White Horse

EIGHTEEN

It’s Morris’s doing, I know it is, constantly pairing me with Nick. She’s got this wild idea that love and romance can still flourish in a dying world, as though the dead are some kind of emotional compost. When I confront her about it, she denies everything.

“We all talk to him but he gets to talk to no one. Doesn’t seem right, now, does it?”

I assume the indignant position: palms flat on her desk, leaning inward. It’s behind this pose that I hide my feelings.

“So you’ve assigned me as his—what? Therapist? Jesus, I was a janitor.”

“Domestic engineer.”

“A janitor. And I don’t know a thing about therapy.”

She shrugs one-shouldered. It’s a feminine movement inside a gender-neutral uniform.

“You went to therapy.”

“I’ve flown in a plane, too, but that doesn’t make me a pilot.”

“Just listen to the guy. These are dark, dark times, my friend, and even cavemen need a shoulder to lean on.”

I name the donkey Esmeralda for no good reason. It fits. I don’t know why, but when I speak it, the name slips on the way a favorite sweater does on a chilly day.

She comes willingly, does Esmeralda, for all the quirks of her stubborn species. Maybe she knows where there’s people there’s food. Or maybe she likes the looks of me and wants some company. Or perhaps she just wants to feel like she has purpose.

So we take turns carrying the backpack. Just because history makes her a beast of burden doesn’t mean I desire the same. I do my share. Either way, she plods along behind me at the end of her rope. When she stops, I do the same. Esmeralda is skilled in the art of finding water and food.

The Roma camp lies miles behind us now. I don’t know how many. Two days’ worth, however many that is. I’m on the path to Delphi. Yes, I remember what the Roma said about the monster woman who lives there. Medusa, they said, with her snake hairdo and petrifying gaze.

Another day slouches by, followed by the night, and on its heels another day. The road narrows the closer I get to Delphi. Or maybe it just seems that way, compressed and colored in ominous tones by the Roma stories.

My imagination doesn’t conjure up the earth’s split lip as we round the road’s gentle curve. The chasm is real and it’s separating me from where I need to go, so deep and so wide is the injury. There’s a flip-flopping in my belly, as though the little person growing in there senses my longing and finds me pathetic with need. Pressing a not entirely reassuring hand against the bump, I stop to figure my way through.

There is another road, though it is less traveled. Instead of asphalt, it’s a flattened grass dogleg that jags north, then east, then north again until it fades from sight. It’s not its disappearance that bothers me but the where it’s disappearing to. While the road slices through towns and countryside, the lesser path delves. Into a bank of brush and olive trees it slithers, parting the greenery just enough to dip its tongue inside.

There should be a sign, one fashioned from weather-worn planks, staked into the ground. There should be a fading message in once-white paint, warning me to turn back or die. But there’s nothing, not even a dent in the grass where a stake might have been shoved into the ground. The lack of a sign is a sign in itself: Keep Out.

Foreboding fills me until I’m bloated with dread. What would Nick say? If it was just we two sitting in his comfortable office, batting banter across the low table, what would he tell me about handling this situation? I suck in my breath, hold it until my chest stings, then let it out nice and easy because I know what he’d say.

He’d tell me to take a chance. To not be afraid to explore the unknown. It’s only strange until we stare it in the face and say, Hey, how are ya doing?

“Hey, how are ya doing?” I mumble the words, don’t inject any substance or volume. The last thing I want to do is tempt fate by announcing my arrival. So I stare down the unknown, hoping to dispel its air of doom.

Esmeralda snorts, her hooves suddenly stamping an agitated dance on the blacktop.

“Settle, girl. Easy.” I whisper the words and listen. The sensation of someone— or something—else creeps over me like a smallpox blanket settling around my shoulders.

Out there, alien breath is held as fast as mine. It eases out in time with my own. Could be paranoia, but it’s not paranoia if they’re really out there. Isn’t that how it goes? I’ve long tired of this world where I’m constantly stalked by things I can almost see, things that hide on the edges of plain sight. Once upon a time, just a few months ago, if you held your bag tight, stayed away from dark alleys, locked your doors and windows, you were relatively safe from harm.

My hand tightens on the rope that binds us. Judging from the defiant head toss and the challenging snort, she’s not happy about me leading her off the path and into the olive grove. She doesn’t have to be comfortable with it, she just has to follow and watch my back.

The bushes and undergrowth have become set in their ways and they’re reluctant to part when my boots tamp them down and shove them apart. We come to an uneasy agreement where they spread enough to let us through, then spring up into their previous position. This way they retain their wild dignity and Esmeralda and I have more or less safe passage.

The wall of silvery green swallows us whole, presenting me with a double-edged blade I have no choice but to grasp. Along one honed edge, that presence dances with its copycat breath, while the unknown glides along the other. Choose the evil you haven’t looked in the mouth and counted its iron fillings. Risk the other choice being your salvation.

Nonetheless, the choice is made and I press on with my ass on my ass. Laughter burbles up my throat. This is ridiculous. Nothing about any of this is sane. Each tragedy has stacked up on the last so that I’m left staring at a teetering tower of black blocks. And yet, the harder I stare at them, the less real they become.

“If I’m crazy, do I know I’m crazy or am I in denial?”

Esmeralda says nothing. She plods along behind me without expression. We walk quietly, although not silently, and I hope that the sounds of nature’s takeover are enough to drown out the us.

“It’s not just a river, eh?”

We walk and I watch for her, the wild snake-haired woman of the woods.

Nick laughs when I say, “If you need to talk, I’m here for you.”

“Did Morris send you to do my job for me?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t want to.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I look up at him and, despite myself, my lips twitch upwards. “Are you analyzing me now?”

He gives that half smile, the one that should be delivered over drinks in a dimly lit bar instead of this makeshift infirmary.

“Why not?”

I laugh, shake my head. “Don’t even try it. I don’t want to be picked apart like meat from a chicken bone.”

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed? But I know why. I don’t want him rooting around inside me, helping himself to the bits and pieces I stash away for safekeeping. Gadgets and walls, some of them hiding silly things like my attraction to him.

“Because… because it’s easier to keep all this together, to keep the horror in perspective if I wrap it up in pretty paper and stash it in a box marked Do Not Touch. That’s why. Giving it a poke won’t lead to anything good.” I expect him to laugh again but he doesn’t. Instead, he nods. His booted feet swing up until they’re resting on his desk. Mine mirror his. For a moment I think we’re two people who look comfortable together, and maybe part of me is, but there are pieces of me that are anything but comfortable with Nick. Looking at him pokes and prods me in tender places I don’t want to be touched.

Hands clasp behind his neck. He shifts in the chair, and as he does, his eyes slide from my neck to my navel and back up to meet my eyes. “So pick me apart. Analyze me. Do what Morris ordered.”

I swallow slow, wishing I could rise from the chair and walk away, but I know if I do, the movement will be clunky and herky-jerky. And if there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to look anything less than cool and composed in front of him. I don’t want him to see what’s there. I don’t want him to see what isn’t there.

“I think you’re like me.”

“Go on.”

His words embolden me; my thoughts begin to pick up steam, and along with them, my mouth.

“I think you’re functioning on autopilot, doing what has to be done. Part of you died in that war because you’re a doctor, not a killer, and being ordered to kill made you feel like shit, then you came back here, to hell, and all you found was another serving of death, only bigger and scarier and more personal, because it took everyone you loved. I think you want me because I’m from before, when things were normal and sane. I remind you of the way it used to be. It’s not me you desire, it’s the memories I evoke. I belong to that other world. And any ‘us’ there could have been belongs to that world, too.”

On that note, my voice dies so I sit and wait and watch. At first there’s nothing, but I can see him chewing on my words and I’m half afraid he’ll tell me I’m right, that it’s not me, really, he wants, but the past and me by default because I’m a relic from that time.

“You know what I want right now?”

A thousand things spring to mind, all involving twisted sheets and bodies slick with sweat. My eyebrow lifts, asking the question because my mouth can’t be trusted.

When he smirks, I can’t discern if he’s inside my head without permission or if I’m wearing my lust on my face for him to see.

“Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“KFC?” Not what I expected to hear.

“No. Kentucky Fried Chicken. The way it used to be when we were kids. Crispy skin, gravy, coleslaw, the whole shebang.”

“Back before fast food became too fast to be good.”

“You’re there,” he says.

“I’d kill for pizza.” The words pop out easily, and then in a flash I realize what I’ve said. I should feel bad and I do, but I can’t help myself, I start to laugh.

Nick throws back his head and lets out a belly laugh.

“Shit. Could I be less sensitive?”

“Gallows humor, baby. It’s good to get that out.”

When, I wonder, did I go from Zoe to baby? “But—”

“Don’t worry, it was funny.” He pats his lap. “Come here.”

“I’m your appointed therapist. It would be unprofessional.”

“Where’s the harm?”

“I could love you and then you’ll be gone or you could love me and then White Horse gets me and I die. That’s the harm. We’ve been hurt enough. All of us.”

I look away because I’ve said too much. I intended to close a tiny window and wound up throwing open a door.

Nick doesn’t speak. His boots fall from the desk; he rises from the chair and moves around the desk to my side of the barrier.

“You sound like Oprah.”

“Dead. About a month ago.” Morris bounces in through the open door and stops. “Am I interrupting?”

I look at Nick. He’s watching me, waiting for my cue.

“Yes,” I say slowly. “I kind of think you are.”

“About time,” she says.

He touches me then, and I am lost in him forever, though I do not speak the words.

We make love at the end of the world, but we don’t pin a name to what we do. Lack of a label makes it no less true. The love is there in his hands as they clamp my hips hard against him. It’s there on his tongue as he sets me ablaze with explicit descriptions of all the things he wants for us. His eyes shine with it when he understands I’ve let down all my walls for him and only him.

Love fills all the gaps in our souls.

“I have to go,” Nick whispers in the dark one night.

“What?” I prop myself up on one elbow and try to look as serious as I can with bare breasts and hair styled with an egg beater. “You can’t just leave.”

“If there’s even a chance my parents are alive, I’m gonna take it.”

And what about me? What about us? I leave the words in my head, don’t speak them, because they’re soaked in selfishness.

“What if I want to come with you?” Ask me to come. Please.

His fingers stroke the curve of my hip.

“You’ll be safer here. At least I’ll know where you are.”

“None of us are safe anywhere.”

“I won’t risk you.”

“Look around, Nick, don’t be naïve. We’re all at risk.”

He grabs my arms. His fingers press hard against my flesh.

“Do whatever you have to to survive, Zoe. You’re the best thing in my world. Don’t fuck it up by dying.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

His fingers unhook themselves from my skin. He buries one hand in my hair. Holds my face with the other. And this time when he’s inside me he roars until he’s empty and I am full.

In the quiet afterward, I stay close to him, half hoping our bodies will melt together so we’ll be bound forever.

“Don’t go where I can’t follow,” I whisper. “Please.”

I will stay awake. I will. But sleep snatches me and drags me far from him. When I awake, it’s in a warm bed with a stone-cold Nick-sized patch along the length of my body. The frost spreads until it holds my heart hostage in its crystalline grip. Nick has left, I can feel it.

I can’t hate him for leaving me. How could I when all I’m capable of is loving him?

“What is it?”

I stare at the envelope in Morris’s outstretched hand. She waves it at me like I’m supposed to do something clever with it.

“It’s a letter.”

“Is it a bill? Because the utilities haven’t been all that reliable lately.”

She flips it at me. “It’s from lover man.”

“Nick?”

“Unless you’ve got another one stashed away.”

I snatch the envelope from her hands, pinch it between a finger and thumb. “He left.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“I tried.”

“And he said no?”

So I fill her in on our pillow talk and watch as she shakes her head increasingly fast until I’m sure her head will pop clean off her shoulders.

“Shit, girl. You’re gonna follow him, aren’t you?”

With fingers stiff from anger, I stuff the letter into my pocket. “When hell freezes over. He left me.”

“You’re gonna follow him,” she says.

“Fuck him.”

“Right now, that’s just the anger talking.”

My anger talks a lot once I get to my room and hermetically seal myself off from the compassionate world. Mostly it rants and raves about what a jerk Nick is for leaving, for not giving me a chance to go with him. He started this. He made the first move. He made me love him.

God, how I love him.

We’d been building up to this from the day I walked into his office with a head full of worry about that damn jar. I laugh bitterly because the jar started all this: the end of the world and me falling in love with Nick. With one smooth move, it destroyed, built, then devastated.

I fall to my knees, bury my face in my hands, and sob.

Delphi is more than ruins and remnants. There’s a souvenir shop, its postcards long gone, having fluttered off in a stiff wind, or perhaps decomposed into a pile of colorful pulp before being rinsed away by a cleansing rain. The rack still sits outside the shop, rusted and ready for new stock. One firm push would force it to turn with a reluctant squeal. Branches and leaves blow through town, past stores with names that mean nothing to me. I can guess, though, what they used to contain. Through one window, a baker’s peel is visible, long and leaning against the bakery wall. Four other walls hold up a roof from which meat hooks descend, brown with stale blood.

Esmeralda takes food where she can find it, and she finds it in abundance. But I don’t have that luxury. These grasses and plants are mostly alien, and I have more than just myself to consider.

I should stay hidden.

