Coyote (13 page)

Taking out her implements, the woman began to stitch. Aside from the occasional flinch as the needle pulled at her flesh, the patient never moved, and never spoke. She merely stood, her stare fixed away from the group.

Finally finishing, Leanne swabbed an antiseptic ointment over her work and wrapped the wound in fresh gauze, then stepped back. “That should do it, I guess. God, I don’t have any of the things I really need. But at least it shouldn’t bleed any more… not too much.”

She shrugged her jacket back on and turned away, taking a few steps to a corner of the room, where she sat in an open chair. She didn’t say thank you. She has never said thank you.

---

The rest of the group had remained silent through the stitching too, and now they all looked a bit at a loss for what to talk about.

“Well, now we have a medic,” said the Mule.

“That’s right!” cried Bait. “Welcome, Medic!” Somehow all of them could hear the capital letter at the beginning of the woman’s new name.

The woman smiled gratefully at them both and sat back down with the group. Soon the idle chatter was flowing again when suddenly the Professor, who had stood up to look out the window, called out.

“Hey! There’s a light over there!”

For a moment the group was stunned, trying to take in the news. Then there was a great rush for everyone to plaster their face to the window the Professor had been looking out of.

She stood too, walking close to the window but staying a few paces back of the group, out of touching range.

In the house across the street, there was indeed a light. She looked up and down the rest of the street, as far as she could while standing back from the crowd at the window, and saw no other lights. Then, while they all wondered at this, the light faded, becoming almost invisible.

Nobody spoke, each probably conjuring their own thoughts about what that meant. Then the light grew brighter again. This happened several times. Dimmer, then brighter. They all stared, wondering what it meant, and what could be happening.

Then, just as the pattern was becoming predictable, the light got brighter than it ever had, and could finally be seen as a glowing ball, approaching the window of the house. When she saw the vague outline of a person carrying the glowing ball of light, she realized it was a candle, and that someone was moving around one of the upstairs rooms in the house across the street with it. Soon the candle approached the window, shining out in the darkness.

It stayed still this way for a moment and then moved, turning sideways, finally facing back into the room. Now they all could see that it was illuminating a person, standing in that room across the street, holding the candle, shining it up into their own face.

It was obvious that the person had seen them across the street, had been signaling them, and now that he was sure he had the group’s attention, was shining the candle on themselves for the group’s benefit.

Which, she realized, left the question of what the group was supposed to do about it.

They could not distinguish any features of the person from this distance—solely that it definitely
was
a person, and the shape looked generally male, if somewhat smaller than most men.

Suddenly she was surprised by a light blossoming right below her, amongst the group in their own room. The Professor had pulled out a candle of his own, and was lighting it, most likely intending to signal back. She lunged forward, swinging her arm and knocking the lighter he had been using out of his grasp.

He looked at her, stunned.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Signaling back, of course,” said the Professor.

“But
who
are you signaling?” she asked.

He just stared at her.

“You don’t know who this is, across the street,” she explained. “Is that person more like you, or more like the people you met in the farm house?”

“Hey, she’s right,” chimed in Bait. “Maybe we shouldn’t be attracting attention, you know?”

“But that’s another human over there!” argued the Professor. “We can’t just ignore him. Who knows how many of us are left? Not many, by my guess.”

Then Medic entered the discussion. “I think he’s right. We can’t just ignore another person. Where’s your faith? Before the Fall, I always believed that given a chance, most people were decent. I still do.”

“This is not about being decent or kind. There is no space for that,” she countered, looking at both Medic and the Professor. “And this is not a discussion. If you wish to go make new friends, do so. Walk over there tomorrow and see who you find. She does not care. But do not draw attention to this room, where she is.

“Do all the foolish things you want, but do not put her in danger.”

“Hey, listen,” said Bait. If there was talking going on, he had to get involved. “I think Coyote’s right. I mean, none of us know who that guy is across the way. Is he alone, looking for companions or help? Is he luring you over there so the rest of his group can jump you? We just don’t know.”

The Professor was not satisfied. “We don’t know until we find out. Will you let your baser suspicions rule your actions? Or is there still a place for human decency in this world? I, for one, vote for the latter. It is, quite frankly, our moral imperative to make contact with and to support whatever other survivors we can find.”

With this, he stepped over to his meager possessions, putting on his jacket. “I’m going to go find out who that is across the street. And if he’s amenable to it, I’m going to bring him back here, share some of our food with him, and prove to you that there are good people in the world.” He gave the group a significant look. “And if I’m wrong, it’s just as well, because then I don’t want to live in this world anymore.”

“I’ll go too,” said Medic, bending to retrieve her jacket and medical bag. “Maybe he needs medical attention.”

“No way, man,” said Bait. “Count me out. Those zombies from the pile of bodies in the gym are probably wandering around outside by now. We’re not that far away from the school, you know. Plus, Coyote’s right that we don’t know if that person over there is someone we even
want
to meet.
Plus
whatever
other
horrible things are wandering out there in the night.”

“Me neither,” said the Mule. “I’m not going out there in the dark. And,” he looked at Bait with a roll of his eyes, “there are no zombies.”

“Fine,” said the Professor, a look of disgust on his face. “We’ll let you know what we find.”

She spoke up. “You will not.”

Nobody had noticed her moving while they were having their debate, but now she stood directly in front of the door, the only practical exit from the room. The dog stood next to her.

