The Crooked God Machine (20 page)

"Charles," Jeanine said, "look Charles."

I pressed my hand to the window as if I could stop the passengers from running headfirst into the tall warriors riding speckled horses and wearing chain mail armor and pig snouted god masks. But they kept running across the field away from the bus, their limbs disintegrating in the light of the black moon. The warriors impaled the passengers on their striped spears and dragged them away.

The baby let out a wail.

"There's that fucking baby again," the man with the mark of Cain said.

The woman with the crying baby stood in the back of the bus near the emergency exit. The exit opened and sucked on the curls of her hair.

The warriors tore down the walls of the collapsing farmhouse. The man with the Mark of Cain held me back from running by keeping an arm against my chest.

"Wait," he said, "wait until most of them have caught someone. You'll have a better chance of surviving."

A pig snouted God mask appeared in the window closest to Jeanine.

"Charles," Jeanine said.

"Wait," The man said once more, and then added, "fucking cults."

The warriors rocked the bus. Most of the remaining passengers ran out of the bus to try to escape, only to be impaled, gut wrenched, wrists broken, and dragged off on the heels of the horses. I thought that the ground underneath the bus screamed.

"Okay, now Charles," the man with the mark of Cain said, "Run for those hills you see over there. Come on. Now."

The man with the mark of Cain shouldered his bag, grabbed a machete from his knife collection, and ran toward the back emergency exit. He shouldered past the woman and her baby, jumped out of the bus, and headed for the machine fields.

Jeanine and I bolted to our feet and chased after him. A horse’s shudder flanks filled space of the emergency exit, blocking our way. A man in a God mask, carrying a spear, jumped down into the bus and grabbed the arm of the woman holding the wailing baby.

I gripped the knife tight and lunged at the man. He knocked me back straight into Jeanine. Jeanine lost her balance and fell in the aisle. The knife flew out of my hand. The man rammed his spear straight through the woman's ribcage and killed the baby with a sharp blow to the back of its head.

He slung the dead mother over his shoulders, jumped back onto his horse, and rode off.

Jeanine climbed to her feet and pushed her hands against my back to keep me from falling.

"Charles?" she said, "Charles, we need to go."

Jeanine and I jumped out the emergency exit. I touched the siding and my fingers came away slick with the woman's blood. Jeanine pushed me back flat against the side of the bus as two men thundered past on black horses, carrying lit torches and dragging busted and slack jawed children behind them. I looked for the man with the Mark of Cain on the horizon, but I couldn't make anything out in the dark.

Jeanine turned her head to watch the men on their horses leave the wreckage of the bus and farmhouse, her blue hair sticking to my mouth.

"Our bags," Jeanine said, "they're still in the bus."

"Leave them," I said.

"I'll get them," she said.

"No."

"I'll get them. You go. Run for the hills past the field, like he said."

Jeanine climbed back into the bus. The men on horseback threw their torches into the farmhouse and the dry wood burst into flames. I did as Jeanine told me and ran.

I ran toward the hills across the open field. I was always running with heat on my back. The weeds and fennel and rye grass of the field glowed and cracked and bent. Screamed. They screamed. I kept looking back to see if the bus had caught on fire, to see if I could catch sight of Jeanine. I tripped and fell several times. Got up again and again, shaking, my knees and elbows scraped hard. I rubbed the woman's blood over my mouth and I listened for the pounding of hooves coming after me. To have the death that sat with me every morning to eat breakfast finally reach over and pull me into his undertow.
But I reached the hills still alive. I tried to hide in a low bank but a young girl was already there. She wore a wolf mask and held tightly to her bleeding arm.

“Can I hide here with you?” I asked.

She snapped and growled at me, digging her bare feet into the dirt, the toes curled so tight they might snap. I moved on, searching for the man with the mark of Cain.

I found another girl lying on her back, wearing God's mask with its black, velvety pig nose and goat horns. She clutched a black striped spear to her chest. Her skirts billowed out on the grass, hiked over her panties, revealing the pale, wretched space of her broken legs.

