Circuit Of Heaven (9 page)

Knowing they’d never die.

He went to the row of coffins, found his, and got in. More Bin nonsense. Place was meaningless in here, but the fiction of reality had to be scrupulously maintained. This is where he came in, so this is where he left, as if it were a doorway. He hit Download, and the lid closed. It took a few seconds to rotate to the horizontal position, and then there was the falling sensation, and he was back in his own body. He usually felt a sense of relief being back home in the real world. But not tonight.

THE
REAL
WORLD
WAS
DESERTED
. IT
WAS
RAINING
THERE
, too. He boarded an empty train, leaned against a pole and watched the buildings slide by in the darkness. No lights anywhere. No signs of life. He couldn’t believe he’d promised to go back into the Bin the next night. Then he thought about Justine, the look in her eyes, and he believed it.

The train passed through Quantico about thirty miles south of D.C., and he caught sight of the stacks from the crematorium glowing in the distance, the only light for miles, except the lightning. He thought about Jonathan and what he’d say if he knew he was falling for a Bin girl. Probably not much unless he asked him. That wasn’t Jonathan’s style. He witnessed, but he never preached. Knowing Jonathan, Nemo had come to appreciate the difference.

Nemo first met Jonathan when he ran away from school and came back to his parents’ house, or what was left of it. Most of the furniture was gone or busted up for kindling. The banister was gone, the interior door facings, the columns in the hall—most anything that would burn without bringing the house down. Somebody’d left a ratchewed sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, and a stack of books next to the fireplace for starting fires. On top was a Bible. The pages from Genesis to Judges were torn out.

What his parents had called the “breakfast nook” was ankle deep in shattered dishes, thrown against the wall that had been papered with a photomural of an idyllic mountain lake in springtime. All that was left of the mural was a smear of faded blue where a young couple sat blissfully in a canoe. A chef’s knife had been buried in the middle of it, a good two or three inches.

Lawrence and Nemo were hauling junk into the yard, making two piles—everything that’d burn and everything that wouldn’t. Jonathan came up and stood on what was left of the sidewalk, a hard place under the knee-high grass. He was about Nemo’s age, tall and thin with dark, thick hair cut like somebody’d put a bowl over his head. His eyes were large and dark with long black lashes like a girl’s. His face was pale and earnest, but not weak. He had the sort of calmness required to stroll into a lion’s den or chat with Pilate.

“Are you moving in?” Jonathan asked, polite and friendly in a world where caution was the accepted etiquette.

Nemo threw down what was left of one of the metal kitchen chairs, watched the seat and back slap together like closing a vinyl book. “This is my house,” he said. “I’m moving back in.”

Jonathan gave him no argument. “My name’s Jonathan,” he said. “We’ll be neighbors.” He pointed down the street. “We live in that big white house with the black shutters.” Nemo looked past an old pickup truck sitting in the middle of the road, stripped of its wheels and doors and windows, the hood open, the engine gone. All the houses looked pretty much like Nemo’s—weather-beaten, scarred, the porches choked with vines, shattered glass scattered around like confetti. One of them had a corner burned away.

Then there was Jonathan’s house, three houses down, on the other side of the street, the place where the Proxmires used to live. It had glass in all the windows. The paint gleamed. The grass was cut and edged, the hedges precisely trimmed. A blue flag with a white cross and red pentacostal flames waved gently from a flagpole mounted above the front steps.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Nemo asked.

“My mom and dad, my little brother, and me.” Jonathan shrugged. “We take in people sometimes. If you need a place to sleep until you get your house fixed up, you can stay with us.”

“No thanks,” Nemo said. “We’ll be okay.” Lawrence had come up behind Nemo, his shadow stretching across the road.

“Come on down if you change your mind. Dinner’s at sundown. We’ve got plenty.” Jonathan raised his eyes to Lawrence’s. “My name’s Jonathan.”

Nemo watched Lawrence’s shadow nod, heard his Texan voice rumble, “Lawrence. Pleased to meet you.”

They both watched Jonathan stroll down the middle of the road and into the big white house. “If we were you,” Lawrence said, holding up a battered can of creamed corn, “we wouldn’t turn down dinner. Unless you got a can opener on you. This here’s the only food we could find.”

They ended up spending a couple of weeks with Jonathan’s family. They fed them, gave them a place to sleep, even gave them paint and brushes and helped them paint, helped them dig a well, gave them rabbits to raise and seeds to plant. Even when their place was all fixed up, Nemo spent as much time at Jonathan’s house as he did his own.

