Coyote (18 page)

“Look at these,” he said proudly. “Each one of these came off from something I’ve killed since the world went to shit. Something that tried to kill me, but I got it first. Each one is proof that we don’t have to lay down and die for these monsters. Each one, proof that we can fight back.

“And now one more prize, from the biggest monster yet.” His grin was huge. “We killed it! Yes!”

She understood his triumph, though she felt no desire to decorate her own self with bits of dead monsters. The others displayed various degrees of acceptance or disgust on their faces. Bait was laughing, and the Mule seemed to have a certain degree of awed admiration on his face. The Professor looked plainly disgusted—she could have guessed that this joy in violence and death would not be his thing. The dog just looked on, as all dogs do, inscrutable, and Medic…

Where was Medic? She was not in the group around the beast’s body, and she did not remember seeing Medic at all during the fight.

“Where’s Medic?” she asked, giving voice to her concern.

All the others looked at each other, mumbling things about how they hadn’t seen her.

“Spread out,” she ordered. “Find her.”

They spread out and began to hunt through the bushes, the joy of the kill evaporating in the mystery of Medic’s whereabouts.

The man hopped down from the beast and walked next to her as she searched.

“Who’s Medic?” he asked.

“Another woman who was with us. I heard…”

And suddenly she knew. She ran to the bushes she had heard Medic’s scream come from earlier. She thought she had seen Medic run out of those bushes, but she now knew it had been Bait she had seen running so quickly. She should have recognized it sooner.

After a few false starts at different sets of trampled bushes, she found the right ones, and was proven correct. Medic lay there—at least what was left of her did. At first Medic looked to be in peaceful repose, but when she looked closer, she could see that Medic’s body was off, somehow—it was wrong. She had been crushed, obviously by one of the legs of the beast as it thrashed through the forest. She was lying on her side, arms thrown out in front of her and legs looking as if they might still kick, but her body was flat, as if she were lying on her back. Her head looked in the same direction her arms were pointed in, but it was longer and flatter than any living person’s head should be, with the tongue protruding and the eyes bulging as if they might pop out at any moment. It was too dark to see the blood, but she could smell it, the coppery tang coming up from the ground where it must be soaking in a great pool.

It was obvious right away that there was nothing to do for the woman.

“Found her!” she called, turning away. The others turned and began to move towards her, but she held up her hands.

“You should not look,” she said.

“Is she…” began Mule, with big eyes and a catch in his voice, almost whispering.

“Dead,” she replied. “Crushed. There is nothing you can do.”

---

It was a solemn group that left the beast’s carcass behind. There had been some desultory discussion of burying Medic, but nobody had a shovel, and after their fight none of them were up to digging a grave with sticks or bare hands.

The Professor made a half-hearted attempt at scavenging Medic’s bag for useful supplies, but all the liquids had been crushed and broken, and had soaked into the bandages and dressings. After a few minutes he gave it up as a lost cause and moved away with the rest of the group.

They left her behind, walking back to the road they had come from and moving on eastward. They were all tired, all wanting to stop, to sit, to eat, and to sleep, but none of them felt safe enough where they were. Who knew if there were more of those giant beasts close by?

And so they walked. They walked, strung out in a line, tired, with no one, not even Bait, making conversation. They walked alone through the darkness at the edge of the Mount Hood National Forest.

As the sun was starting to lighten the sky, but before it was high enough to be seen over the trees surrounding the road, they came to a town called Zigzag.
[14]
A strange name for a town, she thought, but those things didn’t much matter anymore.

At the edge of town, she turned off the road, stepped up to one of the first houses she saw. After only a quick peek into the front window she decided this would be their resting place. She saw nothing special inside. It was a small house, single story, with maybe four or five rooms total, and looked rather run-down. But they were tired—she was tired—and at some point one source of shelter is the same as another.

After a struggle with the lock that required the use of the Mule’s baseball bat to solve, they spilled into the front room of the house. It was dark and dreary inside, with the shades mostly drawn down across the windows, only partially hiding the fading wallpaper and ratty, dusty furniture. The house suited her mood.

Silently, without needing to discuss it, they each separated, moving through the various rooms of the house and making a cursory check to be sure it was unoccupied by both man and beast. Finding nothing, they all found themselves back in the front room, the only room in the house with a couch and chairs, staring at each other—staring at her.

Why would they not make their own decisions? Why must she be in charge?

“It is time to rest,” she said, turning away, lowering her pack from her shoulders, and beginning to dig for something to eat.

The others all began to do the same, some plopping onto the couch or chairs, and others just kneeling or sitting where they were, too tired and hungry to make more comfortable choices.

The Professor, after a few minutes of his own rustling about, seated on the floor and eating from a bag of nuts he had pulled from his pack, spoke up.

