The Zona (24 page)

XII. The Pima desert is a land of sand storms and rare sanctuary

Lead ran barefoot against the backdrop of a burnt orange and bruised sunset.  Rifle shots peppered the sand and dogs barked with men, and all of it focused and pursued Lead; it all belonged to a world Lead was no longer a part of.  He had detached, dissociated.  He felt no pain, or rather, that which created pain inside him had broken.  He looked at the brilliant setting sun and bolted south, towards Tucson, towards New Pueblo, towards the grave of his friend, Terence Wood.

Lead’s bare feet carried him over sand and rock and brush. From the southern horizon loomed an enormous sandstorm, charging up from the Pima.  In the far distance, black-robed guards poured out of Purgatory gates astride horses.  Lead ran with strides like leaps.  He tilted his head and bounded through the storm wall and into the blinding miasma of howling wind and earth.

The interior of the storm was otherworldly; an alien atmosphere populated by tornado worms and air that could only be ingested through gritted teeth.  At the storm’s edge, horses whinnied and bucked and threw their riders, for sometimes animals show wisdom beyond the want of man.  Black robes whipped like bats wings and guards struggled to control their beasts, to find fellow guards, to flee the storm before they were consumed like the escaped sinner had been.  The storm swelled and reached across the desert into Purgatory. It scoured the structures and swept sand into the pit of men more dead than alive.  The residents of Purgatory, freemen or not, fled for cover and more than one contemplated mans’ futility in the face of nature and the unquenchable wrath of God.

Lead shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted through fingers.  Every attempt at vision was thwarted by grains of sand inevitably peppering his eyes.  Lead waived his chair leg like a blind staff and continued short steps against the storm’s winds. Sand tore at his bare skin and scoured off much of the filth he’d carried from the Hall of Gluttons.  His feet stubbed against rocks and cactus as he stumbled first without sense, then without direction.

Lead pushed on against the storm.  All sense cut away, he saw nothing, his ears filled with the ubiquitous howl of wind, he felt nothing but sand against his skin and rocks at his feet.  Lead was alone.

A dark image peered before him, a shelter against blinding sand, a black obelisk jutting from the earth.  Lead knelt against object and cleared the grit from his eyes.  It was a limousine, flung upside down and half-buried in earth.

Lead leaned against the body and propped his back against black glass.  Above him the sandy winds ebb and flowed.  Lead put the hand against the window.  It was warm and smooth in a way alien to his touch.  He pressed his face against it but saw nothing through the heavy tint.  Lead swung his chair leg, the window imploded and little shards of glass like rice scattered into the dark unknown.  

The air inside the limo hung thick with death, like a mausoleum.  Velvet upholstery crumbled in Lead’s hands as he pulled himself into the shelter.  At the back end of the limo, just visible at light’s edge, sat a body mummified by time.

Lead crawled to the mummy.  Its skin had converted to leather, snug against skull and hands.  The mummy was clothed in a lavish business suit, dress shirt and a blue silk tie; all items Lead recognized from magazines he’d seen.  It was the uniform of rich and important men, men of influence who had won and then lost the physical world.

The corpse’s left hand was fused to a revolver.  Tiny glass bottles littered the floor around the body.  Lead touched the man’s cheek.  The skin rasped like tree bark, the eyelids hung low over empty sockets.  The back of the man’s skull was an absent and obvious victim of the revolver.

“Why’d you swallow your muzzle?”  Lead asked.

He pulled the gun out of the man’s hands, fingers snapped and rolled and were lost in the compartment.  The piece was a hulking .44 caliber, coated in rust and patina.  Lead thumbed the hammer, but it was fused to the frame and would not budge.  He laid down the gun down.

“This car was yours.  This gun was yours, why did you snuff your own light?”

Lead turned from the corpse, the passenger compartment was lined was storage bins.  Lead opened one and three water bottles fell out.  Lead opened another and found bars of chocolate and bags of peanuts.  Another compartment held tiny bottles of spirits, cans of soda, and more bottles of water.  Lead’s heart raced; here was a bounty of food and water, sustenance to battle his rampant hunger and thirst.   Lead piled his bounty in front of the corpse and bowed his head.

“I thank you, and God thanks you.  I pray that you are in Heaven, and that I may someday meet you and thank you for what you have left behind,”

Lead greedily devoured the candy bars.  He drank one of the bottles of water.  Lead lay uncomfortably with a full stomach.  The winds outside whistled through the shattered wind, grit sprayed across the opening.  His eyes grew heavy and his mind drifted to dreams.

When Lead woke, the wind was still whistling and a pool of sand had grown through the shattered window.

“I have to go, sir,” Lead said to the corpse.  “Please forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

Lead took a deep breath and started stripping the clothes off the corpse.  

The suit jacket and pants hung on Lead’s body.  Malnutrition gave him the look of a man succumbing to illness.  Thankfully, a belt of fine, black leather was still attached to the pants.  Lead pulled the belt tight and cut a hole with a collapsible corkscrew he’d found in the pants pocket.  The corpse also wore ornate dress shoes, stiff and cracked with age and natural decomposition.  Lead removed them carefully and slipped them over his bare feet.  They fit, though the low cut and thin soles were not ideal for the desert.