Jonathan’s father, Harold, a stockier, muscular version of Jonathan, explained to Nemo one night at their kitchen table, his face lit by candlelight, just why he and his family didn’t go into the Bin. “The Lord will come for us one day,” he’d said as if he were talking about the sun coming up or the rain falling out of the sky. “And I want to be here when He does.” The whole family—Jonathan, his little brother Matthew, Constance, their mother—had nodded in agreement, and Nemo had wished that he’d grown up with them, had their faith. But he knew he didn’t, knew he never would. And then Rosalind came.

It was a few years later. He’d just turned eighteen. Rosalind and her father Peter, Harold’s little brother, came to live at Jonathan’s house because Rosalind’s mother, Peter’s wife of seventeen years, had gone into the Bin.

Rosalind didn’t say much of anything to anybody. Everyone thought she was broken-hearted and afraid, except Nemo. He watched her, and he could see it in her eyes, in the way she moved from room to room never staying put for too long, in the way she speared her food with her fork with a quick brutal movement, in the way she’d hacked off her dark hair in sharp angular lines with a razor. It wasn’t grief. It was anger. She was burning up with it.

But three weeks after she’d moved in, Jonathan and Nemo invited her to sing with them on Jonathan’s front porch, and to their surprise, she joined them. Jonathan played an old Gibson guitar with a crack in the front and strung with piano strings. Unlike a lot of fundies, he played something besides “Amazing Grace” and “Old Time Religion.” He liked the blues, and Rosalind had a strong, bluesy voice. She closed her eyes when she sang, pouring her rage into old songs about no-good men who’d done her wrong, even though she was only sixteen years old.

When they quit singing, she fixed Jonathan and Nemo in her harsh gaze and told them she was going to check out the main crematorium in Quantico. She didn’t believe all that crap about piles of bodies on a conveyor moving through fire in an endless stream. She was going to see for herself. And if Jonathan and Nemo had any guts, they’d go with her. Nemo could usually pass up a dare, but he couldn’t pass on this one. And once he’d agreed, Jonathan wouldn’t let him go alone. They sat on the porch and listened for an hour, as Rosalind, who hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words in the three weeks since her arrival, told them her plan.

THEY
RODE
OUT
AT
DAWN
ON
THE
TRAIN
TO D.C.
NEMO
was on the aisle on the left, Rosalind across the aisle from him, Jonathan in the seat behind her. Rosalind had a pair of wire cutters stuck in the back pocket of her jeans. Jonathan had a tiny pair of binoculars around his neck. Nemo kept his eyes on Rosalind. The sky behind her—gray clouds streaked with red and purple—might’ve been her anger. Her dark eyes were intent on the horizon, waiting to catch sight of the smoke stacks in the morning light. Nemo had no doubt people were being burned out here. He didn’t have to see the bodies. She was the reason he came. He had plenty of his own anger, but hers wasn’t deadening and pointless like his. Hers put her on this train at dawn, tracking it down, stalking it, ready to spit in its face. He wanted to be there when she caught up with it.

“Any time,” she said, and he followed her gaze and saw the stacks and the line of smoke stretching toward the sun. She reached up slowly and yanked the emergency cord, lurched to her feet and into the aisle as the train started braking, letting the momentum carry her to the door at the front of the car. Jonathan and Nemo fell against the seats in front of them and scurried after her when the train rocked back. She shoved open the doors with her shoulder and leapt into the air. Nemo jumped after her, hitting the ground hard, running into the high grass and dropping flat when Rosalind did, about twenty yards from the train.

Rosalind said she’d checked it out, yanked the emergency cords on four different trains, and every time the train would take exactly three minutes to run through its security program, and then it would take off. Nemo lay in the grass, the ground cold and muddy. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained in weeks, or this place would be a swamp. Rosalind was just ahead of him. The legs of her tight black jeans made a V in the grass. The soles of her hiking boots were an arm’s length away. He heard Jonathan shifting in the grass behind him and knew he’d jumped, too.

The train’s motors started their whine, and the train sped away, leaving them in silence. Nemo pulled out his contribution to the expedition, a periscope he’d made from a plastic pipe, a roll of duct tape, and a pair of hand mirrors. It took him a moment to get his bearings, and then he saw them on the horizon, the smoke stacks, directly in front of where they lay. Rosalind had timed it perfectly. All they had to do now was crawl on their bellies for a mile or so.

