Reapers Are the Angels (31 page)

His jaw moves in small slow circles like the jaw of a cow.

Anyway, she says, turning her attention to the flooded road ahead. Maybe I’ll stop here on the way back—put on my explorer’s hat once I unburden myself of you.

She comes to a big building like an opera house or something, and the streets become a confusing tangle in the deepest part of the downtown area. She turns this way and that with no time to stop and think. She has to keep the car moving so the slugs don’t have a chance to collect in one place.

The rain comes down hard and there is no sun by which to navigate, and she passes some buildings twice and even three times, and she looks for signs with the number 59 on them. Once she arrives at a large intersection and cannot decide which way to go. On the side of one of the buildings, she finds a fellow traveler’s message hand-painted in dull red. There’s an arrow pointing down one of the roads, along with letters scrawled as tall as a person:

S
AFE
R
OAD

What do you reckon that says, Maury? she asks. I wish sometimes people would write in pictures. A skull or a happy face or somethin. That alphabet, it just ain’t friendly to my cause.

Warning or invitation, she doesn’t like the looks of that sign, so she chooses one of the other roads and follows it straight down the rain-soaked avenues, and the desolate city towers over her
and tolerates her creeping through it like an ant. Eventually, she begins to spot signs that say 59, and she follows them and finds the freeway that continues to take her south.

The city has seen other lost travelers like her, seeking safe passage from one end of its labyrinth to the other. Too far south, its population could not hold against the plague of the dead—and its inhabitants fled to other cities leaving this one a forgotten husk of a place. Some groups have tried to establish a foothold here and been overrun. Once, even, a band of twenty raiders made their home in a gutted movie theater in the heart of the city. They set traps for other travelers, painting signs on the sides of buildings to lead them toward dead ends where the raiders would attack and plunder their supplies and leave them to the neutral army of slugs swarming the streets.

If one were to follow these signs, one would come upon cul-de-sac graveyards, aged skeletons, whole or in pieces, hanging out the windows of automobiles, jammed partway into the gutters so that the rainwater has no place to drain, some even arrested in pathetic gestures of escape, clawing with wasted fingerbones at the barred doors of empty shops where their lower halves had been consumed while their hands had locked in moribund spasm around the door handles.

But now, in following the signs, one need not fear the hostilities of the raiders, for they too were overrun, years before, in the theater they had been using as their home, where they had learned how to run the projector, and where they had all watched the ancient reels of
Gone With the Wind
over and over until they knew the lines by heart and wondered, each individually, if it weren’t possible for such an era to come again on this earth.

T
HE RAIN
comes down like something incontestable. It rains as though it were going to be the last rain ever—Noah’s flood, a rain of oceans, like the seas have been picked up into the clouds and dumped on all the land. It rains through the night, sometimes so
hard that she has to bring the car to a halt because she can no longer see the road.

She shuts off the engine and makes sure the doors are locked and sleeps until she is woken by the crackling explosions of thunder that leave the air smelling of mineral and burn. In the lightning flash, she can see the line of the horizon, impossibly long, impossibly distant, but clear and distinct like the edge of a stage she might stumble off if she isn’t careful.

She rubs her eyes and drives on.

Every so often, she looks in the rearview mirror thinking to find Moses Todd there, his headlights, pursuing her still. Truth be told she doesn’t know whether she fears it or desires it. But she knows it’s impossible. Even if he had survived, she has left behind the car with the tracker. There is no way for him to follow her—no way for him to imagine that she would come down here into a blasted wilderness long ago given up by civilization.

And the rearview mirror remains empty.

Because the rain has slowed her down, it is morning by the time she reaches Point Comfort, the weak light of day filtering cold and cadaverous through the rain clouds that are still spitting drizzles of water down from the sky.

It’s a small community on the edge of a lake, block after block of square two-story houses with patches of lawn in front that have long since turned to weed. Other than the restoration of nature to its more primitive form, the area is untouched by devastation. It’s one of those places that must have been evacuated early on—emptied out so that the slugs had no reason to come there—and so far removed from safe society that it remained undiscovered by looters and raiders.

Ghost town.

Looking down the residential streets, she sees that the mailboxes are intact and form a pretty little line like tin soldiers—some of them even with their flags raised. The streetlights, too, are still lit from the night before, which means that the town must be contained on the periphery of a power grid that’s still operational.

There are cars still parked in the driveways, bicycles still overturned on the sidewalks. One of the houses must have been undergoing renovation at the time, because its back half is covered in plastic sheets that funnel the rain down into puddles in the bare mud of the backyard. Some of the garage doors stand open, and she can see the appurtenances of suburban life lined up along the inside walls: the mowers and lawn chairs and kayaks, gardening implements whose functions she cannot interpret, hammers and saws and drills hanging from hooks on large holed boards suspended over workbenches.

