The Rain (6 page)

            “They’re too low,” he says. He leaves me, pushes me off of him, and walks down to the water’s edge. I follow right after him and wait, hoping he’ll tell me what the plan is. He just stares, and I look too. They’re waists are level with the water.

            “Can they make it?” I say. They’re so close. Russell doesn’t say anything, but he kneels down for a minute, like something’s wrong. I kneel next to him, put my arm on his back, rubbing it, but he just keeps looking at the mud. He’s not even checking the water anymore. I ask if he’s okay, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s breathing really loud again, like the short walk to the water was too much for him. They see us I tell him, but he already knows that. My hope that they might miss, get swept in the wrong direction, or not see us altogether evaporates.

            “You have your knife?” he finally asks me. I show him it, and try to remember the way to stab that he taught me. You go across, not down. You keep the blade pointed toward your feet, not up to the sky. You swipe, not stab. I rehearse everything. I can’t believe he sounds like I’m actually going to use it.

The silence and rain stay united, until finally, after a long torment, the splashing of oars interferes, and the boat can’t hold any more water. The limp man looks like he’s dead. He isn’t moving, bailing, even opening his eyes. I wonder if he will even try to get off the boat. The other man has a look on his face like the one that died earlier today. His eyes are spread way open, unblinking despite the rain, like he’s had a last shot of adrenaline, the final push before death. Sea water starts spilling over the rail of the boat, and the whole thing tips over. They fall out together with a quiet splash. The limp man doesn’t even try to swim, he just sort of bobs for a bit, and then floats back out into the brown, like a current is dragging him south. The other one knows how to swim and he isn’t too tired to do it.

            “He’ll make it,” is all Russell says. He stands back up, holds his knife ready, and looks at me. His face isn’t blank like before on the boat, and in the tent, or even a minute ago when he was kneeling in the mud. He looks concerned, like life’s back in him, a last fight. I stand behind him, scared to death.

            “Get next to me,” he says. I obey him immediately. We stand side by side right at the water’s edge. The man makes good time swimming in. But he’s not crying for help like the last man. Finally, he reaches our canoe, where it’s half-submerged, and uses it to hoist himself up for air. He gasps loudly, destroying for a moment the consistency of the rain taps. Then he moves again, back into the water, walking underwater right up to our feet. His hands come onto the bank first, and they find a small rock to cling to. Russell steps up and stomps on his foot. The crushing pain makes the man scream. I cringe, unsure whether or not I should jump in. Then, like the pain brought him back to full strength, the man rises to his feet and ducks his head down way low, and charges at Russell like a bull. The head rams in. Russell stumbles from the blow before he can force his knife forward. The man falls on top of Russell. I finally snap alive and run to them.

            I can’t tell who’s screaming. I reach the back of the wet animal and he throws his elbow backward at me as soon as I’m close enough to stab him. White flashing pain stuns me for a second. I can’t focus, I don’t know if Russell is pinned. I hear them grunting, a fight for life between the walking dead. I rise again, feeling undead myself, and try again to save Russell. Only he doesn’t need my help. He stands up all on his own, pushing the man off his chest. The man rolls over, both his hands firmly gripping the handle of a knife. It’s deep in his belly, right in the middle. Russell stabbed him in the gut. He doesn’t even make a sound even though the sight of it hurts my own stomach. It’s like he’s numb to it. And he starts to rise again.

I think I should stand next to Russell but I can’t. I can’t take my eyes off of the face eater. He looks like one of the rotting corpses. His whole face is a beard, a dripping mop, funneling rain onto his gut where the red is streaming out. He doesn’t act fazed by the wound. He looks at Russell, and Russell steps back a couple feet. And then Russell slips when he tries to back up even farther. He falls, hits a mud stream, and rolls down, all the way down, out into the water. The man pauses, both hands still feeling the knife handle, testing it, like he wants to try to loosen it. But he decides to leave it in, and he looks from Russell to me and then back to Russell. Russell doesn’t move in the water. I panic, thinking he hit his head and he can’t breathe. And then the man walks toward me, ignoring the knife sticking out of him, raising his hands toward me, moving in with like giant claws to make sure I don’t escape.

