Stories From the Plague Years (35 page)

As we dragged our sled over the carpet smeared by lymph that seeped from the family that had laid the carpet down, I felt the echoed ghost of the third person who’d stood over our sleeping bags, the dust-angel who’d watched over our sleep as neither sentry nor foe. I looked over my shoulder at where the ghost had stood, and the ghost refracted into greater solidity over the span of the deep breath I took—gaining shape as does an audience the instant house lights come up—only to fall back into greater nothingness as my eyes widened to see it. The
feel
of the ghost stepped into me, as if filling the void left by the person I’d been before taking to the road. Had I been stronger, such a violation would have felt unreal. In my unreal hunger, I felt the ghost with the same patient dread one feels standing under a dead oak on a winter’s night. That dread seemed to leave the house with us, following as would a guilty thought . . . walking, perhaps, as it had since I’d left Justine in the hallowed space that Janice had touched while her sister and I said goodbye. What followed us was
hurt
, and feral. It lurked on the periphery of our senses in a way that made me think of the street kids who used to stand at the gates of our wards and cut themselves down to the muscle with smashed bottles, so they’d be let in as emergency cases and so gain a meal and a night of peace in a true bed.

Miles down the road . . . how many I can’t say, but we’d made good distance, because we were close to the old toll stations on the border of town . . . we smelled smoke rich with the scent of roasting meat. We coursed the scent as would hounds, hoping to trade or buy food, knowing that no one who didn’t have food to share would light a fire so near the road,
telling
ourselves this was the case, not wanting to admit we were being stupid—maddened by the promise of meat—approaching somebody with food and fuel that he may not want to share or trade, and who might be too eager to defend what he had. The carboy held enough dregs to trade for a meal, giving a patina of sense to our dash to the smell of cooking flesh.

By dying embers in a yard, we found rabbit pelts curing above the reach of wild dogs atop what had been a children’s swing set. Within the embers, we found rabbit bones we snatched up and sucked the marrow out of. On the rim of the fire were orange peels we devoured; the smears of rabbit grease on the peels left by the man who’d eaten the orange were savoury as a banquet on our brittle, coated tongues. On a peel was an import sticker bearing the name of a grove near Cape Town. Allen and I looked at the pelts, to see if any meat or fat could be gnawed from the skins. Our host made himself known then, with the slow, deliberate cocking of his rifle from the window behind us. We walked away slowly, following our own sled tracks.

The earth-heavy
dread
of a bullet is a mark on your back, on the coin-sized spot that waits for the impact of what you’ll only feel as a tackle. The mark presses into you as you hold your shoulders low, not daring to show your worry, lest it encourage the one in whose sights you walk to squeeze the trigger and punch apart your spine and lungs. The dread forced breath out of us even as we reached the road again, out of range of even the most high-powered rifle.

Adrenaline and food scraps are a cruel mix while you starve. There is a sadism to being partly fed, regaining only enough strength to fully feel how hungry you are, losing the numbness that is the one meagre gift of malnutrition. We could feel, with the new volume of our famine-thinned blood, with the rush of receding adrenaline, the rotten wood in the joints of our feet, the cramping poisons in our calves that meant the scarring of muscle. We could feel—with the new flow of nourishment to our brains—how invasive and sick was the way that “we” were feeling. Old grandmothers preach that familiarity breeds contempt. What
I
felt was past all contempt for the “we” that Allen and I were . . . who felt together, who saw together, who spoke together, who shared the convulsions of our folding bellies. It was hunger, not fellowship, that made Allen and I the “we” that we’d become. Famine had scoured away the walls of “self” that had separated us. Allen and I had been sharing our thoughts, our discomforts and our desires because
we
were too physically weak not to. It’s a sharing without language, without the mortar of syntax and words: a preliterate, pre-verbal bleeding of what’s within, like the sadness you feel as your own when you see it in the eyes of a dog trained to guide the blind.

And I realized that the “we” that Allen and I were was a “we” of more than two persons. “We” were also the ghost that followed us . . . that
had
been
following us . . . the living, guilty thought whose tread was distinct, even as it filled our footprints behind us the way the absence of the newly dead fills a sickroom.

