The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

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      The woman in front finally lowered the barrel of her rifle slightly. “You haven’t been out much, have you?” she asked.

      Ory shook his head.

      They all looked from one to another silently again. Ory snuck a glance at the cracked, weathered cool deck where they were gathered. Twelve bodies, four shadows. Four shadows. He stared. Four. Shadows.

      Finally they all looked back to the woman at the front, one by one, waiting for her verdict.

      “You have anyone?” the woman asked. She was one of the four.

      “Yes,” Ory said. “She, uh …” He gestured lamely to his own silhouette.

      That seemed to soften them. The wrinkles in the woman’s face deepened, and she scratched the short velvet buzz on her head with the back of her hand. “How long?”

      “Seven days.” He tried not to think of how many were left. How many more days that she’d still talk in funny voices when he was upset until he laughed. How many more days that she’d bravely attempt to make meals out of their scant ingredients, even though she was the worst cook they’d both ever met. How many more days that she’d sit in silence with him in the mornings and watch the sun come up through their tiny kitchenette window. He loved those sunrises with her.

      “I’m sorry.”

      Ory shook his head, refusing to accept the sympathy. Sympathy made things real. “She’s very strong. She’s only really just started forgetting,” he said. He tried not to stare at the group of shadowless at their center. He wanted to ask them what to do. How far gone were they? Did they have rules? How were they making it work? Most of all, how were the ones with shadows not afraid of the ones without? At what they might do at any moment—like the deer, or maybe worse—if they forgot something?

      “That’s pretty impressive for seven days,” one of the shadowless ones whistled. His blue eyes were unnaturally clear.

      “He doesn’t even remember which one of us he’s related to,” a woman next to him joked, and a couple of them laughed. The shadowless man grinned sheepishly. After they quieted, two women with jet-black skin muttered, “Tell him already,” to the one with the gun.

      “You ought to head south, to New Orleans,” she said at last. “Something’s happening there.”

      “What’s happening?”

      “We don’t know,” she confessed. “But something. Everyone’s heading for it. Arlington’s almost emptied out; we’re the last group that we know of. We were waiting for—” She cut off abruptly, but Ory knew the tone. He’d heard it often in the beginning. It was the tone of someone who’d refused to give up a hope she shouldn’t have anymore. “We’ve heard a lot of stories,” she finally continued. “A lot of names.”

      Ory thought of the ones he knew. The One with a Middle But No Beginning. The One with No Eyes. The Stillmind. “They’re rumors,” he said. “Just a bunch of rumors.”

      “But they’re all about the same place,” the woman replied. “Whatever the names mean, they’re all about someone or something in New Orleans. That can’t mean nothing.”

      That much was true. Whenever one of the names came up, almost always so too did the city. But what it meant, if anything at all—that was the part that mattered to Ory.

      The woman cleared her throat. “Besides, we’ve heard rumors about D.C., too. Bad things are happening there. And it’s spreading. We waited as long as we could.”

      “Bad things?”

      “I don’t know what they are,” she said. “But the few people that have come through here, before they stopped coming altogether, they said it’s bad. And they were saying the same names, and all heading for New Orleans. So that’s what we’re doing, too.”

      Ory looked from person to person in the group. He was suddenly keenly aware of how many of them were studying him—his watch, his knife, his pack. Or perhaps they were just looking at his shadow. “You trust what they say?” He asked.

      “I’ve been in this complex a long time,” she said. “You learn to watch, not to listen. I’ve ignored what they said and watched what they did. And it’s what I told you—people are leaving. They’re coming from Arlington and they’re coming from D.C., and they’re all going south, to Louisiana. Something’s happening out there.”

      “If the names are all real, I’m not sure I’d want to go.”

      The woman shrugged. “Then don’t. But I’d rather be running toward than away from something.” The others behind her nodded.

      Ory tried to read her face for some kind of tell, but the woman looked earnest. She was tired, and too wise to hope for too much, but there was no lie there. Whatever the rumors were, that they existed and that people were heading for New Orleans, at least, was true.

      “Then why are you still here?” he asked.

      “We aren’t,” she said. She rested the butt of the rifle gently on the ground. “We leave today. As soon as this one finishes his goddamn cigarette.”

      The smoke trailed out between the tiny gaps in his teeth as the man beside her grinned. “Helps me remember,” he said.

      They all waited in the silence as the man exhaled and put the roll of embers to his lips again. Against the cool deck, its tiny shadow floated in midair, attached to nothing. After a last long drag, he pushed the remains into the ground and then placed his shoe slowly over it, snuffing the life out. It was time to go.

      “How are you getting there?” Ory asked when they all looked at him again.

      “We can’t—” she started.

      “No, I know. I didn’t mean … I just meant, how are you getting there?”

      The woman crossed her arms. “We’ve been saving. There are still cars that run if you look for them. Victor here was an engineer before everything went to shit. He calculated it for us. How much food, water, gas. We want to survive, but we want to travel light. We’ve been building our group for a year, and have just enough to get the twelve of us there, no more. That’s why I said you were too late,” she said, an explanation as an apology.

      “There are only two of you,” the shadowless man with the blue eyes said. The wind pushed his pale yellow hair in front of his cold stare for a moment. “You’ll travel fast as such a small unit.” His face was grimly determined. “Find a car. You’ll make it.”

      “I just …” Ory shook his head. He looked at the ground-floor unit closest to the pool that had obviously been theirs. There were bicycles propped up against the railings in the back, a grill chained to the wall, clothes hanging to dry. Here they were, sitting around the empty pool in the last warmish sun of the season, smoking cigarettes they had made themselves. It was almost a normal life. “You’re leaving all this—you’re going to go out there—for a rumor?”

      “We have to,” the woman said. She looked at the shadowless man, and they watched each other for a long moment. “Or there won’t be anything left anyway.”

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