I’m gone, pelting back down the hill and through the woods to where I left Maeve, moving like my life depends on it, which it does.
It’s not far, but I think about how fast the skrake moved with the beast through the trees, almost on its tail.
This skrake will catch me.
It is bigger than the one I killed a few days ago, a million years ago, and I was stronger then. I can hear it, just behind me, moving with its juddery distinctiveness, on my heels, its dead breath on my neck.
I move faster than I knew I could, but I have come farther than I thought, and I was away longer than I meant to be. My breath is short and fast, and the muscles in my legs start to ache so I’ve no more room for thoughts and that is maybe no harm.
It still hasn’t got me by the time I run off the path into the lines of shops.
It doesn’t land on top of me when my shoe tangles with a branch and I land hard on my front, the little breath I have getting knocked out of me in a rush. My mind clouds with a blank dark of panic for a moment, and every inch of my own skin knows the end has come. For just a sliver of time I feel relief in there too, but I’m not done yet.
I get up again, Maeve screaming at me, and I move.
Past the buildings, the broken glass, the meaningless rubbish of the roads, and there is where I left the barrow, and for horrifying moments I can’t see it, but there it is at last and I’m nearly there and thinking what difference does it make anyway where I am, I’ll have to turn and fight this thing—there’s no way I can get away from it with the barrow—and maybe I should have stayed in the trees to fight and die. And somewhere beneath my thoughts Maeve is in my ear saying tactical error and—
It’s on me with not a wham or a slam but something more like an inversion of noise, as if everything in me gets knocked right out. I hit the road hard. It’s on top of me and I am flattened. Its rotting elbow is between my shoulders, pressing me hard against the ground, though I can just about twist round enough to get an arm up between us and my face away from its snapping jaw. I’m stuck fast and running out of breath. I try kicking back but can’t reach anything. I go methodically as I can, trying not to panic: one leg, then the other, one arm, then the other, but keeping the skrake mouth away from my skin takes nearly all my energy and I’m tired, so tired.
In a single moment the weight of it nearly doubles. I can’t move at all, can’t breathe, and then it is gone, and I wonder if this is what happens in the moment before death—a moment of floating, of freedom.
“Get up.” I listen to Maeve in my mind and think maybe this time I’ll just ignore her.
“Get up!” She sounds fragile, nearly. She’d never sound that way in my own head.
I clamber to my feet and have to close my eyes against a wave of whiteness. I think I’m going to fall over but it passes. I take two shaky breaths and open my eyes, and it is, it’s Maeve.
Actual Maeve. Swaying. Looking like death, looking like someone else entirely. But standing.
“Maeve?” The word isn’t even fully out of my mouth before the skrake makes for her again in a blur of movement. She feints left and comes right again to fall into a sort of awkward, too-tight fighting stance, waiting and ready and fierce even with her feet almost one on top of the other.
A half breath later the skrake launches itself again, talons and teeth for her throat, and she gets her hands up in front of it but goes down hard. It’s now I see what is wrong with the skrake, why it never caught me: its body—the body of its host—had been burned and the meat of the stomach and upper legs has melted and fused.
Maeve is shouting for something. I find it hard to focus, to bring myself back from staring at the fused blackness where flesh once was. I am removed from everything. I can hear Danger growling.
“Knife! Knife!” It’s her voice; it has changed, weakened; the deep sonorous tones are gone and it’s a rasp. Wind blowing along a beach.
“Knife!”
She is struggling with it. The skrake is much bigger than she is, and though she has a knee up against its chest, she has nothing to work with, nothing she can hurt or kill it with, and her hands are free but her feet are tied still. My hand goes to my knife, and I only know about it afterward because I feel the hilt in my hand, and then my feet are moving and since I’m moving I may as well try to be in charge of which way things are going. I take two knives and I put one between my teeth, and I put one arm around the skrake’s neck and go to pull it off her. I hand Maeve the knife that’s in my other hand hilt-first and then I jam my own in the skrake’s throat.
I don’t stop. I learned already to keep going, stabbing, twisting, and withdrawing only to stab again, and I don’t stop—I do not stop—till the thing is done. I cut with determined fury. I know that Maeve, the bit of her that is left, is watching, and now more than ever before I want her to say that yes, I am good, I’m a good killer.
Maeve has her legs around what was left of its legs, holding them down, and has one arm in a lock, which is what makes things easy for me. I wrestle the skrake, dead weight now, off her and on to the ground, and I try that trick of pressing hard into the small of its back, and I keep cutting at it from there. I hear Maeve coughing behind me, but I don’t want to turn round to face her. This skrake is easier to busy myself with now.
“Muireann?” Maeve coughs again, then retches, a thick, ugly sound.
I feel my heart give a pull, and I know I have to turn round and be a human now, which is hard.
Muireann was Mam’s name.
I let the skrake go now and sit on the ground a little ways away and then at last go to meet her eyes. She is staring at me, her face red from coughing. There is an expression in her eyes, in all her face, that does not belong there. It is hopeful; she seems young. She is coughing blood up onto the side of the road, but she looks nearly happy.
“That one took it out of me. Have we water?”
Numbly I get up and go to the barrow and fumble and find a half-full plastic bottle. She takes it from my shaking hand and between coughs takes a swig. When she hands the bottle back to me, it is bloody, and I put it aside.
“Maeve?” I manage.
“Have we far still to go? It’s mad but I can’t remember.” She pauses, looks around, and blinks a lot. She is confused, but her happiness shines through it. Her eyes keep coming back to me, and my skin prickles.
“I’m thirsty still. That water did nothing for m—” She breaks off into more coughing, her body, tiny now, racked and bent double with the effort.
She smiles suddenly, and I see that her teeth have changed too. They’re falling away at the outsides, crumbling and going black, but they’re bigger as well.
“You look terrible, Muireann, I’m only noticing.” She grins at me, mischievous. The effect, with her broken teeth and ravaged face, is grisly. “You’ve gone too skinny…”
Her eyelids seem heavy on her and she sits, falling harder than she meant to, on the road.
I have to be quick.
“Maeve! Maeve. Phoenix City—which way?”
She stares at me, confused, appalled. “I’ll never go back there,” she says. “Do you hear me?”
It is real, and she knows where it is.
I knew it. I knew it was true.
“Which way?” I shout at her. “Maeve!”
“Muireann, we swore it together, never to go back. Not after what happened to us.” Her eyes fill, and mine with them. “Let that baby in your belly be a reminder, Muireann.”
My heart is a stone. I know well what that is; I know it from my books.
I knew it always.
“We should keep moving,” Maeve says, her gray gaunt face shaking off the fear and turning hopeful again. “They’ll be on us before we know. Has it rained?”
She takes two shuddering breaths and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and looks away. The last words are nearly inaudible. She seems to notice for the first time the length of cord I had tied her legs together with. It didn’t slow her down, of course, not even a little. I will have to tie it tighter. Even as Maeve leans forward to look more closely at it, the lines on her forehead drawing together, her eyes are closing. Her arms and legs twitch, a little at first and then she slumps and the twitches get much worse.
“Maeve,” I say in nearly a whisper. I wipe away the tears and snot running out of me.
Afterward we stay for a long time on the road, and I think about the thing I knew already, really, and I think about men.
It’s a long time till I remember the squeaky wheel. Danger whines and comes to sit by me, keeping well clear of Maeve and the mess of skrake smeared on the road, a fatty, viscous ooze spreading outward from its torn proboscis. I’ve an answer for the wheel, at least.