The Devil by Name

The Devil by Name

Naomi Laurent

Nevers, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, France

Denis knocks once and steps into her room.

Past her bed and to the window, where he thumbs aside the gauzy curtains. They’re on the fourth floor, next to the stairwell. Naomi rises, sits there numbly, sleep still crowding her. She’d been dreaming of her brother.

“Come,” Denis says, without turning from the window. “We have to go.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” he says curtly. A tall, wide-shouldered man wearing a black knit cap and a mishmash of scavenged tactical gear. A black hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. A week’s worth of beard. “Just get dressed.”

“Where’s Emilie?”

“Getting breakfast.” He steps away from the window.

Naomi rises out of bed, and when he sees she’s only in her T-shirt and panties, sees the blocky red glyph on her thigh, somewhere between a birthmark and a brand, he blushes and cuts his eyes away. He steps out of her room, staring at the floor. “Two minutes,” he says.

Naomi hunts for her clothes as the door shuts behind her. She’s seen Denis kill a trio of fevered from a quarter mile away, patiently ejecting the spent bullet casings from his rifle, the shots measured and even. She’s seen him once argue with a shopkeeper over a payment he’d tried to renege on, the two of them getting so heated that Denis had spat at his feet and then dug his knife into the shopkeeper’s guts, hoisting him off the floor, the man’s toes scrabbling for purchase while his wife had looked on screaming. That’s Denis and his broken, funhouse morality: He’ll kill a man for looking at him wrong, but Naomi in her underwear is something that will send him running from the room.

She gets dressed, gathers her pack, looks longingly for a moment at the bed, and then steps out into the hallway where she finds Denis and Emilie waiting for her. Denis spends a moment assessing her appearance, her readiness for travel, then hoists the rifle and his pack onto his shoulders. He carries almost all of their supplies. Emilie hands Naomi a muffin slathered in butter and a paper cup full of water.

“Thank you,” Naomi murmurs. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes: a small, quiet moment of grace between the two of them, a respite against Denis’s ceaseless intensities.

They are in the small town of Nevers after days of travel. Denis and Emilie do not know that this is her hometown. She has so few secrets left, but this is one of them. To be here is to hold fiercely to her mother and father once more, to hold tight to little Hugo. She remembers this hotel as a child, its trio of spires on the roof, its arched windows. Her family hadn’t been poor, but even if there had ever been a need or opportunity to stay at a hotel in their own town, they couldn’t have afforded this one. Now, five years after the Message, everything is different. Much of Nevers remains in ruins, with straggling bands of fevered still roaming its alleyways, trapped in its cellars, thumbs of smoke still occasionally coloring the sky. There are armed guards at the entrances of the hotel, men who had given Denis a hard time about his guns until he’d paid them, his face drawn tight with resentment.

Now he pushes open the door to the stairwell. Besides the rifle, he carries a pistol on his hip. He doesn’t let Emilie have a gun, and would never—never ever—let Naomi have one. He thumbs off the pistol’s safety, keeps it pointed down.

They don’t like stairwells, any of them. It’s too easy for bad things to happen, and then you’re trapped. Bullets in stairwells, Denis has told her, act sneaky, ricochet in impossible ways. Emilie is the most afraid, and as they begin their journey toward the ground floor, Naomi can hear the woman’s breathing become pinched behind her. She wonders what it was that made Emilie afraid like that. Naomi, the cargo, walks in the middle, as always. She takes a bite of her muffin and feels a savage twist of cruelty toward the woman behind her. You’re afraid? she thinks. Good. I hope you slip. Crack your skull open.

At the ground floor, Denis pushes open the door and they step out into the parking lot. Only a few vehicles back here, rust-lashed and likely in the barest working order. Occasionally, if the weather is particularly bad, they’ll hitchhike, but Denis insists that relying on a car is too dangerous. There was a stretch where they had tried motorcycles, but the bikes had been loud, had brought the fevered out from the tree lines and the insides of buildings. Now they either ride bicycles or walk. They walk for miles most days. Naomi sometimes wonders how much of the country she’s traveled since meeting Denis and can’t fathom it. A guard is leaning against the wall, a shotgun on a sling across his chest. He nods as they make their way across the parking lot, let themselves out of the gate.

