White Horse

She gives thanks later when the Swiss stops to piss on a gas station wall. I squeeze her hand, sorry I brought her into this, yet selfishly glad I’m not alone.

Night arrives with all her baggage and none of the melodrama of day. She brings a hostess gift: a small hotel, a plain white vanilla cake hugging the road’s curve. Behind a wrought-iron fence, the swimming pool masquerades as a swamp thing filled with rotting leaves and mold. Esmeralda waits as we traipse inside. The Swiss is at the back. Always at the back with the gun.

The dead are inside, sprawled out on once-snowy sheets, their final resting places so far from home— wherever home is. Even the breeze can’t carry the smell of this much death out to sea.

“Take a mattress outside,” the Swiss barks.

We choose a queen from an empty room. The bed is neatly made and we keep it so until it’s in place where he wants it, butted up snug against the iron fence. I wait for him to demand another but he doesn’t.

“Is this for us?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“What about you?”

“Such comforts are for weaklings and women.”

I almost gag on the words. “Thank you.”

He laughs cruelly. “You’ll need rest. Soon we’ll be in Volos.”

What business do you have there, you bastard?

Irini and I share handcuffs and a bed: the Swiss takes no chances. Nick doesn’t come to me that night. I’m too far gone, too wrapped up in crisp sheets with my head pressed into the softest pillow I’ve ever known. I hope he forgives me.

“Are you ladies in trouble?” the Russian asks. He’s dressed in swimming trunks and introduces himself as “Me, I am Ivan.” For a man in a dead society, he looks well. Healthy. Nourished, but still too lean.

The gun muzzle is hard against my spine.

I smile and hope it doesn’t falter. “We’re fine. Thank you for asking.”

“Where you going?”

“To see family up past Volos. Do you know it?”

He scratches his head. Glances over his shoulder. “Yes, is that way.”

“How—”

My head explodes, eardrum stretches to its thin limits. Ivan doesn’t have enough time to register surprise as the slug punches its way through his right eye. He slumps to the ground, perennially helpful and friendly. Forever Russian.

Hands over my ears, I yell at the shooter. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What? He was only trying to help. What’s your malfunction?”

The Swiss steps around me, nudges Ivan with his boot.

“Walk.”

“Volos,” Irini reads, although the first letter looks like a B. In the middle of the name someone has pitched a crude tent—an A without its supporting bar. There’s no hallelujah chorus to herald the city’s appearance or our arrival. It juts out above the dusty shimmer, a geometric concrete maze. Take me as I am or leave me, it says. I care not. Perhaps I’m painting the city with my own subjectivity, slopping gobs of doubt on the boxy apartment buildings with their abandoned balconies. My own fears make the city glower. The empty tavernas lining the promenade scoff as if to say, People, they think they can endure? They who are so small? The ships and boats sinking in the harbor are reruns of Piraeus. Here they sit a little lower in the water as though they’re exhausted from fighting both gravity and salt. The Argo waits on its pillar for Argonauts who will never sail again.

It’s a strange thing to claim kinship with objects crafted from steel, but there’s a heaviness in my bones that’s mirrored in their submission to the sea. Although, in essence, metals are born of the earth and our bodies become earth when we’re finished with them, so perhaps there is some common ancestor. Some people are more resilient than others, some metals as pliable as flesh.

So lost am I in my thoughts that I hear the Swiss’s words, but they don’t register.

“What?”

He prods me with the gun. “I said we are stopping here.”

For supplies, I assume, or maybe for respite. “Right here?”

“No. There.”

My gaze travels the length of his gun all the way to the wasteland of marine vessels. Amidst the sinking ships and loose slips, some boats prevail. Small wooden fishing boats, mostly, painted cheerful colors like you’d see on a postcard. Wish you were here. Glad you’re not.

“I don’t understand.”

He moves so he’s standing right in front of us, lifts the weapon, shoots Irini. Blood flows. There’s so much. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that she’s a gushing fountain of brilliant scarlet. She falls into my arms and I sink to the ground with her, try to find the hole. There it is, buried an inch below her rib cage. It’s a tiny thing, I think as I press my hand to the wound. So tiny I can’t even shove my finger inside to plug the leak like the little Dutch boy did the dike.

Sounds of things scuttling away from where we are. Still human enough to be scared of the gun. Or animal enough to shy from loud noises.

My jaw is spring-loaded with tension. It’s all I can do not to leap up and tear his throat open with my teeth like some crazed animal. But that’s what he’s done to me: pushed me to the desperate edge as though he wants to measure how much I can lose before my sanity snaps into jagged pieces.

“What more do you want?” It hurts to speak. My teeth ache from the tension. “What else?”

“Your baby.”

Hate fills me until I’m radiating pure loathing. It’s a wonder it doesn’t take corporeal form and slay him.

“So many people caught White Horse. Why couldn’t you have been one of them?”

He looks at me. “I did.”

Surprise hits me like an automobile. “What did it do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. It changes everyone who doesn’t die from it. What did it do?”

“It made me stronger. Better. I can hold my breath longer. Heal faster.”

If I had it in me, I’d laugh at the delicious irony. “Do you hate your own kind? Is that it? The abomination hates his own.”

No more answers. He just curls those steel-cabled fingers around my forearm and pulls until Irini slips away.

“Go,” she says.

“Come on,” he says to me.

“Why? Why shoot her?”

“Fewer mouths to feed.”

“I hate you.”

“This is not school. Life is not a popularity contest. Power wins.”

He drags me. My boots scrape across the concrete. I sag, make myself deadweight, flail. Anything to inconvenience him. He wants me alive. He needs me alive. That means there’s still some luck left to push.

“I’m going to kill you. First chance I get,” I say.

“I believe you. But you will not get a chance.”

“We’ll see.”

He slaps me. Hot, angry tears fill my eyes. I don’t want them to, but my body has other plans.

“Your friend will be dead soon. Look.” He grabs my chin, makes me look at her. She’s sitting in a crimson