Eric realized he was wrong about feeling numb. There was something in him, something terrible but powerful, something that should have frightened him but did not.
Rage.
At night, he dreamt of his father. They were in the aluminum boat, floating in the lake in Maine. His father was drinking a can of beer with his feet up. Eric rowed toward the island. The skies were green and shivered like leaves disturbed by the wind.
“Is that as fast as you can row?” his father asked. He tossed his empty beer into the lake where the red and white can bobbed in the water. “I can’t believe you’re my son.”
Eric said nothing. He pulled at the oars, but it was like rowing in thick mud. Water dripped off the oars, thick as honey.
“You’ll never get to the island,” his father said, disgusted. There was a snap and a hiss as he opened another beer. “Your mother ruined you.”
Eric grunted at the oars, but suddenly they would not budge. The oars felt lodged in stone.
His father laughed. “Holy shit,” he said. “Your mother really screwed you up.”
It was only water. Eric heaved and strained against the oars. Suddenly his father shot up and was directly in his face, his hot breath in his face, his face twisted in contempt. “What’s wrong with you?”
Eric woke up sweating, his arms flailing around him, as if he were trying to fly.
The next day, over the campfire where the water boiled, Eric announced that he didn’t want to move today. He wanted to stay at the camp. “I have to think,” he said.
The others didn’t argue. They both seemed to have pulled away from him. They found consolation in each other. They stayed close together, speaking only in Spanish. Normally, Eric would have felt lonely and hurt. Now he felt relief. He wanted to be alone.
He was thinking about leaving them.
There was a freedom to solitude. Eric could feel it, sitting at the crest of a ravine, his legs dangling over the hundred foot drop. He had failed at everything important to him. And those around him suffered for it.
A gust of wind blew over the forest, tossing the leaves in a great rolling wave, turning the forest into a sea of green. Birds fluttered in the trees above him, chickadees, yellow warblers, and a group of voluble goldfinches. Dark turkey vultures traced lazy, slow circles in the air above.
Eric tried to think of the future. Why should it matter? For an instant, he detached from his dream of the island. There was another possibility. He could wander. All his life. Like birds, he could move south in the winter, and then return north, moving, always moving, with no place to call home, no goal he could fail to reach. No people he could lose or put in danger. He looked over the mountains of Vermont and saw the wilderness, not as something to pass through, but as his ultimate destination. He could wander.
The hell with the island.
During the day, the others gathered food. Sergio fished while Lucia gathered berries.
She found a patch of blackberries, buzzing with bees under the August sun. While she picked the tender berries that stained her fingers purple, she happened upon a meadow of blueberries. The meadow sloped up the mountain, and, on the other end, Sergio tossed his line into a mountain stream.
Lucia was picking blueberries when she heard it. Up at the edge of the meadow, a black bear plodded out of the forest. It was aware of her immediately, stopping and sniffing. They looked in each other’s direction, Lucia’s heart pattering inside her. She was on the edge of panic, thinking of the great, diseased brown bear that Eric had told her about. But just before she cried out to Sergio, the black bear looked away, sat lazily in the midst of the blueberries, and then began licking its paw. Apparently it decided they were no threat.
Lucia watched the bear, the fear dissipating from her limbs. When she returned to the job of picking berries, she began to weep silently, in gratitude. Toward what, she did not know.
She never told anyone about the bear.
Eric spooned the food in his mouth mechanically, thinking of when he was going to tell the others that he was no longer interested in going to the island, that he was no longer interested in being with them. The food was tasteless.
Sergio and Lucia ate with happiness. Lucia had fried the trout perfectly and covered it with mashed blueberries. They finished with a dessert of blackberries sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Lucia, inspired by their meal, boiled blackberries in water and then ran the mixture through cloth. After adding a sprinkle of sugar, she shared the tea with Sergio, but Eric turned his away with a wave of his hand.
The meal seemed to revive the brother and sister. Even Sergio, who had been inconsolable since they fled Cairo seemed content. Eric found it distasteful. Were they such creatures of their body that their mood could be radically changed by a decent meal? Did fried fish and crushed fruit bring back Birdie? Did it rid the world of the Vaca B? Did it repopulate the towns and rebuild the scorched cities?
Finally he could not stand them anymore. He got up without a word and walked away from them, into the darkness of the forest, where he had pitched his tent.
At breakfast, Eric said he did not want to move again, not yet. In reality, he was finding the right time to make his exit. He had decided he would not even say goodbye. He would simply pack up and leave. He would head south and leave them all behind. He ate the oatmeal that Sergio had mixed with blueberries he had gathered at dawn, thinking of the relief he would feel, free of them.
“Do you think they’re alive?” Sergio asked Eric. When Eric looked up, his eyes were cold. “The people of Cairo?” he prodded when Eric only stared at him.
“Some of them,” Eric said. “The ones who fought are dead. The rest are in Boston by now. They probably burned Cairo to the ground to make a lesson of them.” He added this last with cruelty that twisted inside him.
“You don’t know that,” Lucia said, disgusted, when Sergio looked away from Eric quickly to hide his pain. Lucia turned to her brother and said something soothing in Spanish.
“No, he’s probably right,” Sergio said quietly. He made a sound that was supposed to be a chuckle, but came out like a choke. “We’ve come all this way, and it’s not the Zombies I’m scared of. It’s the people. They’re the real disaster.” Sergio shook his head and, standing up, swiftly walked away.
Lucia turned furiously toward Eric. “Was that really necessary? Don’t we have enough bullshit to deal with? Sergio met a girl in Cairo, you know. They kissed, Eric. His first kiss. Can’t you give him a little hope?”
“I’m tired of lying,” Eric said. He meant to look at her steadily, but he felt his gaze turn to a glare, and Lucia blinked at him, hurt by his anger. She turned away from him, thinking of something to say, something that would ease his suffering.
But Eric didn’t want that. What hope did any of them have? So what Sergio had his first kiss? The girl he meant to kiss first, she was dead in the street, shot through the eye. The woman who had kissed him first had done so out of grief before she too died. He got up noisily and dumped the rest of his water into the campfire where it hissed angrily, spewing out steam. He walked away, thinking they would be better without him. That night, he thought, while they were sleeping. That night he would leave them.