White Horse (27 page)

“What’s in the sack, Zoe? Can you show me?”

Penitent and afraid, I kneel before him, the bleeding sack a guilty offering. “Are you sure?”

“Show me.”

His is a command wrapped in silk, but an order nonetheless. Somewhere deep in my soul a gong strikes; I have no choice but to obey.

Stiff fingers untie the knot binding the lab coat. The fabric is soaked with blood and sticks to the contents. Wet red cotton peels away from the cold flesh inside.

Meat. Just like beef or pork or lamb. The lie that dams the bile in my stomach. If I stop and think about where it came from, I will run screaming from this room.

Meat. Just like the supermarkets used to stock.

Nick inhales. I close my eyes and wait. He doesn’t state the obvious, doesn’t ask the stupid question. He can see the coat contains a severed head, so he doesn’t need to underscore and bold.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Whose is it? Does anyone need medical attention?”

I shake my head. Just meat, Zoe. Chicken and ham. “He was dead already. I was following instructions.”

“Whose?”

“His.” I nod at the just-meat-maybe-turkey. “George Pope.”

He sits. Processes. Then he asks why. And I tell him how Pope was afraid that he’d rise in death.

“Do you believe he would have?”

“I have to.” Otherwise I chopped off his head for nothing.

Nick pulls a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. Without looking at me, he begins to scratch words onto the page.

I look at him. “You’re making a shopping list.”

“I’m making a list.”

“A list.”

For ten more beats of my heart—I tick them off—he scribbles, then pockets the pad.

“I’m going to help you. That’s what I’m here for.”

“I’m fine. I can deal alone.”

He crouches in front of me, wraps the head so it’s no longer staring up at us.

“We might all get our fill of alone. Take companionship while you can, Zoe. I’m reaching out my hand. Don’t slap it away.”

Nick and I are not done.

Jesse makes the front page
that day—and the second. The
United States Times
has turned him into a different-bad person. A villain. A criminal who tried to pin the blame on a company committed to saving us from, not just this disease, but a whole host of ills.

That night a preacher from the South gives the disease a name that rolls easily off tongues and sticks inside heads.

“This disease is a white horse coming to claim the sinners. The end isn’t nigh, it’s
here
.” He speaks to an audience of dying millions where his words find purchase and flourish.

White Horse. It gallops amongst us.

DATE: NOW

A week passes before I
can walk more than a few steps without my vision fading to black. During that time I eat better than I have since before the war. These fringe people are smarter than the rest of us. Forced to exist on the periphery of society, they’ve developed skills suburbanized people allowed to devolve. They grow what they eat. Each member of their clan performs tasks to help the whole. While the rest of us were mourning junk food, they kept on doing what their people have done for generations. Cogs in a simple, elegant machine.

Another week passes before I seek out Yanni. I don’t believe the
Swiss survived. He can’t have. Unless my mind fabricated his death so I’d go to my grave victorious.

“What does the man look like?” I ask the boy.

If he thinks my request is strange, he doesn’t show it. Every word is a chance to show off his English skills.

“He is”—Yanni waves a hand over his head—“white. His hairs is white. Not like old man. Like a movie star.”

It’s the Swiss; it has to be. I don’t know how he survived, what Gypsy magic they wove. I don’t know how I failed.

“Blond,” I say with a thick, numb tongue. “We call that color blond.”

He tries the word on for size. “Blond.”

“I want to see … my husband.” A gallstone, bitter and bilious, rolling around my mouth.

Two women come, both clad in tie-dyed T-shirts and tiered skirts that hang like tired draperies. They talk to the boy, stare openly at me without social propriety. To them I am a curiosity, both a foreigner and an outsider.

“Is he alive?” I say. Please let him be dead. Although it goes against everything I believe, and makes me a little less human, I want that to be true. Can I still look myself in the eye?

“He is not good,” the boy says.

“I need to see him.”

“Okay, I will take you.” His arm links through mine. Stronger than he looks. Wiry. We go slow.

