I kick dirt on the fire, but Cillian gets in my way and keeps getting in the way.
I think about putting him down, and maybe I should’ve, and it’d have been easy to crunch my knuckles again into his pretty cheek, but I don’t. When it’s clear I won’t be able to put out the blaze, I take him by the wrist and drag him away down the hill.
After a while he runs with me back to the road and over it and on a little, but then he stops again and won’t go any farther. With threats and sense, I get him behind a bush at least, and we stay there, in the dirt, waiting and watching the fire. Our funeral pyre.
This is how we die, I keep thinking.
At least I saw something in my life.
At least I’m not alone.
I hope with all my great might that we’ll find them: two lonely figures dragging their feet on the road ahead of us, or crying out to us from behind. Half the country must be able to see the smoke coming off this hill. We only see the empty road, though, green hills around us and half-swallowed buildings.
“They’ll see it,” Cillian keeps saying. “I know they’ll see it.”
Maybe it’ll even work. I imagine if it was me and Maeve. We’d have just looked at each other before she put her sparker to some kindling and that look would have meant “Good luck,” and “This is the right thing to do, we have agreed,” and “Remember your JICs” and even “I love you.”
Crouched down in the bush, I talk to Cillian. I talk to him about where to go if we get separated. I tell him as well as I can how to find Slanbeg, just in case, and I make him repeat it to me, again and again. I give him the thing he’s wanted off me since he first saw me.
And, just in case, I give him a knife, and I show him how to hold it. I think for a moment about showing him something defensive, something simple like a front kick, but he’s shaking and wide eyed already. He’ll do well to hang on to the information he has.
I try to smile because there’s nothing else for it now. I won’t leave him.
“It’ll be okay,” I say. I bite back at the anger I feel coursing around my innards; I tell it to wait.
We’re covered well enough in the undergrowth. We’ve a clear path behind us. We can run if hiding doesn’t suit us. We can separate, and we’ll double back and meet here, or three klicks down the road, at the shady place we can see in the distance, or beyond that, on the beach. We have shared out the things in Cillian’s pack. If we can’t find each other, we’ll continue west, and we can leave each other messages in the dust. He’d find his way to Slanbeg if he has to without me, maybe, to my little skiff hidden behind some rocks on a stony beach beside cliffs that are bright pink in the morning. So close to home now, and so far.
I shouldn’t have left him alone. There wasn’t a rule for that in training unless it was: Beware people. How he managed to get together so much kindling is a credit to him. I wonder how he lit it—some little tool hidden away in his pack, maybe.
We stay quiet. I worry. We should call it off, move farther down the road, get away from all the evils coming our way. But Cillian wouldn’t come, and there’s no point to saying any of it.
So, we stay.
We’re a good while into our vigil before there is movement: a skrake, a long way off but rising up the hill toward the fire. From this distance it’s hard to see, but I can tell from the way it moves. Cillian goes rummaging again in his pack, and I’m nearly ready to whisper to him to shut up, but instead, I watch as he looks through one end of the machine he takes out. He sighs a long, shaking breath, and then hands it to me. I put the thing to my eye the way he did and for a moment see nothing but a blur of green, brown, and blue, but then I see it, the skrake, as if it’s up close.
The person it was has gone totally, disappeared beneath a layer of mostly decayed skin, so that I can guess almost nothing about the host, not even the gender. A type of spiderweb-like fungus or growth has spread around the worst affected parts of the body: the head, especially the mouth and eyes, and underarms, the groin. What is left of the clothing is dark. The hair clings in clumps to the scalp, but the skrake’s head is just a mess of rot and teeth. The mouth hangs open, the jaw nearly gone, and from it protrudes the wet-looking, slug-like growth, the teeth around it. I swallow.
The skrake moves quickly with odd, half-jerking, half-fluid motions. I watch the way it moves its feet. I want to be able to track one, if I lose the run of myself and go chasing after one someday. If I survive this, which is feeling unlikely. The skrake makes its twitching way up the hill and approaches the fire, too quickly, limbs flailing out rapidly. It seems to almost walk into the flames before jerking away again.
In our hiding place, something touches my hand, and I flinch away reflexively. Cillian doesn’t take his eyes off the skrake, but he puts his damp hand into mine and I look at his pale, frightened face, I drink it in, before tearing my eyes back toward the fire.
The skrake is still but for one jerking arm, its head pointed toward us. It couldn’t have heard that small movement from this far away. I hold my breath. It couldn’t. The slug-like thing coming out of the host’s mouth seems to strain toward us. But then there is a noise to our left, from the west. After a moment I can make out movement through the trees. I hear it, then, a throat-deep scratching noise, nearly voiceless, carried on the wind.
