The Outside (12 page)

I dug through our packs for one of the T-shirts taken from the Animal Farm. I wiped away at the wound, saw that there was a tear in her skin. She cried out when I touched it.

I ran to a stone bowl full of water at the front of the church. I soaked the T-shirt with it and grabbed the small yellow sponge at the bottom. I did my best to wash the wound. Alex hovered over the back of the pew. He and I traded glances in the flickering light.

“Is it a claw mark?” Ginger asked. “Tell me that it’s just a claw mark.”

If it was a claw mark, she would live. Alex had told us that much, from his time on the Outside before he’d come to us. It was a bite that we had to be fearful of, a bite that would transmit the infection.

I hesitated. It was a surface wound, one that a person would easily survive . . . if it had not been a bite.

“It’s a bite,” I said quietly.

Alex swore and turned away. Ginger began to sob.

The only thing I could do was hold her as she shook.

***

“How long?”

I couldn’t help but ask.

Alex and I stood at the back of the church. I’d bound Ginger’s shoulder up as best I could with bits of robes that I’d found in a closet. She was kneeling before the altar, praying. She had been there for hours, still as the statue hanging above her. I had crept halfway up the aisle twice to check the rise and fall of her shoulder, to make sure that she was still breathing. I had seen the glitter of dampness on her cheek.

“Based on what I saw before I came to your village . . . it could be hours. Or a couple of days.” His hands tightly gripped the back of the pew, whitening his knuckles. “I suspect that the holy water you used to rinse out the wound may slow the progression somewhat, but there’s really no way to know.”

I placed my hand on his. “We’ll deal with it when the time comes. If it comes. Maybe the holy water will stop it.”

“It’s my fault,” he said in a small voice. “I picked where we were going.”

“No,” I said. “It’s no one’s fault. It’s just . . .” I struggled to find the right words, to articulate the helplessness that we all felt in the face of this tragedy. “It’s just
Gelassenheit.
God’s will.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe that.” His hand curled into a fist beneath mine. “No loving God would want this. For any of us.”

I slipped away from his fury, walked up the aisle to Ginger. I knelt beside her.

“I’m never . . . never going to see Dan or the kids,” Ginger said. Her voice was rough with crying.

I put my arm around her. “You will see them again. In heaven.”

A choked sound emanated from her throat. “I wonder if they are already there. It’s been . . . years since Dan took communion. My daughter is a practicing Catholic, but my son gave it up when he was a teenager.”

“There is no way to know if they will precede you in heaven,” I said. “But God would not allow you to be separated.”

What I told her was the opposite of what the Amish
Ordnung
said. We believed that unless one was baptized in the Amish church, one wouldn’t reach heaven and be reunited with one’s loved ones. I hoped that God would not be cruel to those of us who meant well.

Ginger stood suddenly, wiping at her face, disentangling herself from my arms. She walked with purpose to a small closet in the back of the church. She closed the door behind her. I heard a latch scrape on the inside and Ginger’s soft voice, whispering.

“What’s she doing?” I asked Alex.

“Confessing her sins.” He gestured to the little cabinet. “A priest sits on one side of a screen, and the penitent on the other. The penitent confesses in anonymity and the priest grants absolution, assigns a task to carry out to make things right. Usually a bunch of Hail Marys, from what I understand.”

I stared at the strange carved box. It seemed scarcely larger than a coffin. Again, a human intercessionary standing between earth and God. But there was no one there. I wondered if Ginger imagined a priest on the other side, if that was some comfort.

The whispers eventually died away, but Ginger did not come out. I waited, sitting in the last pew. I waited for a long time, until fear grew in me. I strained to hear any sound.

I stood and knocked on the door. “Ginger? Are you all right?”

“You’re going to leave me here,” she said. I heard the fear in her voice. “You should.”

I sucked in my breath. I imagined it for a moment: locking her in the confessional as she began to change into a vampire. Alone. It was a cruel abandonment. Like being buried alive. I imagined the squeak of her fingernails on the wood, her cries to the priest who wasn’t there. I wondered if she would be able to escape the holy box, if its power would erode under the onslaught of the evil that gestated within it. I wondered if it would hold and she would starve within it.

