Ben Bedard - The World Without Crows

“You’ll be okay,” Eric said, kneeling by her bed. “I’ll help. I will.”

“Thank you,” she said. She sobbed. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t say that,” Eric begged. He held her.

Sarah cried in Eric’s arms until she fell asleep. Her face was wet with pink blood.

Lucia grabbed Eric when he left the cabin to get more water. He had not left Sarah’s side and had slept by her bed. At night, when she woke, gasping for water, he would be there to give it to her. Now Lucia clutched his arm and dragged him to the side before he could return to the cabin.

“She’s getting worse,” she said to him, in a hushed voice.

“I know,” Eric said, tugging his arm free. “I know that.”

“We have to talk,” Lucia said, shifting her feet uncomfortably. “We need to know what to do if—”

“I’m not talking about that,” Eric said. “Not until I have to.”

“We need to be prepared!” Lucia hissed. “It’s better if we know. Believe me, it’s better. If she cracks—”

“I said I’m not talking about it!” Eric glared at her.

“It’s easiest if—”

“Goddamn it,” Eric swore, glaring at her. “I’m not thinking about killing her right now!”

“Believe me, Eric, this isn’t what I want to do either. But it’s better if we talk about it. It’s better if we have a plan. It’s better—”

“I’m not killing the first person I ever kissed!”

Eric glared at her furiously. Lucia turned red, bit her lip and stepped back. He threw open the door and walked inside.

It wasn’t until much later that he became embarrassed by what he had revealed.

They found a kerosene lamp in the cabin and lit it. The light was eerie, bright but fuzzy. The kerosene made the cabin smell bitter. Sarah’s yellow hair was wet and stringy and clung to her forehead. The lips he had once kissed were parched and peeling. She was asleep now, but her fever raged inside her and she slept uneasily, sometimes waking up, demanding unseen people for mysterious objects. When she slipped back to sleep, Eric wiped her eyes of blood, and kept a cool cloth on her forehead. Birdie slept on a blanket at the other end of the cabin.

Lucia and Sergio came in the cabin rarely, to give him food or fresh water. Eric hated to see them. They looked at him with pity but not sadness. He wanted to shout at them. This was Sarah! This was Sarah, for godsakes! It seemed years ago that he had first seen her by the river, back in Ohio, singing while she fished. What would he do without her?

Cooling her forehead, he remembered his mother. She had worn a nightgown. It had once been lemon yellow, but it became stained with blood and sweat, and, by the end, dark, almost brown, urine. He still smelled her in his nightmares. It was the smell of emptiness, grief, disaster, humiliation, and the end. The end of all things.

The Vaca B killed like this. Brought humans low with fever and thirst, scraping away their consciousness, their memories, leaving a shell that could walk, drink, and do little else. For a few, a rare but horrifying few, the stress of the transformation was too much, or they fought so hard, something broke inside them. They cracked. They raved and killed anything that moved. And they lived on and on and on, in this state, this madness for life that devoured it. He had feared it would happen to his mother. Now, he waited to see how Sarah, the first woman who had ever kissed him, would die.

A part of him hoped that Sarah would never speak, but go gently to her end. It was selfish to think so, he knew it, but he couldn’t help it. He sat by her, tortured by the thought she would die, tortured by the thought she might continue. He wanted her to die peacefully. He wanted her to live. He sat next to her, a maelstrom of grief and fear.

If he had to shoot her in the end. If he had to shoot the first woman he had kissed. Eric didn’t know if he could survive that. Something in him would have to die too.

Birdie stayed by Eric and made sure he ate and slept.

Once, when he was just coming out of a dazed sleep, Birdie was speaking to Sarah.

“You’ll be all right,” she was saying. “There’s a man who comes, my mother told me once. He comes to give us dreams. If we’ve been good, we have good dreams. I think you’ll have good dreams, Sarah. Don’t worry, the man will come.”

Eric had rarely heard Birdie speak so much at one time. He wondered if he was dreaming, and then either fell back to sleep or his dream melted away into inarticulate shadow.

Late in the night, Eric crept outside of the cabin to go to the bathroom. He stood under the brilliant stars and tall trees and listened to his urine gently splash on the leaves. When he was done, he didn’t go back to the cabin right away.

Lucia and Sergio’s campfire was nothing but glowing coals. They were sleeping nearby on their sleeping bags. It was hot, so they slept in t-shirts and underwear with their skin to the cool air. Lucia’s long legs, moist with sweat, glistened in the starlight. Eric tossed a log on the fire, and watched the sparks spiral above it, dying in the air a few feet from the fire. He smelled smoke and ash.

There was a time when death had not been such a presence in his life. He had laughed and eaten and been with his friends. They had spent glorious hours together, alive and well, in his basement, tossing dice and slaying imaginary creatures and arguing about the interpretation of rules. There had been no thought of death as anything but a plaything, the goal of a game. Kill the dragon. Kill the evil lich king.

But now death had come. It was terrible. Profound. Horrifying. It was sickening and arbitrary. He lived with it. It was all around him. Death in life and life in death. Together. He knew its smell and its gaze. He had watched the whole world die. He felt a little death in him every time he breathed.

He knew death was no mystical thing. People died mechanically and necessarily, both the good and the bad. Few survived and of those, it was impossible to know why. Death followed no rules except the grand rule that everyone, in the end, came to it. Eric had once thought that life taught lessons. That, as one grew, a person accumulated wisdom and became a better human. It was the myth of the hero, the myth of the trial, from which the hero emerges, stronger, more wise, beautiful and capable, a greater human. But this, he realized, was the mentality of a schoolboy, who thought that the world, in all its intricacies and complexities, all its mystery and variety, could be reduced to a list of lessons, that once learned, could then be checked off. But there was no greater knowledge, no rising above life. There was only death and it decided all things.

All things die for no reason except that they once lived. And life, for all its beauty and variety, is nothing but a spark above a campfire that may be extinguished at any time and fall down to earth, once fiery bright, a hot flame against a dark night, but now, nothing but cold ash.

Eric picked himself up and went back into the cabin where Sarah was moaning. He sat next to her and put a wet cloth to her forehead.

“Mangy dogs,” she muttered. “Wash them! Wash!” She choked and coughed. Then she was quiet again and lay back.

Eric sat back and cried a few silent tears.

There was no wisdom in death, unless wisdom’s absence is a wisdom of itself.

But a strange wisdom it was, unsettling. Empty as the darkness between the stars, like death itself.

Sarah died the next morning.

She had no last words, at least none that was fit to remember. The blood from her eyes had turned nearly black by then. The last few moments had been unpleasant. Sarah stiffened suddenly, grit her teeth together, and then gasped for air between her teeth. Dark liquid oozed from her mouth, and her stiff legs shook and then kicked. She gurgled once and then slowly relaxed, as if a sheet of calm was being thrown over her body. When she settled, she was dead.