Steps (18 page)

Chapter 31

Mountain Mercies   
(Man)

H
e delivered mercy to the man-father. The boy next to him remained as unmoving as his father, not out of death, but for lack of life. The Beast ravaged both the spirit and body of the boy until none of life was left to him but the quivering flesh of his bloody eyes. He rolled the man-father away into the trees, and lifted the boy and carried him along the stream toward the boy’s camp by the lake.

Their camp was a pitiful thing, exposed to the north winds, too close to shore during flood, in the low-ground too far down the mountain for protection. Still, their campfire raged as if from the Father Himself, and Man lay the boy next to it and lifted his nose. He smelled blood. The others had fled, searching for the girl-child perhaps, but some had remained. He found blood amid deep tracks, and he followed ruts leading into the lake to where the scent hovered over the water. His hands dipped under and emerged with one of the man-soldiers in his grasp. He dragged the man-soldier ashore, tossed him into the fire, and piled coals on top of him. This was not his way, but it was the way of his children, and he honored them by this.

Lifting the boy, he paced down the lakeshore, and when he ascended the bank he stopped. He listened, raised his nose and closed his eyes so that sight would not betray his finer senses. He smelled the female of them, the woman-soldier, and she hid believing there was some safe place for her.

Man angled to where she hid, opened his eyes, and said the only words he knew of their language. He spoke slowly, such that he would not have to repeat them. “
Shelly Lynn
.”

He waited. The woman-soldier’s breath held, and when it released, she raised herself from where she lay and crawled from beneath the underbrush. She hid in the rabbit’s place amid the briars, but without the rabbit’s fur, the briars scraped her cheeks and arms. She ignored her wounds and stood.

She stared at Man until her breathing quieted, and Man waited. He would let her approach him, which she did in time, and he knelt and shifted the boy to where she could see his face.

She put her hand to the boy’s forehead and split the eyelids. Woman would call them red, as would her children, but to Man they were gray-black things flecked with silver grains. She let the eyelid fall into place.

Crouched, he stood not much taller than the woman-soldier, and she put a hand to Man’s face in such a way that Woman had done, much smaller hands, but much the same.

“What are you?” she said.

Man had no words, and so he sang the only song he knew, the single note Woman had taught him in the Time-Before. He whispered it to the woman-soldier, and she seemed to understand, because she answered in the same note with a hum.

Her hum grew into a throaty whisper, formed into a word and became a song, something soft and mournful that Man had never heard before. She sang with her hand on Man’s cheek as Woman had sung many times, and she cried as she sang. When she finished, she sat, exhausted, and Man sat with her.

He lay the boy beside her and waded into the lake, cupped his hands and brought her water. She wrapped her hands around his fingers, lifted his palm to her lips and drank. After a while, her hands stopped shaking, her eyes dried, and her breathing settled the racing of her heart.

They sat until the sun rose. Man brought her fire and placed fish around it, and she cooked the fish and ate. She poked at the fire, and Man thought of Woman digging for her roots. This was the woman-soldier’s manner of worry, and as she prodded the fire, she stared at the sickened boy. Hers were the patient eyes of Woman, round and soft and thoughtful. Man rose, paced the camp, and brought her more wood and fish.

On returning, he found her with the boy’s head in her lap. On her lips was a song low and soft. Man’s ears strained to hear, one he had never heard. He heard words of love forged through suffering. She held the boy to her breast and cradled his head as she sang. When she finished, she considered the boy, the fire, and Man sitting cross-legged away from her.

He left her and ran up the stream, back to Woman so far away that by the time he reached her, the night bled deep. He pressed open the skins of their shelter and said to her, “The Beast walks among them.”

Woman lay with Shelly Lynn cradled in her arms, calm because she slept, no longer wailing for lack of Woman’s milk. Man sidled next to her, stretched his length inside the shelter, and wrapped his arm around her and the tiny child in her grasp.

Dawn brought Shelly Lynn’s awakening. Too damaged, Woman could not put her to her breasts, and she would not take of Man’s offering of dried meat, nor Woman’s collection of berries and roots. The girl-child finally accepted a sprig of mint, and that was enough to salve her morning hunger.

Woman carried her to the stream, and bathed and washed her. She poured water over herself and the girl, and Man thought of her words, that the Father abandoned them, and he wondered why Woman would think otherwise. The water did nothing to undo her wounds, and she held the child to her, washed her hair and rubbed away the dirt from her skin.

The child spoke of the Father, and said, “Why does Him Potty Man not look at you?” Shelly Lynn pointed ashore near where Man stood.

Woman answered. “He despises me.”

“Does despise mean love?”

“No.”

“Then Him Potty Man does not despise you. Can you sing about my mommy?”

