the mortis (21 page)

It
’s raining by the time they make their way back to the culvert.  Not a hard fall.  Not the cutting kind.  But it’s enough to dampen their clothes, which is enough to blot out the effect of the fire and send a gnawing chill through them.  They huddle together in the dark under a few of the work shirts and trade a few words, and it’s clear that the child’s mind has sharpened somewhat since the beach.  Something about the temperature—or maybe the forced movement from there to here—has brought some semblance of a spirit back into her wireframe body. 

The child starts shivering.  The mask is fixed in its place again. 
“Sorry about before,” she says.  She is staring out the shelter opening, but nothing outside is visible in the dark. 

“
Don’t be,” Lee says.  “It’s okay.”

“
I don’t like talking about that.  Or thinking about it.”

Lee nods. 
“You don’t have to, Hanna.  It’s okay,” she says.

The child falls silent after that, and there is nothing but the sound of rainfall through the canopy crowns, the steady pelting of the exposed corrugate steel above their heads.  Rainwater is gathering at the top lip of the shelter opening; it spills thinly over the rough-cut edge.  They
’ve set up the plastic bottle between two stones underneath to collect whatever can be collected.  The distilled harvest.  More containers would be a welcome blessing right now—more empty things that don’t have to stay empty, things that can be taken and filled again—but as things stand, they’re going to have to drink as much as their stomachs can hold and then put the bottle back outside and wait.

It
’s nearly filled.  Lee gets onto her feet and loosely re-wraps the girl before going to the opening and retrieving the bottle.  She takes it back and sits, and the girl makes space.  Together they finish the water, passing it back and forth, and when Lee starts to stand to replace the bottle, the child stops her.  She takes the bottle from Lee’s hand.

“
I’ll do it,” says the girl.

They share two more bottles before the rain lets up.  Afterward they both lie back, and it
’s only moments before the child’s breathing steadies—turns rhythmic.  Muffled through the mask filter.  Lee listens to the girl and stares up at the unyielding black, the point near the culvert ceiling where the ambient light streaming in from outside abruptly ends.  Her eyes are wide.  She is trying her best to consider what to do next, how to handle the dawn coming, but the whole notion of planning, truly planning—sending her mind off to track the winding spoors of ideas and variables—feels foreign to her after so much time spent purely running.  It feels foolish, using energy to think about how to leverage resources, how to apply them, when there are none.  Survive—that has always been the next thing, the only plan.  Her hands are crossed on top of the gun grip, and the gun is resting on top of her belly, pointed out. 

Lee lies that way for a long time, and when the dawn light finally comes—first visible light, not actual sunrise—she turns to the child and puts a hand on her shoulder.  She moves her gently.

The child stirs.  She opens her eyes.  “What’s wrong.”

“
We’re okay,” Lee says.  “Everything’s fine.  But I need you.”

The girl pushes herself into a seated position. 
“Okay.”

“
It isn’t fair to ask,” Lee says, “and I’m sorry.  But I need you to tell me about the Makoa.”

Before she can even get out the words, the girl starts shaking her head side to side.

“Not about what happened to you,” Lee says.  “Not that.  I mean the people.  The routines.  Where valuables were kept, how to get in the door.  Those things.”

“
So you’re going.”

Lee shrugs.  Then she shakes her head as though admonishing herself.

“Why?” the girl asks.

Lee doesn
’t have a good and ready answer for why.  Nothing that will sound good to someone so young. 

“
I owe it to him,” Lee says.  “It’s what we agreed to.”

The child nods at that, knowingly, as though they
’re operating on the same plane, and then there’s silence between them.  Lee allows it to be what it is; she waits.  She doesn’t want to rush anything. 

After a time the child says,
“Do I have to go?” and her tone is completely resigned, yielding.  Lead me to the next thing.  The next place, the next task.  Lead me. 

It
’s unexpected, the question. 

“
No, you don’t have to go,” Lee says.  “You can’t, in fact.  I need you to stay.”

“
In here?” she asks.  She seems to brighten at the idea of it.

Lee smiles. 
“Think of all this as yours,” she says. 

The girl looks around the shelter and the mask rises.  She
’s nodding slowly.  “Okay,” she says.  “But what else will still be here?”

Lee doesn
’t understand her at first.  “You mean what am I taking with me?” she asks.  The child nods, and Lee thinks about it. 

“
I can leave you the water bottle and the things for the fire.  The bedding,” Lee says.  She goes to her pockets and takes out the plastic scalpel and the screwdriver and passes them to the girl.  “You’re going to have to figure all this out.  Food, water, everything.  I don’t have anything else I can give you.”

The girl
’s hands have started twisting together, warring.  “What about the bag,” she asks.

“
What about it?”

“
Are you taking it?”

Lee pauses.  She understands now; she knows where this is headed. 
“I need to.  I may have to trade.”

The girl
’s hands haven’t stopped moving.  “Yeah,” she says.  “But can I go through it again first?”

