S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (52 page)

 
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Epilogue 

‡ ‡ ‡

 

Our reaction to death progresses through five stages.

So, too, our response to the Apocalypse.

Folks, we are in the denial stage.

—
WDQR shock jock Jeremy “Jay Bird” Burt

Six-year-old Cassie Stemple stared fixedly at the mangled fur and splintered bones laying in a brittle heap in the gutter. She was certain she was going to puke. If it had just been the dead animal, maybe she'd be okay. But hovering over the pile was the statue with the white face and the dark eyes, and it terrified her. She could feel it staring, beckoning her to look at it. She didn't want to — she really didn't — but she couldn't help herself. So she did.

It was dancing.

She flicked her eyes back to the dusty carcass and instead forced herself to think about what kind of animal it had once been. She knew about road kill. She was aware of how it came to be, how car tires flattened it out into hard pancakes in the baking sun. How the heat bleached and shriveled the flesh until it became like plastic. She knew about death.

Like the time she was with her mama when they ran over that possum. It was on the way to her parents' work, and she'd felt the body thumping beneath her bottom underneath the car. Only after her mother had screeched to a stop in the middle of the lane and Cassie had turned around to look did she realize what it was.

They'd been lucky to be on a lonely stretch of road. There weren't many other cars, and none coming right then. Not like the busy streets near where her father had gotten his apartment. If it had happened there, they definitely would have been hit by someone else following too closely behind.

“What was that, Mama?”

“Shit. I think I hit something.”

Cassie remembered how the mewling, bloodied creature had tried to rise up onto its shattered legs, its body almost vibrating in its dying throes, as if all the electricity in its tiny crushed frame was leaking out into the air.

She remembered her mother stepping out of the car, remembered seeing her shaking just as much as the poor animal was. Visibly shaking, unsteady on her feet. Cassie watched from the back seat with horrified fascination, hands pressed against the hot glass, so warm that the ghosts of her breath faded before they were fully formed. Watched as her mother had dragged it off the road by its hairless tail.

Her movements had been stiff and awkward. There was a hole in her belly. The hole where they had taken her little brother out weeks before.

Her mama had stood there on the side of the road, frozen with indecision while the car idled and the possum cried and somewhere off in the distance thunder rumbled.

“Mama?” Cassie had wanted her to just get it over with, the finishing part. Even at her age, she knew there was no way to save the animal. The poor thing was too broken to be fixed. Cassie knew about things like that. “What's the matter, Mama? Why aren't you moving?”

Her mother had waved her hands feebly about. “Poor thing needs to be put out of its misery. I know, I know.” She seemed to be arguing with herself. “But how?”

Tears streamed down her cheeks and dropped onto the hot road, drying quickly, leaving no mark. But then tears began to fall from the sky, too. They hit the windshield and the back window. Cassie hated seeing her mother crying like this. It always made her cry too, when she did.

Her mama had been doing an awful lot of crying lately, as if the sewn-up hole in her belly still hurt her the way Cassie's belly hurt now watching the dancing statue.

“Its neck,” she'd said that day a couple weeks before. “Have to snap it.” She kept muttering to herself, looking up at Cassie, then back down at the dying creature. “Stay in the car, Cass. Don't come out here. Yes, the neck. That's the only way. Quick and merciful.” She was panting heavily by then. “I have to break it. Put it out of its misery. Don't look, Cass, honey.”

And Cassie had wanted badly not to look, but when it came time to turn away, she couldn't. Just like now.

Neither of them had spoken another word after that, not until they'd gotten to her mama's work. The only voice in the car was the crazy man on the radio speaking his crazy words, the one her mama liked listening to but didn't let Cassie. The dead animal had made her forget he was on.

Later that night, when Cassie was going to bed, her mother had come into her room and explained about death, about how it sometimes happens for no reason— “Like the possums today.” Then, as if she'd expected Cassie to make some connection between that and her little brother, she'd added: “And Remy.” She sighed. Then, as if responding to yet another unasked question, said, “As long as you love someone in your heart and keep them close, they will never truly die. They will always be real to you.”

Cassie knew what her mama was saying. She wanted Cassie to always keep Remy close, because that would keep him real. And as long as he was real, he would never truly be dead.

Cassie shivered at the recollection, now a few weeks old, but she kept her eyes fixed on the barely recognizable thing against the curb. It was better to look at it than the dancing statue.