I have to eat.

My child needs to eat.

It’s no contest.

“See that?” I speak of a narrow building with a blue door pressed into the middle. “I’m going in. And you’re coming with me.”

My companion says nothing. Keeps on chewing something of interest low to the ground.

“No, no, you have to,” I say. “Just in case.”

A gentle snot rain sprinkles me as she lifts her head and snorts, but she follows me, leaving a polite distance between us.

The asphalt crust is hard beneath my boots. It’s an old habit the way I stand at the road’s edge and look both ways. Although it’s not traffic I’m trying to dodge now, but trouble. But really, what can I do if it comes? I could fall back into the woods, or run forward and hide in a building. Slender options.

Pebbles crumble away from the blacktop as I work the leather toe against the hardened tar.

Think, Zoe. Think.

My pregnancy pokes holes into my brain matter, making the thoughts harder to congeal and solidify. In the untamed groves, I am weaponless. Stealth is my only real advantage. So I cross the road, make the baker’s peel mine, lift a knife with a gleaming edge from the meat shop. And I rest easier because I am armed once more.

The blue door opens freely.

Silence pours into the street accompanied by the sweet stench of old milk and older cheese. There’s an omnipresent gloom that reaches out and pulls us in. The door swings shut behind us; its click is a death knell.

Stop it, Zoe.

This is a grocery store of sorts. I hoped it would be. It’s not like an American supermarket. The floor is a dark and violent concrete. Products are cramped on shelves that cut me off at the neck. A thick blanket of dust mutes all signs of color to a depressing dinge.

My breath catches; my lungs don’t want the sour air. I force the spongy organs to draw oxygen. Right now I’m grateful I’m long past that first trimester, otherwise I’d be on my knees, painting the floor green. The shop’s stock comes into focus: there’s food on these here shelves, and it’s processed and packed and likely still edible. Whoever said processed foods were bad hadn’t vacationed at the end of the world.

The second best thing about being in a grocery store is that there’s a ready supply of plastic bags. I rip open a box of oatmeal and pour it into a neat heap on the floor for Esmeralda before reaching for a fistful of sacks. And I apologize for the burden I’m about to bestow on her.

She doesn’t seem to care.

It’s the chocolate that catches my attention. I can almost taste the sweet, smooth confection before I peel away the packaging and cram it into my mouth. Flavor explodes and my taste buds shiver with orgasmic pleasure. Moments later, there’s a rolling sensation in my belly as my baby somersaults. I laugh and unwrap another bar—some kind of wafer layers with chocolate pressed between. I scrape off the top wafer with my teeth and shamelessly lick the others clean. Soon my fingers are sticky and there’s that feeling of insubstantial fullness that only comes from ingesting mass quantities of junk food. My body hums as I surf the sugar high; I’m Superwoman shoving boxed foods and luxuries like toilet paper into bags.

And then Esmeralda stops snuffling the ground and begins the soft-shoe shuffle of unease.

My entire body tenses. Even my baby holds still. The thought is fleeting: how sad it is that my child has to come into a world where there’s no chance for normal, no pretense even of safety.

The word floats in on a malevolent draft from beneath the blue door: Abomination.

A taunt.

If not for the donkey’s agitation, I could convince myself my mind had manufactured the word using my fears as tools.

Someone is out there. The cleaver takes on new weight, reminding me it’s ready and waiting should the need arise.

The wall presses against my back as I take a measured step closer. Gravity works its magic and eases me to the ground. My bones creak in appreciation. From here I can see the front door and both windows. There’s no other way in or out. I balance a candy bar on my belly and wait for dark to come.

Minutes tick by. They huddle together to form hours. I don’t know how many, only that the sun shifts slowly in the sky.

The heat grows, but down here on the concrete floor I can feel the cool of the earth seeping into my skin. When Esmeralda dumps her oats, I try not to care about the smell.

Wait. Watch. Listen.

Eventually, the night strides in and forces the sun from her comfortable chair. As she’s unseated, so am I. For hours there’s been no noise beyond the usual sounds nature makes. No more whispered taunts, no breathing that doesn’t belong. But I don’t trust it so we have to leave under the cover of dark and hope that gives us enough of an advantage.

The truth is I could leave Esmeralda, cut my way through the land with just me to worry about, but I don’t want to. Her company makes me feel less lonely. One by one, everyone I’ve cared about has been stripped from my life, and yet I can’t stop feeling a bond with this beast. Please let me be able to keep her safe.

We ease out of the building, onto the barren road. Hugging the curb is a necessity because I can’t see my way back into the bush without light. Risking a fall is not an option. Whoever is out there is likely watching anyway. For now, all I can do is make that task more difficult by hiding in the shadows, the baker’s long-handled peel held in my hands like a magician’s staff.

At first there’s a gentle wind that stirs the leaves making a soft wikka wikka sound. This swallows our footsteps, so I welcome its presence, until a short way down the road it dies, leaving us exposed.

I stop. A half a beat later, there’s the faint echo of another footfall. We’re being followed or pursued. Is there even a difference? One implies a sense of urgency, while the other says, Hmm, let’s wait and see how this plays out. Either way, I don’t like it, nor does my central nervous system; it’s shooting adrenaline like my body is a firing range.

On the heel of my boot, I turn and scan the pitch.

It’s just a flicker in my peripheral vision, like the fluttering of a panicking insect when it realizes it’s just flown into a spider’s web and become entangled. That’s all it is, nothing more substantial than that. Look! my senses scream. As my neck twists, I glimpse it: hair blond and neatly fitted to a smooth skull. Hair that belongs to a ghost.

The adrenaline seizes control. Propels me toward the twisted olive trees. I half run, half walk, deeper and deeper into the wild land. Esmeralda stays close without complaint, more sure-footed than me. Guilt washes over me; she trusts me to keep her safe and I hope I can honor that.

Fate steps in, reaches out and places a hole where ground should be. My ankle twists. Pain shoots through my shin and I fall. The last thing I see is a woman emerging from the black, her face scarred, her hair that of a madwoman.

The Medusa of Delphi.

NINETEEN

The city has fallen into an endless hush. Silence is a sponge soaking us up. Shoes slap silently on the sidewalks. Coughs fade before they’ve left their irritated throats. The only noise comes from vehicles moving through the streets: occasionally passenger cars, sometimes buses with a handful of riders staring hopelessly ahead.

“Where are you going?” Morris asks one day. The bus is straddling the broken yellow line. The driver stares at us expectantly and shrugs. He thrusts a thumb at his fares.

“Wherever they want to go.”

“Any place in particular real popular right now?”

He shrugs. “Airports, mostly.”

“What’s there?”

He looks at her like her brain just dribbled onto her khaki T-shirt.

“Birds. Big silver ones.”

“They’re still taking passengers?”

“Hell if I know. I just drive the bus. Nothing else to do except sit around and wait to die.”

The bus doors sigh and hiss as he eases his foot off the brakes and keeps right on following the yellow line.

“Oz,” I say.

Morris peers at me over the top of her aviators.

“The Wizard of Oz. Did you ever see that?”

“Sure I did. Those flying monkeys freaked me the hell out. What about it?”

“Have you heard any planes lately?”

Head shake. Expectant look.

“Exactly. They’re all going to meet some wizard who doesn’t exist, in search of brains, a heart, or whatever it is they need.”

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

I turn and head back toward the old school. “Nope.”

“You’re losing it. You should go talk to —” She stops dead.

“Nick. Don’t be too much of a sissy to say his name. I can. Nick, Nick, Nick.” I hold up my hands. “See? I’m okay with it.”

But I’m not okay with it. My heart’s been bruised before, battered and bandied about by others. Boys at first, then Sam’s death. And now Nick. But this is different. Bigger, like a bubble of grief that holds me within its thin walls. No matter how fast I run, the bubble moves with me. Hamster in a wheel.

I take to walking the streets on my own. I have a gun. I know how to use it; Morris taught me. There’s a knife in my pocket and I know how to use that, too. Can I, though? I don’t know. But I have it—my cold, hard, metal insurance.

Other things go into the pockets of my heavy coat: food, money, and my keys. I can’t break that habit.

And Nick’s unopened letter. All I have left of him.

Do you love me, Mommy?

I do.

Why?

Because you’re mine.

Why?

Because I’m lucky.

Then why don’t you look happy?

Oh baby, I’m happy about you, but I’m sad, too.

Why?

Because I miss your father.

Do you love him, too?

I do, baby. I do.

Then why isn’t he here?

We’re going to him, baby. Soon.

There’s treasure in this basement. Bars of gold wrapped in plastic, their crumbs packed tight around a chemical core. Their value is immeasurable. I open a box. Slip a precious bar into my pocket.

“You’re actually going to eat that?” Morris says behind me. “I quit them years ago.”

My body jerks with surprise, and the Twinkie falls to the ground with a shallow thump.

“Supplies,” I say. “I was on my way out.”

“Again? What do you do out there?”

“Walk. Window-shop. Go out for morning tea with the girls.”

She steps into the pantry. It’s a room the size of my apartment filled with food. Little Debbie’s entire line of food is here; good eats at the end of the world. Morris plucks a golden cake from the box, unwraps the confection, crams it into her mouth. And a second. When she’s done eating, she grins at me with cake-crumbed teeth.

“Damn, I forgot how good these are. Did you open Nick’s letter yet?”

“No-o-o-pe.”

“That’s mature of you.”

“Says the woman who just crammed a whole Twinkie into her mouth.”

“Two.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, Tara Morris, Twinkie-eating champion of what’s left of the world.”

We giggle like silly girls, carefree and alive, until reality begins to lap around the edges like a thirsty cat.

Morris turns grim. “Open the letter. Please.”

“I can’t.”

She shakes her head at me, her eyes forgiving though her mouth is not. “You’re scared, and for what? That fear buys you nothing except a whole lot of walking the streets with a pocket full of Twinkies, worrying yourself sick over him.”

“It’s just one Twinkie.”

It’s just one Twinkie at first. Then two. Four weeks after Nick left, I take my walk accompanied by three chemical cakes. I pretend he never existed. I believe he’s dead. I pray he’s alive and safe and with his family.

I’m in the library when it happens, the same one where my sister’s dreams died before Pope slaughtered her on an empty street. There are no new lists. The old ones flap with excitement when I push the door open. Look! A person! Then they fall still. The librarian is gone, her haughtiness relegated to the history books as a once-cliché. She’s no longer here to care whether or not I eat near the precious tomes.

I peel away the plastic wrapper.

Crumbs fall onto the pages of the atlas I’ve spread open. I press my finger to the page, then lick the yellow dots. The dry finger of my left hand traces an invisible line across the thick, rich paper, across the pale blue ocean—first the Atlantic, then the Mediterranean—from New York to Athens. From there I creep north, inch by colorful inch, across the splintered states that form the country of Greece.

The name, the name, what was the name? Nick told me the name of the village where his parents were raised, but standing here looking at this swath of unfamiliar places, I’m overwhelmed by their otherness. The names swim on the page until they’re meaningless.

My stomach lurches. The atlas swirls. The bright mosaic tiles rush up to greet me.

Thank God, I miss the books. The librarian would never forgive me.

I am dead and this is hell. Fire licks my face, dances with the shadows, forces its partners into the darkness before taking others. Light plays across the faces of sightless marble men, twisting them into fiends. Soldiers whip their horses, Faster! Faster! as they gallop across plaster walls.

“Not hell.” The words are not mine. They come from outside me; I’m awake enough to know that.

“Where?”

“Delphi.” The voice quavers at the edges as though the vocal cords have been slackened by time. She pronounces the word Thell-fee, not Dell-fie like the corporation.

Moving my body hurts, but I manage to feign sitting. An outsider might see me as a sack of potatoes, and that’s how I feel, my weight constantly shifting, my insides compressed yet lacking the structure a skeleton provides. My perspective shifts. The fire retreats to its pit, leaving the room awash in a preternatural mix of shadows and light. The woman lingers in the half-light.

Two stone men tower over me.

“Who are they?”

“Kleobis and Biton. Heroes rewarded by Hera with the gift of endless sleep.” The words are hesitant.

“Not something you can regift.”

“What is… regift?”

This is Greece, the woman is Greek, and though her words are English, I realize their slowness is a result of translating the words in her head before presenting them to me. I wish I could offer her the same courtesy.

With simple words I explain and she nods.

“Gods give freely… or not at all. Their mother sought a boon and was punished for her pride in her sons.”

Their mother. My hands go to my stomach. “My baby—”

“Still lives inside you. He is strong.”

“He?”

“Or she.”

I close my eyes. The ache is too much—relief that Nick’s child still lives, despair that he isn’t here with me. “At least I have that.”

From the shadows she comes, her face a tangled web of burns. “Snakes,” she says as my gaze slips away from her right side. “A gift from the sickness.”

I look at her and her face, and I know at once what she did. “You burned them off.”

One nod. “Yes. I burn them off with the fire. It was”—she raises a hand to her face, then pulls away as if she dare not touch—“very painful.”

“Like Medusa.”

Another nod. “Of all the figures from mythology, this is the one my body chose. Me who is nobody, just a servant of the gods.”

“The gods? Not the one God?”

“I find more comfort with ones who walked the same path as I. Their feet… mine…” Two fingers step through the air. Then she changes tack. “You know someone follows you.”

