“Are you a man?” she asked me, whilst Anthea was elsewhere.
“I am now,” I said.
“You were a girl, though. Like me.”
I paused, thought hard about it for a moment. Then allowed: “They did call me so at home, for all I don’t think they treated me much different than they would’ve a boy, so long as he wasn’t their favourite. But I never really thought about it, one way or t’other—not ‘til I needed folks to assume I was somebody your mother could love, and feel comfortable doing it. Which would you prefer I be, honey?”
“Well, I already have a mama.”
“You could call me Papa, then. If it suits you.”
And I guess it did, because she did, from then on. Right up until the day she died.
That night, I looked in on Anthea watching Meem sleep, and thought: I want to stay here, to do what I can to keep you both safe. I want to be the man you think I am. Want to kill anything that threatens us, same as I’d kill anyone who’d even try to prevent me from doing so.
And—I will. Oh yes.
You best be very damn sure, I will.
***
By that winter, I’d been less elected mayor than acclaimed so, for the dead things kept on coming, and I was the best they had at knowing how to protect ourselves. Wouldn’t’ve thought the earth held so many, but that it always seems to be the most unwelcome creatures which seem limitless—they flocked in from miles around, when they weren’t propagating by the usual methods. As each day was increasingly given over to clean-up and every evening to funeral pyres, we were also struck with corpse-fever, which thinned our numbers somewhat, while consolidating my own base of power—for it was the nay-sayers who tended to drop hardest, and those who acknowledged me as best choice for role of war-time leader to recover.
But in and between these misfortunes, we did see the first instances of something no one else had, thus far: an apparent cure for infection, as mysterious as it soon proved (thankfully) complete. There were those who lived, for once, after having been caught in the dead’s jaws—fell silent a few hours, suffering bad, yet got back up the very next morning, apparently unscathed. And amongst these was Anthea, who’d already put two bullets from her little gambler’s derringer through the thing that had hold of her before I could rush over and shear its head off, even though it’d already buried its teeth so far in her shoulder that they stayed there, lodged fast, when I finally pulled it off.
I spent the whole night crying over her, with Meem’s solemn little hand on my bent head, stroking away at my shorn hair. At last, worn out, I fell asleep beside the bed—then woke to find her down in the kitchen, making flapjacks.
Beautiful Anthea, her long curls gold in the morning sun. Smiling. Talking. Better.
“You all right?” I asked her, to which she answered, brightly: “Oh, ‘course. Shouldn’t I be? Did something happen?”
I studied her a moment, unsure what-all to say, given her wrap had just slipped far enough to let me see how those two raw holes in her flesh were still visible—not bleeding, not anymore, but not exactly healing, either. Much like that wound at my throat.
S
he noticed, started a bit, and covered them up again. Gave me the same smile I’d sold my soul for, sweet enough to stop my breath.
And: “No,” I said, “nothing like that, darlin.’ Just had a bad dream, is all.”
“Oh? Well, you’re awake now—so sit down and eat these, Mister Mayor, ‘fore they get cold. Given they sell my cooking ‘cross the street, it’s not everybody gets their own private sample.”
“But Papa,” Meem said, once Anthea’d gone back upstairs to freshen herself, in anticipation of opening up the saloon. “She isn’t really better, not at all. She just isn’t done, yet.”
I swallowed. “What do you mean, honey?”
“That she’s still here,” she told me, sadly, “though she shouldn’t be. ‘Cause you love her so much, you just won’t let her go.”
And did I notice, looking back, how all those who survived their brushes with the dead were people I had use for, while those I disliked failed outright and rose back up, necessitating a second destruction? No more than I ever traced the seemingly endless wave of plague-bearing, Weedless dead we now fought back almost daily not to the Hex War at all, but to one very particular instance of the chaos following in its wake.
My neck remained tetchy, never entirely sealed over. Sometimes it wept blood. Anthea would soothe it with compresses, brew me sweet tea, then bandage it anew. I used whiskey to treat it too, increasingly—medicated myself from the inside, so to speak. No one thought any ill of me for that, since I ran myself so ragged in service of this town, and its folks.
My town, now. My folks.
“Papa,” Meem said, a little further on that winter, “you really should let Mister Corcoran move on, at least.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t do without old Corcoran, honey. He’s my right hand.”
“Well, then Missus Yee—let her leave, while you still can. Her girls, too.”