Nine Inesa
Nine
Inesa
I drive for an incalculable amount of time until my heartbeat returns to something approaching normal. Luka slumps in his seat, but keeps his rifle across his lap for easy access. Outside, the dark is seething and silent again, the air as thick as water.
I’ve taken a series of random turns down obscure roads, too panicked to pay attention to the map at all, so now I have no idea where we are. Also, the cracks in the windshield—rippling outward from the point of impact—make it nearly impossible to see what’s ahead. I keep having to stick my head out the window to my left.
Eventually, my body just seizes up on me. I no longer have the strength to press down on the gas pedal, and my fingers go slack around the steering wheel.
The car slows to a jagged halt.
“Sorry,” I mumble, staring vaguely out the cracked windshield. “I just...”
And then, almost unconsciously, I slump over, resting my forehead on the wheel. I squeeze my eyes shut until my vision pricks with stars.
Luka is silent. I can’t even hear him breathing.
“I just want it to stop,” I finish in a whisper.
“I know.”
I lift my head, slowly. My voice is hoarse. “Do you think she’s dead?”
“I don’t know.” Luka glances down at his rifle. “It wasn’t a very clean shot. I couldn’t see well.”
“Yeah. It’s dark.”
My words sound like they’re coming from the mouth of a stranger. Even my tongue feels numb. It reminds me of when Luka and I were little and we found huge bushels of pokeweed in the woods. The delicate white flowers and shiny black berries are poisonous, but the shoots and leaves are edible. We hadn’t eaten all day, so we’d tried to boil the leaves like Dad had taught us. But it tasted so sour that our tongues itched and stung for days.
The memory brings me back to myself, like a ghost possessing a body. I’m in the driver’s seat of the Wesselses’ car, who knows how many miles from home. Luka is sitting across from me. I’m three hours into my Gauntlet. An Angel almost killed me.
The Angel. Her face returns to me, so appallingly, unnaturally white. I’ve seen corpses that aren’t as pale.
Nothing I can envision is so white. Her hair, too blanched to be called blond. And her eyes. Black and unfathomably deep. As hypnotic as a snake’s. The memory of them makes my heart leap and lodge in my throat.
“Let’s just hope she’s dead,” Luka says at last. “Good fucking riddance.”
The venom in his voice makes me shiver. It’s not hard to be afraid—whenever I close my eyes, I see her face and my stomach hollows and my blood turns to ice. But it’s harder to hate. I fish for anger, for the righteousness that Luka seems to feel. I can’t find it. I just feel a horrible, dragging heaviness, as if there’s water sucking at my feet.
Maybe this is why I’m weak. If I could hate her, maybe I would have done something— anything —instead of sitting there gaping, frozen with terror. If not for Luka, I would be dead. Everything is tangled up inside me, all of it so muddled and bleary, and when I get this way, there’s only one thought that cleaves through the murky depths. It’s a phrase that’s almost soothing in its brusque simplicity.
Mom was right.
“Still,” I say thickly, “we should get going again.”
“Yeah,” Luka says.
For the first time, I notice how tightly his fingers are clenched around the barrel of his gun. His knuckles are white, bone straining against skin. He’s sixteen , I think. A year younger than me. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget.
The cracks in the windshield are so bad that it’s impossible to keep driving. We come up with an inelegant solution, which involves Luka standing on the hood and bashing the butt of his rifle against the glass until it shatters, while I watch from the road and wince.
“It’s not Dr. Wessels’s day,” I say, as Luka jumps down from the hood.
“Yeah, well, he should’ve known the risks. We’ll pay him back when this is over.”
I’m not sure how we’ll manage that when we barely make enough to feed ourselves most weeks. But then, I’m not sure if I’ll even be alive when this is over. One thing at a time. I walk over to help Luka brush the shards of glass off the seats.
We work in dutiful silence for a few moments, until I say quietly, “Thank you.”
We never say it to each other, not even for small things, like, Thanks for putting up the sandbags , or Thanks for fixing the hole in the roof. And we certainly never say things like, Thanks for risking your life in the woods every day to hunt for our dinner , or Thank you for being up to your elbows in deer guts so neither of us have to go into the red. Expressing gratitude so openly feels strange. Because thank you implies debt, and you never want to owe anybody anything, not even your own family.
Especially not your own family.
