  * * *

  The third night they are together, Elyse sits up in the middle of the bed so suddenly Tasha thinks she’s having an attack.

  “The creature,” she says. “The creature on the mountain. We can go there, to get food.” She coughs. “I should have told you that first thing.”

  “Elyse,” Tasha says, carefully, “what creature?”

  “The one I saw by the greenhouse. With Heather. It was part man, part horse.”

  Tasha and Annie look at each other over her blonde head.

  Annie clears her throat. “Elyse, we’ve all had such a shock. Why don’t you just lie back down and rest—”

  “I should have said it first thing,” Elyse repeats, frantically. “It’s just—I was just—I was so tired! I saw Heather, in the forest. Just before the scream came. She was talking to a—a creature. Part man and part horse. I was on my way back to tell you when the scream came.”

  “Elyse,” Tasha says. “This has been hard on all of us, and—”

  Elyse shakes her head. “I know what I saw. Tasha—remember, the flowers screamed, and vines moved across the ground. You saw it too! Why couldn’t there be such a creature?”

  “We all tell ourselves stories,” Tasha says. “Maybe it was just a man, someone who lives near the mountain. Someone we don’t know, someone who’s been living in the forest all this time.”

  “I know what I saw!” Elyse cries, again, setting off her terrible wracking cough.

  They sit with her, in silence, until the coughing subsides.

  “All right,” Tasha says. She looks at Annie, who shrugs a little. “Elyse—okay. Maybe there is someone—some thing—on the mountain. Some person or creature or something that no one else has seen. But you can’t climb the mountain. You wouldn’t have been able to do it months ago—you definitely can’t do it now.”

  “Then I’ll stay,” Elyse presses, “and you can go. The two of you.”

  Annie shakes her head. Her voice is low and soft. “We can’t leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine! I was by myself for days before you ca—”

  “What would have happened if we hadn’t heard you—if no one had come? You would have died on that floor, Elyse, and you know it,” Annie says.

  “So what happens when the food runs out here?” Elyse says. “You survived, I survived—only to shrivel away here in this house? This can’t be how it ends.”

  Annie sighs, and Tasha knows what she’s going to say in the instant before the words come out of her mouth. “I’ll go. I can go up the mountain. Tasha—you stay here with Elyse.”

  Tasha shakes her head. “No one is going,” she says. “Elyse—there’s no path. We don’t know what might be up there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “So that’s it,” Elyse says. “We just stay here, and starve.”

  “No one said anything about starving,” Tasha says, and the others look to her. She spreads her hands. “We find whatever food is left in any of the houses, and then we leave this godforsaken city. We go.”

  She can’t decide what’s worse—the relief in Annie’s face, or the way tha
t Elyse shuts down in despair.

  * * *

  When Elyse is strong enough to walk, they go outside. Vines crawl under their feet and shift like snakes around the dead people on the road. Most of the corpses—if they see corpses at all—are buried, smooth mounds of green in the roads, the old town square. After a while, they stop noticing.

  They search the houses that are still standing, but don’t find much.

  “We should go to Heather’s house,” Elyse says. “They might have more.”

  Tasha and Annie look at each other.

  “Because of the creature?” Annie says. “You think it was bringing her food and Heather kept that a secret all this time?”

  “I don’t think,” Elyse insists. “I know.”

  They walk to Heather and Brendan’s house, stand silent before the door. Tasha pushes it open. The smell that comes at them is both must and decomposition.

  They find the bodies of Brendan and the girls hanging in the kitchen. The green hasn’t yet completed its work here, though it has pushed in around the window frames and the cracked and broken glass. Vines have crawled across the floor and up the chair that sits toppled underneath Brendan, wound around his legs, up to his waist. The girls are small green cocoons with black faces and bright hair. Annie goes to vomit in the corner.

  Tasha pulls her eyes away. “Where’s Heather?”

  “I told you,” Elyse says. “I told you she was hiding something. Otherwise she would be here.”

  “She could be anywhere,” Tasha says. Even as she says it, she’s thinking of their long walks in the forest. The greenhouse. The stories that Heather spun as she walked. “Maybe she was outside when the scream came.”

  Elyse crouches in front of the cupboards. She pulls out apples and potatoes, a bag of rice. She reaches into the back and pulls out lentils and beans. There are weevils in some of the bags, but others remain sealed and safe. “Where did all of this come from,” she says, “if not from the mountain?”

  Tasha shuts her eyes against her own memories. The flutter of wings against her ribcage. Stories are never only stories, Tasha. “Bags of rice don’t grow on the mountain,” she says.

  Elyse sweeps an arm around the room. “Maybe she did this.”

  “I know you didn’t trust her, but she wouldn’t do this,” Tasha protests.

  “How do you know? Everyone went mad. Annie almost killed you! How do you know that didn’t happen here?”

  “I don’t know,” Tasha says, suddenly tired of it all. “I just—I don’t think she could do that. She was already carrying so much.”

  Elyse won’t let go. “Maybe that broke her, like it broke everybody else.”

  Tasha shakes her head. She looks at Annie, and then Elyse again, and she thinks back to that first day and the dark, bottomless pain in Heather’s eyes. “Something broke her before all of this happened,” Tasha says. “And she put herself back together in a different way. Maybe—maybe that’s how we survived.”

  Annie is staring at her, head cocked. Then she takes a step closer to the window. “Heather might be out there.”

  The backyard is a jungle—even more so than the rest of the city. The vegetation is more than tall enough to hide a body.

  Tasha shakes her head. “If she is, I don’t want to know. We’re done here. Let’s go.” Looking at the food they’ve gathered, she says, “We’ll stay for one more week. Eat, regain some strength. And then we’ll go south toward the water, and then east along the coast. The sea air will be good for Elyse.”

