Last Ones Left Alive Read online

  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.

  Chapter Four

  If you’d go inside them other houses on Slanbeg, and I always did—I was always looking for something—you’d see into lives from long ago.

  These are wrecked on the inside as well as the outside. Mam let me at it okay, but Maeve didn’t like me going in. She said we’d learned all we could already from ghosts, and I wasn’t to go digging around in lives not belonging to me. Mam and Maeve had been in the houses as well, though—I could see their prints—and that took the shine off Maeve’s argument.

  They’ve got away with a lot, these houses. They’ve their four walls standing and the roofs, too, for the most part. I’d get in where I could; there was usually somewhere that was easy on all of them, which I’d know by heart. So I’d slip through the window that was broken or never had any glass or even sometimes just plain through the front door.

  Everything is covered in dust and dirt, but you can nearly see, you can guess at the lives that went on inside them walls. All the presses with electrical things inside them that haven’t moved, and the chairs that were last sat on by live people in families. So many things still neat after all this age. Upstairs are the beds, same as ours, and books and papers I’d pilfer, and the other stuff that now seems only sadder the more I look at it or think on it. The empty beds. The little socks, no bigger than my palm. Your heart would break for them, so it would.

  There’s a feeling in some of the houses that you’re near the families, that they’re only outside the back and will come in again for their tea in a moment. They’re so present, these dead people, the dead kids my own age and the littler ones.

  The desperate came looking, so they did. People wanting shelter from the skrake, and then from the hunger, trying to get into the houses here, to take whatever these people had. You see it around the island—the smashed windows, remnants of small, desperate battles, the dusted bones. All gone a long time ago now, whether by hunger or sickness or the hands of one another. No skrake got this far, Mam and Maeve told me, and that is a warning as well—there’s warnings all around us on this island about monsters that aren’t skrake. If there were any of them left when I was a child, Mammy and Maeve would have made sure they were no danger to us anyway.

  On the outside, ours is as wrecked as the others, or worse, and boards on the windows, but mostly so that you can’t see that behind them the glass is in one piece still.

  The inside of ours is a living house. Mam and Maeve stole and pilfered and looted, if you can do those things to the dead and undead and never born, which I’d argue you can’t, until they had ours looking the way they wanted it. Like a home. You wouldn’t know we were in a ghost house in a ghost estate and a ghost country, the way I was reared in that house.

  I’d everything I needed, nearly, food and clean water and baths and beds, and there were books I was allowed and others I was not. We had comfort, rugs and blankets, and plants brought inside to save them from the winter. We had the stories Mam would tell about heroes, making me want to be brave, stories about Gráinne the pirate queen, and the Morrígan and Brigid and Maeve, who I confused with our Maeve.

  In a painting on our wall, there’s a man who might be dead or might just be sleeping, and there’s just a little bit of blue in the gray of the bleak clouds. You can see mountains, and the man might be looking at them, if he isn’t dead. My mother loved this picture. I’m named Orpen, even, after the painter.

  There’s other pictures—a naked man, and a woman asleep in an orange dress with a calm sea—but this one with mountains is the best; it’s the one that looks most likely to me. I wonder was the artist some kind of prophet that he could see the trouble we’d be getting into, making a picture like this so long ago when the world was whole. That’s what painters were, maybe.

  I looked a long time at these pictures growing up, trying to figure them out, and I did in the end. It’s a warning, not to be caught out on your own, not to get left on your own, ever, not if you can help it. It made sense to me, then, when I realized this was the problem I had here on the island, this was the cold space I felt within me.

  There was evidence of it all around us, of people living together in families and groups. There’re no houses off on their own on this island, they’re together. People are meant to be together, and I knew that and the painter knew that, but here we were, on our own. Especially me.

  I kept looking. I looked all around the island with a hunger in me to know more about how it was when the world was whole. I read everything. In the houses, in old papers, there was more of it, signs of people all gathered up. I went farther all the time, out to places I wasn’t meant to go on my own, and I ate up the pictures of businesses and towns and cities and countries. I kept going till I first read that word “banshee,” and that was only the start, so it was.

  Chapter Five

  By the time the sun comes up, we’re on the road.

