Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“What, now you’re a doctor for real?” Darby teases. She lets him have his fun. They are three broken men and Moira, who is not a doctor, just someone who used to be on TV sometimes but has mostly been a waitress.

(It was the nose, her agent told her a million years ago. It was too sharp. We want real but not that real, he said.)

She wraps the scalpel carefully in some cloth and puts it in the pocket of her hoodie, then puts her head in her hands and tries to still her shaking mind. The truck rumbles through the dark and no one speaks.

She’d walked and walked and walked in those first few hours after the scream—moving out of her bathroom refuge and then down the street, out of her town, through the town after that. The sun had gone down, the stars had come out, and she’d taken shelter in an abandoned gas station convenience store, then woken to the sound of someone at the fuel tanks. When she went outside, she saw Darby trying to siphon diesel, the old U-Haul silent and waiting. Brian had been sitting in the passenger seat. He’d been the first to notice her.

Eric, already delirious, had been out of sight in the back.

“How do you know if there’s even gas left?” she had called.

Darby had looked up, almost dropping his gas can in surprise. “I don’t,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “But it never hurts to try.”

She went with them—they asked no questions. Darby had rigged the truck up to work on vegetable oil as well as regular diesel, so whenever they stopped, they looked for both of these things. They didn’t travel far. They found JJ a few days after that, waiting for something by the side of the road. Eric was dead by then and so it was only the four of them, swirling into place like a constellation. It feels like she’s known them her whole life.

“Do you know how to set a leg, Dr. Moira?” Darby asks, breaking the silence. “For real?”

“Of course not,” she says, staring at the floor.

Neither of them looks at Brian.

Annie has a pistol in her belt—they found it a few days ago, and it’s the only gun they have—and Tasha has Elyse hooked around her shoulder as they stagger toward the mountain. It is harder going now than it had been during the winter—there is practically no path left, just an endless vista of green, with bright flowers that arch over them, glorious, unchecked. They take their time. The world is quiet save for birds that chirp unseen in the trees.

They smell the greenhouse before they see it, and are grateful the scent doesn’t make them spin in panic. They creep forward to find the greenhouse door broken, its panes of glass shattered.

“Here,” Elyse says between breaths. “The creature was right here. ”

Tasha lowers her to the ground. Elyse still wears the Doc Martens, still has the black leather jacket. Some things, Tasha thinks, have survived.

Tasha looks up at the mountain rising above them. A mountain tall enough that one could climb it and reach the clouds. A mountain where mothers and fathers might have brought their crippled, disfigured young to die so many years ago.

The world is still beautiful, despite all of its terror and tragedy, and she understands none of it. Blood and brains and heartbeats? Things that grow and things that don’t and stories about birds that fall from the sky? She tried so hard to keep them all alive—and for what? When her parents died, she was not there; the people in this city died around her even as she fought to stop it. And here she is, alive. After everything.

“I thought we could do it,” she says then, staring off into the green. “I just wanted us all to survive.”

“People believed in you,” Elyse says. She coughs again.

“People believed in stories, ” Tasha says. She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “The mountain and its secrets. The Food Angel, whatever that was. There was nothing I could do about that.”

“You were a story too,” Annie says. “I told you that, Tasha—and you didn’t listen to me.”

Tasha nods. Her gaze drops to the trees—the green things that grow, the world that has turned away from them all. “I thought I would—rewrite it? Shift everyone’s attention to things that mattered? I don’t know.”

“The Food Angel kept almost everyone alive over the winter,” Elyse says. She points up to the mountain. “That’s what the creature was. And that’s where it is. I’m sure of it.”

Stories are never only stories.

Tasha laughs, even though none of this is funny. “I guess it’s going to remain a story now,” she says.

“I know you don’t believe me,” Elyse says, “but it was there, Tasha. I know what I saw.”

Tasha shrugs. “We should go back,” she says. “We don’t want to be stuck here after dark.” She glances at the greenhouse as she and Annie help Elyse up. “No one told stories about the flowers,” she says. “Even Heather never said anything about them—and she had them in her house.”

Annie snorts. “I guess there’s not much you can do when the world wants to starve you out.” When they look at her, puzzled, she only shrugs. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s what’s been going on,” Annie says. “It doesn’t even take a doctor.”

As they move away, Tasha looks back at the greenhouse one last time. Flowers tumble from it, wild and happy. She felt no whisper of madness as they came close to it, no surge of despair.

It is only a greenhouse now , she thinks, soon to be gone entirely. And these are only flowers. This is all they’ve ever wanted to be.

They reach the city at dusk. They head straight for the townhouse. Around them, the same empty silence. The slow circle of birds overhead.

Tomorrow , Tasha thinks. Tomorrow the three of them will leave.

At the front steps, Elyse cocks her head. “What’s that sound?”

They all listen—they hear birds, the rush of wind, and then a deeper rumble.

Annie breathes out. “It sounds like a car.”

As one they move toward the sound—down the street, across the square and past the clinic.

People , Tasha thinks. People.

Beside her, Annie reaches for her pistol, then looks down sharply as she realizes it’s not there. It must have fallen from her hip as they struggled through the undergrowth toward the greenhouse.

At last the vehicle comes into view, a filthy U-Haul lumbering over the green-choked roads.

It pulls to a stop in front of them, and the driver opens the door and swings down onto the ground.

“Tasha,” he says.

It’s a voice they all remember.

They run until Estajfan can’t go on anymore. It isn’t even Estajfan who stops—Heather makes them.

“Stop!” she calls out into the night. “We have to stop!”

Estajfan is wheezing, his stomach heaving in and out. Heather scrambles to the ground. “We have to rest,” she says. “Estajfan— you have to rest.”

He shakes his head. “They’ll find us if we don’t keep going.”

“If you drop dead, they’ll find us for sure.” Heather pulls him away from the road and his siblings follow.

The trees are close, lit faintly by the moon. “Lie down,” Heather says as she leads him a little deeper. Estajfan obeys. “Aura,” she says, “you need to check his wounds.”

They all feel Petrolio shudder.

“It’s all right,” Estajfan says. “Petrolio, I’m all right. The woman—Moira—she helped.”

“She shot at you as we were running away!” Heather protests.