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Across the River

by Dianne Rees

      The air smells of muted fires. Across the river that separates them from us, I see my sister. She is crouched on her haunches, and I know that she’d come to me, but for the river.

      A strip of fog hovers over that thin sliver of water. It is spring, slouching into summer, and all of us on this side are afraid that the river will dry up and the ones on the other side will cross. My sister raises her head and looks at me ,and I lift my hand in a gesture of acknowledgment. She stretches her lips in a grimace and howls.

      Her howl is joined by a chorus of other howls and more Shamblers come out of the woods. They line up against the riverbank, still as stones, except for the sounds they make. I turn my back on my sister because I can’t stand to see her with them. As I walk back to my car I see others like me standing sentinel along our side of the riverbank. They’re hoping to see loved ones come out of the woods and look across at them with some sign of recognition of a life once lived. Like me, these watchers will be disappointed.

      “Hello, Andrea,” I say to a tired-looking woman who‘s walked up behind me. She smiles at me and smooths her house dress, which is rucked up under the coat she’s thrown on too hastily. She’s doubtless just come from preparing a meal for her second husband and his children. I’ve asked her why she doesn’t let them order take-out on occasion. She enjoys the distraction, she’s told me. She used to be a nuclear physicist - there was so much pressure. She enjoys being a housewife now.

      She says this with all the conviction of an inveterate liar.

      Andrea tells me again that she’s happy now, though tears stream down her cheeks when she sees her child in the arms of his father among the Shamblers. She presses a trembling hand to her lips. “I know I should let go,” she says. “I know it wasn’t my fault, that there was nothing I could have done. Nothing I can do.”

      She turns to me, an expression of horror in her eyes. “But it’s killing me. I play these awful games. I tell myself I might bring one of them back if I could choose between them. And each time, in my mind, I choose my husband over my son. That must be why I’m being punished. That must be why I’ve lost both of them.”

      She weeps silently into her trembling hand, and I pat her on the shoulder awkwardly. “There, there, Andrea,” I murmur. “We can’t help our thoughts. I know you love them both.” While I stand there awkwardly, I hear Shepherd calling across for his dog, Jolie. “Here, girl! Here, girl.” He whistles to her as if he expects her to come bounding across that strip of water. I don’t tell him that the Shamblers may have eaten her. I expect he knows that. I expect we all know how brutal life is on the other side.

      I say goodnight to Andrea and get in my car. I drive back to the village and present my security card to the guard at the citadel, and he opens the gates to let me drive through. Our village is designed like a medieval fortress in case the Shamblers find out they can swim or the summer heat evaporates the river and gives the Shamblers a path across. A moat surrounds our citadel. We pump water for the moat from an underground stream that feeds from the river. If the Shamblers come, we will burn the bridge that leads inside. The moat is twenty feet across and ten feet deep. We suspect it isn’t wide enough or deep enough.

      These are things we fear: the demise of the stream, the coming of summer, changes in the way the Shamblers behave, our own natures. It is accurate to say that we live in fear.

      Inside the gates, I find my bungalow, which looks like most of the bungalows on my street. The village is a “planned community“ and all of the bungalows meet strict community norms. I’m in a model called the Rose Cottage and deeply embarrassed that I bought it. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that my sister would like it. I am here for her - she’s the reason I decided to live in the Danger Zone. I have the money, after all, to move further inland where the housing costs skyrocket and the village walls are more fortified. Security measures inland are inversely proportional to actual risk and directly proportional to wealth.

      In the Danger Zone, we make do with feeble measures and false hopes: Destitute or bereft, we cling to the normalcy of old suburban dreams.

      I move into the living room and log into my notebook, which is still open on the coffee table. I bring it to my lap and start working on my column, “River News.” It will get posted as soon as I write it. People are hungry for news and for warnings of incursions across the river. They want to know if they will have to pack up and leave again. If the mass killings start again, can we find another section of the river that’s safer? Will the townships upriver let us in?

      My readers also want to hear about the mercenaries crazy enough to go across into Shambler territory. Expecting gold for slaughter, these hardened men and women imagine they are smarter and faster and more brutal than those pathetic specimens who cling to the river line. There is usually little to say about this. Most go across and are not heard from again.

