White Horse (32 page)

For a moment, I’m confused. “Did the gods tell you that?”

“No. I hear. Now is time for rest.”

I close my eyes but do not sleep.

Abomination
.
That single word is
a malignancy that takes hold in my mind. Tendrils snake out and coil around the rational thoughts, squeezing them like they’re there to be juiced dry of reason.

Abomination
.

My child is fine. My child is—

An
abomination
.

—healthy.

My savior finds me on the low wall outside the museum. Her gaze fixates on the ground as she walks so that her hair falls forward, concealing the scars with a black waterfall threaded with silver. She’s older than I first thought, skimming the edges of fifty. Only when she’s seated beside me does she lift her head.

“Are you … sick?”

The snake woman’s words tug at the elastic band binding those thoughts, but it does not snap; the bundle of doubt remains.

I shake my head. “Last night, you said someone was following me. Did you see them?”

“No. I just hear.”

“You heard what, exactly?”

It takes her a moment to translate, formulate her reply, then translate again. “Shoes. Who?”

“I don’t know. A ghost, maybe.”

She turns to face me, a question in her eyes. Daylight is cruel and unforgiving: out here the scars are knotted and gnarled and red as though irritated.

“A dead man.” I draw a line across my throat, wiggle my fingers in the air. “Ghost.”

This time she nods. “The dead, they stay with us. But I do not hear your ghost. Maybe mine, eh?”

People used to flock here for this sunshine, this view, this experience. A cobblestone path stretches from the museum’s steps all the way to the famed ruins, interrupted in places to accommodate sapling laurels. The museum is a geometric hillock rising from the path in a seamless transition of color and stone. Someone planned carefully, matching the colors of the new to the centuries old. I can’t see what remains of ancient Delphi from this angle, but there’s a quiet energy that hums through the trees. There are ghosts here, spirits of the dead who walk these paths like death was an inconvenient stepping-stone on their way back to right here, right now.

I’m not convinced and I’m sure she’s not, either, by the uncomfortable way she raises her hand to her face and gingerly scrapes a nail across the mangled flesh.

“Does it hurt?”

She smiles with one side and shrugs with the same. “Eh, a little.”

My hatred for Pope flares anew before fading to a dull contempt: what havoc he wreaked on the world because of his selfish desires.

“Do you have a family?”

“My family is here.” She waves a hand toward the disappearing path.

“Children?”

“I am the child.”

Grief shivs my heart, but it’s dry of tears. “You’re lucky.”

“Perhaps.”

The cryptic word accompanies an equally impossible-to-decipher half smile. Who is this woman? I ask her and so we swap names the way people in polite society do, then we go back to staring, both of us fixated on the same stretch of cobblestone, both of us seeing something completely different, neither of us having shared a thing about ourselves beyond an arbitrary title.

Abomination.

Aren’t we all now?

DATE: THEN

Morris leaps from her seat
. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?”

My cold, clammy hand slips and slides against the door’s slick painted jamb. “Don’t come near me. I’m sick.”

Fear blossoms in her dark eyes, shrinks as her face softens into concern, twists as anger rages in. She snatches up the clipboard on her desk, hurls it at the wall. Two broken pieces clatter on the floor.

“Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” I reassure her, like she’s the one who’s sick. But it’s always like this, isn’t it? The terminally ill assuring their loved ones that everything will be just fine if everyone thinks positive and wears a smile. Nothing holds death at bay like a rainbow over the river Styx.

“It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. It’s not even on the same planet as okay.”

“I have to leave. I can’t let it spread.”

“No,” she says. “You have to stay. Besides, if we haven’t caught it by now, we’re immune.”

“We don’t know that. We’re just guessing. If we follow that logic, I shouldn’t be sick.”

“You’re right. Shit. I can’t think. Jesus, Zoe. You can’t be sick. I—”

“Won’t allow it?”

“Yeah.” She picks up the clipboard pieces, tries to fit them back together, but they’re not cooperating. “I can’t lose any more people, Zoe. You, the others, you’re my family now. I thought we were all safe from that fucking disease. I was relying on it.”

