Preface: Uisce Beatha (Water of Life)

"I am willing to nourish you, cherish you. I am pulsing the blood in your veins."

Whenever she woke in the woods the girl would freeze for a second, half a second even, positive in that one terrible vacuum of a moment, she was alone. That sometime during the hours since she was last conscious and now, the heavy arm draped over her thin shoulders had ceased to hold her and was now merely sitting upon her, as a side of beef sits on a butcher's block, waiting to rot, and her protector, the boy, was now dead.

It was not illogical for the girl to assume that if the boy died she would be alone in the world; save for the cryptids- beast-like cannibals who traveled in deformed packs, preying upon anything that still had meat. After all, how long had it been since she and the boy had seen other survivors- others like them? Three years? Four years? She didn't know. The boy had told her time was something made up by people called physicists, and physicists weren't real in the ways that hunger and the rain were real. And if they had once been real, they were all dead now. This place had killed them. The way it had killed her parents- the way it would kill her.

And anyhow, the last survivors the boy and she had seen had been the boy's own two brothers. She thought she remembered them the way she remembered the sunshine, warm and bright. They had been a little like the boy, only they had names; Arthur and Mikey. Arthur had been thinner and taller than the boy, but had the boy's black eyes and his same quick, strong fingers. But he hadn't been careful like the boy, and by the time the girl had last seen him, he had been more dog than man, always hungry, always awake, and always looking for a fight. Mikey had been little more than a baby, her extra flannel nightgown hanging from his pudgy arms, his golden red hair hanging in strings around his cherubic face. Mikey had light eyes, like the girl. Although he was a toddler, he hadn't cried much, and when he did the cry the girl would give him the brightly colored plastic cards she had found, and read to him the nonsense words embossed on them: bank, insurance, and lottery. Some of the cards had little pictures of people she didn't know. For some reason, whenever she saw those pictures, she felt like crying too.

They had lived in the little farmhouse, she and the three brothers, until one morning, when the river had just begun to thaw, Arthur took his two long hunting knives and their last bag of cornmeal and walked into the kitchen. The boy was soaking that morning's tin mugs in a pail of boiling water and peering out a crack between the boards he and Arthur had nailed over the window. The boy was always watching. The girl was sitting at his feet, cutting booties for Mikey out of old rubber gardening gloves, while the baby lay on the table in a wicker basket that had once been used to hold magazines. Arthur, never one to stand on ceremony, looked at the boy.

"People- men with guns and knives, came one morning to this house and killed our daddy."

The boy turned from the window and looked at his older brother solemnly.

"One day, men, not the same men, but men like them, will come and kill me. And one day, they will come and kill you too."

The boy only nodded.

"But not Mikey." Arthur put the two hunting knives down on the table, beside the basket and pushed them towards the boy. "And not the girl. They won't come for them. No matter what happens, we won't let them get them."

The boy scooped the girl up from the floor in his wiry arms and deposited her on the table. Arthur continued speaking in his plain way, neither in a hurry, nor showing any undo emotion.

"Now, I ain't saying, we ain't fast. And I ain't saying, we ain't been lucky. We've been lucky. And if it were just you and I, we could probably hide forever."

The girl looked at the boy, but the boy's face hadn't moved from his older brother.

"But the hard truth is Mikey is growing up. And the cryptids are on the move. They'll smell three fresh males, like us, from four miles away. If we stay like this, they will find us. They will execute you and me, and eat us. Then they'll fatten Mikey and eat him too. And when they find the girl, they'll do worse things than kill her."

The boy didn't disagree.

"I've never been like you. I've never been the thoughtful, clever type. And the cryptids want me real bad. You know they've been gunning hard for our daddy's first born for a real long time."

The boy nodded.

"Now, we both know you got to protect the girl. And I ain't safe for her."

For the first time, the boy spoke, his voice low and steady. "What you going to do, Arthur?"

"Daddy told me about his sister and her girl." Arthur nodded. "Before he passed, he'd heard they'd found survivors down south. A tribe, an army that could protect themselves against the cryptids. Best I know, they're the last of our family. I'm going to go see if what Daddy heard is true. I'll take Mikey and the horse. If there are survivors, he'll be safest with them. The girl is safest with you- you can hide yourselves. Hide as long as you can. And when you can't hide up here no more, come join us in the south."

The girl watched Arthur pick up Mikey, and swing the cornmeal sack over his shoulder.

"What if there aren't any more people like us, Arthur?" the boy asked.

Arthur nodded to the long hunting knives he'd left on the table. "When it's safe, you come down south with the girl anyways."

So we can die together, seemed to pass, unspoken between the two young brothers.

After his brothers had left, the boy had kept them in the farm house for as long as he could. But one day he found fresh bones a few miles from the house, and they packed what they could in old school backpacks and started walking.

"Where are we going?" she had asked him, his hand tight around hers.

"The south."

"How long will it take us to get to the south?"

"I don't know."

"Will we die before we get there?"

"No. You won't die."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

"I'm scared."

"I know. What are you scared about?"

"Would you ever leave me?"

"No. Never."

"But you're going to die one day."

"Yes."

"When?"

"Not for a very long time."

"Not for forever?"

"Not for a very long time."

"Will you take me with you when you die?"

"No."
The girl began to cry. The boy crouched down and made her look at him.

"Listen to me. I have to keep you safe. Do you understand? God has given me that job."

She had nodded. But after that, she didn't allow the boy to leave anymore. And she held his hand while she slept, to make sure.