Reapers Are the Angels (10 page)

O
VER THE
next rise, there’s a convenience store and a gas station. The pumps are still working, and she fills her tank and then gets some food. She finds some cheese crackers and takes them outside and sits on the curb to eat them while in the distance some slugs wander to and fro oblivious of her.

She remembers Uncle Jackson, when he first found her and the boy Malcolm holed up in a storm drain, living off squirrels and berries.

Where’d you come from, little bit? he said.

There she was, not yet ten years old probably, snarling at him, baring her teeth like a beast of the earth.

Feral, huh? he said. I’m not convinced. I see the glimmer, girl. You’ve got smarts whether you like it or not. My cabin’s that way, about a half a mile. Come by when you’re tired of the drainpipe.

He showed her how to shoot, how to hold your breath when you are aiming at a distance—and he showed her how to drive a car and how to start one without a key. He fed her and Malcolm oatmeal in ceramic bowls.

He said, How long have you been taking care of that boy?

Awhile.

Are you his sister?

She shrugged.

We was raised in the same place, she said. Everything got mixed up. Nobody was sure.

He nodded.

Come here, he said. I have something for you. It’s a khukuri.

What’s that?

He shuffled around in a chest in the corner of the room and brought out something wrapped in a blanket. It was a blade that bent inward and shone red in the firelight. It was beautiful, and she wanted to touch it. She thought it would feel cold, that it would make her fingers feel vibrant.

It’s Nepalese, he said. There were warriors in Nepal called gurkhas. Very strong, very fierce. Resilient and self-sufficient. Like you. They carried blades like this.

What you call it? Cuckoo?

Khukuri. But if you can’t remember that, you can just call it a gurkha knife.

She remembers, later, Malcolm, just a couple years younger than she, asleep on a mound of blankets in the corner, Uncle Jackson’s snoring from the other side of the room, the light from the remaining embers of the fire casting a pale glow through the cabin—and her turning the blade over and over in her hands, her eyes closed, feeling the weight of it and the balance, getting to know it, putting it against the skin of her face and her lips.

It was a gift. It was the first gift anybody had given her since she could remember.

In the parking lot of the convenience store, she gets to her feet and returns to the car and sits in the driver’s seat for a while, thinking about a lot of gone things.

Finally she starts the car and swings the wheel around and drives back to the subdivision.

He’s still standing where she told him to stay, pulling on the ends of his greasy hair and squinting in the sun.

She pulls up next to him and rolls down the window.

How long were you gonna stay there, dummy? she asked. What was your plan exactly, just wait until the slugs gave you a reason to move? I never seen such a fool as you—and I seen some foolishness without compare in my life.

His sad thick eyes look into the car. She tries to follow the gaze, but what he’s really looking at is inside his own head. He has a skillet face and a frame like vegetal growth and sluggish eyes and a mind with no doors or windows.

She reaches over and opens the passenger door and then tosses the duffel bag into the backseat.

Well come on if you’re comin, she says. But I ain’t promising you’re gonna live.

H
E KEEPS
tugging at his hair and scratching, and pretty soon she figures it out.

You got head critters, dummy.

In the next town, where the water lines are still pumping, she finds a house with a spigot in the side yard and a hose attached.

Bare yourself, dummy, she says. He doesn’t understand, so she has to show him by unbuttoning two of his shirt buttons. His eyes watch her fingers intently. Go on, she says, don’t be shy. You got no luggage I ain’t seen before.

He strips himself down and stands in the middle of the overgrown yard and shuts his eyes tight and holds on to the rag she gives him while she sprays him front and back with the hose.

Now wash, she says, miming the action for him. He moves the rag around on his body, trying to mirror the gestures she makes. Harder, she says. That soot ain’t just gonna brush off.

Finally she gets impatient and takes the rag from him and scrubs his back and his front above the waist and his arms.

Now you gotta take care of yourself down there, she says, pointing to his crotch. This girl ain’t full service.

He circles the rag lightly over his genitals a few times.

Close enough, she says. We find a place to stow you, and someone else can teach you about personal hygienics.

A few blocks away, in a commercial strip, she finds a hair salon and bashes in the window and takes him in the back where the sink is and shows him how to wash his hair. For a
long time he just sits in the chair with his neck leaning on a sink with a semicircular cutout, letting the water wash over his scalp.

