The last of them fell to a caved-in skull, courtesy of my ax. Struggling for breath I glanced around. None of them left. Haver nodded at me and cupped his hands to give me a boost. Taking it I jumped, only barely clinging to the edge of the roof. My arms burned from fatigue. I hauled myself up anyway.
I stood, being careful with my footing. These buildings were old and long abandoned. It wouldn’t do to fall through a bad spot because I hadn’t looked where to put my feet. Keeping a hand over my eyes to protect them from the sun I took in our surroundings. Nothing.
“Clear!” I shouted down to my companion, before letting my body sag to the ground.
This last fight had been exhausting. So many Zees. We hadn’t encountered this many of them in weeks. But it wasn’t just the numbers or the fatigue after over a month out here that was making this hard. Our rhythm was off. We had gotten used to fighting as a three-man team, and now we were down to two again.
I rolled over to my stomach and shuffled to the edge to get another look. Haver was standing on top of a building across the street, still keeping an eye out. Even now he wouldn’t let down his guard, protecting us in case one of them had been hiding in one of the buildings.
That would be our next task, sweeping through every single dwelling and hovel, clearing them out. Only then would this place be safe. Only then could we move on to our objective. I saw her come out of a storage shed further down the street. While we were resting she had already begun her sweep.
It hadn’t been the same ever since that thunderstorm. What had slowly grown towards a three-man team was now back to being two people and a dangerous and creepy stalker Zee. She kept her distance, a lot of distance. It was better this way, safer. We all knew that.
It hurt, knowing that something had been there, something that was now broken, lost. I think it hurt for her as well. Maybe I was just humanizing her, but why else would she target the other Zee with such fervor, hunt them with such reckless abandon. All the help she still gave us, she did it on her own, as far away from us as she could.
I gestured at Haver and jumped down. It was time for us to do our part of the job. Time to get this over with and move on to the wreckage we had spotted in the distance. That was what I’d been looking for out here. Two years, twenty-three trips, and I’d finally found it. If we hurried we’d be able to get to it before nightfall.
“You sure you want to do this now?” Haver pulled me close, sensing my unease.
“No…” I admitted with a small shake of the head. My voice was barely more than a whisper. “But if I don’t do this now I’ll be up all night.”
The idiot guide gently squeezed my shoulder.
“I’ve been searching for this for too long Haver. I need to see. I never thought I’d… I’d…” I babbled, trying to find the words I needed to convince this man to join me on this last mile.
He didn’t need convincing. I knew that. It was my father that needed the persuasive arguments. It was him who never understood what I sought out here. I had never been able to pour these feelings into the right words. I wouldn’t be able to now. Closure was the closest I had ever come, closure and responsibility. but those words still felt so pitifully inadequate.
“C’mon,” I nudged an elbow into his stomach. “Before we drown in my sappiness.”
I set off at a soldier’s march, legs stretched out, and arms swinging wide. It was silly. It looked stupid. I did it only to still my fraying nerves, and maybe a little because I could feel Haver rolling his eyes behind my back. I’d get rid of that competent fool yet.
The wreckage was what I had been looking for. I don’t know what I would have done with myself if it hadn’t been. The remnants of a caravan were strewn across the ground. Broken wagons, half-decayed corpses, luggage, spare clothes, and keepsakes of desperate refugees.
It was pitiful, this sight before us. After twenty years there wasn’t much left. Still, I knew this was it. The remains of the last refugee caravan between Onda and Sig.
Sig had fallen to the Zee hordes. Internal strife, my father had called it. As if thirty thousand dead people, including my real parents, could be summed up in two words. He was always so clinical about these things, always hounding me with his well-meaning advice, grooming me. Yet he never did it for me. It was always to protect Onda from Sig’s fate.
On earlier trips, I sometimes wondered how much he really cared for me, or if I was just a political tool for him to wield. That was a long time ago. I’ve since realized that adopting a runty Sigian brat was already near to political suicide. And all his opposition to these trips was merely to protect the scant political capital he had left. My selfishness really wasn’t doing him any favors.
The few survivors from the fall of Sig had been ferried to Onda with caravans such as this one. What we were looking at was the last caravan, the one that had never made it back.
I unfurled the little slip of paper my father had given me. Written on it, with shaky handwriting, was what I needed now. It was the description of a person, as detailed as possible, tailored to what would be left of a twenty-year-old corpse. It contained height, build, every part of what she wore, all she had with her, every break in every bone, but little in terms of features. The note did not mention the curl of her lips, the twinkle in her eyes or the shape of her nose, yet all those things I knew intimately from the tales my father had told me.
I cried as I went from corpse to corpse. So many dead people and these were only the ones that had actually died here, not the ones that had been wounded and had turned.
Once I had gone over all the bodies I began anew. There were a couple remains that of sort of maybe looked like her. I could examine those once more. Yet all too soon I knew, she wasn’t here. She had to be here. If she wasn’t then it was... so much worse. I had to find a body. I had to. I had to know that she had fought and died and was at peace. Because if she wasn’t here then that meant that she had turned. If she wasn’t here among these corpses, then my mother was a Zee.
All I found in that second sweep were some scraps of cloth that could maybe, maybe have been hers. There was so little of it, so much of it gone, decomposed. But a little was not the same as nothing. She was here and I only had to find her. I may have missed a corpse those first two times, didn’t look hard enough. It was okay. I merely needed to search a tiny bit harder, go over everything a third time.
Haver wasn’t helping. He should be helping me but he wasn’t. He kept grabbing me, pulling at me, shouting, but he wasn’t helping. I pushed him, kicked, and screamed until he let me go. I didn’t have time for his bullshit. Couldn’t he see that the sun was setting? Soon I wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Fourth time’s the charm.
Fourth time’s the charm.
