South E-Book

Frank Owen

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Stephen King's The Stand, plus graphic violence and heart-stopping action set pieces, but what lifts South above many recent examples of the subgenre is Owen's pared-down prose, slick narrative and the sensitive depiction of Dyce and Vida's relationship. - Guardian South takes place in a USA ravaged by Civil War. It's been thirty years since the first wind-borne viruses ended the war between North and South - and still they keep coming. Every wind brings a new and terrifying way to die. The few survivors live in constant fear, hiding from the wind - and from each other. In this harsh Southern expanse, brothers Garrett and Dyce Jackson are on the run from brutal law-enforcers. They meet Vida, a lone traveller on a secret quest. Together, they will journey into the dark heart of a country riven by warfare and disease. This is the story of Dyce and Vida. This is the story of end-time. This is the story of The Cure and how it came too late. This is the story of South.

Leseprobe

South

Frank Owen is the pseudonym for two authors – Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer. Diane Awerbuck’s debut novel GARDENING AT NIGHT won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize and Diane was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2014. She has long been regarded as one of South Africa’s most talented writers. Alex Latimer is an award-winning writer and illustrator whose books have been translated into several languages.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2016 by Corvus Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Frank Owen, 2016

The moral right of Frank Owen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781782399612EBook ISBN: 9781782398912

Printed in Great Britain

Corvus BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

When I was small I studied US geography,

The teacher said: ‘Would you stand up

and list the states for me?’

My knees began a-knockin’,

my words fell out all wrong;

Then suddenly I burst out, with this silly song:

Used to be a lot of states

fifty all-in-all

But now there’s just the North and South

divided by The Wall.

FELIX CALLAHAN

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

1

Felix Callahan sat on the rusted exercise bike, naked. He had hung up his dripping clothes bachelor-style and they were drying against the opposite wall. As they stiffened they dripped a line of dots onto the dirt floor below. Old men pedal slowly, but with each turn of the coiled copper wheel the light bulb above him shimmered brighter and cast a wavering halo on the ceiling, a small, insistent glow against the dark. ‘Jesus bids us shine,’ Felix told himself. ‘Yessir, He does.’

Over his head was the shack proper, laid out like many a single man’s lodgings – part bar, part mausoleum – but here in the room below was where Felix did his best work. The light played over the piles of books on the floor, the bronze instruments on the makeshift desks, and the ancient Califone tape player settled on a cardboard fruit box. When Felix finally climbed down, his withered thighs shaking, he’d charged the swollen eighteen-volt car battery enough for forty minutes of power, maybe an hour. It would have to do.

He limped over to fetch a cracked glass from a crate. Felix liked things nice. He set the tumbler on the table and filled it halfway with a brown liquor that looked like cough mixture and tasted worse. It made his eyes water but – goddamn! – it sure woke you up.

He turned, his skinny shanks flexing, and opened a drawer. The rusted Llama Danton was under a stack of maps, some printed, most hand-drawn. He nodded a greeting to the gun and laid it carefully on the table next to the bottle. He sat in the better of the chairs, and behind him the tape player waited like a patient on a drip, connected to the battery with wire interrupted by nodes of brittle duct tape.

Felix needed to get his head straight. Two days ago he’d been out looking for chickadee eggs when a woman stumbled past him, calling for her dog, Pavlov. Felix had stayed hidden in the fescue and watched her go. She’d caught something bad. Brain viruses started with dementia and only went one way. He was willing to bet there was no dog. Maybe there never had been. But she thought there was, and that was what counted.

When he was sure the woman had gone, Felix came out, rubbing the small of his creaking back. He could handle most of the viruses. There was something comfortingly medieval about the boils and rashes, and they ended pretty quick, anyway. It was the speed at which the sicknesses ate their hosts that freaked him out. Renard had engineered that, Felix thought. He was the kind of asshole who would want results. Old-time viruses had taken a couple of days to incubate, but the ones that had started blowing in after The War were different. And Renard had had time to observe disease, Felix supposed. All that time up north, watching and learning as the president gave him his head – and all the laboratory equipment he needed. That was the kind of man that made Felix afraid: one who hadn’t been bad at the outset, but found that he liked the power – the kind that would poison someone, take notes as they died, and call it science. Like Pavlov, now that he thought about it.

But the kind of crazy that came with lonely was what spooked Felix, because you couldn’t fight that. Dog Lady had once had a family, hadn’t she? A place people knew her name, somewhere to bunk, a husband, maybe, or a wife – Felix wasn’t inclined to judge, and even the fur traders had a right to live. The War had wiped out all of those pernickety permutations. And, really, what was there to hang onto now, if you were the only one left? Survival was fine, but Felix thought that a man needed a purpose. And a purpose went hand in hand with community. ‘Love and service,’ he said softly. Take that away, and the mind went with it. How did you hold on to your sanity? It wasn’t enough that he had set up the weather boxes, though that sure as fuck filled his days. The longing had gnawed at him for a long time, and soon after that he’d wired the car battery to the exercise bike.

He’d laid his story down on tape, everything he figured worth knowing, in two thirty-minute segments. One for each side, like the North and South. And when someone like Dog Lady wandered past and rattled his cage, he’d sit down and listen to the tape. He promised himself that if the voice on the tape began to sound like someone else, or began to talk about things he didn’t recall, he’d pick up the pistol and eat it. And he would not think too hard before he did it.

The speaker in the tape player was gone, taken long before Felix had picked it up near Hayden, stashed in a tin box in the rotting ruins of a holiday cabin, but he had found a pair of headphones in an abandoned music store days later – pink, with a pussycat on each side. ‘Cool cat, looking for a kitty,’ Felix sang to himself whenever he saw them. Now he fitted the headphones over his ears, running the cable over his shoulder like a tail. He took a long drink from his tumbler and leant back in his chair so he could press play on the old machine. It whirred, and his recorded voice was deep and distant, stretched out a little further each time he played the tape. He rested a hand on the gun, breathed deep and closed his eyes.