It looks like a ratty wig
, she thought.
Or a hat
. Like one of those flat coonskin caps she'd once seen in a museum.

Mixed in with leaf litter and plastic candy wrappers and soda cups. What had it been when it was alive? A cat, maybe. Or a dog. Although a raccoon seemed more likely. There had been a lot of them around the house lately, raccoons, scavenging through the trash, making trouble.

Bearing diseases.

That's what their neighbor, Mister Sam, had told her. Cassie's window overlooked his house. “Hen killers,” he'd said, his voice getting tight, as if the very idea of a diseased animal frightened him so. He was a strange man, Mister Locke. Tall and skinny with a long, funny-looking face, all rough and splintery with whiskers, like he had been carved out of old, dried wood with a dull knife. “Nasty vermin. Dirty, rabies-carrying vermin.”

But Cassie thought they were cute, even the mean ones. She'd seen them on the street in front of the house, beneath the streetlamps at night. Bunches of them with their funny masks, looking so businesslike. Sometimes two or three families of them toddling about. She bet they had soft fur. She wanted to touch them.

There had been rats too, come to think of it. Not as many, but she'd seen them as well. If anything deserved to be called nasty vermin, it was them. They were the ones carrying the diseases, the plague.

Her mother had made such a mess of the possum. She'd tried but couldn't wrap her too-large hands around its too-small neck. Couldn't crush the delicate little bones. The animal, even in its dying moments, kept snapping its jaws at her. The razor-sharp teeth coming ever-so-close to her mother's skin. The blood bubbling through its teeth and out of its nose.

She ended up smashing its skull with a stone. The blood spatter made tiny patterns on her pink shirt and on her pale cheeks. Blood which she wiped away on a sleeve after each hit, never giving it a second thought.

Nasty, diseased vermin.

But finally it was done. Six blows, each one punctuated by a high cry from the tiny animal's throat. Each one like an electric jolt to Cassie's own body, causing her to flinch and hitch her breath. Six strikes. That's how many it took to do the job, to strip away what little remained of the animal's life.

Cassie hadn't remembered getting out of the car and going over to her mother. She didn't remember how many minutes passed as they clutched at each other crying. It had to have been many, because by the time they finally got up off the hard ground it had started to rain and they were both drenched and all the blood had formed rusty streaks on her mother's shirt and pink tears on her cheeks.

One thing Cassie did remember was how soft the fur had been. At least it was on the tiny baby she found there with its mother. How sharp its tiny teeth had looked. How pure and white and hot the pain must have been when she pinched its little neck.

Even acts of love can hurt terribly.

Not like the pain in her stomach right now.

The car nudged forward a few feet, and Cassie heard her mother utter an impatient curse, complaining about the constant delays from all the new construction. How they should've taken the long way around to her father's apartment. “Another damn tower,” she said through clenched teeth. She waved her hand at the taped-off site just ahead. “How many do we need?”

Cassie turned away. She knew the question wasn't meant to be answered, so she didn't say anything.

The radio was on low, some woman talking about a problem out near Brookhaven, which was just a few miles further down the highway. A disturbance of some kind. The police were there, they said. Someone was causing trouble and making traffic difficult.

“Whole island's gone to hell,” her mother muttered.

Cassie tuned it all out.

Her eyes flicked to the work crew beside them in their fluorescent green coveralls, their faces hidden behind plastic masks. Printed in black letters on their backs were the words: P
ROPERTY OF THE
US G
OVERNMENT
. She figured it must refer to the clothes rather than the people wearing them, the bad people. How could a person be property? They couldn't be owned, could they?

Like the dancing man on the curb, she didn't like the way the workers looked, either. She didn't like their stiff, shuffling manner or the mute way they went about their business, never once speaking or acknowledging anyone. Not even to each other. She had even tried an experiment once — because that's what her parents did, experiments — and had waved at them while in the car with her father. The window was open and she'd said hello in a timid voice that was probably too small for them to hear anyway. And of course they didn't hear because they didn't answer her back.

“Don't talk to them,” Daddy had said, frowning at her. He used his button to close her window. “They're not nice people. They're convicts, murderers. People who belong in jail.”

“Then why aren't they? Why are they out here with us?”

“Because now we can control them. We put little, tiny machines inside their heads and make them do work.”

“Can they do that to me, too?”

“No, honey. Just convicts. Those people stole from society. They owe a debt back. So, instead of letting them sit inside cozy jail cells reading books on how to cheat the system, we make them work.”