and see Big Daddy, sit on His lap like he’s been dreaming of. There were lots of true believers who snuffed it at the start, before word got around about how great it was, how great everything was, a Better life with our techno-angel friends. The wrong kind of angels for this old fart, but Mark had bought the story and tried to sell her on it, even got his sick brother to sneeze on her but she didn’t catch it, she who was immune and didn’t want to anyway. Mark wanted to, wanted to and wasn’t immune and so he did catch it, leaving her to nurse him through five days of fever until he became too good for her, every physical and mental flaw scoured away, too good and too kind and too understanding and too brotherly and untroubled and unmoved and—
Bang her ears are ringing and the farmer’s falling over and away from her, bumping sideways off his cane and onto the flat-top stump beside him, his head slamming right into it, just missing a moonlit ax blade jammed into the wood. A black stain spreads in the middle of his robe––red when she turns her light to it, a two-inch arterial fountain spurting from the hole, two inches, then one, dwindling to a faintly pulsing puddle.
Shit, shit, shit, she shot him and didn’t even mean to. Or did she? Deciding not to think about that, she moves in to see if she can stop it, pressing a hot soaked fold of his robe against the hole and almost tasting the copper smell of the quart he’s already pumped out. It works about as well as she figures: a last soggy exhalation and he lies as quiet as the grave she’s going to have to dig for him.
Then he opens those glinting sunk eyes, grabs her jacket and says, “Nope––guess that didn’t do it.”
Casey twists and jumps back, the heels of her boots landing hard. She’s heard about this.
“Same as Sarah; same problem, exactly.” A cough, a gob of spit, and a hiss of air from his ventilated chest. “Every night with the pillow, quieting her fight. And every morning there she was, alive and fevering again.”
Casey takes another step away.
“Kept on getting Better, just like me.” He looks down at his wound in wonder. “It’s almost like you got to chop them up in pieces.” A single wet and bitter laugh. “Or do your damage to the part that really counts.”
His hand has come up with his gun, but now it’s bright in the moonlight and looks an awful lot like hers. Casey doesn’t have to check; a certain reassuring weight is missing from her side. Instead she peers at the shadowed grass, searching for the one he must have dropped.
“Don’t bother––rusted solid, couldn’t harm a fly. Had my hopes on you, but... well. Shouldn’t expect a girl to do a man’s work.” He presses the muzzle up under his jaw.
“I thought that was a sin,” she says, moving back in.
“I’d sooner lay in Satan’s arms than with those heathens.” He pulls the hammer back but pauses. The seconds stretch; a bubbling exhalation, and then another.
A man’s work? He didn’t have it in him. Still, a second chance is all he’s asking––a second chance at dying. Casey moves in closer, puts a hand over his and he doesn’t pull away. His skin is burning, his eyes wide and on her. Should she say a prayer? No, he’s said his own. Placing her thumb on the curl of his index finger, she pushes down.
His lips puff out in a hollow cordite bark; the skull’s exit wound is messy but she remembers to turn away in the last instant, catches only the slightest spray that leaves no stain on her palm when she wipes at it.
....
The farmer’s head, or the ruin that remains, has fallen back to the flat-topped stump. Casey is numb until the Maker’s Mark is in her hand and she’s tipping it towards those stars, towards the silver fucking spheres, towards Mark’s and hers and every other idiot’s missing future. But not this biblical dick’s, she thinks: his future is assured. Her throat burns fierce––she almost coughs but stifles it, can’t bear to hear death’s hoarse bark again.
‘Chop them up in pieces...’ He looks dead enough, but he did last time, too. The third time being the charm. Casey puts a boot beside his head and levers the ax from the wood. The blade is cold as that doorknob and sharp as the anger that lit his shrouded eyes.
She’s small but strong and eventually gets the hang of it, bringing the heavy blade high, letting it drop in the October night but also rushing it, helping the steel accelerate to meet the flesh. His stringy neck is stubborn––she’s still learning––but then she finds her rhythm. A few down to the bone, a good one to snap clear through, another swing to cleave the hanging tissues that remain. Then haul whatever limb is handy to get the rest positioned, and move on to the next.
....
