White Horse (9 page)

I clutch at the damp lapels of his jacket. It’s too dark to see here, but I remember it being the drab green of all things military. “You said she was dead.”

“She
is
dead. Or she will be when I blow that place off the planet.”

Now I see the burden he carries: a backpack filled with secrets.

“It was you at the church, wasn’t it?”

He doesn’t confirm, only grunts.

“You can’t do it. Not with her in there. I won’t let you.”

“You have no choice.”

DATE: THEN

The jar is heavier than
it looks, as though its core is filled with sand. Or maybe good intentions. Silence is the only protest as I walk it backwards and lean its top half onto the soft ottoman.

Something shifts inside. There’s a whisper like old, discarded snake skins rubbing together. A chill tiptoes down my spine’s spurred steps.

My knees dig into the beige carpet’s level loop pile as I kneel to follow Dr. Rose’s recommendation. Maybe there’s a clue here about what
lies beneath. I look. Nothing. A whole lot of nothing but more of the same. Smooth, with a hint of chalkiness. It’s left a faint dusting of itself on the carpet, and I can’t help but run my fingertip across the cheap fibers. The residue is soft and silky like cornstarch.

A frustrated sigh rides my breath. I wanted there to be something. Even if it was a Made in China sticker.

This time Dr. Rose doesn’t
wait for me to speak. We settle into our respective chairs and roles, or so I think until he sets his notepad aside. Instinctively, my legs cross and I lace my fingers together, clasping them over my top knee. A model of cautious propriety.

He drinks in my defensive pose with his dark gaze, then knocks it aside with his question.

“Do you want me, too?”

“Yes. And no.”

He leans back, flashes a smile that makes me wish we hadn’t met here, in this place where my mental health is a question mark.

“I’ll take that. For now.”

Inside I shiver because
for now
means there will be a later, and he thinks I’m worth the wait. The pursuit. But part of me flares because I turned him down, and here he is steamrolling over me like my “No, thank you” was a meaningless thing.

For a moment he watches me and I feel naked. Usually it’s just my mind feeling exposed here, but now it’s my body as well. My nipples tighten. I swallow hard.

“Did you have the dream?” he asks.

“What?”

He never goes first. Never prompts me. But here he is changing all the rules. The notebook is back on his lap and he’s sitting there, pen idle in his right hand. That much, at least, is normal.

“The jar.”

“Oh. That.” The jar, the jar, the stinking jar. The tumor in my life. The jar is like having cancer and trying to figure out where you went wrong so its growth was nurtured. Was it the butter? The margarine? Too much beef? Too much watching and waiting on the microwave to
ding? What had I done that someone felt compelled to enter my home and give me an antediluvian mystery? I pick through the bones of my life looking for clues and find nothing.

“Yes,” I say.

He waits.

“It’s the color of scorched cream.” My hands reach into thin air and grasp invisible handles. And stop. They sink to my knees, massage the patella. “We do this every week and nothing changes.”

“Did you look at the bottom?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Wherever it’s from, it’s not made in China. That I know of.”

We share a tense smile.

“What do you think is inside?” he asks.

“I couldn’t guess. Most likely nothing.”

“Have you wondered?”

“No,” I lie.

“But something has changed: this week you looked at the bottom. Next time I want you to see if you can look inside. How do you feel about that?”

My hands ball into fists. “Fine.”

DATE: NOW

Dawn comes in the same
gray cloak she always wears these days. Shades of blue would be more becoming, or maybe pearls and pinks and peaches, because somewhere out there it’s spring—or should be. My eyelids fly open to the welcome feeling of no nausea and the less welcome feeling of a two-by-four beating against the inside of my skull in some kind of erratic Morse code. Pressing my hands against my stomach, I perform a half crunch and my muscles tense in protest. Concave, although slightly closer to flat than before.

“Amino acids.”

“What?”

My captor is crouched on the floor, fastening wires to a cigarette-pack-sized block of sweating plasticine.

“You still want to save your friend?”

“Yes,” I rasp.

