You Stay Here

[gryphons_quill]

“You stay here,” I said, handing her the gun, “and I'll go look for food.”

She nodded. “We need wood to burn, too.” She turned toward the smoldering pile of broken furniture.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I'll be back soon enough.” I walked away into the darkness. When I turned to look back, she wasn't watching me go; her face in the firelight was a bright spot in a dark world.

***

The first time, they came in the night. We woke to gunshots and shouting, words we couldn't make out. Every shot was percussive—I could feel them, and the pounding of booted feet, against my skin. Someone kept screaming outside, man or woman or child, no way to tell. Our curtains were drawn, but we could see lights moving and smell hot metal and something penetrating, acrid: gunpowder. My wife took my hand and her eyes spoke fear that matched mine. We were paralyzed, silent, sure every second that the next one would end with a pounding at our door. After a timeless time, the noises stopped, the lights vanished. The boys somehow slept through it all, waking twice in the stillness later. Both times my wife rocked them back to sleep; she hummed so softly I could not have heard her from across the room.

When day came the world had been quiet as death for hours. Even the night animals were quiet, and the first birds waited to sing until the sun had risen and the day was bright. My wife broke our long silence. “We should go,” she said, a simple certainty.

“Where?” I asked. That was the question—what was safe? Where could we go? We didn't know who had come in the night, or why, or who they had come for.

She shook her head, helplessly. “I'll go out, if it seems safe, buy food for the day. Maybe someone will know what happened.”

I nodded. “I'll talk to the neighbors. Will you take the boys?”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “As safe there as here, I suppose.”

She was right. Our home, the house my grandfather built and lived in until he died, that stood empty until we moved into it on our wedding day—our home wasn't built to withstand men with guns, to hold out against attackers. If they wanted us, they would break down the door or shoot out the windows. Whoever they were.

Outside, I walked like one already dead, stunned by the suddenness, the impossibility of it. A smear of blood on a wall, a broken door, the tracks of countless heavy boots: the evidence was unmistakable. It all swirled through my mind like numbers, like long columns of figures that I couldn't sum up. Faces were missing; half a dozen people had disappeared, gone overnight, like a flawed magic trick—we had all seen behind the curtain, heard the gunshots and the screaming. I looked blankly at the faces of my remaining neighbors, unsure what to ask, or who. Perhaps someone had called in the nighttime visitors—who could be trusted? But overall, it seemed, if not safe, as though the men with their boots had gone away. There was space to breathe, time to make plans.

My wife went out to buy bread and find out what people knew, to try to turn rumors and half-heard whispered thoughts into something we could hold onto. She carried the baby in his sling; the older boy held her hand and walked proudly beside her. I watched her walk away, glad she was taking the boys. I could hardly think, one thought following another like a baby's tiny, hesitant, stumbling footsteps; how could I have taken care of the children? On the advice of a neighbor, I dressed for work and pretended nothing was wrong. All day, every small percussive sound—a pencil falling from a desk, a door closing, footsteps on a wooden floor—rang in my ears like a gunshot. Every shadow wore boots and waited for me.

All my wife learned was that no one knew anything certain—the heavy boots and guns that had come and broken our night in half could have come from one group or another or a third. A smear of blood, footprints, a shell casing on the ground: none of it told us anything. Perhaps the enemies, whoever they were, had finished with us. I think we wanted to believe it would be safer to stay, that our home, the place we made our own, where our sons were conceived and our hopes had come to life, would remain inviolate. In any case, we had no idea where to go, so we put off the decision another day.

That night, we slept one at a time, our two sons between us in the bed. No one came—no gunshots tore the night into pieces, no boots shook the street, no screams shivered through us.

***

I can almost see her now, leaning over the boys, touching their faces with a gentle finger, smoothing the blanket like a shield between them and the blackened world.

***

In the light of another clear dawn, the whole situation began to seem somehow unreal. I wondered if we had dreamed it. Someone had cleared away the bloodstain. I fed our older son his breakfast while my wife nursed the baby; we had hot cereal and fresh fruit, like any other day.

“The old women in town were saying some towns have lost only a few people,” my wife said. She sounded matter-of-fact, as though she was discussing what to have for dinner, or the price of bread.

“How do they know?” I often doubted the wisdom of the marketplace.