  I heave us up bad hills and hold the barrow tight when we come down the other side. Rolling green and dazzling blue every direction, so lush, so verdant, I want to open my mouth and eat it in slices. We see: a church made of stone, its crosses fallen away but three gray walls standing, and a tree growing up through a raised platform on the eastern side; a place where the ground is flat and the grass, for no reason I can see, growing only in inches in a perfect circle; in a hollow of land, a lake, but out of the water spike the tallest parts of buildings, chimneys, the tops of towers, and a spire. Everywhere there is life, birds and biting insects, rats near water, and small animals that’ll rush out of the overgrowth ahead of our steps, making my heart leap into my mouth and my hand move toward my knife a half-dozen times a day.

  I let my eyes go where they want to as long as my feet are moving us forward.

  Danger is still limping, but he’s no worse than yesterday, anyway. He’s not used to seeing so many cars, and he stops to inspect them, sniffing carefully, weeing everywhere, especially on the flat, crusted wheels. Then he comes back to me looking for the water I’m breaking my back carrying.

  Later in the day, when the sun is a few handspans up into the sky, I have to put down the barrow and drag him away from something: a dusty pile of bones with its leash caught in a car window. I peer inside through the grimy windows at the leathered shapes. So close to each other but unable to move: surrounded by skrake, terrified, starving, or dying of thirst or heat. Stinking of shit. Women, children. Men. They’d no good choices, these people; we’ve that in common.

  I’m more frightened today and more steely too. There will be more skrake, and it’s just a matter of when and how, and if I can beat them. I strain my ears and I touch my knives and I keep my wits about me.

  We move, aiming east.

  Around us Ireland only becomes more beautiful and more alien. I can smell the rich, dark earth.

  Just a few more days, I tell myself. I’ll get more out of her yet, and being on the road is still better than being on that fucking island.

  I keep pushing. I want to get as far as Athlone by the time it rains, and when the road turns north and the sun’s out of my eyes, I take it as a little victory and the three of us stop and rest in the shade of some greenery. I watch the low sprawling town awhile from here and swat away bugs, and I drink and mooch around in the barrow for something to eat. I mean to share a tin of something—the label long gone off it—with Danger, but I’m so hun
gry, it’s gone before I know where I am. Instead, he gets the last of the cooked potatoes, which are squashed and starting to smell bad. He has them ate in three heartbeats, and then he sits down to fart and stare dolefully at me for more.

  I’d set the chicken crate on the road and open their little door, and after a few moments two of them come out and bawk and blink in the sunlight. They drink down their water and peck. I can feel Danger beside me, wanting to go for them, but he knows he’s not allowed. He thumps his tail on the ground in embarrassment.

  I doze. If a skrake comes at me now, I’ll be in trouble, but isn’t it always the way?

  * * *

  My feet, used as they are to walking, feel pinched and bald in my shoes. I know I should take them off and air them, but I can’t face it, and going barefoot feels dangerous now. Not being able to move quickly could be death. How right Maeve was, I think. My eyeballs are tired with trying to take in the stern landscape against the glare of the sun and the unyielding blue of the sky. They have me caught between them, like pincers, and together they squeeze.

  I breathe deep against the relentless wind and feel that my life has begun.

  In the end, we don’t get as far as Athlone, but we do okay and I’m happy enough to get off the road and find somewhere on the outskirts of the big town. The countryside is so much greener than I’d imagined. It’s all the rain. The ground is flat again, but the earth is so thronged with growth that I can only sometimes see the horizon. There’s trees growing right up through the smaller road we’re on, casting a green shadowy light over us, protecting us from the lurid sun. We’ve to stop often to unpack or hack a way through them, and it’s tough going now and only getting harder. I look over at Maeve in case she’s anything to say to me about this but she doesn’t, and my mind wanders while we work.

  Sweating, being stung by a hundred hungry bugs, I slash our way forward till, suddenly, we’re at a clearing, and it’s beautiful. The earth here is covered in soft grass, and under the largest trees grow small white flowers. Snowdrops. There are none on the island, but my mother brought me back some once and showed me how to dry them between the pages of a book. I thought it was stupid at the time, but I know now how it must have been, to see beauty like this, to need to try and share it.

  “Maeve, look,” I whisper.

  Low, one-story buildings, old looking and made of brick, doorless, roofless, glassless. Ash trees find shelter behind the walls and grow up through chimneys, thrusting fresh green leaves through caving holes in the roof. Then more greenery, and a lone cottage standing just off the small road I’ve found. The front windows are gone, but otherwise it looks neat, almost intact.

  Good shelter. Maeve’d approve of me doing things properly this time, instead of hanging around getting us all caught out in the storm and catching our deaths with it. I put the barrow aside quietly and draw a knife.