I shivered. It disturbed me that I could even think of it.

“No,” I said. “We won’t leave you here.” I reached for the door and wrested it open. A small hook and eye closure inside the frame splintered and gave way.

Ginger sat on a little bench inside, deep in shadow. The ornate cutout pattern of the confessional screen obscured most of her face.

“I don’t . . . I don’t want to become like them.” Her glass blue eyes fixed on me. Whether they were fevered with conviction or infection, I couldn’t tell. She reached out, her cold fingers knotting in mine. “Don’t let me become like them.”

I sucked in a breath, let it out.

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

And that promise hung as heavy on me as stones.

***

We left at dawn, when the dark sisters had retreated to their grottoes. The sun shone brilliantly as we emerged from the shadow of the church.

I had a bit of hope. Hope that the holy water and that our prayers might have helped Ginger, as they had helped me at Pastor Gene’s church. But that hope dwindled as I saw her in the growing light of morning. Ginger had grown pale. Dark circles settled beneath her eyes. She refused to eat more than a bite or two of some crab apples I found and turned away from the potato chips from the convenience store.

As the day wore on, we wandered through golden, unharvested fields of wheat. I thought I saw a suspicious ripple of movement in the tall stalks. I glanced at Alex.

He nodded. He’d seen it too.

I squinted. There was the flash of a gray tail.

“I think we’re being followed,” he said.

As long as it wasn’t by vampires, that was all that mattered.

Exhaustion hit Ginger by noon. We’d put her on the horse, but she was nodding asleep over Horace’s neck. Alex called a stop so we could rest. We stomped down the stalks of wheat in a broad circle to provide rough bedding.

Ginger and I lay in the golden field, staring up at the shapes that the clouds made in the blue sky. I rested while Alex kept watch, feeling the sun warm on my face and Ginger turning fitfully beside me.

It almost reminded me of home. Of a normal life, feeling earth at my back and sky above me. I remembered sneaking a few naps like this in my father’s fields when I was a girl, when my chores were done. I’d wake and look up at the clouds, picking out the shapes of beasts and men, daydreaming about the future. My dogs would doze with me, moving their legs and whimpering as they dreamed of chasing rabbits.

Now I watched Ginger twitch beside me. Her eyes were closed, but a thin gloss of sweat covered her face. Angry red tendrils from the wound at her shoulder had crawled up her neck. A sign of infection. She moaned in her sleep. I wondered what she was dreaming. I wondered if it hurt.

A couple of hours before sunset, we roused ourselves to continue moving. Ginger opened her eyes and blinked at the sunlight. I noticed that there was a small fleck of red in the glass blue of her iris. I took her pulse and laid my hand across her forehead. She had a bit of fever, and her heartbeat was rapid.

“How long?” she said, licking cracked lips.

“I don’t know.” I smoothed a piece of blond hair out of her eyes. “But you’re still with us right now. And that’s what matters.”

I glanced up at Alex, but he couldn’t meet my gaze. He turned away, and his shadow blotted out the sun. But I could see his shoulders shaking in grief.

***

Turning toward Darkness is a gradual process, in all things.

When I was a child, I was taught that evil creeps in stealthily. First there are little things, like coveting a pocket mirror in the sin of vanity. Then lying to one’s parents, reading magazines with subversive ideas, drinking beer and smoking. These sins seem small, but they taint the soul and grow larger, become theft and rebellion and turning away from God. Once the seed has taken root, there is no stopping it.

I don’t think that I believed that philosophy, then. But I might now, seeing the terrible Darkness of vampirism slowly destroy someone I loved.

Ginger stopped eating that evening. The crab apples had been vomited up in a mess of black blood. She was awake all night. We took the risk of a small fire to make her more comfortable. It was the time of year in which we were beginning to have no choice in making them at night if we wanted to avoid frostbite. But Ginger backed away from it. I saw the fire reflecting in her eyes as she looked out in the darkness.

Somewhere, in the black countryside, something howled.

I wondered if it was one of the wolves from the Animal Farm, or local coyotes. I wondered if he—or they—were following because they were hungry, because they smelled death.