“They hear everything.”

It was true. “So what should we do?”

She didn't answer right away, just rose and looked around the room. The baby fussed when she moved, and she soothed him by drawing a fingertip along his cheek slowly, gently. I watched her take in the broad beams, the fireplace, the old oak table. Without thinking, I drew my finger across it in an echo of her movement. It was made of heavy, thick timber, scarred in several places but otherwise polished by use until it felt more like silk than wood.

“I don't know,” she said. “If I knew it would be safer for us to leave, we would leave before you could take another breath.”

I nodded. “If.” The fireplace, the only stonework in this old wooden house, was blackened by years of fires laid in it, ashes swept out. As a small child, visiting my grandparents, I had played on the hearth for an hour one day, drawing designs in the soot. When my mother found me, soot-smudged and happy, she had to struggle not to laugh.

We stayed home with the children after that, left the house only rarely, acted as though it was a holiday. I sometimes caught myself eyeing the door, as though I expected family or friends to burst in with gifts--even though the only visitors I really imagined wore heavy boots and carried guns. Life went on for a day, a few days, a week. We began to talk about the future again, to plan beyond the next few days. The shadow had begun to pass us by.

When they came the next time, it wasn't quite dark yet; the sun was setting, painting everything golden and then fire-orange. The boys were in their nightshirts—old shirts of mine they wore to sleep in—and scrubbed for bed. They came then, when the sunset was at its most beautiful, when we were thanking God for our meal and for another day come to a close. I heard the shouting first, and then a pounding at our door. We didn't have time to do anything but stare at each other for the space of half a terrified breath before they broke it down, came inside, grabbed us. A man in black put his hand on my wife's arm and pulled her outside, jerking her roughly. She fell. I pulled both of the boys to me, lifted them. Under the eyes of the guns, I walked outside.

They used their guns like a shepherd uses dogs, keeping us all—it was everyone, this time--in a cluster. A man yelled too many times that they couldn't do this, and was shot. A woman, watching, fell to the ground and was still. Then, with the care and precision of ants on a piece of fruit, they set our houses on fire.

It was so soon after sunset that the sky was still orange-red. Our homes matched the edges of the sky. They made us stand and watch. All the children were crying; I buried my face between my sons' faces, whispering to them to keep quiet, to keep still. All I could think was that they would be killed if they made noise. The fire made a noise like roaring, like it was alive. It was loud enough to cover the shouting around us. The air felt hot and thin and smelled like fear. I felt my wife's hand on my arm then. She reached toward me with both arms. I handed her the baby and watched her take a careful step backward. She met my eyes and jerked her head toward the open space behind us.

We backed through the press of sobbing people, whispering to the boys to stay still, looking nowhere but at each other. At the back of the crowd I could feel the guns watching us, trained on our backs. She didn't try to speak, just nodded her head one, two, three and we were off and running, faster and harder than I have ever run. Shots hit the air around us and I was certain every step that the next one would find me dead. She ran ahead of me, the baby held hard against her chest. I don't know if they even chased us. All I knew, all my world, was running.

The ground was rough, sharp stones turning under my feet. I watched the ground ahead of me, watched my feet slam down into it, avoided the bumps and hollows that were waiting to trip me up. It felt like forever that I ran without looking up, without even looking ahead more than a few strides. I could sometimes see the heels of my wife's shoes, the hem of her dark skirt as it flapped loosely around her ankles. Sometime after full dark came, I tripped on a stone and went down hard, twisting on the way so the child in my arms wouldn't be hurt. When I landed, the air left my lungs and I couldn't move. I thought this is it and waited, but somehow nothing happened—I heard no shots, no shouting, only my own harsh breath. My wife tried to help me up, but I was weak as a kitten and she fell beside me instead. Night deepened, and the cold curled up around us while we learned again how to breathe.

***

I hope she knows she has only five bullets. If they come while I'm not there, I hope she uses them well.