But part of it, too, is that I’ve always seen the things we do for each other as separate from the tangle of favors and dues, tallies and tabs. If we started keeping track of our respective balances, it would never end. Should Luka say, Thanks for letting me crawl into your bed when I was five and Mom and Dad wouldn’t stop fighting? Should I say, Thanks for punching Adrian Pietersen after he pinned me down and tried to stick his hand up my shirt behind Mrs. Prinslew’s shop ?
The silence is long, and it seems to stretch out between us, a physical thing—between our hands, nicked with tiny scratches from the glass, toiling at the same task. His hands are bigger, rough with calluses, and mine are smaller and softer, but the olive tone of our skin is the same.
At last, Luka says, “If only it’d been a better shot. Then we’d know for sure that she’s dead.”
The Angel’s face flashes through my mind. Those black, black eyes. “I thought it was a pretty good shot.”
“That’s why Dad never trusted you with a gun.”
There’s just a fleck of humor in his voice, and it defuses the seriousness of the moment. I huff out a laugh. “At least we know he’s right about one thing, then. That’s a good omen, right?”
“I’ll take it.” Luka brushes the last bit of glass off his seat. “Come on.”
We climb back into the car. Even the air feels colder now, sharper. Hostile. Whenever I blink, I see the Angel, her pale hair rippling. Sometimes she even appears in the path of the headlights—but that, at least, I know is a mirage, a trick of my exhausted and panic-stricken mind.
Sometimes it’s Mom who darts across the road, blanket trailing behind her, feet bare. I resist the urge to slam on the brakes. I press down steadily on the gas and keep driving, as the vision dissipates like smoke.
It’s less than an hour before the car starts making troubling noises. I pull over and Luka opens the hood. There’s blue-white smoke wafting from the engine. Not that either of us has a single clue what that means. We both stare down, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed in bewilderment. Luka dares to reach down and touch the bizarre metal tubing, but he jerks his hand back almost instantly, fingertips singed bright red.
“Fuck,” he says.
I squint at the engine, then poke one of the tubes gingerly. Nothing happens, except that the smoke grows thicker and more acrid. Luka pulls down his sleeves to cover his palms and fiddles with some of the knobs. They make a sinister grinding sound.
My brain has literally never felt smaller. It doesn’t help that I’ve gone almost twenty hours without sleep. Luka takes out his tablet and tries to give himself a crash course on repairing an engine, but it’s hard when all we can search is “what does that nozzle thing do” or “why is there black stuff dripping from the undercarriage.”
“Even if we figure out what’s wrong,” I say, “we probably don’t have the tools or the parts to fix it.”
Luka scrolls through a page of dense, incomprehensible automobile repair tips. “And I doubt there’s anyone nearby who knows how to fix a gas-powered car.”
“Probably not.”
Silence covers us, unpunctuated by bird trills or cricket warbles. I shiver at the eerie quiet.
“As long as we’re just waiting here, we’re sitting ducks.” Luka turns off his tablet with a furious exhale. “Damn it.”
I didn’t expect to hear the pitch of frustration in Luka’s voice. Usually he’s the epitome of the strong, silent type. Strangely, though, his anxiety makes me calmer. “It’s all right. We’ll just—we’ll have to continue on foot.”
Luka gives me a scornful look. “You saw how quickly she caught up to us when we were driving. We don’t stand a chance on foot. Even if we run. And no offense, but I don’t think you have the stamina for that.”
The back of my neck prickles. “I’m sorry I’m such a liability.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s what it feels like.”
A part of me knows I’m not being fair. But Mom has poisoned my brain, and that poison is spreading, seeping into everything. Weak. Stupid.
Luka stares at me, unflinching.
“Just leave me, then,” I say. I draw in a breath that puffs up my chest, feigning strength where I don’t feel it. “Go back to Esopus. You and Mom will manage fine without me.”
“Fucking stop it, Inesa. Don’t do this right now.”
“Do what?” The tip of my nose is growing hot. “This was never going to work. I’m not... Mom was right. I can’t do this, I can’t—”
A short, rough sob wrenches itself from my throat, and my eyes water. A thousand emotions flit across Luka’s face, because this is part of our silent agreement: not to make each other cry, not to burden the other person with your fears, to pretend you don’t have any fears. I reach up to brush away the tears before they can fall.
As Luka opens his mouth to reply, there’s a strange, guttural noise from the bushes beside us.
I watch the color drain from Luka’s face. Every drop of blood in my body turns to ice.
Another sound, like twigs snapping under a boot. The bushes rustle.