Allen felt my realization . . . and in my awareness of his feeling what I’d realized, we reaffirmed the “
we
” that we had been.
He’d known
of our follower with a surety I didn’t have until now. It dawned on me that since leaving home, I’d been dimly aware of our follower the same way a child who has only seen pictures in fairy books would know a sylph were he to see it, a thing the unreality of which had yet to be tested . . . like the unreality of a fox the child has only seen painted in rich watercolour reds and browns staring up at a crow it will outwit.

Our follower wasn’t welcome, not by me, who found him lurking in my thoughts as I would a bilge-damp stowaway. He followed out of hunger, a scavenger tracking sick animals, even though he had no flesh to nourish.

Allen’s shoulders rose as he pulled the sled. I waited until we’d walked another mile, and his shoulders had dropped, to ask what he knew about our follower, even though I knew he’d lie . . .

. . . when again the smell of smoke stained with meat wafted on the road, pressing our skulls, bringing gorge to our throats and the danger we’d vomit the precious scraps we’d wolfed. The smell was a flood-crash of memory that struck us with the feeling we all know when we talk to old friends in dreams, and only remember as they walk away that they’re dead. Had the wind blown another way, Allen and I would now only walk the dreams of friends who’d known us while we lived. We fled the road and the memory the scent brought the same way we had, as small boys, run from what such poisoned air had carried as
sound
: the music of people driven mad by panic and grief, made with the clatter of scrap metal and the blowing of horns made of bones pulled from slaughterhouses and the heaps behind triage centers. The memory of lunatic marches followed us, the way those processions had years ago coursed people and animals that they tore and held aloft as standards, still bleeding and thrashing on pikes, under banks of crematoria smoke.

Allen and I hid the sled behind a rusted van, too panicked to care that our tracks made hiding it futile. We climbed an embankment, our minds packed with ghosts of spinning death-dancers. Our footing on snow and mud, we clung to the barrier rail of what had been a playschool, almost level with snow-buried yard-toys humped like fresh graves, cursing the tracks we left, yet knowing we had to take high ground. We reached a tree that jutted out of the embankment, gaining footing on the barrier rail to climb it in our snow-slick boots. We reached a stout branch, gripping another branch above us for balance with our scabbed hands. We saw along the road for miles . . . and so saw our city dying. Greasy smoke rose like funneling leaf-swarms from what had been factories: the fruits of hunger and weakened immune systems. Perhaps a death-gift from ships that had brought plague along with crops from the southern hemisphere. We clung to the tree, watching as if from a masthead scores of people drowning on land.
Burnthrough
. . . when sickness devours the flesh that fuels it, until no more kindling that has loved and mourned and suffered and walked in God’s image remains for it to burn, and the husks of those who have been scalded by fever and suffocated by the water of their own lungs must themselves be made ash in furnaces.

The smoke was beautiful the way that only things that herald death can be, haloed by swirls of crows we were thankful we couldn’t hear. The smoke lorelei’ed us to sleep, even as it caked our throats with tomb soot. In sleep, there’d be no hunger. No cold. The smoke of our sleep would paint the sunsets of latitudes to which we couldn’t fly over the span of a single day. We couldn’t know whose bodies danced as ash within that smoke, who among those we loved now found homelands in the sky.

In sleep, we could join them. In sleep we’d be warmed by the hearth of dusk. . . .

A sound like a child in pain pulled me from the trance to which the smoke had lulled me. Had I been stronger, alert, I could have better caught Allen as he tried to catch the bird’s nest we’d dislodged. He gripped the higher branch with one hand as I gripped his collar to steady him. I read in his face, as a feeling through my skin, his need to have saved something fragile. We looked at the smashed nest below, and tasted the fragility of our own lives.

Quarantine would be enforced by those with the authority to do so and by panicked homeowners with rifles. After sunset, the city would be shut down. Guns on the roofs and streets. Anyone found on the roads without permits or proof of residency in the hinterlands would be herded, thrown into holding pens to control the spread of sickness, where we’d be certain to contract sickness in our weakened states. We didn’t dare sleep without a fire tonight, yet any squat with a working chimney would be raided or burned or held by squatters better armed and stronger than we; any fire lit outdoors would be shot at from a safe distance. There might be aerial monitoring. And it was too cold to find adequate shelter in one of the rotting houses, little more than lean-tos, far from the roads that were still traveled. Martial law, and vigilante law, could already be enforced in the city to which we had to return tonight, before weakness, starvation and cold killed us while we waited for quarantine to end. I’d read stories about long-ago travelers on roads stalked by the blood-drinking dead, and the dread those travelers felt as they saw the day end. I knew such dread, looking at the long shadows before us as the sun stepped west, and knowing this was likely the last day I’d see.

