Stay clear of tall buildings. Maeve’s advice. There is no way around that I can see, not unless we go back, unless I unload and load up the barrow all those times again to get over the trees and gaps and cracks. Going back never seems the right thing to me.
I shade my eyes against the sun and look on ahead of us at the town, trying to see if anything might fall on top of us.
“Is it the right way?” I ask Maeve, and I ask it out loud, my voice a tremble, in case she can hear me. I’m nearly afraid she’ll answer, and then when she doesn’t, I feel a swell of pure rage.
We’ll go through. If these were going to fall, they’d have fallen already, they would. And I want to look, anyway; I want to see a bit of the lives that were led in the towns here in Ireland.
We go on straight, and the buildings get bigger the way the trees did before till we’re surrounded by them. We go slow and we go quiet, I’m awake now and looking around, and my stomach is in my throat. Glass crunches beneath us. I see shadows and reflections.
I see a dark shape out of the corner of my eye, and a half turn, a breath, is all I manage before it is on top of me. The barrow goes sprawling, and the back of my head is smacked into the road. One hand comes up reflexively toward my belt, but the other is pinned behind my back as I fall.
I can do nothing at all. I can’t think or breathe or blink or move. I’ve no answer for this thing on me.
Move!
Maeve. It’s the edge in her voice in my head that gets me going.
I try to push myself up and can’t, but get a breath in at least. The smell of rotten meat hits me, and I hear, nearly feel, teeth clacking together, trying to snatch a mouthful out of me. I throw an elbow up and thrust. It’s flimsy and I go again, harder. The weight on me shifts a little. I smash, my elbow bruising, and again, and then both my hands are free, and the weight lifts enough to let me get up as far as my knees. Danger is barking hoarsely. It’s everywhere, snapping its teeth furiously, and it’s the most I can do to push the head away with both hands. The teeth are just a whisker off my ear. I can feel the skin and hair shift beneath my palms, its flesh coming away from rotting sinew and muscle and bone. Its dead breath is overwhelming. I fall backward, and the skrake doesn’t break for a second before it comes at me again fast, so fast, but I get a foot under it and pitch hard upward as I land (Sacrifice throw, Maeve says. Good.) and with a desperate thrust, I get it most of the way over my head.
I get up to my feet to put more space between us, and I crouch low and ready. I’ve an anger in me now that I have my breath, now that I’m not so panicked. I feel it all the way up from my toes. My fingers go to my belt and I let fly.
My hands are shaking with the fright, but the knife gets into the skrake’s chest and I feel like I’m going to win. I feel like I’m getting something back; I’m clawing something away from the dread I have in me. I can see it gather itself together for another attack, and without looking for it, my second knife is in my hand. I back up a few steps more as it reaches for me, aim for the skull, and I throw. The knife glances off.
Danger has the skrake’s lower leg in his mouth. I think I shout while I pick another knife, toss, catch, and throw again, aiming again for the head. I’m wondering stupidly if I can even pierce a skull from this distance. I’ve spent all my life bloody training and really, I have no idea. I know nothing. The head moves to the left as Danger pulls harder on its leg, and the knife glances off again.
I take a breath through my nose. I try to calm down. I reposition myself with one knee beneath me on the ground and one knee forward. The skrake is going to shake off Danger, or he’ll get hurt. I move my hand to my knife belt again, bring it up, let fly. This one catches it full force in the throat, but the skrake doesn’t stop, and I get my hands out nearly as it lands on me. I roll sideways, get to my feet, and crouch low, trying to gather myself before it comes at me again.
Syrupy black blood is oozing from its injuries, but the skrake keeps coming. It grabs my hair and an arm, whatever is in reach, and pulls me apart while its teeth go for my head. I arch my back, try to get a knee between us, and loose a hand so I can get hold of the knife still lodged in its neck. I pull it out, and the skrake gives a deep gurgling noise. Blood throbs out much faster now, drenching my clothes. I stick the knife in again and feel it weakening at last. I don’t stop. The knife meets soft flesh and gritty muscle and bone, and when I pull it out, the blood spurts onto me. It’s all I can do to keep my face out of the flow. I worry about the sores on my hands.
I push it off me, feeling the shakiness, the weakness in my arms. I don’t let myself lie there even for an instant. I move.
I’m on my feet, in a guard position, watching.
I breathe, in and out.
