Chapter 8.
The next morning, there’s an abundance of silence.
Echo doesn’t speak to me. She barely looks at me. If she did this through anger, I could understand. But it’s worse than that. Something is broken inside. She gazes into the dust. I don’t want to talk anyway. I’ve had a lot of practice avoiding things these past few years, so I’m fine with the whole silence thing.
At first, anyway.
Slowly, the tension mounts. It mounts over breakfast. It mounts on the road. It’s hard not to interact with someone when you’re probably the only two people in a hundred miles, and one of you is pushing the other in a wheelbarrow. The silence grows over time, seeping in, smothering everything else. Hunting and gathering doesn’t help. Eating doesn’t help. Any little sound only enhances what isn’t being said. The tension insists upon itself. But still I shut it down, bury it, adhering to an ancient theory: ignore it and it will go away.
When Echo’s face isn’t blank, it’s pained. My ear is numb, my arm manageable, but her pain doesn’t fade. The day passes, my muscles ache, and at night Echo lies six feet away and cries quietly to herself. I feel bad now, so I tell myself Lectric would still be here without her. I have to justify the pain. My mind takes itself to court over the matter, but the judge frowns at me, because beneath it all I know it’s not really her fault. When she’s sleeping, I drape the blanket over her.
The next day, nothing’s changed. When we speak at all, it’s with eminent politeness. She insists on doing everything herself, no matter how much it pains her. When I cook the meat we wrapped yesterday, she shakes her head slowly, saying she’s not hungry. She can’t be anything but starving.
“Don’t be stupid,” I say.
She gives me a look that threatens to shatter the silence with thunder … then nothing. What can I do? We get back on the road. By my calculations, we’re still two hundred miles south of the z-line, yet around noon…
We see our first roamer.
It’s a new experience. Echo has seen them in abandoned towns west of Foundry, but I’ve never been down that way. I’ve heard a lot of talk about plague-walkers from travelers in Farmington, but I suspect half of it was lies and nonsense. Toyota has spoken of them too, though he was never been big on details.
Echo sees it first.
“Stop,” she whispers. The fear in her voice compels me to obey. She’s looking west. The land is still largely scrub-desert, though taller plants grow here and there. Houses are few and far between. Everything else is rubble and dust. At first, I can’t see what has her scared…
There’s movement along the horizon.
A man. A desert hermit. Yet something’s wrong with him.
“Roamer,” Echo whispers, and my blood turns cold. It’s one thing to hear tales over a hearth in the safety of your village. It’s something else to see a thing with your own eyes–to know that it’s there, right there, and you could touch it if you dared.
Even through my spyglass, the roamer is too far to make out the face. The body is hunched forward. It doesn’t shuffle as I imagined. It lifts its feet high with each step in a kind of slow, awkward march. Its body jerks unsteadily forward, struggling for balance, like a poorly programmed automaton.
It’s almost a let-down. From here, it doesn’t look particularly frightening. These things helped kill the World Before? How? It’s only the stories and Echo’s caution that keep the fear in me. Through the spyglass, I watch the roamer rip a plant out of the ground. The plant goes into its mouth. It’s torn apart, devoured.
“I thought they eat people,” I say.
“They bite people. They eat everything. If they ate everybody they bit, the plague wouldn’t have spread. There’d be no new biters.”
“Oh. Right,” I say stupidly.
“We have to go that way,” Echo says, pointing east, away from the roamer.
“Can it even see us from here?”
“If we can see it, it can see us. We don’t want that thing coming after us.”
“It doesn’t look so bad.”
We turn east regardless, and Echo isn’t satisfied until the roamer is out of sight. We circle wide around the roamer. Echo becomes more withdrawn than ever. She says nothing at all, except when we hit a particularly large bump, eliciting an involuntary moan. Her face is always pained. She tries to sleep, succeeding by the time we hit the next “town.”
It’s more rubble than anything. Only one house still stands. The windows are all broken, but someone has made repairs to the roof and doors–which makes me wary. I stop in a patch of shrubs on the edge of the area and watch for a while. Echo wakes up. I caution her for quiet. There’s no sign of life…
“Stay here. I’ll check things out,” I say.
“No!”
“I’ll just be a minute,” I say, pulling loose. I leave her the machine-pistol. It’s only got four bullets left, but that’s better than nothing. My crossbow is loaded and ready.
