Alex Adams: White Horse

But I’ve already heard it. Something approaches. Night has come while we were busy fighting, and along with it those that dwell in the city’s secret places.

Not the screaming. No. The vociferous noises of angry humans shoo away weak things. Yell, and a creature that believes itself to be weaker— either by size, constitution, or pecking order—will scurry away lest the brunt be turned on it. Even in concrete jungles, such laws of nature persist. It’s why they haven’t come sooner. They’ve been crouched behind doors and dumpsters, evaluating our weaknesses, trying to determine which rung on the evolutionary ladder we occupy.

The dynamic only changes when variables alter: when there are more of them than there are of us; when they believe we’re wounded or weakened; when we have something that will ensure their survival.

No, two adults yelling has not awakened the shadow things and brought them here; it’s the crying of my newborn.

“Silence the child.” He locks the cabin door. Peers into the darkness. A scared thing. Now I see for myself what my mind glossed over before. All those weeks, I looked without seeing. So plain to me now, the slightly feminine movements that are nigh on impossible to erase: a hip tilt; a hair tuck; the telltale sway in an unguarded moment.

I hold my girl to me, jiggle her in a way I hope is comforting, but she’s only warming up for her debut performance. Even my breast cannot divert her from her song.

“I said silence.”

“You’d make a lousy mother.”

“Look at yourself. Are you a paragon of motherhood? You are handcuffed to a table after chasing a dead man across the world like some common slut. If he had wanted you, he would have brought you with him to care for him as he died.”

The vicious retort is there, balanced on my tongue, just behind my teeth. One small flick is all it needs to nail its target. Shred him with my words. But one word stays my tongue.

“Zoe?”

The voice comes filtered through a door, but still I know it and my heart races.

“Irini?” I yell.

The Swiss explodes like a flare in the night. “Shut up. Shut up, you idiot.”

“I told you she was alive.”

“You know nothing. Look,” he says. “She has betrayed you to her kind. Monsters uniting with other monsters.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You should see her, America, standing on the dock with the others. She means to kill us, and perhaps your child.”

Your child . A shift. He no longer wants her now that he knows one of her parents is dead from the virus he created for Pope in Pope Pharmaceuticals’ labs. What a fickle bastard. But that bothers me. It really does. Because now she’s as useless to him as I am, which means my daughter’s life is worth as much as a foam cup.

“How can I look if I’m cuffed to the floor?”

A dance ensues. Two choices wrestling for the lead. He wants to gloat, he wants to keep me subjugated, and the two are mutually exclusive in this time and place. His ego seizes control. My restraint falls to the floor. I am free as I can be while still imprisoned.

On gelatin legs, I amble to the door. See Irini for myself, her skin glowing under the moon’s caress.

The Swiss is right: she is not alone. They swarm the dock’s end. People who are not people. And yet, under this moon, they appear real and whole. I can’t discern what is still human and what is other. Irini stands on the gangplank, apart from the others. It is from there that she calls to me while my daughter wails on. It is there the moonlight stops to admire itself in the blade she holds.

“Is a girl?” she calls out.

“Do not speak,” the Swiss says.

But I do not take orders from him. “Yes.”

“Is she well?”

“Yes.”

“Come. I want to see you.”

The Swiss’s hand is an iron band around my arm. “You cannot go.”

I stare him down in the dark. “How many rounds do you have left? One? Two? Enough for me and them? Or are you saving the last one for yourself?”

He reaches for my child.

“Touch her and you will die.”

Then I step through the door. I choose the lesser of the evils.

The gangplank bows and flexesunder the weight of my broken heart. Bodies shift and shuffle to let us come ashore. What they are isn’t clear in this light. They look like me, world-burned and weary. Maybe they are me, but with tongues that speak another language.

“Who are they?”

“People,” Irini says.

“Are we safe?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still alive.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Maybe not only my face is changed. Maybe inside, too.”

Irini lifts my child from my arms, cradles that fragile skull in her sunburned palm. Too close to the knife’s fine edge.

“Please.”

“I will not hurt her.” She smiles down at that sweet, new face. “We want people to go on.” Then she turns that smile on me. “We come for you. To save you. I prayed we were not late.”

They surround us then, peer at my child, and she falls silent, done with her song.

“It’s like they’ve never seen a baby before,” I say.

One by one, they dry-spit on my child.

“To ward away the Evil Eye,” Irini says. This comforts me, knowing they are all still human enough to cling to their superstitions.

“They will never have their own,” the Swiss says from his fiberglass perch. “No abomination can breed.”

I turn, stare at him, barely able to contain my disgust. “Is there anything you didn’t take from them?”

“The disease stole from me, too.”

“There’s no excuse for the hurts you’ve caused,” I say.

My rescuers move away now, a human tide peeling itself from the rocks. And when they return, they bring the Swiss with them and hold him fast.

He looks to me for help. “Will you let them take me?”

I shake my head. “I don’t have any mercy left to give. You’ve used it all up.” Gently, I take the knife from Irini’s hand. “My hands are already stained with blood,” I tell her.

A piece of my soul flakes away as the knife moves in an elegant arc. I wrap it in silk, encase it in an ice block, and stow it in a lead-lined trunk. Someday—if there are days left that belong to me—I may pick the lock and set that fragment in the sun to thaw. Ah , I will say when I look upon it again. I remember now. I remember who I used to be. Just a girl with simple dreams and a crush on her therapist .

How does it make you feel? Nick says from the past.

Terrified .

The blade skims the surface of his man-made Adam’s apple, draws a thin red line upon the skin, a half inch above the scar I already made, allows gravity to pull it down into a neutral position at my side.

“You can’t do it,” he gloats.

“I won’t do it,” I say. “There’s a difference. You poor bitch.”

I reach out to Irini, the snake woman of Delphi, and take my daughter from her arms. Then we turn and go and leave the Swiss at the mercy of his own creations. He owes them.

My heart is still tender enough that I flinch at the sound of his screams.

I am still human, with all the frailties and strengths of my kind.

We walk in the half-lightof a benevolent moon. North again. Always north, we four. We’ve taken what we can from the boat: things for us and Baby. Esmeralda hauls them without complaint. There’s barely enough energy in my body to carry my daughter and myself.

“Why?”

“Forward is the only way. One foot in front of the other.”

“We could go back to Delphi.”

“Just a little further,” I tell her. “Nick wanted to know if his parents were safe. Now”—my tongue thickens—“I have to do that for him. You’re free to go wherever you choose, my friend.”