‘Felix,’ his past self warned, ‘I hope you’ve still got the balls to have that gun on the table.’ He nodded and smiled.

‘Okay. Here we go. My name is Felix Callahan, but you know that, don’t you? I was born in Norman, Oklahoma, back when it was still a place.’ Felix had done the math. He’d kept track of his birthdays as best he could, adding another year to his tally each fall when the buckeyes turned orange. He figured there wasn’t a lot left to celebrate, so they were important – a reason to save up rations, a night to get drunk. He poured himself another drink and raised the glass in the gloom: ‘Had more than my three score and ten, so amen to that. Seventy-nine shitty birthdays – give or take a few of those times I was laid so low I didn’t see the seasons changing.’ He downed the drink and went back to listening to his younger voice and the mystery of his old life.

‘I had older brothers, once upon a time, and a mother and a father, the way it ought to be. I was the youngest by far. Not remembering it much probably means it was pretty smooth. There was milkshake vomit in footwells – that I remember – and broken arms from trampolines, and crackers in turds. The usual.

‘The War was where it all went wrong. Hitler’s war, though that’s not saying much, is it? I mean the Second World War. I remember the feeling at the end there, of the narrow escape we had all had, the West. When I heard about how my older brothers had stormed ashore and saved the Allied asses – that there was the first unpicked stitch that turned into the unraveling of civilization. Our corner of the quilt, anyhow. My brothers re-enacted those war scenes when they came home, like it was a game, gunfire coming from the hills: gack-gack-gack. Afterwards, when the show was done, there was always a silence when you were supposed to remember the soldiers who had died. It made me feel like Clark Kent, when he takes off his glasses, you know? America was invincible if young men would die before letting it fall apart. That’s what I believed. We all did.

‘But while everyone was slapping backs and shaking hands, the real threat was creeping up on us – and no one took any notice. I heard about it first years later on the radio. It was playing through the window of a corner shop in downtown Manhattan, that tinny newscaster’s voice, the smell of deep-fried yeast and sugar. I stopped to listen since I’d not heard news for some time. That, along with the Yankee scores, was the first I ever heard of the proposal: a Unified America. Another guy had stopped there too and both of us shook our heads and smiled.

‘“Same money works here as it does in Montana and Utah and the Dakotas. That’s as unified as it gets,” the man said. I nodded and bought a donut and a soda like I was trying to prove the point.

‘What was I doing all the way up there? I’m glad you asked, Future Felix. You’re a nice guy. I ended up opening an appliance store in Greenwich Village when I was twenty. I mainly sold TVs – installed them myself, too. There were only so many times I could hear my brothers go on about the war. They could make each other laugh or cry by saying things like, “Remember Frosty Joe?” or, “Abbiamo surrender!” Me, I was an outsider: too busy dirtying my diapers to fight the Germans when it all began, and by the time I was eighteen the whole damn thing was done and the carpet had been rolled up and packed away for next time.

‘I had to get out of Norman. New York was the only place I knew anything about. I thought I knew it because we used to listen to Lights Out on the radio every Wednesday. Man, I loved having the bejeezus scared out of me back then! One story stuck with me – about the ghosts of the animals from the Natural History Museum living in the sewers beneath the Empire State Building. That was where I was heading – to stand on the sidewalk and peer in through the manhole covers, just for kicks – when I stopped for the soda and the donut and heard about Unified America for the first time.

‘Soon after that came the legislated slum clearance of Greenwich Village. The Northerners wanted parks and new buildings: rent was cheap for those brave enough to pioneer. Or dumb enough, I hear you. I bought three television sets from a store in Jersey and ferried them, one by one, to Felix’s Television Emporium, clutching each set like a newborn on my lap as the Hoboken Ferry bobbed across the Hudson. Got a cat, a tuxedo, and called him Dallas because he was a cowboy. He was good for business: made people come in when they saw this fat-ass tomcat curled up in the window. Reeled them in. Whenever I sold a TV, I could buy two more. Then I made enough to afford a car and save my back from the newer sets, those motherfuckers with their twenty-pound glass screens. Twelve years I was there, and that included a failed marriage. I remember that part real good, let me tell you. But you don’t need to know all that. I still had Dallas. We sidewalk specials got to stick together.

‘I didn’t pay much mind to politics until the day that a UA member was voted into the US senate. As soon as he was in, he called for a national vote on the topic of unification. I laughed at the idea. It became the new How’s-this-weather? “How’re you gonna vote?” I’d ask as I approached a customer, and they’d smile and say something like, “Same money works here as it does in Utah. Can’t see how much more unified we need to be.” Then, when the customer came over to pay, I’d finish the joke by taking their money and looking at it closely, turning it over in my hands a few times and saying, “This ain’t Iowa money, is it?” We sure yukked it up.

‘The joking stopped a few years later when there were enough Unified America supporters in the senate to force a vote. Over the December of . . . jeez . . . nineteen-something . . . sixty-five? Seventy-five? Shit. It all looks the same to us geriatrics. Anyhow, one December came when every American was forced to return to the state of his or her birth. Kinda like Bethlehem in the wayback, know what I mean? The population of New York halved overnight. I closed shop and took the cash from the register and waited for a taxi to take me to the airport. I’d packed my things that morning. Not much: a couple of changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a copy of The Martian Chonicles I meant to reread. I’d need to be back in the city pretty soon if I wanted to make up for the loss of the best business weeks of the year. The Jamaican lady in my building, Mrs Bishop, promised to feed Dallas.