      Occasionally, we see these mercenaries on the shoreline, stopped by the river from returning. They look bewildered - shocked that they’ve been bested. Occasionally, one comes back, though if he looks even the little bit off, we shoot him. Lately, it takes very little to look “just a little bit off.”

      Once, a mercenary came back with a specimen of a Shambler - a severed hand. We took it to Dr. Phlock, the geriatric Mengele in our village who claims to be an expert on abnormal pathologies. He injected some of the Shambler cells into one of the neighborhood cats. We had to put the cat down of course, but we got to it after it had already bitten a child. The child’s mother took the child across the river herself.

      Andrea, Shepherd, and I were there that night. We watched the woman stumble across the narrow divide when the child woke up and sank his fangs into his mother’s shoulder. The woman’s transformation was so rapid, she sank into the river almost immediately, dragging the shrieking toddler with her. Both disappeared beneath the waters, which bubbled and roiled. We were all horrified and relieved at the same time. It showed us that the waters still worked, that the river was the best weapon we had.

      The problem is - we don’t really know why it works. People have doused the Shamblers with water before. Dr. Phlock sprinkled a bottle of Dasani on the Shambler tissue that the mercenary brought back and then on the cat. The tissue just lay there, inert. The cat was pissed off, but otherwise unaffected. We were only able to kill it by drowning it in the river, and not before it had done its damage.

      We don’t have scientists in the village to figure out the whys of this. Truth be told, Dr. Phlock was a dentist in his past life. He’s sent samples of river water inland, trying to get a mass spectrometry analysis, but no one has responded. There’s a rumor on the Internet that there’s been an incursion to the west and north of us. We count on the moat now to protect us from Shamblers coming from other directions. Though the stream that feeds the moat comes from the river, we are uncertain of its powers. Does the water need to flow over certain ground, some numinous line in the earth, to work? The moat water diminishes and we suspect that our neighbors, our friends, are filling their old milk bottles with its contents. We suspect them of replacing the moat water with tap water. We fill our own bottles. We count the days.

      And the days are getting warmer. The earth is cracking from the heat. The river flows, but the water doesn't hurry. Soon the river will be a creek. Soon, a person, or a Shambler, with a large enough stride, will be able to hop across.

      I write this down. Not to alarm people, but because I think the truth is important. We had no one to tell us the truth when this all started. I did not tell the truth when this started.

      When my sister came down with the disease, I expected her to condemn me for my complicity in the horrible fate that awaited her. But when she lifted her eyes to mine, her look was not one of betrayal, but a vast understanding of the meaninglessness of it all.

      I ran from her then.

      She stumbled after me and I knew she would be the end of me. I ran, crashing across the river, leaving her there on the other side. I ran, betraying the little girl who had shared her crayons with me, the teenager who had cried when I’d graduated from West Point, the woman who had comforted me when I’d told her of the bad things that I’d done. When I’d told her about all the wrong people I had worked with.

      I write now about these bad things, these wrong people. I use a pseudonym and post from an undisclosed location. My articles are still getting published, but I know this is an automated process. I begin to think that we are alone in this. That the last battle mankind will ever fight is here. I start posting under my job title: “News from the President.”

      I go out to the river when the night comes again. I bring a flask to drink and I share it with Andrea and Shepherd and the others who need to come here. I light one of my last cigarettes. We all wait here and watch, as if waiting and watching will bring an answer. A Shooter walks restlessly up and down the grass line, muttering to his rifle. He’s just a boy. He thinks that his bullets can really stop them. No one’s told him otherwise.

      Across this river of loneliness, I see my sister. She is standing at the shore, in a too-short, ragged dress. Her hands hang limply at her sides, palms cupped outwards. She is looking at me, drawn by some instinct that doesn’t rise to thought, an instinct that brings the lost together, the living and the dead.

      I blow her a kiss as I step forward, my sneakers sucking into the mud at the river‘s edge. Andrea and Shepherd are silent, though after a while Shepherd starts calling for Jolie again. I take another step and feel the water come up to my shins.

      “Sarah,” I say. “Wait for me.”

Dianne Rees is a writer and attorney/anarchist (no, the two are not compatible).  Her works have appeared in Vestal Review, Spillway Review, Farmhouse Magazine, The Scruffy Dog Review, Planet Magazine, Universe Pathways, Bewildering Stories, The Harrow, and Halfway Down the Stairs.  She lives in Southern California.

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