Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(31)
He ignores the way his left arm tingles, the tiny pains shooting from wrist to shoulder. They’re nothing. He ignores the scent of dust, thick and right next to his nose. He isn’t lying down. The world isn’t fading, crumbling, shrinking to a tunnel of grey surrounding the too-bright whiteness of the sun.
No, he’s walking up to the station platform now, suddenly shy, his heart beating too hard only from excitement and barely contained joy. Then she catches sight of him, and he knows. Her smile – all that tentative, fragile hope, all the big, impossible love no one has ever given her a chance to show before, all the moments to come, the poetry and the slate broken over Gilbert’s head, all of it. It’s all there in her smile. And he knows. She’s come home and he can rest. He’s finally found her. His Anne.
JENNY OF THE LONG GAUGE
Michael Matheson
His heart hangs from the gallows where she left it. His skin and bones she took with her, and his name he traded away long ago. What’s left of him hangs from the noose, swaying in the hot, dry wind, while his heart burns black in the beating desert sun.
The chinooks have become siroccos. They set the whole of the scaffold to creaking and his disembodied heart, tied in an oubliette bow, swings with it – traces a pendulum arc as a murder of crows descends on it with a furious beat of wings. Digging, tearing, snapping, biting, the crows feast and rise in a flurry, winging away still fighting over the last remnants of gore.
Their caws linger in the air long after they’re gone, only gristle and half-cooked ropy trails hanging from the swinging gallows knot.
? ?
His bones rattle in the lockbox hitched on the back of Jenny’s cart and the iron-shod hooves of her pitch team clop muted on the dusty road. She lashes the Clydes and they quicken to a trot, braying in protest as she hurries them west toward Spiritwood, making her seasonal round.
A flash of black on brilliant blue catches her eye and she turns skyward, shielding her eyes against the sweltering sun with one long hand. High overhead a murder of crows wings its way north. She frowns; tightens her grip on the reins and slows up her team. They whinny, anxious to be on, while Jenny watches the murder fly. It blots out the burnished sun as its patchwork shadow shifts and writhes along the ground, keeping pace with the welter above.
With sun-browned hands, slender, fine-boned, callusworn, she ties back wavy, black-bleached-nutmeg hair dark against the plains around her. Lets it waterfall over her shoulder as she turns in her seat to eye the lockbox on the wagon bed. “You got something to say?” The box shakes fiercely, though the wagon bed is still. “Didn’t think so.” She straightens, the box rattling on as Jenny lashes the reins. Her titan blacks neigh and pull forward past stunted trees and withering scrub.
The string of broken black bodies littering the path behind her goes unnoticed; glutted crows cawing weakly as they fade away in the choking dust.
? ?
Jenny pulls hard on the reins as the wagon comes to a ford in the river. Her stallions snort and shake their heads, hooves splashing into the edge of the shallow, pebbled water. The liquid runs cool on the hot metal of their shoes as they slow up and stop. Across the burbling stream, no more than a score wide, sprawls a Lowlands camp, covered wagons sending up streamers of pale smoke.
She leans back in her seat, considering, shifting into the shadow of a tall, skeletal tree with gnarled and greedy roots dug deep into the riverbed.
Eyes trained on the Lowlands camp and one hand on the reins, she reaches back into the wagon bed with the other. Roots among tossed blankets and tanned hides. Ignores the rattling box. Her fingers find the 12-gauge buried beneath a sprawl of coarse-haired hides. The metal of the long shotgun is cool against her palm as she draws it free and lays it across her lap.
She flicks the reins and her Clydes drag the cart through the splashing water, clomping hooves sending up small sprays and wagon wheels sluicing long waves into the air. The cart dips and rises again as it comes up the other side of the shallow bank. But the shotgun, clutched in long, lean fingers, never wavers as Jenny makes her way into the camp to pick up more wares before she heads into town.
? ?
The Lowlanders stare up at Jenny with blank, filmy eyes near blind from the driving dust. The sirocco whips at their tangled hair; picks at nests of nits and other, smaller things hiding in coarse tresses – only the elders of the tribe allowed hair shorn close to the skull. They follow her as the cart rattles through the waste of the camp. Wild dogs lie dying, poked by children with sharp sticks; the ones already dead split open to roast on cook fires. The smell of burning flesh fills the air.
Jenny slows her team to a halt, horses snapping sharply at children who come too close, made reckless by hunger. The women paw at her cart, stroking the grain of the wood. Listening to the creak of the wagon as the wind rocks it.
The flap of a covered wagon folds back, held open by a grimy hand corrupt with age spots and withered flesh. The chieftain’s face pokes out after it, eyes scrunched up against the sun, deep black irises swimming in a sea of off-colour white. He drops down from the wagon and rears up, a tall man over six feet, all gristle and burlap, wrapped in sagging flesh over strong, lank bones. “You got something to trade?” he rasps, voice ruined by too many years of drinking down the grit in the air; inclines one skeletal hand at the slow-cooking corpse of a wild dog. “We have meat.”
Jenny rises and comes to her full height, a fence post of a woman: rail thin and pole tall. Her hair streams in the hot wind and her long gauge rests in the crook of her arm, barrel aimed casually down at the face of the Lowlands chief. “I have hides,” she croaks through a parched throat and dry lips. Her eyes don’t leave his face. Around her the women paw at her boots; coo softly at the feel of the supple leather.