What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (2 page)

I stopped at houses along the way. Most were easy to break into, some had been left unlocked but I found little inside. I spent the night in one of them where I was lucky enough to find unopened cans of baby hotdogs and creamed corn which I ate cold, huddled in blankets. Someone about my size must have lived there because I found dry clothes to change into, the first of many times I helped myself to someone else’s wardrobe.

When I reached the town the next day I was amazed at how desolate it looked, long-abandoned, shops emptied, dead power lines draped across the streets. There must have been a gas explosion at one end of town because a large pit’s worth of earth had been torn from the ground. The buildings closest to the pit had burned down to a few steel girders that poked out like skeletal fingers.

I didn’t know where to go. At first I worried someone might see me but it was so quiet, so dead, that I stopped thinking about that. I never found the car my mother had taken. The only thing I could imagine happening was that someone had attacked her, had driven the car away with her in it. I pictured some type of Robinson Crusoe guy with a long beard, dressed in rags, having been trapped in the town for months and overjoyed at discovering a vehicle that still ran. And a woman driving it.

It began to get dark. I felt numb, hollowed-out, as if someone had wrung all the strength and determination out of me like water from a wet towel. Worst of all, I was totally incapable of figuring out what to do next. I was standing out in front of a furniture store on Mountain Park’s main street and I walked in.

The store’s plate glass windows had been smashed and cold air streamed through the place. The front of the store was damp, the furniture water-logged and reeking of mold. I found a couch near the back that was mostly dry and didn’t stink as bad where I could curl up and try to get warm. I piled on as many cushions as I could find. I burrowed under them in my wet clothes, keeping the rifle tucked in close.

Feeling as bad as I did, hungry and exposed and cold, I didn’t think I would be able to fall asleep but I awoke to see thin winter light streaming in from outside. It was early morning, the rain had stopped and I felt a little warmer, almost dry. I sat up with the rifle balanced on my knees.

I tried, really tried, to force my mind to come up with some notion as to what to do but it was torture. I didn’t want to go outside again. I didn’t want to look for food. Right then, I just wanted to
stop
.

Stop completely. I wanted my heart to stop beating. I wanted my mind to stop remembering anything about before. I was completely lost in a place I’d always known. It seemed pointless to do anything for myself. Where could I go? What could I do?

Then I heard a scraping sound, like a chair being shoved aside, from the back shadows of the store. I jumped to my feet. I fumbled a cartridge into the rifle from my pocket and swung the barrel to where the sound had come from. It was so quiet that soon I was able to hear someone’s ragged breathing, a frightened panting.

I was about to fire into the darkness, try to scare whatever it was away, when I heard a voice. “Don’t.” It was a small voice, the word so fragile it hardly seemed to have been spoken.

“If you don’t want me to shoot, come out where I can see you,” I shouted.

I heard the scrape of a chair again and the soft shuffle of feet. Then I saw the shape of a small girl younger than me emerge from the shadows. She looked filthy and emaciated, her hair a wild tangle of blond straw, the cast-off clothes she wore rags. “Don’t hurt me,” she said.

“I could have killed you,” I said. “What are you doing here?” Now that I was face to face with this empty-handed little girl, I felt immensely relieved, lowering the rifle, but also furious that she’d frightened me, taken me by surprise.

“I haven’t seen someone this close for a long, long time,” she said. “I saw you. I saw you walk around and I followed you. I saw you come in here.” Her voice was weak, a ghost-like whisper. “I’ve been here all night, too.”

I thought of my mom and the ragged man I had been imagining had attacked her and taken the car. I felt a chill run through me realizing someone could have watched me for so long without my knowing it. I swore to myself I wouldn’t let that happen again. “Where did you come from?”

“I live here. Mom and dad lived here but they left.”

“They left you
here
?”

“Well, they didn’t leave, they…”

“I know,” I said. “You don’t have to say it.”