“Be my guest.” He doesn’t look up.

“What about amino acids?”

“They are the building blocks of life. Combined in the right order, they make proteins. DNA is made of amino acids. Probably they will kill her and eat her. Human flesh has the amino acids they need.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Are you menstruating?”

“What?”

“You’re angry. Women are often angry when they menstruate. It is the hormones.”

I rub my head until the tapping subsides to a tick.

“Where do you come from?”

“Switzerland.”

“Do they teach manners there?”

He keeps working with his blocks. “They don’t teach anything there now. My country is gone. And my people.” Hard planes maketh this man. He is the Alps of his homeland in miniature: hard, unyielding, cruel.

I pick up my body, then I pick up my backpack. And I leave.

I am going to rescue Lisa. If I don’t, there’s no hope for the child growing inside me. I need to be able to save someone.

DATE: THEN

Purple paper does not flatter
Stiffy, but that’s what Ben wants.

“The bright color will make people look,” he says.

Who am I to argue? I’ve got a soft spot for that hunk of orange fur with the
Kiss my ass, but not too close
attitude. A roll of tape gets dumped on top of the paper stack.

“Put them everywhere. Cover other people’s lost pets if you have to.” He takes off, shoving fliers at all available warm bodies. Purple paper floats to the ground, but Ben doesn’t notice that people think he’s just another loon with something to shill.

The opposite direction is mine. I’m more conservative as I tape
Stiffy’s face to walls and poles. I smile at a few people, but they glance away, focused on their own troubles. At the end of the block I turn back. That’s what we agreed to. Ben and I meet in the middle outside our apartment building.

His top lip twitches beneath his crusty nose. When I ask how he is, he shrugs.

“Just a cold,” he says. “And I think maybe I’m pregnant, because I’m always riding the porcelain bus, or thinking about it.” He sounds like honking geese when he laughs. “I’m happy now, though, because someone’s going to find Stiffy. He’ll be back by tonight, I know it.”

He’s wrong. The fliers yield
nothing more than a handful of obscene calls and one guy with a Korean accent inquiring about a job. Stiffy shows up a week later, gaunt and matted and filthy from some adventure that only makes sense to him. He saunters through my window with his usual nonchalance and takes the front-row seat in front of the jar.

Something cold and scaly uncoils in my gut.

“Stiffy.”

Usually he’ll glance up at me, rub my shins, make noises about food. But this time he employs selective hearing and ignores me. When I approach him, he spits, lashes out, nothing like the cat I know. I shut the window and call Ben. The phone rings in stereo, through the floor and in my ear. Nine rings. I dial again. Three more and he picks up.

“Hold on.” His throat forces out noises that sound like he’s coughing up a hairball. “I can’t stop puking,” he says, but he makes an effort when I tell him I have his cat.

A minute later he’s busting through my door, his skin waxen, his breath acidic and foul.

“Stiffy!” He rushes to hug his cat.

Ben leaves with a spring to his step. The last image I see of Stiffy is the marmalade cat wide-eyed and unblinking, staring at the jar over his owner’s shoulder.

SIX

DATE: NOW

N
ew physiology brought with it change to old patterns. Humans infected with White Horse mutated in unpredictable ways. Ninety percent died. Of the remaining ten percent, maybe half were immune. The other five mutated in a way that was survivable. Unless pushed by career or some other drive such as the burning desire to beat the next level on a video game, humans are not nocturnal. Oh, we can do it, of course, but never wrench from it the satisfaction that comes from sleeping nights.

But in this leftover world, in the dying gasp of humanity, some things now hunt at night. Which means during the day they sleep. …

The once-woman twitches like a
dog mid-dream. Is there enough human in her that she dreams of an exorbitant shopping trip in Milan, or has her mind slipped into the primordial stew where her single-cell body propels itself to its next meal with a whip-like flagella?

All six creatures are sleeping like obscene, fattened kittens nestled in the straw. Their mouths chew in their sleep, but they’ll stop when the
Swiss blows this barn clear off the field. These stones have withstood earthquakes, weather, and war, but they will crumble in a duel with plastic explosives.

