the mortis (23 page)

The woman turns her head slightly. 
“What?”

Lee doesn
’t answer.  She straight-kicks the woman in the back of one knee, buckling the limb, and the woman falls. 

“Open the buckets,” Lee says.  “Both.”

Wincing, gripping the leg, the woman struggles to go up onto her knees.  She grasps one of the buckets with both hands and she hoicks off its thick white lid.  She lets it fall and then she turns and does the same to the other.  When she finishes, Lee leans forward and glances i
nside—there is a stew of bone and entrails and blood in each, exactly what the child said there would be.

“
Cover yourself,” Lee says, and when the woman doesn’t budge, she says, “Reach in there and put it on.  All over.”

The woman hesitates, staring straight ahead at the door, but after a short time she turns and gingerly dips two
wavering fingers into the bucket on her left and starts daubing her forehead, painting underneath her eyes.  The tears are visible.

As the woman works, Lee watches, urging her on, barking out orders, but after a short time she decides that she can
’t wait any longer and she lifts up one of the buckets herself.  She holds it over the woman and turns it upside down, letting the contents stream directly onto her—her head, her back, her legs—engulfing her.  Spattering everything, including her own dress.  The woman instinctively goes fetal onto the carpet.  Gasping for air through the wet mask.  As the woman lies at her feet, Lee picks up the other bucket and repeats.

Lee strips off the stained dress and balls it up and tosses it down onto the prone figure.  She does the same with the mask.  She puts the gun in her waistband and unthreads the crowbar from its loop. 

Lee steps over the woman, rears back with the crowbar and slams the beveled wedge into the crack between the door and jamb, at the level of the deadbolt strike plate.  Metal on metal.  The bevel doesn’t take at first so she tries again and then another time, spearing the door until the fit is firm.  Embedded.  She grips the length of steel with both fists and pulls back, using her weight, and almost immediately there is a series of splitting sounds.  She braces a heel up on the door frame and pushes.  The hasp pings free and falls.  The lock mountings are starting to release from the wood frame, to separate.  She stops pulling—there’s too much slack.  She removes the crowbar so that she can reapply the bevel, and then she starts again, heaving. 

S
oon there is a rending crack.  The entire structure goes off-kilter, unseated.  She dislodges the crowbar and kicks the wood paneling with her heel until the door gives way and buckles inward.  The aluminum honeycomb of the infilling is visible through the broken panel. 

Immediately, gaunt faces press into the shattered entryway.  Heartbreakingly pale.  Broken hands, scabbed limbs.  Skeletal bodies scrabbling over each other, pushing out.  No sound at all other than their movement, their reach.  They start to pour out into the hallway.  Lee steps to one side, but when she turns around to look behind her, the floor is empty.  The woman is gone. 

The sick are streaming from the open room and falling on the scattered bones, the remains, devouring whatever they can salvage.  They ignore Lee entirely.  She carries the crowbar high on her shoulder, at the ready, and she watches them, scanning every haunted face, and when she doesn’t see his, she slips past the throng into the dark room. 

Just inside, she finds a large shard of splintered wood and uses it to prop open the foundered door while she looks around.  Her pulse is clicking in her throat.  There isn
’t any time; she needs to hurry.  She says his name into the darkness, and when there isn’t any response she says it again, louder.

After
a short time her eyes adjust, and she can see a hunched figure wedged between the wall and a vanity dresser by the window.  Its legs are pulled in, held close.  Its face is buried in its knees.  She recognizes the form, the contours.  The build.  She rushes over to him.

Lee crouches down.  She cups his face in both of her hands and tries tilting his chin upward but he blanches, recoiling from her.  Swatting her hands away, pushing her off.  His eyes are wide and unblinking, registering nothing, and his entire frame is shuddering violently as though feverish.  She repeats his name over and over.  Trying to call him back home.  We have to go, baby, she says.  Please, you have to get up. 

There isn’t any time; if they’re going to leave this place, it has to be now.  She takes him by the forearm and tries to force him to stand, but he pulls firmly away, wide-mouthed and silent, and his arm slithers out of her grip.  He starts to rock back and forth, holding himself, and she looks at him for a moment as she considers trying to lift him again, but in the end she doesn’t try.  She bends down to pick up the crowbar.  Her palms are slick from his blood, the blood that came from the fresh, open bite wounds he’s made on his own arms, and as she stares at her hands she has to blink back tears.  There isn’t any more time.  She tells him goodbye in as many ways as she can without actually using the word, and he stares straight ahead, fixedly, as she whispers to him.  There is a spindle of saliva suspended from his lower lip. 

Lee runs from the room.  She side-steps past the wasted souls feeding themselves from the floor of the entryway, and she tears down the corridor.  Passing room after room.  More barricaded doors.  The crowbar is in her grip and her arms are pumping, reciprocating, in clean and even strokes. 

She reaches the hallway’s end and grasps the handle of the grey fire door that leads to the stairwell.  She rips it open and plunges in, casting herself wholly into the descent, the flight downward.  She is gripping the rail with one hand and skipping every other step.  If she can reach the door of the service entrance and crash through, burst outside into the open space of the hotel grounds, nothing of this earth will be able to come close to her.  She’ll be all the way gone.

She is on the last flight before the first-floor landing when the heavy grey door below her slams open.  Crashing against the stop.  A red
figure wearing a red mask emerges—sanguine, completely covered in blood.  Long dripping hair and the sopping fabric of a dress.  The Feeder sees Lee and without a sound she rushes up the stairs, her wide white eyes flashing.  The door closes behind her.

As the Feeder approaches,
charging, Lee plants her feet in a side-stance on two stairs.  The crowbar is gripped low in her right hand and she is holding it at the end, right above the rear notched bevel, opposite the upper curve.  The length of the shaft is obscured by her forward leg. 

The blood-soaked woman is barreling toward her.  The mask obscures the woman
’s mouth but the cast of her eyes is ravaged, consumed.  Hate-filled.  Lee waits for her to draw on, and when the distance is right she snaps the crowbar up and around in an overhead motion, and the woman has just enough time to register her surprise, to try to slow down and rear back and begin raising her arms in defense, before the metal connects with her skull cleanly at the crown, caving it.  The woman collapses.  Falling hard.  Her limp form smacks against the trenchant edges of the staircase, and then she lies utterly still.

Lee doesn
’t wait; she steps over the fallen body.  She continues to the first-floor landing, but as she starts to round the corner of the platform, to take the last flight of steps down to ground level, to the service corridor, the grey fire door in front of her crashes open again.  A man limps through—tall and thin—and he stops short for a moment at the sight of Lee, just staring, but before she can make a move he grabs her in a steel grip and lifts her high into the air.  The crowbar falls, clanging.  Her arms are pinioned at her sides and her feet are kicking violently.  The hold is constricting—soon she can’t take another breath.  She hears the sound of one of her ribs cracking and then she loses consciousness. 

It’s strange, the things you think of.  There’s no real way to account for it.  For some reason her mind drifts to a point in time, maybe two weeks ago, when she was kneeling on a pebbled bank and washing two knives in a streambed running through a quiet clearing.  The water was salinic, so it wasn’t good for anything other than getting things slightly cleaner, and she was letting the current flow over the stainless steel blades.  Holding them both under.  The cleaver and the butcher, hers and his.  Every once in a while, she would use her fingers to pinch off anything that the flow couldn’t readily loosen on its own.

She remembers
her husband’s approach, the way he paused close behind her.  She remembers his hands, warm, on her bare shoulders.  The press, the inherent question.  His skin had grown rougher than it was when they were back home, before all of this.  More calloused, she remembers that.  His touch was a surprise and she probably started a bit, she isn’t sure. 

She was ready to put down the two knives—she was about to.  She was going to lay both blades on the wet
stones of the stream bank and then turn around and stand up, inches from his face. Close enough to trade breath.  Maybe ten more seconds—that’s all it would have taken—but he broke contact well before then.  He let his hands fall from her shoulders and he walked away, looking for the next thing that needed to be done to survive, to continue breathing.

When Lee returns
to consciousness, she becomes aware of the steady chirr of cicadas and the smell of the blackland.  The lush, open heat of the
sielve
, different from the heat of a confined space.  She is outdoors, somewhere on the islet.  She opens her eyes. 

She is seated against a tree trunk on the inside of a crude shelter made of rough-cut branches, most of whic
h are caked with dried blood—the dirt floor, the walls, the ceiling: everything is stained with it.  There is an opening in the shelter directly in front of her, looking out onto a stark white wall.  There is a plank with a rope attached, threaded through a thick eyelet screw, and the plank is raised.  There is a gaping hole in the wall, and on the other side is the dense understory of the woods.

Lee tries to move, but she
’s bound to the tree at her back by a long chain.  A padlock is resting against her chest.  Her arms are at her sides, useless, and as her breathing starts to quicken she can feel the stitch in her side where the rib bone was fractured. 

She knows what this place is.  The child told her about it—the way they use this pit, this trap, to draw the fossa in, and how the man enters the stru
cture from behind to finish off the animals barehanded.  How they’re butchered for meat by the women afterward.  Most importantly, the child told her that the man likes to use human lures as bait to bring the fossa through the gap in the wall, to help them commit.

Soon
Lee begins to hear the voice of the man responsible for this.  His plodding approach.  He is dragging something heavy toward the shelter through the grove—she can hear the sound of delicate shoots breaking, the sound of his exertions.  After a short time his face appears in the opening. Ruddy skin.  Squared-off white teeth and close-cropped white hair. 

The man doesn
’t speak to her; he turns and looks behind him at the hole in the wall for a brief moment.  Evaluating something.  Then he leaves the opening, and when he returns, he pushes a limp, bloodied form into the shelter with her, letting it spill over onto the dirt floor.  The body of her husband slumps, motionless, across her outstretched legs. 

The man
’s face reappears in the entry. 

“
It’s calm today,” he says.  He is breathing heavily.  He takes off a glove and wipes his brow with the back of his hand.  He looks down at the body, nodding.  “But some meat will bring the wild in.”

Lee is alone with him now, her husband.  His body is splayed, face up, across her lap, and her legs are quickly growing warm and wet with his ebbing blood.  His chest rises and falls almost imperceptibly, and between the lifting and lowering there are long, long intervals. 

He has been cut deeply, irreparably.  There are savage lacerations on his limbs that reach bone, and a single incision across his belly down to the insides.  His eyes are open and they are focused on hers.  She weeps openly over him.

Desperate, s
he tries calling to the man outside—she screams out that she has the medicines, all of them, and that she could bring them as a trade, but there is no answer.  The man either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.  Soon her voice gives way, going hoarse, and she is sobbing over her words to the point that she’s unintelligible, and so she gives up.  She hangs her head and closes her eyes and lets herself go.

After a time she feels
her husband’s movements—Park is struggling to unseat himself, to roll off of her—and she opens her eyes and tries calming him.  It’s okay, she says.  Baby, don’t move.  Stay here, it’s okay.

Park slumps to one side onto the dirt floor and immediately curls into a fetal position.  Knees tight to the chest.  His fingers are scrabbling at his ankle as though he
’s scratching an itch, and she is telling him that it’s okay, telling him to stay still, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.  He is probing with his fingers, struggling for purchase, and after a time his hand settles and closes into a tight fist.  He weakly reaches for her, bringing his fist to her hand until the two meet.  He presses something flat into her palm, and when she looks down at her hand, she sees a silver sewing needle. 

He doesn
’t move again after that, and she watches his chest but there is no rise, no fall, only the longest of all intervals.  She lays her head back against the trunk and stares up at the gaps between the overhead limbs—there’s nothing left to be done here.  She just sits and waits, holding the useless needle, until she hears the sound of churning in the foliage on the other side of the wall, the sound of something wild on approach, and then she closes her eyes. 

Not long after that she can feel another presence in the shelter with her.  There is the sound of its ragged breathing, the sound of its track being laid in the soft dirt.  She opens her eyes.  A thin and pallid woman is kneeling just inside the opening.