Authors: Norman Dixon
“Cale, get him on the table,” Lyda said,
chewing on her glasses.
He nodded and laid the boy down. Cale
had survived twenty-two winters, but as hardened as he was to life on the
Settlement, he was not prepared for this. His mouth dry, and skin pale as
winter’s snow. The sight of the boy covered in blood and trying to put on the
bravest of faces rattled Cale. But he had an obligation to the Settlement and
the Lord. He swallowed that fear, choked it down with determination and faith.
Lyda busied herself with gearing up for
the amputation. She donned a heavy rubber apron, gloves, and a full helmet with
a faceguard. Every precaution was taken when dealing with blood, infected or
not. She powered on the bone saw, testing the action with a whir. The whine of
the tool made her jump as it broke the silence. Her emotions had gotten the
better of her.
“Are you gonna’ take my arm?"
Ryan’s voice was smooth, but his limited winters came through in it.
Lyda turned to face him. She was
thankful the disdain on her face lay hidden beneath the helmet. It was not very
Christian of her to hate this child, but she did. She hated him; she hated them
all with an ilk that filled every fiber of her being. She hated them more than
she hated the Creepers that took her husband, Steven, seven winters ago. She
hated them because they killed her child.
“No, the Creepers already saw to
that." She unrolled the sterile operating kit with shaking hands. Tears
rolled down her freckled cheeks, warm and sticky under the suffocating helmet.
“This is going to sting a bit.”
Ryan laughed. “Can’t be all that bad.
Won’t be playing baseball anytimmmmme . . .” His head lolled to the side as
drug induced slumber gripped him.
“Cale, you don’t need to be here for
this." Lyda busied herself with legating the artery.
“I’ve seen worse. I’m here to help,
Lyda." Cale reached out for her shoulder, but stopped when she flinched
away.
“You’d better go. This isn’t like being
out in the field. This is a little boy." Lyda picked up the scalpel
carefully, studied it in the harsh fluorescence.
“Lyda.”
The door to the infirmary opened. Pastor
Craven cleared his throat. He paused in the doorway, the sun at his back,
reminding Lyda, ever so briefly, of Steven returning from the fields, from
God’s war, but as the aging preacher broke the threshold the memory faded.
“You’d better go, Cale,” she said,
harsher this time.
Cale nodded to her, hesitated a second,
but one look at Pastor Craven revoked that hesitation. He acknowledged the
Pastor then headed for the fields and lighter air.
“Pastor,” Lyda greeted him in an even
tone, doing well to hide her reservations about the boy.
“Doctor . . . is he out?" The
Pastor walked to the head of the table and loomed over Ryan’s sleeping body.
“Yes, you don’t need to be here for
this, Pastor." She knew he wouldn’t leave at her word, but she had to try.
She thought for a brief second that if she could be alone with Ryan, with the
scalpel in her hand, she might have just enough nerve to kill him, and put her
demons to rest. Perhaps, that was why Pastor Craven simply waved her off, as if
her suggestion was complete nonsense. Where most normal people found comfort in
the sleeping face of a child, she found only unending pain, pain that tore at
her mind, at her womb, prodded by the cruel finger of memory. She squeezed the
scalpel in her fist.
“Is everything okay, Doctor?”
“Yes, Pastor . . . just shaking off the
jitters. Even with the Lord on my side it never gets easy, and it’s especially
hard when they are this young." She let her shoulders drop, completing the
lie.
“Indeed, but are you sure, Lyda? Maybe I
can gather a few of the others to aid you. Lord knows they’ve had the
experience. I know how you feel about this child. Believe me, I know how we all
feel about these children. But those feelings must be put aside for the
Lord." The Pastor patted the boy on shoulder and smiled. He started to
pray inwardly that Lyda would accept his offer, but she was as stubborn as a
newborn fighting sleep. Then he prayed for her to make a mistake, a slip of the
knife, he prayed for the child’s death.
Lyda watched the light reveal everything
in the Pastor’s face; the deep-seated hate, the lie, the slight twitch of the
brow, oh Father who aren’t going to Heaven. She wasn’t fooled by his games.