“I’m sorry.”

She stomps over to her second-floor window, shoves the glass pane high in the sash.

“Fuck you, George Pope!” she screams into the empty streets. “I’m glad you’re fucking dead, you asshole. Burn in hell.” In stoic silence, the other buildings stand, reserving their judgment yet unwilling to yield to her hard words.

“Tara,” I say gently. “It really is okay. We all have to die somehow, right?”

“Wrong. We should be immortal.”

“That’s mature.”

“So is you stomping out of here because you think you’re sick.”

“Look at me. I’m sick. I just puked all over the library floor. Soon God knows what’s going to happen to me. This thing will flip my genes on and off and I’ll turn into something that isn’t me anymore. There’s no telling what that will be. Maybe I’ll survive as some kind of evolutionary freak, maybe I’ll die. I’m going to pack.”

“Don’t,” she says. “Please.”

“I have to.”

Morris sighs, hard and loud. She bends over, presses her elbows into her desk, bangs her head against the surface. After a few good thunks, she looks up at me.

“You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

“Not a chance.”

“Fine. Do me a favor. Don’t go too far. Set up in one of the buildings across the street where I can keep an eye on you.”

I nod, turn away from my friend. What I don’t tell her is that death isn’t totally unwelcome. For the first time in my life, I’m flirting with The End and I don’t care. Let it slide its tongue into my mouth, taste the metal and take control.

Anything to stop my heart from hemorrhaging.

TWENTY

E
eny, meeny, miney, mo. The street is filled with choices, each as unappealing as the next. Oh, they’re all fine to look at: office buildings and businesses and apartments hewn in bricks and rough stones. The thing is, I’d feel like an intruder living in someone else’s home, even though they’re long gone.

Dead. You helped burn them, remember? They didn’t go on vacation
.

Morris is a whippet bouncing at her office window. She’s pointing directly across the street at what used to be a Kinko’s. Technically it still is—they’re just no longer printing copies. Directly above that is a small office space once filled by a small accounting firm. No beds, but they have a decent sofa in the waiting room, Morris told me. That’s where she wants me.

My wave is limp and lacking, and hers is just as weak. I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. No choice. I turn to take another long hard look at my new home. It’s just me, the backpack digging into my shoulders, and this box in my arms. For a moment I balance the box on my knee and readjust the weight, and then let myself into the building. The previous tenants made it easy, or maybe Morris and her crew did; either way, the door opens freely. The door is made of both bars and
glass. Anything coming through is going to make enough noise to wake the dying.

That would be me. I can’t help but laugh a little. Who knew death could be amusing?

It’s true, there’s a sofa in the bland waiting room, along with two generic armchairs and a cheap desk. In places, the laminate is warped and stained with rings from hot, wet cups. My knees bend; I touch my backside to the very edge of the chair that doesn’t have its back to the window and place the box between my feet.

What do I have?

A great view with a direct line of sight into Morris’s office; all the clothes I can carry; toiletries, food, water, and bedding; an extra-bad attitude that starts somewhere behind my eyes and reaches out so far even my toes feel wracked with ill will. I want to hurt something, break it, control it until destruction is inevitable.

The wall yields easily beneath the toe of my boot. Only about twenty good kicks before it punches right through the Sheetrock. A pile of crumbles amasses on the synthetic beige pile, like Pop Rocks half pulverized by a brick. Guilt is a serial killer, stabbing me for losing control of my anger, then choking me for being foolish enough to think:
To whom do I send the check for the damage?

Nausea washes over me, using me like I’m the shore of a long-abandoned beach. Once again I’m on my knees, praying to the gods of cheap carpeting.

Please let death be swift.

DATE: NOW

Shadows stretch across the cobbled
path, from east to west. The sun is still new in the sky and hasn’t yet gained her confidence. From room to room I wander without pausing to contemplate the relics of the dead. There’s a stillness in the air that tickles my intuition, telling me I’m alone, so I put it to the test and establish that my instincts are sharp and true: Irini, the Medusa of Delphi, isn’t here. There was a time when this wouldn’t have bothered me, but that was before. I’m calm. Honest.
The museum’s expansive windows tell me so. The bouncing pulse in my throat is the lie. A fabrication concocted by my hormones and fears for the sole purpose of feeding my paranoia.