Had she lived here by herself for nearly a year? I set the rifle down on the couch where I had been sleeping. “Don’t be afraid. I’m in the same situation you are.” She didn’t come any closer so I held out a hand and she finally stepped forward and took it. At that first touch, she was so immediately trusting it scared me. Her hand felt cold and hard and greasy, like a moldy piece of wood. “You’ve been alone?” I said.

“There were people here, some kids I went to school with, but they left.”

“Left for where?”

She shrugged. “There’s no food left. I hid some but it’s almost gone.” She let my hand drop and looked down at her feet shyly, as if she was unsure she should be telling me what she was about to say. “There’s a city where they have lots of food.”

“What city?”

She shrugged again. “Someone told us once that if you walk down the road all the way to the river, find the highway and follow it as far as it goes, you’ll find the city. You have to go north.”

“I don’t understand why they just left you here,” I said.

She studied her feet again, shy and embarrassed despite the suffering she’d been through. “I was too young, they said. They were older. I couldn’t keep up. I tried but I was afraid of getting left behind somewhere so I came back.”

That was how I found my first child, a child to me although I’m not much older. And that was how I found a direction in which to go. My father had said he was being taken to the large city to the north and I would follow.

The name of
the girl I found that day, or who found me, was Emily. After a day of berry picking, after having been unable to shoot the rabbit, I have an older, cleaner, healthier Emily perched at my feet, her back propped against a leg of the recliner I’m sitting in.

I take a sip from a bottle of orange juice. We’re in a house that has a clear view on all sides of the surrounding neighborhood. Except for cobwebs, flyspecks and dust, a clean house, abandoned long ago. A house where we did not come across the body of someone who had died of the disease, the corpse of a frightened person unable to reach their car to drive somewhere to seek help. So often, Larkin and I have found remains in a bedroom at the back of a house we’d entered, that mildewed, sickly-sweet smell, the shrunken, contorted, mummified bodies beneath the sheets.

If we find a house with a body inside, the kids refuse to stay there. I don’t blame them but it’s caused Larkin and I to spend a lot of time looking for just the right place. Even here, in this house, at night, while the others sleep, Larkin and I take turns walking through the house, keeping watch and listening, trying to tell if there are any strange human sounds mixed with those of the animals outside.

Emmy’s become a chatterbox over the past two years. She never seems to worry much about the future or talk about the past. I draw a comb through the tangles of her thick, uneven hair. I cut everyone’s hair, even my own, with a pair of barber’s scissors I found long ago. “Gilly,” she says. “Can we can go swimming in the creek tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” I say dreamily, staring out the house’s intact front windows. It’s so tranquil outside, deep in the hot afternoon, with the branches of shade trees hovering over the sidewalks, a few abandoned cars blocking the street the only thing out of place. The other three kids are in the yard, Stace, CJ and Terry, kicking a soccer ball around, their yelling and teasing so happy and natural, it’s hard to believe anything’s wrong.

This town, Oxbow Ferry, seems untouched, despite how near it is to the interstate. Finding a place like this was one of the best things to ever happen to us. The only supermarket in town has shelves still heavy with cans and jars. There are boxes of crackers and cereal, some of it not completely stale, sealed in plastic pouches. There’s powdered milk and cans of cheese whip. It feels like years since we’ve eaten this well, tins of meat and fruit, rice and pasta we boil over a fire pit in the backyard.

Emily jabs my shin. “You’re not listening to me.” She’s been talking but I haven’t been paying attention. She jumps to her feet and stretches. She’s as tall as I am. She’s only about a year younger. I thought she was much younger when I first saw her, ragged and starving. She runs a hand through her straw-colored hair, skin tanned and glowing. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.”

“Okay,” I say, getting up and tossing the comb on the chair. “Have you seen Larkin recently?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “I think he went upstairs. Let me know when you’re ready to make dinner. I’ll help you.”