I said, “hey,” but I couldn't hear myself over the throb of the nearby machines.

I said it again. Said, “hey,” as I bent to touch cheeks with her God mask. I pried the spear out of her hands and threw it into the grass. Her hands stiffened. I peeled off her God mask and met the smile of her blood encrusted jaw, the upside down twitch of her nose sliced in half.

She whispered something to me.

"What? What did you say?" I asked, yelling over that unbearable, increasing throb of my body being sawed straight through.

The girl squeezed fistfuls of my shirt between her fingers and died.

Someone touched me on the shoulder. I whirled around and tripped over the dead girl. I pushed myself up to my elbows. Jeanine stood there with her hand held out toward me, the two bags slung over her neck and shoulder. She stepped over the dead girl and She reached down to help me up. She touched the dried and cracked blood on my mouth. Her fingers were greasy hot. Her face. She smelled of smoke and ash and when she tipped her head debris fell from her hair.

We left behind the dead girl and moved past the hills into the field of machines.

That was the first time I saw the machines up close.

Shiny, hard machines sitting on the graves of our dead. Machines with dirty hearts and piston pumps, grappling arms heated red. Efficient and inhuman, big and small and hurled straight from heaven. There are machines that look almost human, machines with seraph faces, baby limbs - but these machines are dead, inoperable, becoming slowly crushed by the newer models that look like nothing a human could have ever created, machines spinning wheels and dripping loose skin from their jaws. Still others were like black boxes with steely mouths, bulging nests of plague woman locusts swinging from their arms.

Jeanine and I tried not to get too close.

Chapter Three

Jeanine and I arrived in Sodom the next day. Sodom lay flat in the middle of the desert, taupe and silver buildings jutting out the sand with solemn grim faces. The streets ran with desert yellow.

We stopped in front of the sign that said “Welcome to Sodom,” sticking halfway out of the sand.

"This can't be Sodom," Jeanine said, "my brother used to tell me stories about God destroying Sodom. It was completely obliterated. There was nothing left."

"The sign says this is Sodom," I said.

"It can't be the same one."

I didn't tell Jeanine that before we reached city I saw the plague machines in the distance get up and lumber toward the outskirts.

Outside the city limits we found a hell shuttle line-up a mile long. It wrapped like a streamer around the gray buildings. Old men with ring scars asked to feel Jeanine's breasts. Young girls in tulle skirts and orange lipstick asked for cigarettes and kisses.

"I'm sorry, I don't have any" I said, over and over again, "I don't have any."

Jeanine took my arm and led me away from people being herded into the shuttles. We continued on into the city.

“I can’t go on anymore,” I said, “I need to rest.”

“I don’t have time to rest,” Jeanine said, “I’m going to die any moment. My heart is crashing. It wants to quit.”

She had a rabies grin and the smoke in her eyes made her look wild and inhuman.

"Weren't we going to find your brother?" I asked Jeanine.

"Didn't you hear what I just said?" she said.

Instead of finding a place to rest Jeanine took me into the nearest bar.

All of the televisions in the place had been smashed, and "dance you cunts" was written all over the walls in blood. I lay my bag down against the bar.

“I just cleaned the blood off that thing!” the bartender yelled at me, “now I’m going to have to clean the bar all over again!”

Without a pause he turned to Jeanine.

“What can I get you?” he asked.

“I don’t care,” Jeanine said, “but I’m dying tonight so you better make it good.”

The bartender poured her a water drink in a plastic cup and pushed it over to Jeanine. She drank it quickly and when she slammed it down on the bar.

“Feel my heart,” she said to me.

“No.”

"It's a dying animal.”

"What are you doing?" I asked when she ordered another drink.

"We do crazy things when we're about to die," Jeanine said, "you saw those girls outside."

I felt my face slipping. The entire bar seemed to drift down into snow. A man approached Jeanine, and he was made out of snow as well. He tapped on her shoulder. Jeanine turned around in her chair with her hand pressed to her chest. Her drink spilled across her lap. The man laughed.

"I know you," he said to Jeanine, "you used to strip at the Legion. Back in Edgewater."

