The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  A long time passes. Hours? Estajfan can’t be sure. The light fades, eventually. Every now and then someone swears or bangs the side of the vehicle.

  Then Brian appears. “We’re spending the night,” he says to Moira. “JJ says to get that thing out of the truck.”

  Moira rolls her eyes. “And how am I going to do that?”

  “Not you,” the boy mumbles. “I just wanted to tell you what was happening.”

  The other men jump into the truck. Together with Brian, they grab Estajfan by the legs and haul him toward the doors.

  He can move more than his fingers now, but he stays limp as a fish.

  “Jesus,” says JJ. “This thing is heavy.” As they tip Estajfan over the edge, his head thumps against the frame, hard. He fights to keep from grimacing in pain, but he can’t help it.

  “Hey,” Moira says. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” JJ again.

  “He hit his head,” Moira says. “And I think he winced.”

  “So? Fucker’s tied. He’s not going anywhere.”

  They drag Estajfan away from the vehicle. When they drop him, his head hits the ground again, but he doesn’t react. He’s staring straight at Moira, who looks away.

  “Is the truck fixed?” she calls.

  “It’s fixed, princess,” Darby drawls back. “But we’ll camp here for the night.”

  “Since when do we stop because it’s dark?” Brian says.

  “Since now,” JJ snaps. “I don’t want to have to fucking stop and fix the engine because we’re driving over God knows what in the night. What the hell kind of hurry are we in, anyway?”

  Moira points to Estajfan. “We just play prison guard until the morning? Why didn’t we leave him in the truck for the night?”

  “Sure,” Darby says, slowly. “You can be the one to open the door in the morning, Moira, and see if it’s broken free of the ropes and is ready to jump down and crush us all.”

  “I meant keep him in there, with us,” she snaps. “No one’s sleeping outside.”

  Darby thrusts his chin at the truck. “We’ll sleep in there and leave him out here. You can take first watch. I thought you liked horses, Moira. Don’t all little girls want a pony?”

  “I’m not a little girl,” she retorts. “And he’s not a fucking pony.”

  Darby doesn’t respond, just heads to the truck.

  Moira stands looking after him, and then jumps into the back and retrieves the rifle. When she comes back, she settles down against a tree and scowls at Estajfan. “Don’t go anywhere,” she snaps. “If you even know what I’m saying.”

  There’s a sadness in her face and eyes that reminds him of Heather, and makes him want to speak. But he looks away from Moira and stares at the trampled grass, the vines and overgrown weeds all around them. He digs his hands into a cluster of vines and pulls against the ties. The strands of rope weaken, give way. He waits until there’s more commotion from the men—a clang, “Fuck you, that was my finger, jackass”—and when Moira looks up their way, he jerks and snaps the ropes, then lets his hands go limp.

  He won’t be able to get at the ropes binding his legs as easily.

  Soon the daylight is gone and the dark is all around them. Eventually he hears the men swearing at each other as they settle down for the night, and then they grow quiet. Moira hasn’t moved.

  He looks up at the sky and tries to count the stars.

  20

  The tingle in Heather’s fingers becomes a tingle in her hands, a warm flush that spreads from her shoulders down to her toes. As they run, she feels Estajfan come awake. He can move, and yet he doesn’t. He can speak, and yet he doesn’t.

  In the early afternoon, Aura stops. Petrolio reaches for Heather—she almost falls, she’s that stiff, but he has her, his hands gentle. He lifts her down onto the ground and holds her until the sleep passes from her feet and she’s sure her legs will bear the weight.

  “You haven’t eaten,” Aura says. She pulls her satchel over her shoulder and reaches into it, then hands her an apple.

  “I’m not hungry. And anyway, you haven’t eaten either.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” Aura says. “If anything happens to you, Estajfan will never forgive me.”

  Heather bites into the apple, chews, swallows.

  As she takes another bite, Petrolio comes to stand in front of her, swishing his tail back and forth.