‘JFK Airport hadn’t ever seen so many people, all of them muttering about the crush and the reason for it, the waste of our time and our money. I didn’t know one person who’d voted for Unification. The moaning reinforced the feeling that we’d all be back here in a fortnight, bitching about the same things, being crushed under the same armpits and shoveled through the same doors – only in the opposite direction.

‘When the plane took off, I didn’t even look out at the city, I was that sure I’d be back. Of course, I never was. Poor Dallas—’

Felix snatched the headphones off his head in mid-sentence, as though he’d been stung by a hornet. He stood and pressed stop on the tape, listening. In the sudden silence he heard the shack above him creak, expanding its joints in the midday sun. Whenever he was down below he heard the ghosts walking overhead. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d climbed up to peep out and found nothing. He was getting that creepy-crawly feeling again now, but he could talk himself out of it. Today the tapes had made him paranoid, the unquiet eye of a gathering storm. Some days they were a comfort; some days they were a torture. Felix wasn’t sure what was worse – knowing that everyone you loved was gone, or knowing that they were still circling in some less than friendly form. He shivered. He needed to lay down. This was the time he missed Dallas the most – the furry warmth in the darkness, solid and familiar, even though the cat had been surrendered to history. Somewhere his small bones were littered, from the teeth in his clean skull to the bones of his tail.

Felix went over to his bunk and stretched himself out. Imagine if he was out there now, stumbling into the storm that was coming, calling, ‘Dallas! Dallas! Where are you, boy?’ He’d shit his pants if anything came out of the trees to answer his call.

2

The two brothers fled through the mesquite and along the valley ridge. Some way behind them came the Callahans, stocked with rifles and rage and vengeance.

Garrett thought that he ought to be used to it by now, it being a week since Bethlehem Callahan had given up her thin ghost, but he wasn’t. Some part of his mind was back there with Bethie, watching, hidden, as she lay dying, and maybe it always would be. He pictured her egg-yellow soul coughed up out of her chest and into the wind, where it would join the rest of the dead as they swooped over the living left behind on the Colorado plateau.

Dyce watched his brother side-on but knew better than to say anything. At least they were making good time, not running, exactly, but moving fast, following the course of the Yampa River and zig-zagging over the places where they would leave heavy tracks. The morning had been fair and, anyhow, they could take a couple of rain showers and keep going as long as the chafing wasn’t too rough. The jeans they’d traded in Glenwood Camp had been a bad idea and the boys had swapped them some days back. Now they hiked in cargo pants like an advert from the adventure catalogue they’d used for fuel – one where the dudes were outdoors because they chose to be, not because they were being chased across the country by lunatics.

It was only the wind that slowed the boys down, because then they had to find shelter until it died. No one was crazy enough to be outside when there was a chance of new viruses blowing in – crazy, or suicidal.

The stopping didn’t hurt their escape much: if they were hunkering down someplace then the Callahans were doing the same. Stopped like a paused TV, Dyce thought, reruns of the Road Runner and Coyote in a rictus till the dogs stopped their barking outside and Garrett pressed play again.

Dyce had learnt to feel the wind’s slow rising in his sinuses, a primitive thickening between the eyes as the air pressure changed and the cells responded, as if he were regressing: now man, then amphibian, reduced at last to bacteria, ready to start the cycle all over.

He was grateful that no one traveled at night. That was one quick way to meet your maker, and it could be something simple, too, something laughable and deadly at the same time – a missed turning, a wayward root, a blind fumbling for a place to shelter from a sudden gust, a rabid field mouse striped with panic.

The boys checked each other a couple of times a day without knowing they did it. Their ears had become attuned to the cough that turned wet, the sneeze that propelled a virus six feet through the air to the next carrier. So far, so good. Dyce laughed at himself. Being pursued like cowboys in an old-time Western, and all he could think was that he wasn’t sick yet. God darn, boy! You git goin’ and don’ stop till you hit the Klondike! Garrett looked at him funny, and Dyce sobered up.

‘’Member that time Dad took us to that cave up Salida way?’

Garrett nodded, saving his breath. It was hard to forget. Turned out to be the last road trip they’d all take together before he died, before even the dregs of gas ran dry and folks left their cars abandoned on the roadside – the American Dream scoured for cloth and stuffing and engine oil and radiator water that turned out to be bitter with standing. Any color, Henry Ford had said. Any color as long as it’s black.

The rock face had looked close enough until they were all out in the dust, treading the soft shale. Dyce had on his Batman pajama top, Garrett remembered that, a size too small already, and that their father offered to carry their backpacks even though he was sick by then. Proper sick, pale as paper. They scoured the cliff face, searching for the orifice their father had sworn he’d seen through the Lark’s busted windshield. When they all got up there it had disappeared.

‘We were up there for, like, days.’

‘Months.’

It had been half an hour, max, but Dyce wouldn’t ever forget the feeling of clawing for purchase on the smooth, impersonal stone, praying for a crack to open up and let him in; the relief when it finally did. He bet that sex didn’t come close, though Garrett said different.

That scramble among the rocks had stood them in good stead. Now they fled through the rocky landscape, sticking to the trees. Cowboys and Indians, thought Dyce. And the Indians always lost. He remembered – how had he forgotten? – that Garrett and his friends used to tie him to a bristlecone pine and poke him with whippy little sticks until he cried. He had never told. Eventually they had stopped whaling on Dyce. There was a little retarded boy called Teddy next door, and Garrett had discovered that he was mute. One time they left him trussed up for the whole afternoon. His mother hadn’t come to find him, or seen the rope burns: she was just happy that normal kids wanted to play with him. It wasn’t me, Dyce told himself. I was just watching.

‘Garrett.’

‘What?’

‘Wind’s rising.’

‘You sure?’

‘Can’t you feel it?’

Garrett shook his head, the faint scars of his old acne making shadows on his cheekbones. ‘You’re the sensitive one, virgin.’