"Oh, the Legion. You mean that hole in the wall?" Jeanine asked, "where all the old people hung out at before they got taken away by the shuttles?"

"You had nice tits," he said, "nice body for a deadhead."

"I'm not a deadhead. Not anymore."
He smudged the ash still on her cheeks.

“Everyone called you the gasoline girl,” he said, “the always on fire girl.”

"I've been on fire more than anyone else I've ever known," Jeanine said, "was I really a stripper?"
She touched the tips of her blue and orange hair.

“You’re the best deadhead stripper I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Maybe love is real,” she said.

Jeanine reached out for the man and touched his face, her fingers lightly cupping his cheek.

“Do you want to go to my hotel room?” he asked.

Jeanine stood up and slipped her hand around the man’s waist.

"Charles, I'll find you later," Jeanine said.

"What about your brother?" I asked again.

"I only have one more night left to live," she said, and she took the man out of the bar, leaving me alone.

“Get your hands off the wall!” the bartender yelled at me, “Don’t people know decency anymore?”

I left the bar before the bartender could yell at me again. I wandered the streets of Sodom hugging my arms to my chest. Somewhere people were chanting about the grapes of wrath, the wine press of wrath, the wine of blood. Somewhere else people were huddled together like animals and crying for deliverance, their backs bared to the cold.

I wondered if Jeanine would have stayed with me if I told her I didn't get a slip implant that day because I wanted to save her.

In the distance I heard the approaching machines.

I could barely open my mouth it was so dry. I went into a restaurant and found it abandoned except for a lone waitress. The door swung shut behind me as the people outside started to wail.

The waitress approached me.

“All the other employees are in hell, and I can’t cook,” she said.

“Can I get a drink?"

The waitress sniffed hard and walked back into the kitchen. She returned shortly with a glass of water, and then went into the back room. I heard her sobbing.

I sat by the window with the glass of water trembling as the machines pounded closer, my bag in my lap. The door opened. The man with the mark of Cain sat down beside me.

"You need to get out of this city, Charles," he said, "it's about to be destroyed."

The waitress came back into the front of the restaurant to take his order, her eyes now streaked black.

"Water, please," the man with the mark of Cain said. The waitress left the table.

"You survived," I said.

"Of course I did," he said, tapping a finger against his mark of Cain, "that you survived, Charles, that is the truly remarkable thing."

“What are you waiting for?” Cain said

"Jeanine told me something," I said.

"Who's Jeanine?"

"It's not important," I said, "but she told me that Sodom had been destroyed before."

"She's right. And it will be destroyed many more times."

"I don't understand."

"Understanding is irrelevant in a world like this," the man said, “look outside.”

It was snowing. The snow turned the sky a dirty white. It blew into the gutters and stuck to the windows. It obstructed the buildings from view.

"It's not even cold," I said.

"Look closer," the man with the mark of Cain said.

As I looked out the window the snow began to shift. It grew edges. Turned metallic and stuck out tongues of black ink.

It wasn’t snow. They were pieces of paper, with "repent" printed on every one.

"The last bus out of the city leaves in an hour," the man with the mark of Cain said, "and you look to me like someone who needs to get somewhere."

"I don't know," I said.

"Know soon," he said, “where did that waitress go? Never mind.”

For a moment it seemed as if the blizzard of paper muffled all sounds, all the screaming and pleading, the gnashing of the machines, so that all I could hear was the crying of that waitress.

The man with the mark of Cain got up from the table.

"Don't go," I said, "please don't go. There's so much I don't know. What does God want? Where did the monsters come from?"

"One hour," he said, "I hope for your sake you're on that last bus, Charles."

He left the restaurant. I followed after him, but lost sight of him in the storm of paper. I went back to the bar and found the bartender standing on top of the counter with his fist stuck through a smashed television.

"You remember that woman who was in here?" I asked him, "the one with the orange and blue hair?"

“That man took her to the hotel down the street,” he said, pulling his bloodied fist out of the television, “room six5. Now get the hell out of here before you smudge something else.”