“Shouldn’t we talk about what happened?” he asked. No one answered right away.

“Talk if you must,” she said, still rummaging for her own food. “She is going to eat and then sleep.”

The man who had helped them kill the beast looked at her with a question on his face and began to open his mouth to ask that question. She caught his look and gave him one of her own. Less quizzical, more unfriendly.

Bait picked up on the interaction and guessed what the question might be. “She is her,” he said, pointing to her to be sure he was clear.

“Her?” asked the man.

“Yup. She,” he responded, still pointing at her. “Coyote talks that way.” He finished with a shrug, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did, well enough.

“Coyote?”

“That’s what we call her. Don’t know her real name. Don’t use any of our real names. It’s a group thing, I guess. I’m Bait,” he said, putting out his hand to be engulfed by the hand of the other man.

After they shook he continued, pointing out the others as he mentioned them.

“The sweaty one with the big pack over there is the Mule. Sometimes we call him Ass.” the Mule paused in his own rummaging to raise his middle finger in Bait’s direction. “And this is the Professor. Coyote, you’ve met, and finally, over there’s the dog.”

“Not even the dog has a name?” The man sounded genuinely perplexed.

“Nope. Just ‘the dog,’ or maybe ‘Dog,’ like with a capital letter, you know? I’m not sure—we’re still kind of making this up. Most of us have only been along for the ride for a few days. Honestly, I don’t know why nobody uses their real name here.”

“Maybe so it’ll be easier to leave you dead in the forest when your time comes,” suggested the Professor with a sarcastic snarl in his voice.

“What the hell, man?” It was the Mule that spoke up.

“We just left her, dammit!” yelled the Professor, suddenly standing. “No burial, no last words, just rifle through her stuff a little and then walk away. What kind of people are we? Maybe we don’t deserve names.”

“What were you going to do? Nobody here has a shovel to dig with. Nobody here is a preacher, far as I know, to give any last words. Hell, man, we don’t even know if Medic was religious! We’d just got done killing that giant thing, and I, for one, didn’t want to hang around and see if another one, or something else, had been attracted by all the noise we made.”

“Professor,” added Bait, “there was nothing to do. She was dead. We weren’t. Time for the survivors to get on surviving.”

“That’s disgusting. Is this why we don’t give each other our names, or why we don’t really talk about our pasts or what we think is going on? Is it because we all just want to live a few days more, and make it easier to leave the bodies of the dead behind? People can’t survive that way. We need something more.”

The big man spoke up, not shy to jump into the group’s argument. “You kill. You fight back. That’s your something more.”

“Is that it? Killing? More violence?” asked the Professor, looking around the group. All he got was blank looks and a few shrugs. This seemed to irritate him more than anything so far.

“Come on people! Wake up! Don’t you see what’s going on out there? It’s not the monsters that are taking away what we are. It’s us!”

Suddenly he rounded on the man, taking in his muscles, the primitive trophies hanging from his wrists and neck, and the aura of ferocity he was radiating. He pointed to the man while speaking to the group as a whole.

“Who knows what these things are that we’re killing, but I know what he is. He’s the beast, not the things that he’s killing.”

The huge man took a step forward, making the Professor’s outstretched finger bend against his chest, a frown beginning to darken his face.

“Yes I am, Professor-man. I am the beast in this world. We all are. And we need to teach that to these monsters. We need to teach them there are worse things than them here, and this isn’t their place. It’s my place. More than you know, it’s my place.”

The Professor threw up his hands, looking done and disgusted. “This world is ‘your place’? Jesus, can you hear yourself? This is nobody’s place, this violent, chaotic shell of our former world. We should be working to hold up what we can, maybe even put things back together, not finding our personal glory in adding more violence to what’s already out there.” With this last he gestured to the trophies that adorned the man.

For his part, the man stood with his enormous arms crossed, cords of muscle running up his forearms and into his vest. The scowl on his face should have intimidated anyone, but the Professor plowed ahead, buoyed by his own passion.

“This isn’t ‘your place’,” continued the Professor. “This is nobody’s place. It’s a ghost, a memory of what once was. And the more people do what you’re doing, adapting to this new world, even reveling in it, the further our society falls. These are the hard times, get it? We need to persevere through the hard times without losing our basic decency, even our humanity. If you become some sort of beast, and if you lead others down that path, then you’re no better than what’s already out there, trying to kill us. If you become like them, then all hope of putting a civil society back together is lost.”

She expected the man to tear into the Professor at that point, living up to the violence he was being accused of. In fact, she was crouching, readying herself, preparing to spring into the middle and do what she could to save the Professor. But the man surprised her. His scowl had turned to a look of puzzlement, and he squinted his eyes and cocked his head, as if really seeing the Professor for the first time.