Blood—dark, viscous, clinging—is everywhere. I do my best to wipe it from my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the skrake incredibly—predictably—making to get up. Ruined eyes roll in decayed sockets and its proboscis, pink smeared with black, throbs in the dark cave of its mouth.
The fear is gone, and I feel revulsion and then anger. I use it: I rush at the skrake, low and fast. I gather its legs and keep pushing till it’s on its back, and I land on it as hard as I can, pinning with my knees. I reach for my ankle knife and go for the eyes and the mouth.
It seems like a long time again till the skrake goes still, but in the end it gives way.
It’s small, I can see now.
It was just a child, half the size of a full-grown one. Half the strength. I try not to look too hard, but at the same time I don’t take my eyes off it. The body isn’t far gone. There’s jeans, tied with a belt that somehow hangs on to that skinny waist. It has a jumper, shoes on it still. One lace tied and the other trailing and filthy.
I lie quiet again until my breathing is more normal, and then I get up and tie the lace.
Maeve lies in the barrow, just the same, dustier maybe from being inside the buildings. I nearly thought something would stir her and she’d be up.
We go on, quick and quiet, just like I’ve been trained, and soon we’re through the town and back out onto the lonely roads, and I push hard.
I want to put distance between us and the corpse before the light starts to go. I’d half thought, I’m only realizing now, that maybe I’d get all the way east without seeing any skrake at all.
I think again about turning around and going back and doing the thing I’m supposed to do instead of striking out this way. My mind does the same sums and comes to the same conclusions, though, and on I go.
You’d nearly expect skrake to be outlined in red or something the way I was told about them. With pictures Maeve had drawn, badly, targets for knife practice, with long descriptions, repeated till I knew them by heart. They’d been half-mythic, half-nonsense. But they’re just gray and ordinary, kind of, part of the background, human-shaped and unobvious. Till they’re going for your throat.
When the afternoon’s storm comes, I put the tarp lightly over the barrow, and we keep walking. I turn my face up to the sky and wipe it with a cleanish bit of my shirt. Danger walks almost on top of my heels with his tail between his legs.
I move so fast now, my feet nearly trip over themselves. My fingers grip the handles of the barrow till they cramp and I have to shake them loose, but I hardly get them unclamped before I pick it up again and get us on our way.
I am spooked is what I am. My eyes rove around the countryside, looking for movement. I cannot stop thinking about the way the skrake felt beneath my fingers. So dead. Twice killed.
“Maeve. Maeve.” I say it over the weather. She says nothing back.
“I am spooked,” I say to her then, but quietly. I want to own up to it.
How often are skrake alone?
I push the barrow as if we are being chased. I imagine I see them everywhere, in bits of plastic blowing in the wind and when bushes sway and when we turn a corner in the road. Danger skitters along, tail still low, stopping to look back at me and the road, then me again. Come on, he is saying. Quick.
We stop eventually, right by the road. I’m so dead on my feet that suddenly to go even a little farther seems impossible. The shelter must once have been a shop. There’s a massive metal roof outside covering rusty, cowering machines. One side of the building is smashed clear away like a giant fist took a swipe at it.
I’d stay clear of tall buildings, but it’s stop here or stay out in the rain, so I take the risk of it. There’s broken glass everywhere inside and pushed-over shelving units. There’s papers that I gather up, and dust and more glass. On the papers, and on some of the bottles I see, is that same drawing I’ve seen everywhere with the cup and the snake.
I get Maeve out of the barrow and onto the blankets I’ve laid out for hSB1er and listen hard in the perfect quiet. I pour some water into her mouth, just a trickle. I can’t be sure that any goes down her throat.
In the near-dark, I walk around the shop, touching things, trying to read. Danger walks nearly on top of me, wanting to be close, and I’m glad of him, though he should stay and watch for Maeve. The shelves are long, empty, matted with dust, broken. I can see the trail of fingers, fingers that were here long before mine, trailing the dust that had already gathered on these empty shelves, finding nothing. A print, perfect nearly, on top of a counter. I put my own sore hand in it and try to imagine another life. I can see footprints, too, in the fading light, very old ones with shoes and then two newer sets, bare, and then mine and Danger’s.
When I open the chicken crate, they show no interest in leaving, only blink slowly at me. I look at Maeve, her crumpled form wrapped in the damp tarp on the ground. I don’t kill one, in the end, only because I can’t bear one more dead thing around me.