***

When I saw the first body, I was surprised to find I could still be shocked. It lay among the rocks, arms and legs at strange angles, twisted and broken and far too small. Half her face was gone from where the bullet had come out, and birds had been at the other half; the eye was gone, and the tongue. She had been seven or eight years old, perhaps, when she died. I tried to shield my wife at first, unthinking, but she walked past me and looked at the girl for a long moment. She didn't speak.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, for a while; all that was left in my mind was a cold emptiness, heavy and hollow. I put down my son—he didn't make a sound even then--and knelt beside the poor broken child, felt for warmth or breath even though it was impossible that anyone with her head half gone would still live and breathe. She was cold and her skin felt rubbery. I could smell shit and coppery blood, and the strange sweet smell that comes with death sometimes, but she had not yet begun to rot. Dried blood flaked under my fingers, and I felt despair for the first time. This child-corpse was the death of all my hope for my sons' safety—if our nameless, faceless, booted enemy, with their guns and fire, would shoot a schoolgirl in the head, there was no more room in the world for hope.

My wife had to pull me from the child's stiff heaviness—I think I would have stayed there until they found me, in a senseless vigil of mourning for a child I never knew and a life I could no longer hope for. As I rose, I spotted a flash of color nearby—a doll, stained with ashes but whole, in a bright red dress. I picked up the doll, with some vague idea of using it to comfort the boys. I think I saved the doll because I couldn't save the child.

My wife faced me then, and spoke for the first time since our interrupted dinner. “We can't stay here. We just can't.”

I didn't respond, just stared at the doll, brushed ashes from its skirt.

She waited a moment, then continued, “We don't have a shovel or the time to dig a grave. We can't even stay long enough to make a cairn. Someone could find us.”

The ashes wouldn't come off the skirt. My son was holding onto my leg, looking at the dead girl only a few years older than he was.

Her voice grew more firm. “Listen to me. I know it's terrible. It is. She deserves a grave and prayers and someone to remember her, but we can't do that right now. If we want our own children to live, we need to move. Now.”

I think I nodded. When we had left the girl's body far enough behind that she was no longer all I could see, I said, “Thank you.”

She nodded, but said nothing.

“We left her to be eaten by carrion birds and wild dogs.” I couldn't find anger; I was too tired, too scared.

My wife looked over at me without changing her stride. “Someday, when we can, we'll say a prayer for that little girl. When we have time.”

***

She's probably boiling water right now in the cast-iron kettle we found. The boys will be thirsty when they wake up.

***

We had no destination, only a desire to get as far from the ashes of our home and our hopes as we could. We had no words anymore—she had used all of them--nothing but step after step after step. The boys rarely stirred and never made a sound, even when we saw more bodies: a whole family laid out in a row on the ground, father and mother and grandmother, and several children, lined up neatly and killed. They had been stripped to their underclothes. The father was still wearing his glasses; one lens was shattered into a spiderweb of cracks clinging to the frame. We stepped over them, tried not to look at their faces. Despite the blood, the raw holes where bullets had gone in and come out, the worst was looking into their faces. Their eyes, glazed over or even gouged out, still somehow held terror.

The next time we saw bodies, there were many more of them, lying haphazardly in the road. A house nearby was still smoldering, a few wooden beams still standing, the rest ashes in a sea of ashes that seemed to stretch to the horizon. I could smell blood, thick and cloying, mingled with the smell of shit, and over it all the scents of burnt wood, burnt flesh, burnt stone. My eye skipped from one spot of color to another, a bright blue shirt, blond hair in the sunlight, red berries on an unburnt bush. I nearly stepped on the remains of a baby, a shattered little body that had been flung at the ground and broken like crockery. I felt beyond horror. We turned over the cleanest bodies to take their coats, and searched their pockets for matches and food.

The time after that, they were in pieces, because the ground had exploded beneath their feet. It was impossible to tell one person from another, and in a way a relief. My eye couldn't see people in the tangle of body parts—only piles of arms and legs and other, less recognizable parts, charred, stinking. They had been dead long enough that I could smell rotting meat, which made me retch even though I thought I was beyond caring. We picked our way through the streets, stepping in the craters. Every step, I was certain the ground would burst beneath me and my leg would disappear, eaten by dirt and metal. Every step, the earth stayed solid and strong under me, and I thanked a God I no longer thought was watching.

***

I hope she'll be wary of strangers, even others like us, if they find her. I would never kill for a corner of roof and a bed, but there are men who would, desperate men.

