Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

She can’t decide what’s worse—the relief in Annie’s face, or the way that Elyse shuts down in despair.

When Elyse is strong enough to walk, they go outside. Vines crawl under their feet and shift like snakes around the dead people on the road. Most of the corpses—if they see corpses at all—are buried, smooth mounds of green in the roads, the old town square. After a while, they stop noticing.

They search the houses that are still standing, but don’t find much.

“We should go to Heather’s house,” Elyse says. “They might have more.”

Tasha and Annie look at each other.

“Because of the creature?” Annie says. “You think it was bringing her food and Heather kept that a secret all this time?”

“I don’t think,” Elyse insists. “I know. ”

They walk to Heather and Brendan’s house, stand silent before the door. Tasha pushes it open. The smell that comes at them is both must and decomposition.

They find the bodies of Brendan and the girls hanging in the kitchen. The green hasn’t yet completed its work here, though it has pushed in around the window frames and the cracked and broken glass. Vines have crawled across the floor and up the chair that sits toppled underneath Brendan, wound around his legs, up to his waist. The girls are small green cocoons with black faces and bright hair. Annie goes to vomit in the corner.

Tasha pulls her eyes away. “Where’s Heather?”

“I told you,” Elyse says. “I told you she was hiding something. Otherwise she would be here.”

“She could be anywhere,” Tasha says. Even as she says it, she’s thinking of their long walks in the forest. The greenhouse. The stories that Heather spun as she walked. “Maybe she was outside when the scream came.”

Elyse crouches in front of the cupboards. She pulls out apples and potatoes, a bag of rice. She reaches into the back and pulls out lentils and beans. There are weevils in some of the bags, but others remain sealed and safe. “Where did all of this come from,” she says, “if not from the mountain?”

Tasha shuts her eyes against her own memories. The flutter of wings against her ribcage. Stories are never only stories, Tasha. “Bags of rice don’t grow on the mountain,” she says.

Elyse sweeps an arm around the room. “Maybe she did this.”

“I know you didn’t trust her, but she wouldn’t do this,” Tasha protests.

“How do you know? Everyone went mad. Annie almost killed you! How do you know that didn’t happen here?”

“I don’t know,” Tasha says, suddenly tired of it all. “I just—I don’t think she could do that. She was already carrying so much.”

Elyse won’t let go. “Maybe that broke her, like it broke everybody else.”

Tasha shakes her head. She looks at Annie, and then Elyse again, and she thinks back to that first day and the dark, bottomless pain in Heather’s eyes. “Something broke her before all of this happened,” Tasha says. “And she put herself back together in a different way. Maybe—maybe that’s how we survived.”

Annie is staring at her, head cocked. Then she takes a step closer to the window. “Heather might be out there.”

The backyard is a jungle—even more so than the rest of the city. The vegetation is more than tall enough to hide a body.

Tasha shakes her head. “If she is, I don’t want to know. We’re done here. Let’s go.” Looking at the food they’ve gathered, she says, “We’ll stay for one more week. Eat, regain some strength. And then we’ll go south toward the water, and then east along the coast. The sea air will be good for Elyse.”

Elyse does not ask about the mountain anymore.

Slowly, their strength comes back. The air begins to carry hints of summer. The plants outside continue to grow—lilies that mushroom into great orange giants, vines that thicken until they’re as wide across as Tasha’s arm. The women stay inside during the day and venture outside in the late afternoons, finding their way into each and every last house. They take what they can and ignore the green mounds that are everywhere. There is no sound, there is no change.

Still.

“Are you sure we’re alone?” Elyse asks one afternoon. “I keep thinking that I hear things.”

“Like what?” Annie asks, sharply.

“I don’t know,” Elyse admits. “It might just be an animal. Sometimes I feel like I hear something running down the streets.” She looks to both of them, then swallows. “Something… galloping.”

Tasha sighs. “It’s probably just deer,” she says. “There are probably so many more animals in the city now that the people are all gone.”

Annie perks up at this. “If it’s a deer,” she says, “maybe one of us should try and catch it. We could use the meat.”

“No,” Tasha says. “No going out alone. It isn’t safe. We can go a little closer to the mountain in the morning and see if we find anything.” She tries to ignore the sudden light in Elyse’s face.

“And then what?” Annie says.

Tasha watches the ceiling. “Then we get ready to leave.”

Everything hurts. Dark shapes come into focus—a man, a woman, another man behind her. One has a gun at his hip; there’s another gun in the corner where the woman is sitting. Estajfan remembers humans shooting the animals in their forest, terrified deer trying to get up the mountainside. His abdomen aches at the memory. No, not a memory. They shot him.

He tries to flex his hands—they are stiff, and barely move. He’s lying on a floor that moves and jostles and bumps him—he recognizes the sound of wheels beneath him, that great whir and whine of machine.

The truck hits something on the road and his head bounces and hits the truck bed. He can’t help it; he whimpers in pain. The woman crouches close to him, a worn boot near his eye.

“Is it moving?” a man says.

“No,” another man grunts. “It’s the truck, you fool. It’s the goddamned fucking road. I told you we needed to keep cutting those fucking weeds.”

“We can’t fix all the roads,” the woman says. “There’s no one else left to do it, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The first voice sounds panicked. “It’s moving. I can see it.”

A hand on his head, suddenly, and the woman’s face dips into view. Brown eyes, a sharp, crooked nose. “You’ve been hurt. You’ve got nowhere to go, so don’t move. You hear me?”

“You’re talking like you think it’ll answer back.” The drawl again, coming closer. A man’s boots. “For all you know, it can’t even talk.”

“He can talk,” the woman says. She crouches on her heels and looks into his face again. “He understands everything we’re saying. You can see it in his eyes.”

“So it’s a he, now?” The man squats to stare at him, the rifle spread out across his knees. His muddy-green eyes remind Estajfan of the mountain centaurs; he has a tattoo of a cross on his left cheek. “Stop it, Moira. It doesn’t matter if it can hear us or not. It’s not going anywhere now, thanks to you.”

“I wasn’t going to let him bleed out,” she snaps. The man only shrugs.

“But—but what if there are others?” The third voice again, younger, almost a boy. “Darby—what are we going to do?”

“We’ll take this one wherever JJ wants to take it. Then we’ll see what happens.”

Take him where? Estajfan has lost track of how long he’s been in here. How long have they been driving? He can’t see outside but he can sense, from the way that the wheels jostle, that the humans are driving as fast as they can. It makes everyone nervous—he can feel it in the air.