Dyce let it go. He ran his hand through his hair. He would need a haircut again soon. Garrett just let his grow: he was the only guy Dyce knew who didn’t look dumb with a ponytail.

‘You know we need to start looking. Be dark soon either way.’

Sometimes the looking was quick – a shack, an abandoned mine shaft, some convenient opening in the side of the earth that welcomed them in, as if it had been waiting. Other times they spent an hour or more searching for a likely spot, somewhere they could bed down before full dark. Once or twice they hadn’t been able to get there, and those nights weren’t worth the stretching out: the jeebies from dusk till dawn, praying the wind stayed away. Except it’s not a nightmare, Dyce told himself. This is just how it is.

The boys stopped and dropped their packs, the buckles jingling like spurs. They listened for a minute, for steps approaching, the sound of a rock loosened by a misplaced hand or a scrambling foot. One of the advantages of sticking to the ridge was that you were always looking down on strangers approaching. Weird how you got used to the vigilance. We be some baaad-ass outlaws, thought Dyce.

They stretched and Garrett’s backbone clicked. He wasn’t used to lugging twenty pounds around the whole day. They’d gotten a bit too comfortable in Glenwood.

Garrett gave Dyce a little push. ‘You go.’

‘Man!’ Dyce tried to stop his voice rising in a whine. Garrett was too old to be pushing him around that hard: it hurt. ‘It’s your turn!’

‘Yeah, but it’s your thing.’ It was the closest Garrett would get to a compliment, Dyce knew. He sighed. Another concession. Somewhere in his head there was a list.

‘Look after my bag.’

‘Duh.’

Dyce wasn’t two paces off the track when the leaves and grasses began to twitch, as though they too were lengthening, cracking their spines. The wind had come quicker than he’d figured, which he knew meant it was going to blow hard, an all-nighter. He tied his cloth mask around his face, just in case, and went back to fetch his bag. Garrett didn’t say anything but Dyce read his eyes peering out from above the mask, hard with fright: You better find something DOUBLE quick. I’m watching you, little brother. Impress me.

He beckoned. There had to be a rock face below them.

The boys dropped off the side of the ridge, sliding where they could, clawing at silver beard stalks. The lip of rock above gave some shelter, a few more precious seconds to search, the difference between a full night’s sleep and twelve hours of suffering.

3

Beside a pair of young spruces, it was the only thing on the ridge, and at first Vida thought it was a scalp, its reddish strands blowing gently back: mermaid’s hair, white girl’s hair, hair like a horse’s tail.

It was perched on the top of a long pole. Further down there were sets of instruments that looked like cups on a carousel, slowing and then speeding up as the wind sighed and puffed in tired gusts. It was picking up speed more steadily even as she watched. Fuck. Too far to get back to her ma and the house now.

How much time? She swallowed against the parchment of her throat and squinted into the pale light. No one to block her way. There was never anyone out in the hills anymore. Crazy Lady this morning had been an exception. She’d followed Vida for ages but had fallen away a couple of hours back, still spitting gobs of phlegm onto the track and cursing her ghost dog for his desertion. She had been a big old sign, hadn’t she? Vida had to take more care: there were fewer people, but they were desperate.

Hell, so am I.

So far she had kept to the tree-line, out of sight. There was more wind on the plateau but it didn’t seem to collect the way it did in the valleys, ferrying the viruses onwards. Vida quickly breathed into her palm and sniffed, but there was no sign of sickness. She’d save her surgical mask for when she really needed it. That she had escaped so far was a true-by-Jesus miracle, isn’t that what her mama would’ve said in the early days? She heard Ruth’s voice: Man proposes; God disposes. Vida cracked her neck and shifted her sweaty backpack. Move on, girl, she told herself. One quick look. This time the voice that came through was the slippered mammy from the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Mm-mm-mm! Time’s a-wastin’.

She limped out from the trees down onto the bald track.

The box had once been painted white, its sides louvred against the wet. It was about her height and not a hive, after all. That was a real shame: honey was just about the only thing that helped a weeping wound, and Lord knew she’d seen enough of those in the last few weeks.

Vida peered through the peeling slats but the inside was dark and secret. It ticked faintly, like a mechanical heart. Or a bomb, Vida thought, and backed away again. Fuck, that was dumb. Could’ve been a booby trap. Don’t you learn?

But there could be something useful inside, her rag-picking conscience insisted. Come on, Veedles. Open it up and take a look. How bad can it be? Vida scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and was newly disgusted at her hands, the scratches and scrapes, their ashy shade. She wasn’t ever going to get used to rubbing animal fat into her skin. She didn’t give a shit that it was something her ancestors had done: this was one law of her mama’s that she wouldn’t be following. A girl had standards: older fat stank, and the fresh stuff had better uses.

Vida looked at the torn nail of her thumb and saw it again in the sand outside their house, the clapboards shifting and creaking as she worked, as if the place would loose itself from the soil and move into some deserted town on its own. Vida imagined her mama inside, cocooned in her blankets, breathing shallow and feeling each blow of the spade as if it would separate her ribs from her sickly spine. The grave had to be deep enough that the coyotes couldn’t get at what was in it, but the earth knew the lie for what it was, and resisted.

Vida stared at the weather box, weighing up the risks of opening it. Just do it, Pandora.

She circled the container and its wooden marker pole, skew against the sky, looking for clues. Now there, at the very top, was something she recognized: not a scalp but a stuffed bird perched on top, beak into the wind. A rooster in his past life, Vida thought. He looked nothing like that now, as if someone was working from memory when they made him, and they hadn’t been paying attention the first time. The thing reminded Vida of the story her ma told about Medio Pollito, the half-chick who was cosseted in his coop. When he left home to search for his other half, he was torched for his arrogance: burnt to a cinder, Ruth always said, and Vida suddenly wanted her world back, with its talking animals and ordinary people, where good was rewarded and evil punished. She wanted to believe in the magic of numbers and the safety of community and Black don’t crack, but right now it was just her and the box, watched over by the zombie cockerel in the fading light.