“So you were an actual professor before the Fall, right?” She never knew how, but somehow most everyone she met, even in the early days, was calling it the Fall. Some things are just too right to be denied. “I mean a real one,” he continued. “A real professor, giving lectures, smoking your pipe, and all that.”

The Professor seemed taken aback. “Well, I never smoked a pipe, but…”

“Then you don’t know me, Professor,” snarled the man, his bad mood returning. “I guarantee you don’t know me. I come from the real world. The world that mostly sucks, that’s about fighting for what you get, and about being kept down by people like you. Shit, Professor. I’m the guy your college co-eds turn the other way from when they see me walking down the street—the guy your college security rent-a-cops come out to hustle off the campus if I walk too close to the carefully-trimmed lawn.”

He flexed one arm, making the muscles jump and writhe, pointing to them with his other hand. “You know where muscles like this come from, Professor? From prison, man. Hard time. The kind of time where you got nothin’ else to do but pump iron and read a bible.”

Next, he turned over the arm that had been flexing, displaying three dots tattooed on the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger. “See this?” he asked. “This is the vida loca. All the Mexicans have it in the can, and shit they were pissed when I got it on me. It means ‘my crazy life’. The dots are the three things they expect out of life: gangs, drugs, death. And this one?” now he was pointing to three solid teardrops tattooed at the outside corner of one eye. “These ones you get if you’ve killed somebody. A tear for every death.”

He had other tattoos visible on his wrists, one forearm, and his neck, but nobody was asking the meaning of them.

“This is me, Professor. My world wasn’t the pretty lawns and ivy-covered buildings you saw outside your office window when you weren’t looking down the shirt of some sweet co-ed come to beg for a better grade. The world was shit before the Fall. It was violence, it was death, it was one long fight to get to the top of the pile and survive to the next day. And now? Now, after the Fall? It’s the same world, Professor, the same world—only there ain’t no cops or no judges holding me down.

“I was made for this world. Been practicin’ for it my whole life. And I intend to show those sons of bitches out there, those monsters that have made a meal of everyone I know, that I am the beast and they are the hunted, and they’d damn well better go on back where they came from.”

By the end of this tirade the man was standing toe-to-toe with the Professor, almost daring him to respond. The Professor stood his ground, looking up at the man as he towered over him, but was smart enough not to speak up. Maybe the two had come from such different places that there was no way to bridge the gap between their worlds, even before the Fall.

She had her doubts, now, herself. Back in the forest, in the exultation of bringing the monster down, she had been convinced that fighting was to be her new purpose. Now, listening to the two men argue against each other, she was not so sure.

One spoke for fighting back, and one for rebuilding. Neither had mentioned surviving as a purpose. Wasn’t that the most basic purpose, the most basic motivator? It had certainly been enough to keep her going so far, and no matter what the two men said aloud, she couldn’t help but note that neither the goal of fighting back, nor the goal of holding on to a degree of civilization had prevented either man from attaining the basic goal of survival.

Whatever her ultimate decision was, it was time to end this posturing now. She pointed to each man in turn.

“You are the Beast, you are the Professor, and both are different people. There is no need to be the same. Each of you can live your own lives and make your own choices.” As she said this, she stepped between the two, forcing each one to take a step back.

Her frank declarations brooked no argument. She had no time for their arguing when there were things like eating and sleeping to be done.

The Professor made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, turning away to pull a few cushions off of a nearby couch and begin forming a bed for himself in one corner of the room. The Mule and Bait, who had mostly been spectators for the whole scene looked at each other and shrugged, seeming to come to some agreement of their own.

“And welcome to the Beast,” said Bait, patting the newly-named man on one massive shoulder and turning to his own preparations for sleep. Everyone somehow heard the capital letter at the beginning of the name “Beast.”

That left her and the Beast standing, looking at each other. As he looked at her, there was a message in his eyes—maybe gratitude, maybe understanding—some soft emotion that he would probably never put into words. It was just as well that he didn’t. She was hungry and tired, and had had enough of people and their emotions.

She turned away from him, getting some jerky and a can of peas out of her pack and wolfing them down quickly, then rolling herself into her own blankets. The Beast didn’t say anything, busying himself with his own routine. But she felt his eyes on her long after she turned away to pretend she slept.

---

From the diary of The Mule:

I slew a dragon today. Well, maybe it wasn’t a dragon, but it was as big as a dragon. It was this huge, many-legged thing, with eyes all around it and no head—the thing was probably about as big as my garage, or as big as my garage used to be, I guess, before everything burned…
[15]

And maybe it wasn’t just me that slew it. And, hell, maybe “slew” isn’t even the right conjugation of that verb, I don’t know.

But we surely killed something big, something nasty—something that was trying to kill us. It was scary, it hurt (I think we all got knocked down at least a few times), but God, it felt good. It felt right.