Authors: Zachary Rawlins
Jenny shrugged.
“Don’t see how that’s my problem.”
Yael started to unpack the tent from a compression
bag. Somehow she had ended up carrying most Jenny’s baggage along with her own,
though Yael wasn’t certain exactly how that had happened.
“You’re in a bad mood tonight,” Yael remarked. “What’s
bothering you, Miss Frost?”
“I’m sober and filthy, trapped in the middle of a
goddamn wasteland with an annoying little girl. What’s not to love?”
“Language.”
Yael ducked just fast enough to avoid the piece of
scrap wood that Jenny flung at her head.
***
A city built just beyond the horizon. Yael steps only on
light-colored tiles as she runs from the narrow shadows that the ancient towers
cast. Her hands are filled with cut flowers and Yael knows that she must not
hold them tightly, or she will risk bruising their waxen petals, but they drift
from her hands, found and then lost again.
“Have you woken?”
Listless and bored, throwing rocks
into the dark water of a pond in a ruined industrial park near the old heart of
Roanoke. The water is poisoned with metals and polycarbonates, useless for
swimming. Yael watches the reflected lights of the Visitor’s ships as they arc
overhead and wishes for company.
A white hallway. A hospital gown,
cool air. Yael catches her face in a mirror, but the eyes are all wrong.
“Will you wake?”
***
Yael would have slept longer, were it not for a profound need for the
bathroom. The night was almost gone and the light of a reluctant dawn petered
through the fabric of the tent walls, illuminating Jenny’s empty sleeping bag,
crumpled and discarded. The tent door hung partially unzipped, swaying with the
cold breeze.
She lingered briefly in her sleeping bag, reluctant to
leave the warmth for the chilly morning air of the Waste. Then she kicked
herself free of the sleeping bag with a sigh and hurriedly put on the clothes
she had worn yesterday, dusty and still damp with sweat. Yael decided to skip
her mask out of simple laziness – after all, she didn’t intend to stay out
long.
The campsite was deserted.
Their campfire had died down to red coals that hissed
and popped, the only sound in the flat grey expanse of the Waste. The night
before they had set up camp in what had probably been a courtyard between structures,
pitching their tent on a bed of dry crabgrass, surrounded by coarse sand and
the bone-white remains of the toppled buildings. Yael glanced around, then
hurried behind one of the larger fragments of a nearby wall, modest even in the
absence of company.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the shadows
of the partially collapsed wall, resiliently denying the reality of what she
saw in the creeping sunlight. Yael uttered a very small sound, a tiny yelp that
cut off almost before it began.
A fallen piece of concrete lay diagonally over the top
of the stub of the wall, creating a sort of crevice. The ground was disturbed
all the way to the mouth of the unnatural cave, probably from the body being
dragged across it.
At least Yael
hoped
that it had been a body by
that point – and not a person.
Fenrir raised his bloody muzzle briefly from the
cavity torn in the corpse’s abdomen, leering at her with his malicious eyes,
the edges of his mouth drawn up in a snarl or a ghastly smile. Yael suspected
there was little difference. The corpse was turned toward her, and what had
once been eyes shone like black marbles in a face so mangled that she couldn’t
even guess at gender.
Yael retreated carefully, afraid to turn her back on
the savage, laughing dog.
Fenrir whined and advanced, red paws staining the
grey-brown sand between them.
Yael took another step back, cursing herself for
leaving her tools, everything that could help her, beside her sleeping bag in
the tent.
It was like a dance, slow and deliberate, one step
and then a corresponding response, the distance between them maintained despite
the changing position. Fenrir snarled continuously deep in the back of his
throat, a sound like a rusted machine coughing to life. The dog’s eyes were
filled with a primal and direct longing that made her knees shiver. Yael kept
her hands out in front of her in a gesture of instinctive self-defense, almost
as if she planned to ward the dog away by gesture.
The fifth step took Yael out from behind the fractured
wall and into the gradual dawn and sour wind of the Waste. She had to fight the
impulse to run as her eyes adjusted to the light of the open courtyard, Fenrir
disappearing into the shadow behind the wall.
Instead, with an act of tremendous will, she continued
to back away, one trembling step after another.
Yael really did shriek when she bumped into something as
she retreated. She struggled and fought against the arms that wrapped around
her.
“Hey, cool it, Princess,” Jenny said, her tone amused.
“It’s me.”
Yael clutched Jenny’s arm without even thinking about
it, her shaking fingers digging into the fabric of her red sweatshirt.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jenny asked, confused. “Did
something happen?”
“Nothing,” Yael snapped, not sure why she was lying,
or where her sudden embarrassment came from. “Nothing happened.”
“That’s not very convincing, Princess...”
Yael shrugged herself free and walked back to the
tent, ignoring Jenny’s bemused expression. She tucked herself back into her
sleeping bag, pulling the fabric up over her head. She remained that way when
she heard Jenny clamber into the tent, kicking off her sneakers at the entrance
and then laying down next to her.
“C’mon,” Jenny said, poking at Yael through the
sleeping bag. “Tell. What’s going on?”
Somehow, in the warm darkness of her sleeping bag, the
words came easier.
“Your dog...” Yael whispered.
“Fenrir?” Jenny prompted.
“He is... eating. Behind the wall. Eating someone.”
There was a pause.
“And?”
Jenny sounded genuinely puzzled. Yael tore the
sleeping bag from her head and stared at her in astonishment.
