“JJ,” Moira says. “It’s hurt.”
He slides his eyes over to her. He is so quiet, JJ. They know next to nothing about him. “Would you want to save it if it was a deer?” he asks. “Or would you want to eat it?”
“I can’t,” she says. “It’s at least—at least half human.”
JJ snorts, then stands up. “I know where we can take it,” he says. “Put it in the back of the van.”
Darby sighs. “Fine. Brian, JJ—let’s just load the motherfucker in and go.”
The beast is even heavier than it looks—the three men half drag, half carry it to the rear of the truck, then lift it in. Moira walks beside them, pressing her sweater against the wound all the way. Once it’s in the back of the truck, she climbs in and sits beside it, then reaches for one of the flashlights they’ve stashed in the back and hands that to Brian, who climbs in beside her. From what she can see, there’s a bullet lodged at the place where human skin gives way to fur.
Fur, she thinks, and suppresses a shudder. “Darby. Give me your knife.” When he hands it to her, she reaches for the bottle of whiskey that Darby keeps in his pack. She opens it, then splashes it over the wound. As always, she thinks of Eric, who’d survived the scream and the godforsaken plants with Darby only to die from a blood infection, raving and delirious, a cut on his hand gone untended. He’d been halfway to death when Moira had found them. Now, whenever they stop, alcohol of any kind is the first thing Moira looks for.
“You’re wasting good whiskey on an animal?” Darby grumbles.
She kneels in front of the creature and slides the knife into the wound, using her sweater to sop up the blood that wells, and gently pries the bullet out. It clatters to the floor.
As if he’d been waiting for her to be done, JJ starts the truck. Darby rolls the back door closed and Moira blinks in the sudden darkness, the flashlight wobbling in Brian’s shaky hand. They move forward, slowly, into the dark.
Moira takes off her shirt and tears a strip from it, then douses the strip in more alcohol and presses it against the wound. The strip quickly goes red. “Tape,” she says. Brian reaches into one of the packs and rummages around, then pulls out a roll of duct tape. Moira tears a piece from it with her teeth, the other hand still holding the bandage, and presses the tape across it. It sticks. She doesn’t know how long it will stay put, but at least the beast won’t bleed to death in the truck.
She hopes it won’t, anyway.
“Dr. Moira to the rescue,” Darby drawls. He and Brian snicker. Brian hands Moira another T-shirt from a pile in the back, and she pulls it on.
She says, “Tie its legs with something. What if it wakes up and thrashes around?”
Darby and Brian comply, using the rope that they keep by the door. Then they settle themselves on the blankets. Moira sits cross-legged in front of the beast and looks for the rifle, which is propped in the corner. Odd, she knows—given that she’s just pulled a bullet out of the creature—but it’s good to know it’s there, just in case.
“You didn’t even seem that surprised,” she says, after they’ve bumped along for a few minutes. She’s looking at the shadow that is Darby, but he only shrugs.
“The world went down in fire and then in screaming,” he says. “Nothing seems that strange to me anymore.”
Life had seemed strange to her until the meteors had come and taken her sister away. It was a delightful strangeness—days that sparked in front of her, brimming with both routine and possibility. She could audition one day and find the part that would change her whole life; she could buy a lottery ticket at the convenience store and lift her whole family into another world. Every day was another day wherein something could happen.
Then the meteors had come. She’d been staying at her sister’s place. Jaime had offered Moira her bed for the night, playing the good host, but Moira had said, “I’m fine on the couch,” and it turned out to be true. She had been fine—the meteor had come through Jaime’s bedroom window, demolishing the south side of the house and leaving the other half standing, practically untouched. There was nothing left of Jaime, not even bones.
She had expected to fall apart with grief, but instead the world became fuzzy, two-toned, monotonous. The collapse of things around them, the starvation—all of it unremarkable, all of it drudgery. She’d made her way back to her old basement apartment—her landlord was gone, or dead—and got used to living without power. One by one her neighbours left, and her friends disappeared. She grew potatoes in the backyard and was not surprised, come harvest, to find them stunted, almost inedible. She ate them anyway.
The other plants around her grew lush and green. Hollyhocks had bells as large as her hands and grew taller than her house. Tree roots broke the ground in the backyard. Berry bushes grew along the sides of the old roads, fruit hanging dark and luscious. For some reason, she did not touch those.
As the months stretched into fall and then to winter, she began to see small mounds on the roads when she went out in the morning—small green mounds with maybe a flash of red hair in one, a small curled hand in another. She didn’t look too closely. Then the winter came and the snow kept her mostly inside, except when she had to salvage for food.
When the scream came, she was outside again, scavenging for supplies. She first felt a tremor of rage and grief shiver through her. When the big orange flowers around her opened their mouths and let loose, she backed into the first building she could see, an abandoned restaurant, and shut herself in the bathroom at the back. The scream became human, became a hundred different screams, became footsteps that ran around in terror. She thought dully about how the Moira of a year ago would have been alive in her terror, electric in her madness, desperate to hang on. There was nothing to hang on to now, so why be terrified? Survival was an instinct. Survival was boring. That was the secret, that’s all it was. There was no hope, yes—but there hadn’t been any since Jaime had died.
She sat on the toilet and counted the tiles at her feet. They were chipped and filthy. One, two, three, and four. Five. Six. One hundred and twelve.
See? She almost wanted to open the door and scream at them all. See? You have it all wrong. Grief isn’t painful—it’s just boring. Boring as fuck. You can get used to it too.
She sat on the toilet until the world went quiet and then sat until the darkness outside was absolute. Then she stepped out of the bathroom and around the bodies on the floor and went outside. She walked back to her apartment. Just like she’d done in the days after Jaime, she let herself in and crawled into bed, and slept until she couldn’t anymore.
When she woke, it was late afternoon and the world outside had changed again, gone lush and thick, an even deeper green. For the first time Moira could remember since the meteors fell, it felt wrong to be inside. She changed into cleaner clothes and went out.
There were so many bodies. On the ground, slumped in doorways, everywhere. As she walked, vines stretched over the ground like twisted green snakes—slithering over the bodies, winding around the bodies, covering their hands and faces and hair in emerald green.
She avoided the vines as she walked. Eventually, even this felt ordinary, like she’d seen it all before.
17
Darkness, and then light. A force breaks her from the dirt. Air rushes at her face and she gasps in great lungfuls of it.
Blue-green eyes drink her in.