the mortis (20 page)

The girl stirs, opening her dark eyes, and she sits up slowly.  She blinks and looks around.  It must be sometime in the early afternoon, maybe two or three o
’clock, and the sun is streaming through the glass of the passenger window, bathing her, and backed by the light this girl could be any girl—just a normal teenage child—waking in the middle of the day, back before everything in the good world burst into fragments.  For a moment you can almost ignore the white mask and the bruises and the under-eye circles and the torn fabric.  The bones boiling up to the skin’s surface.  You almost can.  But then the girl shifts her head and there is a change in the way the light falls on her, and then you understand that you can’t define normal by remembering what the world used to be.  You have to look at what’s in front of you.  This is normal.  This is what a child looks like in the world now, the way it is.

“
This is your stop,” Lee says.  She shuts down the truck. 

“
Can I come with you?” the girl asks.

Lee is ready for the question; she considered it carefully over the last hour. 
“For tonight, yes,” she says.  “Tomorrow, I need to move on.”

“
Okay,” says the girl.

Lee opens the driver
’s door and steps down, scanning the treeline on both sides of the murram.  “I need to put the truck somewhere for the night,” she says.  She points vaguely to the woods.  “Drive it in as deep as it will go.  Cover it up.  That’s what I’m thinking.”

The girl gets out on the passenger side.  She looks around and after a time she nods. 

Together they find a shallow break in the understory of the woods and they set to work on clearing more space.  The girl uses her bare hands.  She’s stronger than she looks; this isn’t her first time performing manual labor, you can tell just by watching her movements.  The way she grips onto low-hanging branches and bears down with her body weight and the wood flexes and splinters.  Afterward the girl gathers armfuls of heavy downfall from the leaf litter.  Load after load.  For her part, Lee uses the bevel of the crowbar to chisel away at the larger limbs until they’re weak enough for the girl to pull loose and drag away.

After a short time they
’ve cleared enough room and Lee backs the truck in.  They camouflage the chassis with everything the girl collected.  They gather the supplies and start the long hike to the beachfront.

When they come to the culvert they stop twenty yards afield, and Lee tells the girl to wait in a grove of tamarind.   She takes out the handgun.  Keeping it pointed to the ground, she steps quietly to the culvert opening.  She aims the muzzle forward and ducks down and pushes in.  Sweeping from end to end, wall to wall.

There
’s no one inside—the truth is that she didn’t really anticipate otherwise.  She lowers the gun.  On the culvert floor, on the side that used to be hers, there is a bag.  A zippered sport duffel.

It
’s unsettling to her, the sight of something so intact and new—unblemished and brightly colored—in the otherwise empty grey space.  She approaches the bag slowly, hunched over.  She kneels and returns the gun to her waistband at the small of her back, and then she unzips the main body.  She spreads the two sides apart.

The interior is filled with foil blister packs and plastic bottles with screw caps, more than a hundred of them.  A medicine for every conceivable ailment and all of the most common insecurities.  A balance of off-the-shelf and prescription.  Tablets, primarily, but when she digs a little she finds an asthma inhaler and two cough syrups, the kind for kids.  There is even a syringe of epinephrine in a snap-lid case.  

Lee zips the bag closed and straightens up as much as the ceiling allows.  She rubs her face, looking out through the culvert opening at the light filtered by the tree canopy, and she thinks about what the duffel means.  This cache of medicine, its singular presence in this dark place.  The reason it was left here for her, and the message it was meant to send.

There
’s no question that her husband brought the meds, no question, which means he did exactly what he told her he would do—he held himself together for long enough to make his way to the hotel, to their suite.  And when he couldn’t find the drugs that belonged to her, he made his way back here with everyone else’s, whatever he could put his hands on, by the looks of the bag.  It’s as though he went through and scoured every single room in the Makoa.  It’s a hell of a haul, almost inconceivable for these threadbare times.  And when he came to the culvert and found that she was gone, he decided to leave it all behind, everything he worked for, directly on the spot where she used to lie. 

There
’s no evidence that he stayed in the shelter for even a single night.  By all appearances, he just dropped the bag here and left.  Which means he could be anywhere by now—he could still be close, and he could be looking for her, either because he thinks she needs him or because he’s figured out what she did, how it was a lie that sent him on his way. 

After a while,
Hanna ducks into the culvert and immediately stops short, staring at Lee.  Her wide eyes over the curve of the mask. 

