FEAR IS THE DEMARCATION between light and dark.
It is future’s shadow, hidden in mist.
Michael could not remember a time in life when he did not feel the encroaching arms of fear embracing him. It was there since he was a boy, when he had crossed from one world to the next. It abided in him as if he carried an absorbed twin in his cells which whispered despair. Softly. Subtly.
But now, standing on the road looking down at Kyle, he saw what fear looked like in its rawest form.
Kyle was afraid.
His fear controlled the muscles in his face, contorting them into a childlike visage of macabre wonderment. The pain and anticipation of what lay at the end of each breath. The hope that there would be one more, the agony that there were thousands left.
Kyle could no longer talk. His eyes communicated the fear of a man dying alone on a country road. Michael could feel the fear coursing through Kyle’s broken body. The fear of how long it would take to get to the end, the fear of wanting to both live and die and not knowing which was worse. But mostly, Michael could feel the fear of loneliness, the sense that Kyle was terrified to be left alone to suffer in isolation on a back country road, no one to comfort him in what could well be his last minutes alive.
Michael poured another stream of water over Kyle’s mouth, but it fell through his lips and onto the ground.
“I hope you understand,” Michael said, “that none of this needed to happen. It was you boys who came hunting me. It was you boys who jumped me and stuck me in the ground.”
Kyle’s eyes stayed fixed down the road.
“To be left alone. That’s all I tried to do. I didn’t mess with you all. Kept my distance. We could have gone on like that till the end.”
Michael stood erect and Kyle’s eyes followed him.
“You all could be sitting in the back of Gilly’s right now. Me, minding my business. You all minding yours. But it’s never going to be like that again, is it? No, none of this had to happen.”
Michael looked back and forth down Countyline Road. The night was setting in. He wasn’t sure how much traffic came this way once night fell.
“Hopefully someone will come along shortly and call an ambulance.”
Kyle closed his eyes and coughed, which appeared to cause him excruciating pain.
“There’s nothing I can do for you, Kyle.”
Michael gathered what supplies he had salvaged, stepped down into the ditch, and walked north into the woods. He stopped, turned, and spoke to Kyle’s back as if performing a eulogy.
“It was you boys . . . didn’t need to be this way.”
He repeated this to himself as he ventured into the wild unknown, each utterance working to absolve his conscience from the guilt that attempted to find a place to take root in his heart.