the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Read Free Book Online

start to wane, falling off northward.  Trailing in the direction of the oceanfront.  Whatever is out there coursing deliberately through the woods, fossa or not, has traveled past them.  It ’s heading out toward the sea and toward the remains of Resort Lavelha.  Park closes his eyes and allows himself to breathe audibly.

chapter five
     
     
    The sky is beginning to pale, and from their position in the culvert Park can see the desolate beachfront through gaps in the treeline.  Its rows of sunlounger chairs and tent-like canopy shades.  Wicker end tables.  Everything barren, abandoned.  A long skeleton frame racked with sea kayaks and playboats and yellow double-blade paddles.  An aluminum valet overrun with lifejackets like bloated treefruit. 
    He sheathes the knife.  For a while he alternates between watching the waterline and watching the woods on either side of the culvert.  Mangroves with root systems that tentacle widely above ground.  The tamarind.  The palms and the soft ferns.  Baobab trees dripping with their overripe gonga , all of it half-eaten by some animal and then left on the vine to molder, ant-covered and fly-ridden.  The soft white vanga still nesting, oblivious, in the branches of a neem tree. 
    Offshore there is the steady, immutable roll of swells.  Their booming resonance and their turnover.  Slow and lulling and metronomic.  Again and again, the breakers crest to height and spill over against the low shoal, radiating across the sand with a hissing sibilance, and then fall seaward again, skimming off the topmost layer. 
    After a time he glances at her, taking in his wife’s worn expression.  The matted thickness of her black hair pulled loosely back, the shards of brown leaves and branchlets visible in the braids.  She’s been wearing the same outfit since the day they were first chased into the woods from the hotel’s Recreation Annex.  A thin red flannel shirt layered over a white tank top.  The kind of khaki pants that end below the knee at the calf, a zippered pocket on each leg.  New Balance trainers, off-white.  The cooking class had required closed-toed, comfortable shoes, so she was fortunate enough to be wearing gym shoes on that morning instead of sandals or flip-flops.  The small things can sometimes make a big difference in this life. 
    She looks out at the woods through the screen of limbs.  Watching in the same way he is, for the same terrible things he is, with the same expectation, with equally haunted, hollow eyes.  She ’s still gripping the butcher’s cleaver tightly and her knuckles show through the skin.  He puts a hand gently on hers.  I think we’re good, he says to her.  It’s gone.  We’re good. 
    She doesn ’t say anything.  She just stares awhile.  Clutching that glinting meat hatchet in a tight, mudded fist.  The whites of her teeth and eyes in the dark.  There is no good, she tells him.  Not for us.  There’s only being ready for the next bad thing coming.
     
     
    They go back to the watch, and not long after, Park sees a pale boy emerge from the trees lining the beachfront.  A true wildling, this one.  Sunburned, ragged.  Dirt and abrasions and bruising and what look to be bite marks all along his arms and wrists, his ankles, anywhere his mouth can reach.  They watch him running, shirtless and shoeless, casting himself wildly down the shore toward the warm waters of the guulfo .  Barely more than a baby, this lost child.  Three, maybe four years old is all.  His thin arms and his rounded belly and the raw, unfledged gait.  His bare feet are pocking the wet sand like the track of a small animal. 
    The boy patters shin-deep into the wash and then he starts to stomp.  Kicking a spray, splashing through.  The child is smiling, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, ghoulish, God have mercy on what remains of him.  He leaps and lands hard with both feet down, sending plumes roostertailing on all sides.  Soaking his body