“
Stop it,” says Hanna.  “You shouldn’t do that.”

Lee tries to answer the
child, but she can’t speak—her mouth won’t respond.  It feels as though the hinges in her jaw are locked, and she quickly realizes the reason: her teeth are engaged, latched onto the flesh of her own forearm.  Embedded, parasite-like.  She manages to unlock her jaw and release her flesh and then she gags, spitting out her own blood.  The punctures on her skin are welling red, running over.

The girl watches her passively. 
“You didn’t know what you were doing, did you.”

Lee spits another time and then wipes her mouth.  She bends down, bracing her hands on her knees.  She shakes her head.

“That’s normal,” the girl says.  “It starts that way.”

“
I’m not sick.”

The girl nods. 
“It’s normal to think that,” she says. 

The girl returns to the grove and brings everything salvaged from the truck back to the culvert.  Extra work shirts that will serve as bedding.  The meager food and water, the tools, the oil, the assorted odds and ends.  There isn
’t much inventory—it only takes the girl one trip to deliver—and by the time Hanna finishes arranging everything, the place doesn’t look much different than it did empty. 

Lee sits down and swabs her arm with one of the alcohol wipes while the girl lectures, going on about the sickness.  She talks with certainty about the progression, the way that the healthy transform into the infirm, each at his own individual pace.  She lists the commonalities, the typical presentation, the symptoms that eventually manifest themselves in every single one of the infected.  Self-consumption.  The implacable reduction of every degree of freedom in the body.  A loss of connectedness.  It may take time, the girl says, but these things happen.  To all of them, these things come about. 

“Seems like you know all there is to know,” Lee says.  She takes one more pass at her skin and tosses the spent pad into the dirt outside the opening.

The girl hesitates. 
“I’ve seen a lot of sick people, up close.  I’ve watched them,” she says.  “I didn’t want to, but I had to.”

“
Why?” Lee says.  “Where the hell were you?”

The girl doesn
’t answer that—she looks around, aimless, at the interior of the culvert, focusing on nothing.  Eventually her eyes settle on the floor at the far end, and her expression abruptly changes.

“
How did you get that,” the girl asks.  She sounds terrified.

“
Get what?”

“
The bag,” says the girl.  She points to the duffel. 

The child explains that she
’s been living with the bag’s owner ever since the islet fell—she doesn’t have any idea how long it’s been.  The man kept her and around ten other women as workers in the Makoa building, and over time he had the place transformed into a kind of compound.  She thinks he’s probably ex-military, but she isn’t sure.  After a short time explaining how things were, the girl doesn’t want to talk about her time in the Makoa anymore.

She tells Lee that another man came to the compound recently looking for medicine.  Not the bad man.  A different one.  It was about a week ago, and the man didn
’t want any medicine for himself; he wanted to find it for his wife.  Are you the wife, the girl asks.  Yes, Lee tells her.  I am the wife.

“
I tried to help,” says the girl, almost proudly.  “I unlocked the door where he was.  And he didn’t know where your medicines were but I did.  I told him.”

Lee doesn
’t say anything.

The girl seems finished with the subject.  She crouch-walks to the duffel and unzips it and starts digging a little.  Her back is to Lee.  When she turns around, she
’s holding a handful of bottles and a clamshell blister pack and the asthma inhaler.  One of the cough syrups is crimped under her arm.

“
Can I keep these?” the girl asks.

Lee looks at her for a moment—this scarecrow child—and then she nods. 
“Sure,” she says. 

The girl seems to smile; the mask rides higher on her face, and her eyes thin out.  She squats and sits cross-legged with the drugs in her lap, and then she starts going over them like they
’re birthday gifts. 

The mask is still riding high. 
“I’m glad he got these to you before they took him,” the girl says.

“
What do you mean?”

“
Before they took him back,” says the girl.

Lee is staring now. 
“So he was taken?  He’s there?”

The child isn
’t even making eye contact.  She’s reading prescription labels.  Murmuring. 

“
Hey.”  Lee snaps her fingers a few times.  “Is he in the Makoa?”

The girl looks up. 
“Sorry.  I think so.  They took him back.  I saw them through the trees.”  She shrugs.  “There wasn’t anything else I could do for him,” she says.  She returns her attention to her lap.  She opens the clamshell pack and starts unfolding the instructional insert. 

