We Leave Together, стр. 43
She opened her eyes.
“What the hell did you feed me?” said her father. Golden bile spilled from his ears, into the tree. The fluids smoldered in the wood. That poplar was dead, now. Brown death rolled up from the roots to the branches. The poplars had always had their branches up in surrender, and now they were going to die from the ankles up from the demon stain.
Her father’s eyes rolled in his head.
Djoss had a quarterstaff in his hands. He stepped on his father’s back to hold the older man down.
“Rachel, get out of the way,” he said.
Rachel didn’t move.
Djoss swung the stick hard, directly onto the man’s skull. The first strike drew blood. The fourth scraped skin away. The fifth cracked bone.
Through the miasma of blood and tissue, a long, slender insect unrolled out of the crevice like a living chain, wriggling in its own toxic vomit. The thing had tiny insect eyes. It looked directly at Rachel.
“Rachel, get out of the way!” shouted Djoss. He kicked his sister away from the long centipede crawling out of her father’s cracked skull.
The poplar tree and the grass seemed to burn in the blood spurting out of the body.
Djoss’ stick descended upon the narrow demon. Djoss cracked the creature’s chitinous back. The red blood that leaked out of the long demon looked human. Every little drop seemed to kill the grass.
When the beast stopped wriggling. Djoss tossed the staff onto the beast. The staff had been badly burned where blood had struck it. Bits of wood burned away in the acid. The staff was only half as long as it was.
Djoss stepped back from his handiwork in the poisoned grass. “You all right, Rachel?” Djoss said. He started coughing. He choked up something and spat it out. Blood. His eyes had turned red, all bloodshot and weeping blood.
“What did you do?” she said. She wasn’t crying, yet. She looked at the broken skull and the dead black centipede.
Djoss kept coughing. He clutched at his own stomach. His skin was green. He was dying with all the plants. The poplars groaned and cracked in death. A brown wave of dying grass like the essence poured from some invisible decanter in the clouds, splashing all around them.
Djoss touched Rachel’s arm. “You can tell Mom when we find her,” he said, “We have to find Mom.”
Rachel touched her face. She was crying, now. The tears burned. When they touched her dress, they burned the cloth.
“Elishta! You’re crying! Stop crying!”
“I can’t,” she said. She brushed at her own tears. The sleeve of her dress burned where she wiped.
Djoss picked Rachel up, and slung her violently over his shoulder. He staggered to the water down the hill and along the beach beside the village.
Behind them the poplar tree, where her father had died, had collapsed into a dead heap and the grove around the tree was dying. The poplars’ bark dropped away like peeling wallpaper. The branches wilted. The trunks popped and groaned. The weight of the branches falling swung the trees around until they cracked entirely, tumbling down.
Rachel was still crying. She felt bruises rising in her stomach from her brother’s sharp shoulder bouncing into her. Every leaping step hurt her more until she was screaming.
When he reached the fjord, he threw her into the cold water, clothes and all. He jumped in after her, letting the blood seep out from him and his own sickness.
“Stop crying, Rachel!” he shouted.
Rachel couldn’t stop. She cupped water in her hands to splash the tears away from her face. She tried to say something, but she couldn’t speak.
Djoss turned around and looked up at the hill. Some men from the village had climbed the hill with axes to investigate the fallen trees, perhaps collect wood. The man looked down at the dead body of man and the dead demon beside the body. The man looked surprised.
Rachel kept crying. Djoss jumped into the water. He grabbed his sister again, and carried her under his arm like a bag floating in the water. He ran down the beach, away from the village. He stopped long enough to puke blood. He collapsed three times. Rachel helped him up, out of the waist-deep water. She was able to walk now. She had his arm around her shoulders, and she was holding him up, in the water. He was terribly heavy. He told Rachel that he couldn’t see anymore.
Then, when they had gone a way through the water, and he was having too much trouble walking to walk through the water, the two turned up the beach and into the low salt flat marsh grasses at the edge of the woods.
She put him down against a tree. He rested his hands on his knees. He gasped for air. “She’ll find us,” he said.
Rachel curled into a ball and turned away from her brother.
“I need you to wait here,” he said, “Can you wait right here and be very quiet?”
Rachel didn’t say anything. She was clenched up tight on the ground. She let her tears smolder on the mossy ground below her face.
“Rachel!” said Djoss, “Are you listening to me?”
She didn’t respond.
“Just stay here!” he said.
And he stood up and ran off again, looking for his mother in the village.
Rachel didn’t move.
“We have to get up,” he said. He fumbled at his belt for tiny bottles of clear liquid (holy water, I suspect or alcohol) to pour into his eyes.
“Where’s Ma?” she whimpered.
“I’m going to smear mud on our faces so people won’t recognize us, okay? Then, we’re going to go into the village and we’re going to see if we can find Ma, okay?”
“I want Mommy.”
“Rachel, I need you to stand up, okay?”
“Okay.”
Rachel stood up. She let her brother cover her in his shirt on top of her old clothes, leaving him naked to the waist. She let her brother smear mud all over