A man cuts across our path wheeling a barrow heaped with watermelons. It’s warm here. Feels like high summer. A caterpillar of sweat hunches across my upper lip. I can’t help but wonder what the weather is like at home. Although it no longer exists, home stands still in my memory, a monument to what it was before the fall. My heart has been rubbed raw with steel wool. Words need to come out of my mouth, and soon; otherwise I’m going to lose it. I swallow. My throat stings with the big gulp of clean air.

“There are lots of people here.”

“Yes. Many people.”

“Did they get sick?”

A pause as he translates on the fly. “Some. Not as many as the city.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It is life. Many of my people die young.”

Corrugated iron walls and roofs form makeshift mansions. Maybe fifty in all. Nothing that couldn’t be broken down easily enough and hitched to the back of a donkey. The Roma have livestock. They congregate untethered at the edge of this shanty town, smart enough to stay close to food they don’t have to gather themselves.

Yanni’s boot-clad feet halt outside a shack slapped with white paint. “Your husband is in here.” He tugs my sleeve as I stumble toward the door. “He is not good.”

I’m a shit lying to this boy. But I make it right inside my head, tell myself they chose to believe this. They assumed the Swiss and I were together. A lie of omission. They were there, they saw him bleed. They could have gone the other way, seen the truth, that I cut him to save myself. To bring him to break bread with the Reaper.

The boy hangs back, lets me enter the building alone. It’s a cracker box room with a thin curtain bisecting the space. The room stinks of blood and shit and piss and death.

Foot by laborious foot toward the curtain. He’s back there, that Swiss bastard. His boots jut past the flimsy fabric. They do not move.

I hope he is dead, or at least close enough to tumble over that edge into the long sleep.

My fingers jerk back the curtain and there he is. I half expect him to leap up from that military cot and strangle me, but he doesn’t. His eyeballs perform a vigorous ballet under the thin membranes. His chest rises and falls rapidly; his breathing is shallow. Parchment skin stretches across the planes of his face. He’s a parody of himself carved in damp wax. Not so male now. Not so intimidating. All the bite leached from his bark. Across his throat a poultice sips the infection from his body, but the area is raw and red. The infection has taken hold. Death creeps.

Too slow.

I’ve tried so hard to be good, to stay human enough to recognize myself in those quiet moments when it’s just me and the voices inside my head. But the gods of this land are either testing me or telling me something, because they’ve placed a thin pillow covered in striped fabric just inches from my hand.

Do it
, they’re saying.
Snuff him. Take him outta the human race before he gets another shot at you
. My fingers twitch with want.

Ladies and gentlemen, the parade marches through my head. Theme: Thirty Years of Yearning. On the first float a pony stands, its saddle so polished that all my other desires reflect back at me: Cowgirl Barbie with Dallas the horse; just one more chocolate-frosted cupcake; red shoes, like Dorothy; impossibly high heels; a Trans Am; a Ferrari; Sam; a good education; and then Nick— only Nick. On the last float, the Swiss takes his final breath and exits the world stage left.

The pillow is in my hands, then it’s not, then it is again. My hands keep changing the game. So easy to wipe him out. One firm, enduring press and there would be one less thing to worry about. A rectangle of salvation. All I have to do is act.

But … but …

Lay the pillow across his face and lean as I would on a ledge. Easy. Pretend the tin wall is a shop window filled with unbroken things. Mentally, I could tally the coins in my pocket and choose one thing as a treat for coming this far, while the Swiss finally climbs off the fence and chooses death.

Inside me, tectonic plates clash and collide, scraping at each other, wrestling for dominance. To kill or not to kill? That is my question, my imaginary friends. I push the pillow away from me, release it from my tight embrace, lower it onto the Swiss’s sweat-slicked face. The stopwatch starts in my head. I need three minutes, maybe four.

Thirty seconds. His hands twitch at his sides as he tries to suck air and gets nothing but cotton for his effort.

One minute. A struggle. Jerking shoulders. Snapping knees.

Two minutes. The Reaper chews a breath mint, shoots his cuffs, primes himself for seduction.