Lee
eventually convinces the child to tell her about the compound.  To edit herself out of the Makoa story, and to talk instead about its inhabitants, its workflow.  Its structure, the codespeak.  Vulnerabilities and strengths.  The child does the best she can, saying what she remembers, pretending that she was nothing but an embedded observer rather than a participant.  She tries her best.  But in the end, it’s all just scraps, and after an hour Lee decides it has to be good enough.  She readies herself to leave, to follow through on this threadbare plan of hers. 

Lee starts by trading clothing with the child.  A shirt in exchange for the long dress.  Then she turns her back while the child takes off the mask and ties a strip of flannel cloth in its place.

Lee puts the dress on over her white tank and cargo pants, and then she straps the girl’s mask around her own neck.  The cup, the part that covers the face, is around back at the nape of her neck, under her hair.  The elastic is tight against her throat.  She hikes up the long dress and secures the gun in the waistband of her pants, and with the fabric still gathered over one arm, she hooks the gooseneck of the crowbar through a belt loop at her hip and lets the hem fall.  She checks her skin; the bite mark doesn’t look too bad.  She stretches out her hamstrings and her calves.  While she does all of these things, the child has already moved on—she is seated in the dirt, combing through the contents of the duffel. 

Once the child has found whatever
she needs, Lee takes the bag and slings the strap over her shoulder.  As she’s leaving the shelter, crouched in the opening, half in and half out, the child stops her.  Still sitting there on the dirt floor.  A half-circle of twenty kinds of medicine in front of her. 

“
Block me in,” the child says.  “Make it look like no one’s here.”

Post-rain, the dense understory of the
sielve
is lush and humming—rampantly verdant.  The avarice of growth, the bristling reach.  Sunlight is streaming through cracks in the canopy, and there is the humid air of the surround, the scent of damp loam and the water beading on everything, gradually sliding off. 

The dress is soaked through, clinging, by the time Lee reaches the murram, the thick mud crossing.  She uses markers to find the right treeline break.  She spends a while standing on the shoulder, looking up and down the road, before she gets to work digging out the pickup.  She dumps the criss-crossing limbs off to one side and hauls away armloads of loose brush until a path is clear.  She gets in the cab.  She starts the engine and pulls out onto the road.

This route will take her through the heart of the Trap, and she knows that, but this is the only viable choice for her.  Fossa be damned.  The alternative is the ocean route—her husband’s route.  And while she’s probably stronger at the paddle now than he ever was, she doesn’t want to deal with the exposure of the open cockpit, the variable of the surf threatening to pull her from the drawstring catch, to force her under.  Sending her body ragdolling into a jagged rock face.  It’s too much to account for.  At least this way she’s bounded by the closed walls of a steel chassis and the roaring engine block in front of her. 

The plan of approach is basic from this point.  She
’ll barrel forward and through.  She won’t stop for anything until she pulls up to the front lobby of the Lavelha. 

Soon the murram turns to ragged cobblestone, and the woods on both shoulders thin out as the
sielve
gives way.  There are signs for small sundry markets.  Shops that used to peddle beachwear or Mirasai craftworks or shaved ice with natural syrups or some combination of all of these.  An eatery that sold fresh-caught fish wrapped in raphia leaves, and another that sold steaks made from the livestock that used to graze on the islet’s southern pasturelands.  Maybe they still do, who knows. 

Everything, everywhe
re, has been looted—broken and overturned.  Some of the interiors are burnt-out to black.  In the middle of the road are the remains of a street cart that used to sell dog kibble so tourists could feed the local lemur population.  All along the sidewalks are decaying bodies.

Lee steers the truck around the obstacles—going maybe fifteen miles per hour at most—and soon she sees the signs for the town center.  The small, open plaza with the park fountain built on a five-step pedestal.  As she approaches the plaza she presses on the accelerator and the truck gets up to thirty-five and when it does, she immediately turns the key and cuts the engine off.  Letting the vehicle travel on inertia
alone.  The only sound is the tires burring over the roughshod cobble road. 

In a few moments the truck rolls in view of the fountain, and she can see the fossa—scores of them—on the steps.  They are already standing, already alert, and some are pacing.  God damn them.  Somehow they heard, somehow they know.  All of them are staring directly at the truck. 

Without warning, they charge—nearly the entire pack.  Forty, fifty of them.  A few stay near the fountain, stalking up the stairs and down the stairs, over and over—maybe their role is to hang back and stay close to the young—but the rest are tearing toward the main road to intercept the vehicle.  A black wave.  Ears flattened, bodies low-slung.

Lee turns the key frantically to restart the truck, and when the engine finally catches she pops the clutch trying to accelerate, to peel away, but she releases the pedal too fast and the engine stalls.  The truck is limping forward, helpless.  Twenty miles per hour, then fifteen.  She turns the wheel to swing around a heap of broken lumber and then she tries the key again and the engine fires up.  She gives it gas and forces herself to ease gradually off the clutch, and the gearbox catches.  The truck starts to pull away, but then there is the sound of a thudding impact on the driver
’s side door.  Then another.  Bone and flesh against steel.  The fossa are hurling their bodies against the outer paneling, and the cab starts to pitch side to side. 

