Canis Lupus

My mother taught me the secrets of the Earth. Now, I use them to survive it.

I remember going with her to protests. I used to have pictures of her carrying me as an infant, wrapped against her chest as she disrupted hearings, town halls; she kept one arm free when she handcuffed herself to a tree so she could feed me. The enforcers, back then, would at least hesitate before roughing her up, when I was with her as a child. They started putting me in handcuffs too, when I turned seven. That was her world, a world I didn’t live in for very long. And she hated it.

When she wasn’t protesting, or in a holding center, or in underground meetings with the resistance, we were sneaking out of the city. It was hard, but she had friends everywhere. There was not much green in the city those days, just high concrete walls and harsh artificial light. Outside, though — the trees grew taller than the walls of the city. Their limbs hung over the hard plastic roofs and when it rained, they shook and rattled and the whole world screamed with their noise. Grass grew up to our knees. Flowers bloomed in every color, and the scent of their pollen made the air thick and sweet.

She taught me everything. How to tell time by the way the sun casts shadows. Which plants had roots that you could boil and eat, or leaves that you could make into bitter tea. How to track an animal — though in those days, we would follow from a distance and just watch them, tending to their young or making a den for the winter. But more than that, she taught me to respect the Earth. She taught me it was alive, and more intelligent than most people knew. That trees talked to each other, that birds know when a storm is coming. And she taught me that no matter how hard we tried to tame it, the Earth would always come back.

So when the city fell, I guess I was lucky. It started with the acid mold. It grows in shades of orange and red. You can’t touch it for even a second without it burning your skin, and it ate right through the concrete walls. Then the weeds and vines crept in, so tough a knife can’t cut them. The only thing that works is fire, but even then they grow right back. Animals started attacking. Giant birds with four monstrous wings that seemed to learn as they were fighting the enforcers, and more bears than I thought even existed those days, skin rippling with mutated muscle. Some people stayed and died. Others fled into the forest and died.

At first the city government urged us to stay calm. They urged us to stay inside during the attacks, but the enforcers died out quickly. Then, they armed us and told us to fight back. The citizens were even less effective.

My mother and her enforcer friend Patrik snuck us out through the tunnels after that. The population of the city had already been halved. I was twelve. Since then, I’ve been travelling.

When we first left, we were looking for other cities that might have survived. Communication went out early when the Earth turned against us, so we had no way of knowing who else might be out there. We found a few. All of them were in ruin. All of them held horrors we never could have imagined. Humans eaten alive by flora, their corpses jerking with lichenous signals. Starving, murderous, mutated animals that hunted us in the night — foxes as large as moose and insects that moved intelligently in coordinated attacks.

When we did find living people, they had lost their humanity. They had turned on each other, and we narrowly avoided being killed for our resources, or for our meat.

After a few years of that, we just tried to survive. It was me, my mother, Patrick, and his son Theo. Patrick died first. My mother died next.

Theo died yesterday. Today is my nineteenth birthday.

The sun has been setting earlier and earlier with the cold months around the corner. It’s starting to go down now, at my back. I turn and let my eyes linger on it briefly, smoldering red against the verdant world. It melts into the yellowing tallgrass. I want to cry, but my eyes just harden and squint. I can feel dirt caked into the face on my skin. I turn back around and lean down, give Lucky a pat on his right neck. He’s ambling along through the grass, which won’t bother him. The grass seems to let the animals pass. He snorts amicably, tossing his left head. Lucky’s almost a normal horse, until his thick neck splits past his shoulders. He has two identical faces, and they never seem to mind each other. It also makes him better at spotting predators, which is helpful for me.

He’s all I have left.

He hasn’t seemed to be bothered as I’ve gotten heavier these last few months, and he carries all the supplies I’ve gathered, too. We learned quickly not to eat anything that grows. I’ve become a scavenger, living off of rusty cans of whatever I can find. I hunt sometimes, when I’m desperate, but I never know if the animal meat will be rancid or cancerous or poison me from the inside.

We come to a clearing in the grass, so I pull on Lucky’s leather reins and halt him. I swing my left leg over the saddle with difficulty, and slowly dismount. Hitting the ground hurts my ankles. I press a hand to my swollen belly and breathe out slowly. Moving at all is difficult these days, and no one is here to help me. So I’ll just have to take my time.

I let Lucky graze freely; I know he’s not going anywhere. I unpack my small blowtorch, turn it on the lowest setting to preserve the gas. I singe the tall grass around the clearing, it hisses and coils in on itself, getting the hint to stay away. Hopefully that will keep it from creeping up on me in the night. Many mornings I had to cut Theo’s limbs free of the tangling weeds, inching up his ankles, cutting into his skin.

I make a small fire and warm one of my last three cans. I’m treating myself tonight with the peaches. The saccharine yellow fruit dissolves slowly on my tongue. I try to make each slice last as long as possible as I watch the sun disappear.

