Ben Bedard - The World Without Crows

It was dangerous to enter Bethel, but she had no choice. Eric needed medication or he would die of infection. She didn’t know what she would do without Eric. She had lost Sergio and that was too much to bear already. She left Birdie to care for Eric, swung up into the truck, and headed for the town.

Bethel was a small town in a rolling valley. Mountains rose in the distance, their heads shaved with ski slopes. Clapboard houses lined the streets of Bethel where, before the Vaca B, ski tourists once walked the streets. Now Lucia crept into the empty town slowly.

She hadn’t gone far when she saw Carl Doyle.

Doyle stumbled around his Rover, which was half inside the pharmacy, covered with glass. Lucia had parked the truck far down the street and slowly approached to watch Doyle.

As she crouched silently behind a car, Doyle leaned against the Land Rover and put his head on the roof. He stayed that way for so long, Lucia thought he might be dying right before her eyes. Yet he picked up his head, said something she couldn’t hear and then opened the door to the Rover and climbed in. A second later, he pulled the Rover out of the pharmacy and screeched out of Bethel, toward western Maine.

Lucia waited until she was sure Doyle would not return before she went into the pharmacy. Lying in the glass where Doyle must have struck it was a Zombie, looking more like a skeleton than a human. Lucia stepped over it, crunching through the glass and into the pharmacy.

It was another instance of Doyle saving them. If the Zombie was cracked, Lucia would have been at its mercy. As she searched the shelves of the mostly empty pharmacy, she thought about Doyle.

He had saved Eric. If he had not attacked when he did, Lucia doubted he could have lived through many more lashes. One moment the whip had been raised, the next the man with the cowboy hat and boots had been dead, shot through the right eye. The whip fell before he did. Then the crowd had erupted into shouts and cries of terror. Gunfire ripped through them, and, as people dropped in the street, Lucia grabbed Birdie and ran to Eric. In the chaos of Carl Doyle’s onslaught, as he fired into the crowd from some distant rooftop, Lucia had dragged Eric into a truck. That was the escape. Without Doyle, Lucia would have spent her life with Daniel Sullivan. She shuddered. She would not think of him again. Never again.

Lucia could find no serious antibiotics in the pharmacy. Almost everything was gone. In the end, all she found was a tube of antibacterial salve, a container of aspirin, and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She also found the skeleton of a child, with many of its bones missing. It looked like it had been torn apart by dogs.

She was about to leave when she heard the knocking.

The sound came from underneath a trap door behind the counter of the pharmacy. The door was chained shut with a bright steel padlock. Lucia stood over it. The faint noise continued.

Was there a rhythm to the knocking? The question coursed through her. Were Zombies capable of rhythm or had someone locked innocent people down there? She opened her mouth to call down through the door, but then shut it quickly. What if it was a cracked Zombie and the sound of her voice drove it crazy? What if it burst through the door? What if this door was not the only way it could get out? She had only a tire iron to protect her.

The sound continued.

What if it was a human, like her, like Eric, like Birdie? A survivor imprisoned by some sick, twisted person like Carl Doyle. The knock came again and she swallowed. If she could tell if there was a rhythm to the sound, maybe it would be different.

She crouched down. Her heart thudded in her chest. The knocking sound continued. Lucia bent down closer. If she could hear a rhythm or maybe a groan from inside, some indication that it was Zombie or human, she would know whether to open the door or not. She trembled and bent down even further until, finally, her ear touched the cold metal of the door.

The knock came again. She listened, holding her breath, trying to separate the sound of her own heartbeat from the silence throbbing below the trap door. She closed her eyes.

Immediately, as if he had been waiting for her, her brother came to her.

“Lucia,” Sergio said. “No seas tonta.” His voice was solemn with the power of the dead.

Lucia leapt away from the trap door with a soundless cry, blinking. She could still hear the knocking sound, but she scrambled away and leapt out the pharmacy window.

She did not look back.

Lucia had never sewn anything before. She took out the needle and the two pieces of cloth and began to practice. Her first try would not be on Eric’s skin.

Birdie sat beside her, watching her quietly.

“Puta!” she cried and sucked her finger.

“Use this,” Birdie said, and passed her a thimble.

“Oh, is that what that’s for?” Lucia smiled at her.

Trying to remember her mother, Lucia bent over the cloth. Her mother had always tried to get her to learn, but she had been dismissive. She was going to be a lawyer. Yes, her mother said, yes, good, but even lawyers lose buttons. “Mother,” she had groaned. “Don’t be so old fashioned.” She always talked to her mother in English when she wanted to make that point.

“No,” Birdie said, watching her. “Smaller stitches. It’ll cinch up if you do it like that.”

Lucia nodded her head and began again. It would be one thing to sew this cloth, another to pierce living skin. For an instant, her breath caught inside her, and she felt on the verge of screaming. But she caught herself by focusing on Birdie. She pushed the needle through the cloth and pulled the thread all the way through.

Sergio was dead.

The thought came to her like that. Sometimes there was no reason to it, just a flash of horrible knowledge, trailing misery and grief like a comet’s tail. There had been no chance to sew his wound. Just a single gunshot had done it. He had bled to death within minutes. No last words, no chance to tell him it was okay, to tell him she loved him. He just died. He was just gone.

Her hands shook.

There was not even time to grieve.

Lucia turned away from the cloth and taking the needle and thread in her hand, she began searching Eric’s back. There wasn’t time to practice long. The wounds glistened with blood. She felt sick for a second and had a moment of severe, crippling doubt. She could not do this. She couldn’t even sew a button. Then she felt Birdie’s hand on her shoulder, and Lucia took a deep breath.

She must do this.

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

She chose the most serious wound, a great ugly canyon that cut from his shoulder blade down to the middle of his back. Starting at the end nearest the shoulder blade, she took his skin between her fingers and pressed it together. Blood and clear liquid oozed up between the skin. Eric’s breathing was uneven, but otherwise, he did not move or make a sound. Lucia took the bright needle in her hand. Eric’s flesh was soft and warm between her fingers. Closing her eyes, she muttered a quick prayer to Mother Mary, and then, in one movement, stuck the needle through the flesh. Eric groaned but did not awaken. Pulling the dark thread through, Lucia turned the needle back and stuck it through Eric’s flesh again. This time his back twitched and his left arm rose a little.

“Hold him down,” Lucia ordered Birdie.

With only a whimper of protest, Birdie moved to Eric’s left side and pressed down on his arm.

“Try not to let him move, Birdie,” Lucia said to her. “He could hurt himself.”

Birdie nodded and pressed down harder.

Lucia focused on the wound. She tried not to notice the blood on her fingers.