In the early evening they take time to build a beach fire on the sand near the treeline.  A shallow pit with a ring of sedimentary stones.  Dry driftwood and ravenala limbs and dead leaves that the child casts over the top like adornments, the final touch.  Lee uses the engine oil and the lighter, and within a few seconds the whole thing is ablaze, churning, but it quickly settles into a low burn.  They sit on opposite sides of the ring.  Lee tells the child that she needs to be ready to run, but if they have to run, not to run back to the shelter.  The first instinct is always to go directly home, but don
’t do that.  Run to the truck, Lee tells her.  That’s the rally point.

They sit together awhile.  There is the guttering sound of the banked fire between them.  Wood cracking.  The surf rolling over and crashing down and spilling, reaching ashore all the way to the wrackline twenty yards downslope from them.  The girl has gone heavy-lidded.  Swaying lightly.  The mask is riding high again. 

It’s become clear that she’s already taken one of the drugs from the duffel, something with an opiate effect—hydrocodone possibly—or maybe the cough syrup was the kind with codeine in it.  What does it matter.  Whatever it was that she took, the child is sedated now—barely present.  Lee gets up and comes around the fire ring to sit next to her, and the girl looks up and blinks a couple of exaggerated blinks but doesn’t say anything. 

They share the rice and chicken from the wrapped foil, and even in the state she
’s in, the child is hungry enough that she readily eats.  Afterward they pass the water bottle back and forth once and then Lee caps it.

The child leans into her.  She
’s not certain whether it’s out of fatigue or a need for comfort, or perhaps the child has simply fallen unconscious, but Lee allows it, whatever the reason.  She puts an arm around the girl, the arm with the wounds.  The child’s face rests against Lee’s shoulder, and when it presses in, the mask starts to ride up, pushing the grey fabric up over the child’s eyes.

“
You don’t have to wear that,” Lee says quietly.  “You can take it off if you want.”

The girl startles a little at the sound of a voice but then her body sinks back. 
“I do have to,” she says.  “I have to.”  She is slurring her words even more than normal. 

“
I’m not sick,” Lee says.

The girl tries to nod. 
“I know you don’t think you are.”

Lee pauses for a few beats, then continues. 
“But even if I was, I don’t think it would help you.”

The girl lifts her head from Lee
’s shoulder.  The mask is still askew, blocking half her vision.  “It’s not for that,” she says, slurring.  She cups the mask in both hands and lifts it clear of her mouth and nose.  Allowing full view of her face in the cast of firelight.  “He makes us cover up the things he did,” she says.

The girl fades quickly after that.  Her head is falling to her chest, jerking back and falling again.  Eyes closed.  Lee gets to her feet and starts pitching handfuls of sand onto the remains of the fire.  When the glow is gone, she gathers up the supplies they brought with them.  She keeps one hand free, available, for the gun. 

“Come on,” Lee says.  She nudges the girl gently with a foot.  “We need to get back.”  Lee glances up at the sky.  “I can’t carry you, sweetheart, you have to get up.”

The girl opens her eyes. 
“You shouldn’t go,” she murmurs.

“
We have to.  We can’t stay out here.”

“
No,” says the girl.  “I mean the Makoa.  You shouldn’t.”  The child’s eyes are half-lidded but the gaze is fixed on another place.  Head swaying.  “I know you’re thinking of it.”

Lee doesn
’t say anything. 

The girl goes on. 
“Think of him as gone,” she says.  “Because he is.”

Lee ignores her.  She hooks her free hand under the girl
’s thin arm and tries pulling her up.  “Come on.  Stand,” she says.  Her tone is starting to harden.  “Stand.  We have to go.  I can’t do this for you.”

The girl finally struggles to her feet.  Unsteady but upright.  She looks at Lee. 
“Where your husband is, you wouldn’t like being there,” she says. 

“
Walk.  I’ll leave you if you don’t.  I’m done begging.”

The child doesn
’t budge from where she stands.  “I know you want to go.  I know you’re thinking of it.”

Lee lets go of the girl.  She shakes out her hand and exhales, long and hard, trying to calm herself.  She glances up at the sky again, at the gathering storm, and she closes her eyes.  The child is wrong about her.  Everything the child said, it
’s all wrong.  That’s the problem.  The child is describing how she should feel and what she should think, but the child is wrong.  Up to this point, when Lee thought about her husband, when she imagined where he was—far away, unable to drag her along on his descent—she felt relieved.