There’s no sign of life as I approach. The house is as dead as the world that built it. Still, I’m cautious. Every miniscule sound is a threat. After checking in all the windows, I go in through the front door. Empty. A few pieces of smashed furniture. A broken TV. Whoever made those repairs is long gone. But wait–what’s this? A coiled rope! It hangs from a hook on the wall. Score one for treasure-hunting.
I’ll take that.
I find a dusty compass in a kitchen drawer as well. With the right ingredients, I can make a compass myself, but this one’s old and fancy. It’ll fetch something good from the right trader. There’s nothing else of value. I check one last closet in the kitchen, opening the door and–
A yellow eye bulges in a puce socket, the skull showing through in patches on the right, the other eye missing, the remaining skin taut and dead like melted plastic, the teeth broken and jagged in silver-gray gums; and it’s coming forward, the jaws open and ready, an abomination, a thing that should never have been allowed the grace of motion; and my heart is screaming the same silent scream emanating through that single soulless pupil, and I’m tripping backwards over my own feet, squeezing the crossbow in a panic, the bolt is flying and missing and thudding uselessly into the wall, and I’m deader than dead…
And the zombie jerks to a stop.
A chain clinks. There’s a metal collar around its neck. It’s chained to the wall inside the closet. I stare at the thing, mesmerized. Every rotting detail is startlingly clear; this used to be a person? Crom. I scramble to my feet. My heart is in overdrive. The shakes come as the adrenaline lets go. I’m paranoid–are there others in the house? What kind of asshole chains a zombie in a closet? I can’t assess. The fear has put me out of my head. I have to get as far away from this house as possible.
The closet door won’t close; the thing’s arms are extended past the frame. I want my bolt back, and it’s stuck in the wall above. Using a broken plank, I push the limbs back inside, enough to get the door closed. I yank the bolt out of the wall and get the hell out of there.
I’m wheeling Echo down the road in a hurry, looking in all directions, before I can find the words to tell her what happened. She doesn’t say much even then. I can’t convey to her the full importance of what just happened. Or maybe it wasn’t important, but it sure felt that way. If I’d been a little slower, if the chain had been a little longer, I’d be food. I guess Echo was right. Better to keep roamers out of sight if you can.
I’m still thinking about it when we stop for the night. The thing was almost machine-like, an organic robot. There was something silvery and unnatural gleaming in the gums and skull. I don’t know what to make of it. Echo lies down first, away from me again, keeping the blanket. I watch the desert for a while.
At night, I dream it’s Ballard in the closet, and the chain is so long that he chases me into the street. Then Echo is there and she’s glad to see him. She hugs him. She
watches placidly when he comes after me, when he sinks his jaws into the soft flesh of my calf.
I wake with a start. I help into the wheelbarrow, and then she’s trying unsuccessfully to doze off again. I’ll have to hunt today, but I want to get a little further first. I can almost feel Echo’s despondence. She exudes it like a physical cloud. Her eyes are glazed and unfocused, her expression rigid. She refuses to eat what little we have. Nothing is of interest to her. Everything’s an unwanted distraction.
We set our camp close to the shore. Dusk is a few hours away still; I mumble something about foraging. Echo nods once, slowly. There’s something odd about her reaction, though I can’t say what. Heading into the desert alone, I have an uneasy feeling.
I’ve bagged a single tan desert rat and some edible plants by the time the sun is closing on the horizon. I return to our camp–but it’s empty. Echo is gone. A powerful dread overtakes me. My insides turn to ice. There’s only one explanation: there was another roamer. She’s dead. She’s one of them now.
Panicked, I follow a set of tracks from the camp. They lead toward New Sea. I’m at the top of the slope leading down toward the water … when I spot her. She’s on the ground, dragging herself toward the water. I look for the roamer. I look for blood, for bite-marks, for signs of a struggle. There’s only a fallen stick.
Confusion. Relief. She’s not one of them? What the hell is she doing? I jog down the slope. She has apparently hobbled most of the way here, leaning on the stick, before abandoning her support. She’s reached the sand at the bottom and is cutting a slow, wormlike path toward the ocean.
“Echo?”
She crawls faster. She can only use one arm and one leg, so “faster” is a relative term. I stand over her.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.
“Go away, Tristan.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Leave me alone. I don’t want to be a burden anymore.”
“So you’re … crawling into New Sea?”
She doesn’t answer. Apparently that’s her plan. For a moment, I just watch her, baffled.
“Echo. Stop.”
“No,” she says.
Well, I tried. Ludicrously, the phrase pops into my head.
“You can’t crawl into the ocean,” I say.