“They’re straight ahead,” Nemo said, and they all started crawling.

The night before, when he’d lain in bed thinking about what they were going to do, Nemo had imagined crawling endlessly through the mud, had prepared himself for an ordeal that would push him to the limits of his endurance. But as he moved through the mud like a snake, he didn’t tire. His blood was racing, and his senses were alive. He was surprised each time he stopped to check their position that the smokestacks were bigger, closer than he’d expected them to be. It seemed to him they’d been crawling maybe five minutes when he ran into Rosalind, stopped at the fence. And there, about a hundred yards away, was the crematorium.

She pointed wordlessly at a place a few yards off to their left where the land was eroded away from beneath the chain-link fence. They could crawl under it without even cutting it. Jonathan came up beside them and shook his head as Rosalind pointed toward the opening. “We should look first,” he whispered, holding up the binoculars.

They didn’t know what kind of security there was. Crawling through high grass to the perimeter was one thing, but between them and the low, featureless concrete building was nothing but packed dirt and gravel. If anyone was watching, they’d be seen. “It’ll be robots,” Rosalind had argued. “Who in the fuck’s going to work in there? Robots can’t kill people. Worst that can happen is we get tossed out.”

Jonathan studied the place with his binoculars. Nemo didn’t figure he could see much more than he could. It was a big concrete box that joined up with a round building at one end. From the air it would’ve looked like a big rectangle joined to a circle, like a keyhole. The smokestacks rose out of the round building. On the opposite end from the stacks, a pair of railroad tracks came out the end of the building and then through a wide gate in the fence, around the corner to their left. The tracks disappeared into the distance, headed for D.C. to the north.

All of a sudden the smokestacks roared and belched smoke hundreds of feet into the air, and the ground vibrated like a drumhead. When the sound stopped, it still seemed to hang in the air, changing everything—making the colors brighter, the edge of each blade of grass more precisely defined—as if the blast had compressed everything into a more substantial reality.

“What the hell was that?” Nemo said.

“Souls,” whispered Jonathan.

Rosalind turned on him with a sneer, but whatever she was going to say was forgotten when a train rolled out of the building and came to a stop at the fence. It looked like a Metro train, only it had no windows. It was three cars long, all flat black with a small silver pentagon on the side where the big M would’ve been on Metro cars. There was something that looked like an air conditioner perched on top of each car. The train was stopped only a moment when the gates slid to one side, and the train sped away, the gates closing behind it.

“I say we go in,” Rosalind said.

“There’s cameras covering the grounds,” Jonathan said. “But that’s about it. No people anywhere.”

And then they all heard it at the same time, jerking their heads around like startled deer: the sound of an approaching train. Rosalind didn’t hesitate. She broke into a crablike run toward the gates. Nemo knew immediately what she intended to do. He went running after her, not sure whether he was going to stop her or go with her. By the time he caught up with her, she’d already crawled up to the tracks and rolled into them, lying on her back between the rails, hoping to hitch a ride with the dead.

Nemo looked down the tracks. He couldn’t see the train yet, but he could feel it under his feet. He didn’t have time to crawl. He ran toward the tracks and dove between the rails, skidding on his belly through the ballast. He rolled over on his back and looked down the tracks in time to see Jonathan lie down between the rails a few yards away, just as the train came into view. Nemo snapped his head back, flattening himself into the ties. The brakes squealed, the sound ringing through the rails and inside his head as if he were inside a shrieking bell.

The sky disappeared and the train covered him. The undersides of the cars were braced with steel girders in an X pattern. He reached up and grabbed the top branches of the X above him, hooked one foot, and then the other, onto the bottom branches. Staring at the underside of the car, the same flat black as the top, he couldn’t see Rosalind or Jonathan, couldn’t hear them. The muscles in his arms were already aching, sweat burning his eyes. Then the train lurched into motion, and the ground sped by at his back. He tightened his grasp on the steel, now slippery with his sweat. Then the light suddenly dimmed, and everything smelled like wet concrete. The train stopped, and he half lowered himself to the concrete floor beneath him. It was bitterly cold, maybe ten degrees. His breath came out in clouds, and his nostrils felt brittle. He was glad he’d worn a heavy jacket. He stuck his periscope sideways from underneath the car and saw Rosalind crouched in the shadows, Jonathan beside her, beckoning to him, about ten yards away.