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Panic had sunk its teeth into Milly’s lungs and cut off her air.
Wind slams into her face, her nose. Sand grains scourge her cheeks. Desert air instantly dries her mouth when she opens it to suck in a shuddering breath. A fish in the desert, choking and flailing. Riding like all hell.
Behind her, Meryl yells something but the rushing wind cuts her off.
Milly’s thomas is barely hanging on but she keeps digging her heels into its sides — anything to get as far, far away as possible from that town where…
“Milly! Milly, stop!” Meryl’s desperate voice cuts through the wind. She has finally managed to get ahead.
She looks frantic. Her thomas looks like it’s about to drop. She tries to ride closer to take hold of Milly’s reigns but the beast can’t keep up the pace, begins to fall behind.
This makes Milly stop. She tugs at the reigns, then just lets them slip from her sweaty hands. Her thomas drags itself forward another couple of yarz and firmly plants its feet in the sand, its chest heaving and making its rider sway up and down with it.
Meryl stops next to her. A plume of sand and dust settles down behind them.
“Goddammit, Milly.” Her voice is hoarse like… because she has been screaming, trying to get Milly’s attention.
“Sorry… Sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry,” she says to her thomas, to Meryl, to Meryl’s thomas.
“It’s…” Meryl doubles over in a coughing fit before she can finish. “We’re iles away. We can stop. It’s safe, baby, it’s safe.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry,” she repeats because she doesn’t know what else to say. Doesn’t have the breath to either. Her lungs burn despite her not doing any of the running herself. It feels as if the suns have breached her chest and fried her up from the inside. Her shirt is sticky with sweat.
Meryl’s shoulders slump in a mix of reproach, relief and some other word starting with re- that Milly can’t think of.
“Let’s just find some cover and set camp for the night. We won’t make it to New Oregon today.”
Milly agrees. There is a rocky patch to their left, so they head there, letting their thomases walk with no rush.
Both are silent the whole way.
Up close, the place is less than ideal. There’s barely enough shadow and protection from the wind, but they are in no condition to search for a better place to set camp. Meryl takes lead, secures their thomases’s reigns to a conveniently elongated rock. The wrung-out animals flop onto the sand as soon as Milly is done with untacking.
Safe in the scarce shadows, Meryl tries to comfort Milly, but she is shaken as well. When she sits Milly down and keeps standing, hugging the other’s head to her chest, her heart beats urgently. Like when she has a nightmare. Milly wonders if she is going to have nightmares too.
The adrenaline rush of the ride leaves her chest, but she still has to force herself to breathe evenly. A tightness sits there. Something stops her chest from expanding all the way, threatens to throw her into hyperventilation if she’s not careful. When she sips water from an offered flask she nearly chokes. Coughs like her lungs want to see the suns. She doesn’t know if it’s the heat, the weariness or the coughing that makes her head spin and her attention slip from Meryl’s comforting hands and voice. Her mind keeps drifting back to that town. That damned place.
It was not on the map — too small to leave a mark. They knew what happened to towns like this, without a single plant, stranded and reliant on some nearby bigger town. Things weren’t cheery on better days, and since The Ark’s shadow had swallowed the first town in its wake…
They thought there would be no one left. That they could find some rations left behind, maybe even water if it was bottled or if there was a well… Three months into this hell they were not above looting. They really thought it would be empty.
Gaping windows gave away no sign of life. Going through the single main street, the only sounds were that of the abandoned wind turbines whining. There was a bad feeling to that town. And a bad smell. Milly avoided looking too closely at any sand-covered rags they passed. It was unlikely they were going to find anything here. The place was stripped bare.
Suddenly, her thomas perked up, drawn to something behind a nondescript sandstone building. Coming closer to investigate, they heard a new sound: something wet and disgusting like a thomas slurping down a worm.
Someone was there, in the shadow between two buildings. A person, crouched over something on the ground. As Meryl was asking if they needed help, they turned and opened their mouth. It was red. Very, deeply red. Just as their hands. Just as something that was clutched in their palm and could be still seen between their red-framed half-rotten teeth.
Milly’s thomas seemed keenly interested in whatever was lying before the person in a pile of rags. She had to be very persistent at making it walk the other way. And fast.
The whole encounter lasted less than a minute. They were out of the town in just as much time. Meryl said the person had scurvy. Assured her it was just that, she learned in college it caused gums to bleed. She kept saying that’s all it was and that they couldn’t help them and that they needed to go right now.
That last part Milly took to heart.
Didn’t need to be told a second time as panic she couldn’t quite place crushed her lungs, made her feel trapped, made her force her poor thomas to go faster and faster so she could be farther and farther away from that town, from that alleyway…
“You should eat something,” Meryl says gently.
Milly shakes her head. Thinking of food makes her want to throw up. Thinking of that alleyway, of the sounds coming from it, makes bile rise up her throat.
Little hands rubbing circles into her shoulders manage to keep her afloat.
“Alright, alright. Hey,” Meryl combs Milly’s mess of hair out of her face, drawing attention to herself. Despite the dark bags under her eyes and overall disheveled appearance, she manages to sound reassuring. Like she can keep everything under control if she just keeps up the right tone. Milly tries to believe that. “You need a distraction. And I think I’ve got just the right thing.”
