Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

I open the wallet and search through it. When I read the card, I look at Pest in astonishment. I can hardly sleep that night, thinking about it, disbelieving my own eyes.

Miraculously, Pest wakes up the next morning without a fever. I expected the Worm to have dug into him by then, but he looks fine. Maybe a little pale from all the blood he lost, but otherwise, he’s healthy. He gets up and actually helps me make breakfast, using some of the last of the oatmeal he brought with him from the Homestead. He doesn’t say much, only thanks me for bandaging his arm. He says he wants to get going. He doesn’t want to stay there any longer. I think we both know what’s going to happen and we don’t want to talk about it.

While I try to feed Eric some oatmeal soup, I steal glances over at Pest. He’s patting a wildly happy Queen who can hardly keep from covering his face with dog slurp. I study him while he packs up all our stuff in his backpack. He looks like he’s always looked. A round, white face, topped by a mop of curly black hair. His blue eyes shine and sparkle. There’s darkness under his eyes, but he’s the same Pest as usual. Except he’s not. I search over his features and I think I see something under them that I hadn’t noticed before. Something in the way he moves, so deliberate, so…experienced. It’s the way an adult moves. It’s always been spooky to me.

“Unh,” says Eric. I’ve been so occupied with Pest that I hadn’t been paying attention. Eric’s black tongue is wriggling, trying to get to the oatmeal soup I’m just barely dribbling out of the aluminum mug.

“Oh,” I say to him. “Sorry, Eric.” I try not to think of Pest for a minute and concentrate on Eric. He’s looking a little better, not so gaunt as before, or, I don’t know, waterlogged. I steady him with a hand on his chest and then carefully pour the oatmeal into his mouth. I’m getting better at it, but most of it still falls all over him. His black tongue writhes toward the mug, and I cringe as I watch. “Gross, Eric,” I groan as he pushes his head up toward the mug.

“Unh,” he says, straining upward. “Unh.”

I’m glad when he finishes, so I can stand up and move away from him. Eric continues to search for more, his black tongue wriggling.

“Okay,” I tell him. “There’s no more.”

While he’s occupied with searching for more water, I take advantage of it by pulling a pair of socks over his red feet and then the new boots. As I lace them up, I look over to Pest who’s sitting down on a log not far away, looking away into the forest. As I finish putting on the boots, I look down at them. They fit him well. But I think of what a terrible price we paid for them. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to tell Pest something, to thank him, to hold him. But when I look over to him, I’m just so confused, I don’t know what to say. I want to ask him about what I saw in his wallet, but I can’t. Not while he’s like this. Not while he’s only got a few more hours before the Worm gets him. It’s precious time. It’s his time, and I don’t want to disturb it. It’s probably the last time he’ll ever have.

I pull Eric to his feet. Eric stands straight at first and then leans forward. His arms swing senselessly down, like they’re filled with water. Eric looks like someone who’s about ready to pick up something. He clomps forward like this for two steps before I stop him.

“Stand up straight,” I tell him, trying to maneuver him. He stands up straight again, but then sags forward, but not all the way, like he’s searching for something on the ground.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pest asks, approaching us.

“Nothing,” I answer. I shrug. “He just does what he does.”

Pest looks at him and frowns. I try to read what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, but I can’t. I wonder if he’s thinking about the Worm inside him now, how in just a few days, he could be just as Eric is now. Or he could be dead. That’s what I’d be thinking. But as much as I stare at Pest’s face as he looks up at Eric, I don’t have the first clue of what’s going on in there.

“Let’s get going,” he says finally.

We continue south, making a wide circle around the town. Neither of us mention what happened there. We just keep walking through the forest. I try to hide the glances I keep giving to Pest, waiting for signs of blood in his eyes, the flush redness in his face that would mark a fever, the sudden clumsiness in the limbs that would suggest the Worm has him. For hours we walk and I see nothing. But my heart is breaking slowly, at this walking pace through the forest, as Pest marks out the last hours of his life.

I keep thinking as we walk: what will be my last words to him?

I make different speeches in my head. I thank him for what he’s done for us. I tell him that Eric and I will never forget him. In some version, I tell him I’m sorry for the way I treated him. It seems unfair. I don’t know why I get so angry with him. But the speeches don’t sound right. They sound false. When I plan it, it sounds then like someone else talking. I want to say those things, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to talk about these things. I remember the last thing I said to Eric, about him not being my father, and I remember how I felt even as I said it, like I didn’t know why I was saying it or why it came out sounding so cruel. I don’t know how to say goodbye to Pest, and I don’t know why, after all the death I’ve seen, the thought of Pest being gone from my life makes me feel weak and vulnerable.

“Stop it,” Pest says suddenly.

“Stop what?” I ask, shaken from myself and my thoughts.

“Stop diagnosing me with your eyes,” he says flatly. “I’m okay, trust me.”

“I’m not diagnosing you,” I scoff. But of course I am.

Pest doesn’t argue with me but he makes the slightest huff sound that says everything I need to know. It annoys me. Even though I’m lying, I’m offended he doesn’t believe me. I know that sounds stupid, but that’s what Pest does to me.

“I saw your wallet,” I tell him. Pest stops and then I stop too, giving Eric’s rope a sharp pull to get him to stop.

Pest looks at me. I can’t tell what the look he’s giving me is. Anger? Frustration? Patience? He’s impossible to read. “I thought probably you had,” he says finally. He leans over and pats Queen who’s come running back. Eric obediently stands next to them with his jaw wide open and his dark mouth stinking. Pest turns away from Queen and stands to look at me. “Yes,” he says. “I’m eighteen years old.” That was what it said on his school ID: born in the year 1982.

I cross my arms. “How is that possible? You look twelve.”

Pest clears his throat. He looks over to Eric and then back at me. “Shit,” he says finally. “I guess it was only a matter of time.”

“Just tell me,” I say.

Pest looks away into the forest and then back at me nervously. He sucks on a tooth and then clears his throat again.

“What is it?” I ask. He’s worrying me.

“You know why I haven’t got the Worm right now?” Pest asks. He looks at me steadily in the eye. “You can’t get the Worm twice.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Pest says. “Just listen to me, Birdie. Don’t get angry, just listen for a second. Yes, sit down.

“I had the Worm. Back then, when it first came. I was young, like eight or nine, I guess. I remember getting sick. I remember the fever and the nightmares. But when I woke up one morning on the side of the road, the world was different. My parents were gone. All my friends were gone. There were three other boys with me. The oldest one, Shawn, had taken me because he felt sorry for me. I don’t know why they didn’t leave me or kill me. Maybe they didn’t know either. But they took me with them, and for some reason, I didn’t die from the Worm. I was like Eric for two or three months, I guess, and then I got better. I really don’t know why.