I roll out my sleeping bag. It’s hard to get comfortable on the ground. When I lie on my back my hips ache, but it’s better than anything else. I stare up at the sky; it’s filled with stars now. They’re the only light, and I can see the faint dusting of the Milky Way. Theo used to make up stories about the constellations. When I think of him, my eyes sting again. Unconsciously, my hands rest on my stomach.

—

It was around this time last evening that Theo lay dying. We had finally gotten the elk down, and it was just a few feet away on the forest floor. It had countless sets of antlers, twisting and rising from the flesh on its back. Several of them were speckled with dried flesh and blood. Its herbivore teeth had been replaced by sharpened fangs and incisors. But now, it was snorting in pain and its legs twitched, and its blood was streaming all around us, mingling with Theo’s, the yellow leaves of the aspen above trembling and quaking in some unnoticeable wind. I had propped Theo up against its trunk. His breath was slow and jagged, like every inhale was a pained gasp, and his chest moved in short, jerky undulations. He was clutching our shotgun in both hands, the one we had used to kill the elk. His eyes were already becoming glaucous and unfocused, but every few seconds they would stop darting left to right and linger on my face. I was crying silently.

Vaguely I was aware that the sun was setting behind me and I hoped it would bring him some comfort. Consciously I was trying to think of something worthwhile to say. What can be worth a person’s last moments? We grew up together, in this world. Every day was spent with him, with my only friend. I couldn’t save him, and he couldn’t save me. I tried not to look at the holes in his chest where the elk had gored him.

I thought that silence would last forever. I thought about the fact that once he was dead I wouldn’t have anyone else to talk to. I could live out the rest of my days in that silence. I just kept crying and looking at him. I touched his cheeks, I pressed my forehead against his. I thought words were beyond both of us, but finally he took one of his hands off of the gun, and I felt it on my stomach. Our child.

“This is her world.” I leaned back and looked at him. His eyes were half-lidded and each word sounded excruciating. “You know what to do.”

—

I wake at dawn, and something is wrong. My stomach pulls in on itself, sending waves of pain up my spine. I groan and clutch my stomach. It’s too early for this. The baby shouldn’t be born for another two months.

I push myself to sitting, and then slowly, slowly, to my feet. I have to hobble along as I gather my sleeping bag, but before I can even tie it to Lucky’s saddle, another contraction wracks my body. I cry out in pain, and Lucky noses me curiously. I can almost see concern in all four of his eyes.

Theo said I know what to do, but I don’t. I don’t even know if I can get back on Lucky to ride somewhere safer. My mother taught me about childbirth, but delivering alone is another story. I always thought Theo would be here to help. When I first realized I was pregnant, we were scared, but excited. Now, I’m just scared.

I pull the shotgun off of the saddle and hold it close to my chest. I have only a few shells left, and if there are animals around, they’ll know I’m vulnerable. I look around, panic settling into my bones. Nothing yet. Another contraction, and I double over, trying not to scream.

I give up on the idea of riding Lucky, and decide I’ll have to risk the grass. I stand at the edge of the golden stalks, but I don’t have time to waste. I cautiously brush against it with the toe of my boot. To my surprise, it doesn’t react except to bend gently, inviting me in.

Lucky and I traverse it carefully. I hold one hand in front of me to part it, but nothing clutches at my ankles, nothing leaps out and tries to kill me. I lead him towards the forest, hoping it will give me some cover from whatever might lurk nearby. Pines and junipers loom on the skyline, and when we finally reach the treeline, I clutch the rough trunk of a fir like it might save me from sinking into the needle-covered ground.

I manage a few more steps before my body writhes again in pain, and I can’t help but scream. I hear an animal somewhere in the forest stir against the leaves. But I have no choice, I lower myself to the floor. Lucky wanders a few feet away to graze.

I strip off my clothes and get ready to try to deliver this baby. I hear the animal approaching, and my head snaps in its direction. Maybe ten feet away is a huge, grey wolf. It seems to grin at me, baring two rows of teeth, overlapping like a shark's.

I can hear my heartbeat in my ears as I scramble to aim the shotgun. My hands are shaking, and just as I find the trigger, another contraction hits. My eyes squeeze shut, and I grit my teeth. When I open my eyes again, the wolf is joined by two pups, tumbling over each other. She sniffs them calmly, and turns her eyes back to me. We regard each other, my fear still present, but subsiding. My finger is on the trigger, but without trying, my body is starting to relax, and somehow, the ground feels softer, a cradle of roots and leaves.

The mother wolf lies down on the ground, and her pups bark amicably, chasing their tails and pawing at her. She looks away from me and into the forest, as if keeping watch.

—

My child is born a few hours later. A girl, as Theo suspected, healthy in every way. Once I have her to my chest, the wolf wanders off. I watch her disappear into the forest, and look back down to my child.

“Hi there,” I say, my voice soft and unfamiliar in the air. The baby’s hands reach up into the air, searching for my face, and I bring it to her. She smiles, and the little girl blinks up at me with three beautiful hazel eyes.