They’d shared many a long conversation on the same subject. Each, the Doctor
and the Pastor, knew where the other’s thoughts were at the moment. There was
only one major difference though . . . Lyda hated them more because she had to
give up her only son to the grace of God, not three days removed from the
warmth and safety of her very own belly. The last of Steven’s line cradled in
her arms, oh how she could smell him still.
“You can go." She knew she was out
of line, but the memory was far more threatening than the Pastor could ever
hope to be.
“Very well. I will be in the chapel,
praying. May the light of the Lord shine on you and this little boy." The
Pastor left without another word.
As the door closed Lyda lost her cool.
She collapsed to the floor, dropped the scalpel, and curled up in a tight ball.
The inside of the helmet fogged up with tears and heat and snot. A low moan
escaped her trembling lips. The pain came on the spiked cocktail of recent
memory that traveled from her brain to her now barren womb, a dead place, a dry
and forgotten land where nary a sign of life would spring ever again.
She was at the gates with young Jake,
named after Steven’s father, cradled in her arms. Steven had been dead nearly
two months and the last reminder of him cried in her arms. All of the
Settlement’s inhabitants stood stone silent at her back. The ghost of Ma and Pa
Crannen, too, stood with them, an unseen reminder of the way of the Settlement.
They had succumbed to injuries they sustained while out west. Injured or not,
they rewrote their own established rules and changed the Settlement’s, and
Lyda’s life forever. They had returned, changed everything, and then passed
into God’s land, leaving a beguiled Settlement, and two teenage twins shocked
in their wake.
Their ghostly voices echoed in her head
in the present and in memory, “The Settlement can only sustain one new life
every winter and that is all. It is by the will of God that we see this
through. That means any child born beyond the first of that winter must be put
in the hands of the Lord. They are to be put beyond the fence.”
She remembered clearly the hypocrisy of
the Settlement. Only one new child per year and it was her year, her turn, it
was Steven shinning down from Heaven . . . and then it was not. Suddenly Ma and
Pa Crannen returned from an expedition with not one, not two, but five babies.
And just as sudden the rules no longer applied to them. They told her that
these children were to be taken in and cared for because the Lord demanded it
of them, the Lord demanded sacrifice. But it seemed that sacrificial demand
rested solely on her shoulders.
She wanted to run away, to take Jake and
make a new home for them far away from sacrifice, and the will of the Lord, but
she knew the gravity of her situation, and she knew the shrewd, one-sided will
of God, honor thy mother and father, she had to obey, as bad as the world is,
as wrong as the world is, Hell, she’d been taught, was much worse. And it was
with that thought, that ideal, she accepted their words, and God’s demand, and
she was going to join the elite rank of mother’s who left their children beyond
the fence. But unlike them her pregnancy was not a lapse in judgment—it was her
turn.
Lyda’s feet were concrete blocks. She
clutched Jake close to her racing heart, the heat of her body melting the
slow-falling snowflakes before they even touched her skin. The Settlement
silent at her back, she dragged her feet ever forward, praying for the love of
God, and hating him in the same breath.
Grim-faced guards looked away from her
as they rolled the massive rusty fence back. The creaking metalwork, the
wailing moans of those grief stricken mothers that walked this path before her.
By God, what kind of world have you wrought? She thought angrily. She froze as
little Jake buried his cold nose in her breast, a shudder tore her apart then.
She still notes the moment as the instant her soul died, murdered really, like
little Jake, with complete faith in the word of the Lord and Settlement. She
walked through the open gate.
The bodies of the children never
lingered more than a night at most, but it was time enough for the cold to
steal the life from their innocent throats, time enough to be dragged away as
food. However, the Creepers were never a part of the dragging, they steered
well clear, strangely so, or perhaps not, perhaps the Creepers were even more
ashamed of the Settlement’s mothers than they were of themselves. Either way,
the innocent newborns were never welcomed into Heaven by the rotten teeth of
the walking dead. The weather and the carrion feeders were their chariots to
the afterlife.
