the mortis (6 page)

It
’s the same reaction he had during his first encounter alone with one of the diseased coming at him headlong, over-bold.  He remembers it was a woman, that first time.  Pink-pale, somewhere in her fifties or sixties.  She burst from a hotel stairwell with her teeth bared, and he remembers that he allowed her to reach him, to take hold, and then he stumbled backward, keeling.  The weight of her years spent on this earth, her execrable breath, the inertia she so easily bore along, her dominion, he remembers all of it.  The way she straddled his chest and then immediately bit down hard on her own forearm and how the blood fell onto him.  He remembers her expression.  She looked as if she felt almost apologetic about her actions but didn’t know how to do anything else, as though this was simply her reflex, fast-twitch, the result of her own procedural learning.

The man is hurtling down the beachfront—this stripped-down scarecrow papered over with a pallid dermis—advancing toward him.  The yawning orifice and the voided eyes.  Twenty-five yards, fifteen maybe.   

As Park stands, waiting motionless, he sees his wife stepping into his field of view.  After all this time, she is still able to surprise him like this.  She is still able to eclipse his perspective like this, to take over.  Her movements are sure, like always.  She positions herself so that the entirety of her body is between him and the pale man and she plants her feet.  The white sand caves under her shoes, conceding, and her form is delineated sharply against the bleached ground.  She is holding the cleaver low.  He recognizes the inflection of her shoulder blades through the thin flannel fabric. 

She has committed herself now.  But Park knows her well enough to know that she is nowhere near as confident as she puts on.  Inside, she isn
’t sure that she can carry this thing off—dueling, bringing a blade to bear against a rampaging animal.  Even after all she’s seen and done out here, she still isn’t sure she can accept the sooth of the wild mantra: it is always permissible to cut your predator down.  Always.  The idea is still distasteful to her somehow; she believes that the notion of an automatic survival instinct has been largely overblown.  According to her, it isn’t all just natural instinct.  There also has to be at least some small part of you that is convinced of the value of maintaining your own life.  You have to be certain of its worth, and in the end it is so difficult to be truly certain of anything.

When the devil is in range
, Lee swings the cleaver.  In spite of any doubts she may have, she chooses to.  The cleaver goes from her right to her left, crossways, and she puts her weight forward as her arm travels.  The devil doesn’t see it coming or doesn’t care, one or the other, and he shambles directly into the keen. 

The blade enters at nose-level and thuds into his skull at the occipital, and immediately the blood erupts from him, spraying out.  His head is nearly halved at its equator.  If you spend enough time in the wild, you
’ll learn: the pith of a man is not so far removed from the pith of fruit.  It cuts nearly the same, especially at velocity.  The man stumbles past her, takes a few halting steps and falls heavily into the sand at Park’s feet.       

You begin to understand the progression of the disease after a short time.  Its indications and its contraindications, their distribution.  The way that the symptoms chain together reliably in a given system to present a recognizable condition.  It doesn
’t take very long—soon you know more than you want to—and the learning happens without any conscious effort.  You learn through your constant, forced exposure to the afflicted.  You learn through the simple observations you make while trying to survive your daily encounters with them.  All you have to do is keep breathing.  Keep on.  Then you turn around one day and suddenly realize that you’ve become a latter-day expert in the pathology of the ruling disease.  You know the disorder so well that you’re no longer certain where it starts and where you end.

It is night and Lee is writhing ne
xt to him in the dark shelter, her fists wringing the hotel sheet.  She is screaming out and he is trying to quiet her, to help her breathe through it, but it’s like telling dry leaves to stay motionless against a gale.  On her forehead there is a damp strip of fabric torn from the hemline of his undershirt—puckered and threadbare and darkened all the way down to grey.  Soot-streaked.  For a moment he looks at the scrap of undershirt plastering the brow of the woman thrashing in front of him.  Is that even still a word?  Undershirt?  Once you’ve lost every article of clothing that was once worn over it?

She
’d fallen ill not long after they left the beachface, after she struck down the sick man.  This was the illness that she came here with—sickle cell anemia—not anything new, and so the signs she’s showing are oddly comforting.  They remind Park of being home. 

During the short hike back to the shelter, she first went stiff-legged and lockjawed, drooling, and soon after that she began gasping for air and gripping tightly onto her left wrist.  She had to take several breaks, doubling over and heaving, almost theatrical.  Her fingers were kinked and bowed into a rheumatic snarl, and after a time he had to pick her up and carry her.  This episode, this crisis, had been a long time coming.  They were lucky she
’d held out as long as she had, given their never-ending dehydration and the new default norm of elevated anxiety and the constant, futile running from one dire circumstance to the next one. 

“
Look at me,” Lee says.