It can’t hurt him to have a good long soak, so she spends the time washing her own hair and combing it out and using the scissors to trim off the ragged ends.

When he’s done in the sink, she puts him in one of the swirling chairs before a mirror and takes the electric clippers and cuts his hair down to the scalp. Then she shaves his face and finds some good-smelling cream to slather all over.

Look at you now, Dapper Dan. Now you won’t befoul our ride.

Across the street she spies a tall office building, higher than anything else in the area. They cross and find a way in and take the elevator as high as it will go. Then they walk through the empty corridors until she finds what she’s looking for: fire stairs leading to the roof.

She climbs atop a large metal air-conditioning unit, and he sits next to her. Then she takes out her small spyglass and scans the horizon all around. The sun is low in the sky and the clouds are deep orange and look burnt at the edges.

Let’s take in the view for a little bit. What do you say, dummy?

She looks at him, a big man with a physical density to him, a thickness of body and shape. His eyes look like they are peering out of deep wells in the earth. The skin of his face is worn and leathery.

How old are you anyway, dummy?

He looks out at the sun descending behind the clouds.

I’m guessin you’re a solid thirty-five. That means you were around before all this slug mess started happening.

He puts his hand to his newly shaven face.

I wonder if you remember it. Does that gone past still haunt up your dummy skull? Do you remember the first time you saw a meatskin? Did you recognize it as somethin different, or does everything walkin on two feet look the same to you?

She looks at his eyes, and they seem to be staring at nothing.

You know something? I knew another dummy once before. It was in the orphanage home where I grew up. He was my age, though, and he wasn’t a nonspeaking dummy like you. He could talk, but not very good. And he was runty—born to be slug food, if you ask me. Not like you, you’re like a bear or somethin. Downright fortitudinous is what you are. Anyway, Malcolm and I, we liked to take him around with us. Malcolm especially—he was always trying to teach him things, like how to blow bubbles in his soda with a straw.

She looks down at her hands, the pink polish on the nails, the stump of her left pinky finger wrapped up in gauze. It aches, and the aching seems like a symbol of something.

Anyway, she says, I don’t wanna be talkin to you about Malcolm. Forget I mentioned it in the first place. What we gotta do, we gotta find a safe place to unload you. Cause followin me around everywhere is a sure way to get yourself eat up. That’s our mission, dummy, to find you a new home.

She looks through the telescope onto the horizon. In the distance she can see a black car approaching on the same road she came into town on herself.

See now, she says, I knew I was feelin something not right. You gotta trust your gut to guide you true, that’s lesson number one.

She looks through the telescope again and the car dips behind a foothill.

See, it’s possible that that’s just anyone—but you know what my gut tells me? My gut tells me that’s my old friend Moses Todd who’s got some business he’s gonna want to finish up with me. It’s a wonder how he’s trackin me, but you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.

She collapses the miniature telescope and puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold.

S
HE TAKES
the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in the middle of the road. She hums tunes, and the big man hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it. He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep.

The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbecue shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages. In the middle of town is a square that must have been the site of some final showdown. There’s a huge marble fountain, long dry, filled with eviscerated corpses gone to bone and black. In the middle of the fountain is a marble statue of an angel, her wingtips pointing still unbroken toward the sky, and a dead man hangs slung around her neck as though he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over something holy.

The slug population is dense. Temple has to slow down to avoid hitting them, and she has to keep moving to keep them from congregating.

Downtown the city is overrun, a grotesque panorama. They walk, some of them, in twos and threes, sometimes even hand in hand like lovers, lumbering along, slow and thick, blood crusted down their fronts, stumbling over the bony remains of consumed corpses. Their gestures are meaningless, but they
hearken back with primitive instinct to life before. A slug dressed in black with a white preacher’s collar lifts his hands toward the sky as if calling upon the god of dead things, while a rotting woman in a wedding dress sits open-legged against a wall, rubbing the lace hem against her cheek. Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Temple has never seen before. A slug with no arms nestled up against the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its mother. These, the desperate and the plagued, driven to consume beyond their usual ken—a swarm of them pulling apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal from the backside of the bristly skin. Some even so bubbling with abomination that they turn on one another, by instinct preying on the weak, pulling them down, the children and the old ones, digging their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers some purchase, a mob of them backing a pale-faced girl against the concrete base of a building. She opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the arm of one of her attackers, but there are more, a groaning, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain. And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and
rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic.