Thirst (20 page)

Her shirt was damp beneath the armpits.

“That was stupid,” Eddie said.

“You did it, too.”

“It was stupid for both of us.”

She didn’t wait for Eddie to pour her a glass. She poured it herself, and drank it down fast, though not as fast as Eddie had.

“I can’t leave yet,” she said. “Now I’m tired.”

“Is he still out there?”

“Yeah.”

“He won’t make it in the sun.”

“I told him to go inside.”

“Did you look in the driveway?” Eddie asked.

Laura closed her eyes in the way she might if stymied by an endless argument.

“No,” she said.

“Where’s the gun?” It struck him suddenly. “The gun that Patty had?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus, Laura. We can’t let him have that gun.”

He went out and stood in the driveway. Patty’s head was crystallized like rock candy where the bullet had gone through. The creases at her shoulder and in her elbow were barely creases. The skin was too tight and full of gas to fold. She’d fallen on her arm, and her right hand was tucked beneath her body. Eddie went to the side of his house to get his shovel. When he returned, he pressed the metal tip beneath her belly to use it as a lever. He leaned down on the handle, but the curve in the head wasn’t big enough, and the handle hit the asphalt before she budged. He had to get down on his knees and put his shoulder into her side and push back with his feet to get some daylight between her body and the driveway. He
saw her hand under there—pink and meaty—but it didn’t hold the gun.

“Get the hell off her.”

Mike Sr. was standing at the fence. Eddie’s chest tightened as he watched him stagger, his legs buckling. He fell hard into the grass and didn’t move.

Eddie went back inside.

“Did you find it?” Laura said.

“No. It must have gotten lost.”

“It can’t be lost.” She shook her head. “Mike Sr.’s got it.”

Eddie leaned back on the sofa pillow. Laura brought him another glass of water.

“It’s too much,” he protested, but only weakly.

“Just a little bit of it, then.”

He took a few sips. The water was warm and felt silky going down. The air in the house was hot, but not intolerably hot. Not like outside.

“If you’re taking a nap,” Laura said, “I’m taking one, too.”

“I just need to rest,” Eddie said. “Then we’ll go.”

Laura went into the bedroom.

He took another sip and then another, and then he lay back and thought about how they would do it. It would be slow going. He was right in thinking that they might have to travel at night, when it was cooler. At night, though, they’d have to walk on the highway, which he didn’t want to do. He expected that if people were out, they’d be out on the highway. They wouldn’t be safe with the jug of water there.

There were at least twelve miles of trail heading northeast through the park. Eddie had run that stretch when they’d first moved. It was soft and without much grade, and it followed the
stream almost all the way. It connected with the big regional park to the north, and from there with another park, though he didn’t know what it was called and had never been inside it. They’d have to cross along some roads then and cross Route 29, and then they’d be in the burned-up reservoir and could follow it east for a while. After that, they’d have to find the highway. There were woods alongside the highway, and if they stayed in the woods and kept the highway in sight, it would take them to the bridge and they could walk right over the Bay. Laura’s parents were just eight miles on the other side. It seemed like a lot, but they could do it. He just needed to sleep for a couple of minutes to build his strength.

But he couldn’t sleep.

Beneath his fatigue was an energy that made him tremble.

Mike Sr. with that gun.

They were wasting time. The key was to get away from there, and yet they were sitting around, doing nothing. The truth was hardening all around him. The rest of the world wasn’t coming. The fire department was gone. He’d have to muster the strength to do it now, to get out of the neighborhood.

His fingers tingled, but it wasn’t like before. The map was mostly clear in his mind. He could run it, if he had to. He could put Laura on his back. He’d make bad time, but he would make it. He’d run that marathon without training. Once, he’d been a track star.

He went to her and could hear her soft breathing—a healthy breathing. Hadn’t she said she was feeling better? When she stirred, he touched her thigh. It was warm, and he could feel the fluids straining beneath her skin. It was full of life! People
had no idea what was happening inside of themselves. Eddie knew this. He rested a hand softly on her belly. Then he laid his forehead down on top of it.

“Eddie …”

He felt things. Tremors, currents—an incubating heat. It filled him up, just touching her like that. On the other side of this, they would be a family.

“You’re crushing me,” she said.

He crawled up close to her, so her ribs expanded against his own. The symmetry of their bodies brought him some relief.

“We have to go,” he said.

“It’s too much. I can’t stop thinking about Patty.”

“Try,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that image.”

“You will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because everything fades.”

She scooted to the edge of the bed and sat there. Eddie felt the cool place against his body where she’d removed herself.

“It’s awful,” she said.

“We’re surviving,” Eddie said. “We’re saving ourselves.”

“We’re abandoning him.”

“Mike Sr.?”

“He’s got nothing left, and now we’re leaving him.”

“We can’t save everybody. That’s what you said.”

“I don’t want to save everybody. I want to save someone we know. Someone right there.” She pointed at the wall in the direction of the yard.

“The fire department …” Eddie started.

She went into the living room, and when he came in, she’d curled up on floor and pressed her face into the carpet. “I’m no good at this,” she moaned. “I can only keep myself alive.”

“No,” Eddie said. “You don’t know what you’re capable of.”

“She’s out there right now. His
wife
, Eddie. And his son is dead, too.”

“You have to forget about them. When we go, you won’t think about them.”

“They’re our friends.”

“Our neighbors,” Eddie corrected.

“If I could kill him now, I would,” she said. “Just to put him out of his misery.”

While Laura slept, he tried to imagine the directions to her parents’ house again, but his memory of the directions had begun to blur. Every turn led back to the sidewalk in front of the abandoned house. He needed to get outside to regain his bearings and see how the streets connected to one another. He looked out the window; Mike Sr. must have gone inside.

Eddie opened the door.

When he walked to the end of the block, he saw that his street intersected with Eisner, and that Eisner connected to Kerwin—and was relieved that the world possessed more dimensions than what his imagination had reduced it to. He could see the park in his mind again, how they would walk down the hill to get there.

They would be gone by the time Bill Peters’s body was discovered. Eddie wasn’t sure if Mike Sr. would corroborate his story, but they would think of something if he didn’t. It was best to be far away. Bill Peters and the Davises were
already casualties of this place, and there was no telling who else would be.

But Eddie needed to check one final time before they left.

He walked down the block and into the backyard of the abandoned house. All the leaves were off the hedge, making it a bouquet of tall sticks stuck in the ground.

From where he stood, he could see that something was wrong with Bill Peters’s body.

There was something else on top of it.

Eddie was very still. The backyard was silent except for the sound of shallow breathing. Behind him was the outline of a flowerbed made up with paving stones. He gathered his strength and lifted one. It was a jagged rectangle the size of a quart of milk. He held it in both hands and walked across the grass.

The sound came again. It was the noise at the back of a throat. Eddie looked around; there was nothing to stand behind, nowhere to run but back to his door, through the open street. He listened, but the sound had stopped.

On top of Bill Peters was a man.

Eddie held the stone out in front of him. There was only the faintest whiff of putrescence in the air. He leaned in close to the man, and the branches of the hedge ran up along his chest and shoulders.

He was lying there, facedown. He wore a white shirt, stained dark brown at the shoulder. His hair was flat and matted, his ear as gray-green as mold.

Eddie bent down to take his pulse, but stopped before he was close enough. The shoulder rose and fell a little.

“Hello?” Eddie whispered.

The man turned his head to look up at him.

It was Steve McCarthy.

The branches had cut his nose and left scabs like raisins on his cheek.

“I’m all right,” he said.

Eddie’s heart pumped great jolts of blood into his ears. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

Steve McCarthy moved his lips. “I found this man,” he said. Eddie watched his eyes close and listened to his breathing.

When Steve McCarthy bolstered his strength, he said, “I was trying to help, but then I fell. I think this man is dead. He’s not moving. I’m having trouble discerning how long I’ve been here.” He rolled and lifted his hand. In it was the steak knife. “Look,” he gasped. “He’s been stabbed.” Beneath him, Bill Peters’s face bulged unrecognizably. Eddie saw where the collar of his shirt had turned his neck a dark blue from the pressure of the swelling.

“I need to report this,” Steve McCarthy said. He was still for a moment. Then he said, “This used to be a good neighborhood.”

Eddie’s palms hurt. He looked down and saw he was still squeezing the stone.

“Violence,” Steve McCarthy said, “all of it.”

Eddie looked at his face. There was a clean spot at his temple—a stretch of skin between his hair and the stubble of a beard. The hard corners of the stone pressed into his hands. He still had the strength to do it, to lift it up over his head and bring it down. It would all be over quick.

“God gave me a gift late in life. That water …” Steve McCarthy began. He’d closed his eyes again. “But it’s not too late. I can still use it. He’s asking me to use it.”

Eddie lifted the stone. He stepped forward to get his weight moving in the right direction.

“He gave me a supply to take to you people,” Steve McCarthy continued. “His people.”

Eddie held his breath. He looked at the spot of skin at Steve McCarthy’s temple, and then lowered the stone to his belly. “A supply of what?” he asked.

Steve McCarthy opened his bloodshot eyes. “Water,” he said. “There’s more of it. I just need to get my strength.”

Eddie put the stone down and knelt beside him. “Tell me where it is,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

“No,” he said. “I have to do it.”

“I’ll bring it back for you.”

Eddie touched the shoulder of Steve McCarthy’s shirt where the blood had dried. Beneath it the skin was as crisp as cellophane.

“I need to get my strength,” he said.

“You’re sick. Let me do it,” Eddie said, but Steve McCarthy didn’t respond. “Tell me where,” Eddie said.

He got his arm between the two of them—between Steve McCarthy’s belly and Bill Peters’s chest. Steve McCarthy winced as he was lifted off the dead man’s body. But Eddie got him to his knees. Then he laid him down in the yard.

“Can you stand?” Eddie asked. “Can you feel your legs?”

He bent again, pulling at the sides of Steve McCarthy’s waist and raising him like a bag of heavy dirt. They staggered together, but once he was up, his legs straightened and held him. Eddie took him by the shoulders and guided him down the walk. The blood on his shirt was powdery. It brushed on Eddie’s arm and cheek.

At the house, the door was locked. Laura must have gotten up. She must have been afraid that something had happened.

He knocked, and when she opened the door, he leaned Steve McCarthy against the brick wall beside it. He kept his hand pressed into the man’s chest to keep him from pitching forward.

“He’s alive,” Eddie said.

Laura looked with horrified eyes.

“It’s the guy who helped us,” he said. “The guy with the water.”

“We can’t give it back to him, Eddie. We can’t.”

“Help me get him inside.”

She got a sheet out of the closet and laid it out on the floor. She folded up a towel for his head.

“Put him here,” she said.

“I think we have some gauze.”

Eddie stepped back out onto the porch and surveyed the street. It was empty the way he’d come. When he looked in the other direction, Mike Sr. was standing in his driveway. Eddie nodded, but Mike Sr. only stared.

“Who you got in there?” Mike Sr. asked. His voice was hoarse.

Eddie stepped back inside and closed the door.

Laura was perched next to Steve McCarthy, wrapping gauze around his shoulder.

“Is it bad?” Eddie said.

“I don’t know. We need some tape.”

He got her the duct tape, and she filled the room with its wretched tearing sound as she pulled it from the roll. Then she wrapped it around the gauze on Steve McCarthy’s shoulder.

“I don’t know what this will do,” she said.

“Is he breathing?”

She turned her face and put it down close to Steve McCarthy’s mouth.

“A little,” she said. “It smells really bad.”

“We have to keep him alive.”

Laura stood up fully and rested her hand on her hip as if examining Eddie’s motives had returned her to a normal life.

“Why,” she asked, a shrewdness in her eyes, “do we have to save him?”

“He was shot,” Eddie said, “helping us.”

He looked at Steve McCarthy’s shoulder and his face full of scabs. His hair was too thin to cover the liver spots on his forehead. He was an old man, Eddie saw.

In the kitchen, he poured some of the water into a mug. Then he stood in the hallway holding it, looking at the two of them: Laura, and Steve McCarthy on the carpet.