1: Weight of Living
#
"…It all crept up on you, in the night it got you
And plagued your mind, it plagues your mind
Every day that passes, faster than the last did
And you'll be old soon, you'll be old
Do you like the person you've become?
Under the weight of living
You're under the weight of living…"
-Bastille, "Weight of Living"
#
The smell was the worst part. So pungent it could practically be tasted in the air and seen by the naked eye, a green fog wafting up from the enzymes and microorganisms instigating the decay of flesh. It was a common effect, but seldom discussed. So many were forced to cope with the scent after that… time. It wasn't worth speaking of at length. It was just a part of life.
It was a part of life.
Now it was a grisly reminder of where they'd all been, what they'd seen… what they'd done to continue trudging on. What shattered bits remained of their humanity after it was said and done, cumulatively couldn't fill out a single soul.
Doubly worth not discussing. Starting the vicious loop of how bad things had become, and what roads led to the present only dead ended with emptying the oak whiskey barrels they all worked desperately to fill.
No whiskey meant no trade with the stronger tribes that continually fought over dominion of the forest and its resources. Meat. Sap. Herbs. Berries. Roots.
Firewood.
It took an excruciating amount of work to remain neutral. Siding with one tribe or another could spell out starvation as the lines of territory constantly shifted back and forth, or worse, death if their little parcel of land happened to fall under enemy lines at the end of a conflict.
Whiskey had been the answer. The one thing they could offer that neither of the forest tribes could produce alone, but all tribes desperately wanted. Not just the forest tribes, but those of the farming plains, and those that still lived in the cities and picked off the remains of civilization. They were all willing to trade for golden brown liquid, for the ability to be numb. To remember and forget at the same time.
Several groups had tried to haphazardly distill their own alcohol with disastrous results. Many made what amounted to poison, rendering blindness or death. Others just made themselves violently ill with contaminated swill. Then there were the batches that could run a car, and burned holes in the esophagus of the drinker. Those were the worst deaths to witness, slow, painful, and entirely preventable but for the desire of drink.
Only one man, a former distiller of fine spirits before the end times, knew how to do it right… and damn well. He was a commodity, a man who had been hidden away to avoid his abduction by outside forces. He was their meal ticket, as well as the only person keeping their tribe from getting violently absorbed by others. Only a handful of the people in the small town knew his actual identity. It would stay that way until the end of time as they knew it.
The green stench in the air mixed with that of fresh, cool, brown earth. Thoughts of the distiller shifted immediately back to the task at hand.
The growing hole. The blue skinned corpse that would go in it.
The "chh" of four shovels continually breaking loose dirt stirred a soft sigh from her pale and entirely empty face. Short winter sun had stolen the remnants of her color away, but even at the apex of summer, she was still fair in comparison to those around her.
She stood beside the corpse, looking blankly from it, to the hole. Solemn, gruesome memories echoed in the depths of her mind, silent to the others with shovels. Patiently, she watched the cold earth gather in a mound.
In a few minutes, it would be over, three years cumulating in a nameless hole in the ground. At that moment she found it interesting that she felt nothing. At one point she thought she'd be happy, angry even, but she felt nothing. If it wasn't for the strong sense of duty instilled in her by her father she wouldn't have wasted her time showing up. Duty to what exactly, she was uncertain.
The digging slowed. Her gloved fingers tightened around the hilt of the fireman's axe resting at her side, the scuffed head resting in the brown grass. If she didn't know better, she would have thought the fluttering in her heart was anticipation.
It was almost over. Finally.
Fluttering turned to thunder as the last man removed himself from the now five foot deep hole. He rested his tired eyes on the woman as she stared down at the rigid body prone in the grass beside her. It had become customary to behead the dead before they were put in the ground. Once the war with the dead had ended, it had been found that all the carriers had a nasty habit of coming back to life when they passed.
Traditionally, it was an act not seen by anyone but the burial crew, but in this case she'd insisted on not only being there, but taking the swing herself. Four men watched curiously as the woman stepped back, picked up the axe, and took a vicious swing. It struck home with authority, severing the head and sinking several inches into the ground.
It should have been the end of the procedure. The men should have picked up the body and deposited it in the ground, but all were taken back when something peculiar happened.
The stone faced girl whimpered once, ripped the axe out of the ground, and sunk it into the corpse seven more times. Whimpers turned to snarls then angered, unintelligible roars as she hacked away.
Raising the axe an 8th time, the woman interrupted in her swing as the fourth man pulled the axe from her hands and threw it to the ground. Turning on him in a fit of rage, she pummeled him with blind fury.
"IT SHOULD BE OVER! WHY DON'T I FEEL BETTER?!"
Catching her fists, he was finally able to keep her from striking his face. With a snap of her body, she broke free and sprinted back into town.
Bewildered, the man fell back on his hindquarters. Landing beside the corpse nearly chopped in two at the waist, he leveled his gaze on the ground up midsection, then at the ghastly face staring straight up into the night sky with dead milky eyeballs, the sharp angles of its face catching the hellish orange light of the torches.
"What the hell was that about?"
The other men pulled him to his feet, chattering in confusion at the woman's apparent fit of insanity, after two years of even and usually apathetic behavior.
The fourth man ignored them, and stepped over the body to stare down at the head. The queasy discomfort returned, slithering around in his gut. Shuddering, he punted the skull into the hole then started walking back towards the town. He didn't think he really wanted to know why she'd popped a gasket, but damn was he curious.
"Ellis! We're not done here!" One of the men barked in protest.
