Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“Jesus, Brian. You’re lucky I didn’t blow your head off.”

“I was trying to be quiet.” The boy shuffles up beside the other man and props another gun against the tree. “Anyway. I’m here. You can go get some sleep.” There’s a pause, and then, “Did anything—happen?”

“With this thing? No.”

He can hear Brian swallow. “Not just—the creature. The—plants.”

“Brian, for God’s sake—”

“You know they move! You’ve seen them reach for people. That’s why we’ve been sleeping in the truck!”

“It’s fine,” Darby says. “Nothing happened.” He stands and thumps the boy on the back. “Try not to get us all killed,” he says, and he heads for the truck.

The boy clears his throat and leans against a tree. He’s nervous. He’s also very tired. Estajfan looks up at the stars again and waits for the boy to sit, to slouch, to nod off.

He almost doesn’t want it to happen. He can feel the green things waiting, watching for a sign.

As soon as Brian relaxes and slumps to sit down against the tree, a slender grubby hand clamps his mouth, and the other holds something small and sharp against his neck.

“If you move,” Heather whispers, “I will slit your throat.”

The boy’s eyes widen in terror, but he doesn’t move. The rifle falls into the grass.

Petrolio emerges from the trees on the other side of Estajfan. He bends and slices the ropes that still bind Estajfan’s legs.

Estajfan is on his feet almost instantly.

“We’re going to leave now,” Heather hisses to the boy. “Don’t scream, or move, or I’ll come back and kill you.”

She retreats, slowly, and the boy doesn’t stir. Then she trips over the undergrowth and the boy is after her instantly, grabbing her hair and her shirt, and now she’s the one with the sharp thing at her neck as Brian screams, “ There are more of them! There are fucking more of them! ”

“ Go! ” Estajfan roars at Petrolio. He sees the other three scramble out of the truck. JJ runs to the front and turns the truck lights on and Petrolio cries out against the sudden blare of light, then turns and disappears into the trees. Darby plunges after him.

“Run!” Heather cries as Brian drags her back toward the truck. “Estajfan, go!”

Someone fires a shot; it whizzes past Estajfan’s ear. It’s Moira, coming toward them, her gun held high and pointed at his face.

Estajfan ducks and charges at the boy; Brian, terrified, drops Heather and falls backward onto the ground. Estajfan scoops Heather up and then he’s rearing over Brian, and his hooves come down as Brian screams.

“ Stop! ” Moira screams.

Estajfan looks straight at her. “You saved me once, Moira,” he says.

For a few seconds, she’s stunned by the sound of his voice. It’s all the time he needs. He turns and leaps and runs. Shots ring out, but they run and run and suddenly Petrolio is there, and Aura, and then they are all galloping, the shouts fading behind them.

Moira lets out one long, rage-filled scream as the creatures vanish into the trees. Then she goes to Brian, who lies panting and white-faced on the ground. His right leg is shattered, the tibia splintered white and ugly below his knee. She runs to the truck, jumps in, and grabs her makeshift medical supplies—rags, the bottle of whiskey. She tears a large strip of cloth and douses it in alcohol, then ties it as tight around his shin as she can to stop the bleeding.

He passes out, which is probably just as well.

“ Darby! JJ! ” There’s a moment, a long one, and then they come back to her, out of the trees. Without a word, they carry Brian into the back of the truck.

“I need—sticks,” she says. “Straight ones.”

Darby goes to look while JJ dismantles the camp. Darby comes back carrying two large branches. Moira strips the leaves and gets the men to help her position them on either side of Brian’s leg. She douses an old sheet in the rest of the whiskey and then winds it around and around his leg, over the branches, tying it as tight as she can to form a splint.

As she works, she sees how guilt-ridden and furious the other two are. She feels the same way. They had all pushed the kid around a little, but you had to be hard now to survive. Like JJ, so flint-eyed and dour and capable, holding a hundred different secrets, or Darby, who was snappy and mean and had panic-filled night terrors they all pretended to ignore.

They’ve known each other maybe two weeks at most. It feels like a lifetime.

“Okay,” she says, when she’s done the best she can. It isn’t pretty, or particularly clean. Brian is mercifully still unconscious. She tries not to think about what will come later.

“I should have let him take the first watch,” Darby says. “I would have—I would have let them go. I wouldn’t have tried to be a hero—”

Moira pulls her hoodie over her head, grateful for its warmth, then rests a hand on Darby’s arm. “At least he’s alive.” Alive, with a leg that’s as good as useless. And no hospital in sight.

“We have to go after them,” JJ says. “Both of you get in the truck. Let’s go.”

Moira and Darby both stare at him. “Why?”

“There was a woman with them,” JJ says. “Right?”

“I think so,” Moira says.

“Where there are people,” JJ says, “there might be food. We need to follow them.”

“How the fuck are we supposed to follow them in the dark?” Darby says. “We don’t even know which way they went, for fuck’s sake.”

“They went north,” JJ says, and he points behind them, into the trees.

“How the hell do you know that?” Darby says.

JJ shrugs. “It’s just a hunch. A feeling.”

“ I don’t want to drive God knows where on a goddamned hunch! ” Darby shouts.

JJ remains calm. “They’ll come back out on the road,” he says. “Even they can’t run through the forests forever—you’ve seen the undergrowth. They’re heading north, toward the mountains.”

Moira doesn’t ask how he knows this. She thinks of the creature. How he’d reached for the woman and shattered Brian’s leg in less time than it took her to inhale. How the woman had curled into his chest as though she was the wounded thing.

He could speak. He’d looked right at her when she held that gun in his face.

The rifle. She runs back to where Brian fell and finds it, already half covered in green. She reaches for it and is not surprised when the green vines and long, tangled grasses at her feet twine more tightly about it. She tugs, gently at first and then less so, and finally the green things let go and she stumbles back. As she rights herself, she notices something glinting at her feet—a small, delicate knife, a scalpel. She picks that up too. It is always good to keep what they find. She hurries back to the truck and hands Darby the rifle, then lets him hoist her up.

“What’s that?” JJ says, pointing to the knife in her hand.

“Don’t know,” she says. “A scalpel? I found it near the rifle.”

“What’s Dr. Moira need a scalpel for?” Darby says, trying to make a joke.

She echoes JJ. “Just a hunch,” she says. “A feeling.”

JJ nods, then shuts them in.

As they bounce over the unforgiving road, she turns the scalpel over and over in her hands. She’s never seen a scalpel like this—not that she’s seen many scalpels at all. The handle is cylindrical and smooth, with tiny designs running the length of it. She slowly draws a line through the air with the blade.

Maybe it’s magic , she thinks. Like the creature . Maybe she can cut a window through the air and step back in time to the years before any of this happened.