  Danger hops along through the wild grass with me. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I move carefully, expecting horrors round every corner, but the little house has been cleaned out. Whatever could be ate went first, and then whatever could be burned.

  In the best-preserved room I find what I’m looking for, but there’re only a few books left on the broken-down shelves, and they’re soggy from the roof leaking on them. I go through them hungrily, but the pages come away in my hands and the ink has run. I try to imagine the hands that held them last.

  I should go back out to the barrow, but the shadows inside the cottage are cool and it feels so good to have my back straightened out, to be walking unencumbered. I go into another, darker room toward the back of the house, a bedroom. The two windows and what’s left of the ceiling are overgrown with ash, moss, and cobwebs. The light in the room is musty and yellowish. There’s a good inch of dust underfoot, and the room smells sad but not evil. It’d be all right to defend, some part of my brain is thinking, for a while, if you had to, but mostly I’m staring at the iron bedstead in the middle of the room. It has the remains of a bedspread on it. There are blotches of faded color, a brown that might have been bright red once, and I can’t tell if it’s part of some old pattern, or whether it’s something else.

  There are shapes under the covers. I feel very still and very heavy, but my feet are moving toward the bed and my hand is reaching out to the coverlet.

  There is a noise behind me.

  “Orpen.”

  I turn, knowing in my heart that I’m only imagining her voice again, she’s such a part of me.

  But it is her.

  It’s Maeve.

  She stands in the doorway, using it for support, to help hold her up. Her eyes are on me, glassy and bright.

  “Maeve,” I breathe, and my throat feels like someone has a hand around it.

  Her face is still pale, her lips drawn back over her teeth. There is a smell like rotten vegetables clumped together. It’s just like the last time.

  “Orpen,” she says again, so sweetly, so invitingly. She has never said my name like that before; she always said it like she’d stones in her mouth. Mam was the sweet one to me.

  Maeve reaches an arm out toward me.

  Tears topple down my face; my nose is running.

  My feet won’t budge. I’m more frightened now than I was with the skrake.

  “Orpen.”

  I take a step back.

  “Come here.”

  “Maeve,” I say, and try to make it stronger and do the thing I’ve been waiting to do since I put her in that barrow. “Maeve, where’s Phoenix City?”

  She says nothing back, only coughs, and then her shoulder gives a kind of twitch, and then she looks at me again.

  “Where’s the city?” I say, louder and bolder in this little space where I’ll probably die now, where Maeve will kill me at last.

  “Come here,” she says, no fake sweetness in it now, and I nearly do, I’m so used to obeying her, but for the smell off her, the smell of death. “It’s to the east,” she says when I don’t move. “Come here and I’ll tell you … Come here, it’s on your map…”

  Maeve reaches for me again, brushes my forearm before I move back another step. Her nails are long, the edges frayed and broken. I’ll go no farther toward her, but I’m battling my revulsion, my horror, as I try to hold my ground.

  “Come here, you—” Maeve lunges for me but misses, tries to hang on to the doorway but slips, one foot flailing out in front of her. She lands hard on the ground.

  The backs of my legs are pressed against the bed, but Maeve is crawling toward me now, her face turned up, her lips peeled back in a snarl.

  I climb up on the bed and even in my fright, feel my shoe do something new and biting to my left foot.

  “Where are we? What have you done, you bitch?” Maeve is screaming.

  And I scream back, I bawl, “Where is it, Maeve, where is the city?”

  She reaches for me, and I take another half step back and I’m cornered; there’s nowhere else for me to go. Her thin lips are drawn back from her graying teeth, her skin seems nearly to be coming away off her. She is monstrous, and I am half sobbing, half moaning. My hand goes to my knife belt.

  She goes sweet then again, suddenly wheedling, as her strength gives out.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, forgive me. Come here, come here to me, come here to your Maeve.” Her voice is getting weaker, and she’s having trouble lifting her head off the ground. “Come…” Her voice is full of muck and dust. She twitches, then lies still.

  I fall to my knees on the bed and wrap my arms around my face, and I cry.

  Chapter Six

  I’m six and will be seven. Seven is big. Seven means I’ll be out of being a child and into being a girl and aiming to be a woman. I’m to put away the stories about the monsters that are not real and to hear about the others. They’ve got worse as I got older; heroes are caught, turned, burned, throttled, they die of hunger and cold. Children same as me. Maeve listens approvingly. Mam mops up my tears and comes to me if I scream at night, but she doesn’t stop telling them.