“You will not leave this room tonight. You will not attract the attention of what might be out there, human or other.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Professor. “Of course I will. There’s another person out there, for God’s sake. And for all we know, he needs our help!”

“You will not leave,” she said. Her stance made the threat in her words obvious.

“You have to right to do this!” yelled the Professor.

“There are no rights,” she said calmly. “No rights, no justice, no ‘moral imperatives.’ There is survival and nothing else.”

She knew that the Professor would not challenge her physically, not while she still had the blood of the last person to cross her under her fingernails. To her, all his talk was just that: talk—empty noise running though his vocal cords, as meaningful as the wind rattling the tree branches.

She relaxed her stance, standing straight. “Tonight you all will stay here. Tomorrow, when she moves on, you may go where you wish.”

That took the wind out of his sails. Medic turned away without a word, settling down on one of the mattresses. The Professor stared at her for a few minutes, then gave in, turning away to his own mattress. He was muttering things under his breath that no one asked him to repeat.

The others, Bait and the Mule, just watched, and nothing more was said on the subject.

That night she slept on a pile of blankets laid out in front of the doorway, with the dog at her feet, on its own pile of blankets. Nobody left the room. Bait turned the fireplace down low, muttering about the light attracting attention as the others all settled in to sleep. The light across the street shone for a quite a while longer, alternating between being held up to the window and turning back to illuminate the face of the person across the street, but nobody responded. Eventually, it, too, went dark for the night.

---

From the diary of The Mule:

Tonight we’re holed up in some house in the town of Sandy. Nothing special about this house, it’s just a place to spend the night. And a place to rest. God, I’m tired. That pack is heavy, and my new clothes are adding to the weight. I picked up an awesome new jacket today in this motorcycle/snowmobile shop we visited. It’s got chainmail inside it, of all things. Chainmail! Every adolescent nerd’s fantasy, and it only took the end of the world for me to get a chance to live it.

I got new boots and gloves, too. Shopping is so much more fun when you don’t have to pay for stuff.

In other news, I spent a while chatting with the Professor during the day today. There’s not much else to do as we trudge along. He’s an interesting guy, full of ideas, but he doesn’t give off that sense of superiority that some well-educated folks do. Thank goodness. In a group this small, with us being pretty much the only people to talk to, I can’t imagine how annoyed people would get if one member of the group were some kind of asshole.

He’s definitely got some Professor-ish ideas, though, talking about moral imperatives and so on. All I’ve been thinking about is how tired I am, what might be waiting for me around the next bend, and where my next meal is coming from. And hoping that next meal won’t be green beans. He’s thinking about what he calls “the underpinnings of a civilized society.” All that, even though I know he’s just as tired and scared as the rest of us.

Now that I think of it, the Professor is the first ivory-tower kind of person I’ve met since the Fall. Everyone else has seemed much more working-class. Maybe college didn’t prepare folks for the end of civilization?

We chatted while we walked—there’s nothing else to do but think about how sore your feet are and, if you happen to have overloaded your pack but be too prideful to admit it, how much your shoulders hurt.

First he asked me about the other members of the group. I was kind of surprised to admit that I didn’t know much of anything about the others. Bait seems like he was kind of a loner before the Fall. At least he’s never mentioned any family or anything. And all I know about Coyote is that she came from some private school on the other side of Portland. Come to think of it, they don’t really know anything about me, either. Nobody has ever asked and I don’t feel much talking about what’s lost forever now.

The Professor said it was about the same with him and the other woman that was hiding in the barn (who we are calling Medic now, I think. She’s a former nurse—seems like that could be hugely useful in the future). Even though they had been stuck in there for a long time with nothing left to do, they never really got into their backgrounds. He knows she worked as a nurse, and he’s pretty sure she did have family, but that’s it.

The Professor thinks we all have a natural reluctance to dig up the past, or to inquire into each other’s pasts too closely. It’s all just guaranteed to remind each of us of what we’ve lost, and everyone has lost pretty much everything. He says that might even be behind our growing habit of giving each other nicknames instead of using real names. It’s like we’d rather just reinvent ourselves here, and leave our old selves behind in their nice, safe, pre-Fall world. It makes a kind of obvious sense once I think about it. I just never thought. I get the feeling that he’s ahead of most of us in a lot of things that way.

Of course, the thing we talked about most was the de-facto leader of our band, Coyote. It’s a really strange situation (like everything these days). She’s the one that we’re following, but she’s the one we’ve all gotten to know the least.

The Professor picked up on our odd dynamics right away. He asked me if I knew anything about her history, but I don’t. She’s shared even less than most of us. You can hear just a little of an accent when she speaks, and she does that code-switching thing, speaking in a foreign language once in a while. So I guess she didn’t start her life in America. I thought the language sounded like Russian, but the Professor thinks it’s some other Eastern European thing.
[11]

No matter what language she started off in, though, he is sure that her habit of referring to herself as “she” isn’t part of English being a second language. He’s fairly confident that most Eastern European languages use their own equivalent of words like “I” and “me,” and with her English being so nearly perfect she’s obviously had plenty of opportunity to learn the English version of those words. Again, something he thought of that’s been staring me in the face, but I had missed it.

Instead, he thinks her strange way of talking may mean she has some sort of mental or emotional problems. “Challenges,” he calls them. It kind of makes sense, the way she doesn’t seem to care all that much about the rest of the group, and the way she thinks so differently than the rest of us. But she’s not a total psycho, at least not usually. I still can’t believe the way she tore through those guys at the farm.