He does.  The pallor of her skin—her lips—is deep-set.  Perspiration is beading on her body like condensation against cold plastic.  She
’s been in acute crisis for the better part of the last hour, and this is the first blessed lull.

“
I don’t think I can do it,” she says.

“
It’s okay.  I know.”

“
I need something.”

“
I know,” Park says.  He tips water from the soda bottle onto the cloth and reapplies it, but he knows that’s not what she wants right now.  What she wants is her prescriptions, the ones she left back in their hotel room in the Makoa.  “I can get them.”

“
I’m sorry,” she says.  “I’m so sorry I need it.”

“
We knew this might happen.”

Lee shakes her head from side to side.  Her eyes are closed. 
“If anything goes wrong, just come back.  Leave them.  Just run.”

“
Hey, hey.  Stop,” he says.  “I can do this.”

She nods. 
“Okay.  I know you can.”

“
So it’s the folic, naproxen, drox.  The vicodin.”

“
All of it,” she says.  “Just bring it all.  Everything should be in the brown pouch, the zippered one.  I think I put it back in the suitcase.”

He takes her hand. 
“I can do this,” he says.

They sleep fitfully, and when
Park can see dawn light he decides to go.  He puts together the essentials, packing light.  He shoulders the satchel and then he lays the meat hatchet and the water bottle in the dirt next to her.  The blade is still bloodied and the bottle is only a quarter full.  She tells him to be careful.  I’m sorry, she says.  I’m sorry for doing this to you.  He tells her it’s fine.  Everything will be okay.  I’ll be back soon, he says.

He climbs out of the shelter and starts to reposition the masking boughs over the opening, aligning a group of them in a straight row.  Laying each branch down starting from
the left and moving rightward, one beside the other, as she watches him.  When the warp structure is complete, he begins pitching limbs across the facade at irregular angles.  The presentation has to look natural, which means disarrayed. 

He takes up armfuls of leaf litter and scatters them over the veneer.  Arranging, filling in blank spaces he finds.  The process feels almost funereal, as though he
’s performing a ritual before sealing her in permanently.  Before he finishes, he puts his face up to the last breach in the barricade, and he tells her he’ll be back soon but not to wait up.  Don’t leave the light on for me, he says, but she doesn’t even crack a smile.  The lower half of her face is completely obscured.  The last thing he sees is her eyes looking up at him from the dark interior. 

On their last evening at home, they packed for the trip here.  All of the lights in the bedroom were on.  The drawers were open and the garment bag was hooked over the top rail of the closet door.  Their flight was scheduled for the following morning, and it was later than they meant to pack, which was normal for them. 

He remembers that his wife was holding her various lists of things.  Her printed-out brochures from the hotel website.  A currency exchange rate table, as if it made any difference.  She had her carry-on suitcase unzipped on top of the bed, and the cat had gotten itself inside, like it always did.  She set down the lists and picked over the fabric of her dinner dress with a lint roller, and when she finished she peeled away the used tape and then packed the lint roller, which was a normal thing for her to take along. 

She put the medications in last.  He saw her drop the brown zippered pouch into a sleeve made of elastic webbing stitched against the inner wall of the carry-on.  And according to her, the pouch is still inside the suitcase, and the suitcase is still inside their suite at the resort, in the Makoa building, resting on the fold-out stand next to the bedside. 

After leaving the culvert, Park returns to the beachfront.  From where he stands at the treeline, he can see the body of the felled man near where the surf leaves off.  Pale skin against pale sand and the red liquid coronating the broken skull.  A swarm of blowflies and sand gnats lift into the air and circle madly before settling again on the back of the still body. 

Park scans the shore in both directions, and there is no movement other than the incoming wavefronts and the cormorants and petrels, airborne on the currents of the tradewinds, idling above.  Gulls on the ground jockeying over a beach position.  He reaches into the satchel and pulls out the sheathed knife, just to hold it.

Carefully, he lowers himself onto the outer berm and pauses, watching—scanning the treeline on both sides.  For a while he just holds still and listens, but there’s no audible sound other than the advent of breakers onshore and the wisping of liana palm fronds, sinuous.  The beachfront is abandoned.  He starts walking toward the water, into the open, still scanning around him. 

Park stops at the collection of mounted watercraft on the long rack.  He works the knife in between his belt and waistband, and then he reaches up and hauls down one of the kayaks, a sea-tourer around ten feet long, meant for one person.  Blue green, yellow detailing.  He lets it fall onto the sand.  He tries out a few double-blade paddles, hefting them, getting a feel, and after he
’s chosen one, he leashes it to the kayak coaming with a five-foot nylon tether. 

