Sheila held the door open as the truck wound its way down the arrow-straight drive. She thought it moved more tentatively than usual and became concerned, though the head of the schnauzer resting atop the cab with its tongue lolling out did nothing to inflame her concerns. It pulled forward, slowed, and stopped with a ginger creak that was redoubled by the removal of the schnauzer’s weight. Steve, in the driver’s seat, rolled his head back against the headrest and she considered for a moment yelling at him but thought better of it just in case. The truck had been moving in such a way… .
The schnauzer sprinted off across the yard, heading- if history was any guide- toward the cow barn to look at the heads and growl. She watched it go with her customary mixture of disgust and affection, the push-pull of seeing a schnauzer, but such a schnauzer. It bounded past her and around the corner of the house and she was able to reframe the moment in her mind, for posterity’s sake if nothing else, to erase the strangeness of the whole thing. Satisfied, and with the lowered heart rate that comes with self-delusion, she turned back to the truck, whose door was now ajar though Steve appeared not to have moved.
She opened her mouth, considering and content to begin berating him, when a discoloration, indeterminate through the windshield, caught her eye. Her curiosity aroused, and this being a small fraction of the world in which indulging said could be considered safe enough, she moved to the side in an effort to improve her angle. There was something familiar about the new color Steve was wearing, that he had not been this morning as he’d left. Sheila paused, reflected, realized it was the same color which she herself had been earlier that day, and wondered where Steve had gotten ahold of a goat. Then she realized he was the goat and moved to assist him.
Consider the paramedic. Not the first responder, per se, given the looseness of that term, but the person whose job it is to come to the most gruesome of scenes and do any number of a thousand possible tasks in what is, by the time they arrive, too little time to perform any single one of them with maximum efficiency to attempt to… what? We have heard them declare that they are saving lives but we think it much more likely they are simply fighting a losing battle against the yawning chasm of death we all face on a particularly bloody and immediate front. They are stalemating lives at best, and deep down they all know it. Consider what it would take for you to face that kind of immediacy every day? And would you notice? We don’t think so, not after awhile.
The point here is this: when your entire life is about fighting battles on a particularly messy front with a life that seems determined, finally, to take itself away from you and everyone you know, it’s unlikely that the impending loss of it on any given day is going to shake you in any violent way. Consider what that says about the brain, the adaptive capability of the lump of flesh that named itself residing in your cranial case, and normality as a concept when juxtaposed against the fairly pervasive tendency to faint at the sight of, say, blood. We’re not sure there’s much to be said for something so radically changeable.
And yet through the entirety of human history that very changeable and unmoored lump has reigned supreme over all the things not directly governed by the crushing rearguard forces of nature itself. Do you truly believe that your distaste for onions or using your own excrement as fertilizer will last longer than its practicality? Because we do not, and we think that is normal. That, if there is anything, is the thing to be said for the lump in your noggin. But that also raises serious questions about the nature of normality, which we’re sure you understand we’ve considered once or twice across the goings-on- both in life and in this narrative, where there are places the two diverge. And those, we think, are fewer, in fact, than you think.
They limped together into the guest bathroom, Steve because of combination of general weariness and his semi-raised position vis-a-vis Sheila’s shoulders more than any specific complaint and Sheila because she banged her leg on the door frame helping Steve inside it at 1.75 his normal width. They together slung him down onto the side of the avocado bathtub and considered for the millionth time how the color clashed with human skin- though only briefly, because by the time Steve’s clothes were off and the clash was evident so too was the damage which had been done to his body. His shoulder was a mangled mess of tubes and fluid, some beginning to scab over and turn the deep, cracked black of brimstone.
“This is gonna fuckin’ hurt,” Sheila said to him, her eyes softer than her words but intent enough that Steve, in his haze, would know a wave was coming. She poured alcohol on a rag, held it to his shoulder, and watched as he strained against bonds from the cellular to the societal in an effort to stay where he was rather than leap to, say, the moon. Forced to say anything she would have said she was proud of him, but there was no one to force her and she genuinely didn’t feel like it at the moment, so she held the rag and watched him squirm and considered the potential explanations for the wound, even as she replayed the events relayed through the radio in her mind and knew that she knew.
It would be bad, she thought. There wasn’t much else for it, not if she knew the people on the other end of all the kerfuffle. She felt she did. Her bones creaked a bit as the image of her knife, clean and available, rose in her mind. She began to inventory her weapons, thought of the Hermit and whether he might help, realized Steve was gasping beneath the rag, and lifted it so he could catch his breath among the stars which now must be floating in his vision.
“Wolf got me,” he said, air in his breath and his eyes shut tight. “Dog took it down. Then they chased me.” She nodded, and decided that saying I know at this critical juncture in his recovery wouldn’t do much good. Given the pain he was in he probably wouldn’t register it, lessening its impact for both planning and sarcasm purposes. With neither on the table the information shouldn’t be, and she wiped his forehead with the back of the rag. “Didn’t get the lumber. Rest of it’s in the truck.”
She found it interesting that lumber, an item which might have bolstered their safety and security, was going to be the thing that got them found and butchered by a group of psychopaths in trucker hats- for with names like Bo she could picture no other status of their collective heads- but again decided the observation was less useful in the current situation and kept it to herself. Steve laid his head back against the tub’s porcelain and closed his eyes. Sheila watched the tension leave him, the pain from the alcohol swab apparently ebbing away along with the last of the adrenaline he must have ridden on to get him here. It was, now that she thought about it, astounding he had made it home like this. She would have, but then again in another life she had also been more certain of herself than she was of other people. Why would that stop after most of them proved to be corpses-in-waiting?
She stood. Steve didn’t react. Sheila found that interesting, if understandable, and she went and retrieved a pair of shears from one the first aid kit they kept by the door- one of several in the house, it not making much sense to be stingy with them when the populace for which they were intended had shrunk to the point where often, and when Sheila felt most comfortable, the census would have read “2” if there had been anyone to take it and the taker didn’t live in the area. She made her way back to the bathroom, considering the likelihood of there being a census at all but especially one in this particular social climate which featured, as its ostensible star, a census taker from Somewhere Other, and rejecting the idea in a swarm of aerosolized fear sweat as being both ridiculous and irresponsible before reaching down and cutting Steve’s shirt in half with the shears.
She flung the halves back, looked at the wound properly now in its full extent, and before he could finish reacting the towel, once more full of alcohol, was once again in contact with his vulcanized skin.