Girl, get over yourself – it’s not voodoo; it’s a weather vane.

Vida edged forward and poked at one of the slats. The plank rattled, loose as a tooth in a glass jaw. She wiggled it out of its brackets and inspected the interior of the box. It looked like the tiny hospital rooms her ma used to work in during The War, the way she’d described them, anyways: glass and steel and their accurate, useless measurements of time passing. At least the air was fresh back then. Here was a maximum–minimum thermometer – even Vida could see that – but also some other devices. A barometer, she guessed, although she had never worked out why people needed something to tell them what the weather was doing when they were right in the middle of it. And that? A little brass sphere like an alchemist’s globe. A hydrometer, maybe. Lately she had come to appreciate water in all its forms. Dragging a stew pot across the countryside and then heaving the thing home twice a week made you appreciate a drink, especially since the borehole ran dry.

Could she use these instruments? The mercury? Maybe siphon off some alcohol? How heavy would they be to lug around? Vida had learnt the hard way to keep her pack weight down. She envisioned herself ripping the thermometer and hydrometer from their nails. Probably not worth the effort, especially in the hard wind coming.

The real question was: would someone be coming to check on the weather box? Before The War, containers like this were inspected every twenty-four hours, but now weather prediction wasn’t just a hobby for an eccentric, or part of a government program. Vida remembered the bald TV man who had stood in front of a synoptic chart, tapping at it with his baton. Teeth, he had joked, and pointed to a cold front coming in, its blue back arched like the Loch Ness Monster. Teeth and gums. Vida wondered if he was still alive now all these years later. Back then the weather was an inconvenience; at worst a chance to stay home from school. But the wind had turned out to be more important than they had thought, and not only because it carried the spirits of the dead with it, the way her ma’s stories said it did.

The wind had turned out to be very fucking important indeed.

And here it came. Vida watched the little leaves shaking. Shit. There was no way to make it back in time, the wind was rising fast and her limbs were Jello from the climb. Old lady’s legs. Vida searched her bag for the surgical mask, and then put it away again. Not yet. They got saturated too quick. Save it, she told herself. Use the blue bandanna and save the good one. And MOVE! Look for a place to wait until the worst of the wind is over. You know what to do.

Vida scanned the rock she had covered already that day. A crack: that was all she needed. Some small and kindly sheltering space.

It didn’t take long.

She crept into the cave as far back as she could, hugged her knees and waited.

4

Up ahead the rock split and shadowed and Dyce shifted like a dog to inspect it. No game trails; no bones or fur. It smelt okay – not great, but who was keeping score? Not like they were packing a can of Lysol. The wind was whipping the air around his face, anyway. Dyce reached an arm into the cracked darkness and waved it in the merciful space inside. It would have to do. He dropped his bag and squeezed in sideways. When Garrett arrived, he followed the sound of his brother’s buckle straps, and they slithered like bullsnakes into the dark.

They sat cross-legged in the gloom, breathing into their sleeves, waiting like runners to get their breath back. They tried to measure the lungfuls so as not to disturb the air. Keep the outside out and the inside in, sang Dyce’s brain. Easy to say, but the veil was thin. He lowered his arm and breathed, nice and shallow to start with: acclimatizing, expanding to fill the space.

The cave held the stale human smell of leakage and occupation. In the old days that had made for warmth and companions; now it meant contagion and quarantine. They strained for tell-tale noises – shuffling, swallowing, breathing – but the wind outside made it all but impossible. Dyce gave up.

‘Fire?’

Garrett shrugged, his universal response. A small angry flame flickered in Dyce’s chest and he damped it down. It’s just us, he told himself. The two of us. We have to make nice. He could hear Garrett swallowing hard against the rawness of his throat. That was where every phage struck, even if it came through the eye or the ear or, worse, the privates, like those vampire catfish that wriggled up this one guy’s dick when he swam in the Amazon. Anyhow, a virus always attacked the throat first: it loved the mucous membranes, and it felt like a rusty nail moving down the gullet.

No fucking fire, then. They were used to these dark hibernations: sometimes they lasted a day or two. Dyce remembered how, early on, they used to curl into balls and cover their faces like mummies, unable to talk – or unwilling. You ran out of thoughts, Dyce decided, a place between sleep and death. It was as bad as solitary confinement. People lost their minds.

And, like prisoners, the boys had found ways to keep themselves busy in the dark, single-minded as moles, sick of each other. Dyce felt around in his bag, his heart giving a quick clench when his fingers missed it, but it was there alright, his eternal stick of wood and the knife that went with it – an Opinel his dad had given him, worn down now, the slot in the handle too big by double for the blade that folded into it. Dyce made mermaids. He always had. If he did enough carvings in the dark of hibernation, he would eventually make something perfect and recognizable and whole. Someday, with the right time and effort, he would make an instrument. What Dyce missed most was rock ’n’ roll.

It hadn’t happened yet. Dyce knew that when the wind died and they emerged in the sunlight, Garrett would name the misshapen thing he had carved and turn it bad. ‘Horse,’ said Garrett, and Dyce’s siren with her fish tail and blank face became a hoofed and galloping animal, extinct. ‘What is that? A fucking phage?’ and there she turned in Dyce’s hand, venomous, sharp-toothed, inevitable. ‘The Michelin Man?’ and the abandoned dead rose before him, their joints thickened. The carvings that turned out okay were the ones he had done the quickest, from the fewest strokes: with enough practice you internalized the muscle memory. If only he could stop himself showing them to Garrett every single time.

Dyce blamed the swan.