Then my baby kicks, swift and hard, right where it counts.

The anger dies. A disappointed Reaper slinks away, toting his blue balls. I’m tired, I want to rest, I want to go home and find my family still alive and raise my child with Nick. I don’t want to have to kill to survive.

The Swiss isn’t coming back. There was no real fight in his movements, just the herky-jerky reactions of a brain stem with enough power
left to simultaneously breathe and piss his pants. He’s already dead, it’s just that nobody’s bothered to deliver the bad news.

“I don’t know how the fuck you’re still alive, you bastard. But if you don’t die, I promise I will kill you.”

Yanni is still waiting outside, cigarette dangling from his lip. A little kid playing at being a man. I want to snatch the cigarette from his mouth, tell him to be a child awhile longer, because being an adult isn’t always fun. Hard choices have to be made. Battles need to be fought. Struggle is inevitable. Then I look around and see this is no place to be a kid. It’s a hard world encapsulated in a brutal new world. Being an adult before his time might just save his life.

The boy rushes to steady me.

“He is not your husband. No?”

“No.”

“I did not think this is true.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“No. I hear everything and no one says nothing. They say he is a dead man.”

“Good.”

“Is he a bad man?”

“Worse.”

He leads me back to my own bed. I don’t look back. If I do, I might race to the building and finish what I started. I want to. I don’t want to.

If he leaves that bed, I will kill him. Can I look myself in the eye if I do that?

I think I can.

DATE: THEN

Nick watches me for cracks
. I watch him for pleasure when he’s not looking. Life has changed him, scraped away any softness he once had, so that he’s all hard edges. If we two were strangers passing in the street, I’d hold my purse a little tighter while checking him out.

“I’m not crazy.”

“I know,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Are you sleeping?”

His fingers are long and thick, even curled around a pen. Capable hands. Safe hands. I wonder how they’d feel cupping my ass, tearing off my clothes, holding my legs up over his broad shoulders. How would he look holding our children? Dangerous thoughts anytime, but now more than ever.

“Zoe?”

“Some.”

“Do you dream?”

“No.”

He knows. It’s in the set of his jaw, the steel in his eyes. He knows when I lie.

“I dream about Pope. Fifty times a night I lift that ax and let it fall. His head bounces. Not like a ball. Have you ever dropped a melon?”

“Sure. Once or twice.”

“It’s like that.”

“How do you feel when you wake up?”

My face burns. “Like shit. How do you think I feel?”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Feelings are healthy.”

“I’m
not
crazy. But if I’m not crazy, why do I feel like I am?”

Sometime later, Morris says, “He
wants you.”

Steam rises from the two coffee cups between us.

“I’m not going to risk loving him.”

“Who said anything about love?”

“What else is there?”

She laughs. “You want him, too.”

I slurp my coffee, fill my mouth with piping hot liquid so I can’t say, “I do.”

Moving into the old boarding
school is merely a formality. Nick and Morris help me carry the few things I can’t live without. Clothing,
important papers, the plain gold band Sam slid onto my finger on our wedding day. I almost never think of him now and it shames me. I could tell Nick, but I don’t want him to see me naked. My soul is not a newspaper to be read.

I claim a room on the second floor as mine. A space that has never known the jar.

DATE: NOW

In a world full of
death, things are still born: legends, myths, horror stories. The imaginations of men don’t need to toil hard to create terror in these times.

The moon is a narrow slit once more. She waxes and wanes, oblivious to the planet beneath her. She is an absent guardian and a fickle friend, one who tugs the tides and denies she’s made of green cheese.

At night, the Roma congregate around the campfires. Meat and vegetables bubble over the naked flames. A lone accordion holds the night’s feral sounds at bay. After the meal, the music becomes infectious—

White Horse, coming right for us
.

—flitting from body to body until most join in the song. When the song changes, voices drop out and others rise up to take their places. These are people who’ve never heard of karaoke or
American Idol
; they sing for love, for expression, to nourish their souls.