For a moment, I’m confused. “Did the gods tell you that?”

“No. I hear. Now is time for rest.”

I close my eyes but do not sleep.

Abomination. That single word is a malignancy that takes hold in my mind. Tendrils snake out and coil around the rational thoughts, squeezing them like they’re there to be juiced dry of reason.

Abomination.

My child is fine. My child is—

An abomination.

—healthy.

My savior finds me on the low wall outside the museum. Her gaze fixates on the ground as she walks so that her hair falls forward, concealing the scars with a black waterfall threaded with silver. She’s older than I first thought, skimming the edges of fifty. Only when she’s seated beside me does she lift her head.

“Are you… sick?”

The snake woman’s words tug at the elastic band binding those thoughts, but it does not snap; the bundle of doubt remains.

I shake my head. “Last night, you said someone was following me. Did you see them?”

“No. I just hear.”

“You heard what, exactly?”

It takes her a moment to translate, formulate her reply, then translate again. “Shoes. Who?”

“I don’t know. A ghost, maybe.”

She turns to face me, a question in her eyes. Daylight is cruel and unforgiving: out here the scars are knotted and gnarled and red as though irritated.

“A dead man.” I draw a line across my throat, wiggle my fingers in the air. “Ghost.”

This time she nods. “The dead, they stay with us. But I do not hear your ghost. Maybe mine, eh?”

People used to flock here for this sunshine, this view, this experience. A cobblestone path stretches from the museum’s steps all the way to the famed ruins, interrupted in places to accommodate sapling laurels. The museum is a geometric hillock rising from the path in a seamless transition of color and stone. Someone planned carefully, matching the colors of the new to the centuries old. I can’t see what remains of ancient Delphi from this angle, but there’s a quiet energy that hums through the trees. There are ghosts here, spirits of the dead who walk these paths like death was an inconvenient stepping-stone on their way back to right here, right now.

I’m not convinced and I’m sure she’s not, either, by the uncomfortable way she raises her hand to her face and gingerly scrapes a nail across the mangled flesh.

“Does it hurt?”

She smiles with one side and shrugs with the same. “Eh, a little.”

My hatred for Pope flares anew before fading to a dull contempt: what havoc he wreaked on the world because of his selfish desires.

“Do you have a family?”

“My family is here.” She waves a hand toward the disappearing path.

“Children?”

“I am the child.”

Grief shivs my heart, but it’s dry of tears. “You’re lucky.”

“Perhaps.”

The cryptic word accompanies an equally impossible-to-decipher half smile. Who is this woman? I ask her and so we swap names the way people in polite society do, then we go back to staring, both of us fixated on the same stretch of cobblestone, both of us seeing something completely different, neither of us having shared a thing about ourselves beyond an arbitrary title.

Abomination.

Aren’t we all now?

Morris leaps from her seat. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?”

My cold, clammy hand slips and slides against the door’s slick painted jamb. “Don’t come near me. I’m sick.”

Fear blossoms in her dark eyes, shrinks as her face softens into concern, twists as anger rages in. She snatches up the clipboard on her desk, hurls it at the wall. Two broken pieces clatter on the floor.

“Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” I reassure her, like she’s the one who’s sick. But it’s always like this, isn’t it? The terminally ill assuring their loved ones that everything will be just fine if everyone thinks positive and wears a smile. Nothing holds death at bay like a rainbow over the river Styx.

“It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. It’s not even on the same planet as okay.”

“I have to leave. I can’t let it spread.”

“No,” she says. “You have to stay. Besides, if we haven’t caught it by now, we’re immune.”

“We don’t know that. We’re just guessing. If we follow that logic, I shouldn’t be sick.”

“You’re right. Shit. I can’t think. Jesus, Zoe. You can’t be sick. I—”

“Won’t allow it?”

“Yeah.” She picks up the clipboard pieces, tries to fit them back together, but they’re not cooperating. “I can’t lose any more people, Zoe. You, the others, you’re my family now. I thought we were all safe from that fucking disease. I was relying on it.”

“I’m sorry.”

She stomps over to her second-floor window, shoves the glass pane high in the sash.

“Fuck you, George Pope!” she screams into the empty streets. “I’m glad you’re fucking dead, you asshole. Burn in hell.” In stoic silence, the other buildings stand, reserving their judgment yet unwilling to yield to her hard words.

“Tara,” I say gently. “It really is okay. We all have to die somehow, right?”

“Wrong. We should be immortal.”

“That’s mature.”

“So is you stomping out of here because you think you’re sick.”

“Look at me. I’m sick. I just puked all over the library floor. Soon God knows what’s going to happen to me. This thing will flip my genes on and off and I’ll turn into something that isn’t me anymore. There’s no telling what that will be. Maybe I’ll survive as some kind of evolutionary freak, maybe I’ll die. I’m going to pack.”

“Don’t,” she says. “Please.”

“I have to.”

Morris sighs, hard and loud. She bends over, presses her elbows into her desk, bangs her head against the surface. After a few good thunks, she looks up at me.

“You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

“Not a chance.”

“Fine. Do me a favor. Don’t go too far. Set up in one of the buildings across the street where I can keep an eye on you.”

I nod, turn away from my friend. What I don’t tell her is that death isn’t totally unwelcome. For the first time in my life, I’m flirting with The End and I don’t care. Let it slide its tongue into my mouth, taste the metal and take control.

Anything to stop my heart from hemorrhaging.

TWENTY

Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. The street is filled with choices, each as unappealing as the next. Oh, they’re all fine to look at: office buildings and businesses and apartments hewn in bricks and rough stones. The thing is, I’d feel like an intruder living in someone else’s home, even though they’re long gone.

Dead. You helped burn them, remember? They didn’t go on vacation.

Morris is a whippet bouncing at her office window. She’s pointing directly across the street at what used to be a Kinko’s. Technically it still is—they’re just no longer printing copies. Directly above that is a small office space once filled by a small accounting firm. No beds, but they have a decent sofa in the waiting room, Morris told me. That’s where she wants me.

My wave is limp and lacking, and hers is just as weak. I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. No choice. I turn to take another long hard look at my new home. It’s just me, the backpack digging into my shoulders, and this box in my arms. For a moment I balance the box on my knee and readjust the weight, and then let myself into the building. The previous tenants made it easy, or maybe Morris and her crew did; either way, the door opens freely. The door is made of both bars and glass. Anything coming through is going to make enough noise to wake the dying.

That would be me. I can’t help but laugh a little. Who knew death could be amusing?

It’s true, there’s a sofa in the bland waiting room, along with two generic armchairs and a cheap desk. In places, the laminate is warped and stained with rings from hot, wet cups. My knees bend; I touch my backside to the very edge of the chair that doesn’t have its back to the window and place the box between my feet.

What do I have?

A great view with a direct line of sight into Morris’s office; all the clothes I can carry; toiletries, food, water, and bedding; an extra-bad attitude that starts somewhere behind my eyes and reaches out so far even my toes feel wracked with ill will. I want to hurt something, break it, control it until destruction is inevitable.

The wall yields easily beneath the toe of my boot. Only about twenty good kicks before it punches right through the Sheetrock. A pile of crumbles amasses on the synthetic beige pile, like Pop Rocks half pulverized by a brick. Guilt is a serial killer, stabbing me for losing control of my anger, then choking me for being foolish enough to think: To whom do I send the check for the damage?

Nausea washes over me, using me like I’m the shore of a long-abandoned beach. Once again I’m on my knees, praying to the gods of cheap carpeting.

Please let death be swift.

Shadows stretch across the cobbled path, from east to west. The sun is still new in the sky and hasn’t yet gained her confidence. From room to room I wander without pausing to contemplate the relics of the dead. There’s a stillness in the air that tickles my intuition, telling me I’m alone, so I put it to the test and establish that my instincts are sharp and true: Irini, the Medusa of Delphi, isn’t here. There was a time when this wouldn’t have bothered me, but that was before. I’m calm. Honest. The museum’s expansive windows tell me so. The bouncing pulse in my throat is the lie. A fabrication concocted by my hormones and fears for the sole purpose of feeding my paranoia.

The steps are empty. So is the path as far as I can see. Only Esmeralda is there, and she’s busying herself with grasses and the other things donkeys deem important. Her calm state presses a cool hand on my forehead and tells me to chill. My ears listen. My brain processes the message. My pulse continues to thump, regardless.

We walked up there yesterday, Irini and I, just far enough for her to point out the areas of interest: the stadium, Apollo’s temple, the tholos—a circular structure with three of its original twenty Doric columns still standing—but we didn’t move close enough to do more than admire the passage of time from a distance.

I’m trapped in a déjà vu loop. Only the scenery changes, but the dangers and the accompanying reactions are the same. Something is following me, someone disappears, and I chase after them, only to be too late to help. In truth, there’s nothing to suggest Irini is in trouble. There are no signs of a struggle, and if she’d called out, I’d have heard her. But my intuition whispers its brand of poison, and I listen.

The ruins are tall and proud and blond in the morning glare. A noise trickles between the rocks and spills into the sunshine. At first I think it’s Irini talking to herself, but it soon separates into two distinct voices: Irini’s hesitant lilt and another, thicker, harsher, struggling against itself.

Go. Stay. Go. Stay. I do my own internal dance. Then the decision is made for me.

“Come. I know you are there,” says the thickened tongue.

I move as if in a dream.

“Closer. I want to see you.”

Around a corner. Along the Sacred Way until I see the Polygonal Wall. Then I stop, because there’s a rock jutting up from the path and my mind is trying to make some kind of sense out of what it’s seeing. Yes, it’s a strange, pale rock, but with a human center. Arms and legs spring forth from the boulder’s core, hang there like laundry in the sun. These useless limbs are topped by a woman’s head, her hair piled high in a loose bun, her eyes keen as if she knows all. A vine creeps up to her middle, spreads itself around her like a thick green belt. She’s older than Irini, but their eyes are the same shade of nut brown and their noses hold the same curve.

Jenny lying inert on the sidewalk, a red circle marring her forehead. The hole in my soul widens another inch.

“It is true,” she says in hesitant English. “You are carrying a child.”

My hands move to cover my belly. “Yes.”

“Come here.”

“No.”

“You don’t trust?”

“Almost never. Not now.”

She nods. “Why did you come up here?”

“To find Irini.”

“And what would you have done had she been in danger? Would you have risked your life and that of your unborn child to save her?”

“My child has been at risk since the beginning.”

“Irini tells me you are looking for your husband.”

I don’t correct her. “Yes.”

“You have traveled across the world, all the way from America, to find this man?”

“Yes.”

“How many women would do such a thing? If our world was not dead, they would write poetry about you—long, gamboling stories filled with half-truths, all of them predicated on one solid fact: you are a hero.”

“Heroes die.”

“We all die. Heroes die gloriously, for things bigger than themselves.” She glances at Irini. “Water, please.”

Irini lifts a bottle to the woman’s lips and tips slowly. They’ve done this before, perfected the art.

“What happened?” I ask. “Can we get you out of there? There have to be tools somewhere near.”

Her laugh is more wheeze than mirth. “It is not rock. It is bone.”

Shock steals my words. My cheeks pinken with embarrassment.

“I was sick before with a disease that was turning my body to stone, as they say. The tissues, the bones, all of them stiff and fused. But it was slow. Then the disease came and my own skeleton began to consume me.” Another wheeze. “My sister became Medusa and I became part of the landscape.”

“Why here? Why not stay closer to the shelter?”

“I like the view. It makes me believe I am free.”

The whole world has become a house of horrors. Women made of snakes and bone, men with tails, primordial beings who feed on human flesh. Those of us who survived are clinging to the edge of the soup bowl, trying to find a spoon to ride to safety.

“I have to keep moving,” I tell them. “I have to find Nick if he’s still alive.”

“He lives,” says the rock woman.

“How—”

Irini bows her head. “My sister has the sight. She knows many things. She is the sibyl, the oracle of Delphi where there hasn’t been such a thing for centuries.”

“Hush, Sister. The gods have been cruel enough. Do not give them reason to take more from you.”

“What more can they take?” she asks simply.

“You still live, do you not?”

“This is not a life,” Irini snaps. Immediately she dips her head in contrition. “I’m sorry. I did not think.”

The woman of the rock looks straight at me. “Take her with you. I implore you.”

Irini’s head jerks up. “No.”

“Go with her.”

“I have to stay with you, Sister. Who will feed you, bring you water?”

“My time is short. You will go with the American, deliver the child into this broken world. Maybe some good will come of her birth. Everyone needs a purpose. This is yours.”

The screaming wakes me on the third morning. Holding my belly, I race up to where Irini is standing, her face melted in horror. My brain processes the scene like an investigator, in explicit, full-color snapshots. The rock woman’s head dangles at an unnatural angle, her useless limbs hacked off and used to form the letters I and N in one single word painted on the ground in scarlet letters.

ABOMINATION.

My mind flips through the searing photographs with gathering speed.

“We have to go. Now.”

Irini doesn’t argue. With methodical detachment, she gathers her things and stacks them neatly in a sleepover bag. It’s high-quality leather, the kind that improves as it is passed down through the generations. Within minutes we’re moving on with Esmeralda in tow.