Six pits in the soft brown silt that stretches out beside the creekbed. One small and round, one the size of a burlap sack, and four foot-wide trenches, all scattered as far as possible from the cooling ashes of her campfire. Casey digs the last too deep, so deep the spade bumps over faint round white shapes and she rears back, thinking skulls until she sees river rocks, the buried bed below the silt.
Then the moon has set and the sky is black and she’s bent with hands on knees and panting, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, sweat cooling as the night air wraps itself around her freckled arms. The bottle is empty and so is Casey, empty of thoughts and self-loathing and yes even tears as she carries the blood-drained parts to their allotted resting places and drops them in, the parceled flesh manageable except for his stubby rib-sprung trunk, which she still can lug, fingers digging into a stretched-out flap of belly skin, over the narrow water without unseemly dragging.
Afterwards, a sink-sized upstream pool holds liquid ice that she plunges her hands and wrists and forearms into, then shakes them dry and back into the jacket, to stumble up the hill and fall into the outline of her tent.
....
Casey dreams of the dark earth moving, a low moaning grind that echoes up from far fathoms, starting here and stopping there but always somewhere moving, always changing, never quiet. In the dream she’s kneeling, ear to the ground, listening hard. The rumbles are indecipherable, a deeper language than she knows and one that tells her nothing. When the sun crests the rise and hits her tent she wakes in a sweat, unzips the bag she’d wormed into and remembers every unwanted detail of last night.
Fresh air––fresh air, now. She kicks the tent’s flaps aside, sits up to grab its fiberglass front hoop and falls back with it, dragging the bendy aluminum stakes out of the ground. Blue sky above and all around her, the dusty rattle of the surrounding trees’ remaining leaves, and air that smells untouched by the hand of Man. It could be worse, she thinks, if not more lonely.
A thin, high whine—Casey turns her head to spot, between the branches, an ultralight going east. Twin dots of rider and engine under a birdlike span of fabric, an easy mile away. She doubts she can attract the pilot’s attention, a good thing given the saturated mess around the stump behind the house. Casey knows she’s not alone, just that the un-Bettered––the uninfected and the unwilling––are few and far between. It was too excellent a virus to miss many, and too excellent a deal, eternal health and peace and even wisdom, for almost anyone to refuse.
But when the unwilling became infected...
Casey stands up quick and dresses: what’s done is done. Five minutes later she’s breaking camp, on all fours to roll up her sleeping pad when she feels the grating rumble of her dreams, a vibration deep beneath her knees. Oh please, she thinks, not that. Her jaw tight, she continues, refusing to turn back to check the six scattered pits beside the stream. Finally she carries the bag and pad and tent down, trying to look only at the bike but unable to avoid noticing the six heaped-up mole trails in the dirt, heading for each other. All arrow-straight except for one––was it his left arm?––that has jogged around a sapling. Even in pieces, the Bettered were considerate of green and growing things.
She almost leaves, worried that his head will pop up first, a horrorshow she knows she can’t stomach. But the silt is bulging and shifting over the largest chunk, which she’d dumped navel-down, and after loading her bike she sit
s along the border of trees, arms around her knees. There is a welcome note of humor when his bare butt wiggles free and vigorously wags the dirt from two well-proportioned hemispheres. Their unwrinkled perfection is followed by the rest of him; broad dust-streaming shoulders, the straining cords of his bent legs, and then, with spread hands flat and pushing at the soil on either side, the emerging chin and face and brow of a blue-eyed, gold-haired farmer of fifty years ago, in his prime and then some. He blinks and snorts and puffs the grit from his lips before he stretches out and spots her.
The once-old man stands tall and square, yards away and not approaching. Naked muscles twitch and flex, but she knows she’s in no danger, that the farmer of this morning is way too evolved to be a threat. His skin is amazing: not a healing scar, not the faintest red line from his wounds––her wounds––last night. As she watches, a pebble-sized bump forms between his crotch and one hip. The same place Mark’s hernia scar had been, before it wasn’t. A darkness in the lump’s center thins and dilates to exude a deer-poop clot of earth. It plops to his feet; by the time she looks up the skin has sealed itself, baby pink. Next door, his cock is as fabulous as Mark’s was, after. Fabulous and, just like Mark’s, unrisen.
Casey