“This funny to you?” She’d had a fistful of the grapes and was about to toss them into the garbage but obviously, smooshing them in my face was a better call. Learned a lot of things that night. First, going out with your friends and getting drunk doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get some when you get home, and second, grapes are extremely toxic to dogs. Who knew? A thick pocket of pain traveled quickly through my entire body as I thought on that small, sweet moment in time, indelibly etched upon my memory. I did my best to keep that part of me sealed off, but from time to time bits would leak through my not-so-impenetrable defenses.
“Sacrificed how?” I asked once I’d dusted the old thoughts away.
“The Landians set up an attack under the guise of a parlay. They killed as many of the tainted ones,” he looked over to Mathieu as he spoke before continuing, “as they could before retreating. Then they deliberately allowed three of their own, those that had eaten the fruit, to be captured.”
“Jesus!” I exclaimed as I ran my hand through my hair. I generally refrain from using that name in vain, but right now I was at a loss for other words.
“They must have known the three would be eaten,” Mathieu said. I don’t know if he was stating fact or speaking his disbelief.
“At least one of them was. The Lycan that ate him died a most horrible death. It was entirely effective. Fear spread through the Lycan population; assumptions were made that perhaps something had been done to anger our gods, making the humans poisonous to us.”
“Lycan have gods?” I asked.
“That is your question, Michael?” Mathieu asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be? I find it strange.”
“We are not godless savages,” Lunos said.
“Not believing in a god doesn’t make you a savage,” I told him, pretty sure my own God would back me up on this.
“You are both digressing from what we must discuss,” Mathieu interjected or interceded—both most likely.
“A werewolf is standing here, mediating a meeting between a vampire and a Lycan. Could this fucking day get any weirder? I think talk of gods is right on the agenda.” Thinking back, I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but in any case, Lunos went on without a hitch.
“The Landians destroyed a significant portion of Xavier’s fighting force.”
That he’d not said ‘tainted ones’ was an improvement that wasn’t lost on me.
“He is losing support amid his people’s concerns of angering their gods, yet soon he will be forced to march his Lycan en masse for attack; he is vulnerable.”
“Hard to picture a savage, six hundred pound wild beast as vulnerable,” I said.
“No, it makes sense,” Mathieu said. “The Lycan do not prefer to fight openly; it is not their way. They prefer to hunt their grounds and rule over the werewolves through terror. The Landians were the aggressors. They have already proved they will do whatever is necessary to stop Xavier’s brutal hold.”
I knew what he meant. To demoralize the Lycan camp, the Landians had fired into unarmed innocents. Who, twenty-nine days out of thirty, were merely scared, starving slaves to a cruel master.
“He’s going to make a move before the moon turns,” I said as the revelation hit me. “He has to. He has to force his command, and the only way to do that is to distract them with battle. Shit, back in my day presidents had been doing that since they’d started getting elected. Nothing makes a leader more popular than winning a war.”
“Governing men sought more popularity by allowing their citizens to be killed in armed conflict?” Mathieu asked incredulously.
“Yeah, something like that.”
Mathieu could only shake his head.
“If his grip is so tenuous, now is when we need to strike,” I said.
“With what and with whom?” Mathieu asked. “There are hardly enough Talbotons alive to mount an offensive and I fear Denarth will do nothing until it is far too late.”
“Me. I plan on mounting an offensive,” I told him.
“It is very difficult for one man to mount an offensive, Michael.”
“Nevertheless, this is the opening I’ve been waiting for. The Denarth diplomacy bullshit is just a stall tactic. They aren’t going to help. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next couple of days, they forcibly remove us from these lands. I’m leaving now. I’m going to kill Xavier. Tell Azile not to follow.”
“I’m not telling her anything. She’ll string me up for not stopping you. No, Michael Talbot, I will not do your dirty work for you; anything you need to tell Azile, you will do alone. But I will help you kill Xavier.”
“And you, Lunos? What will you do?” I asked.
“Certainly not help you two fools. It was not my intention to spur you on to your hasty deaths. I thought my information would help gather your allies against him. This foolhardy plan will only hasten the demise of Man. I have wasted my time here.” He turned without saying another word and as quickly as he’d come, he vanished.
“He’s an entertaining fellow,” Mathieu said to me, so deadpan I was not sure if it was meant sarcastically or not. Which, considering I grew up in the cradle of sarcasm, was pretty impressive.
“Well, I guess no time is as good as the present.”
“This is it? You wish to leave now?”
“I have my friend, my dog, hand axe, and rifle. What more do I need?”
“Are you forgetting about the Red Witch?”
“Hell no. That’s why I want to leave now.”
“Are you not afraid she’ll turn you into a newt or something?” Mathieu asked in all seriousness. Was it even conceivably possible he could have known that line from the Holy Grail? I knew it was extreme coincidence, but that didn’t make it any less funny to me. For the first mile Mathieu could not understand why I was laughing tears.
“Getting turned into an amphibious creature is nothing to laugh at,” he railed.
That only made my stomach hurt more as I guffawed, yeah guffawed. I always thought that was just one of those descriptive words that doesn’t exist in real life. Not so. After I finally calmed down and the occasional leftover giggle had petered out, we walked a fair portion of the remainder of the day in a comfortable silence. I can’t be sure how it is between two females, but in my experience, women have a tendency to avoid quiet contemplation when in company, at least for any serious length of time. I’m not sure why the silence is so unsettling that they have a constant desire to fill the void with the sounds of their own voices. I mentioned this to Mathieu. He thought upon it for a moment before he said that I was “brave for saying such things when no woman was around to dispute or hear them.”
“Brave, maybe...stupid, no,” I told him.
We picked up the same deer trail we’d used to escape Talboton. Every so often we would find reminders of our swift and demoralized retreat. A discarded bloody bandage, a lost child’s toy, and the graves we’d dug along the path.
“We do not stand much chance of victory in this endeavor, Michael.”
“I know that.” My eyebrows furrowed in anger as I looked upon a stone marking the senseless death of another innocent citizen of my namesake town.
“Yet, we continue?”
“Yet we continue,” I echoed his question with an answering statement.
I knew beyond a shadow of doubt it was not fear that urged Mathieu’s line of questioning. He was simply looking for answers, and he had a right to know. If someone asks you to lay your life down, you’ve earned an explanation, maybe you’re owed. At least that.
“Who are we helping by our deaths?” he asked.
“No one,” I told him truthfully.
“Do you have a plan?”
“How long have we known each other?” I meant to interject some humor with my words, but instead they were laced with anger, not towards Mathieu, but the enemy I marched towards. I thought I should apologize, but left it alone.
“Bailey has told me that your friend, BT, wrote entire chap
ters in his story dedicated to your lack of planning. One was called ‘Winging It’, another ‘Flying by the Seat of his Ass’, and another, I believe, was ‘Pissing in the Face of Caution.’”
“I get it.”
“The best one though was, ‘Skull-Fucking Reason.’”
“I get it!” I said more forcefully.
“He loved you, though.”
“I loved him. I miss him, Mathieu, I miss them all. Their absence has created a vast wasteland within me that cannot ever be filled. They have been dead for nearly a century, yet I feel the pain as acutely as if it had happened yesterday. I now know why Eliza’s anger was so white-hot; she could never forget the wrongs that were committed against her, no matter how many centuries passed. I cannot suffer through any more loss. I’m doing what I’m doing now to stop this madness. I’m glad you are with me, but I’d have been happier had you stayed safely behind. For decades my world had been reduced to me and my wallowing self-pity. I have expanded the circle of those I care for to Oggie,” whom I took that moment to pet affectionately, “Tommy, Azile, Bailey, you, and maybe even that damned ninja, Lana. I have nothing left to give after this, Mathieu. I’m already slopping through the dredges of what was once Michael Talbot. I was never the best-suited man for this job, no matter what those that are actually moving the pieces around may think.”
“Sometimes the most unlikely fortune comes from the most unlikely source. Perhaps you were chosen specifically because of your randomness. That you do not follow in a conventional manner can be a useful tool for fooling fate.”
“Yeah, I’m sort of like playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun that has a propensity to go off at random times and may potentially explode, whether the trigger is pulled or not.”
“How did your people ever think to call placing a gun to their temples a game?”
I shook my head, although it seems like I should have known that answer by heart. I’d been playing one suicide game or another for nearly forever. Maybe not with a gun to my head, but I’d certainly been a pawn in a dangerous game every time I’d gone out on a mission. But I had never answered the root question: why was I in such a rush to give the most precious of gifts back to whomever had bestowed it upon me? It’s not like I’d get my deposit back for an early return. “We’re a fucked up species.” Reductive, but it was all I could think to tell him. Descartes I wasn’t.
We continued our journey. I was nestled so deep in the past I didn’t realize that what I was experiencing at that very moment was in the present. I’d read once that most of our memory is tied to smell; this was definitely not the exception. Mathieu had reached forward to grab my shoulder, shaking me back to the now.
“Do you not smell that?” he asked.
“The weirder question is, why are you smelling my memories?”
“So not only do you not think before you act, but you also do not think before you speak.” He was whispering.
I wrestled with my thoughts for a minute as I organized them back into their unsettled beds. “Zombies,” I said in resignation.
“Many, if the stench is correct.”
“Why, of all the things that could possibly survive from that time, does it have to be zombies?” There was an anguish in my voice I could not disguise.
We were creeping nearer; the smell had become as close to intolerable as was possible without our retching. We were stopped in our tracks by a sight that was easily enough to send us both to the edge. Perhaps if we’d not both been through all we had, it very well would have pushed us right over. The zombies had dug up the grave of one of the women we had buried and were busy devouring what was left of her gray and black, bloated, decomposing body. They were fighting over maggot encrusted meat. Slivers of wriggling masses would fall from their eager mouths onto the ground where other zombies would grapple over the fly larvae.
“This cannot be normal.” Mathieu had backed up. He was looking a little worse for the wear.
“They’re starving. How many do you think there are?” I asked.
“Two dozen...perhaps as many as thirty. We should easily be able to skirt around this particular death trap to ensure that we die somewhere else.”
“You get funnier every day. But no, we are not going to avoid them.”
“You wish to fight them, but for what purpose?”
“Not fight them, but we can’t leave them here. They’re on this path because they’re tracking us. Not us, specifically, but the Talbotons. They are looking for food sources and they prefer it on the hoof.”
“We could go back and warn them of the zombies’ approach.”
“We could,” I said with a small smile, an actual plan rattling around inside of my head.
“But we’re not,” he finished my thought.
“Nope. I’m already in trouble with Azile; it will make no difference whether I come back in seven hours or seven days.”
“What if you never go back?”
“Well, that solves the problem as well. Doesn’t it?”
“How have you survived this long with that mentality?”
“It works for some. How far do you think Talboton is from here?”
“Nearly sixty miles would be a conservative guess.”
I was silent as I began to dwell on the lesser merits of this idea. I was making Mathieu nervous enough that he had to ask: “Why?”
“We need to lead them away from their present path.”
“Okay… but I sense there is something more...NO,” he said, louder than he’d meant to once he’d figured it out. “You yourself have told me that zombies can run. How could you possibly outpace them for that distance?”
“As a regular human, it would be an impossibility.”
“You are not wholly a vampire, either. Is this something you are even capable of?”
Maybe he hadn’t meant it to be, but his words had very much sounded like a challenge. In my mind, and my mind only, to back out now would make me feel less like a man, which, ironically was something that I would need to be if I was to have any chance of success.
“Zombies are the enemy of my enemy...thus, we’re friends, right? Do you think that quote holds any validity in this particular instance?”
“I sometimes wonder if my life would have been better if I’d never had you sample my beer. You certainly wouldn’t have hung around too long to talk.”
“Words can hurt too,” I told him, placing both of my palms against my chest.
“Again, I will come with you,” he sighed.
“I’m not asking, Mathieu, and I don’t want you to. This is an enemy like no other. They will never stop. They never tire; pursuit, capture, and devour is all they ever think about. We will not be able to stop to catch our breath, to sleep, to eat. We will not even be able to take care of any...err...basic necessities.” By referring to bathroom breaks I’d just come to that realization myself. It was not one I was overly happy about. I could piss on the run if circumstances dictated. But shitting my pants and then continuing to run? That sounded about as much fun as sandpapering my nipples.
We knew what we had to do as we pulled back.
“We will need to eat heartily before we begin.”
I knew what he meant. We had some beef jerky but that really wasn’t going to cut it for what needed to be done. It is difficult to justify killing a human, even to save others. On a philosophical level, I’ve always believed in the concept of the sacrifice of the few for the good of the many. On a practical level, this was not always the clear choice. It is difficult to look into the eyes of those few and tell them their sacrifice is with merit. The general response is “go fuck yourself.”
“How does venison sound?” Mathieu asked.
The blood and the meat would be welcome, not quite the turbo charge that a human’s life fluid would afford us, but it would inflict less guilt upon my conscience.
“You will wait here?” Mathieu asked with concern.
“Where would I go?” It was a stupid questio
n and we both knew it before the airwaves I’d moved with my voice even had a chance to stop rippling.
“I’ll be back soon.” He did not warn or prepare me in any manner. One moment he was Mathieu the man, and in the next, after what looked like a painful, yet practiced transformation, he was Mathieu the werewolf. He must have sensed concern in me. He lopped a huge paw on my shoulder then bounded off.
“I have got to get a better class of friend,” I said before I found a log that looked like a reasonably comfortable place to sit. “What am I going to do with you my fine furry pup?” I was rubbing Oggie’s head, he was lying down, almost like he knew we were mustering for something big and was conserving his energy. “This is going to suck something fierce, puppy. I kind of wish you’d go on back to Denarth and Azile.” His tail wagged slightly for two beats. Oggie running this long was going to be a problem as well.
“Whatcha think, boy? Is this something you think you’re up for? You can always sit this one out. Stay or go?” Oggie’s tail wagged, he barked then reached up to lick my face. Seemed like he wanted to go.
Whenever all around me was quiet and I was still, my mind tended to travel back to a different time. I consciously fought that inclination. I did not want to visit the ghosts of the past; they charged too much per view. Every time my thoughts are wont to stray, I stand and do a small walk around the clearing I find myself in. The first time I did this, Oggie raised his head to watch. After that, he knew I wasn’t going anywhere, at least nowhere he could follow.
“Someday, Tracy, I promise I’ll make my way back to you.”
Maybe the breeze sighed “I know,” maybe I made it up. There was comfort in that, no matter how the words were conceived. I was on my fifty-eighth lap (yes, I counted) when Mathieu returned. He’d just finished turning back into a man as he entered the now well-trodden clearing. He dropped the buck at my feet.
“Looks delicious,” I said sarcastically as I looked at the still warm tongue lolling out of the majestic creature’s mouth. “So now what? We just tear into it like animals?”