We Are None of Those Things

(This story depicts systemic ableism and death.)

Bare-legged and trembling, I feel the wind in swatches – a pin prickle on the front of my thigh, but a distinct nothingness up the side, where nerve damage paints its way from knee to hip in a river of scar. It doesn’t stop every muscle fiber from shaking.

“Do you think we should go for it?” Manny asks, his words jittering out through clenched teeth. He’s also bare-legged, a dirty white T-shirt barely covering his boxer briefs. At least he has flip-flops on.

I slide my barefoot forward, over the hard rock freeze of the dirt and look over the edge of the cliff. It’s fifty, maybe sixty, meters down. The surface of the lake is definitely frozen, a ghostly swath blanketing the whole thing. The sun is just starting to crest the mesas in the distance, throwing pink and orange over everything.

Fuck. This was all supposed to be temporary.

“No,” I manage through my own clenched jaw. “Too risky.”

But there isn’t much of an alternative. Pants-less and freezing in the winter desert is as sure a way to die as jumping onto a lake of ice.

Like I said, this was all supposed to be temporary. Not the pants-lessness, but the job. The wild-eyed gig that brought me and Manny out here in the first place. Experience wide open spaces, the ad said. Protect the portals, enjoy the peace. Peace my ass. And portals? We’ve only ever seen one open up, and not even in this area. Manny’s assumption that a portal will open up and swallow us into Neverland when we launch off this cliff is strictly a product of his indoctrination. He drank the Kool-Aid day one. Just like I thought he would. “We’ll get there one day,” he always says.

“We go back,” I say, “to the pod.” I feel Manny look at me. I feel how wide his eyes must be. How insane he must think I am.

“Go back?”

“Yes. They’ve probably moved on. We could at least get some goddam pants on and reassess the situation.” I can tell Manny wants to jump off this fucking cliff, wants to trust in the promise of the portal. But he knows I don’t buy it. I never have.

“Fine,” he finally says. “We go back.”

It isn’t an easy trek, but it’s less painful that our full-out sprint across the frozen desert in the darkness before dawn. The sun rises and the desert plants come into full view. Fouquieria splendens, Ocotillo, its many-leaved tentacles reaching toward the sky. Carnegiea gigantea, Saguaro Cactus, spiked sentinels spread out across the scrubby floor that splits the skin under my feet.

But no animals. Except us.

The plants that survived are marked by the infection that’s nearly decimated this sector. Disfigured and bent by a pathogenic fungi, an opportunistic interloper. I watch the cacti watch me, both of us marked, both of us blamed. My limp is more pronounced after this morning’s run. The cold doesn’t help.

That was the whole point of the portals – bring the animals back to the desert. Dicotyles tajacu, javelina. Canis latrans, coyote. A reverse Noah’s Ark. Years ago, the animals who escaped infection were portaled to a safe haven – where prettier people guard the openings. People and plants without scars.

“Do you want my sandals?” Manny asks when we’re halfway back. The sun has warmed us up a little. His voice isn’t shaky anymore. And no, I don’t want his fucking sandals now.

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

We march on, and finally the pod comes into view on the horizon. It houses our quarters, and a lab that hasn’t been used for decades. The building is smooth and sleek, a pearl nestled in the palm of the desert.

“What if they’re still in there?” Manny asks. He sounds confident, unscared. But I know he’s full of shit.

“They’re not,” I say. But they could be.

The door is still open, shredded along its thick metal edge by the claws that nearly ripped it from its hinges.

I hear Manny swallow. I hear that fucking wind, howling through the half-open eye of the doorway. But no growls, no unhuman sounds. Not the shrill scream that rended the morning darkness just a few hours ago.

I swallow, too. It’s either die here or die out there. They’ll find us eventually.

I grab the smoothest edge of door I can find and pull it with both hands. It scratches into the ground and cracks at the remaining hinges. Manny, of course, doesn’t help.

“You go first,” he says. Already planned on it.

I step inside the old laboratory. We’ve never been in here before. This part of the building was sectioned off years ago. Quarantined. They say the fungus invaded the lab, so they sealed it off. The fungus doesn’t affect humans who have compromised immune systems or whose bodies are otherwise marred by illness. That’s how we got the gig in the first place. The more scars the better. Conveniently broken. The fungi is particular, selective. It wants the perfect host – a pure victim.

We are none of those things.

Manny is behind me. I can practically feel his warm breath on the back of my neck. I pull the short-bladed knife from the sheath at my hip, the only weapon we’re allowed on site. Not that it’ll do any good.

The lab would be pristine if it weren’t for whoever – or whatever – raided it earlier. There is no dust, no debris except what’s been created from ravaged equipment and tools – broken beaker glass, metal implements bent at sharp angles. Pants should be our first priority, but we might find answers here.

