the mortis (19 page)

The surrounding voices of the group continue imploring, chastising, and the bloodied man stands motionless
at the center.  After a time the man turns his head slowly toward the truck.  The movement is unexpected; several of the onlookers retreat a step or two, their hands raised.  The man stares at the vehicle, and then he looks directly at Lee’s face, making eye contact.  The sense of purpose returns to him.  The appetite.  His expression tightens, transforming into a rictus.  His lip curls back over his top teeth and he redoubles his grip on the pitchfork and then without any warning he charges. 

The man is bearing down on her. 
Lee tears around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.  She opens the door and scrambles in, slamming it closed and hitting the lock button.  The keys hang from the ignition.  It isn’t a choice; she turns the key and fires up the engine and punches the gas.  The tires spin freely over the loose gravel of the murram until they find purchase, and then the truck barrels forward.  The trailer careens along behind with the gate still down, roostertailing reddish dust.  In the rearview mirror she can see the man slow his pace until he’s jog-trotting and then walking.  Soon he stops altogether and stands, watching the truck go, and he lets the pitchfork fall from his hand flat into the roadway. 

Lee drives for mi
les, breakneck, up the murram—far too fast.  On a number of the tighter curves she nearly skids into the woods.  Around halfway to Lavelha she allows herself to slow down, and then at three-quarters of the way she stops the truck entirely.  She scans the treeline on either side, turning to look at the road behind.  She jacks the handbrake.  The shifter goes into neutral.  She rests her head on the steering wheel for a moment, and then the tears come. 

Lee sits in the idle truck until she convinces herself to keep moving, to do something.  She decides to take stock of the supplies she just inherited.  Get an inventory.  If she has to abandon the vehicle on short notice, she doesn
’t want to leave anything behind. 

She starts with the cab interior.  She flips down both sun visors and finds nothing.  She kneels on the floor and
reaches under the bench seat—there is a metal toolbox on the passenger side.  She drags it out, hefts it onto the seat, and opens it.  Nothing is inside the first partitioned tier.  She lifts it and it hinges upward and outward, giving access to the main body.  Just a collection of screws and bolts, mostly.  Needle-nose pliers and black electrical tape and some red wire.  She pockets the roll of tape and replaces the toolbox. 

She
opens the glove compartment—it’s the kind that has a push-button latch with a keyway built in.  She pulls out a stack of papers, and at the bottom of the bay there is a black handgun.  Rubberized grip.  She stares for a moment, and then she lifts it, angles it.  She ejects the magazine and finds seven rounds inside.  The safety is off.  She switches it back on and slides the handgun into her waistband at the small of her back.  The only time she’s ever shot is at a range, but having the weight against her is a comfort, and simply putting the weapon on show should be enough to make a difference in most situations, at least those in which a clear-thinking person is involved.   

She needs to check the gearbox in the truck bed and also the trailer exterior, which means going outside.  She keeps the engine idling, and she lifts the lock button for the driver
’s door and takes her time scanning the surroundings again.  The liana palm fronds and the sedge grass, their ceaseless motions in the wind, and that’s all—there’s no sign of anything else moving out on the murram.  She opens the door and steps down from the cab, leaving it open in case she needs to return at a run.

The first task is to work on releasing the trailer; there
’s no reason to drag it behind her everywhere.  She goes to the gooseneck assembly and unscrews the coupler before pulling the split cotter pin and dropping it down.  She squats low and gets a shoulder under the hitch arm and then straightens, lifting until the linkage point clears the ball mount on the undercarriage.  She dumps the entire thing to the side and it thuds on the hardpack, sending a rattle through the trailer frame. 

She climbs into the truck bed and opens the gearbox, and the interior is mostly empty, but there are some good things.  At the top she finds one of the foil packets of rice and chicken.  A water bottle with two inches of liquid left.  There are a handful of tools, but only one of them is worth the carrying weight—a two-foot black crowbar.  Assorted shirts.  She trades her old flannel for one of the button-downs.  Toward the bottom of the box she finds a yellow plastic Bic lighter and she shakes it and decides it
’s worth holding on to.  There is a quart-sized oil bottle that is still almost half full.  She takes it and shuts the gearbox lid. 

She forces herself to go to
the trailer, the box portion—she tries to focus solely on the exterior.  There is a twist-lock compartment near the wheel well with a soft-shell equine medkit inside.  It’s been pretty well picked over already.  She fishes through the remains, and she salvages a few alcohol wipes and a pocket scalpel and two aspirin packets. 

Through the gaps in the trailer siding she can see a slant-load water tank mounted inside the box.  A capacity somewhere between twenty and thirty gallons.  Bone dry, in all likelihood.  With the world being what it is, it
’s hard to imagine anyone indulging in the luxury of hauling around extra water for their livestock, but she can’t ignore the possibility.  She steps onto the ramp and enters the trailer. 

The blood on the aluminum flooring has dried enough to hold footprints, to feel tacky.  The inner walls are spattered.   The ceiling.  Only two bodies out of the original eight are still lying there—one man and one woman.  The rest must have slid out of the open bay, rag-dolling onto the murram a
t some point during the drive. As she steps past the two bodies she can’t help but see the crisp, elliptical puncture wounds in groups of four, peppering the distended flesh on their backs and necks, but then she looks away.  She approaches the tank and tries the spigot, but nothing comes.

Holding the good things she found,
Lee walks back to the truck and climbs in though the open door.  She arranges the crowbar and the oil, food and water on the passenger side, then she closes the door and presses the lock button.  She brings the aspirin, scalpel, wipes, and lighter out of her pockets and sets them with the rest.  She gears the truck into first, and she is about to release the handbrake when she notices movement outside—a lone woman is walking out from the treeline of the woods on the road shoulder.  Around twenty feet afield of her.  