Very, very quietly, Luka says, “Let’s go, Inesa.”
Go where? I want to ask. But my mouth is too dry to speak.
We’ve been so terrified of the Angel that it was too easy to forget the reasons no one leaves Esopus Creek unless they have to. Reasons why the town is surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence. Reasons why if you do leave Esopus Creek—especially alone, at night—there’s a chance you’re never coming back.
Luka and I take a few cautious steps away from the trees, but there’s not much room between us and the now useless car. Eventually I’m standing flush against the side of it, hands clenched into fists, while the rustling sound grows louder and closer.
We’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, and I can feel Luka trembling. His rifle is still lying across the passenger seat. Without turning, he reaches his arm around his back, through the window, and grabs it. The car’s headlights blink off, and there’s only the scant light of the moon, which casts everything in an icy, alien silver. Briefly they blink on and then off again, plunging us into total blackness.
Something launches itself out of the brush and the shadows, but I only catch a glimpse of it. Luka catches my wrist and hauls me around the other side of the car.
“Inesa, run !”
I stumble across the empty road, blood roaring in my ears. Without hesitation, Luka plunges ahead into the woods, dragging me after him, the growling, snarling creature just steps behind.
In the pitch dark, we scramble over tree roots and rocks, branches scraping my cheeks, thorns tearing at my clothes. Luka pulls me along with such relentlessness that I’m afraid he’s going to yank my arm out of its socket. I’m more afraid he’s going to let go. But he doesn’t, and we stumble on through the darkness.
My lungs are burning. I want to say, stop, please, I can’t do this , but my throat is too parched to speak and my tongue feels dry and heavy in my mouth. I don’t know how long it takes, how many steps we’ve put between us and the road, but eventually, the rustling and snarling behind us ceases.
We’ve lost the thing. For now.
Luka’s chest is heaving. He lets go of me and rests his hand against a nearby tree, doubled over. He’s still clutching the rifle in his other hand, but his arm looks limp, trembling like a leaf in the wind.
I’m woozy with the ebbing of adrenaline, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. My vision blurs and sharpens and blurs again. I lean back against the tree trunk, eyes swimming. When I wipe at my budding tears and runny nose, my palm comes away bloody.
It doesn’t seem real. Nothing seems real anymore.
Luka coughs, then straightens up abruptly. He was one of those kids who always seemed to get sick: from the rocking of a raft in the water, from eating food that didn’t quite settle right in his stomach. He’s mostly grown out of it. You’d have to, living in Esopus Creek. But seeing him like this, face pale and slightly green, eyes damp and cracked through with red, he looks like a little boy again.
We stand there in utter silence, while time seems to warp and bend. The sun comes up again, finally. Just the faint glimmer of it over the horizon, dewy and barely yellow. It casts the trees and the grass with a light like honey. It illuminates the sheen of cold sweat on Luka’s brow. It shows me my shaking hands, blood dried into the creases of my palm.
“Where are we?” I ask, at the same time Luka says, “What was that thing?”
The answer to both is I don’t know , so we lapse back into silence.
“Your face,” Luka says quietly, after a moment. “It’s all scratched.”
“Yeah.” I wipe it again. “I must have run into some brush.”
The burgeoning light mottles the forest floor, squeezing between the gaps in the tree canopy. The ground is remarkably dry, mostly dirt instead of moss and the long, bright green grass that I’m used to. The trees are all pines, the lower level of their branches brown and dead because not enough sun or rain can reach them. It gives the forest a sense of bleak strangeness. I feel impossibly far from home.
If the ground were wet, we would’ve left tracks, a path to follow back to the car. But the forest floor is carpeted with dried pine needles. We had to flee so quickly we couldn’t carry anything with us, except Luka’s rifle. No food, no water, not even my tablet. Even though I can’t tell how much time has passed, how much time is left in my Gauntlet, the tracker still pulses like a second heartbeat.
I swallow around the lump in my throat. “We have to get back to the road.”
Luka’s face is hard. I can’t bear to speak aloud the hopelessness of our situation, and neither can he. But then, to my surprise, he reaches into the front pocket of his coat. He takes out Dad’s compass and holds it out on the flat of his palm.
“We have to go north,” he says.
“Is that the way to the car?” I wonder if somehow, he’s managed to keep track.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “But it’s our best chance of getting to safety. Of finding...”