When he’d first started carving he’d sat out in the yard and tried to make something from the ivory piano key he’d found in the gutted pre-school. He hadn’t intended for it to be a swan. It started out as a mermaid, but Garrett had seen its torso and figured it was a bird, the tail its wings. It was the only thing he’d ever asked of his little brother, and Dyce, dumb-struck by approval, had obliged. Garrett hung onto it for a couple of years, polishing it on his pants-leg in the dark till it was smooth, almost wet to the touch. He gave it to Bethlehem even before he’d caught scent that she was pregnant. Dyce had asked Garrett as they high-tailed out of Glenvale whether he’d taken the swan. ‘Jesus, Dyce!’ was all Garrett had said. Had the Callahans ripped it from her throat when they laid her in the ground? Dyce could see them telling each other it was too pretty to go down in the darkness.

Fuck them all.

He ran his fingers over the stick’s ivory bark, a good piece of birch. He wasn’t up for whittling today: lately everything made him feel tired, and he was having a hard time seeing the point of the running.

‘Garrett.’

A gusty sigh in the darkness. Garrett was opening his bag, Dyce could hear. Looking for his tools, maybe. Or the salt tablets. Sometimes they helped.

‘Do you really, really know where we’re going?’

‘I told you. The coast.’

‘But why?’

‘You know why.’

And Dyce did. He just didn’t believe it. Garrett repeated things because he thought that reinforcing them would make them come true. Sometimes they did. Like calling their cousin Larry ‘Lard-Ass’ until he ate his own weight in unhappiness. But they weren’t kids anymore. This was different.

This mattered.

‘There’s a reason we’re passing fewer and fewer settlements the closer we get to the sea.’ The moisture in the sea air made it double deadly, wind or no wind. Humidity kept those tiny killers alive. The first waves of viruses had driven people steadily southwards: folks saw the southern coast as the best place to set up camp – furthest from the source of the plagues, close to the bounty of the ocean.

How wrong they were.

‘Yeah. Can’t figure a way of getting to the sea without going near the coast. Let me know when you crack that one.’

‘Plus we don’t have a boat.’

‘No shit, Sherlock.’

‘I’m not so hot at swimming, Garrett.’ Mainly because you nearly drowned me one summer, you asshole, he thought. Garrett had held him casually under the brown water of Tumblesom Lake until Dyce had thought his head would burst, like the old Scout song about Running Bear and Little White Dove, pulled down by the raging river and ending up in the Happy Hunting Ground. Dyce hadn’t been able to get rid of that song, even as he felt his lungs emptying themselves. That ballad had been etched into the grooves of their dad’s most enduring LP. When all the others were lost or broken or scratched to hell, there was always ol’ Running Bear drowning in a river.

I did pass out, he told himself. I passed out and a mermaid saved me. One of the older girls, Dillon’s sister, had dragged him onto the jetty, her undersized costume pulling tight against her breasts. The water was unfriendly ever after. Dyce had cheated death and he knew not to take another chance.

‘You’re going to have to get good at it.’

Dyce fell back quiet. He heard Garrett laying out his kit on the cold floor of the cave: the rusty iron needle; the thread made of long grass or maybe gut; the fresh-skinned pelt of their last meal. Waste not, want not, Garrett liked to say, but Dyce thought that he just enjoyed killing things.

He’d seen the striped woodrat before and after it had served its purpose; though half a mouse hardly gave back the calories spent on the catching and cooking and chewing, it did offer a tiny, delicate skin. Dyce had often watched Garrett sewing in the daylight: his brother knew what he was doing. He had challenged himself to work at the same craft without being able to see his hands. In the dark he would have to be more careful, Dyce thought. No more injuries than they absolutely had to have. There was no anti-tetanus shot.

Dyce imagined each step. Garrett would fold the woodrat skin so that it was inside out. He would sew tiny, blind loops in a neat row from the neck, along its stomach, right to the asshole. Then he would sew up the slits that ran from the belly sutures outward to the feet, all the while stroking with his greasy thumbs for lumps and errors.

Next, Garrett would rub the woodrat between his palms to soften the fibers of its skin until it was warm and smooth. He would pull the creature in on itself, like righting a used sock, so that the fur was on the outside. If he’d had the skull, he would have inserted it so that it would sit in its proper place in the head – eye socket matched to eye hole. It really was that simple.

But this rodent was too small for the boys to spare its skull. They had eaten every bit of it, bones and all, and kept it down, too. Dyce had counted himself grateful for his dad’s survival lessons. They’d hated them, but when the electricity finally stopped for good, they were a distraction from the blank TV. With the woodrat’s skull already cooked soft, chewed and swallowed down, Garrett would have to search around his feet for a pointed stone and feed it into the face of his creature at the chin. Eventually, if he did it right and didn’t break the fragile skin, the stone’s point would reach the woodrat’s nose and voilà! Mickey would have a face again.

Dyce heard the scraping and scooping that meant that Garrett was gathering handfuls of sand and funneling them into the limp sack of the body. You had to fill it tightly from the neck down, make sure that the granules reached the insides of the legs.

The final stitches were always the hardest, and Garrett would take his time on these, sewing from the chin to the gullet. When he was done, he held the rodent upside down over his open hand, waiting for a trickle of sand, then feel for the guilty holes.

When he had more light, Garrett would select from his bag a pair of dried juniper berries and position them inside the eye holes. The woodrat needed one for the nose too: the soft, fleshy nub never survived the skinning. Dyce hated the finished animals. They always looked pregnant with death, droopy-headed, seed eyes blank – staring at him from The Other Side. What was the point of them, either? Garrett’s crazy totems.