Woman sang a song of mothering, if not of the child’s mother, but of mothers of all time. This abated her, and Shelly Lynn said, “Do you have any songs about my daddy and brother? What about me?”

This pleased Woman. She held the child in the stream as she sang, and they danced in the water. They laughed as Man hunted the shore, and he remembered a time when Woman’s laughter and that of their children drifted among the trees as common as the breeze.

In the afternoon, the Beast came to them and took hold of the girl. She lay with Woman sunning herself when her eyes drifted to the sky. Shelly Lynn’s body stiffened, and Man heard the stop of her breath, and it was his expression that alerted Woman.

He wished he had taken away the child, because Woman was not ready, so long had she been on the mountain and apart from her children. She pressed Shelly Lynn’s mouth to the ruins of her breasts, and found this as helpless as her songs to halt the bleeding of the child’s eyes. She carried her into the stream, poured water over her forehead, and sang songs of healings. She doused the child’s body and called out to the Father for mercy. Still, Shelly Lynn shook in Woman’s arms until a vein burst in her right eye and bled her nose, and when she found her breath, it emerged a ragged and desperate flow through an open mouth and a constricted throat.

Woman waded ashore, sat with the child in her lap, and wept. Shelly Lynn’s eyes seemed no longer to focus, so lost were her senses, and she grasped at Woman’s hair, gnashed her teeth and kicked her feet.

Man said nothing, but waited until Woman spoke. “Does the Father have no mercy?” she said.

“It is ours to give.” He lifted Shelly Lynn from Woman’s arms, but he could no more deliver mercy to her than he could the boy-child.

Chapter 32

The Good Fight   
(Gentry)

T
he temperature of the entire planet dropped fifteen or twenty degrees without a breeze or a drop of rain. The sky was so filled with smoke that Gentry could not tell if it were day or night or something in-between. Something in-between, perhaps. He plodded behind Fletcher, with Billings in the rear, shivering. Gentry lost track of how long they had been at it, a day or two maybe, and it did not matter anyway, because who’s counting.

Billings’ nose had begun to bleed. They all knew what it meant, and Fletcher had been the one who said, “
FIDO
, bro.” They put Billings in the rear not because he was slowest, but because of an unspoken pseudo-rule that if he snapped they did not want to see it coming, and none of them could even speak the unthinkable other option.

“This is my mile, boys,” Billings had said. He sounded like Sarge then, not a year older than Gentry but a wizened old owl with a bent wing who could still outfly the youngest and spryest of them, and he did so from behind him and Fletch.

Gentry heard the Marine anthem rise up, at first a hum, then a mumble of words, and then they were all singing it even though he and Fletcher had been Army. They finished, and sang it louder this time with their voices ringing off the stream and the rocks, and dying unheard in the vast emptiness of the open mountain.

The mountain was not so empty as they had thought, and the singing attracted a group of young men who could have been from any of the darker races like Billings, hard to say because their faces were so streaked with blood and wounds that none of them were recognizable as human. They were from Mayberry, that much was clear from the torn uniforms, six of them along the far bank unarmed, staring across the stream with their mouths hung open as if from a great weight attached to their chin. The smoke-glow blanched them into the black-and-white of an old movie, the men moving jerkily as if from the stutter of torn film.

One of the six screeched. His head rocked back, and he let forth with a thunderous yell that became fluid, gurgling. His breath stopped, and he leaned forward and vomited blood into the stream. He scooped up some water and shoved it into his mouth as if to drink, but the touching of water to his lips ignited a fury of spasms that dropped him onto the rocks. The others fell on him with feet and fists and teeth, tearing at him like a band of mad wolves on a wounded animal. One of them yanked his arm until there was an audible crack of bone as it separated from his shoulder. Another dug his teeth into the flesh of his thigh and tore out a piece the size of a sandwich, and ripped it from his mouth and held it in the air as if in worship. After they crushed his bones, they kicked him into the river and threw rocks as the current drifted him away, here a hand rising as if to wave, a foot, his head with its smashed lobe and gauged eyes. The man never made a sound, and he made none as he drifted away.

“Move on,” Billings said. Blood trickled from his nose, and his right eye shone the deep red of a fresh-dug beet. “What?” he said, when Gentry did not look away.

“Nothing,” Gentry said.

For a while, the five remaining soldiers followed them along the other shore. They hooted and hissed and threw rocks, and it reminded Gentry of wild animals, angered chimps, maybe, locked by the river in their unnatural make-believe habitat.

“You think that’ll happen to us?” he said. “Devolve us back into our inner apes?”

“Inner apes,” Fletcher said. “It’s not a bad way to think of it.”

“It’s terrifying to think of it that way,” Billings said.

