Thatch looked back and forth indecisively. “Gus—”
“Gus can’t keep a corpse in here,” Zena said. “He needs a woman.”
Thatch looked at Floy. The girl was lean and hollow-eyed from her own mourning. Her hair was long and wild, and her claws were showing. She was like a hungry tigress, but her dynamism gave her a certain sex appeal. And Gus had always had a certain hankering…
“And I need a man,” Zena said. “I think I could love a man. An independent man.”
Still Thatch hesitated, unable to break his long symbiosis with Gus. It was this more than anything else, Zena realized, that really stood between herself and Thatch. A physical homosexuality would have disgusted her; this emotional mutualism acted more subtly to inhibit other attachments.
At last Thatch nodded. He bent again to pick up the body. “Thatch!” Gus cried again, but Thatch ignored him. He hauled Karen’s corpse off the couch and down the hall toward the door.
Gus tried once more to interfere, but halted as Floy came at him. “I can do what she did,” Floy said. “I know how you feel. I’ve been through it all.” She spoke with a low intensity that showed she meant it.
They got the body outside. Zena glanced back, unable to restrain her morbid curiosity. Gus and Floy were already on the back couch, in an embrace of antagonism or of passion. Probably some of each—but it was what was required at that moment.
The rain blasted down, instantly matting the hair over the dead woman’s face and obscuring visibility. “That girl’s got courage,” Zena said. Actually she was yelling, to get over the noise of Mindel.
“So have you,” Thatch called back.
He dumped down the body. Zena couldn’t even tell whether it splashed, because everything was a splash out here. She had the sheet, and now laid it over the face.
Thatch drew his knife. Zena held Karen’s hair tightly while Thatch cut around the neck. The sheet concealed the sight of what they were doing, and the rain washed away any blood there might have been before it showed. It should not have been wasted—but there were limits.
“So have you,” Zena said, averting her gaze anyway.
“She showed me how,” he said, misunderstanding her comment.
There was another tremor, a violent one. The corpse jumped into the air. Zena screamed involuntarily, and Thatch jerked back. His glasses flew off his head; they had been anchored by a chain around the back of his head, but this must have broken.
Even through the thick rain they saw it: the flare of Crack Toe letting go. The falling water turned red, and Zena thought she saw a halo from the refraction. Then the sound came, as of a mountain being torn apart.
Slowly the sight and sound faded. Zena’s attention returned to things nearby. “Your glasses!” she cried.
Thatch held them up. The lenses had been shattered.
“Can you see without them?” she asked.
He nodded. “Well enough—close range. You are beautiful.”
“That’s well enough,” she said. Why this coy banter, amidst the most grisly business of butchering a friend? Was she losing her grip on reality?
They returned to work. The head jerked and rolled with the force of cutting. It felt like a living thing, struggling to get free. Zena vomited into the storm, but did not relinquish her hold. It had to be done.
After an interminable time the head came away. Zena lifted it by the hair and forced herself to look. It was no longer Karen, but the mask of a stranger, severed at the neck. Still, she knew that some of the water streaming down her face was tears. If only there had been some other way…
Zena wrapped it carefully in the sheet and set it on the step of the bus, just inside the door. “We’d better do the rest now,” she said. “While I’m still heaved out.”
They removed Karen’s clothing and Thatch took up the knife again. But the blade trembled. “I can’t carve a woman!” he said miserably.
Zena looked down at the headless corpse and saw what he meant. The head had been a necessary thing, and he had done that before. Now a beautifully feminine torso was exposed. Only a certain type of man would be able to mutilate those attributes, and Thatch was not that type.
Gus normally bullied Thatch into finding a way. Zena was not going to do that; she wanted such bullying to stop. “I’ll start it,” she said. She knew that once the body had been defeminized, Thatch would be able to continue. He would have to, because Zena lacked the physical strength to sever the bones and tissues of that body.
She took the knife. It was glistening and clean, for the rain scoured it constantly. She gritted her teeth and made an incision. The blade was sharp, and it was like cutting meat—unsurprisingly. Then she retched again, her stomach knotting. But there was no escape in sickness; this job, like every job since the first rain started, had to be done.
She carved. Through much of it her eyes were closed, but she kept going.
When she was done she turned the blade over to Thatch.
She saw a discoloration on his teeth and knew that he too had been puking. She reached out to catch his hand, touched by this first sign of genuine weakness in him. She brought it to her lips for a wet kiss.
Then they both leaned over the body from opposite sides and kissed each other on the lips. It was the first time, for even in the sexual embrace she had always turned her face away. It was unutterably sweet.
There was no refuge from the horror of Karen’s demise but love. With love they could continue. Zena knew that this feeling, so long and hard in coming, would never depart.
Zena held while Thatch carved. It was a long, difficult, awful job—but her spirit glowed with that transcendent emotion, and time was nothing. She loved Thatch—and through him Floy, and even Gus, and Karen and Gordon, and Dust Devil and Foundling… and herself. Love.
At last they were done, all but the smoking of the new meat. They reentered the bus, to find Floy and Gus recovered. Zena kissed Floy, then Gus, and returned to Thatch, and nothing needed to be said.
“Do you think Karen’s spirit is with Gordon now?” Floy asked.
Zena had to set aside her own returned misery while she considered the ramifications of the question. What would be the right answer? “Karen was a good woman,” she said. “A brave, good woman. Gordon was a good man, and he has been alone long enough. It is only right that they be together. They have to do what is best in their life, just as we must in ours.”
“That’s beautiful,” Floy said. “I am not jealous now.”
Then, as once before, they were hugging each other, expressing in tears the emotions that could not be properly conveyed in words.
Now they were four, and the two animals. Thatch continued to forage for edible moss, and Zena carved and cooked the meat in small portions. The rain went on, and the noise and motion of the volcano.
At five months of the Mindel deluge, something under the bus collapsed. They tumbled out of bed, alarmed. Zena, seven months pregnant, clung to the furniture while Thatch leaped down the steps to check outside.
“Foundation’s gone!” he yelled. “The whole area’s been undermined. The bus is falling into a sink hole! The next ’quake will—”
“We’ve got to get out!” Zena cried. “If we get stuck in an underground cavity, we’ll never survive the rain!” She had thought the worst was over when Karen died; now she knew that none of them had any guarantee of survival.
“It can go any time,” Thatch said. “Jam everything you can into the packs and get out in a minute or two! I know where we can find temporary shelter.”
Zena packed feverishly. She didn’t bother with clothing, but concentrated on useful items: the knives, tools, rope and remaining smoked meat. She tossed the first pack out to Thatch, and worked on another. Floy made a quick, clumsy search of the closets and cupboards, pointing out the essentials. Gus just stared.