Lyda’s hands shook unmercifully, her
tears icy rivers of a mother’s greatest deceit. She placed young Jake on the
grass, kissed his brow, listened to her soul’s final plea, and then she looked
to the Lord, as she turned her back on her own child. She walked towards the
blank faces of the Settlement, those shocked, slack-jawed vacant eyes, and a
few, a select few, a dirty group, stared at her with a deep understanding. She
nodded to those few, in the action, saying, some day.
The crowd broke apart, busying
themselves with anything that would take their minds off of how truly hopeless
they were. No one bothered Lyda, how could they? How did one approach a mother
after such an act? There is only one answer to that question, you didn’t. And
so Lyda stood, back to Jake, wracked with grief as her child, the only remnant
of her beloved husband, wailed with the power of all the world’s lungs.
Jake’s accusatory cries banged on the
eardrums of every inhabitant of the Settlement, banged on the eardrums of God
himself, even. As the baby carried the tune of unspoken guilt into the dusk and
beyond, Lyda fell to her knees and wailed along with him. To this day she does
not know how long they cried together.
She opened her eyes, returned to the
present, and was ashamed at what she returned to. She was better than this,
stronger than this, she was soulless now. Taking a deep breath she got to her
feet and picked up her instruments.
Ryan’s good arm twitched in the throes
of a dream. His skin was horribly pale.
Lyda leaned in close to Ryan’s ear and
whispered, “I hate you.”
With an even hand she cut into the young
flesh and busied herself with the business of removing the boy’s arm. And she
did so with a smile.
Bobby could sense his brother’s presence
on the other side of the slim bathroom door, about the only thing the thin wood
was good for, was simple privacy, but so help you if you had a ripper, the
entire barracks would catch a whiff and hear you jamming it out. He wasn’t
ripping one out; the shit had long since been frightened out of his body. He
studied the bite in the small mirror. He had to stand on tip-toe just to catch
a good glimpse of it.
“Everything okay, Bob-O?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, Pete. Just . . . my stomach
hurts, feels like I gotta’ tear one.”
Bobby wished Peter would go away, but he
knew his brothers well, and Pete was the most persistent of them all. Maybe it
was his red hair and freckles that made him so, as if he had to make up for
them somehow. The Settlement boys were always teasing him about those features,
but he just pestered them with questions. He constantly asked, and never took a
simple no for an answer. Bobby had to think quickly to keep Peter at bay.
“Yeah, I bet, but why did you guys
leave? What did you do? What happened? We were real worried about you guys. And
you missed Paul knocking the ever loving hell out of the fat Clarendon kid,
socked him good, right on the chin, you could see the rolls of fat shake from
the shock of it.”
Bobby laughed at that. “Be a minute,
Pete, just gonna wash up."
He ran the faucet and splashed the cold
well-water on his face. It shocked him back into reality. Using his fingertips
he poked and pulled at the flesh around the wound. It was crusted with blood,
ringed with red, and a slight yellowish color on the outmost edge. He wanted to
take his pocket knife out and cut the flesh away, but it wouldn’t be worth the
pain, he’d be dead soon anyway. He opted instead to flush it with pure, clean
mountain water. The coldness of it caused his skin to tighten, sending a shiver
up his back.
He wet a bit of toilet paper and rubbed
away the caked on blood. The sink sloshed with pink water, swirling poison,
creeping death back into the water system, but somewhere on the other end,
Bobby knew, many filters and purifiers would annihilate the Fection, preventing
it from spreading further. Many throughout the world, when the Fection first
hit, were not so lucky, for poorly filtered water delivery systems served as
mass arties of unintended death.
The wound finally clean, he looked down
at it. It wasn’t so bad, as far as wounds went, it was small, slightly bruised
and red, but other than the fact that it was enough to kill him, it was
alright. He rummaged through the small silver case under the sink, which served
as the first aid kit for the barracks, and found a roll of gauze and some tape.
He fashioned a bandage and patted his stomach. Now all he had to do was smile,
be himself, and wait for death. No problem, he thought, and then the truth of it
overwhelmed him.