There’s a hole in my soul and it’s filled with the dead.

“Not a ghost.”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

I know what she wants: some explanation so she can make sense of her sister’s death. But all I have is an improbable story that sounds like a lie. I give her the bones, then the story’s meat. My tongue lifts my mind’s petticoat and skirts and displays my regret: that I didn’t double-, triple-check that the Swiss was dead.

“Why?” she asks.

“Why what?”

“Why you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why chase?”

Why do crazy people do anything? Why did I sprint across the world to find one man?

“I don’t know.”

I leave a note in the box, place it outside the front door. When Morris comes, she reads it moving her lips.

“Crackers and Twinkies?”

“Everything else makes me sick,” I mouth through the glass door.

She shrugs, scratches her nose. “Okay.” She disappears across the street with the box. We’ve been doing this for a week now: I leave the box out front, she returns with supplies within minutes.

Only, this time the minutes drag by slow enough that I have to run to the ground-floor bathroom twice to throw up. She comes back empty-handed.

“Where’s my box?”

“C’mon. Doctor wants to see you.”

“I’m in quarantine.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Reluctantly, I open the door, step out onto the sidewalk, maintaining a distance between us. Our boots echo down the hall once we enter the old school. Hers clip along cheerfully while mine drag all my baggage behind them.

Joe is in the infirmary waiting on us, blowing into a latex glove. He holds it to his head and grins. “I’m a rooster. How long has Nick been gone?”

Morris glances at me. “Six weeks.”

“Six weeks, two days, six hours. Give or take.”

She raises an eyebrow, scratches her nose.

He pulls open a drawer, rifles around, tosses a box to me. I stare unblinking at the packaging.

“When was your last period?”

“I don’t remember.”

Morris scoffs. “All this stress, who bleeds anymore?”

“Did you use protection?”

My cheeks flush. “Mostly.”

“Well, then it mostly worked,” Joe says with a brightness that makes my retinas burn.

Although the box is light in my hands, the gravity of the situation elevates it to the weight of a brick. I can’t be pregnant. I wanted children, yes, but not like this. Not now.

Joe ties a knot in the glove. “Go pee on the stick.”

Morris steers me out of the room. Numb, I allow her to propel me to the bathrooms. I pee on the stick while she paces. Two pink lines slowly form in the white window.

“How many lines?” Morris asks.

“Two.”

There’s a hoot of laughter.

“I’m glad one of us finds this funny.”

“‘I don’t know nuthin’ about birthin’ babies,’” she screeches.

Joe grins when we walk in. “Looks like your death sentence has been reduced to life imprisonment.” He throws me a bottle. The irony of the rattling container is not lost on me. “Prenatal vitamins.”

Like all bad ideas, this one is born in the middle of a sleepless night when my mind has inevitably turned to a channel where I’m a child again. I’ve flipped through the other pages of my life already tonight: the regrets, the embarrassing moments that still manage to color a grown woman’s cheeks; all those choices made and opportunities that languished while I wandered down life’s side streets. Then I’m seven, six, five, four, three years old, dragging Feeney, my toy monkey, along behind me in a cherry-red cart. An invisible finger yanks one of my heartstrings and holds it taut until I’m aching to see the monkey again. The sensation of longing evolves in a painful fantasy where I’m holding Nick’s hand, watching our child toddling ahead of us with Feeney tucked under his or her arm.

When I wake, my pillow is wet.

At breakfast I tell Morris about Feeney.

“I’m coming with you,” she says.

“Huh?”

“You’re planning on going back to your folks’ place, right?”

She knows me too well. “You got me.”

“Coffee first. Then we’ll rustle up some bicycles.”

An hour later, we’re peddling through the badlands. Out in the burbs, the grasses grow wild, concealing the curbs, defiantly shooting pollens into the crisp air. They seem to know they’ll never see another lawn mower, never have their stems whacked ever again. There are signs everywhere that nature has seized control. Vines race up the brick veneers, competing for the highest gutters. They grab saplings in choke holds and wrestle them for precious sunlight. Our tires roll along parched blacktop that’s become cracked and warped enough for green sprouts to poke their heads through. Nature is having her wild way with the land—a party to end all parties.

My mind plays a cruel game, stripping away these new adornments, giving me furtive glimpses of how it used to be. I used to ride these streets when they were cared for by people who had no idea how soon the end was coming. The lawns were once neatly manicured, the flower beds free of weeds, and the houses didn’t peel. There’s no longer the soft tsk-tsk-tsk of sprinklers accompanying the birds and bugs. Now my old neighborhood is a strange new world where the curtains twitch and things creep. I have my gun. I have bullets. Or rounds. Whatever they call them. I’m not a gun person. All I know—and need to know—is how to load and pull the trigger.

The last time I cruised these streets, I was driving Jenny’s car. That was the last time I saw my parents alive. Maybe they still are. Hope fills me like helium and I pedal faster, hoping to get there before some big prick bursts the bubble.

It’s like old times almost, me coasting to a stop, throwing my bicycle onto the lawn, but this time I don’t run to the front door. Morris stops, butt on the seat, feet on the ground. She lets her bicycle down easy next to mine, draws her weapon.

I came prepared: I have keys.

The smell comes up and backhands me across the face. I stumble backwards into my friend.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she says. “You never get used to that smell. You okay?”

I give her a look.

“Didn’t think so.” Her voice takes on a soft, gentle sheen. “We’ll go slow, okay? Where’s the monkey?”

I’m holding my nose, trying to not to breathe, trying not to think about how this smell is probably what’s left of my parents. Morris pats me on the back.

“I’m okay. He’ll be in the attic. They kept all our toys up there in boxes.”

The air is stale and the silence deafening. Growing up with electricity, I never appreciated how much noise it made. Everything is the same. The den is neat, although the cabbage rose couch is cultivating a layer of dust. The kitchen is clean, the dishes put away, the sink empty. The beds are made and somehow the bathrooms are mildew-free. Mom cleaned before—

“Up there.” I point at the trapdoor in the hall ceiling, its synthetic rope dangling low enough for me to grab. We climb deeper into the gloom. Sun leaks in through the tiny grimy windows. Dust flecks aimlessly ride the beams.

Morris coughs.

My whole childhood is up here, packed in boxes bearing labels in my mother’s tidy hand. One side belongs to Jenny, the other to me. Easier to sort that way, Mom used to say, when we had our own children.

My eyes heat up. Tears make threats. So I fake a cough to chase them away.

“I wish I could take everything,” I say.

Morris gives me a wry smile. “You’d need a moving truck.”

She’s right. These boxes are stacked in minor mountains.

“Maybe someday,” she says.

“Maybe.”

We get to work. I don’t linger over old photos. I barely recognize the happy people depicted in the quilted albums. They belong to a time I’m not entirely convinced ever existed. Maybe the past is all a fairy tale we tell ourselves over and over until we believe it’s true.

I find Feeney crammed into a box with other old toys and claim him for my child.

On the way out, I use the bathroom. Stare at the trapdoor in the floor.

It’s locked.

I wonder which of the neighbors was left standing long enough to slide the bolt home.

Morris sneezes. “Allergies.”

It’s not allergies. Morris knows it and I know it. But neither of us wants to jump to the right conclusion. We’re walking down the hall at the school when she paints the floor in two of three primary colors.

She pulls out her pistol, shoves the end into her mouth, and bang! Just like that. Her skull shatters. Brains splash. The wall is Morris-colored on institutional beige. And that damn jingle keeps dancing around my head: How many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Cleanup in aisle five, Dr. Lecter. Don’t forget to bring a nice Chianti and those fava beans. And a spoon. You’re gonna need a spoon because this is one sloppy mess and a fork isn’t going to cut it.

The voices are distant, miles away at the end of a long dark tunnel. But they’re getting nearer. Closer. Closer. Closer. Until they’re right in my face, shouting at me, trying to pull me away from Tara Morris. That’s when I realize I’m kneeling, holding her in my arms, trying to scoop up her brains and shove them back into her head. A rerun of Jenny’s murder.

“Don’t touch me!” I scream, but their hands keep tugging until I’m forced to let her go. A sob blocks my throat, reducing my voice to an animalistic whimper. “No. No.”

Then something inside me snaps into two pieces—maybe my mind compartmentalizing, stowing away the grief and horror in a steel vault until I can gain perspective and cope. Suddenly I’m looking down on the scene, not dispassionately, but through a cool veil. Separate. Other. Not part of this. Not part of this at all.

“Let’s clean her up,” I say.

Detached.

I stride down the hall in the direction of the broom closet. Bucket-and-mop time. Someone has to clean the Morris mess.

It’s me who lights the match that burns my friend. I try to pretend I can’t smell her body cook. When she’s reduced to the contents of an ashtray in a dive bar on a Saturday night, I let myself into Nick’s room and pull his letter from my pocket. The envelope’s edges are worn now and the paper brittle from the cold. This room smells like him, like sunshine and citrus still, although there’s nothing of his left in here. Not that any of us brought much. A person doesn’t need a lot of stuff for survival in a temporary home.

That Nick smell intensifies as I lift my feet off the floor and sink into his bed. I close my eyes and rifle through my memories, searching for the perfect image.

I remember him. I remember us. The things we did. The things we talked of doing back when I had no idea how little time was left for us. A mixture of anger and lust builds inside me. How dare he go without giving me a choice? How could he make that decision for me? I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be safe. I can’t exist on some fucking pedestal like some precious thing. I picture him standing there, listening, riding out the tempest until I’m empty of rage-coated words.

My hand slides down the flat plane of my stomach, down, down between my legs, and I remember everything good until I’m biting my lip to stop from calling out to him.

Sometime between the storm and the calm that comes afterward, I slide Nick’s letter back into my pocket, unopened still. And I know that I am leaving.

The librarian would understand: I tell myself that as I tear maps of Europe from her precious atlases. She would understand.

The week whittles away.

Monday creeps. Tuesday crawls. Wednesday stumbles by like a drunk searching for the perfect gutter to piss in. Christmas never took this long to arrive.

On Thursday I hear a familiar rumble. The bus sounds close, but it’s still blocks away. Nonetheless, I pull on my boots, grab my backpack, and run, leaving my good-byes to float back over my shoulder. The well wishes fly at my back like arrows. They hit true: right at my heart. It’s all I can do not to turn back and look at what’s become my family. But I have to go. I have to find Nick, if he’s still to be had for the finding.

The morning air takes a crisp bite out of me like I’m a chilled apple. I jiggle to stay warm.

The bus hisses to a stop. The doors whoosh open. Same guy behind the wheel.

“More questions?”

“I need a ride.”

He chews on this a moment. “Where to?”

“The airport.” I slide the backpack strap off my shoulder, offer him payment: a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He snatches them from me, stashes them between his heavy legs.

“Where else?” he mutters.

Shocks whine as we take the first corner. The old school disappears from my view, probably forever. In the round mirror mounted high at the front of the bus, I see the driver peel the foil from the candy. He meets my eyes and something primal creeps across his expression as he chews furtively. Don’t you touch them, don’t you dare. Mine.

I slide my hand into the backpack’s front pocket, finger Feeney’s soft fabric, and hate that the world has become every man for himself.

TWENTY-ONE

The easiest distance between the two towns is a highway. The shortest distance is whatever road our feet can make for themselves. My biggest problem with the former is that it’s so visible. Our every move is out there for the Swiss to see.

I remember his too-healed wound and wonder if he used this same voodoo to overcome the death I gave him.

The battle rages in my head. Take the high road and hide, or take the highway and risk open warfare?

“You cannot walk the mountain,” Irini says. I know she’s right. Neither of us is as sure-footed as a goat.

I nod. There’s nothing else to say. At least if we’re in the open, our enemy is, too.

We are turrets with feet, so tightly are we concealing our respective pain, following Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice, doing the things we think we cannot do. I lose myself in thoughts of Nick; he is alive there in perpetuity.

The numbers parade through my head. I divide the total distance into palatable chunks that we can safely chew in a day. One hundred and forty miles. It’s nothing compared to the trek across Italy, but the funny thing about the past is the gloss with which it paints itself the further it is removed from the present. Those miles passed seem sweet and easy, walked with a calm and luxurious gait, while these are fraught with tension and peril. Maybe because the Swiss walked with us instead of chasing behind us, when he should be good and dead.

My feelings divide themselves in two teams: one berates me for not waiting until his body cooled on that cot bed. The other gleefully wipes the black smudge from my soul with a ragged sleeve edge. In the middle is my heart which stands up for what it believes: we would be safer with him deep in a hole in Greece’s rocky earth.

The sun moves faster than we do, waving as she climbs overhead and sails by. By the time a small arrangement of stones shimmers on the horizon, my shoulders have crisped to bacon. My face stings. Thank whatever deities are listening that I don’t possess a mirror. I don’t think I could bear myself.

With her naturally olive skin, Irini fares better. Her hues deepen while mine fluoresce. She lifts her arm to point at the distant heap.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Right now, today, I believe if He exists, He’s an asshole. If we survive, I reserve the right to change my mind.”

Her head tilts so, using crude sign language, I explain. Her mouth attempts a smile, but I can see by the way she presses her fingers to her scars that it hurts. So I change the subject. I don’t want this kind woman to feel pain. She’s had enough.

“What is that?”