She gets up — makes Milly miss the arms around her despite the heat — to walk over to their bags.
Theatrical as a stage magician, Meryl reaches into her saddle bag to pull out… a file filled with paper. Not any recycled flimsy but proper paper, the kind they used for official reports.
“I had some Bernardelli paper left,” she explains, confirming Milly’s guess. “Didn’t want to throw it away, thought… I thought we might still need it… someday,” she says quieter, the magician’s facade fading. “Anyway, you can use it for Milly’s monthly. It’s been a while since you’ve got a chance to write. What’s it now, Milly’s bimonthly? Trimonthly?”
Milly takes the offered paper mechanically. Small crinkles aside, each creamy off-white page is pristine and smooth under her fingertips. Somehow, it makes everything seem even less real. A gust of wind surges past and a thought of letting the out-of-place — too clean, too proper, too normal — pages go passes with it.
But she wouldn’t waste blank paper like that.
“Oh. Oh, thank you!” she remembers to say, realizing the silence has been hanging for too long.
She accepts a clipboard and a pencil as well — so that she doesn’t waste precious paper on a draft.
Yes. Yes, that’s what she reckons she needs. A distraction, something to occupy her hands and mind with. She really hasn’t written in a while, not since they had set out to find Frank Marlon. The infamous colt that needs fixing lays inside the same bag Meryl had procured the paper from.
Meryl’s hand brushes her shoulder.
“I’ll set camp, you just rest here, think of something to write. I’ll get back to you when I’m done. Okay?”
Milly nods, excepts a chaste kiss Meryl gives her before starting to fuss. Milly watches her absentmindedly.
Right, the letters.
She starts by counting the pages. It’s a thick enough bundle but she still goes through the trouble.
A minute later she is still staring at the pages, unsure if she had lost count or haven’t started counting yet. She reminds herself to breathe and finally gathers enough focus.
Forty-two. A good number. She is sure it is a very good number. Cozy like an old cardigan.
But it’s too small. She haven’t written in so long there isn’t enough space to cover everything and repeat for everyone…
At that her breath hitches.
A thought startles her: forty-two could as well be too many. She doesn’t know how many letters to write this time. Her hometown should have been safe, — for now — she’s been checking the occasional broadcasts on every radio they came upon. How long has it been since the last check-in? A week? Two weeks? A town could be destroyed in a matter of days. If it happened she would not know. And the cousins and uncles and aunts and…
Breaths, deep breaths.
If she keeps thinking like this she won’t get anything done. Meryl is putting up the tent, and despite being told to rest Milly can’t stand doing nothing while her partner, just as tired, if not more from all the sleepless nights, does all the work.
Maybe she should try a different approach. Think about what she’s going to write about first, figure out the addressees later.
She reckons it would be fitting to start, well, from the start. When was the last time she wrote, three months ago? A little more? She chews on the pencil in frustration. Lately, her memory has been hazy. And no matter how much back she goes — to their last stay in a place with a hot shower and a proper bed, to acquiring thomases, to seeing a real bugger of a worm one evening — her mind keeps returning to the town they just fled. To the shadowed narrow alleyway.
Despite it having happened only a couple of hours… Or was it more? Or less? How long did they ride? How long has she been sitting here? She can’t tell. What she knows is that she still doesn’t quite understand what had happened.
There was a person in the alleyway. And something on the ground. The person opened their mouth… Only now does she realize they must’ve said something. Maybe even yelled? Did they chase after their thomases? She doesn’t remember. Can’t even recall what the person had looked like. She remembers the mouth. And red. Too much red. Streaks of it. Bits of it between the teeth and clutched in a dirty red hand. Red in a pile of rags on the sand.
Bits and colors and no noise except for the one she heard before she could see, the one the person made when they opened and closed their mouth, the one she remembers so clearly it overshadows words.
Milly swallows dryly and wets her cracked lips.
And then the pieces finally fit together.
The tightness in her chest bursts out. Surprising herself, she begins to cry. She doesn’t know if her tears are more about the person or the unwritten letters or the general way the world is these days. No matter the cause, they sting her dry cheeks all the same.
Meryl is quick to notice. The papers and clipboard are gently taken out of Milly’s hands and moved aside so Meryl can sit next to her, hold her tightly and reassuringly despite her small frame.
“I’m sorry, shh, shh…” she keeps saying while dabbing away the tears. “Shouldn’t have left you alone. I’m here, I’ve got you.”
“Not curvy,” Milly sobs.
“What?”
“That person…”
The person crouched in the shadow turning their head up. Licking their lips before opening their mouth to speak, the gesture doing little to smear all the red. Red running down their beard and tattered shirt, staining their gums and teeth. In their hands a spongy red thing. Something Milly should’ve recognized sooner from her life on a farm. From helping out in the kitchen. From any butcher’s shop.
A lung. A piece of a human lung, torn out of the chest of the fallen body.
It looked fresh. Like it could still give out its last scream.
“They didn’t have scurvy,” she chokes out.
“No. No, I’m so sorry…” Meryl whispers. Her voice cracks. “It was not scurvy.”