“You’re the best.” I wander into the kitchen to set the bottle of juice on the counter. The kitchen table is littered with cans and boxes, some empty, some waiting to be used. I wander slowly through the house. It’s a mess, the corners piled with clothes we’ve found, games and toys, shoes and sandals strewn across the floor. I go to the staircase and clump heavily upstairs to let Larkin know I’m coming. He likes to be by himself sometimes, reading a book he’s taken from the local library.

The door to the room he’s claimed as his own is shut which is odd. He usually leaves the door half-open in case something happens or someone needs to talk to him. I knock. There’s no answer. I open the door a crack. “Larkin?”

He has the windows shut and the room has a heavy, musty smell. It’s very hot. He’s lying curled up in a corner. The curtains are drawn and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. He’s turned toward me with his eyes open but he isn’t really looking at me.

“What’s wrong?” I go to the side of the mattress he lays on. I want to reach down and touch him, run my fingers through his hair. He’s wearing the same shirt he wore earlier, stained with berry juice.

“I’m all right,” he says slowly. It’s as if he’s looking through me. I wave my hand in front of his eyes.

“Are you there, Larkin?” I smile as I say this but I’m starting to get worried. He’s never been ill before, really ill. Some of the younger ones had to be nursed into shape after a fever or a sore throat but never Larkin. Or me. We won’t allow ourselves to get sick.

He makes an effort to look alert, heaves himself up on his elbows. I slip a pillow behind his back. He looks annoyed. “I’m okay, Gil. I felt sleepy when we got back today. Too much sun, I guess.”

“But it’s weird to see you like this. You’ve got to tell me if something’s wrong.”

He laughs a little but it’s the fake laugh of someone trying to cover up a lie. “It’s nothing. Don’t freak out, worrywart, about me taking a nap. It’s not like anything’s going to happen.”

I finally do reach down and run my fingers through his hair. His forehead feels cool. His skin looks paler. There are a few tiny white spots like reverse freckles. He grabs me by the wrist and holds my hand in front of his face, studying my open palm like it’s a map.

“I know we’ve never talked much about the future,” he says. “It’s not something you really want to think much about. We tell the kids we’re making our way north to this magic city but you and me…”

I sit down on the edge of the mattress. I want him to stop talking and hold me. I want him to tell me it’s going to be all right and make me believe it. There’s been an understanding between us for a long time, something felt but never spoken. To me, it’s that someday, when we find the perfect place, the safe place we won’t ever leave, when the children are old enough to take care of themselves, we could be together, starting out like Eve and Adam.

“You don’t have to say anything, Larkin.”

“I know I don’t,” he says. He takes my hand and kisses it softly.

The day Larkin
found us, it changed everything. There was still just Emily and me the first time we saw him. It wasn’t long after that cold winter morning when I woke up in the furniture store, where Emily had taken me by surprise.

What she said to me that morning stuck in my brain.
Follow the highway. Find the city.
For her, the city meant food enough to last forever and a safe place to hide. For me, it meant a way of searching for my mother. The only place that made sense to keep looking for her was the next closest town to where we lived, which was to the north.

There was no other option. Returning to my house and waiting to see if my mother ever came back meant starvation. It was better to keep moving, especially with Emily to care for. And even though it became increasingly hopeless, in every town we came to after that first one I could search for some sign of her—for her car, for anything else my mother might have left behind.

The first day we spent together, Emily told me she had seen a car driving through the town just days before I arrived. It was white, a four door like my mother’s. The car wove its way slowly through the streets that were still passable, then drove off toward the highway.

“Was the driver the only person you’d seen since your friends left?”

She nodded.

“What did the driver look like?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t look too close. I hid.”

I must have looked angry or frustrated because she started talking faster. She seemed frightened by the thought that she might make me upset, might give me a reason to leave her behind like the kids she had gone to school with had.

“I was scared,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Someone else
was
here before. At night. It was loud, a man riding a motorcycle. He didn’t look right, like he would kill me if he found me. His hair, his face was white.” She stopped talking.

“When was this?”

“It wasn’t long after the others left. He just scared me. He wasn’t right.” She studied my face. “Why did you ask about the car?”