But I’d not give Justine false reason to hope. Even as a footpad with a shit-smeared soul, having exiled myself from my better self, I’d never betray her. I had no right to the luxury of dying out here, with the money that’d be the salvation of Justine and the others I loved. I hadn’t earned the privilege of sleep, even in death.

There’s a fire that’s snuffed in the plumage of a game bird that’s been shot; it dies before the bird itself does, even while the blood around the quarrel in the bird’s chest is still warm enough to nurture hatchlings. I saw an ember of such a light return to Allen’s eyes, and felt a flush return behind my own eyes. It was like the feeling that pushes into a limb when a tourniquet is cut. All wish to live. Yet to wish is not to
will
. A wish is not a choice that pulls your sinews tight, that wakes the blood in your marrow.

“The Club,” I said softly, as if I spoke with a candle flame before my lips I didn’t want to make flutter, as if I honoured in near-silent
kaddish
the thing I’d just killed. Because the decision to live is a kind of death; it’s the stone-knife sacrifice of the part of you that’d be happy to die. To rest. I gave that part of me what it longed for. It was the Isaac within me to whom I showed no mercy, though since that moment, I’ve felt a trace of Isaac’s brother in my heart: the wanderer, the ever-homeless exile.

“The Club,” I said again, for Allen’s sake and my own. No prayer of mourning can be uttered just once, nor can any cantrip for strength. In a way that could happen at no other time and in no other place, Allen understood what I meant. I saw in his rekindled eyes the mirrored understanding that we should make pilgrimage to a site of atrocity while we dreaded snipers’ bullets, to a place that was a witch’s lair of candy-bread stabbed into reality . . . so that once there, we could make changelings of ourselves.

To walk to The Club was to live a life sustained not by breath and heartbeats but by ruin such as I’d tasted once before, when, with numb hands, I’d clung to the vents of an ice-caked subway car, balancing on the rear coupling as tunnel walls screamed past, proving my manhood to boys who were not my friends . . . and whom I despised in the way we all hate those to whom we feel the need to prove ourselves. Gripping that train, my knuckles about to shatter, the rumble of wheels punching through my boots into my knees and hips, I was then further from death than I was walking through the fallows of ruined houses and looted businesses toward the The Club—the hulk that had been the tinderbox of an isolated, virulent burnthrough that littered the surrounding parking ground with victims killed by wind-like fever and the bullets of panicked sheriffs. I was nearer, because I now waded into the dream-world that borders death as if into a riptide.

The concrete plain around The Club for the stowage of vehicles was cracked as the mosaic of a child’s puzzle. It was visible under the waist-high, sword-sharp canopy of lethal plants above the lot that kept snow off the fractures. The blood of a man walking through and cut by that canopy of leaves would fall to the mosaic in snowy wet clumps with his strides. Jumbled bones lay framed by broken windshields . . . blackened by the fumes of rotting upholstery like scraps in a roasting pan. Other cars, their roofs made smooth-edged by snow, were nests to feral things that had found the marrow of human femurs sweet, and still other vehicles bore the neat bullet holes that kept their would-be drivers forever behind steerage wheels. I don’t know if this harrowed place had called to the razor-leafed bramble that grew out of the pavement. I can’t know, any more than I can palm the smoke of my thoughts, if the bramble knew the dreams of those who still lived nearby, and so answered the enticement to root among the vehicles as it would around a spell-trapped castle. Maybe the bramble—which I’ve seen grow wild around rust-vacant military bases where it had been planted in lieu of barbed wire—had been seeded like hydra’s teeth around the club as a forbidding. What might have been the last minutes we’d know still warm in our bodies were lost hacking bramble to the club door through which we’d have to pass, and there take the elf-glamour that might let us live past moonrise.