Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the best I can do. I’m sick, you see.”

“So am I,” I whisper. I can’t hold the words back. They seem pulled out of me.

Her dark eyes gleam. “I know. I can smell your disease.”

I glance over at the dead cub. “You’ve lost your child. To an Icarite hunter?”

“Yes,” she says, blowing out a breath long with suffering. “But now you’re here.”

I don’t know what that means. If I’m imagining this conversation, am I trying to tell myself something?

“I have to go,” I tell her.

The bear shifts in her corner, grunting. “I’m hungry,” she says.

I’m hungry too. What I feel, she feels , I think, though I can’t explain where the knowledge comes from. My sickness is her sickness. Is this real? Or is my mind doing this?

I slip out of the tunnel into a bright day. Clouds still linger in the sky, but a chilly wind pushes them past the sun. To the west, a black scorch stains the forest. Wisps of smoke still rise and catch the wind, even after the storm’s deluge. I’m afraid to go there, but I’m drawn to it, as if I have no choice but to bear witness to the devastation.

I make my way down the mountainside, stopping once to look back. The bear emerges from the den and watches me. In the full light I see that she’s a grizzly, and so bony I don’t know how she’s still alive. She looks after me a moment, as if I might not return, then ambles off.

I continue my descent. The ground is puddled and slippery. I lose my footing so often that by the time I make it halfway down the mountainside, I’m covered in mud, scrapes, and scratches.

In a patch of ruined trees I come across the Icarite hunter who pursued me. His body is twisted around a broken sapling, half covered by a slide of rocks. His head is crushed, and a branch protrudes from his gut. The storm has taken its sacrifice and spared me. Looking at his mangled body, I feel little but relief.

When I finally approach the charred aftermath of the flamers’ attack, the acrid odor of burnt, wet wood hits my nose first. Then I see my camp, burned and ruined before me. The scene hurls me into my memories and I’m a ten-year-old girl again, feeling the horror of it.

I’m not prepared for this. The loss of my clan hits me hard. These blackened, misshapen bodies are people I knew. I never felt a strong connection to them, but now that they’re gone, I feel it—the bond severed, conspicuous in its absence. It’s a hollow ache inside my gut, worse than the hunger that always seems to be there. Much worse.

Without realizing it at first, I start counting the bodies. Ten, twelve, twenty…. When I reach thirty-six and find no others, I know some have escaped. There were forty-three in our clan, including me, so six are unaccounted for. A rush of hope fills me, hope that my brother and father are among those who escaped. But I know Bode, lying on his travois and unable to move quickly, would never have been so lucky. I keep looking, and soon I find him—number thirty-seven—burnt and twisted, bone and flesh and leather and wood, all one charred mass.

Emotions I never expected to feel take up arms and clash inside me. Grief and rage and emptiness. Most of all, guilt. If I’d been there… maybe…. But I know I would likely have died alongside Bode and the others. All at once, I miss my father. The knowledge that I will never speak to him again, never hope for acceptance from him again—it all overwhelms me. I miss a man I never felt love for, never thought was important to me.

But now his absence leaves a hole. I wonder if this is how the bear felt when she lost her cub. The emptiness is infinite inside me.

I feel a sudden need to make it up to him somehow—now that it’s too late. I have to do something, show that I’m sorry for not giving myself to him more, for not being there when he might have needed me, for letting Gunther carry the whole burden.

But I don’t know what to do. I have no idea if Gunther is among the dead. The bodies don’t give up their secrets. They’re all blackened and shrunken and warped by the white-hot fire that consumed them. I recognize children from adults only by their size. I know Bode only by the shape of his travois on the ground.

Phantoms emerge from the burnt trees and hiss at me. They point accusing fingers and stare with hate-filled eyes. The cold wind wails in my ears, a lament for the loss of so many lives. Bode cries from his ashes. “Why weren’t you here?” he moans. “Why didn’t you help?”

I turn and run. I put the scorched devastation far behind me. I run back to the only place I can call home, now that home matters. Back to the cave. Back to the bear who is sick, as I am sick. Who is hungry as I am hungry. Maybe I can tend to the bear in a way I never allowed myself to do for my father.

At the base of the mountain, I nearly stumble over a recent kill, maybe a day old. The storm must have chased away the predator before it had a chance to finish its meal. The hindquarters on the young doe are still mostly intact. This is more meat than I’ve eaten in weeks.

I sever the spine with my knife and hoist the hindquarters over my shoulder to take with me to the cave. If the bear will eat, I’ll feed her. Before I get there, though, I need to find a place to make a fire, somewhere away from the bear’s den. There’s always the risk that a fire will draw Icarite hunters when they see the smoke. But the severity of the storm should keep their heads down for a while. I’ll take my chances.

I find a rocky nook in the hillside that gives me some respite from the wind. The temperature has fallen steadily and the clouds have gathered again, turning the sky to steel. I manage to collect some dry tinder, and scrape my flint to spark a flame. Most of the wood I find is still damp, but I toss a few branches on, watching as steam billows up. The wood hisses and pops as it releases moisture. Soon the fire is burning hot, and I arrange the meat on the heated rocks to cook. The fire feels good and chases some of the ache from my muscles.

I don’t hear the Icarite. He just appears on the other side of the boulder. He has no gun, no weapon of any kind that I can see. I jump to my feet and pull my knife, ready to attack. But he does nothing more than eye me curiously and smile.

“Smells good,” he says. “Venison?”

I begin to wonder if he’s a phantom too. Is my diseased mind conjuring this hunter out of my fears? Has he come to seek revenge for the other Icarite’s death in the storm?

“Share your fire with me, Feral.”

I have no choice but to do what he says. He’s too close. If I try to run, he’ll be on top of me in seconds. I’m no match for his size and strength. I might be able to attack with my knife, but I need to catch him off guard. And that’s not going to happen with him standing there, staring at me. Besides, I’m still not convinced he’s real. No Icarite hunter would ask to share a fire with a Feral. Much less a female.

So I cautiously crouch by the glowing stones, my muscles protesting my every move. The Icarite settles himself opposite me, rubbing his palms in the heat of the flames. He squints at the sky.

“Looks like snow,” he says. “Not a good time to be outside the wall.”

“Then why are you?” I try to keep the acid from my voice.

He studies me with a strange gleam in his eye. “Urges,” he says. “Primal urges. They drive me.”

I can only imagine what he means by that, but I don’t like the sound of it. I glance around me, looking for an escape. There’s a space between two rock slabs. If I jump there, the rock might slow him down, give me a chance to run. He can’t grab me without….

“They’re going to wipe out every single one of you,” he says. “They’ve decided you’re too much of a threat.”