But apparently she can, because she’s almost there. The water washes over her hand, up to her shoulders. There’s a flutter of panic: will she actually do this? I curse and get down and physically grab her, yielding a tight pinch in my wounded bicep.
“Let me go!” she yells. I only grabbed her so she would pause and talk, but abruptly we’re drawn into an unintelligible scuffle, and I’m on my knees in the water, and somehow she ends up in a sitting position with my arms around her. She has no real chance of overpowering me. She slumps against me, defeated. She’s crying again, but this cry isn’t like the others. Despite being almost silent, it’s much worse. It comes from deep inside, shaking her whole body.
“You’re better off without me,” she says, though it comes out in a barely comprehensible high-pitched blur.
“No. I need you.”
“You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me. All I do is slow us down.”
She’s right too–about both parts. In her current state, I’d probably be better off on my own. In the Library, I liked being alone. No one to worry about. No one to argue with. No one to talk to at all, except Lectric … No one to lie beside on cold nights.
She makes a feeble attempt to move forward again.
“Annabel, don’t.”
“Don’t you dare call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“No, it’s not! I’m going to die anyway, Tristan. As soon as we hit more roamers, you’ll have to leave me. I can’t run. Face it. It’s better this way. Just go.”
I can’t think of a response, so we just sit there. I want to apologize for what I said the other night, but I don’t know how. Crispin would’ve known what to say. He’d always been the peacekeeper among us, calm and cautious. He could see through people’s words to their needs, even at that age.
And then I’m talking about Crispin and Berkley and my grandfather’s store. Words are pouring out. Echo calms by degrees, rocking slightly. She mentions Hailey, a younger girl she’d played with who’d been sickly and often stayed at home. I’d all but forgotten her. She and Annabel had been good friends. It feels good to mention Farmington, to know it had been real once. We talk until the moon comes up. Then there’s a pause.
“It’s never going to go away,” Echo whispers.
She means the pain. It’s constant. And she could be right, for all I know. Some wounds never heal. How would I feel if I knew I might be in pain for the rest of my life? How long before I crawled into the sea? Good thing I took the machine-pistol to hunt. Then again, I don’t think she would’ve used that. She doesn’t want to die. She just can’t endure her life anymore. Maye that’s true of anyone who finishes things that way.
“It’ll get better,” I say.
“No, it won’t.”
“We’ll look for medicine.”
She shakes her head. I’m not surprised. I can’t even convince myself.
“Will you just come back to camp?” I ask.
“What’s the point, Tristan?”
“Look, I don’t know, but there’s got to be something better than this. Something more. You can’t just give up. What about Haven?”
Silence.
“Fine. Screw it, let’s go into New Sea,” I say.
She gives me a look.
“Why not? Let’s go.”
I stand up and walk into the water.
“Tristan.”
“What?” Turning, ankle-deep.
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“I thought we were gonna do this.”
She sighs heavily, dropping her chin, defeated.
“Let’s go back to camp,” she mutters.
She leans on me for the walk back. When we’re there, I gather kindling for a fire. It’s a risk, but at this point neither of us much care, and there’s a good amount of old wood and dead plants available. Plus our clothes are wet from the struggle, and there’s a chill in the night air.
“Crom. You know how long it took these pants to dry last time?” I say to myself.
“Crom?” Echo repeats, giving me a weird look.
“It’s from Conan.”
She just looks more confused.
“You don’t know about Conan?”
I have to explain about the graphic novels in the Library. I take Volume Seven from my pack. We sit close and look at it together. This is how books were meant to be read: by the light of a flickering fire. It’s a little harder to see, but it does something to your imagination. Echo absorbs everything without comment. She’s not into it like I am, but she’s attentive, grateful for any distraction. A closeness hangs between us now, and I’m glad she’s talking to me again, even if she’s not technically saying much. We go through more than half the book, slowly, before the fire dies down.
“I’ll keep watch a while,” I say.
She doesn’t protest, just lies down with her head on the pack. I scatter the remnants of the fire. It can’t hurt to watch for roamers. I can’t sleep yet anyway. For once, I’m more worried about the future than the present. What if her pain really doesn’t go away? How’s she going to live like this? What if we come upon a pack of plague-walkers, and I can’t wheel her away fast enough?
We have to turn west. We can’t risk going further north. I’ll have to convince Echo.
When I wake in the morning, she’s still asleep, Lectric is still dead, and there’s an old man sitting on a twisted log just beyond the ashes of our fire. There’s a pistol on his hip and a rifle slung across his back. Startled, I reach for my crossbow–but it’s gone.