Dyce saw him sometimes when he was done with one of his creatures, combing it with his fingers to neaten the fur. It was then that he could see his brother loving someone like Beth Callahan. Had she laid her head softly in his lap? There would be no shotgun wedding, even when everyone could tell Garrett had knocked her up. Used to be you’d plan your life in years. Now it was months and weeks when no one had any right to think they’d see the next blessed, windless summer. Getting pregnant was always going to end that girl, anyway. She was already half-dead when Garrett fell in love with her. There hadn’t been much of her to begin with, and then the hunger and the sicknesses had taken their share.

But the heart and the dick don’t talk to the brain, do they? Garrett’s heart brought her its flowers and all the frogs he could trap down at the stream and roast over the fire, offerings like chocolates in a box. And his dick wanted somewhere warm and wet, and Bethie was pretty if you imagined meat on her bones. The Callahans, with their badges and their boots, were never going to take kindly to the idea of losing their girl-child. One way or another it was going to end with both of them deep in the dirt. And now that she was gone, the rest of the Callahans were going to make sure Garrett followed poor Bethie just as quick as they could make him.

But they couldn’t make Garrett sorry. They couldn’t take that away from him. Dyce listened and knew that the work was steadying his older brother and his broken heart. He set the creature aside, and the boys laid themselves down.

Dyce reckoned about an hour had passed when the phage arrived. And they’d been so careful! He heard Garrett swallow and felt the scrape as if it was in his own throat.

First the scrapes, then the sweats – the body fighting the virus by red-lining all systems.

The boys had seen a lot of people infected with a bunch of different phages, some so mild that they passed within a day. Others worse, much worse. Dyce shuddered. He couldn’t help himself.

Jay Loram had caught something while they were camping near the Colorado River. It killed off his nerves. He couldn’t feel if he needed a pee or if his hand was resting on a hot frying pan, or if his neck was burnt to blisters from a day of walking in the sun. Dyce had seen him bite down on bird shot and shatter two teeth. Jay had spat them out in his hand, bloody and jagged without even a grimace. If you didn’t know about the virus and you came upon his body, you’d think he’d been tortured to death. His legs had been cut and bruised; three toes were missing – their stumps festering. A bone in one finger was sticking up sideways and his mouth was so rotted that there was no color in there, just a black hole, and it stank like a dead dog’s guts. That’s what got him in the end, Dyce thought hysterically. Brush and floss, little nuggets! ’Cause there are no more trips to the dentist! Yeehaa!

But trips to other places: those abounded. Mrs Fordice had come home from the wood one evening with a temperature so high that people said they could feel her pass by from across the road. She hadn’t recognized her own daughter, wasn’t sure where she was or why she’d been out in the trees in the first place. Mr Fordice had dragged a drinking trough out of the stables and into the courtyard and they put the old lady in there for the night, changing the warm water for cold every fifteen minutes. In the morning she was dead, her body mottled orange and purple and red like a poisonous snake.

The external illnesses were pretty bad: they ruptured and melted the skin, made people lose hair or grow scabs.

But the brain viruses were the purer evil.

Dyce had known Niccola Drew before she died. They had been at each other’s parties as kids. She had gone early on to work as a cleaner for one of the doctors up near the border and caught something from an organ tray. After her throat, it went right on upstairs to her brain; Do Not Pass Begin. She had started getting her left and right confused – women, right? – and put it down to lack of sleep.

But then she had started to have memories of things that she knew had never happened – fucking terrifying things, she told Dyce. She knew, rationally, obviously, that her father hadn’t murdered her. But she had kept seeing him standing over her with the bent tennis racquet.

One night she had left her bed, boiled the kettle and scalded the skin off his face while he slept. At least she had the sense to run away, Dyce thought as he rolled over, trying to find a spot in the dirt that his body had already made warm. They had found her hanging by her neck from a tree. There was some kind of heroism in that, wasn’t there? Taking yourself out of the herd before you did any more damage? Garrett definitely thinks so, although I’m not seeing him doing the same, Dyce thought. Nope. That fucker is hanging in there, like his life is so awesome it’s worth saving.

As if he had heard the thought, Garrett moaned, the sound of someone with their demons right behind them. Or the Callahan marshals, thought Dyce. Which is about the same thing. He tried to see his brother in the darkness. Nothing.

He crept closer, trying not to touch Garrett accidentally with his bare skin. You never knew how these things were transmitted, and contact was not smart.

Garrett was drenched and muttering. Dyce thought of Nic Drew and her dead daddy with the skin boiled right off his bones, and he wished he had his whittling knife to hand. What he would do with it, he didn’t rightly know.

Now his brother had subsided. It sounded as if he was drifting in and out of consciousness. You just had to let them sweat, Dyce knew. The fever was one good way to get rid of a sickness: the burning fried the germs and purged the system.

And if the fever meant that they were already dying, you couldn’t stop it.

Garrett lay there beside his woodrat, their bodies heavy and limp.

Dyce scooted a little ways off and then stretched out his fingers so that he could keep touching Garrett through his shirt. That way he might manage to get a couple of hours of shut-eye. Not enough. Never enough. That was what freedom was, thought Dyce as he closed his eyes again. Freedom from vigilance. Rest.

The boys’ snores rose softly.

In the darkness at the rear of the cave, Vida sat up and straightened her legs. She had been hugging her knees for so long that it felt as if they’d turned into a tail.

5

The wind had stopped and the cave mouth was bright white with morning sun. It hurt to look out. The rays didn’t reach far: the back of the cave stayed blackly quiet and dank, smelling now of their own bodies, mingled with the older odor of creatures who’d sheltered here before. Stone soup, thought Garrett. Everyone lends their flavor.

He massaged his neck for raised glands. The virus seemed to have burnt itself out overnight. The salt tablets really did work. He’d dissolved two on the back of his tongue, determined not to gag, and it was worth it now. Rare good news.

He reached over to Dyce, grabbed a leg and shook it.

‘I’ve made flapjacks!’