  “He can move his arms at least,” she says, her mouth filled with apple.

  “Is he being watched?” Petrolio asks.

  She closes her eyes and sees flashes of the woman—brown eyes, crooked nose—the boy, the man with the tattoo. They are all thin and tired and angry.

  “I don’t know if they’re watching him, but they’ve stopped,” she says. “I think there’s something wrong with the truck.”

  Petrolio nods. “We need to go now.”

  Heather drops the rest of the apple on the ground and lets Aura lift her up onto Petrolio.

  They run.

  * * *

  Something shivers in the ground beneath Estajfan’s ear. He knows, instantly, that they are here. He can feel Petrolio’s beating hearts, the simmer of Aura’s rage.

  And Heather—he can feel Heather.

  There’s a rustle nearby and the man who is now on watch—Darby—sits up and cocks his gun. A twig breaks.

  “Jesus, Brian. You’re lucky I didn’t blow your head off.”

  “I was trying to be quiet.” The boy shuffles up beside the other man and props another gun against the tree. “Anyway. I’m here. You can go get some sleep.” There’s a pause, and then, “Did anything—happen?”

  “With this thing? No.”

  He can hear Brian swallow. “Not just—the creature. The—plants.”

  “Brian, for God’s sake—”

  “You know they move! You’ve seen them reach for people. That’s why we’ve been sleeping in the truck!”

  “It’s fine,” Darby says. “Nothing happened.” He stands and thumps the boy on the back. “Try not to get us all killed,” he says, and he heads for the truck.

  The boy clears his throat and leans against a tree. He’s nervous. He’s also very tired. Estajfan looks up at the stars again and waits for the boy to sit, to slouch, to nod off.

  He almost doesn’t want it to happen. He can feel the green things waiting, watching for a sign.

  As soon as Brian relaxes and slumps to sit down against the tree, a slender grubby hand clamps his mouth, and the other holds something small and sharp against his neck.

  “If you move,” Heather whispers, “I will slit your throat.”

  The boy’s eyes widen in terror, but he doesn’t move. The rifle falls into the grass.

  Petrolio emerges from the trees on the other side of Estajfan. He bends and slices the ropes that still bind Estajfan’s legs.

  Estajfan is on his feet almost instantly.

  “We’re going to leave now,” Heather hisses to the boy. “Don’t scream, or move, or I’ll come back and kill you.”

  She retreats, slowly, and the boy doesn’t stir. Then she trips over the undergrowth and the boy is after her instantly, grabbing her hair and her shirt, and now she’s the one with the sharp thing at her neck as Brian screams, “There are more of them! There are fucking more of them!”

  “Go!” Estajfan roars at Petrolio. He sees the other three scramble out of the truck. JJ runs to the front and turns the truck lights on and Petrolio cries out against the sudden blare of light, then turns and disappears into the trees. Darby plunges after him.

  “Run!” Heather cries as Brian drags her back toward the truck. “Estajfan, go!”

  Someone fires a shot; it whizzes past Estajfan’s ear. It’s Moira, coming toward them, her gun held high and pointed at his face.

  Estaj
fan ducks and charges at the boy; Brian, terrified, drops Heather and falls backward onto the ground. Estajfan scoops Heather up and then he’s rearing over Brian, and his hooves come down as Brian screams.

  “Stop!” Moira screams.

  Estajfan looks straight at her. “You saved me once, Moira,” he says.

  For a few seconds, she’s stunned by the sound of his voice. It’s all the time he needs. He turns and leaps and runs. Shots ring out, but they run and run and suddenly Petrolio is there, and Aura, and then they are all galloping, the shouts fading behind them.

  21

  Moira lets out one long, rage-filled scream as the creatures vanish into the trees. Then she goes to Brian, who lies panting and white-faced on the ground. His right leg is shattered, the tibia splintered white and ugly below his knee. She runs to the truck, jumps in, and grabs her makeshift medical supplies—rags, the bottle of whiskey. She tears a large strip of cloth and douses it in alcohol, then ties it as tight around his shin as she can to stop the bleeding.

