Alexandria (43 page)

Lia screams as the snake jolts at them again, shooting from the debris like a forced projectile, straight toward her throat. She swipes the spear shaft at the yawning mouth that hurtles toward her and swats it sharply. The blow sends it off course and it splashes into the muddy water headfirst, with the tail sliding up and over the skiff. Lia pierces it on the soft underbelly as it submerges and a trail of snake blood dribbles across her lap.

They reach the mouth and surge forth into the open, and Jack rows like he has a race to win. Lia kneels with her back pressed to his and looks bleakly over the crimson spear tip toward the darkened cloverleaf. A flash of green catches her eye and she lets out a crisp shriek just as a fat toad lurches into the water. She exhales slowly.

“How’s your leg?”

“It could be worse. You okay?”

“Yes,” she says with awe, adrenaline still coursing through her. “I am.”

They trade places so Jack can tend to himself, and Lia takes up the ore and guides them down the lazy waterway, through the heart of the swampland metropolis. The old, corroded ruins lean over in the same general direction as if they were blown outward. Lia curves between skewed posts and beams and they enter a vast circular cesspool, sparsely vegetated and devoid of fallen buildings altogether. They have reached the epicenter. The steady hum of the swamp echoes distantly and a strange quiet befalls them. She arcs around the outer perimeter and rows to the far side, where the rubble now lay in the opposite direction like windblown weeds. They pass several crooked side-passages and finally reach an inlet to the cavernous main channel, and they follow its slowly curving path throughout the afternoon.

Quick shapes rustle in the thickets and abscond away before Jack or Lia can glimpse them. They glance around uneasily and plow forward. Already the wetlands are marinating in dusk and Jack begins to worry they will not make it across before sundown.

“I’m starving,” he says, “do we have anything left?”

“We ate the last of it.”

He settles back in the stern and keeps watch, his belly grumbling. They have nothing to drink except rancid bog water, and they are both covered from head to toe with rosy insect bites that itch and tingle. The mudbars are overgrown and rife with snakes and crawlers, and offer no dry land on which to camp. If nightfall comes, they will have no choice but to sleep in the skiff.

“Jack, we’re blocked off.”

Lia raises the dripping ore and they coast along with the current. The watery thoroughfare is closed off with a scaffolding of fallen debris, heaped before them like a mountainous junkyard.

“We’re gonna have to go around,” says Jack, hating the words as he speaks them. He recalls Thomas’s warning—
keep on the main course
. “There,” he says, pointing at a narrow inlet that branches off the wide channel.

She makes for it cautiously. The little passage envelops them, walled in by trees and rickety constructions laced over with weeds, and the drone of cicadas grows so loud it drowns out all other noise.

“Look for a way back around,” he says, scouting over her shoulder.

Lia peers into the shady alcoves, searching for a line that cuts straight through. Pale, white shapes are caught up in the tangles of foliage and she squints to make out their details. A deer’s skull, wrapped in twisted branches, twin horns projecting outward. The whip-like skeleton of a snake, braided together with slinky strands of ivy. Fragments of ribs and bent leg joints, all fastened high up on the surrounding structures with much deliberation.

“Skulls, Jack…”

“Keep going. We gotta find a way out of here.”

As they venture forward, the skeletal fragments become commonplace fixtures, hanging from every surface like holiday ornaments. A sagging branch juts out over the water with three white orbs suspended by brittle fibers. They sway and spin lazily on their tethers, slowly rounding their hollow eyes toward the skiff. Human skulls. The mandibles have fallen away, and Jack and Lia peer up inside the dark braincasings as they float underneath.

Lia’s hands shake the ore and Jack reaches around to steady her grip, and together they row toward a bleak offshoot on the right-hand side of the prow. They maneuver the claustrophobic crooks and curves, pushing away from the high piles of greenery and concrete. Bones run the length of it.

“Did Thomas tell you about this?”

“Nothing,” says Jack. “That junk must’ve fallen recent.”

“No more luck.”

“Don’t say that.”

A soft patter draws their eyes toward the muddy bank. A branch snaps across the other bank and they swivel their heads furiously and see nothing. Jack’s skin glosses with sweat as he realizes that some entity in the swamp now stalks them.