Lisa. I have to get her. I can’t leave her here.

She’s crouched in the same wooden intersection, knees drawn to her chest as though they’re a shield that will keep the monsters at bay, the equivalent of a blanket warding away the bogeyman.

When I move several inches to the left to gain a better view inside the barn, Lisa’s head jerks as though she’s spotted me. But it’s a lie. Her eyes are flat and lifeless. She’s given up. Probably thinks I’m dead, or as good as, too.

Please don’t let her move. While the creatures sleep, there is a chance.

The backpack slides off my shoulders. I cover several dozen feet and drop it at the base of a tree. The paring knife is already in my pocket, and a moment later I am wielding the cleaver. It has good balance.

Please don’t let me need to use it
. Would that my wish held more magic than a prayer.

The barn has one set of doors. A rusted padlock is a broken arm dangling from an equally oxidized latch. It’s a low building with the characteristic red roof that dots the Italian countryside like the measles. Three windows. One on each wall that doesn’t have a door. None are large enough even if they did open. Which leaves me with the door and hinges so old they’ll sing soprano at the first touch.

I pray Lisa can hold on.

At the house, the Swiss is poking through a metal box. He slaps it shut as I stride past him with silent purpose, straight to the tiny galley kitchen.

“Were you unlucky?”

“No.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.” I pull a gallon can of olive oil from its hiding place beneath the narrow strip of counter. There are no cabinets below, just curtains concealing pots, pans, and baking goods from polite company.

“Olive oil?”

“No kitchen in Italy is complete without it.”

“You can’t save her,” he tells my back. “They probably ate what was left of the other villagers. They won’t care about your stupid friend.”

It’s not just college grades
that fall in a curve. Human decency is bell-shaped, with some of us slopping over the edges. Saints on one end, sinners on the other—if you want to be biblical. There’s no way of knowing where these posthumans fall, how much of the
person
is driving the meat bus.

I can’t play the genetic lottery with Lisa’s life. I’m armed only with my own good intentions.

Oil slops over the hinges, seeps between the metal cracks. I pray to a God I don’t really have faith in just so I feel like I have company, but He doesn’t answer. Minutes tick by. I wait as long as I dare; I don’t know how long the posthumans will sleep. For all I know, they’re like dogs, sleeping with one ear open, waiting for food to fall on the floor in the next room.

Behind the dense high clouds, the sun is a spot of lighter gray. Morning is here in full. Enough light that I can peer through the window and tack together some kind of rescue plan.

The door barely complains as I inch my body through the narrow slit I’ve made. And then I’m in a scratch-and-sniff snapshot of hell. The church was just a warm-up. These things sleep here. They shit here. They eat here amongst their own filth.

My boots poke holes in the straw. I look down because I don’t want to step in the brown sludge piles littering the floor. In places it’s thick, like a melted-down mud hut. It is this disjointed dance of one hesitant step after the other that carries me to the beam holding Lisa.

One of the beings stirs.

I hold my breath until it settles again.

Hold.

The pressure stings. Carbon dioxide burns my lungs, but I don’t dare release too soon.

Hold.

Tears fill my eyes.

On the barn floor, the creature is still once more, lost in its wretched dreamworld.

Quietly
, I mouth to Lisa, then reprimand myself for forgetting. So I wrap the word in softened breath.

Lisa’s lips move, forming the shape of my name.

Matted, bloody hair clings to her right ear in a red poultice. Her right eye is beaten to a blackened slit. They must have knocked her out to bring her here, although I haven’t yet figured out how they got to her and not me. She must have gone exploring after I fell asleep, probably through a window, because the door was blocked by what there is of me.

No. Something must have lured her. There’s no way she’d go alone.

Idiot kid.

Thank God she’s alive.

Blood flakes from the red-brown crust around her mouth. She seems even thinner than yesterday. Her legs are compasses bent at tight angles beneath the denim. I want to cry. I want to hug her. I want to shake the stupid from her bones.