He tosses a blue lifejacket into the open cockpit.  He takes hold of the bungee deck-rigging and starts dragging the kayak down the beachface.  As he approaches the water, he is watching for the body he pulled out of the surf yesterday morning.  The rescued remains.  He doesn
’t see them where he thought they would be.

There
’s no easy way to get back to Resort Lavelha from here.  It’s a spectrum, really, but every choice on the spectrum is pretty near the difficult end.  The problem isn’t distance.  The resort complex itself isn’t very far as the crow flies—this beach practically adjoins it, separated from the main resort beach by nothing but a rugged stone outcropping.  The problem is access.  The routes across are impassable ever since the Collapse. 

There used to be a paved footpath that ran between this beach and that beach but it
’s been barricaded, choked off at one of the narrow bottlenecks.  It was a handful of survivors—all of them dead and gone now—who constructed the barricade out of a mound of beach chairs and drink tables and fallen trees hauled out from the nearby groundcover, everything piled together and woven through with a decarya plant’s thorny brambles.  A few boulders at the base to serve as an undergird.  Makeshift, but strong enough.  The survivors were hoping to secure this position at some point during the first weeks, not sure of the reason exactly.  The barrier doesn’t do much besides make it more difficult to gather resources from the hotel proper, now that the outlying buildings have been picked clean.  The only thing the builders really accomplished was to cut off their own ingress. 

Park could choose to head through the
woods down to the main road—the murram, they call it.  Unpaved dirt track, nothing too finished or pretty.  It’s been packed down with crushed stone to keep the dust from kicking up to intolerable levels, but that’s all.  The murram runs the entire breadth of the islet, slicing from Cãlo through La Sielve all the way to the north side, over fifty miles.  It dead-ends right here at Resort Lavelha, and this is the only way to access the forward-facing portions of the hotel complex. 

So, in theory, he could cut southeast on foot through the trees for a mile or so until he linked up with the murram, and he could follow it northward, let it funnel him straight past the security gates to the main entrance.  Just walk right into the resort
’s front lobby like he’s checking in.  But there’s a problem with that route: ever since the collapse, you can’t use the murram to access the hotel from the front because it passes straight through the heart of the Trap first.  This means you’d have the resident fossa population nipping at your heels, which effectively takes this option off the table.  In a vehicle, it might be one thing, but never on foot.      

Which leaves him with one other option: rowing this boat.  It
’s the last, best choice out of a bad lot.  Head about a thousand yards seaward to the shelf break, then run parallel to the coastline and navigate around the stone breakwater.  Turn the corner and swing inland.  Row the thousand yards back to shore and pull up on the main resort beachfront and hope that it’s empty. 

Park is cinched up inside of a neoprene spraydeck in the cockpit.  He draws the blades evenly through the tidewater, along one flank then the other, cyclic, metrical.  Starboard, port.  He is coursing northward through a small recessed cove etched out of the cliffside, shielded from the hard surf by a few outcropping formations, on his way out to open sea.  The craft skims across the placid shallows.  The only sounds are of his breathing and of the distant wave cycle.  Water guttering from fiberglass.  The sun is high enough now to turn everything candescent. 

He pauses, resting his arms.  He lets the kayak stream forward of its own accord.  Gliding off.  He sets the paddle down across the deck coaming and looks out at the seabed beneath the hull on all sides.  Antiseptically clear water—he can see all the way through to the sanded shelf of the seafloor.  Its screed of corals and polyps and cardinal fishes and spiked urchins and tropical wrasses, all of the littoral yellows and oranges and reds and violets.  The flickering movement and the billowing. 

It
’s hard to look away from it—the calm, the normality—so he doesn’t try to.  He watches a black rock face encrusted with white mollusks, exposed to the open air, deluged, and then laid bare, endlessly recurrent.  The holdfasts of kelp, their blades buoying on the sea surface.  After a while he can’t look anymore, and he closes his eyes.  He puts his face in his hands.

Park has to force himself to leave the cove.  He pushes on.  The kayak passes the boundary line demarcated by a stone outcropping and enters the choppy outer waters of the bay.  The wind is gusting.  The hull lifts and lowers.  He steers directly into the wavefronts, going from high crest to low trough, trying to time his strokes with the mass moving under him.  Assailing the waters with both blades.  One flank to the other.  Starboard, port, repeat. 

He is running parallel to a towering stone embankment on his right, and he can see the tip of the headland in front of him, the cape.  A jagged projection stabbing into the frothed surf.  Just off to the front of the cape there is a range of rock spires jutting from the water’s surface, and they’ll offer a degree of shielding from the worst of the waves, so he decides to wind his way through them rather than heading further out into open water.  He plots the course and pulls hard right.  Bombarding.  His heaviest draw strokes.  Digging the blade in on the right flank.  Again and again, hacking away wildly, full-blooded.