The woman stands in the road directly in the line of the truck.  Her hands are raised.  She is wearing a faded blue slit-leg maxi dress; her black hair is long in the wind and there is a painter
’s dust mask covering her mouth and nose. 

The woman begins to walk slowly, hands above shoulders, toward Lee.  No shoes.  Bruising up and down her pale arms.  Lee guns the engine once, taking the RPMs up into the sixes, and the woman stops.  She stands still in the road, and the arms go higher.  The hem of her dress is whipping, twisting.  Lee drops the stick into neutral and rolls down the window with the hand crank. 

She leans out.  “I don’t have anything,” she tells the woman.

“
I don’t want anything,” the woman says.  Her speech is slurred.  It’s as though her tongue has grown too thick for her mouth to carry. 

“
Then move,” Lee says.  “I’m leaving.”

“
Let me come.”

“
No.”

The woman takes a few more paces forward. 
“I don’t want anything.  Just to come.”

Lee guns the engine again but it doesn
’t stop the woman this time.  Without thinking, Lee reaches back for the handgun and points it loosely toward the woman’s feet. 

Seeing the weapon, the woman stops walking.  She stands about ten feet from the front bumper. 
“I won’t ask for anything.  Please.  I won’t speak.”  She goes silent after that.

“
Lord,” Lee says.  She exhales, shaking her head and staring off into the tree canopy.  After a time she looks at the woman. 

“
Okay,” Lee says.  “I’m going to put this away.”  She tilts the gun so that the muzzle is toward the sky.  “But I need you to understand: I will drive this truck through you.  Right through you.  Please believe me that if I have to, I will do that.  So I need you to stop walking unless I tell you to walk.”

The woman nods. 
“Yes.  I’m sorry.”

“
Okay.”  Lee sets the gun down on the dash.  “Now I want you to look where the truck is headed,” Lee says.  “If you want to go to Cãlo, this isn’t your ride.”

“
I don’t care where I go,” says the woman.

“
You don’t care,” Lee says.  Then in a brief moment of panic she looks around the roadway, including behind her in the rearview.   “Are you alone?”

“
Yes,” the woman says.

Lee pauses, considering the variables she can consider in the time she has.  A minute passes, and she waves the woman in. 

“Okay.  Come on.”

Lee keeps the handgun in her lap as she drives, and the woman sits silently.  The supplies Lee foraged from the gearbox and the trailer are on the bench seat between them.  There is the sound of the engine block, the truck tires churring over the aggregate of the roughshod murram.  Gravel popping, fragments caroming off the undercarriage.  Rhythmic.  The wind winnowing the tamarind trees.  Before long Lee finds herself starting
to nod off behind the wheel—her chin falling to her chest.

The woman says something, and Lee
’s head snaps up.

Lee looks over at her, blinking. 
“What?”

“
I can take over,” the woman says.  It comes out muffled from under the mask.

“
No,” Lee says.  “I’m all right.  Sorry.”

She keeps driving.  After a long time the woman says,
“You can talk if it helps.”

Lee looks over at her.  This is nothing but a child, really.  Just a girl, possibly twenty years old, but probably not even that. 

“What’s your name?” Lee asks her.

The girl pauses.  She half-shrugs. 
“Hanna,” she says.

Lee talks to the girl for the rest of the drive into Lavelha.  Going on and on, much more than she ought to.  Not about anything too substantive—mostly she talks about the means of survival over the past months.  How she
’s managed to stay breathing for this long.  She tells the girl about the supply runs into the outlying buildings of the hotel, about her scrapes with the fossa cats, and about the things she’s forced herself to eat, things she never thought she could possibly stomach.  She tells the girl about the shelter in the culvert, the inside and the outside, but for some reason she never mentions that her husband was there also, that he was a part of every survival story she has to tell.

After a time the girl asks,
“Can I please lay down,” and this might be the longest string of words she’s put together the entire drive. 

Lee looks over at her.  Tall and reedy and angular in the oversized dress.  Nothing about the child seems at all threatening.  Lee nods. 
“Okay,” she says.

The girl starts to gather up the supplies between them on the bench seat, one at a time, and place each item on the floor mat.  The food, the oil, the water bottle, the crowbar.  She starts to pick up the rest but Lee stops her. 

“In there,” Lee says.  She points to the glove box.

The girl nods.  She puts the last of the items away in the glove box, and then she takes off her seatbelt and shifts onto her left hip, bringing her legs up onto the seat, curled under.  She lies down on her left side, face-forward, and she rests her head carefully on Lee
’s right thigh.  Making herself small and fetal.  Still wearing the dust mask over her mouth.  The girl’s long, sable hair spills down over the side of the seat, and the ends brush the floor. 

Lee
’s first instinct is to strip her leg out from under the child.  To recoil from her.  But she doesn’t pull away, and as soon as she gets past the shock of the proximity, she decides there’s no real harm to it.  She relaxes her leg, trying to soften it.  She takes the gun from her lap and rests it up on the dash. 

The child sleeps all the way to the junction that leads to the Trap.  The point in the road where you have a choice—go on toward the hotel proper, or park your vehicle on the roadside and take a rugged, uncut footpath through the woods to the public beachfront.  Lee slows the truck and pulls off to the shoulder.  There are a few cars still parked here, and they
’ve been completely gutted down to their skeletal frames. 

Lee shakes the girl
’s shoulder.  “We’re here,” she says, and it sounds ridiculous the moment it leaves her mouth.  We’re here.  She’s talking to this stranger as though they’re on a family trip and she’s announcing their arrival.  We’re here.  And where exactly is here?  And how is it any different, any better, than the place we just left behind?