“Is a shrine to Panagia. You know her?”

I nod. “We call her the Virgin Mary.”

“We will stop. I will pray to her for your child.”

“Thank you.” My belief system is broken, but hers is not, so perhaps that’s enough.

We walk on, our steps making strange sounds on the blacktop. The heavy fall of my boots. The soft shuffle of Irini’s rubber-soled espadrilles. Esmeralda’s keratin-thick clops. The shrine slowly comes into focus, its blurred edges sharpening until it’s crisp and real. Someone has taken care in building this monument, choosing stones carefully, pressing each layer into thick mortar, treating each to a slather of whitewash. Inside the arched hollow, a gilt-rich portrait of the Virgin Mary smiles as though she knows good fortune awaits. I wish I shared her optimism. I wish I did not think her a happy fool. Above her haloed head a brass bell dangles, and higher than that, on the shrine’s roof, the white cross is an advertisement to travelers, should they lose sight and forget that Greece’s old gods have been shunted into the backseat—at least for appearances’ sake.

Irini crosses herself, moves to push the bell, shake it from its slumber, but I stay her. My silent warning feels foolish, because here we are out in the open, advertising our location to anyone with two eyes and decent vision; but for all we know, the ghost of the Swiss isn’t the only danger that stalks us. The lazy peal of the shrine’s bell could easily alert anything lurking in the hills that border this inland road.

We pray silently, lost in our own heads. I pray for my baby, for Nick, for Irini, for Esmeralda, for everyone I love, and for the dead. I don’t pray for myself. When Irini asks why, while we eat crackers dipped in chocolate spread, I tell her that it feels like bad luck to offer that kind of temptation to the universe when it’s already having such a laugh at humanity’s expense.

Then Esmeralda surges forward, her cereal scattering and popping as her hooves stomp it to powder. She lets out a cry of pain. I leap up, try to soothe her.

Irini stoops, picks something off the ground. “Look.”

There in the flat of her palm is a rock, brown with old blood. My head snaps up. One hand shielding my eyes, I scan the hills for a glimpse of our enemy.

Nothing.

Cracks form in my fragile temper until I cast aside my own good counsel.

“Fuck you!” I yell through cupped hands.

Laughter echoes through the hills.

We sleep in shifts, just like Lisa and I did. But unlike that poor dead girl, Irini is meticulous in her efforts. During the day we walk, until one day the scenery changes. The generous foliage bends over the road, concealing us from the sun, dipping us in a pool of cool shadows. My skin temperature plummets immediately. I sigh with the relief. Even Esmeralda perks. Temptation taunts us, urging us to walk faster, but the shade feels so good I want it to stretch on forever.

Just before the bend in the road, there’s a sign shoved deep into the earth.

“‘Lamia,’” Irini reads. “Half.”

I know from the map she means we’re halfway to our destination. Halfway to Nick.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yes. On the bus. There is…” She mimes eating.

Sure enough, there’s a roadside restaurant up ahead, its entire front made up of glass panels, the grounds dotted with picnic tables and umbrellas that were once dyed bold colors. Now, with no one to secure them in bad weather, their tattered and faded fabric flaps freely in the breeze. Tour buses sit abandoned on the roadside, waiting on passengers who will never pay their fare. Their seats beckon to us, issue seductive invitations of comfort and rest.

So we do. There’s a ready supply of springwater, restrooms that—thanks to some miraculous feat of engineering—still have flushable toilets.

“Tell me of him,” Irini asks when we’ve settled down in the plush seats.

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

“Nick’s not my husband.”

“Is okay.”

I get up, double-check the door is secure, and give thanks that the glass is tinted a gray the sun can scarcely penetrate. Esmeralda is up the front, where she has room to move. I stroke my hand down her back, then let my tired hips sink back into the seats.

“There’s nothing much to tell. He left. I followed.”

“Why?”

“Because I love him. Have you ever loved a man before?”

“Once. Perhaps.”

“Would you have followed him anywhere?”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. He was killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was many years now.”

“I’m still sorry.”

There’s a pause, then: “What will you do if he is dead?”

I think about the possibility, although it leaves me so empty each breathe is a knife wound.

“Mourn him forever.”

“What’s up here?” I point to the map beyond Lamia.

“More.” She indicates the trees and the hills. “Then the water.”

We walk on. I wonder where the Swiss is now.

“What will you name her?”

I look at her, surprised. “I don’t know.”

“You have time. In Greece, babies don’t have names until…” She draws a cross on her forehead.

“Baptism?”

“Yes. Until then they are named Baby.”

I try it on. “Baby.”

“Does he know, the man?”

“About the baby?”

She nods.

“No.”

“What will he do?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, because until now that thought never occurred to me.

“Do not worry.”

Too late.

Towns shuffle by. They’re ghosts now, dead and purposeless. They served the people, but now the people no longer keep them alive. They’re purposeless shacks. Even the trees look tired from living. The heat drinks the life from the land. We stop and look for food, but the perishables have long passed their expiration dates, forming decaying sludge in their containers. Sometimes we find cookies and candies, and after we scoff those hungrily, we add what we can’t eat to the stash.

There’s salt on the breeze now. There’s something else, too: the bright acidity of new pennies or copper piping. I know what it means; I’ve smelled it before. Irini has, too, but she says nothing.

“I smell blood.”

“Yes,” she says.

“I’m sorry about your sister. She was wrong, though: you should have stayed. It’s not safe with me.”

“I need a reason.”

“For what?” I ask.

“To exist.”

We see a trio of Roma women who do not look us in the eye as we pass each other in the street. Tense and alert, them and us. Their mismatched clothes hang from their bodies like shapeless sheets.

“Excuse me,” I say after they’ve passed. The short one stops, turns, watches me under heavy lids. I hold out a handful of candy bars. She moves away.

They keep walking and so do we.

Irini glances at me.

“It costs nothing to be kind,” I say.

There’s a chair by the ocean and it’s filled by an old man. The rising tide has its lips wrapped around his ankles. He minds not. On his lap is a puppet, the Edgar Bergen kind with a smart mouth and wooden composure. He and his companion turn their heads as one as our footsteps make themselves heard. He waves to us before turning back to the sea. The puppet continues to stare. As we draw abreast, I see the puppet is not made of trees but of flesh and bone and papery skin. Then she looks away and the two continue their tandem deathwatch.

Wind whips the seas into a rabid frenzy. Sheets of hot rain blow off the ocean, drenching us so thoroughly I can barely remember what it is to be dry. Shades of Italy.

Sanctuary appears in the form of a church, small and humble and dry. We bar the doors from inside and listen as they rattle on their ancient hinges. Jesus weeps for us from up high on His cross. Would that He had more to offer than painted tears. From window to brilliant window I move, peering through to the outside. Nothing is visible besides fat drops rolling along the glass. The length of the church passes under my feet several times while I contemplate our safety. Eventually, I abandon my task and do my thinking sitting in one of the few seats. Unlike American churches, the Greek Orthodox church is short on pews. Standing room, mostly.

So normal is discomfort by now that I don’t notice I’m wincing until Irini kneels in front of me, her eyes wide and worried.

“Is it the baby?”

“No. I don’t think so. It’s my back.”

“It’s the baby.”

“It’s too soon.”

“Yes, once. But now? Who knows?”

“It’s not the baby.”

It can’t be. Not yet.

But in truth, I’ve lost track of time. Or maybe it lost me.

The storm rants and rages, but we are safe in our wood and stone bubble. Our wet clothes are limp flags hanging over the altar. Like all Orthodox churches, this one has a generous supply of thin candles meant for prayer. They remain unlit. Why leave a porch light on for trouble? Instead, we bury the ends deep in the sea sand holder and offer our prayers in quiet desperation.

The first shift is mine. I use the altar as a seat so I can look Jesus in the eye.

I have a bone to pick with You.

Choose whichever most pleases you. I have many.

Your Father let everyone die.

No. You were all at the mercy of one man’s free will.

What about the rest of us? What about our free will to live?

He chose for you all. For selfish reasons, but it was still a choice. My Father could have no more stayed his hand than He could stop Judas from betraying me.

So You’re saying it had to be this way.

I’m saying it is this way. It’s what you do now that matters.

Do You have plans to come back?

Who’s left to notice?

I don’t really believe in You.

His tears are frozen in paint. I don’t believe in Me, either.

With my scarred guardian angel keeping watch, I am free to meet Nick. I feel like a teenager sneaking out the bedroom window; the waking hours are my prison while my real life comes in dream snippets.

My fingers draw lazy circles upon his smooth chest. He feels real and warm and not at all drawn by wanton parts of my brain.

“I had a dream,” he says, “that you walked across the world to find me.”

“Not true.”

His dark eyes ask the question.

“I flew in a plane, rode a bicycle, and sailed one of the seas in a boat.”

I love you, my fingers trace on his skin.

“I told you to stay.”

“I couldn’t. You’re all I’ve got left. You and our baby. Morris died, did I tell you?”

He strokes my hair. “She told me.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She’s here.”

“Where? She can’t be. I watched her die.”

“Nearby.”

I wake with a sick feeling in my heart, like something I didn’t even know I wanted has been snatched away before I had a chance to love it.

The dream paints my mood with a thick, foul substance that taints the day. To prevent myself from snapping at Irini for no good reason other than that she’s available and my temper desires a release, I hunker down in the corner nearest the doors. The ache in my lower back has eased some, now that I’m not constantly pounding pavement.

The rain, the fucking rain, rains on until I’m sick of the sound. No crash of thunder to break the monotony. No ease from downpour to sprinkle. Just relentless rain.

My turn to watch comes and goes and then I sleep again. Nick and I sit across from each other in his old office, the one where I first spoke to him of the jar.

“Pandora’s box,” he says. “I told you to open it.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“No. But you being here is.” He writes on his notepad. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“In the dream?”

“Greece. I should have told you. Why haven’t you opened my letter?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m your therapist, Zoe. Tell me.”

“Because I’m scared.”

“What scares you?”

“What’s inside.”

“What do you think is inside?”

“Something that takes away hope. I can’t let that happen. I need to hope. I need to have hope.”

He stands, pulls his T-shirt over his head, tosses it on the chair. When he reaches out to me, I take his hand and let him pull me close so that my back presses up against his hard planes. His fingers pinch my nipple, hard, so that I wince and moan at the same time. His breath is hot against my ear. It sets my blood to boil.

“I need you to wake up, baby.”

“But I want you.”

“Baby, wake up. Now.”

Invisible fingers drag me from my dream. With a gasp, I go from there to here. Clean, bright light pours through the colored glass, wrapping everything in a rainbow. The rain has stopped.

“Hello, sunshine,” I say.

Irini is at the doors, her ear pressed against the seam. The colors dance upon her shiny scars. Her forehead has that telltale crinkle. I go to her side, shucking off what’s left of sleep.

“What?” I mouth.

Her eyes meet mine. “Someone is out there.”

I’m not surprised. When he would come was my only question.

Irini watches me arm myself. Cleaver. Baker’s peel. I’m a homeless ninja hopped up on pregnancy hormones.

“You can’t.”

“I am.” Her lack of understanding doesn’t stop me from explaining. “This way I control it. My terms. In the open.”

Foolish. Furious. Forced into a corner. Fucking tired of it. All those things are me. I own them as I stomp into the blazing light. For a moment I’m blind and helpless. Slowly the burn fades. My pupils do their job, get real small, while the dot on the horizon swells.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I tell him.

“And yet, America, I am here.”

“I killed you. I watched you die.”

“You watched me hold my breath until you scampered away like a coward. You are a failure in everything.”

“Come on, asshole. You and me. Right here.”

I must look a sight, ripe and round in the middle, bones jutting through my skin everywhere but there. Even a steady supply of chocolate hasn’t fattened this calf. My baby is taking all I can ingest, but that’s as it should be. Mothers go without so their children can have. Although I haven’t read all the right books, I still know that.

The Swiss is as ragged as the rest of us, a scarecrow with an attitude. Not like Nick’s confident, relaxed swagger, but more like he made it up one day after inspecting himself in the mirror. Ah, yes. That’s who I want to be. There’s nothing organic about the Swiss. I see that now.

He stares at me with an obscene fascination.

“I can’t wait to cut you, neck to navel, America. Slice you open like a melon.”

“Like you did to Lisa?”

We circle each other. Perpetual motion.

“No. You I will keep alive. At least long enough so that thing inside you can breathe on its own. Then I’ll cut it, too, piece by wretched piece.”

“There’s something men never quite understand about women.”

“What is that?”

“The most dangerous place in the world is between us and the things we love.”

“Like shoes and jewelry and shallow pleasures?”

“Like people.” My words are shrapnel right in his face. “Stuff doesn’t matter. Only people.”

“That thing which grows in your womb is not a person. It’s an abomination— of God, of medicine, of science.”

His words play me like a cheap violin. The notes are there but the melody is off, the tone hollow and thin.

“My child is fine.”

“You don’t know. Not for certain. Don’t you lie awake and wonder, Am I going to give birth to a monster? You’ve seen them out there. We saw them together, did we not? Creatures of mutant flesh and bone, like that creature in Delphi. It was a kindness what I did to her.”

“Who the hell are you that you can just walk in and dish out this… kindness?”

