Survivor Song(60)

Danger crashes through the woods, snapping branches and overturning rocks, impatient for the teens’ arrival, thirsting for their introduction. Blocking the entrance to the forest, a zombie deer greets them with a storm of hooves. The teens’ defense is impregnable, however. The deer soon fatigues, and ultimate, inevitable defeat arrives when her reed-thin foreleg shatters at the dull swipe of the wooden staff. Her epileptic convulsions and contortions communicate a dire warning and judgment: their time was brief, their time is over. In the forest where the path thins into ruts and the branches above overlap like entwined fingers, there is no more gray sky. Something follows the teens from the cover of the opaque brush. Judging by the ruckus and upheaval, perhaps it’s the forest itself stalking them. Josh slows, and staggers more than he walks. Luis urges him on, the rope limp and dead in his hand. The zombie bats appear next, a mini-tornado of wings, claws, and needle-sharp teeth. There are too many bats for Luis to deflect; it would be like fighting rain. Luis freezes up but Josh knocks his friend to the ground and shields him with his body. The bats are left to satisfy themselves with Josh’s skin and blood. They begrudgingly accept the tainted offering, but they do not linger. The teens push deeper into the forest, following the paths they traced and memorized years ago, when their summer adventures and tragedies happened here. They are still kids, of course, but they have already lost their childhood. A zombie coyote as large as a wolf finally crashes through the brush ahead of them. It allows the teens to gape at its glorious all-ness before the attack. In the gray, dulling afternoon light, smothered by the conspiratorial canopy, the animal’s great head appears to be floating disembodied over a mass of dark-brown fur. It has glowing, hot-coal-red eyes, all the better to see them with. As it creeps forward, within pouncing distance, impatient lips reveal an overcrowded mouth and dripping stalactite canines. Its paws don’t pad as much as they gouge, each step scalloping a mini-grave. Close enough, its body now fully seen, brawny muscles flex and ripple. The standoff with the teens lasts only a few seconds, and it lasts a geologic age during which glaciers grind and birth the landscape around them. Then it finally leaps. Josh steps into the arc, taking the brunt. The coyote’s bear-trap jaws snap onto his forearm. There is no grace to this battle. It’s savage and dirty and desperate. Josh, strangely quiet but for heavy breaths and short grunts, knees the animal’s rib cage and stomps on its paws. Luis swings the wooden staff, and he pokes and jabs, but the weapon is ineffectual. He abandons the staff for a heavy stone he raises with two hands and bashes into the side of the coyote’s head, and then the top of its skull. There’s a crack and a uniquely canine whimper; red eyes shrink and dim. The coyote deflates, goes slack, releases Josh, and wobbles down the path on quivering legs, veering into the brush without so much as a ripple or snapped twig.

Danger lurks inside the teens, thrashing through one’s heart and the other’s mind. In a circular clearing, ringed by boulders and tree stumps, a hub spoked with alternate paths marked by carved wooden trail markers, Josh stops walking. He turns, and he has turned. This is the reveal of Zombie Josh, the zombie teen with red coyote eyes, lips a ragged drawn curtain, foam and saliva fauceting from his gagged mouth. Luis cannot help but stare at his friend’s teeth, as though he’d never really seen them before, seen them for what they can be. Hands still tied together, Zombie Josh rushes at Luis. Thus begins a dance that will last into the night. Luis will not hurt Zombie Josh, even though he’s seen all the movies and knows all the rules. Instead, he will duck and he will dodge and he will sidestep and he will run. He will leapfrog onto the boulders and tree stumps and he will wind around the wooden posts of the park signs, centrifugal force aiding in acceleration and changes of direction. He will use the staff as a pole vault and he will use the staff to deflect, to block, and to steer Zombie Josh away without ever striking him. He will pull and then slacken the rope lead tethered to Zombie Josh’s hands and wrists, puppeteering his friend into an arcing, orbiting trajectory, one that will not intersect with his. Luis’s plan is simple: to outlast. It is in this manner, with the watchers watching from the trees and the shadows that Luis and Zombie Josh dance their shoes to pieces.

*

If Josh had his druthers, were still capable of having druthers, they would’ve made it to a giant calved boulder called Split Rock. Josh has succumbed to physical exhaustion and the late stages of the virus. He is sitting on the ground in the clearing, half-propped against an oblong, couch-sized boulder. His eyes are closed. His breathing is arrhythmic and shallow.

They didn’t make it, but they are home.

Luis’s eyes are open wide, light-starved in the dark. His breathing is even and controlled. Luis is crouched next to his near comatose friend. Luis wonders where Ramola and Natalie are. He wonders how long ago Natalie ceased being herself. He wants to think that he and Josh did something good today, something that, if it doesn’t balance the cosmic ledger for the irredeemable sin of their past, it at least tilts the scale back toward their favor. But then he remembers the last time he saw Natalie’s face, and he fears their help might’ve been too late, might’ve been for nothing.

The irredeemable sin of their past: the inexplicable [even now, especially now] complicity in a brutal beating resulting in the death of an old man, and the silence after, and the terrible price of that silence: the disappearance and death of their best friend.

We will not intrude on Luis here, not for much longer. His past, particularly his regrets and recriminations, belong to him. We know enough and we will never know enough to understand what he will do next anyway.