B. Larson - Shifting

“Are they dead?” Vance hissed in my ear.

I gestured for him to be quiet. I stared at the wreck for a full minute more, but nothing changed. The steaming sedan lay on its side in a ditch full of dead leaves. The windshield was a spider web of silvery cracks. A long, pale arm had punched out a hole through the windshield. A single fly crawled over the knuckles in hops and jerks.

The fly on the knuckles vanished.

“What do you think, Gannon?” asked Vance, still whispering.

I glanced at him. He was my younger brother, the only family I had left. Like me, his hair was black and his eyes were blue. His face was bloodless and tight with fear. His breath came in hard puffs that made white plumes in the crisp air. It was a cold day for Indiana in October. You could feel the first frosty promise of the winter to come.

“I think they’re dead,” I replied.

“Are they going to stay dead?”

“I hope so.”

“Are we going down there?”

“Not just yet,” I told him.

He didn’t argue, and we waited. The arm hanging out of the windshield did not stir. The ticking engine cooled and the wisps of steam died down. Vance squirmed nervously, licking his lips and gripping his hunting rifle, a Mauser.30–06. I could not blame him. I had the hilt of grandpa’s old Marine dress saber gripped in both hands myself. Vance seemed to be looking everywhere at once. We had heard the crash not more than ten minutes ago and had worked our way down through the forest to it. We still were not sure as to the cause.

After a reasonable time, I stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked up and down SR 446, not that you could see very far in the forest. There was no other traffic. Cars were rare these days. One end of the highway went north and back home past Redmoor. In that direction lay what locals called “the Cutright”, a boat launching area on the lakeshore. Farther north, the 446 went on over the bridge across Lake Monroe. In the other direction, heading south, you eventually hit U.S. highway 50, which drew a stripe across the southern tip of Indiana. At least it used to, before things had changed .

This car had been traveling north toward Redmoor and the lake. It had Kentucky plates, and they were probably coming out of Louisville. We had heard rumors about Louisville-none of them good.

“Let’s go,” I told Vance. He watched me with frightened eyes then finally got up and followed five paces behind.

The woods sound different on a cold day. Each footstep is muffled somehow. Most of the leaves were still on the trees in their fall yellows and reds mixed with green, but there were enough on the ground now to make every step crunchy.

I peered inside the windshield. The car had come to rest on the driver’s side. The driver’s body lay against the side window with his face pinned between the steering wheel and the windshield. It was his arm that had punched through the windshield. Still gripped in his other hand was a large revolver. His throat had been torn open by something. No doubt, this had caused the crash. His eyes were open and he looked decidedly dead.

There was another passenger, however, a woman in the backseat. After the car had done its death roll off the highway, she had ended up crumpled against her closed car door.

Vance clucked his tongue in my ear. I glanced at him. He had come to crouch next to me.

“She’s pretty, dammit,” he said. “There’s blood all over her shirt. She’s dead. What a dammed shame.”

I moved around to the back window and kicked it out. I looked her over. Her wrist hung at an odd angle, probably broken. There was a matted bloody area in her hair where she had hit the car roof. I reached in and put my hand on her neck, just to be sure. I felt a light, fluttering sensation under my fingers.

Vance paced behind me, shaking his head. I gripped his coat, stopping him.

“She’s not dead. Help me get her out.”

It took us about twenty nervous minutes, but we managed to build a crude stretcher out of the dead man’s coat and some branches. I wondered how she would react if she woke up and noticed she was riding on the bloody clothes of her companion.

In the open trunk I spotted a large wad of newspapers. They were copies of the Louisville Courier Journal . I checked the dates, and they were from last month. I decided to take them with us. Outside news was valuable.

While we built the stretcher, I noticed a tripod-shaped print in the mud near the car. It was a deep print, indicating something big had made it. It looked like a hoof-print. I chewed my lip for a second, glancing at Vance. I knew what his reaction would be; he would want to run-right now. I covered the hoof-print with a scoop of dead leaves and worked faster on the stretcher, eyeing the trees around us distrustfully.

“What’s wrong, Gannon?” asked Vance.

“Nothing.”

When it was time to lift her, she seemed to weigh nothing at all stretched out between the two of us. I wondered if we were doing the right thing taking her in. Sometimes, these days, strangers went bad on you. They rotted and changed overnight, like fruit that you had forgotten about and left on the counter for too long.

Vance at first took up the rear position, letting me lead. But almost immediately, he halted.

“Let me lead,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s no good,” he shook his head. “I can’t keep a sharp eye out with her stretched out in front of me, I keep thinking if she’ll die or not and what her voice will sound like and…”

“Okay,” I said, and we switched places. Walking behind him, I noticed he had a new heavy lump weighing down his coat pocket. It had to be the dead man’s pistol. Vance still believed in guns, but I did not. They did not always fire anymore, because like everything else, they had changed . Sometimes, usually when you had a frenzied monster chewing on your foot, they would misfire or jam. That’s why I carried my grandpa’s saber. It always worked. Vance’s theory was to have a lot of guns, hoping at least one of them would go off. I didn’t argue. There was no need. Whoever lived the longest would be proven right.

As we carried her, I thought about the benefits of being attractive. Would we have worked as hard to save the driver, if he had been the one to survive? We had even brought the backpack she had with her in the backseat. True, she didn’t weigh much, but I had to wonder if we would risk so much for someone less interesting. The world was anything but fair.

“You think she’s a hitchhiker?” asked Vance from up ahead between white puffs. We were going uphill and the loose leaves were sliding around, slowing us down.

“I don’t know.”

“How old do you think she is? She looks like she’s maybe twenty.”

“Kind of young for you then,” I remarked.

“ Really young for you,” he said with a dark glance.

“You’re still thinking about her, even though we switched,” I said, grinning.

“Yeah. I bet you are, too.”

I didn’t respond, I didn’t have to. We both knew the truth of it. She was possibly the only adult female under thirty left alive in the county. We trudged westward, deeper into the woods and away from the highway. The shores of Lake Monroe were to the left and less than a mile off.

“Who do you think she is?” Vance continued when the land leveled.

“She’s probably up from Louisville. Plenty of people have been trying to get out to the countryside.”

“So what went wrong? Do you think one of them changed and caused the wreck?”

“It would have to be her if that happened, it was the driver’s neck that was ripped.”