When I was little, and I first learned that I don’t have a real family, and back then some people still had real families, I felt sad. I felt sad for a really long time. I couldn’t remember my mom, or my dad. Russell filled me in with some details about my parents over the years, but I don’t know for sure if he just made them up because he knew I was sad then. He always cares if I’m sad. But Russell is my family, the closest thing to it I’ll ever know. And I turn away from the man coming at me because I can’t take my eyes off Russell, helpless in the brown.

            I used to talk him up to anyone I met. The other boys, girls, older men, women, it didn’t matter. He was the toughest guy around. Who is he? they’d ask me. I never called him Dad once, always just Russell. He’s Russell I’d say, like they were idiots for not knowing that. Back then he was stocky, but he was tall and stocky. Enormous really. A bear of a man. Six foot three. Maybe two hundred and seventy five pounds. I was always safe when he was around. He’d beaten the shit out of a boy once who’d tried to get me to go home with him. Russell told me that boy had no intention of taking me to his house. He’d been about my age, and I was more curious than anything—I’d never really had a friend my age. He was after my body, Russell said. For food or sex, it didn’t matter. Though things were relatively calm in Philadelphia, and Pittsburg even, and the rain didn’t mean yet what it means now, the reports of cannibalism had already started. Despite those warmer, dryer times, people hadn’t seen the reason to wait, when it was necessary to survive, to eat other people. Society crumbled so fast, Russell says, that it makes the veneer disappear in many before the environment dictates that it has to. Some had different caveats about eating human flesh—they only do it in near-death situations, only if the person is already dead from natural causes, only if it is the thigh muscle, or the bicep, or the breast. Most of those rules about eating human flesh faded by the time we reached Chicago. By Rapid City, all the caveats were gone—and now it’s just the face eaters. Some of them I’ve seen, the ones who hunt in packs, have pieces of their faces missing, and other parts too Russell says, but those missing chunks are concealed under the plastic suits. Russell told me that they’d just as soon cut a block from each other’s arms for a meal than risk the rain some nights. I had thought it was bullshit. But then I saw the bodies—large sections missing, bones with teeth marks, faces with the serrated punctures of canines and molars. Until Rapid City, we were once removed from the face eaters, all the cannibals, because we played it safe. We stuck to the high rises, where food was more plentiful. We stuck to the
Sea Queen Marie.
We stuck to the towers and the skylines and the towns on mountain tops. It was in the backcountry you ran into the face eaters, Russell told me then. We avoided backcountry like the plague. But after Rapid City, and even long before that, the cannibals weren’t the minority anymore. If a body floated by in the rain that hadn’t been dead for more than a day, it simply meant another day of life for someone else. But we’ve managed to make it this far without doing it. It’s one of the last pieces of the veneer Russell will talk about. That we don’t eat other people. The veneer was so strong before the rain, he says, that no one ate people. I can’t imagine that. We’re just another food source, like any other animal out there.  

The man steps carefully on the mud, then again, moving toward me his food source and ignoring Russell in the water. He’ll eat every part of me raw is all I can think as he comes. But I hear water splashing, and movement at the bank—it’s Russell. I watch him trample up the mudslide on his hands and knees, weaponless, but seething. The face eater halts and turns to Russell as Russell barrels into his legs. I charge at him too. I see the knife handle sticking out of his stomach and grab it and push as hard as I can, wedging it deeper in. It slides in, like his skin has no measure of resistance anymore, like he’s one big sponge soaked in red water, and the whole handle disappears inside him. He falls, almost on Russell. He misses and rolls off to the side. I run to him even though I think he’s dead now, and my fear disappears, and I stomp on his face like it’s a big spider. I do it over and over again until I slip. Mud smacks my mouth and I bite my lip. I taste the blood, very different from the rain. I stand back up immediately, expecting to have to continue, but the man is dead. I walk over top of him and look down at him. His eyes are still wild, and they’re still wide open. He looks just like he did when he was coming after me. But all the other life has gone out of him. And maybe it’s traveled somewhere else, like Russell used to say happens, but I don’t think so. I pause at my instinct, which screams that I roll him down into the water. The pause comes because for a moment I think that he’s food. We don’t have any food, not much. Not enough for the trip to Leadville. It’s five hundred some miles to Leadville. It’s a wasteland out here. But I can’t look at Russell, can’t bear to ask him. I know he’ll refuse. I follow my gut and kick the man, then get down in the mud on my knees, rain smacking my back, and push. I grunt, and I cry, and I push him down into the water. He floats away some, then his body drifts back toward the bank, like the gravity of our living bodies is pulling him toward us, because our bodies need him for nourishment. But then he is sucked away, captured by the same current that took his friend. He disappears before I realize I haven’t heard Russell move.

