Alma Katsu - The Taker

As the wagon lurched to life, I cried copiously, returning my mother’s and sisters’ frantic waves through my tears.

As the town rolled by, the aching in my throat and heart intensified as I watched the only place I’d ever known shrink into the distance and said good-bye to everyone-and to the only one-I’d ever loved.

The border crossing is not far away. Although Luke hasn’t driven there in years, not since taking the family on some half-assed vacation to the Appalachian Range trail, he’s pretty sure he can still find it without looking at a map. He takes back roads, which are slower and will take longer, but he figures they’ll be less likely to run into any state troopers or other police officers; there are too few of them to watch secondary roads or bother with small towns. The highway, that’s where the trouble is, speeders and overweight long-haul truckers, the money offenses that will bring in revenue for the state.

He grips the steering wheel in the dead center and steers with one hand. His passenger stares doggedly at the road in front of them, biting her lower lip. She looks even more like a teenager, burying concern under a veil of impatience.

“So,” he says, trying to warm the air between them. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Be my guest.”

“Well, can you tell me what it feels like to be-what you are?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything special.”

“Really?”

She leans back and puts her elbow on the armrest. “I don’t feel any different, not that I can remember anyway. I don’t notice change on a day-to-day basis and not in the ways that matter. It’s not like I have superpowers or anything. I’m not a character in a comic book.” She smiles to let him know that she doesn’t think it’s a stupid question.

“That thing you did in the ER, cutting yourself? Did that hurt?”

“Not really. The pain is very minor, just feels sort of dull, maybe like how surgery would feel if you got a low dose of anesthesia. Only the person who made you like this can hurt you, can really make you feel pain. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten what pain feels like-almost.”

“A person did this to you?” Luke asks, incredulous. “How did it happen?”

“I’m getting to that,” she answers, still smiling. “Be patient.”

The revelation that this miracle is man-made almost makes Luke dizzy, like suddenly looking at a landscape from a different perspective. It seems all the more impossible-more the chance that this is a deception by a pretty and manipulative young woman.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I’m pretty much the same as I was before except I don’t really get tired. I don’t get exhausted physically. But I get emotionally tired.”

“Depressed?”

“Yeah, that’s probably what it is. There are a lot of reasons, I suppose. Mostly, it just gets to me every once in a while, the futility of my life, having no choice but to live through every day, day after day. What is the point of enduring all this time alone, I wonder, except to make me suffer, to be reminded of the bad things I’ve done or the way I might have treated people? It’s not like I can do anything about it. I can’t go back in time and undo the mistakes I’ve made.”

This is not the answer he expected. He repositions his hand on the wheel while it vibrates hard in his palm as they travel over a rough patch of macadam. “Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”

She laughs. “Antidepressants, you mean? I don’t think it would do much good.”

“Medications have no effect on you?”

“Let’s just say I’ve built up a pretty high tolerance.” She shifts away from him now, facing the window. “Obliteration is the only way out of your head, sometimes.”

“Obliteration-you mean alcohol? Drugs?”

“Can we stop talking about this?” Her voice wavers at the end.

“Sure. Are you hungry? It’s probably been a while since you’ve eaten… Want to stop for a bite? There’s a place that makes good doughnuts over near Fort Kent…”

She shakes her head noncommittally. “I’m never hungry anymore. I can go for weeks before I think about eating. Or drinking, for that matter.”

“And what about sleeping? Do you want to take a nap?”

“Don’t sleep much, either. I just forget about it. After all, the best part of sleeping is having someone next to you, isn’t it? A warm body, a heavy weight leaning against you. It’s very comforting, don’t you think? How your breathing falls into a rhythm together, gets synchronized. It’s heavenly.” Did that mean there hadn’t been a man in her bed in a while? Luke wondered. Then what of the dead man in the morgue, the mussed sheets at the cabin-what did it all mean? Or maybe she was playing him, covering up what she is really like.

“Do you miss having your wife with you in bed?” she asks, after a beat, prodding him.

Of course he did, even though his ex-wife had been a light, restless sleeper and frequently jolted him awake when she tried to get comfortable or acted out in a dream. By the same token, he loved seeing her asleep in their bed when he came home from a late evening at the hospital, her long, elegant body draped by the covers, all gently rising and falling curves. The crush of golden hair looped about her head, her mouth slightly open; there was something about seeing her, unaware, that made her beautiful to him, the memory of those intimate scenes forcing a knot to rise in his throat. That is too much to confide to a stranger, his loneliness and regret, so he says nothing.

“How long has she been gone? Your wife?” Lanny asks.

He shrugs. “Nearly a year now. She’s going to marry her childhood sweetheart. She moved back to Michigan. Took our two daughters.”

“That’s-terrible. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t waste your sympathy on me. It sounds as though you’re dealing with something much, much worse.” He has that feeling again, the same one he had outside the morgue, disorientation at the clash of her story with the world as he knows it. How could she possibly be telling the truth?

Just then, he thinks he sees the flash of a black-and-white patrol car in the rearview mirror as he makes a right turn. Had it been following them the whole time, Luke wonders, and he hadn’t noticed? Could the police be after them? The thought carries a special kind of discomfort for a man who has never been in trouble with the law.

“What is it?” Lanny asks suddenly, straightening up. “Something’s happened, I can tell by the look on your face.”

Luke keeps his eye on the rearview mirror. “Take it easy. I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I think we’re being followed.”

The trip south in the provisioner’s wagon took two weeks. It skirted the eastern edge of the Great North Woods, went wide enough of Mount Katahdin to keep us from seeing the snow-capped mountaintop, then picked up the Kennebec River, which we followed down to Camden. It was a lonely trip through that part of the state; not widely settled now, it was practically empty then. We’d passed trappers and occasionally camped with them for the night, the wagon drivers anxious to have someone to share a bottle of whiskey with.

The trappers we met were generally French Canadians and were often either stoic or strange, the trade suiting those who were hermits or fierce independents at heart. A few of them seemed to me to be half mad, gibbering to themselves in an unsettling way as they cleaned and oiled their tools before settling down to work on the game they’d caught. Frozen animals would be set by the campfire until they’d thawed enough to be malleable, and then the trappers would take out their narrow-bladed knives and set to skinning. Watching the men peel back the skin and reveal the wet, red bodies made me nauseous and uneasy. Having no desire to sit with them, I’d slink away to the wagons with Titus and leave the drivers to pass the bottle with the trappers in the warm embrace of the campfire.