***

By midday, we had been moving for so long I had to remember how to stop. We were slowing down, and the boys were crying from hunger and exhaustion. I saw a man's body curled around something, his back, full of bullet-holes, toward the sky. He wasn't as decomposed as others had been, and hadn't been stripped of his clothing or belongings. I reached toward him unthinkingly; it was becoming routine, checking the bodies for anything that might be useful, taking the gifts of the dead. I reassured myself that surely any one of these people would want us to take what we needed, would want us to escape and live.

The man's corpse rolled over with a heavy thump—it was quite stiff, and smelled sickly sweet, with a sharp sour odor underneath it. He had a gun in one hand and was cradling an infant in the other. I jumped like a startled deer at the sight of the gun—it made me think of them herding us like sheep, pointing guns to make us walk, watch, be silent. It took me a moment to notice the baby, wrapped in a blanket, as stiff as the man. One of its arms stuck up towards the sky, stiff with death, but otherwise just like any child pointing at a funny-shaped cloud or passing bird. At first I thought the man had killed the child himself, because the gun was so close to the tiny skull--but then I saw that the baby's face was broken, a ruin, that it had been dashed against the rocks. This man had curled his long body around the corpse of a child, protecting a body with no life in it until he died.

I picked up the gun, pulling it carefully out of his stiff fingers, checked it over. It had five bullets in it and one empty chamber.

He'd only fired one shot before he was killed.

I took the gun, made sure the safety was on, tucked it in my waistband. My wife nodded her approval.

We had stopped long enough, searching the dead, to notice our hunger and especially our thirst. “I hear a stream,” I said. “I think.”

She listened, hushed the baby, listened again. “I think so too.”

We found it a few minutes later. A dead woman was in the water, naked, her flesh bloated and pale. Her long dark hair was tangled in the rocks; it moved with the current like a living thing. The smell of rotting flesh was stronger there, flowing and eddying with the water. I looked away, and we moved upstream until we couldn't smell anything but clear water, moss, wet rocks. And ashes, but by then I thought I would smell ashes forever.

We had bread from a dead man's coat pocket, and a cracked blue pottery bowl my wife had found. Before we ate, we washed the residue of the dead from our hands and faces and drank water that tasted clean. My wife put the baby to her breast and I watched. I touched his cheek gently; he was too hungry to notice. Such a commonplace thing, to nurse a child—but all I had seen for miles was death, and this was life. I think that was when I found, not hope, but some idea that we would have a future, that we would not keep walking among the dead until we joined them.

Sharing food and water made me—all of us, I think—feel more human again. We sat by the stream, backs against a large rock, and I let myself pretend it was a different day, a normal sort of day. We had simply gone out for a walk together to enjoy the clear weather and enjoyed our lunch by this pleasant stream... I glanced at my wife and she offered the hint of a tired smile, took my hand.

“It feels good here,” I said. It would have been inane on any other day.

She nodded. “We could stay here, if there was some sort of shelter.”

I took her hand, held it gently. The boys were playing, inventing a game out of sticks and dirt. “We got away,” I said. “because of you, we got away.”

She shook her head, that same hint of a smile drifting across her lips. “You ran too.” She paused to take a stick out of the baby's mouth. “I almost can't believe we did it. I thought it would be better to be shot for running than wait and see, but... I really thought we'd be killed.”

“So did I. Every step was the last one.”

She squeezed my hand, and we sat and watched our sons playing for a while, fishing sticks and small rocks out of the baby's mouth when he tried to eat them.

“Greedy child,” she said, “I just fed him.”

I managed half a smile. “He just wants to see how the world tastes.” I paused again. I didn't want to talk about anything outside this moment.

She said it before I did. “What now?” she asked. “Just... tonight, and tomorrow, where will we be?”

I stared at the water. “I don't know. I suppose we should try to find a place to stay, and just hope...”

Hope they don't come back. We both thought it.

“Away from all the bodies,” she said. “If we can. I can't... it's too awful.”

I nodded agreement. “I didn't think I would be able to bear it at all.”

“We do what we have to,” she said, and her look was approving. I felt warmer when she looked at me, and stronger.

“When we're safe,” I said, “I want you to look at me just like that again, so I can appreciate it more.”

“When we're safe,” she said, “I will look at you like that every day.”

Neither of us said that we would never be safe again. She leaned her head on my shoulder. We pulled the boys close and dozed off in the thin sunlight.