Within seconds the fossa swarm every part of the chassis.  The sound of claws skittering across the metal truck bed liner.  The roof of the cab.  Lee slams down on the accelerator, and the truck is careening ahead at forty, then forty-five, then fifty, and she
’s swerving around the debris in the roadway.  The window glass behind her shatters inward.  One of the fossa, a large male, leaps onto the hood and the momentum carries its heavy body broadside into the windshield and it’s like a black eclipse; she can’t see a thing.  Something large gets itself tangled in the drive train of the undercarriage, and the truck yaws precipitously to the left, going up on one set of wheels, and it teeters for a second and then tips onto its side, the metal scraping against stone, and the truck slides to a hard stop. 

Lee is lying on her left flank against the door, her shoulder pressing against the cobbled road through the void where the driver-side window used to be.  There are chips of tempered glass on her arm, on her hands.  Her face.  Studding her hair.  When she shifts positions, the pieces pour brightly off of her body. 

The windshield is hanging loosely in its frame, and she can hear the fossa slavering, circling, outside.  She pops the seatbelt and reaches behind her for the handgun.  Watching the square of open sky above her where the passenger window has been broken out. 

She takes the safety off; there is already a round chambered.  She takes the duffel from the floor and starts to climb toward the light streaming from overhead.

When she reaches the passenger window, she aims the handgun skyward through the opening and pulls the trigger.  There is a loud report, echoing—it may not be enough volume to clear out the fossa entirely, but it may be enough to create a perimeter, to give herself some breathing room.  She pushes through the opening and immediately sights the landscape with the gun, sweeping every direction, turning her body, targeting, and she sees that most of the fossa are scattering.  Running full-tilt toward the park fountain. 

She doesn
’t wait.  She shoulders the duffel and climbs through the opening and vaults over.  Gun in hand.  She hits the ground hard, going to her knees, but she stands right away and she starts to run.  Sprinting down the center of the roadway.  She glances back over her shoulder, and she can see that a few of the retreating fossa have circled around to watch from a safe distance, but the sight of her fleeing sparks something in them, renewing their resolve, and they start to give chase.

They
’re running her down.  Loping over the cobblestones, devouring the distance between them.  It’s easy for these demons—they could be experiencing this entire event as nothing but good clean fun for all she knows.  Mouths open, tails high.  The space is closing.  She isn’t going to last long at this pace.

Up ahead she can see the palm-lined promenade that leads to the hotel.  The white walls, the black iron gate.  Half a mile.  Her arms are pumping and the duffel is swinging side-to-side on her back.

At five hundred yards from the gates she can hear their panting, their clawed footfalls, behind her.  She isn’t going to make it in time.  She comes upon a fallen liana palm, thick-trunked, laid out across the roadway, and she vaults it.  When she touches down on the other side, she immediately swings the gun around and crouches into a firing stance, wrist resting on the trunk, and she sights the closest one.  Wiry and long-limbed—a juvenile, probably.  She squeezes the trigger, and there is a high-pitched squall as the fossa falls, skidding, rolling over, coming to rest about ten yards from her position.  She sights the next one and fires but misses, and she tries again but they’re coming at her too quickly.  Six, maybe seven of them.  She gets to her feet and starts firing wildly.  Two more of them go down before she runs out of rounds, and then they’re upon her.

One of the fossa, thick and barrel-chested, leaps onto the fallen trunk and stands, watching.  The others join soon after that—three more of them, smaller than the first.  Thin and lanky and sleek-black.  Low, throaty growls are coming from all of them.  Lips
pulled back to flaunt the canine teeth. 

  Lee backs up slowly but doesn
’t run, and she keeps her eyes focused down on the road in front of the palm.  I am not your challenger but I am not your prey either.  She turns the empty handgun around to grip it by the barrel, club-like, and then she carefully unslings the duffel and wraps the end of the long shoulder strap around her other hand.  She stands still and waits.

Without any warning, the largest of the group leaps off the trunk and charges her.  It closes the distance between them almost instantly.  She swings the duffel and it connects with the fossa
’s skull, and although the impact is light—the bag doesn’t carry enough weight to do any sort of damage—it’s enough to make the thing stand down.  It pauses and starts pawing its ear as though something is lodged there, and Lee starts to back up, swinging the bag from side to side, back and forth, warding. 

As she retreats, they begin to follow, all four of them.  Stalking slowly, fanning out across the road, trying to flank her.  She keeps swinging the bag, backing up the promenade toward the gate, glancing over her shoulder
for alignment, and when she makes it past the tall bulwarks on either side of the wall, she hurries to throw the heavy gate closed, blocking off the road.  Once the latch is secured, she watches the fossa for a moment through the gaps between the black iron billets.