He reaches behind. Pulls out the gun he stole from the Italian soldier.

I fall to my knees. Hands on my head. See Irini framed in the doorway. She’s holding a large can of something. I can’t make it out. Run mental inventory searching for a match. Pineapple. I think it’s pineapple. I know what she means to do: hit him over the head until his skull mashes to gray-pink pulp. I can’t blame her: he killed her sister. But I can’t let her do it. Her reach is too short. Too much time for him to shoot. She won’t understand, but I have to protect what’s mine. And right now she’s part of what belongs to me. My world-battered family of refugees.

“Stop.”

She doesn’t listen. Maybe the English-to-Greek translator fails. Maybe it’s just too slow. Or maybe she doesn’t care, so much does she want him dead. She rushes. Enough time for the Swiss to turn and backhand her with the pistol. Across her scars. The taut, shiny skin splits, bleeds. She tumbles sideways, slumps to the ground clutching her broken face. Physics is no friend to the losers in battle. Momentum carries them where it will.

He circles around us, the winning dog in this round. Waves the gun at me.

“Get up. Walk.”

TWENTY-TWO

The sound of two seething women is silence. Curious, because you’d think we’d be like silver kettles whistling as they reach a rolling boil. Esmeralda glues herself to my side and plods along, slowing when I slow, stopping when I stop—which isn’t often enough.

“Keep walking,” he says.

“We need water.”

A pause. “Okay.”

Greece’s most precious treasure is never mentioned in the travelogues. Springwater flows from the mountains into faucets dotted over the landscape. They jut from ornate facades of marble and stone. Irini goes first. Then Esmeralda. The Swiss indicates I should fill a bottle for him so I do. Then I drink for my baby and myself. When we’re hydrated, we continue the walk.

The Swiss took my map back at the church. The places Irini reads from the signs are different from what they should be. I know this from the furtive glances she gives me as she reels off the names. The sun still rises in the east, sets in the west. We are still going north, but on a coastal road that clings to the sea.

“Why are we taking this road?”

He doesn’t answer.

I can guess why. He’s worried we’ll encounter Nick or maybe Nick and several someone elses on the way. An ambush. I’d told him so little of my plans, nothing beyond the basics, born of my need to withdraw from the world, pull my resources in to survive, focus on my plan. My intentional isolation has had an expected side effect of the pleasant kind: he is uncertain, so he’s taking a risk calculated with arbitrary data.

“I thought the Swiss were neutral, not cowards.”

“I am no coward, America.”

“Tell me something.”

“What do you wish to know?”

“Why take us north? Why not back to Athens?”

“I want to go home. To Switzerland.”

“So, why are you here? Italy is closer to Switzerland.”

“My affairs are not your concern.”

“Bullshit. You’ve made them mine. If you’re going to kill me, at least tell me what’s going on.”

“I have business here.”

My raised eyebrows are wasted on him because he’s behind me. “There’s no business left anywhere.”

“You know nothing, America.” He reaches forward, nudges Irini’s cheek with the gun. “What happened to her face?”

“Fire. A childhood accident.”

“It looks new.”

“Sunburn,” I say.

I keep Irini’s secret close and walk.

She gives thanks later when the Swiss stops to piss on a gas station wall. I squeeze her hand, sorry I brought her into this, yet selfishly glad I’m not alone.

Night arrives with all her baggage and none of the melodrama of day. She brings a hostess gift: a small hotel, a plain white vanilla cake hugging the road’s curve. Behind a wrought-iron fence, the swimming pool masquerades as a swamp thing filled with rotting leaves and mold. Esmeralda waits as we traipse inside. The Swiss is at the back. Always at the back with the gun.

The dead are inside, sprawled out on once-snowy sheets, their final resting places so far from home—wherever home is. Even the breeze can’t carry the smell of this much death out to sea.

“Take a mattress outside,” the Swiss barks.

We choose a queen from an empty room. The bed is neatly made and we keep it so until it’s in place where he wants it, butted up snug against the iron fence. I wait for him to demand another but he doesn’t.

“Is this for us?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“What about you?”

“Such comforts are for weaklings and women.”

I almost gag on the words. “Thank you.”

He laughs cruelly. “You’ll need rest. Soon we’ll be in Vólos.”

What business do you have there, you bastard?

Irini and I share handcuffs and a bed: the Swiss takes no chances. Nick doesn’t come to me that night. I’m too far gone, too wrapped up in crisp sheets with my head pressed into the softest pillow I’ve ever known. I hope he forgives me.

“Are you ladies in trouble?” the Russian asks. He’s dressed in swimming trunks and introduces himself as “Me, I am Ivan.” For a man in a dead society, he looks well. Healthy. Nourished, but still too lean.

The gun muzzle is hard against my spine.

I smile and hope it doesn’t falter. “We’re fine. Thank you for asking.”

“Where you going?”

“To see family up past Vólos. Do you know it?”

He scratches his head. Glances over his shoulder. “Yes, is that way.”

“How—”

My head explodes, eardrum stretches to its thin limits. Ivan doesn’t have enough time to register surprise as the slug punches its way through his right eye. He slumps to the ground, perennially helpful and friendly. Forever Russian.

Hands over my ears, I yell at the shooter. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What? He was only trying to help. What’s your malfunction?”

The Swiss steps around me, nudges Ivan with his boot.

“Walk.”

“Vólos,” Irini reads, although the first letter looks like a B. In the middle of the name someone has pitched a crude tent—an A without its supporting bar. There’s no hallelujah chorus to herald the city’s appearance or our arrival. It juts out above the dusty shimmer, a geometric concrete maze. Take me as I am or leave me, it says. I care not. Perhaps I’m painting the city with my own subjectivity, slopping gobs of doubt on the boxy apartment buildings with their abandoned balconies. My own fears make the city glower. The empty tavernas lining the promenade scoff as if to say, People, they think they can endure? They who are so small? The ships and boats sinking in the harbor are reruns of Piraeus. Here they sit a little lower in the water as though they’re exhausted from fighting both gravity and salt. The Argo waits on its pillar for Argonauts who will never sail again.

It’s a strange thing to claim kinship with objects crafted from steel, but there’s a heaviness in my bones that’s mirrored in their submission to the sea. Although, in essence, metals are born of the earth and our bodies become earth when we’re finished with them, so perhaps there is some common ancestor. Some people are more resilient than others, some metals as pliable as flesh.

So lost am I in my thoughts that I hear the Swiss’s words, but they don’t register.

“What?”

He prods me with the gun. “I said we are stopping here.”

For supplies, I assume, or maybe for respite. “Right here?”

“No. There.”

My gaze travels the length of his gun all the way to the wasteland of marine vessels. Amidst the sinking ships and loose slips, some boats prevail. Small wooden fishing boats, mostly, painted cheerful colors like you’d see on a postcard. Wish you were here. Glad you’re not.

“I don’t understand.”

He moves so he’s standing right in front of us, lifts the weapon, shoots Irini. Blood flows. There’s so much. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that she’s a gushing fountain of brilliant scarlet. She falls into my arms and I sink to the ground with her, try to find the hole. There it is, buried an inch below her rib cage. It’s a tiny thing, I think as I press my hand to the wound. So tiny I can’t even shove my finger inside to plug the leak like the little Dutch boy did the dike.

Sounds of things scuttling away from where we are. Still human enough to be scared of the gun. Or animal enough to shy from loud noises.

My jaw is spring-loaded with tension. It’s all I can do not to leap up and tear his throat open with my teeth like some crazed animal. But that’s what he’s done to me: pushed me to the desperate edge as though he wants to measure how much I can lose before my sanity snaps into jagged pieces.

“What more do you want?” It hurts to speak. My teeth ache from the tension. “What else?”

“Your baby.”

Hate fills me until I’m radiating pure loathing. It’s a wonder it doesn’t take corporeal form and slay him.

“So many people caught White Horse. Why couldn’t you have been one of them?”

He looks at me. “I did.”

Surprise hits me like an automobile. “What did it do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. It changes everyone who doesn’t die from it. What did it do?”

“It made me stronger. Better. I can hold my breath longer. Heal faster.”

If I had it in me, I’d laugh at the delicious irony. “Do you hate your own kind? Is that it? The abomination hates his own.”

No more answers. He just curls those steel-cabled fingers around my forearm and pulls until Irini slips away.

“Go,” she says.

“Come on,” he says to me.

“Why? Why shoot her?”

“Fewer mouths to feed.”

“I hate you.”

“This is not school. Life is not a popularity contest. Power wins.”

He drags me. My boots scrape across the concrete. I sag, make myself deadweight, flail. Anything to inconvenience him. He wants me alive. He needs me alive. That means there’s still some luck left to push.

“I’m going to kill you. First chance I get,” I say.

“I believe you. But you will not get a chance.”

“We’ll see.”

He slaps me. Hot, angry tears fill my eyes. I don’t want them to, but my body has other plans.

“Your friend will be dead soon. Look.” He grabs my chin, makes me look at her. She’s sitting in a crimson pool. Steam rises from the blood in serpentine curls. I have a crazy thought that if I could press that hot concrete to her wound, it would seal her shut.

“Don’t you dare die,” I tell her.

The Swiss laughs. “You cannot save anyone. Not England. Not this creature. Not yourself.”

“Don’t die,” I say over and over, all the way up the gangplank onto an abandoned yacht. In a game of rock, paper, scissors, fiberglass beats metal. Man-made outliving earth-made once again.

One half of the handcuffs encircles my wrist, the other snaps around the rail. My captor unloads Esmeralda’s cargo and stows it belowdecks.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m going home with my child. To build a new Switzerland.”

But not me. He’ll cast me overboard the moment I outlive my purpose. I wonder if he means to let me live long enough to be a wet nurse to my own baby?

Irini isn’t visible from here, so I twist around until I can see her, ignoring the metal biting into my skin. I’m with you, I want to tell her. I don’t want you to die alone. I’m so sorry.

My face is hot and wet; I can’t tell where the sweat ends and the tears begin.

The Swiss leaves, taking Esmeralda with him. She tags along dutifully.

“Don’t you hurt her.” My lips are dry and cracked and it hurts to speak. The skin splits and bleeds the more animated I become. He says nothing, just keeps on leaving. I know he’ll be back, because I have what he wants.

It’s just me and Irini now, or maybe it’s me and Irini’s ghost. Is she still alive? I can’t tell. The sun sears my retinas until I’m seeing in dot matrix. I bow my head, try to shield my face from the relentless rays. My sunburn has sunburn. If I’m not careful, I’ll wind up with an infection. I almost laugh, because on a scale of one to catastrophe, bacteria rates somewhere in the negatives.

I don’t realize I’ve been asleep until the Swiss’s yelling jerks me awake. He’s pacing the promenade, waving his gun, ranting in his own tongue. Using my hand as a shield, I start looking for the source of his anger.

Irini. She’s gone. All that’s left of her is a browning stain. The sun and the thirsty concrete have sucked away the moisture. But there’s no evidence of the woman who bled so they could drink. My body shivers as I contemplate what might have happened. Did something drag her away? If so, how close did I come to being consumed in my sleep? Or did she escape? No, not possible: her injury was fatal. There’s no way. There’s just no way. But a little voice reminds me that the rules of biology are different now. Things exist now that didn’t before.

The Swiss slides the gangplank into place. The boat shakes under his footfalls.

“Where is she?” His veins are like engorged worms under his pink skin.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“How could you not? Were you not right here?” He jabs the air with his finger.

“I… was… asleep.”

“Stupid bitch.”

The boat shakes and heaves again. He returns dragging a bulging tarp. This he stashes down below with the other supplies.

“I’m going to find her,” he says. “If she is not dead already, I am going to kill her properly.”

TWENTY-THREE

He returns near sunset with more things. Baby things. Clothes and diapers and cream to prevent tiny cheeks from chafing. Things I haven’t had time to think about because I was so focused on surviving.

He holds up a dress, yellow, sprinkled with white flowers. “What do you think?”

The words stick to the walls of my throat. All I can do is look away.

He brings food. Cold meat from cans, a combination of pigs’ lips and assholes and whatever other remnants were lying around the processing plant. Cold vegetables, also from cans, with labels I can’t read. Depicted on these slips of sticky paper are families smiling so cheerfully, they can’t be real. Who smiles like that? Nobody I’ve known in this new life. I slurp down the juice after I’m done chewing the chunks. For dessert he has tiny chocolate cakes wrapped in plastic. I eat these greedily, licking the plastic clean when I’m done. I’m a shameless and wanton eater. I don’t care what he thinks of my manners. When all that’s left is the taste of chocolate in my mouth, I ask about Irini.

“Did you find her?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“She was probably eaten by animals. Or worse.”

“Or she escaped.”

“Unlikely. Not with a wound such as that,” he says. “How is my baby?”

“My baby is fine.”

“May I?” He holds out his hand as if to touch me. Suddenly polite.

“Touch us and I’ll cut you.” Cold. Calm. Truthful.

He laughs like I’m kidding.

“I thought for certain your womb was empty, like that stupid girl’s.”

“When are we leaving?”

“Soon,” he says.

“What are you waiting for?”

“My baby.”

I won’t let him take my baby. I won’t. Never. I’d die first, and that’s what he wants. A plan. I need a plan. I have to get away now before it’s too late and I’m dead and my child is his.

