He lowered the corpse to the ground—at least the coyotes would get the benefit—and returned to the hut. He had to admit it: the place looked like a madman lived there. A little over two years since Lucius had first put pen to paper, and now the walls were covered with the fruits of his labor. He’d branched out from ink to charcoal, graphite pencil, even paint, which cost a bundle. Some were better than others—viewing them in chronological order, one could trace his slow, at times frustratingly inept self-education as an artist. But the best ones satisfyingly captured the image Lucius carted around in his head all day like the notes of a song he couldn’t shake except by singing.
Michael was the only person who’d seen the pictures. Lucius had kept his distance from everyone, but Michael had tracked him down through somebody on the trade, a friend of Lore’s. One evening over a year ago Lucius had returned from setting his traps to find an old pickup parked in his yard and Michael sitting on the open tailgate. Over the years Greer had known him, he had grown from a rather meek-looking boy to a well-made specimen of manhood in its prime: hard and sleek, with strong features and a certain severity around the eyes. The sort of companion you could count on in a bar fight that began with a punch to the nose and ending with running like hell.
“Holy damn, Greer,” he said, “you look like shit on a biscuit. What does a man have to do to get a little hospitality around this place?”
Lucius got the bottle. At first it wasn’t quite clear what Michael wanted. He seemed changed to Lucius, a little at loose ends, a bit sunk down into himself. One thing Michael had never been was quiet. Ideas and theories and various campaigns, however cockeyed and half-baked, shot from the man like bullets. The intensity was still there—you could practically warm your hands on the man’s skull—but it had a darker quality, the feel of something caged, as if Michael were chewing on something he didn’t have words for.
Lucius had heard that Michael had quit the refinery, split from Lore, built some kind of boat and spent most of his time on it, sailing out alone into the Gulf. What the man was looking for in all that empty ocean, he never got around to saying, and Lucius didn’t press; how would he have explained his own hermitic existence? But over the course of the evening they passed together, getting drunker and drunker on a bottle of Dunk’s Special Recipe No. 3—Lucius wasn’t much of a drinker these days, though the stuff came in handy as a solvent—he came to think that Michael didn’t really have a reason for appearing at his doorstep beyond the basic human urge to be around another person. Both of them were doing their time in the wilderness, after all, and maybe what Michael really wanted, when you boiled away the bullshit, was a few hours in the company of someone who understood what he was going through—this profound impulse to be alone just when all of them should have all been dancing for joy and having babies and generally celebrating a world where death didn’t reach down from the trees and snatch you just for the hell of it.
For a while they caught up on news of the others: Sara’s job at the hospital and her and Hollis’s long-awaited move out of the refugee camps into permanent housing; Lore’s promotion to crew chief at the refinery; Peter’s resignation from the Expeditionary to stay home with Caleb; Eustace’s decision, which surprised no one, to resign from the Expeditionary and return with Nina to Iowa. A tone of optimistic good cheer glazed the surface of the conversation, but it only went so deep, and Lucius wasn’t fooled; always lurking beneath the surface were the names they weren’t saying.
Lucius had told nobody about Amy—only he knew the truth. On the matter of Alicia’s fate, Lucius had nothing to offer. Nor, apparently, did anybody else; the woman had vanished into the great Iowa emptiness. At the time, Lucius had been unconcerned—Alicia was like a comet, given to long, unannounced absences and blazing, unanticipated returns—but as the days went by with no sign of her, Michael trapped in his bed with his casted leg in a sling, Lucius watched the fact of her disappearance burning in his friend’s eyes like a long fuse looking for a bomb. You don’t get it, he told Lucius, practically levitating off his bed with frustration. This isn’t like the other times. Lucius didn’t bother to contradict him—the woman needed absolutely nobody—nor did he try to stop Michael when, twelve hours after the cast came off, the man saddled up and rode into a snowstorm to look for her—a highly questionable move, considering how much time had passed, and the fact that the man could barely walk. But Michael was Michael: you didn’t tell the man no, and there was something oddly personal about the whole thing, as if Alicia’s leaving was a message just for him. He returned five days later, half-frozen, having run a one-hundred-mile perimeter, and said no more about it, not that day or all the days after; he’d never even said her name.
They had all loved her, but there existed a kind of person, Lucius knew, whose heart was unknowable, who was born to stand apart. Alicia had stepped into the ether, and with three years gone by, the question in Lucius’s mind wasn’t what had become of her but if she’d really been there in the first place.
It was well past midnight, after the last glasses had been poured and tossed back, when Michael finally raised the subject that, in hindsight, had been plaguing him all night.
“Do you really think they’re gone? The dracs, I mean.”