A towering slab leans out over their path, looking as if it might topple at any moment, and a complete skeleton dangles from its top edge, stitched together at the joints like a gruesome marionette. Jack and Lia duck into the hull and still the bony feet scrape across their backs as they pass. The slender concourse weaves them toward an open patch where the vegetation has been all but stripped away. An altar of bones lay situated at the center, comprised of remains from every kingdom—pieces of human and animal rearranged to form some new creature, wholly unknown in the natural order, with multiple arms and appendages reaching out, mantis-like, as if to clutch the two and feed them into its ribcage mouth.

Furtive scrabblings issue from the surrounding marsh and become profuse. They row with throbbing arms, daylight fading fast. A fallen tree drives them into a narrow culvert and the ore scrapes along the sides as they paddle through it.

A spray of water erupts and a patchwork net of old vines closes around their craft and capsizes them. In an instant, they are underwater and fighting against the braided cords tangled around their arms and legs. Jack fetches a quick gasp of air before being dragged back under. He wheels around and catches Lia by the arm and pulls her to him, and they plant their feet in the mud and push their faces back above the surface.

Naked figures, sallow and filthy, lurch toward them from the bank. Deep-sunk black eyes leer out from their lumpen heads as they gather the netting and cinch it around the two struggling bodies they’ve caught.

The spear bobs on the surface next to Lia and she grasps it and holds it protectively to her body. Jack plunges underwater and claws at the mud, searching for his machete. In the opaque froth, he slices his hand on the blade then feels around for the hilt. The vulgar, emaciated figures tread skittishly around the bank, holding rocks and stones in their bony fingers. Lia jabs at them with the spear tip, and they commence to stoning them from all sides. Jack cuts an opening in the net and pushes through as heavy rocks thump off his arms and back.

Once free, they slog downstream a few paces, their feet suctioning in the mire. A stone clips off Lia’s knee and she hobbles into the filthy water. Jack swings the blade at one of the wiry freaks and it jerks backwards and falls. He lunges and runs him through, and a wretched wail belches out of the thing’s mutant mouth. He hauls Lia to her feet, amidst a bevy of flying rocks, and they break for the bank. Clammy hands grasp at them, tearing their clothes from their bodies. The battery of miscreations encircles them, shying only when the spear or blade is thrust out. They look like inhuman things, birthed from the very filth of the swamp.

“Stay behind me,”
says Jack.

He pushes back the horde, flashing the blade before him like a propeller, severing their fingers and carving gouges in their flesh, and still they persist. They close in on Lia and she fights a frenetic tug-of-war to hold onto her spear. They knock her to the ground and Jack wheels around and chocks the blade into to the long, bluish neck of the one that felled her. Blood spouts onto its kin and they pounce, licking at it and chewing the rubbery flesh.

While Jack is turned, helping Lia, two cold hands slip a length of vine around his neck and twist. He gasps and drops the machete, then drives an elbow into the torso of the thing, sending it backwards, and kicks it into the culvert. He grabs Lia and his blade and they crawl higher up the rise, into a thickening confusion of vegetation. Lia’s struck knee is engorging with fluid and she leans her weight on the spear shaft and climbs while Jack fights off their pursuers.

Smaller figures, child forms, follow in the wake of the mayhem and snatch up the cleaved fingers and chunks of flesh and gnaw on them ravenously.

From the higher ground, Jack gains the advantage and levels his gore-coated blade at their throats. They hiss and shriek and slap at it like cornered animals. Lia pushes her way through the brush and Jack backsteps after her, parrying against the onslaught. Only the most voracious give chase, snapping at them with putrid mouths full of rotten teeth.

They forge deeper into the thick. Three pale wraiths tear after them, while the rest of their sickly brood seem content to stay behind and eat their own dead. The swamp floor is a tangle of pitfalls and Lia struggles to stay upright on her burning knee. A false step sinks her foot into a reed-covered pool of water and she topples backwards. Jack stands off against two of their attackers, and the third lunges into the thicket of reeds after Lia. She sloshes frantically onto her back and raises the spear like a mast, bracing it against her side, and the hungry form impales itself with a terrifying shudder. The blue-white body slides down the length of the shaft, pinning her in the briny muck. It exhales its final breath on the hollow of her neck, hot and rancid.