Denis walks with his pistol still at his side. Something is bothering him. Naomi finishes the last of her muffin and downs the water in her cup in one go. She walks over and sets the empty cup on the windowsill of a building, the window glass broken out. It is the type of thing Denis would normally chastise her for—he pictures a fevered lurching from the darkness of the window, latching onto her arm. A harrier sticking a gun in her face. But he’s too distracted this morning, head roving left and right as they walk. Emilie makes a tsk of disappointment and that’s all.

He’s in his mid-forties, she thinks, and beyond his obvious lethality—he is military through and through—Denis is fastidious, punctual, organized. He’s managed to keep himself and the two people in his charge alive for this long across the broken wasteland that is France. No easy feat, especially considering what they do to survive.

“Something’s wrong with you,” Naomi says to his back. She doesn’t want it to sound like an accusation, and thankfully, Denis doesn’t take it as such.

“It’s just a feeling I have,” he says.

“What do you want to do?” Emilie asks from behind her. They keep walking, the street wide and quiet.

“Keep moving,” he says. “We have an appointment.” He looks at his watch. “In two hours. We have a ways to go.”

“Is it in town?” Naomi asks.

Denis nods, adjusts his pack on his shoulders. “On the edge of it. A farm.”

Naomi secretly thrills at this, even as it cleaves her heart. Walking through her hometown, wondering if there might be a way to lead them past her house. The faint glimmer of an idea moves through her: that her father might have survived all these years, might still be at home somehow. She imagines a light shining in a darkened window of her house, like nothing had ever changed. She knows it’s foolish and wishes for it anyway.

Denis holsters his pistol and unslings his rifle, and Naomi’s unease kicks up a notch. There is the sense that people are here with them, tucked in the corners of things and watching silently, but it’s something only felt, spied barely in her periphery. A flutter of curtain here, a door slowly edging closed. They pass landmarks, so insignificant in her childhood, but charged with loss now, each one like a strike to the chest. Here was where her parents would take her and Hugo to buy school shoes. Here was where her father had sometimes gotten them Thai food on his way home from work. There was the Loire River and the red-tiled roofs of houses, the wide, patchwork quality of the streets. Shrubs once trimmed to offer privacy to people’s homes have grown wild and unkempt. Ivy covers some buildings entirely now. They pass a pair of cars in the roadway, fenders bent and crumpled together, the windshield of one starred in a constellation of bullet holes. Impossible to tell if the conflict was recent or not.

Naomi walks, thinks, pines—even after all this time—for the way things used to be.

They walk down the narrow rue de Lauzon, little more than an alleyway, the pavement so broken from weather and age that it seems specifically designed to twist an ankle. The shrubbery’s grown high enough on each side that it nearly forms a canopy over their heads, save for a small break in the shrubs to her left, where a wrought iron gate has permanently rusted open.

Denis has just passed the open gate when a fevered staggers from it.

A woman. Her hair had once been blond but is now the tint of gunmetal, colored by countless days amid the world’s filth. Her hand brushes against Naomi’s coat before Denis turns and pops her in the forehead with the stock of his rifle. There is an eye-watering whiff of shit and decay—impossible to tell when she’d been turned, how many years or months back, but she is clearly dead. The woman falls on her ass, jaw snapping shut. “Keep walking,” Denis says to Emilie, his voice tight. He is angry that he missed her coming out of the gate. Emilie pushes Naomi onward. She looks back to see Denis slinging his rifle over his shoulder and unsheathing the dark blade of his hunting knife from its scabbard at his thigh, and then she’s walking again.

Later, when Denis catches up to them, Naomi says, “I could have done it.”