"I dug most of the damn hole myself, I'm sure you strapping gents can handle the rest. Night guys."
He waved over his shoulder with one hand while resting the shovel on the other. Resetting the baseball cap on his head with his free hand, he then wiped some dirt off his stubbled chin and continued on his path, complaints filling the air but going completely unheeded with each step.
Ambling down the main street into town, he paused in the middle of the road where he'd stopped many times before. Peering up to the second story living quarters of the old building, he focused on the dark window of the woman that had assaulted him not more than 15 minutes earlier.
He'd seen embers in her eyes for the first time in years as she swung that axe, tendrils of anger and defiance radiating from her very being. She'd reminded him again of the girl he once thought had been lost to the horrors of the infection over the passage of time.
That girl, blinding as the sun she stood before that day as he looked up at her from the ground. That firecracker full of life and hope, he'd once spied on a derelict bridge, not the girl that had been nothing but fading shadow of a flame when they'd finally crossed paths again.
The ghost.
She'd changed. She'd been extinguished, having grown hard and dark, thoroughly shut down, inaccessible…dead.
Swallowing hard, he tried to wet his dry mouth. "Maybe… you're still in there after all."
His stomach lodged in his throat when a pair of eyes appeared at the window, stepping into the silver moonlight.
Busted. Adrenaline surged up his spine as he searched for something to hide behind, but it was too late. She watched him blankly, the stone face firmly back in place after the earlier break.
Yet, he couldn't move, and she didn't move away either, like she had in the past. Hurriedly, as memory recalled, two solid years of retreating into the darkness when he knocked on her door, or even looked her way. For the first time, since he could remember, she acknowledged his presence with a tiny wave.
Before he could respond with his own gesture, she pulled back into the darkness and a curtain obscured the window. He was left to his own devices, stomach lodged firmly in his throat. A tiny, delicate flame ignited in the pit of his stomach, thawing a shard of despair into a sliver of hope. For fear of smothering it with the urgency of his need for human connection, he kept himself in check. It wasn't the first time he'd been falsely spurned into believing there might be a bright side to that shit stack of a world he'd come to inhabit.
It felt different than before, but that didn't mean jack shit when he'd forgotten what real hope even looked like. For all he knew, she'd just been admiring her work. He was sure by the heat radiating from his eye with each of his passing heart beats, she'd left a mark big enough to see a mile off. Besides, it wasn't like there was any residual warmth left between them from that one chance encounter a lifetime ago. She'd seen to that often and with passionate gusto.
It wasn't just him though. There wasn't a being alive that stayed in her good graces once she'd settled into the town, she drove everyone off with brimstone, piss, and vinegar. It had been a year since Louis had had enough and left for the city with Rochelle. Nick had taken only a little longer, since he mostly refused to let her get to him, and claimed he'd left town of his own free will.
Then there was the deceased. Francis had been just about the only person in existence that was too damn dumb and stubborn that she couldn't get rid of him, not to mention his fiery temper that had been cause to separate him from her on several occasions. Hell in the end she had the last word though, he was pretty sure the man recently committed to ground felt her wrath earlier, from well beyond the grave.
A breeze kicked up, sending wisps of cold air between his neck and layered coat collars, and up his sleeves, chilling him to the bone. Shivering, he began walking again.
Honestly though, he didn't want to focus on the deceased. There were too many strings of uncomfortableness left there, most of them with her involved. He had always stumbled through memories that made little sense, feelings that made even less, which basically was where he had circled back around to at present moment.
He didn't like it. Correction, he never liked it and certainly had no energy or time to dwell on it. The day was over, the night had been long and cold, and all he wanted to do was crawl in his bed and sleep. Forget it all for now. It was too much to sort into neat manageable piles. Between the flickers of hope, the oddness of her behavior, and the overhanging dread and depression that usually blanketed his life, he felt light, heavy, and seven levels of confused.
When he'd arrived at his own dwelling, the welt on his face had seeded a deep headache in his skull. Strangely, it was a wonderful distraction from the growing storm in his head. For now, it was time to sleep. The rest would have to wait for morning.
#
Warmth of the late spring Georgia sun felt wonderful on his face, which is why he was so damn pissed off when the dream of laying beneath it was abruptly ended by frantic but deliberate rapping at his metal front door.
"Wake up redneck!" The irritated female voice echoed from the other side of the barrier.
Stumbling out of his pile of random sized blankets and animal pelts, Ellis grumbled various obscenities under his breath. He pulled the various steel bars out of position to open the door, preparing for the rush of cold air that chilled him as he dragged the monolith open with a grunt.
"For fuck's sake Bee, my shift doesn't begin until 2, what the hell do you want? Don't tell me someone left the corral gate open again and the heifers got out."
Rubbing his eyes in the bright morning sun, Ellis was finally able to focus on the noisy blonde girl, with the ever present pale face of her partner towering over from behind her. He never said all that much, but his face was always so expressive that he didn't really need to. Ellis didn't like what it was telling him that morning.
"Ellis…" Bee began, then was at a loss for words for the first time in Ellis's recollection. She looked up over her shoulder at the guy behind her, searching for a way to finish.
"What?" Ellis asked, then shifted his eyes up to the other man, growing a bit irritated. "Jesse? What the crap is going on?"
"She's gone, man. She took off in the middle of the night. Left a letter."
Ellis's throat grew tight. Bee pulled out a piece of folded paper and passed it to Ellis. "It was on the door of the mess hall this morning. We know how much you worried for her. We're so sorry."