Ben Bedard - The World Without Crows

Eric didn’t cry again. None of them did.

They wrapped her body in the blanket she slept on. Then the four of them, the survivors, built a pyre in a clearing not far from the cabin. They found a can of kerosene and doused the dry wood.

Carrying Sarah’s body to the pyre was painful. She was so light. The fever had eaten away her body. They lifted Sarah to the pyre and then stood back.

Eric felt something should be said, but he didn’t know what. He held a burning branch in his hand, but he didn’t light the pyre. He stood there, thinking.

“We’ll miss you,” he said finally, tonelessly. It was all he could think to say. Eric stabbed the wooden pyre with the burning branch and it leapt to awful light.

Eric stayed to watch the fire consume her. When the fire began to die, Sarah’s bones were visible, burnt but whole. The sight tortured him. He might have stayed watching the smoking ruin for some time, Sarah’s bony hands clutching at ash, her skull staring at the horizon, if Lucia and Sergio had not pulled him away. Even Birdie tugged at him.

“Come on, Eric,” she said.

For the rest of his life, he would dream of her bones, sticking from the ashes, and wake up, sweating and uneasy.

For days, Eric lived in a haze. As they walked east, through forest and field, he saw little of what was around him. Fear had finally left him, but now he felt hollow and unreal. It was as if he had died and not Sarah or Brad or John Martin. Now it was he that was the Zombie. He thought of himself that way, like a shambling body, slowly rotting away, waiting for his end.

Staring out once into the forest, he saw movement. He stood still and watched. It was a deer, scraping its head against a slender tree, whose leaves shivered at the touch. As he watched, he saw there was blood on the tree. The deer had the Vaca B. It was rubbing its head bloody against the tree.

Eric turned away, and did the only thing he could now. He kept moving.

They sat on a high ridge, overlooking great waves of green forest. Their camp was behind them. Beans and rice were cooking on the fire. Sergio and Birdie gathered wood, stacking it some distance away. An aluminum pot of water heated in the fire.

Eric sat on a promontory of stone that stuck out from the hill like an accusing finger. It was flat on the top. After lugging back the water from a stream, Eric sat on the rock, his legs dangling over the side. He looked out over the forest and felt a stinging emptiness. If it wasn’t for the pain, he would feel absolutely nothing. Below him was a fifty foot drop to the forest floor.

Lucia came and sat next to him. At another time, Eric might have felt any number of things with Lucia so near him. Anxiety, fear, self-loathing, shame. Desire. Now he felt nothing.

“You know,” Lucia said. “I wanted to be a lawyer before all this. I was going to fight for the rights of immigrants. My parents were illegals, you know. They did all those jobs that Americans didn’t want to do. They worked hard for us. I was scared for them. What would we do if they got caught and sent back to Mexico? What would we do? I thought if I could be a lawyer, I could change all that. Now it’s all gone. No more laws, no more borders. No more family. It’s gone. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.”

Below them, a gust of wind moved the tops of trees, pushed underneath them, and blew back their hair.

“What did you want to do?” she asked him. “Before the Vaca Beber?”

“That time doesn’t even seem real anymore.”

“What were you going to do?” she insisted.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe computer programming.” He didn’t care anymore about any of that. It was all nonsense. “You know what I do miss?” he asked. Lucia shook her head. “I miss the way clothes smelled when they came out of the dryer.”

“I hate to think what we smell like now,” Lucia said.

They both smiled then, looking down at their filthy clothes and the abyss beneath them.

“It’s going to be okay,” Lucia said. She put her hand on his shoulder. Eric nodded at her.

“I know,” he lied. Lucia squeezed his shoulder and then stood up and walked away. He wondered if she really believed in that lie. There was no way to know if it was going to be all right. Looking back at the forest beneath him, he decided she did not. No. She lied to make him feel better.

That’s what humans do. They lie to make the world a better place.

At night, Lucia continued talking. Around the campfire she spoke, as Eric stared at the flickering flames. Exhausted, Birdie slept next to him, her arms wrapped around him. Sergio listened to his sister, his eyes sparkling.

Lucia talked about how quickly the world of humans dissolved around them. It had only been a year since the Vaca B. Already the roads were beginning to crack. Dirt and grass grew in patches on it. Towns and cities, partially burned to the ground, were already succumbing to nature. Swallows nested in houses, raccoons had moved back into the suburbs, deer grazed on what had been golf courses or fields of corn. In another five, ten years, Lucia guessed, the world would be completely changed. In another fifty, it would be like humans never came to this continent, except for the skeletal remains of skyscrapers. It all disappeared so quickly. Vanished.

“When we get to the island,” she continued, “we’ll have to start all over again. The food won’t last. We have to plan for next year.”

“We’ll grow fields of corn,” said Sergio. “Whole fields of vegetables. We’ll can them for the winter. And Eric and me, we’ll hunt. There’ll be plenty to eat, you’ll see.”

“It’s not going to be that easy, Sergio,” she warned her brother. “We need to find seed. There will be others looking for seed too. Even if we do find seed, there’ll be a lot to learn. We’ve never grown so much as a flower, have we?”

Sergio shrugged. “You’re smart, Lucia,” he said with supreme confidence. “You’ll figure it out.”

“We’ll try to find goats and chickens,” Lucia continued, ignoring her brother’s last comment. “I can learn to make goat cheese and we’ll need the eggs for protein.”

“We’ll have horses too,” Sergio said.

“We’ll get some solar panels, so we’ll have some light, even in the winter.”

“I know what it was,” Eric said, his voice low and serious.

“What was?” Sergio asked.

“I know what killed Sarah,” he said. Sergio and Lucia looked at the flames but didn’t say anything. “I’ve been thinking about it. How did she get the worm? She drank the same water, ate the same food. And then I remembered. She told me once that a good cook tastes the food while they cook it. She was always tasting what she was cooking. That’s how she got the Vaca B, tasting the food before it boiled enough to kill the worm. She got the worm cooking for us.”

The discussion ended. Lucia and Sergio crawled into their tent to sleep. Eric stayed up, looking into the fire. He stayed that way a long time.

Leaving the forest, Sergio took point. He scouted ahead. Binoculars slung around his neck, he would stride ahead to a look out point, crouch in the bushes and scan around them. Sometimes he would climb a tree, and from far above, he would study the landscape. It seemed to Eric that they spent most of their time waiting, watching.

When they came to a road (Route 287, Sergio informed them), he swung up into a towering pine tree. He stayed up there a long time, the rest of them waiting. Then he came down, landed in the pine needles at his feet and clapped his hands together. “All clear,” he said.