White Horse

All this world is theirs to live in now, yet the Roma choose to stay here in their familiar nest of lean-tos and shacks with their suspicion of outsiders to keep them warm. But who can blame them? My clothes are brown with the blood of three. I wear blackface made of sweat and road dust.

They are wary; I am wary. Too many faces twist diabolically of late. My faith in my own kind has evaporated to mist. But when I reach out, my bag is beside me untouched. That small gesture lends me some hope that I am among those still as human as me.

DATE: THEN

Cups of steaming tea come and go. Voices swim around me like I’m fish food. Faintly, faintly, I’m aware that my sanity is going walkabout, that I’m acting as though I’ve got one foot in an asylum and the other in a pool of blood. How much can a human mind take before it breaks?

Then he is there.

And here I am.

The desk groans as Nick clears an ass-shaped space and sits. I don’t look, but I feel the air divide as he leans forward and fills what was empty. He’s close enough for me to smell. No cologne, no aftershave. Just Nick. Made of sunshine.

“What’s going on, Zoe?” His voice caresses my cheek.

“The sky is falling.”

“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”

“It’s going to kill us all, one by one, one way or another.” My hand that is not my hand rubs my face. “He started this. All of it. We were an experiment. My apartment was his Trinity Site.”

“Where they conducted the first nuclear test?”

“He wanted to test his drug. No, not a drug: a weapon.” I tell him the things George Pope related to me in the last few minutes of his rotten life. Nick listens with the attentiveness of his profession. When my words fade to ellipses, he remains taut, alert. And when I look up to him he is still wearing that old familiar mask, the one that stops me from knowing him. So many questions. Who are you? What happened to you on the battlefield? Do you cry for your brother? Did you think of me while you were gone? But the questions stick to my tongue like sun-warmed gum to a shoe sole.

“What’s in the sack, Zoe? Can you show me?”

Penitent and afraid, I kneel before him, the bleeding sack a guilty offering. “Are you sure?”

“Show me.”

His is a command wrapped in silk, but an order nonetheless. Somewhere deep in my soul a gong strikes; I have no choice but to obey.

Stiff fingers untie the knot binding the lab coat. The fabric is soaked with blood and sticks to the contents. Wet red cotton peels away from the cold flesh inside.

Meat. Just like beef or pork or lamb. The lie that dams the bile in my stomach. If I stop and think about where it came from, I will run screaming from this room.

Meat. Just like the supermarkets used to stock.

Nick inhales. I close my eyes and wait. He doesn’t state the obvious, doesn’t ask the stupid question. He can see the coat contains a severed head, so he doesn’t need to underscore and bold.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Whose is it? Does anyone need medical attention?”

I shake my head. Just meat, Zoe. Chicken and ham. “He was dead already. I was following instructions.”

“Whose?”

“His.” I nod at the just-meat-maybe-turkey. “George Pope.”

He sits. Processes. Then he asks why. And I tell him how Pope was afraid that he’d rise in death.

“Do you believe he would have?”

“I have to.” Otherwise I chopped off his head for nothing.

Nick pulls a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. Without looking at me, he begins to scratch words onto the page.

I look at him. “You’re making a shopping list.”

“I’m making a list.”

“A list.”

For ten more beats of my heart—I tick them off—he scribbles, then pockets the pad.

“I’m going to help you. That’s what I’m here for.”

“I’m fine. I can deal alone.”

He crouches in front of me, wraps the head so it’s no longer staring up at us.

“We might all get our fill of alone. Take companionship while you can, Zoe. I’m reaching out my hand. Don’t slap it away.”

Nick and I are not done.

Jesse makes the front page that day—and the second. The United States Times has turned him into a different-bad person. A villain. A criminal who tried to pin the blame on a company committed to saving us from, not just this disease, but a whole host of ills.

That night a preacher from the South gives the disease a name that rolls easily off tongues and sticks inside heads.

“This disease is a white horse coming to claim the sinners. The end isn’t nigh, it’s here.” He speaks to an audience of dying millions where his words find purchase and flourish.

White Horse. It gallops amongst us.

DATE: NOW

A week passes before I can walk more than a few steps without my vision fading to black. During that time I eat better than I have since before the war. These fringe people are smarter than the rest of us. Forced to exist on the periphery of society, they’ve developed skills suburbanized people allowed to devolve. They grow what they eat. Each member of their clan performs tasks to help the whole. While the rest of us were mourning junk food, they kept on doing what their people have done for generations. Cogs in a simple, elegant machine.

Another week passes before I seek out Yanni. I don’t believe the Swiss survived. He can’t have. Unless my mind fabricated his death so I’d go to my grave victorious.

“What does the man look like?” I ask the boy.

If he thinks my request is strange, he doesn’t show it. Every word is a chance to show off his English skills.

“He is”—Yanni waves a hand over his head—“white. His hairs is white. Not like old man. Like a movie star.”

It’s the Swiss; it has to be. I don’t know how he survived, what Gypsy magic they wove. I don’t know how I failed.

“Blond,” I say with a thick, numb tongue. “We call that color blond.”

He tries the word on for size. “Blond.”

“I want to see… my husband.” A gallstone, bitter and bilious, rolling around my mouth.

Two women come, both clad in tie-dyed T-shirts and tiered skirts that hang like tired draperies. They talk to the boy, stare openly at me without social propriety. To them I am a curiosity, both a foreigner and an outsider.

“Is he alive?” I say. Please let him be dead. Although it goes against everything I believe, and makes me a little less human, I want that to be true. Can I still look myself in the eye?

“He is not good,” the boy says.

“I need to see him.”

“Okay, I will take you.” His arm links through mine. Stronger than he looks. Wiry. We go slow.

A man cuts across our path wheeling a barrow heaped with watermelons. It’s warm here. Feels like high summer. A caterpillar of sweat hunches across my upper lip. I can’t help but wonder what the weather is like at home. Although it no longer exists, home stands still in my memory, a monument to what it was before the fall. My