Manny is right behind me now, glued to my shadow, like he has been since we were sick kids in the sick ward, bound for the kind of thankless, dangerous jobs the unmarred won’t take. But he’s weak, always has been. Easily fooled by empty promises. Waiting, like an idiot, for a cure to the incurable. It would be so much easier without him. This dead weight, this extra mouth to feed. This asshole who wouldn’t even offer me his sandals even though my feet are ten times worse than his. It would be easy to cover up – with the lab break-in, the shredded steel. Who would know, come Monday morning, if it were me or whatever creature slipped back through?

They wouldn’t know. They couldn’t.

Manny suddenly gasps – right in my fucking ear. I whirl around, blade in hand, expecting to find whatever infected creature breached the portal back to this godforsaken place. But it’s just Manny – eyes wide and popped, mouth open, his thin lips twitching. Fuck.

“No, no, no,” I say as I sheath my blade and step toward him. His whole weight collapses onto me. I pat his T-shirt for wet – for blood – for anything. There is no wound, but he’s not breathing. “C’mon, Manny! Come the fuck on!” My own voice is like a foreign object, distant but close.

Then I see it: two yellow eyes from the dark corner near the door. A crouched form. Fur. Claws. Mangled paws. A guttural animal sound. I wrap my arms around Manny and drag him deeper into the lab, stepping backwards over the shards slicing deeper into the raw skin on the soles of my feet. I palm my blade again and point it at the creature, Manny still draped over me like a human-sized bib. “Come the fuck on!” I shout at it. Take us both, for fuck’s sake.

But the creature doesn’t move. He waits. He watches. He nods.

Then he leaves. Through the doorway and out into the afternoon desert that looks make-believe from in here. His gait is sidelong, gimpy, his fur whipped with scar tissue.

Marred.

I lower Manny onto the floor, pushing away broken things and piles of substances I don’t recognize. I sit back on my knees, my shins pressing into the glass. I cradle Manny’s head in my lap. His eyes are cloudy now – the first sign of infection. But this doesn’t make sense. He’s like me – sick to begin with. Untouchable. Imperfect.

His pupils, thick behind the haze, suddenly latch onto me. He grabs my left wrist, his grip tight and rigid. The skin of his lips begins to crack and bleed. I can’t perform the surgery necessary to extract the infected tissue forming in his brain. No one can.

He will die. And there is nothing I can do about it.

A few breathy, rough sounds escape his mouth.

I lower my face to his. “What is it?” I ask, my voice a shadow of itself, my tears pouring onto his dying body. I lean closer. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. Just rest, my friend.” I barely see him through the salted mirage.

But he pulls me closer. “Close the portals,” he manages. A final breath pushes out with little effort.

Then: nothing. Limpness replaces movement. Manny’s eyes roll back, his head veering to the side in one last nod.

I shut my eyes hard and cry out – a feral cry that is everything I’ve never said to Manny and all the love and rage that would’ve killed him if the beast hadn’t beaten me to it.

Three hours later

I have pants on now. Manny is dead. Buried beneath a pile of rocks because the earth is still too frozen to shovel. I wear his sandals. I lean against the side of pod and look out at the desert.

One human, one coyote – or what used to be a coyote. Or what used to be a human, according to them.

To make good on Manny’s dying wish – closing the portal to the only place he longed to be – is suicide. But so is leaving them open. Clearly.

Once they are closed, there will be no more food deliveries. No more supplies to this fucking nightmare of an outpost.

I walk out into the belly of the desert, my left foot nearly dragging. The pain is immeasurable, but it’s just another limb at this point. Like the numbness, the tingling. The temperatures, at least, have risen. The sun perches high in a clear blue sky. I turn my face up to it and lay a gentle hand on my knife. I close my eyes against the warmth, my shadowed side cold and wanting.

Once I get to the first station, I find the pedestal in pieces. Someone – the beast I assume – has taken care of this entry point already. Fine.

I move on, limping to the next seven stations over an expanse the size of a mid-size city. Each one destroyed. Each promise no more.

By the time I get to the eighth, the sun is setting. The temperature drops far enough that I might die of exposure before I make it back to the pod.

This pedestal is, surprisingly, intact. “Thanks for leaving me one,” I say into the ether. To the creature. My sole breathing companion in this place. I flip open the pedestal lid to reveal the lever – all silver and glowing light. All science and impossibility. I rip my knife from its sheath and plunge the blade into the soft belly of its programming. The glowing light flashes, then flickers, then dies. I leave the blade.

I stumble toward the pod in the waning light. Toward, or maybe away, from my own death. Imminent. Right? But all I can think of is Manny lying to me all these years. He wasn’t sick enough to be out here. He could’ve been on the other side the whole time. That motherfucker.

I’m halfway back when a low growl stops me in my tracks.

I pause. I wait.

The creature is behind me – I can hear his ragged breathing. He’s adapted to the infection, otherwise he’d be just as dead as Manny.

Maybe they’re all dead on the other side. Maybe it’s just me and the beast, left to live out our lives in this marked place, in these marked bodies. Maybe, we will become friends. In the desert, alone but for the creature that hunts you, there is too much room for maybe. Like Manny’s stupid little hope.

I pull in a breath and it shakes its way out.

The beast nears, and I turn around.