Jack watches in horror as bloodied hands grasp the blade of his machete and attempt to wrench it away from him. He twists the blade and slices the hands away, then runs the sharpened tip into the thing’s stomach and a burst of red and jaundiced vitals issues from the jagged opening. He spins crazily, searching for the others, and panics when he sees no one, not even Lia.

“Where are you?”

“Here,”
comes her muffled cry.

He walks toward her soft voice and a wretched heap of flesh and limbs and clicking teeth crashes into him. Cold, ravenous fingers dig into his face and eyes. Jack recoils and flails his arms out, his skin rippling from the ghastly sensation of being touched by those hands. He belts the thing across the jaw and it flinches momentarily, then dives for him again. Jack brings his knee to his chest and digs his heel into its midsection, then rolls back and throws it over him. It lands with a wet slap and Jack crawls atop it and throttles it with his bare hands. Whoops and shrieks abound from the bone altar on the other side of the mudbar and he looks up from his strangulation to spy out any more oncomers. In the darkening swamp, he can’t tell one shadow from the next. When the thing is dead, he rises and searches for Lia.

He finds her submerged in a crater of sludge. The impaled corpse is fish-belly white and covered with ribbons of blood, and Lia struggles to work herself out from under it. Jack hefts it like a bag of chattel and pitches it into the bog water where it sinks with a feeble stream of bubbles. He reaches a hand down and she takes it. Thin shreds of nightgown cling to her muddy body.

“What are those things?”

“People,” says Jack.

He hands her the machete and dives into the water. She limps in after, and he takes her under his arm and strokes downstream through the fetid green lather and swarms of mosquitoes. Luminous mist hovers over the surface. He swims until his arm will turn no more, then they pull themselves onto a shallow bank by the exposed roots of an old tree. They wretch out lungfuls of filthy bile and fall back against the knotted trunk, coated from head to toe in rotten dreck, looking very much like a couple of aberrant swamp dwellers themselves.

“Can you walk?”

Lia flexes out her knee and winces. “Think so.”

She throws an arm around his neck and leans her weight against him. They travel all night long, picking their way through the muddy, infested swamp by moonlight. Day is breaking by the time they reach the edge of it. They climb an escarpment of dry land, famished and thirsting, dried sheets of mud flaking off their bare skin. Lia’s eyes flutter as she hangs onto Jack, and he lays her down in a bed of grass and passes out next to her.

Bright light awakens them. Piercing headaches pound through their skulls. Lia braces herself and tries to stand and quickly topples over, clutching her knee.

“Tighten up?”

“Yes,”
she says, teeth gritted.

Jack chops down a small sapling to replace the spear they forsook in the swamp. He strips the branches and places it in her hand, then pulls her to her feet. They sway unsteadily against one another and begin to climb. The hill is low and flat, but it feels like the steepest they’ve ever mounted.

In the afternoon, they hike through scattered coastal woodlands. At the first stream, they lie on their bellies and drink like serpents. They are worn quiet from exhaustion and manage few words, but in their modest glances much is spoken. They are so unbearably close, and both of their countenances contain an equality of dread and hope, each emotion so intense and simultaneous they cannot tell one from the other. It makes them twitchy and alive.

A trail of windblown scrag leads them to the rock-strewn shoreline. They plod heavily across the sand, tracing the water’s edge so their footprints dissolve behind them. Every large outcropping they skirt leads them to another, as if the beach is elongating to make their destination impossibly far no matter how close, and Jack thinks back to the nightmares that used to wake him in a cold sweat.

Their breathing is rhythmic and synchronized. They wind around another bend and what they see on the other side drops them to their knees. The outpost is nestled in the gentle hammock of the valley. Horses graze in a fenced pasture. Several stone buildings spout cookfire smoke. Jack scoops Lia into his arms and they hold onto each other, soft and unhurried. Numbness tingles their bodies as they gaze off at the idyllic little settlement, golden sun twinkling off the waterfront like an array of polished coins. It doesn’t even seem real. Lia presses her lips to Jack’s ear.