Where are you, Nick? Why won’t you come and save us, you bastard? I came this far for you. Just come the rest of the way for us. Please.

The thought is unfair but I can’t control it; Nick has no way of knowing we’re here. The thing bobs around in my head like a speech balloon in a comic. It’s not supposed to be this way—for any of us. But as people used to say in the old days, when there were enough of us to create and perpetuate slang: It is what it is. And that’s what I have to work with.

He leaves just after dawn. Gone again to get things for a child that isn’t his. This time he cuffs me to the single leg that holds up a tabletop in this tiny room below the deck. He empties my backpack onto the carpet, picking out anything I might use as a weapon. Good-bye, nail clippers, tweezers, and an old dressmaker’s pin that’s been rusting in a side pocket for maybe ten years. He locks the cabin’s door. I know he’s worried Irini isn’t dead, despite his protests and his faux certainty. Nothing is certain anymore—not even tomorrow. I wouldn’t even put money on the sun setting this evening.

I’m on the floor of a boat surrounded by everything I have in this world: old clothes, maps, and Nick’s letter. What can I do?

The carpet peels away easily enough. I don’t pull up much, just enough to figure out how the table’s attached to the floor. Bolts. They’re on as tight as tight can be.

What do I have? A big fat nothing.

Pain cuts across my back. I change positions, lie back, breathe deep. Junior rolls with me. I stare up at the underside of the table. It’s crafted from cheap fiberboard that flakes when I scrape my fingernail over it. There’s a lot number scrawled on there. Or maybe some secret code meant for someone long dead.

When I see it, I wonder how I didn’t see it sooner. Whether it’s pregnancy or malnutrition or exhaustion, my mind isn’t as sharp as it once was. But I do see it now, I do, and hope unfurls her tiny wings. The tabletop is held in place by four shiny silver screws that run through a T-shaped bracket. Hope goes through its rapid life cycle, dies as quickly as it was born. There’s no way the cuffs will fit over the bracket. It and the table leg are one solid piece.

I am doomed. The Swiss will take my child.

Why don’t you come for us, Nick?

Now is all the time I have left. I can’t die without reading Nick’s letter.

I dreamed of the letter last night.

Again?

I nod.

The exact same letter?

Always the same.

Describe it for me, Zoe.

It’s just paper. Dirty. Tattered edges.

How does it make you feel?

Terrified. And curious.

It’s the jar all over again. I have no hammer so my fingers unwrap my fears.

Bang. Out of nowhere a train comes and knocks my heart and soul right out of my body, leaving a crater where me used to be. There’s no way—Nick can’t be dead.

No.

No.

I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

There’s not enough heart left in me to conjure up a tear storm. I’m an empty space on the verge of collapsing in on itself like some dead star. I’m a black hole.

Cold. Calm. A vacuum.

I fold the things the Swiss scattered on the floor and fit them neatly into my backpack. Nesting. When that chore’s done, I sprawl out on the floor to relieve the ache in my back. The cabinets start to look interesting. I can reach them with my feet. If I slip off my boot, I can use my toes to flip the latches that keep the doors in place while sailing rocky seas, so that’s what I do. The lower cabinets are stuffed with cans of baby formula and water in plastic bottles. My gaze snags on something I’ve seen before, although not in months.

Nick can’t be gone. I won’t let him. If I do these things, then he isn’t really gone. I can hold death at bay by doing.

The pain in my back increases as I stretch further, reaching for that holy grail, the mystery of mysteries: a rectangular box made of metal and painted a slick black. The Swiss has carried it with him all this way. And now my curiosity is eating me alive. My toes dip under the handle. White-hot lightning shoots up my thigh. Cramp. I relax the position, wait for the pain to die, then slowly ease the box out of the cabinet until I can reach it with my hand. There’s no lock. Just a silver latch. Strange that he’d be so cavalier about something that clearly holds meaning. It springs apart, almost promiscuous in its ardent action, as though it’s been waiting for this moment and wants me to look inside. The box’s wanting doesn’t save me from the guilt. I don’t like to snoop, but I make an exception for the Swiss. He’d afford me the same courtesy, after all.

The metal box is filled with photographs. Fading Polaroids, yellowing pictures with curling edges depicting people in fashions that might have swung back into favor again someday. The subjects differ, but they’re all blond, Nordic, lean and fit people. The Swiss’s family, I imagine, for who else could they be?

My fingers pick through the leaves of his family tree. It’s the strangest thing: all of these photographs, and he’s not in a single frame.

It made me better. Stronger.

Faster and faster, I flick through the pictures, searching for clues. What did White Horse do to him? How did he change? Then I’m looking at a grainy photograph from some newspaper or another and my face falls slack like somebody sucked out all the bones. I try to fit the pieces together in some way that makes sense in some universe where everything isn’t wrong.

George P. Pope and a cool, sleek blond woman. He’s grinning at the camera, pompous and proud—even in freeze-frame—while she looks like she’d rather be anywhere but there. Oh, she’s smiling, but it hurts. I know that face. I’ve seen it in the last hundred or so photographs. I’ve seen it in a lab. In an elevator. The pained expression is a repeat, too. Her brother wears it. Or maybe he’s a cousin or a young uncle, but I’m betting he’s a brother— otherwise, why carry all these memories across the world?

I want photos. I want my memories in print. I want Nick and our child and the children we haven’t had a chance to make yet, and I want to be able to look back at pictures and laugh at the things we did. But that future is gone, snatched away by that egomaniacal prick in the photograph and that bastard who’s coiled in the grass, a snake waiting to take the only thing I have left of the man I love.

I can’t cry. The pain is so fresh, it’s still steaming. All I can do is sit here like a soulless puppet and rip these photographs to shreds. Ruin them like the world is ruined. Steal the Swiss’s memories like he’s stealing mine.

And suddenly, even though my face is dry, I’m sitting in a lake my own body has created. I know what it means: my baby is coming.

Hard and fast, labor comes. Too fast, maybe. I can’t gauge. I’m choking on sweat and tears, panting, try to get air and some relief from the pain. But with every sweet, sweet breath my body tears another inch.

Stay inside a little longer, I think.

But I’m ready.

It’s not safe out here.

I want to see the world.

Oh, baby, there’s no world left to see. Only death.

What’s death?

I pray you never know.

I came for nothing. For a dead man. To deliver my child alone in a boat.

My daughter arrives in my darkest moment. We cry in tandem.

In the middle of my delirium, Nick comes.

She’s perfect, he says.

Her tiny hand curls around my finger. All her pieces are where they belong. Nothing missing. No extras.

Not an abomination? I ask of him.

No. She’s beautiful like her mother.

I look like hell.

He laughs. Women. You carried our child; you’ve never been more beautiful to me.

Are you sure she’s perfect?

Yes.

He wants to take her.

You won’t let him. I know you.

But I’m tired. So tired. Can I sleep now?

Not yet, baby. Soon.

I read your letter. I love you, too, you know.

This would all be easier if you didn’t.

There’s no such thing as easy anymore.

A kiss pressed on her forehead and on mine. His lips are warm. How can imaginary lips be warm?

This is love, he says. This is all love should be.

Ether. That’s what woo-woo people call it. Nick fades from sight, and maybe he goes into that ether or maybe my brain’s just flipped a gear, switching me back to sanity. Doesn’t matter. Nick is gone and the Swiss is back and he’s filling up the space that used to hold a locked door. Now I don’t know which is worse, because he’s looking at my baby—my baby—with a covetous expression on his hard-planed face. Thou shalt not covet. I want to kill him where he stands.

He inches toward me. Us.

“Give me my baby,” he croons.

Visceral loathing. Hot, bubbling, seething. I’m a lioness primed to tear the pulse from his throat if he dares to touch what’s mine.

“What the fuck are you?”

“Please be calm. You’re crazy.”

“Because you’re trying to steal my baby,” I spit.

“My baby.”

Now he notices that something is different. I’ve redecorated while he was busy hunting and gathering. The things he held dear to him were used as confetti and ticker tape in my rage parade. His gaze travels from piece to piece to the empty box to the newspaper clipping I purposely placed just so on the small table.

“What did you do?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re related to George Pope’s wife?”

“Those… are… my… things. What gives you the right?”

“What gives you the right to hold me hostage and steal my baby? What gave you the right to use Lisa like some sexual spittoon, to cut her open and murder her? She was just a girl. And the soldier. And the Russian. And Irini. Who died and made you God?”

“I am God!” he screams. “I am the only God you will ever know.”

I’m too tired for this fight. “I don’t believe in God anymore. Why should I?”

My baby lets out a thin cry. Poor girl. Just born and already she’s in the middle of a primitive custody battle. But this one will be different. This one will be to the death.

“Just let us go,” I say. Quiet. Calm. Alpha female protecting what’s hers.

He crouches beside us. Holds out his hands. I recoil as much as the handcuffs will allow, but it’s not nearly enough.

“Give me my baby.”

“Why? I don’t understand why you even care. Why us?”

His laugh chills me. “I want your child because it’s born of two parents with immunity to the disease. Your child will survive untouched.”

The puzzle pieces shift and turn. “You’re looking for a cure.”

“Don’t be stupid: there is no cure.” He bites each word, spits it in my face. “The dead are gone and they will stay that way. I engineered the disease to endure. I made it. I. Not George. I designed the changes so they would last. Nobody could guess which chromosomes would evolve and turn the host into something completely new. We are all of us abominations. We should be dead.”

I want to beat him, pound him with my fists, but what strength I have left is all in my mind.

“You and Pope. You did this to all of us.”

“You don’t know anything, America. You are a stupid woman. You cleaned floors and the shit from mouse cages. I am a scientist. A doctor. I want a child. Me, who will never have my own. Me, who gave up my womanhood to the disease. I became a man against my will. George took everything from me. My work. My chance for children. He owes me this!”

The laughter explodes from my mouth, fire and ice in the same breath. Pain slices through me but I don’t care. If this whole thing wasn’t a tragedy, I’d wager I was in a soap opera. The mustache-twirling villain is a real girl. The Blue Fairy was a trickster.

“You’re the woman in the photographs?”

It all makes sense now, what Lisa said about the Swiss not being like other men, his constant misogyny, the overtly masculine movements that often seemed rehearsed in front of a cheval mirror. Somehow the genetic lottery machine dug around in the barrel until it pulled out an X chromosome and gnawed off one of its legs.

“I was before I became sick. I was George Preston Pope’s wife for fifteen years! He was a cold, cruel man, something I never fully comprehended until he made me sick against my will. We needed to test on humans, so he injected me. Not himself—me. I knew then he cared nothing for me— only business, money, his reputation as a great man. He owes me a child.”

I laugh like this is the best joke ever told. Stand-up comedians would have killed for this kind of comedy black gold. I throw Nick’s letter in his face like it’s a brick. “Read it.”

“Do not laugh at me. Give me my baby.”

“Read it!” I scream, until my lungs ache from the word rush. “Read the letter.”

He scans the page. A transformation happens. A devolution of rock to sagging flesh. A hopeless body sublimating. He sits for a time amidst the wreckage of his past and future.

“I do not understand.”

Who’s a stupid woman now? I want to say, but can’t. I’m still human, still a person. I still have compassion, however misguided. No matter what happens, my humanity stands. Even if I don’t live through the night. Kill him? Oh yes, I can, but I can’t mock him—her—for what he’s become.

“Nick died. He got sick with your disease and he died. So you see, she could still get White Horse, could still get sick, die, or turn into some awful thing. As you keep saying: an abomination.”

“No.” Disbelieving.

“Yes.”

“No. This cannot be.”

“It is.”

Nothing.

“And now we both have to deal with it. You made this bed, you and your husband. Now we all have to sleep in it. Even you.”

“Shut up,” he says. “Listen.”

But I’ve already heard it. Something approaches. Night has come while we were busy fighting, and along with it those that dwell in the city’s secret places.

TWENTY-FOUR

Not the screaming. No. The vociferous noises of angry humans shoo away weak things. Yell, and a creature that believes itself to be weaker— either by size, constitution, or pecking order—will scurry away lest the brunt be turned on it. Even in concrete jungles, such laws of nature persist. It’s why they haven’t come sooner. They’ve been crouched behind doors and dumpsters, evaluating our weaknesses, trying to determine which rung on the evolutionary ladder we occupy.

The dynamic only changes when variables alter: when there are more of them than there are of us; when they believe we’re wounded or weakened; when we have something that will ensure their survival.

No, two adults yelling has not awakened the shadow things and brought them here; it’s the crying of my newborn.

“Silence the child.” He locks the cabin door. Peers into the darkness. A scared thing. Now I see for myself what my mind glossed over before. All those weeks, I looked without seeing. So plain to me now, the slightly feminine movements that are nigh on impossible to erase: a hip tilt; a hair tuck; the telltale sway in an unguarded moment.

I hold my girl to me, jiggle her in a way I hope is comforting, but she’s only warming up for her debut performance. Even my breast cannot divert her from her song.

“I said silence.”

“You’d make a lousy mother.”

“Look at yourself. Are you a paragon of motherhood? You are handcuffed to a table after chasing a dead man across the world like some common slut. If he had wanted you, he would have brought you with him to care for him as he died.”