He trails off before he can say it. Invoking Dad’s name is kind of like proclaiming you still believe in Santa Claus. I know some imagined version of Dad still lives in Luka’s head. A version of Dad who’s a hero, who outsmarts the system, who maneuvers out of the restraints that keep the rest of us held down.
But there’s nothing else to believe in, here in the forest, miles away from any semblance of home, with the Angel trailing us and worse things lurking among the dense and shadowy trees. So when Luka points the way, I follow him. Following some dream of our father that might as well be a ghost.
The scenery changes as we walk. The ground becomes hilly, uneven. The trees are at least more familiar, spiky conifers bleeding into deep-green deciduous brush. Lichen ladders up their trunks and bulbous moss grows on their branches. There’s the ever-present sound of rainwater trickling from the leaves.
All of this could let me believe we’re in the woods around Esopus Creek, with our house and the shop close enough to see between the gaps in the trees. But as we stomp through the leaf pulp, my spine is stiff with fear.
Luka and I don’t talk. I can’t even think, really. My mind feels fuzzy, like static. And always, always , when I allow my thoughts to wander, they return to the Angel’s face, that shock of white in the murky darkness. I get so lost in the memory— those impossibly dark, empty eyes —that I stumble over an upturned rock. Luka turns around.
“I’m okay,” I say.
He just nods.
In the absence of adrenaline, I start to feel the weight of the hours. Hours without sleep, food, or water. My throat is dry and my empty stomach is in knots. And the exhaustion makes my vision blur as I try to tread carefully along the edge of what has become an increasingly steep ravine.
Luka stops so suddenly that I slam into his back. I stammer out an apology, but he gives me a fierce look, finger pressed to his lips. That’s when I see it: strips of fabric draped among the tree branches.
My blood turns to ice.
It’s not just tattered cloth. There are crude stick sculptures, twigs held together with dried mud. There are wooden signs driven into the tree trunks, the writing too weather-blanched to read.
Luka takes a hesitant step forward. I follow, heart lodged in my throat. The stick sculptures grow more elaborate as we make our way through the arbor. They hold stones with strange markings etched into them, clumps of moss the size of my head.
I stop to examine the nearest one. Inside is a bundle of small, dried-out bones, wrapped in twine and smeared with still-drying blood.
“Animal bones?” I whisper to Luka.
He doesn’t reply. He just raises a trembling finger to point.
Just ahead of us, nailed to the trunk of a large, spreading oak, is an arrangement of sticks and bones. In the very center is a human skull. It’s crowned with a set of enormous antlers, and where its eyes should be are two smooth, white stones.
There are people who choose to unplug from Caerus’s grid entirely—either because their debt is so staggering, it would take seven lifetimes to repay, or simply, like Dad, out of high-minded dogma. But unlike Dad, who vanished like a ghost, a lot of those people hang around.
Once, in the woods outside Esopus Creek, I came across one of these off-gridders in his campsite. It was just a tarp pulled between tree trunks, hanging limply over a wooden raft. I wondered how he didn’t drown when the water table rose.
“You can never win with Caerus,” the man said.
Luka would have told me to run, but he looked too thin and too worn-out to be dangerous. At least, not yet.
“It’s not a game,” I replied warily.
“Not to us.”
I was lucky the man I encountered was still sentient and mostly human. His mind untainted and his appetites contained. By now, though, I’m sure he’s far gone.
The off-gridders have to hunt for their food—no Caerus drones airlifting them freeze-dried chicken thighs—and what they hunt, of course, are mutations. Sometimes in the outskirts of Lower Esopus you can find the picked-over corpse of a deer mutation, its antlers still dripping with moss, flesh hanging in strips from its rib cage, all four eye sockets empty. I saw one once, and the swarm of blackflies was so loud, I couldn’t even hear my own breath. I fled before I could catch a glimpse of the thing that killed it.
There’s a reason no one hunts the mutations for food unless they have no other choice. The animals are corrupted, irradiated, their gene pools so tainted that eating their flesh is like swallowing poison. If you consume enough of their meat, you become something corrupted, too: feral, violent, not quite human.
Wends, we call them. I’ve never seen one up close. Sometimes there are flashes in the brush, a quick snatch of grayish skin. The smell of decay, heavier than swamp air, thick enough to make you retch.
Now a breeze picks up, ruffling my hair and carrying a scent toward us. The scent of rotting flesh, of meat gone bad. The bones in the trees rattle like wind chimes. And then, in the distance, there’s an ear-splitting, unearthly howl.