The corpse’s shirt was threadbare and stained.  Lead tore off a sleeve and ripped it lengthwise to the cuff.  He wrapped one end around the handle of the broken gun and covered the useless hammer and cylinder.  He then threaded the neck tie through the trigger guard and tied the ends behind his neck, like a Van Cleef.

Lead cut out a leather seat cover and used it to bundle the remaining food and water.  He exited the shattered window and rose into the desert winds.

The winds shifted, the sands settled.  Night had fallen and the stars stretched out to infinity, tracing their slow spiral through the moonless sky.  Despite his many and varied travels, Lead had never seen the evening sky so radiant.  It felt to him as though God were reaching out with hands that comforted and yet proved conclusively what a diminutive and insubstantial creature man is.

The limo stood alone, empty save the mummy and trash; an oddity in a world of rocks, cactus, and sand.  Lead’s eyes traced the sky until he found the North Star, Jesus’ Star.  Lead followed the orb, used it to orient himself.  He traveled through the night desert, fearing no monsters or demons, his mind cleansed of doubt and fear.

XIII. A nomad treks through life and shortly leaves thereafter

Lead wondered through valleys and dunes.  He stayed low, out of the sight line, avoiding the men and dogs of Purgatory he knew must be following.  

Lead trekked through dawn and dusk, always moving south.  He sheltered in the daytime.  Sometimes he slept under brush, though without fear of snakes or demons.  Sometimes he slept in cars, though with no fear of the dead or their viruses.

Lead had been purged.  All the sin, all the fear, all the doubt in his mind had been burned asunder by the shit and grime and horror of Purgatory.  God did not speak to him with voice, but he felt God’s hand control his fate.  His unbalanced mind found causes and reasons.  Why had he met Terence Wood?  Why had he suddenly decided to stop killing, to betray the Church?  How had he survived the Crusaders and cannibals and filth?  Lead incurred the belief that he was God’s true soldier.  That he was protected from on high and had come to deliver His will.

God’s hand pressed itself in all he did.  The early mornings and late afternoons were filled with divinities and shadows made clear in Lead’s addled mind.  Lead traveled without fear.  Things natural and old became to him an acknowledgment from God.  Sunsets lit burning bushes.  Boulders gave life to the faces of Moses, Jesus, Job, and the Apostles.

Lead giggled to himself.  He contemplated the necessity of signs.  God did not need to give him a sign; his constant survival was his sign.  His inability to die was Abraham’s Angel or the Immaculate Conception or the parted Red Sea.

He ate all the candy and peanuts scavenged from the limo and his hunger drove him to capture bugs from under rocks.  The fear of consuming poisonous venom and the sin of the desert’s mean creatures left his mind.  At dawn of the third day he uncovered a rattle snake and crushed its head with a stone.  He consumed the meat raw, without worry of illness.

Lead’s face and hands turned crimson in the unshielded sunlight, but he did not feel them.  He had long ago scoured the filth of the Hall of Gluttons from his skin with desert sand, though it did nothing to erase the musk of excrement and insanity that wafted from him.

On the fourth dusk of his trek, Lead caught a smoke line in the distance.  Lead crouched to the sand and stealthily crested the dune.  A rag man sat shielding his meager fire from the wind; his skin was glowed yellow and sick in the fire’s light.  Lead saw no markings of the Church, so he stood up and walked to the fire with hands raised.  The rag man looked up at Lead.

“Evening stranger, no chance of you sneaking up, I smelled you long ago. You are welcome none the less.”

The rag man looked back to the fire.

“Please join me, company is rare here.”

Lead sat at the fire.  The rag man’s face was as aged and tanned and wrinkled as a brown bag paper.  The rag man pulled a dead lizard from his sleeve and skewered it on a metal wire.  He held the lizard over the fire.

“Who are you?”  Lead asked.

“I should ask first. It is you at my fire,” the rag man replied.  “You’re dressed strangely.  You have what almost could be taken for a Preacher’s Van Cleef around your neck and you smell worse than any man, woman, or child I’ve ever encountered. So I ask you good sir, who are you?”

“I am Lead.”

“That’s it, just Lead?  No grand story, nothing to explain yourself?”  The man said.

Lead thought for a moment.  He gave gentle contemplation to the torrents and rage running wild in his mind.  He looked to shapes shifting in the sand and the early stars smiling and realized the task of explaining himself was overwhelming.

“No.”  Lead replied.

“At least you can tell me where the name came from.  Last I remember mommas weren’t naming their babies Lead.”  The man said.

“It was my regiment name in the Church Guard,” Lead replied.

“Well then that explains the Cleef.  I don’t suppose you still preach with that shabby rig?”

“I don’t preach anymore, I’m…”  Lead contemplated again.  “I’m a pilgrim, I guess.”

The rag man smiled slyly.  “Sure friend, you’re pilgrim, I’m a pilgrim, I think all us wanderers are pilgrims.  Where is your pilgrimage to?”

“New Pueblo,” Lead said.