The vicious retort is there, balanced on my tongue, just behind my teeth. One small flick is all it needs to nail its target. Shred him with my words. But one word stays my tongue.

“Zoe?”

The voice comes filtered through a door, but still I know it and my heart races.

“Irini?” I yell.

The Swiss explodes like a flare in the night. “Shut up. Shut up, you idiot.”

“I told you she was alive.”

“You know nothing. Look,” he says. “She has betrayed you to her kind. Monsters uniting with other monsters.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You should see her, America, standing on the dock with the others. She means to kill us, and perhaps your child.”

Your child. A shift. He no longer wants her now that he knows one of her parents is dead from the virus he created for Pope in Pope Pharmaceuticals’ labs. What a fickle bastard. But that bothers me. It really does. Because now she’s as useless to him as I am, which means my daughter’s life is worth as much as a foam cup.

“How can I look if I’m cuffed to the floor?”

A dance ensues. Two choices wrestling for the lead. He wants to gloat, he wants to keep me subjugated, and the two are mutually exclusive in this time and place. His ego seizes control. My restraint falls to the floor. I am free as I can be while still imprisoned.

On gelatin legs, I amble to the door. See Irini for myself, her skin glowing under the moon’s caress.

The Swiss is right: she is not alone. They swarm the dock’s end. People who are not people. And yet, under this moon, they appear real and whole. I can’t discern what is still human and what is other. Irini stands on the gangplank, apart from the others. It is from there that she calls to me while my daughter wails on. It is there the moonlight stops to admire itself in the blade she holds.

“Is a girl?” she calls out.

“Do not speak,” the Swiss says.

But I do not take orders from him. “Yes.”

“Is she well?”

“Yes.”

“Come. I want to see you.”

The Swiss’s hand is an iron band around my arm. “You cannot go.”

I stare him down in the dark. “How many rounds do you have left? One? Two? Enough for me and them? Or are you saving the last one for yourself?”

He reaches for my child.

“Touch her and you will die.”

Then I step through the door. I choose the lesser of the evils.

The gangplank bows and flexes under the weight of my broken heart. Bodies shift and shuffle to let us come ashore. What they are isn’t clear in this light. They look like me, world-burned and weary. Maybe they are me, but with tongues that speak another language.

“Who are they?”

“People,” Irini says.

“Are we safe?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still alive.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Maybe not only my face is changed. Maybe inside, too.”

Irini lifts my child from my arms, cradles that fragile skull in her sunburned palm. Too close to the knife’s fine edge.

“Please.”

“I will not hurt her.” She smiles down at that sweet, new face. “We want people to go on.” Then she turns that smile on me. “We come for you. To save you. I prayed we were not late.”

They surround us then, peer at my child, and she falls silent, done with her song.

“It’s like they’ve never seen a baby before,” I say.

One by one, they dry-spit on my child.

“To ward away the Evil Eye,” Irini says. This comforts me, knowing they are all still human enough to cling to their superstitions.

“They will never have their own,” the Swiss says from his fiberglass perch. “No abomination can breed.”

I turn, stare at him, barely able to contain my disgust. “Is there anything you didn’t take from them?”

“The disease stole from me, too.”

“There’s no excuse for the hurts you’ve caused,” I say.

My rescuers move away now, a human tide peeling itself from the rocks. And when they return, they bring the Swiss with them and hold him fast.

He looks to me for help. “Will you let them take me?”

I shake my head. “I don’t have any mercy left to give. You’ve used it all up.” Gently, I take the knife from Irini’s hand. “My hands are already stained with blood,” I tell her.

A piece of my soul flakes away as the knife moves in an elegant arc. I wrap it in silk, encase it in an ice block, and stow it in a lead-lined trunk. Someday—if there are days left that belong to me—I may pick the lock and set that fragment in the sun to thaw. Ah, I will say when I look upon it again. I remember now. I remember who I used to be. Just a girl with simple dreams and a crush on her therapist.

How does it make you feel? Nick says from the past.

Terrified.

The blade skims the surface of his man-made Adam’s apple, draws a thin red line upon the skin, a half inch above the scar I already made, allows gravity to pull it down into a neutral position at my side.

“You can’t do it,” he gloats.

“I won’t do it,” I say. “There’s a difference. You poor bitch.”

I reach out to Irini, the snake woman of Delphi, and take my daughter from her arms. Then we turn and go and leave the Swiss at the mercy of his own creations. He owes them.

My heart is still tender enough that I flinch at the sound of his screams.

I am still human, with all the frailties and strengths of my kind.

We walk in the half-light of a benevolent moon. North again. Always north, we four. We’ve taken what we can from the boat: things for us and Baby. Esmeralda hauls them without complaint. There’s barely enough energy in my body to carry my daughter and myself.

“Why?”

“Forward is the only way. One foot in front of the other.”

“We could go back to Delphi.”

“Just a little further,” I tell her. “Nick wanted to know if his parents were safe. Now”—my tongue thickens—“I have to do that for him. You’re free to go wherever you choose, my friend.”

She holds her head high now. Proud. As she should be.

“We are more. Family.”

I wonder how a fractured heart, with all its ragged holes, can still hold so much love.

We stop so I can bathe in the ocean and drag dry, clean clothes over my purified skin. Then we move on.

Onwards. Past the gray stone church with its misspelled English graffiti. Alongside a gulf filled with diamonds. We move slowly, but that’s okay, the bomb no longer ticks with the same urgency. The Swiss is dead—Nick, too —and my daughter is here.

Dawn comes. Morning slides into noon.

Greece is made of roads that curve and hug the landscape like a favorite pair of jeans. We skim her hip and find a cement factory hulking over the water. On the mountain behind the abandoned facility, terraces are tribal scars cut into the land by men with dynamite and hard hats. In the water, rust buckets with Cyrillic letters painted on the side await cargo that will never come. There are bones on the low-slung decks, sucked clean of the bodies that once held them. Cement dust clouds, stirred by a fledgling ocean breeze, smell of freshly poured pavement. I double-check that Baby’s head is protected from both sun and smut.

Beneath the red, Irini’s skin is pallid. When I touch her forehead, she smiles.

“I am okay. You?”

I don’t believe her. She’s dry when she should be steeped in sweat.

“Fine.”

A falsehood. We both know it but we’re too proud to admit to our lies lest we seem weak—not for ourselves but for each other. I’m losing blood and so is she. Only my baby has skin still pink and new and alive.

We don’t speak as we walk. Conversation comes when we’re resting. When we’ve cleared the cement factory, we break again under the protective cover of an olive tree. Its fruit is green and thick like a man’s thumb, but the crop will rot without someone to pick the bounty at harvest time. We sip water from bottles refilled from a roadside faucet. Candy bars for the sugar rush that comes slower and slower each time. Baby pulls what she needs from my breasts faster than my body can replenish the source, so I stir formula on the side of the road to satisfy her. She’s a good girl. Quiet. Alert. The road is all she knows, so the vibration from my footsteps must soothe her soul in ways it will never comfort me. I yearn for a home that’s mine, on a piece of land that never shifts, in a place not teeming with death.

“What happened?” I ask Irini when we’ve filled our shrunken stomachs.

“I do not know. I… was dying. Then not.”

“And in between?”

“The gods came for me and made me whole.”

“You’re still bleeding.”

“Whole… a little… to help you and the baby.”

Just enough. How do you thank someone who turns away from death to come back for you?

TWENTY-FIVE

The first sign of life is no sign of life: abandoned cars and motorcycles, rusted and rotting along the winding road. Conspicuously absent are corpses, which have become the most prevalent form of litter in urban streets. Bones and half-eaten carcasses are as omnipresent as burger wrappers and beer cans—but not here.

Irini shades her eyes, smiles as she delivers the news. “Agria. This is the place.”

My everything sags with relief and I slump against a BMW with a chronic case of rust acne. We’re here. We’re really here. Some magical how happened and we are here.

“This is your ancestral home, baby girl.” My daughter’s hair is soft against my lips. She makes a small sucking noise. Then the fear comes for me, rolling, rolling on wooden wheels, a chariot carrying its terrible driver, his bullwhip held aloft waiting to strike me down.

“I can’t do it.”

“You must.”

“What if they’re dead?”

“Then they are dead and you have lost nothing.”

“Just more hope.”

“Hope is what you hold in your arms.”

The truth of her words can’t hold the gathering storm at bay. I sink my teeth into my lip, clamp the delicate flesh tightly until the physical pain reduces the emotional to a dull ache. I nod. This is reality. Nick was a beautiful, magnificent fantasy, but now he’s dead and soon I might be, too. I look at my girl and I know in that instant that, if not for her, I would be fine knowing that today was the last day, the end cap of my life. I wish I was home. I wish I was in that place before all this. I choke on a sob, because I’m longing for something so dead, so cold, so gone, that I might as well wish for a rocket ship to Mars.

It takes a cluster of clanging bells to pull me from own head. I look to Irini in case it’s a sign I’ve lost my mind and I’m doomed to spend all my days as a tragic hunchback in a bell tower that doesn’t exist on any earthly plane.

“Goats,” she says. “Sheep, maybe.”

Bo Peep–less goats. They bleed between the cars and motorcycles from someplace beyond the crook in the road, swarm around us, inspecting our belongings with slitted yellow gazes. Then, just as quickly, they mosey on down the cracked street in search of green pastures. Their dull bells jangle and fade into the past.

Each new step depletes me further. I see it in Irini, too. She’s my mirror, and in her I watch myself wilt and weaken and drain myself dry. If this was a video game, we’d be out of extra lives.

“I can do this,” I say. “I have to. Sit. If there’s help, I’ll send it.”

“No. Together.”

I take her hand in mine and we walk. The strangers are come to town.

Around the corner is a village that resembles the last, and the one before that, and all the others before those. This place is not unique. Tavernas line the streets. Fishing line still hangs outside so fishermen can display the day’s catch. The gulf laps at the shore like a thirsty cat. Two chairs sit by the shore, between them a small table and two glasses filled with brown liquid and foam. Two people stand in the middle of the road, intent on a conversation. A man and woman dressed in Bermudas and tanks.

A vacation snapshot. The end of the world is someplace else.

Irini and I limp into the picture. We two bums and our donkey spoil the perfect scene with our broken bodies. Irini’s stomach blooms with its carmine stain. She needs help, and soon.

I stand there in the same middle of the same street. “Hello?”

They turn. Echo. “Hello?”

Americans.

The woman is built like a good armchair: soft, sturdy, her skin sun-worn to a rich nut brown. Her companion is tall and lean, with eyes I’ve seen in another man’s face.

“You’re Nick’s parents,” I say. And then I cry.

They stare at me, at each other, at me again. The man speaks.

“The world’s gone mad. We quit asking questions a long time ago, just accepted the strangeness as much as we could to survive. But now I have to ask: How the hell do you know our son?”

The woman slaps him, gentle, mocking, only a minor punishment for his lack of etiquette. A whole conversation in the space of a heartbeat the way only couples who are tightly cleaved can communicate.

“Don’t you know?” she says. “It’s Nick’s Zoe. Who else could she be?” She looks to me for confirmation. “You are, aren’t you?”

All the words I prepared have poured back into the soup of unspoken thoughts, broken down and formless once more. Nod; that’s all I can do.

She comes to me, touches my face with a palm callused and cracked, and yet the touch is tender: a mother’s touch.

“I miss my mom,” I say.

“You always will.” Her gaze falls. “Who is this?” Rises.

“Nick’s daughter.”

“Oh my God. What have you brought us?” Then she holds us both in her comfortable arms. Her husband comes next.

“I don’t believe it,” he says. “How can this be? How did you find us?” But he’s crying, too, so I know he believes, even if his mouth can’t yet form the words.

I look to Irini. Her scars are bathed in tears.

“You brought hope,” she says.

But I didn’t. The message I carry is a mixed blessing. I know how this will go. I am the messenger, the one who bears news both good and bad: Here is your grandchild, but your son is dead. Then the struggle will begin inside them: Should they love me for holding hope in one outstretched, sunburned palm, or hate me for performing the bait and switch of an inexpert con man? Have this child, for yours is dead.

“Nick.” I swallow; his name hurts.

Miracles are tiny things, meaningless except to the person who seeks one. To that one person, a miracle is everything. One happy event can change the course of a life. In the blackest moments, they hide.

Wait….

Wait….

Ignoring prayers and pleading, miracles enjoy the element of surprise. They love those who would step forward and meet them halfway.

Nick’s father moves slowly, a boulder being rolled aside. And there it is: my miracle. My white knight does not ride a steed, nor does he hide behind armor gleaming from the goodness of his deeds and a polishing rag. He does not need those things. He comes instead in shorts and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, bare-chested and barefoot, a fishing rod in his hands instead of a sword. Just Nick.

“Zoe!” he yells. And then we are one again. Me, Nick, and our daughter.

This is my miracle. It is small to everyone but me.

Irini leaves us that night, slipping out alongside the sun. The men bury her while I sob quietly for the woman who saved our lives.

We name our daughter for her, Nick and I. Irini. Peace. As the ground claims her for its own, I pray the snake woman of Delphi has found her peace as I have found the beginnings of mine. I thank her—for all days.

And when I lay my head upon his chest on those hot summer nights, I try not to notice Nick’s beating hearts.