  He passes out, which is probably just as well.

  “Darby! JJ!” There’s a moment, a long one, and then they come back to her, out of the trees. Without a word, they carry Brian into the back of the truck.

  “I need—sticks,” she says. “Straight ones.”

  Darby goes to look while JJ dismantles the camp. Darby comes back carrying two large branches. Moira strips the leaves and gets the men to help her position them on either side of Brian’s leg. She douses an old sheet in the rest of the whiskey and then winds it around and around his leg, over the branches, tying it as tight as she can to form a splint.

  As she works, she sees how guilt-ridden and furious the other two are. She feels the same way. They had all pushed the kid around a little, but you had to be hard now to survive. Like JJ, so flint-eyed and dour and capable, holding a hundred different secrets, or Darby, who was snappy and mean and had panic-filled night terrors they all pretended to ignore.

  They’ve known each other maybe two weeks at most. It feels like a lifetime.

  “Okay,” she says, when she’s done the best she can. It isn’t pretty, or particularly clean. Brian is mercifully still unconscious. She tries not to think about what will come later.

  “I should have let him take the first watch,” Darby says. “I would have—I would have let them go. I wouldn’t have tried to be a hero—”

  Moira pulls her hoodie over her head, grateful for its warmth, then rests a hand on Darby’s arm. “At least he’s alive.” Alive, with a leg that’s as good as useless. And no hospital in sight.

  “We have to go after them,” JJ says. “Both of you get in the truck. Let’s go.”

  Moira and Darby both stare at him. “Why?”

  “There was a woman with them,” JJ says. “Right?”

  “I think so,” Moira says.

  “Where there are people,” JJ says, “there might be food. We need to follow them.”

  “How the fuck are we supposed to follow them in the dark?” Darby says. “We don’t even know which way they went, for fuck’s sake.”

  “They went north,” JJ says, and he points behind them, into the trees.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Darby says.

  JJ shrugs. “It’s just a hunch. A feeling.”

  “I don’t want to drive God knows where on a goddamned hunch!” Darby shouts.

  JJ remains calm. “They’ll come back out on the road,” he says. “Even they can’t run through the forests forever—you’ve seen the undergrowth. They’re heading north, toward the mountains.”

  Moira doesn’t ask how he knows this. She thinks of the creature. How he’d reached for the woman and shattered Brian’s leg in less time than it took her to inhale. How the woman had curled into his chest as though she was the wounded thing.

  He could speak. He’d looked right at her when she held that gun in his face.

  The rifle. She runs back to where Brian fell and finds it, already half covered in green. She reaches for it and is not surprised when the green vines and long, tangled grasses at her feet twine more tightly about it. She tugs, gently at first and then less so, and finally the green things let go and she stumbles back. As she rights herself, she notices something glinting at her feet—a small, delicate knife, a scalpel. She picks that up too. It is always good to keep what they find. She hurries back to the truck and hands Darby the rifle, then lets him hoist her up.

  “What’s that?” JJ says, pointing to the knife in her hand.

  “Don’t know,” she says. “A scalpel? I found it near the rifle.”

  “What’s Dr. Moira need a scalpel for?” Darby says, trying to make a joke.

  She echoes JJ. “Just a hunch,” she says. “A feeling.”

  JJ nods, then shuts them in.

  As they bounce over the unforgiving road, she turns the scalpel over and over in her hands. She’s never seen a scalpel like this—not that she’s seen many scalpels at all. The handle is cylindrical and smooth, with tiny designs running the length of it. She slowly draws a line through the air with the blade.

  Maybe it’s magic, she thinks. Like the creature. Maybe she can cut a window through the air and step back in time to the years before any of this happened.

  “What, now you’re a doctor for real?” Darby teases. She lets him have his fun. They are three broken men and Moira, who is not a doctor, just someone who used to be on TV sometimes but has mostly been a waitress.