            I turn around and race back up the mud, careless, forgetting to watch my step so I don’t tumble down into the water myself. It’s getting really dark. But I see Russell. His eyes are closed. He’s lying on his back. And his chest isn’t rising up and down. No, I think I scream, but nothing comes out. I just go to him and fall on top of him. Rain falls on us.   

 Part 2

Chapter 3

The rain is freezing cold. I talk to Russell, quietly at first, pretending I don’t notice that he’s not breathing, then I start shouting at him. I start slapping his chest. Then I stop everything because it’s all useless. He isn’t responding. But I see up close that he still is breathing. Really softly, but he’s alive. I’m shivering, and I look around, as if someone will spring out of the gloom and help me. Help me carry him to the tent. But no one comes.

            When I was eight or nine, there were two people who lived with us. We moved together from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, across the flooding farmlands, where by the end, we navigated by the sight of the grain silos that rose from the water. But when we reached Pittsburg, we found a high rise building. We were safe from the rain.

            Delly and Jennifer were their names. They came with us and settled next door in the high rise. Russell really trusted them, and so I did too. It was the first time I learned you could still trust an outsider—that not everyone was out to get you or what you had. Their two kids, I can’t remember their names, tagged along with us everywhere we went. We’d go out into the rain together sometimes—supermarkets, abandoned warehouses, militia hospitals, radio towers to check for transmissions. There were never any transmissions, but it was enjoyable then to go out, running through the rain, like it made everything an adventure, and not the cold advance of death that it really was. When Russell got sick back then, with a cold, or a headache, or his leg infection, Delly and Jennifer helped out. I tried my best to contribute—make him soup, find some extra cookies somewhere, trade for ice, anything I thought might cheer him up or make him better faster. Sometimes I found Tylenol that was still dry and edible. But Delly and Jennifer were really the ones taking care of him, as much as I thought I was helping. Most of the time they left us alone, and they worried about their own small space in the high rise, keeping anyone from getting too close to their family in case things became too desperate. That’s how things became in Philadelphia, Russell says—too desperate. But I remember feeling a sense of comfort knowing they were around, within shouting distance, neighbors even. Getting the Tylenol for Russell was really going to Delly and asking him for some. Or maybe running down into the gutted supermarkets by myself, climbing through the ransacked pharmacies, though Russell didn’t like me doing that. He said it was too risky.    Despite the distance they kept from us, I felt like Delly and Jennifer actually cared about us. After Pittsburg, we left Delly and Jennifer behind because they refused to travel through the open rain again. They’d had enough moving from place to place like nomads without a home, even though all the streets were flooded by then, and the militia hospitals were falling apart from disease, and the rampant mindset about heading west was in full fever. We didn’t have anyone else that cared about us for a long time after that. Not until the
Sea Queen Marie.
In Indianapolis, Russell did the work: he traded for food, weapons, clothing, and medicine. That’s when we had a gun. I’d help scavenge, and we’d have extra to trade sometimes. He’d always trade for books with the extra, or let me pick out board games to play with him. But there, in Indianapolis, when I was twelve, I realized no one gave a shit anymore. No one actually cared about us. It was every man for himself. No one would help you there unless you helped them in what they considered an equal way. And that was the best case scenario. If it wasn’t that, it was more often someone who would just try to take what you had. Russell used his gun sometimes, but he didn’t talk to me about it when he did. I could tell he didn’t like that he had to use it. Still, he did use it, and he thought it was important I know how to use it too. He taught me how to shoot then.