***

If they wake in the dark, in a strange place, they'll be frightened. She'll have to rock them back to sleep, whisper a cradle-song no louder than the wind stirring the ashes.

***

Another hour of walking left the worst evidence of the slaughter behind. We found a town full of ashes, with buildings crumbled and caved in from fire, but without corpses. Some of the buildings had been made of bricks; others were wood and plaster. None of them were whole, but we picked through the rubble anyway, looking for useful things, hoping to find something that could serve as a shelter. I didn't think I would ever trust walls again—walls don't keep the world out—but they would be comforting, if we could find any still standing. The air was clean of blood and rot, though it smelled of ashes and dry dirt. I wondered if the people had left before or after the men came in their black boots, with their guns and fire. Perhaps they were herded like sheep to some other place, and killed there, for reasons I couldn't imagine any more than I could understand why this was happening at all. Maybe they heard about what was going on—paid more attention to the whispers and rumors than we did—and left in time, went someplace safe. If there is anywhere safe... We walked through danger forever, and I don't believe in safety anymore. We thought our home was safe, that inside its walls we were strong and the world was held out, and we learned we were wrong.

***

I hope she doesn't let the fire burn down. The dead didn't have many matches. But I hope she doesn't let it burn too brightly either. We've seen no sign of people, but they could be there, and see the light.

***

We were lucky to find the house. From the side, it looked whole, standing in the middle of a field of ashes and the broken wreckage of too many lives. When we got there—we approached cautiously, but saw nothing moving, heard no sound--we found that it was two bits of sooty, plastered wall and a corner of roof; the rest of the house had fallen in, but had not burnt entirely to ashes. Under the roof, there was a bed: a wholly unscathed bed, standing in half a bedroom at the end of a broken house. We smoothed the handmade quilt, red and blue triangles stitched into a pattern of stars, over the boys. She sang them a cradle song. I hummed with her; our cracked, dry voices scraped against the empty air. They fell asleep quickly, holding the doll between them as though it would keep them safe.

I looked around for something to burn; a fire would make the broken house feel like a home, I thought, and we needed the warmth. I found little, just some pieces of broken furniture. The heavy wooden table had burned nearly completely, but a few of the chairs were nearly whole. Other than that, most of what would burn already had. Scorched fabric hung from the remnants of blackened plaster walls; everything, from the unburnt bits of the tablecloth to a pair of charred leather shoes, was covered in a thick film of ash.

She was looking at the boys, asleep together. “They're too young to remember,” she said.

I hope she was right.

Most of the houses I've been searching are empty of useful things; the people who lived here took what they owned with them when they left. Maybe it means they're alive somewhere; I hope so, because it will feel less like we're living among ghosts. There's food, though, in the rubble, or the backs of cupboards that didn't quite burn—preserves, foods that keep. I think there's plenty to keep a small family alive, if we're careful. The public well was capped long ago—the mortar is crumbling—but there's a small stream, enough water for four people even if not for four hundred or four thousand. It looks clean: no bodies floated by me, and the water doesn't smell of rot or blood.

I will never forget the smells of rot and blood.

We could stay here, in a corner of a burned-out house, for a long time. If we're not found, if we don't step on a mine or attract other human scavengers who kill us for our corner of roof. If we're lucky, or the God I've always prayed to before turns His face toward us again, returns from wherever He's gone.

My wife turned her face from me when I walked away, abandoning her to the darkness and the uncertain safety of two bits of wall and five bullets. I saw her face in the firelight, glowing, a beacon I hold in memory now. She knew I might not come back, that she might need the last three bullets, that the choice a parent should never face might fall to her. I see again and again the broken, shattered faces of infants, of eyeless, terrified children—the memories are so vivid I see them in front of me at every step. Her face is a talisman against the memories of horror. I know that she could do what I could not.

She knows why I left her with the boys, why I would rather forage in the night than watch two tiny chests rise and fall and wonder how much longer I can protect them. She turned from me when I left, but not because she resented her heavier burden. She sees necessities, leads us forward, can be harder than stone when she has to be. I have always known that I am soft, compared to her.

But I think she turned from me simply because she could not bear to watch me walk away, however necessary it was. We are stronger together than apart.

When I get back, she will still be looking at the fire, waiting for me.