The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (26 page)

I run like I've never run. With the munies to my back I cut across the mountain, moving between the trees so fast they become one. My body is a slither beast, warmed and touched by the sun. I can't help but think I enjoy this too much.

Graham's scent comes to my nose, Terence's after it. Following them down would be a good idea, to find and help Terence give his brother the death. It's a good idea to do as many things as possible before I find the death so at least I can say I did those things, that I was useful to someone in the world to make up for all those years I wasn't.

The munies don't let up. Their dry teeth and fast feet stay always behind, their noses filled with my blood and their eyes never wandering. I have to find a way to lose them or stop them but nothing I can see on the mountain gives me that way. So for now, I run.

The city enters my eyes below. A few days ago I left it with the mind to never return, but already here I am, running back to it as fast as my legs will allow. But that's what life is. It's making a plan, then making a new one when the first one catches fire.

I take the final few trees and then a metal rail that separates the mountain from a road that circles the edge of the city. As I jump over it I notice it smells like the two brothers and even me- a drop of my blood from Terence's leg. All of this will only make the munies hungrier, wilder, more wanting to catch me.

A gun voice from the city. The brothers are fighting.

Between cars and through alleys I look for signs of the stairs that go into the ground. They helped me before, gave me time to escape with Child, and today they can help me again, but in a different way. A better way.

I spot the sign and run for it. The munies behind me jump over and under everything in their way. Two more inside a building watch me pass by and join the chase. At least seven of them follow me down the stairs and into the world. Seven come with me where little sun does.

Where the stairs lead me isn't like the last time. Instead of coming down to where the trains sleep underwater, I find myself in a hallway where the ceiling has become the floor. Small beasts with pink tails scurry from my feet, over and under the fallen ceiling. The hallway turns and turns and goes darker and darker but still the munies follow my blood, croaking and gasping, and I wonder if I've made the wrong choice coming down here until my feet find the bastard water, floating with ceiling and plastic and all the garbage of real people that doesn't sink.

The hallway opens up to the place where people once paid their money and waited for the trains. It's here the voice inside tells me I'm ready to turn and face the munies, but not the way they expect. Not as supplies, as a victim protecting myself.

I face them as a hunter.

**

After slipping under the surface of the cold and dirty bastard water, my eyes become useless. But this doesn't mean I can't see through the water. It just means I can't see through the water with my eyes.

The weakness of the munies comes from letting the fear choose everything for them, from how they hunt to where they will and won't go, and all because of what the change has done to their bodies. The eyes are weak, almost blind in the dark, and bastard water feels like the death itself on the skin. But if the fear can be ignored, even used, other ways can be learned to hunt and move. To see without seeing.

Even now, I track the first of the munies to wander in. I do this by following the sound of him in the water- the foot sounds on the ground, the water pushing out of his way, the air going in and out of his lungs, the crack of his nervous bones echoing off the walls.

A second before I strike, a picture comes to my eyes of the gator beasts beneath the bridge. Their slow, cold movements. The way they hunt without emotion. Without wasting strength.

My teeth find their mark.

**

Eight of us go down the stairs into the world. Only one of us comes back up.

The gun voices stopped while I was below. The streets are back to their usual quiet, and that means the only way to follow Terence and Graham is to pick up their trail where I lost it. It takes a few minutes but I find Terence's scent and I track it further into the city than I'd wanted to go. Soon I see Terence's familiar mask, his hand waving me over. He stands with his gun resting on an upside-down car in the center of where two, great roads meet. Without looking at me he points down the road and whispers, “Down there.” I join him behind the car and look in the direction his gun does. He whispers again, asking if I see anything, but I don't, so he tells me to keep looking while he checks the other way.

Something is wrong. The scents are all mixed in my head. When I ask Terence about this he tells me they fought here, but still something is missing, and as I stare down the road, checking the cars and buildings for movement with Terence behind me, I realize what it is.

I move as the gun comes up behind me. I keep moving around to the other side of the car and I expect an explosion, a gun voice, but there's only breathing in the air. The breathing of the city. The breathing of me. The breathing of him.

“How did you know it was me,” Graham asks. I stay hidden from him, my back against the cold metal.

“I marked Terence with my blood.”

“Clever girl. You're a bad luck charm, you know that? You have a talent for showing up at exactly the wrong moment. That monster you baby-sit- did you ever think the others hunt her because she stinks of you? You should get the hint. Do everyone a favor and crawl out of here. I'll even put the gun down if you just leave and don't come back.”

I ask him where Terence is. My nose can't find him, and I'm not sure what that means.

“Don't worry about him.” He begins walking around the car, but I follow his movements and keep it between us. “With my brother gone I only need to kill Rachel to take the group back. It'll be easy to pull off wearing his gear. Rachel doesn't have your reflexes. By the time she realizes I'm not Terence, it'll be too late.”

His words make me think of what the world would be like without me in it. Child would still be a part of a nest, a family of munies who hunted with her instead of for her. The hotel would be standing at the middle of the lake. The supplies never would have been stolen from the base, the group never split in two. So many real people would still be alive now- Cruz, Ernie, Tom, Jake, the nervous man, the sad woman, the sad woman's friend.

My mother and father.