“He is
eating
someone!” Yael cried out, her
voice anguished. “Right over there!”
“Yeah,” Jenny said, lying down on her back, sounding
bored. “He’ll do that.”
She couldn’t think of what to say in response and
Jenny seemed to have lost interest in the conversation, so Yael went back to
hiding in her sleeping bag and trying to ignore the increasingly urgent demands
of her bladder.
Ten milligrams Diazepam dissolved under the tongue,
five milligrams Zolpidem taken orally. Simultaneous presence. His ghost lingering
in every room with the smell of old books and aftershave. Three tiny pink Xanax
footballs washed down with lukewarm water directly from the tap, bare feet on
cold tile. There and not there.
Yael devoured the
potato hot from the fire, burning her lips and tongue in the process. She
didn’t care, and was reaching for a second before she even managed to swallow
the first.
“Don’t choke,” Jenny warned. “Slow down. You’ve barely
eaten in two days. Shove a bunch of food in your stomach and you are going to
be sicker than hell.”
She couldn’t have chided Jenny for her language even
if she had wanted to. Her mouth was full of steaming, inexplicably delicious
roasted potato. Yael didn’t know what had caused Jenny’s sudden fit of
generosity, but she was too hungry to ask questions. She had gone without food
for a day before, as part of one diet or another, but never while walking for
miles on end on broken and uneven roads.
“Hey, Princess. Slow down.”
Yael hadn’t ever eaten a potato by itself. Her
parent’s cook had dutifully prepared them for her since she became a
vegetarian, but they were always served as part of a dish, mixed with steamed
vegetables or sautéed in olive oil. Somehow these scrawny purple potatoes, with
their oddly square shape, were infinitely more delicious than any she had
before.
“I’ve got to admit that you impressed me a bit. I was
sure you would break down and eat the stew on the second day. You know, you’re
pretty tough for a spoiled rich girl...”
Objecting would have required either pausing her meal,
or talking with her mouth full, and Yael wasn’t willing to do either. She just
rolled her eyes and removed another one of the foil-wrapped potatoes from the
coal of their camp fire, tossing the potato from hand to hand until the foil
cooled.
“Lucky thing we bumped into that trader. I was
starting to think you would starve before we ever managed to get to whatever
that city is called...”
“Hastur, beside the dry lake of Kali, in sight of the
ivory towers of doomed Carcosa...”
“Whatever. You are already skinny enough, that’s all
I’m saying.”
Yael looked over at Jenny gratefully.
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course! Look at you! How thin are you supposed to
be, anyway?”
“I’ve been on a diet my entire life. My younger sister
is an inch and a half taller, but she weighs ten pounds less. I’m fairly
certain that is why my stepmother liked her more. I meant to ask you before,
but what happened to the trader? You didn’t kill him, right?”
“No, I did not. You made me promise.”
“And that was the right thing to do.”
“Are you sure? The filthy bastard offered to give me
those potatoes, plus a whole bunch of other shit, for ten minutes alone with
you.”
In any other circumstance the revelation would have
killed her appetite. As it was, an icy shiver of revulsion ran down her back,
but it wasn’t enough to stop her from gnawing on potato stub.
“Oh.”
“Told you.”
“Not killing him was
still
the right thing.
Even if he was a creepy old pervert.”
“I’m not so sure,” Jenny said, crossing her arms and
staring glumly into the fire. “You are such a pain in my ass. I have to put up
with your crap right now, but remember that when we get to the city, all bets
are off.”
Yael didn’t even blink.
“What did you do with the trader, Miss Frost?”
“I let him go, alright? I paid him and then let him
go.”
“What sort of compensation could you have offered?”
“I told him that if he didn’t want me to strangle him
then he’d better give me all the vegetables he had.”
Yael tried to get a look at Jenny’s face, but she
always found some reason to look away.
“You are kidding, aren’t you?”
It must have been the firelight, but Yael thought for
a moment that Jenny was blushing.
“Go to sleep, Princess. Dream us a gold-brick road
while you’re at it, will you? This shit is getting old.”
***
“Naked, inevitable.”
There is a problem with her ID card,
the one that lets her back through the checkpoint down the street from her
house. She runs it through the machine repeated, but sees nothing besides the red
light of the rejection panel and the predatory smiles on the faces of the
Public Safety Officers, leaning on their rifles and leering.
She has followed the tunnel too far,
hoping that it would intersect with a wider diameter pipeline that never
materialized, and now she is unable to go any further forward, her fingers
wrapped around the iron grate that blocks her progress. She wriggled this far
on her belly, squeezing through the tight places by holding her breath, and now
there is no room to turn around.
A strange dog won’t stop following
her, no matter how fast she walks, no matter how many turns she takes.
During lunch period, Andrew kissed
her behind the library, and now the girls in her class are whispering again. Most
of them have boyfriends of their own – an open secret to everyone but the
adults. Despite that, Yael can hear them making unkind remarks about her
family, her olive skin, her unruly hair. She buries her face in a book so that
they will not get the satisfaction of seeing her upset.
On a deserted street Yael finds a
black kitten wandering, missing part of its tail and most of one ear. She stops
to pet it, and the cat curls around her ankles, soft and warm.
“It is a fearful thing, to fall into
the hands of a living god.”
She is driving a car, something she
has never done before, and it is going too fast, but she cannot find the brake.
Yael can barely see out of the front window, but she knows that she is about to
collide with the crowd in front of her, the steering wheel refusing to budge.