The white doors are wide and welcoming, though the shrubbery has grown tall and blocks out many of the first-floor windows.

She looks at the man in the passenger seat beside her.

This is one lonesome place, Maury, she says.

He stares ahead and seems agitated, a tiny whine building in his throat.

You recognize any of this?

The quiet whine continues—song or lament, it is impossible to tell. His eyes are blank and untelling.

I’ll tell you one thing, Maury. It ain’t lookin so good for the Duchamps. Looks like your relations got out of here right quick when the first alarm bells rang. Smart, I guess. But that means they could be anywhere in the country now. If they’re still alive at all.

The whine becomes louder.

Somethin’s eating you all right. You recognizing this place? Or you just wailin at that old gray sky? Sometimes I wish you could talk, you big dummy. It sure would be easier on the both of us.

She looks around. The rain has tapered off, but the windshield wipers still clear away a thick muzzy moisture like dew that blurs her view.

Well, she says, I guess we could at least find the house while we’re down here. It’s good to make a hundred percent certain in these cases.

So she drives around until she matches the name from the green street sign with the name written on the fragment of paper from Maury’s pocket. Then she continues down the street until she finds the number of the right house, 442, and pulls to the curb before it.

That’s when she notices, distinct as anything, and unlike any of the other houses in the area, a strange flickering glow coming from the front windows.

Y
OU READY
for a miracle, Maury? she says. Cause it looks like we got the makings of one right here.

But it feels, if she lets herself admit it, not quite like a miracle. They sit in the car and she watches the house for twenty minutes straight—that strange flickering glow that looks like firelight. She waits to see if it will spread, to see if the house is on fire, maybe struck by lightning in the last storm. But the light remains steady. She starts the car and drives around the block, and then she drives around the other block, circling the house from behind. Then she pulls up to the curb again and sits for ten minutes longer watching the glow. There are no figures in the streets, dead or living, no other houses that have any signs of life, and nothing else about this particular house that seems out of the ordinary.

Come on, Maury, she says finally. Let’s go take a look and see if the Duchamps are home. You stay behind me—I ain’t exactly sure about this.

She unsheathes her gurkha knife and moves slowly up the walkway. Rather than going straight to the front door, she crosses the lawn and peers tentatively into the front window. The source of the glow is indeed a fire, burning steadily in the living room fireplace. Otherwise there are no signs of life.

Not knowing what else to do, she knocks on the front door and stands rigid, the gurkha behind her back, held in a quivering grip, poised to strike.

She waits and knocks again, louder this time.

They ain’t answering, she says to Maury, her voice barely more than a whisper.

She tries the door. It’s unlocked, and it swings inward with a noisy echoing creak. In the still of the neighborhood, as the rain lifts and leaves behind a pillowy silence, she feels like the sound of the door opening can be heard all the way up and down the street.

This ain’t no guerrilla mission, that’s for sure.

She steps into the foyer and tries to look everywhere at once. Nothing moves. The fire crackles and pops.

The only other sound is Maury’s quiet moan, which comes from behind her and moves suddenly to her left as he steps past her into the house, disappearing quickly around the corner into another room.

Wait, Maury, wait—

She follows him into the dining room and finds him opening the doors of a china cabinet and removing something the size of a baseball, but clear. Then he takes the object and goes to the corner of the room and sits down on the floor with his knees drawn up, running his hands over the thing.

What’d you find, Maury?

She stands over him and reaches out her hand.

He looks up at her as if deciding whether or not he can trust her, then he takes the object and puts it in her hand.

It’s a paperweight. A glass sphere with a flat spot so you can put it down and it won’t roll away. Inside the sphere is something that looks like a flower, ribbons of inky color twisted and turned into a radial pattern. She hands it back to him.

You knew right where that was, she says to him. You been here before. You remember it, don’t you? How long ago? You must of been just a kid.

He holds the thing as a child would hold it, coveting the feel of it, keeping it protected until he is safely alone so that he can then gaze into it and take the full measure of its beauty.

She feels something large inside her, something expanding, like a balloon blowing up in her chest.

I’m glad you found it, Maury. I’m real glad of that.

The dining room looks like it has been untouched for years—as though the tenants of the place had evaporated just prior to the dinner hour. Four places are set around the table, plates, forks, spoons, knives, napkins, all of it coated over with a torpid layer of dust. She draws her fingertip across one of the plates and a shiny strip of white appears.

Stay here, she says to Maury. I’m gonna look around.