The sound of it.
They shuffle along, one after the other, within a few hundred meters of us. Cillian squeezes my hand so tight it hurts, but we don’t shift otherwise. I try not even to blink. I could take one full-grown skrake, maybe, with a little luck or a little help. I count four, including the one already at the fire. A small thread of wind drifts by us, and we can smell them on it. Rank and rotten-sweet, the kind of stench that’d keep the appetite off you for a week.
Time passes. The clouds are beginning to roll in, and soon it will begin to rain and the fire will go out. I wonder if maybe no more will come, and these four won’t see us, and we’ll be able to get away after all. The smoke is what really counts, though, and it spirals high into the sky. If Aodh and Nic are alive and anywhere near us, they will see it. Cillian was right about that much.
There are five skrake now at the fire, and we keep watching as they pitch and flail around it. They twitch, run a few steps in one direction and then back again. Their heads turn with sudden movements and are tilted on one side, like they’re listening for something. They limp and stumble but do not fall. Their stomachs are bloated, their legs and arms are thin, worn down almost to the bone. Their mouths open and close, and I watch as the protrusions work back and forward from between their teeth, sometimes coming forward, glistening under the sun, as if searching for something or tasting the air, then retreating again. I see mouths open and close, jaws chomping.
They’re desperate, demented, starving. Teeth gnash together, snapping at thin air, and the protrusions come out again. You can nearly see the way it’d happen, the growth in the throat after a bite, filling up the whole body till it’s just a skin. The monster inside, all hunger and violence with nothing else left. Just the way Mam and Maeve said it to me.
I drag my eyes away from the monsters and watch instead for two human figures, frightened and looking for us. We’ll have to see them first, if they are coming, to stop them. I’m not sure Cillian has thought of this.
Time passes. Maybe these five skrake are the only ones that happen to be within sight or smell of our fire. Perhaps seeing them is all we will achieve, and now we’ll have to take to the road again to—
I haven’t finished my thought before I see more coming down the road from the east. There is one, then two behind that, and behind that four, all together, all moving quickly. After a few heartbeats, I hear more screeches, to the north, ahead of us. We’re nearly surrounded.
“Move,” I breathe to Cillian. He lets go my hand, and I work my knuckles stiffly. We move quietly backward; we do not panic. We progress slowly and quietly, on our bellies first and then on hands and knees. We are silent; our noise cannot compete with the fire’s. We creep southwest cautiously, stopping every dozen steps or so to listen hard. The skrake are moving all around us. We stay low, and here off the road, we’re mostly under good cover.
There are so many of them.
I’m biting back the fright, and I can feel Cillian shaking beside me.
We keep moving.
We have circled halfway back to the road when a skrake making for the fire sees us. I’ve a knife flying through the air and buried nicely in its throat before I can think. The skrake slows but doesn’t stop. I watch for the time it takes to breathe in once, and already there is another behind it, going quick.
We move.
We try to keep quiet but that means slow going and the skrake is gaining on us. If we stop to fight it, to kill it, we’ll make noise and more will come. From a dozen choices, we’ve only one now. One bad option.
“Go!” I tell Cillian, and we both stand up straight and get our legs going.
We run flat out, noisily, smashing through whatever we need to. Skrake heading toward the fire, coming from the north and the south, hear us and see us. By the time we make it back onto the road, I’d guess we have six or seven behind us. I will not snap my head back to check. I will not pause.
Ten minutes ago, we felt nearly safe. Now we’re running for our lives. Things change fast, I think as I run, and it’s half Maeve’s voice and half my own in my head.
Now that we are on the road, the going is easier. We move quicker, but so do the skrake, and if there are more in front of us, we’ll get trapped between them. There are buildings to either side of us, a small village almost. Ahead of us, another klick or so down the road, there’s a sharp turn to the left, and I hope that if we can get ahead of them enough, we can lose them around it. Maybe they’ll get distracted by the flames of the fire; maybe they’ll be drawn back to the heat. We could throw ourselves into the undergrowth, lie still. If they cannot see us or hear us or smell us, maybe they won’t know that we’re there. That was our Just-in-Case for if we were being chased down the road by a load of skrake. It’s laughable now, ridiculous.
We round the corner, and beside me I hear Cillian cry out, a gurgling, ugly sound in the midst of his exhausted breath. Even as I glance at him, I hear another cry, answering his, from farther down the narrowing road to the east.
Ahead of us on the road, holding hands, are Nic and Aodh.