  Elyse does not ask about the mountain anymore.

  Slowly, their strength comes back. The air begins to carry hints of summer. The plants outside continue to grow—lilies that mushroom into great orange giants, vines that thicken until they’re as wide across as Tasha’s arm. The women stay inside during the day and venture outside in the late afternoons, finding their way into each and every last house. They take what they can and ignore the green mounds that are everywhere. There is no sound, there is no change.

  Still.

  “Are you sure we’re alone?” Elyse asks one afternoon. “I keep thinking that I hear things.”

  “Like what?” Annie asks, sharply.

  “I don’t know,” Elyse admits. “It might just be an animal. Sometimes I feel like I hear something running down the streets.” She looks to both of them, then swallows. “Something…galloping.”

  Tasha sighs. “It’s probably just deer,” she says. “There are probably so many more animals in the city now that the people are all gone.”

  Annie perks up at this. “If it’s a deer,” she says, “maybe one of us should try and catch it. We could use the meat.”

  “No,” Tasha says. “No going out alone. It isn’t safe. We can go a little closer to the mountain in the morning and see if we find anything.” She tries to ignore the sudden light in Elyse’s face.

  “And then what?” Annie says.

  Tasha watches the ceiling. “Then we get ready to leave.”

  19

  Everything hurts. Dark shapes come into focus—a man, a woman, another man behind her. One has a gun at his hip; there’s another gun in the corner where the woman is sitting. Estajfan remembers humans shooting the animals in their forest, terrified deer trying to get up the mountainside. His abdomen aches at the memory. No, not a memory. They shot him.

  He tries to flex his hands—they are stiff, and barely move. He’s lying on a floor that moves and jostles and bumps him—he recognizes the sound of wheels beneath him, that great whir and whine of machine.

  The truck hits something on the road and his head bounces and hits the truck bed. He can’t help it; he whimpers in pain. The woman crouches close to him, a worn boot near his eye.

  “Is it moving?” a man says.

  “No,” another man grunts. “It’s the truck, you fool. It’s the goddamned fucking road. I told you we needed to keep cutting those fucking weeds.”

  “We can’t fix all the roads,” the woman says. “There’s no one else left to do it, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  The first voice sounds panicked. “It’s moving. I can see it.”

  A hand on his head, suddenly, and the woman’s face dips into view. Brown eyes, a sharp, crooked nose. “You’ve been hurt. You’ve got nowhere to go, so don’t move. You hear me?”

  “You’re talking like you think it’ll answer back.” The drawl again, coming closer. A man’s boots. “For all you know, it can’t even talk.”

  “He can talk,” the woman says. She crouches on her heels and looks into his face again. “He understands everything we’re saying. You can see it in his eyes.”

  “So it’s a he, now?” The man squats to stare at him, the rifle spread out across his knees. His muddy-green eyes remind Estajfan of the mountain centaurs; he has a tattoo of a cross on his left cheek. “Stop it, Moira. It doesn’t matter if it can hear us or not. It’s not going anywhere now, thanks to you.”

  “I wasn’t going to let him bleed out,” she snaps. The man only shrugs.

  “But—but what if there are others?” The third voice again, younger, almost a boy. “Darby—what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll take this one wherever JJ wants to take it. Then we’ll see what happens.”

  Take him where? Estajfan has lost track of how long he’s been in here. How long have they been driving? He can’t see outside but he can sense, from the way that the wheels jostle, that the humans are driving as fast as they can. It makes everyone nervous—he can feel it in the air.

  Sure enough, there is a loud bang and they jolt to a stop. Everyone swears. There’s a pause, and then the back doors roll open. The man called Darby steps to the back of the truck and jumps down. Someone outside is talking, but Estajfan can’t make out the words.

  “The engine blew,” the boy says. The panic in his voice hasn’t go
ne away. “The engine fucking blew.”

  The woman stands and goes to the boy. She’s afraid too—they all are. Afraid of him, of the road, of themselves. “We’ll fix it. Darby and JJ will know what to do.”

  “JJ works with bikes, Moira—that’s what he said! And it’s already halfway through the afternoon. By the time we fix this, it will be dark.”

  “So we camp,” she says, wearily. “We all need some sleep anyway. The truck has broken down a hundred times, Brian. It’s not like we haven’t done this before.”

  “But what if there are more of—them—outside?”

  Moira shrugs. “Then I guess it’s good I saved this one, isn’t it? Maybe he’ll be able to vouch for us.”

  She’s half joking, but as usual, Brian doesn’t get it. “How are we supposed to negotiate with these things? I mean, look at it. Him. Whatever.”

  Moira is silent for so long that Estajfan thinks she isn’t going to respond. But then she bends toward him. “I’m looking,” she says. She’s talking to Brian but Estajfan feels the words go right through him. “I’m watching, Brian. There’s nothing you need to worry about, at least not right now.”

  “Where did it come from, anyway?” Brian asks. “It didn’t just appear on the road. It came from somewhere.”

  Moira shrugs, then locks eyes with Estajfan again. He hasn’t blinked—he can tell that has unnerved her a little.

  “JJ said he knew where we could take it,” Brian says. “He didn’t say he knew where it came from.”

  “Whatever. Go ask him.”

  The boy jumps down from the truck and shuffles away. Estajfan hears voices at the side of the vehicle, though he can’t make out the words.

  Moira walks away from him and slumps down against the wall, her arms resting on her knees. She stares at him. He blinks, slowly.

  She saved his life, he thinks.

  He flexes his fingers, and they move a little more.

  * * *