Graham is right. I already know I have to give myself the death, maybe the world would be better if I did it now. Child and the others are safer the quicker they're rid of me. I know nothing about this world, ten years I spent hiding from it in a trailer, how do I know it doesn't need leaders like Graham, real people willing to act like monsters to protect their group from the real ones? The truth is I don't know, and my not knowing has put people in danger.

But I do know one thing. I know in my stomach that I don't like Graham. That I hate him with everything I am. And I've learned some stomachs can't be ignored.

“You're too quiet,” he calls out.

Slowly I get to my feet, standing over the face of the fallen car. As Graham and I watch each other from across the car, sounds come to us from the direction of the mountain: boots running, masks breathing, and the familiar slap of Child's bare feet hitting concrete. Graham faces away from them with his gun at his side.

“Act natural. If Rachel dies, the girl lives.”

As the group comes closer I can tell by their faces they think Graham is Terence. I move around the car and wait for them to arrive. Child runs into me so fast she almost knocks me over.

“Be calm,” I tell her. I don't want to give Graham a reason to be nervous.

“Mother give munies death.”

“I'm not proud of it, and I told you that's not my name.”

The real people's faces are red and sweating inside their masks. Rachel stands at the front of the group and asks me if it's true, if I shook the munies.

“From the looks of her she shook them straight to hell,” Werner says.

Rachel nods. “A few of them stayed behind instead of following you, but we dealt with them.”

Boyd steps forward. “What she means by that is, thank you.”

“She knows what I mean.” She looks to Graham, still thinking he's Terence. “Did you find your brother?”

He nods, watching the buildings in the distance.

“So? Where is he?”

He motions for her to join him. She gives orders to the group to make sure the area is secure, every way watched for munies. Graham is annoyed by this but tries not to show it in his movements. While he's distracted, I take my chance to whisper to Child what I need her to do. Her face is confused, but she trusts me. She listens and leaves my side.

“We're low on ammo, this better be good.” Rachel walks toward Graham. It's in this moment, as Graham turns to face her, and his fingers tense around his gun, that I know Rachel is about to find the death. She'll find it from my doing nothing- another real person gone because of me.

I decide it's better to find the death from doing something than doing nothing. So I do something.

**

The seconds pull apart and scatter like winged beasts exploding into the air. I watch the slow change of Graham's face into a squint, the squeeze of his finger as it pulls the trigger on the gun, causes it to shout and give birth to a single bullet from its mouth. There isn't time to reach Rachel, to push her out of the way, there's only time to reach the bullet. I stretch my hand as far as it will go and I follow the trail of the bullet with my eyes, and I let the two meet until there's a burst of pain in my palm and a spray of blood out the other side.

Before he can fire again I knock the gun from Graham's hand and push him to the ground. The mask pulls from his face and hits against the upside-down car and the claws of my wounded hand go to his throat. Some of the real people rush forward, their guns aimed.

“This is the second time you shot me.” My blood runs down his neck and into his suit. He calls me things and tells me to get off him. I let Rachel come close so she can see who he really is.

“Graham?”

He smiles at her through the choking.

Child calls out from a distance to say she's found what I sent her for in one of the broken buildings. It's Terence. He's missing most of his clothes, his hands, feet and mouth are tied, but he hasn't found the death.

It's in this moment, when I think something good has happened, that the buildings around us echo with the cries of the beasts, munies who have heard the gun voice. Munies who know that where gun voices are, real people are, too.

“What are you going to do,” Graham gulps, “hold me until they get here?”

I let go of his throat and push away. As he wipes my blood from his neck, some of the group help Terence to his feet. Child comes back to my side and tells me we have to leave.

Rachel holds Jake's knife in her shaking grip. “You tried to kill me, you son-of-a-bitch. How could you think of doing that to someone you lived with for years?”

“Don't feign some moral high-ground for the sake of the crowd. If it meant the leadership you would have done the same thing, sacrificed me just as quickly.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because you already did.”

“What are you going on about, the mission? We had a trial, we did everything the proper way. There's nothing wrong with holding you to the rules you helped create.”

Terence joins us wearing Graham's clothes and some of his bruises. “Leave him,” he says, pulling an electric spike from his neck. “This street is about to crawl, we don't have time to play his games.”

Graham laughs at this. “My brother finally makes a decision. Is this what it takes for you to grow some balls? Listen, whatever it takes.”

Boyd comes over with Werner and a few of the others. “Time's up, we need to get the hell off the street.”

“There.” I point to the part of the city with taller buildings.

“Why so far,” Kate asks.

“It's where I want to go the least.”

Terence takes a gun from one of the group and wipes the dust from his mask. “Not many options at this point. What about you?”

“What about me,” Graham says from the ground.

“Will you play nice, or should I put a bullet in your leg and spare us the mystery?”

Graham grins back.

Young Vanessa's voice cuts through all the others. “Oh my god,” she says, the fear in it so strong we know what she means before we see it.

Four blocks away, where the city goes lower, a pack of fifteen or twenty munies watches us from the center of the street. Their chests move up and down in the sunlight, their noses tasting the air, and at their front is a munie I've seen before. His face is burned badly, the left eye gone, and the skin around it is black and bloody.

It's the New Largest. The munie I shot with the light gun so we could escape the cavern. He can still use the other eye, and I know this because in that eye I see a look that says he recognizes me. With damage like that he had to fight hard to keep his life, and even harder to stay in the front of the pack.