The steps are empty. So is the path as far as I can see. Only Esmeralda is there, and she’s busying herself with grasses and the other things donkeys deem important. Her calm state presses a cool hand on my forehead and tells me to chill. My ears listen. My brain processes the message. My pulse continues to thump, regardless.

We walked up there yesterday, Irini and I, just far enough for her to point out the areas of interest: the stadium, Apollo’s temple, the tholos—a circular structure with three of its original twenty Doric columns still standing—but we didn’t move close enough to do more than admire the passage of time from a distance.

I’m trapped in a déjà vu loop. Only the scenery changes, but the dangers and the accompanying reactions are the same. Something is following me, someone disappears, and I chase after them, only to be too late to help. In truth, there’s nothing to suggest Irini is in trouble. There are no signs of a struggle, and if she’d called out, I’d have heard her. But my intuition whispers its brand of poison, and I listen.

The ruins are tall and proud and blond in the morning glare. A noise trickles between the rocks and spills into the sunshine. At first I think it’s Irini talking to herself, but it soon separates into two distinct voices: Irini’s hesitant lilt and another, thicker, harsher, struggling against itself.

Go. Stay. Go. Stay
. I do my own internal dance. Then the decision is made for me.

“Come. I know you are there,” says the thickened tongue.

I move as if in a dream.

“Closer. I want to see you.”

Around a corner. Along the Sacred Way until I see the Polygonal Wall. Then I stop, because there’s a rock jutting up from the path and my mind is trying to make some kind of sense out of what it’s seeing. Yes, it’s a strange, pale rock, but with a human center. Arms and legs spring forth from the boulder’s core, hang there like laundry in the sun. These useless limbs are topped by a woman’s head, her hair piled high in a loose bun, her eyes keen as if she knows all. A vine creeps up to
her middle, spreads itself around her like a thick green belt. She’s older than Irini, but their eyes are the same shade of nut brown and their noses hold the same curve.

Jenny lying inert on the sidewalk, a red circle marring her forehead
. The hole in my soul widens another inch.

“It is true,” she says in hesitant English. “You are carrying a child.”

My hands move to cover my belly. “Yes.”

“Come here.”

“No.”

“You don’t trust?”

“Almost never. Not now.”

She nods. “Why did you come up here?”

“To find Irini.”

“And what would you have done had she been in danger? Would you have risked your life and that of your unborn child to save her?”

“My child has been at risk since the beginning.”

“Irini tells me you are looking for your husband.”

I don’t correct her. “Yes.”

“You have traveled across the world, all the way from America, to find this man?”

“Yes.”

“How many women would do such a thing? If our world was not dead, they would write poetry about you—long, gamboling stories filled with half-truths, all of them predicated on one solid fact: you are a hero.”

“Heroes die.”

“We all die. Heroes die gloriously, for things bigger than themselves.” She glances at Irini. “Water, please.”

Irini lifts a bottle to the woman’s lips and tips slowly. They’ve done this before, perfected the art.

“What happened?” I ask. “Can we get you out of there? There have to be tools somewhere near.”

Her laugh is more wheeze than mirth. “It is not rock. It is bone.”

Shock steals my words. My cheeks pinken with embarrassment.

“I was sick before with a disease that was turning my body to stone, as they say. The tissues, the bones, all of them stiff and fused. But it was
slow. Then the disease came and my own skeleton began to consume me.” Another wheeze. “My sister became Medusa and I became part of the landscape.”

“Why here? Why not stay closer to the shelter?”

“I like the view. It makes me believe I am free.”

The whole world has become a house of horrors. Women made of snakes and bone, men with tails, primordial beings who feed on human flesh. Those of us who survived are clinging to the edge of the soup bowl, trying to find a spoon to ride to safety.