Horace’s ears twitched. He’d begun to edge away from Ginger, and the wolves made him nervous.

I sidled up closer to Ginger. “Tell me about your family. What was it like when the kids were little?” I wanted to anchor her as much as I could in her humanity.

She licked her cracked lips. “They were always good kids. Dan and I tried to raise them to be independent. Part of that was me wanting to shield them from being hurt when we moved around so much. Dan would be stationed one place and then another for a year or two at a time. We didn’t want them to be crushed when we left their school and their friends.”

I couldn’t imagine that. I’d lived in one place for my whole life, with the same set of friends. Being under the
Bann
—being kicked out of my community—was the first time that I’d spent the night away from home. I had cried. I don’t think that Ginger or Alex heard me. I didn’t want them to.

“I did a good job, I think. Tom and Julia both went to college, far away. Julia isn’t as rebellious as Tom, that’s for sure. I never caught her smoking weed in the basement.” Her eyes glistened. “I think that Julia has a bit of natural faith about her, a docility. Tom, he has to learn everything the hard way. I hope that he’s not learning it the hard way now.

But maybe . . . maybe Dan can find them.”

Ginger had lived alone after her children went off to college. Her husband had reenlisted in the National Guard and was gone for months at a time. I knew that she had gone home every day to an empty house.

“He will,” I said soothingly. “He has all the power of the military around him—all the machines and the minds. He will find them.”

Her gaze was unfocused. “I just wish that I could have told them goodbye.”

I kissed her cheek. “We will tell them.”

Her head lowered, and she smiled ruefully. One of the cracks in her lip split open. “It’s funny. As I passed fifty, with the house empty . . . I had developed a fear of dying alone. Of having a stroke or a heart attack and lying dead on the kitchen linoleum for days before anyone found me.”

I pressed my hand to her cheek. “That won’t happen. I promise.”

She took my hand. Hers was cold. “Thank you.”

It was the least thing I could do for her, but also the hardest.

Alex and I watched as Ginger grew paler and the flecks of red in her eyes grew over the course of the night. Her gums receded, and I could see the teeth growing. Once, when I approached her to offer her water, I startled her and she hissed. She shied away from the sun the next day, sleeping under a tree. She unconsciously rolled and followed the shade in her sleep. I watched as the fingers wound in her coat contorted and twisted, the skin splintering.

“I don’t think she’s going to last much longer,” Alex said.

I nodded. We kept our distance from her for the rest of the day. Horace would no longer graze near her. He stood on the opposite side of this bit of pasture. I rubbed my eyes, hiccupping.

I knew how to destroy vampires. I knew to cut off their heads, stuff their mouths with garlic if we had it, and burn the bodies. I had done it before, to people I knew.

But never someone I loved.

Alex took my hand. “We’ll do it together,” he said.

“As gently as we can.”

“And it should be before dark. While she’s still sleeping.” He cast her a troubled look. “I think she’ll turn then.”

I bowed my head.

We searched the pasture for a rock. Alex found a big chunk of pink jasper, as large as Ginger’s head. We wanted her to feel as little pain as possible, and to our thinking, it would be easier if she was unconscious.

I took the rock from him. He was reluctant to let it go.

“I should be the one to do it,” I said quietly. In the Plain way, men prepared men for burial, for reasons of modesty. Women cared for the women. This seemed no different. More grisly, but the same.

And yet . . . these conditions seemed too harsh for those old rules to apply. This was not bundling a peaceful grandmother in her favorite dress to be buried. Ginger had been my friend, had been like a second mother to me for many years. I rubbed my dripping nose and sobbed.

Alex embraced me. “I will help you. We will do this together.”

“But I . . .”

“You’re not going to be alone in this. I promise.”

Once I could draw breath without sobbing, we walked back to the tree and stood over her. I don’t know if she felt the cool of our shadows on her, in between the sparse shade of the tree. She was drawn in upon herself, like a ball. Her platinum blond head peeked above her coat and her eyes were closed. I gently tugged the coat up over her head, so I didn’t have to see her face. The coat moved against her nose with her breath, outlining the profile of her face.