“Hold up,” Gentry said. “There’s one missing. There were five a minute ago. Now there’s only four.” He searched with the others for the missing soldier and did not find him, but as they watched, he understood.

The big-guy appeared like the death-swoop of a hawk and scooped up the man in the rear. There was a claw of his hand against the soldier’s neck, a jerk of the wrist, a sudden and irreversible limping of the soldier’s body, and both were swallowed by the trees. None of the others noticed, and so it must have been as soundless to them as it was to Gentry and his band across the stream, watching a black-and-white film whose soundtrack was the ripple of the river, and the chirps and squawks of wild things.

Three remained, and when another of them tried the water, he fell into spasms, and the other two stumbled past him and left him. Their eyes remained on Billings as if they understood, as if through the mired red murkiness of their deluded state they still recognized one of their own. Gentry considered this and said, “Look at that. You ever thought about how a dog never sees itself in a mirror or nothing, but it still knows it’s a dog, and it can still recognize another dog? Even different breeds know another dog is a dog and not a cat or some other animal. You ever thought about that?”

“Never on my drunkest night,” Fletcher said.

Billings said nothing.

“I mean, a Pomeranian recognizes a Great Pyrenees. They know. They recognize each other. They just
know
their own, see.”

Gentry spoke as he shuffled along, and the two soldiers on the far shore stopped. Billings crouched with his head down like a man in deep thought, or maybe an Indian checking for game tracks. His back shook, and his head bobbed up and down, slowly. A soft gurgling sound arose from his throat, and then the word,
Ga
over and over,
Ga-ga-ga.

When his head raised, the other eye had burst, and Gentry wondered if that hurt. He wondered if the nosebleed hurt, and he put his hand to his mouth, held it there staring at Billings. His fingers came away crimson. He swiped his hand across his lip, glanced to Fletcher, and God it felt cold.

Fletcher’s head nodded. It was not a deep nod, but his lips pursed, and he said, “You been bleeding for about an hour, bro.”

Gentry thought it would panic him, but his thoughts returned instead to the words,
Kelsey’s home.
His mind rock-skipped over to Perry and Shelly Lynn and the others, to Moore and how could her eyes bleed red, and he wondered if he really had anything to fear at all. Maybe not, that was his thought as he said, “
FIDO
, right?”

“What else is there?” Fletcher said.

Only one diseased soldier remained on the far shore, and he paced the shore staring at Billings and Gentry, and moved his head between them as if to call them across the river.

Gentry’s throat itched, and he wanted water. Moore had said that after the bug swelled his throat, water and swallowing would cause him to fall into spasms. She said most would die of dehydration within the first few days. Gentry swallowed. It felt like shards of glass, and he bent to the river, scooped up a handful of water and forced it down, and then drank until he felt his stomach would hold no more.

Billings coughed, spit blood, stood, and made his way to them. He formed the words slowly on his tongue, forcefully, rasped against his throat as it constricted. “One. More. Mile.” He dropped to the ground, and Gentry thought he had gone into spasms, but his arms shot out, caught him, and he lowered himself and rose. Billings spoke between up-downs. “One. More. Mile.”

Gentry laid his rifle aside and fell in beside him, and Fletcher stretched his length along the ground like a fallen log, and all of them in unison dropped and rose with Billings.

Blood dripped from Gentry’s nose onto the rocks as he worked. He could not feel it against his lips, and he wondered if it seeped down his chin like the others, like Billings and the one across the river. He wondered if either of his eyes had burst. As the blood pressure rose inside his body, he felt it wrap tighter around him, the
it
of the bug.
It
ran hot through his veins. He lost count of his up-downs, and his arms and legs worked of their own accord. He felt none of the burn in his muscles. He spoke with Billings as they worked. “One. More. Mile.”

When Fletcher dropped out, they all stood, and Billings clasped a hand on each of their shoulders. Both of his eyes bled bloody and black, rotating inside his head with almost imperceptible jerks, which were nothing at all like a human’s eyes. “Gun,” he said. He shook his head, clenched his teeth and spat out the proper word. “One.” He tried to go on, fighting off a spasm taking hold of him.

Gentry did not know if Billings’ mind had been lost, but he watched in drunken amazement as the man stiffened and fought his body’s urge to seize up, shake, and become violent against itself. The veins in Billings’ neck bulged beneath the skin, and his eyes widened and his fingers splayed. The prosthetic leg shot back as if it had a will of its own, balancing him as the other knee locked and his hip shot forward.

For a moment he stood there in wooden stiffness, breath held, mouth open with spittle and blood dripping out. Then the grip loosened as suddenly as it took hold, and Billings sucked in a breath, dogged and exhausted, and with the exhalation said, “One more mile.”