He never tired of the joke, Dyce waking up thinking the world was how it was before – and then the disappointment of no flapjacks, not just for breakfast, but ever again.

But the leg under his palm was thin and strange. Garrett pulled his hand away. Dyce had changed in the darkness, whittled himself into one of his own carved totems. The replacement leg was skinny, and it was very, very stiff, as if its owner had frozen in place. Oh, Jesus, thought Garrett. It’s a body! He died in the night!

But the fabric was rougher than Dyce’s cargo pants – denim, maybe.

Garrett shuddered. It was worse than when that crab spider had run up his leg, all the way up his shin, past the knee, up and up till it was hemmed in at the belt line.

He reached out again in the darkness and this time he found Dyce properly. He shook him and then pulled, half-dragging his sleeping brother towards the cave mouth.

‘Jesus, fuck, Garrett!’

‘Shut up!’

He pulled his brother’s sleep-heavy body over the lip of the cave, and vaulted his own ungainly self out after. Dyce lay twisting on the gravel, rubbing his eyes, Garrett looking around for a weapon and wasn’t this always the way? Dyce dreaming, and Garrett on guard. He picked up a twisted stick, burnt black at the end. Better than nothing.

Behind them in the cave there came a dragging, and Garrett was suddenly sure that out of it would emerge some creature, a moth-balled dragon snuffling irritation at the disturbance of its treasure, slow to anger and impossible to appease.

The legs in the faded jeans appeared first, then ten splayed fingers, like someone playing a piano. They searched for purchase on the outer wall of the cave and anchored themselves. The boys watched, unable to run, as if they were stuffed with sand.

A face hauled itself into view, masked cowboy-style with a printed blue handkerchief.

Then the woman crouched in the dirt, a fighting stance, but held up her empty hands.

‘Fuck Renard,’ she said, her voice muffled.

Dyce swapped a look with his brother. Garrett recognized the phrase, the mantra of the resistance – the not-so-secret password pledging allegiance to the South. But the revolt had come and gone years back, the war of another generation. The way things were now was the way they had been since the boys were just kids. The old phrases came back to him as he stared at the grimy woman: Aegroto dum anima est, spes est. The only Latin their dad had gotten a handle on, that’s what he had carved into the back of the bathroom door. He thought it was funny: while they suffered through the cramps and the diarrhea, they could consider the famous words. While there’s life, there’s hope. And of course Garrett hated it; hated that he had to read it every day, sometimes twice, sometimes nearly fifty times. What the fuck did some Roman prick know about it? Try a new virus on every wind. How about that, Cicero? Try churning out Hallmark cards when everyone you know is dead and you’re shitting your soul out of your ass. Fucker.

The woman reached round the back of her head and began untying her mask. The ashes from the cave had streaked her cheeks like camouflage. There was a patch of white flakes on her braids that made her look like a skunk. No, thought Garrett. A woodrat. She looked thirty-something. Too old for me, thought Garrett. But not bad shape.

He held the blunt tip of the stick towards her, uncertain.

‘Hey, now. No harm done,’ she said. ‘In fact, you owe me. I could have—’ She drew a long brown finger across her neck. ‘Found this cave before you last evening. I didn’t think it was, ah, smart to show myself right away.’

Garrett prodded the air, his cheeks red under the little scars. He was twenty-four but his voice still sometimes jumped, and he hated it. ‘Where’s your partner? Who’re you travelling with?’

‘You can lower the big stick, sunshine. No partner. Least, I used to have, till last week. My ma. Our house is just along this ridge.’

Dyce, ever the conversationalist: ‘Where’s she now?’

The woman looked down. ‘Snake-bite. Buried her a couple of days back.’

‘What kind of snake?’ Garrett, testing.

‘Rattler.’

‘You sick?’

‘Nothing bad. Little cough, but it seems to have blown over.’

‘So why’re you out here?’ asked Dyce, getting to his feet. He brushed the gravel from his hair.

‘Need to get to the next town now, don’t I? Can’t be staying in the death house. Life goes on.’

The boys were silent, wondering how much harder it must be to travel on your own, hiding from everyone. Another rhyme everyone knew off by heart: If you’re alone, don’t come home. Two or more and you’re in the door. Loners were trouble: escapees or crazies or carriers so sick they had been expelled from the southern towns. Sometimes, if they were organized, they gathered in ghostly camps, like lepers.

‘Where’s your stuff?’

She was definitely twitchy. ‘Back home. I was just checking out the best route to Fieldstone. Day-pack’s back there in the Taj Mahal.’ She jerked her thumb at the cave. ‘I didn’t exactly have time to pack up.’

Again, the boys and their look.

‘Looks like you need some travelers to be vouching for you,’ said Garrett.

‘Looks like.’

‘We can vouch.’

Vida’s eyebrows shot up. Oh-oh, here it comes, she thought. Now we parley in the saloon.

‘Just need two things,’ Garrett said. He looked over to Dyce. ‘Three things, actually.’

He’s enjoying this, Vida thought. He really is.

Garrett held up his index finger. ‘First, I need to see your ma’s grave. Can’t be vouching for some runaway thief, or killer, or contagious outcast. Need to see that your story holds up.’

‘Done.’

‘Next, I need a weapon. Some grayhounds after this rabbit. You got a gun?’

‘Only an old pistol at the house. No bullets, mind. It’s yours if you’ll take it. What else?’

‘A clean pair of panties for my brother.’

Vida’s mouth stretched wide in a smile. It felt strange, the muscles creaking with disuse.

Dyce kicked a clod of dirt at Garrett. ‘Yeah. Let’s stand around chatting up strange women a little longer, dickwad. I’m beginning to see eye to eye with the Callahans.’

Garrett’s face fell. ‘Shit, yeah. Let’s move.’

‘Woah, there,’ said Vida. ‘You got Callahans after you?’