  (It was the nose, her agent told her a million years ago. It was too sharp. We want real but not that real, he said.)

  She wraps the scalpel carefully in some cloth and puts it in the pocket of her hoodie, then puts her head in her hands and tries to still her shaking mind. The truck rumbles through the dark and no one speaks.

  She’d walked and walked and walked in those first few hours after the scream—moving out of her bathroom refuge and then down the street, out of her town, through the town after that. The sun had gone down, the stars had come out, and she’d taken shelter in an abandoned gas station convenience store, then woken to the sound of someone at the fuel tanks. When she went outside, she saw Darby trying to siphon diesel, the old U-Haul silent and waiting. Brian had been sitting in the passenger seat. He’d been the first to notice her.

  Eric, already delirious, had been out of sight in the back.

  “How do you know if there’s even gas left?” she had called.

  Darby had looked up, almost dropping his gas can in surprise. “I don’t,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “But it never hurts to try.”

  She went with them—they asked no questions. Darby had rigged the truck up to work on vegetable oil as well as regular diesel, so whenever they stopped, they looked for both of these things. They didn’t travel far. They found JJ a few days after that, waiting for something by the side of the road. Eric was dead by then and so it was only the four of them, swirling into place like a constellation. It feels like she’s known them her whole life.

  “Do you know how to set a leg, Dr. Moira?” Darby asks, breaking the silence. “For real?”

  “Of course not,” she says, staring at the floor.

  Neither of them looks at Brian.

  22

  Annie has a pistol in her belt—they found it a few days ago, and it’s the only gun they have—and Tasha has Elyse hooked around her shoulder as they stagger toward the mountain. It is harder going now than it had been during the winter—there is practically no path left, just an endless vista of green, with bright flowers that arch over them, glorious, unchecked. They take their time. The world is quiet save for birds that chirp unseen in the trees.

  They smell the greenhouse before they see it, and are grateful the scent doesn’t make them spin in panic. They creep forward to find the greenhouse door broken, its panes of glass shattered.

  “Her
e,” Elyse says between breaths. “The creature was right here.”

  Tasha lowers her to the ground. Elyse still wears the Doc Martens, still has the black leather jacket. Some things, Tasha thinks, have survived.

  Tasha looks up at the mountain rising above them. A mountain tall enough that one could climb it and reach the clouds. A mountain where mothers and fathers might have brought their crippled, disfigured young to die so many years ago.

  The world is still beautiful, despite all of its terror and tragedy, and she understands none of it. Blood and brains and heartbeats? Things that grow and things that don’t and stories about birds that fall from the sky? She tried so hard to keep them all alive—and for what? When her parents died, she was not there; the people in this city died around her even as she fought to stop it. And here she is, alive. After everything.

  “I thought we could do it,” she says then, staring off into the green. “I just wanted us all to survive.”

  “People believed in you,” Elyse says. She coughs again.

  “People believed in stories,” Tasha says. She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “The mountain and its secrets. The Food Angel, whatever that was. There was nothing I could do about that.”

  “You were a story too,” Annie says. “I told you that, Tasha—and you didn’t listen to me.”

  Tasha nods. Her gaze drops to the trees—the green things that grow, the world that has turned away from them all. “I thought I would—rewrite it? Shift everyone’s attention to things that mattered? I don’t know.”

  “The Food Angel kept almost everyone alive over the winter,” Elyse says. She points up to the mountain. “That’s what the creature was. And that’s where it is. I’m sure of it.”

  Stories are never only stories.

  Tasha laughs, even though none of this is funny. “I guess it’s going to remain a story now,” she says.

  “I know you don’t believe me,” Elyse says, “but it was there, Tasha. I know what I saw.”

  Tasha shrugs. “We should go back,” she says. “We don’t want to be stuck here after dark.” She glances at the greenhouse as she and Annie help Elyse up. “No one told stories about the flowers,” she says. “Even Heather never said anything about them—and she had them in her house.”