Not Flesh Nor Feathers

by Cherie Priest

Page 47

 

  “They’re right there!” he shouted, gesturing with the flashlight as if I didn’t know good and well where they were.

  “In body, sure. In spirit? Not so much. They’re empty, Nick. ”

  “Then how come you gathered all that information above, in the water? All that shit about the church and the fire, and the little girl—”

  “That’s it,” I said. “What you just said. The little girl. She’s the one doing this. She’s sending these ahead, moving them like pieces on a game board. ”

  “But you said she didn’t want anything. ”

  “No, I said she couldn’t be satisfied or stopped. Whatever she wants, she can’t have it. Whatever she’s looking for, it’s been gone for years. It’s only going to make her angrier, and more destructive. And you said it yourself, they’re right there—and I’m as open to them as I can possibly make myself, but I’m not getting a damn thing. ”

  “Then what do we do?” He was backing up too, and there was nothing to back against. Either the tunnel ended there beneath the old building, or it had caved in beyond it. There was nowhere to go except into the earth, which was packed and wet where there should have been walls.

  The stink was unbearable, and unbelievable.

  “Wait for Malachi?” I said, and I didn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but it did.

  “Fuck that noise. Help me with these things—get them up, come on. ”

  Nick was yanking at the beams that had fallen down with us. They had half buried themselves with the weight of their collapse, but he dug them out and wrenched them forward, setting them upright and then changing his mind.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was thinking barricades, but there aren’t enough of these. There might be enough to stack and climb though, so help me out here. They’re slow, but they’re coming. ”

  “I know that, thank you!” So I did what he said, and I grabbed two or three, whatever I could hold. And they were all slippery, but I held on tight and scored a few splinters, didn’t let go of them. I swung them around and gave them to Nick, who was arranging a stack like a baby’s blocks.

  Everything sank, though. No matter what we put down there, it slid, slipped, and squished down into the mud. So we stacked it higher. We piled it for all we were worth, and when we had everything we could stand on, it still wasn’t enough.

  And they were coming.

  I held the flashlight in my mouth. It tasted like earth and dead things, but I was afraid to drop it, too afraid to wedge it into the wall or put it down. Even without looking, I could see them writhing at the edge of the flashlight’s beam, at the fringe of the light’s circle, where the ribs of the tunnel were weak and crumbling as they clutched them, reaching forward, pushing past, slogging through.

  “Malachi!” I screamed up at him, but the word was warped around the barrel of the flashlight.

  “Hurry up!” Nick added. We couldn’t hear anything up there to suggest he’d come back, but we weren’t above hollering for help at that point, so we did. We blew our lungs out with the effort of it; we yelled until we were hoarse, and until the foul-smelling crew was too close to ignore.

  “Up. ” Nick braced himself. “Up—maybe I can lift you from here. Then you can help pull me up. Come on. ”

  “No, I’ll lift you. ”

  “This is no time for feminism, babe. I weigh more than you do. Pure mercenary. Come on. ” He locked his hands together and held them low.

  Christ, they were close. I could see their eyes, scooped out empty sockets that saw nothing. I could hear the gushing gasps leaking from their chests like they were squeezed out of old bellows. All that blackened, barbecued skin peeling in pieces, and all those broken fingers clawing forward—they moved so slow, but it was a horrifying kind of slow, a slow that will never stop. It was a slowness that you could run from your entire life, and you would run your entire life, because you’d have to.

  I nodded at Nick, because he was right—and because it would only be a matter of minutes before they were on us. Maybe a matter of seconds.

  I wiggled my feet free of the mess on the ground and pulled myself onto a pair of two-by-fours that offered something like stability. And from there, I jumped—putting one foot into Nick’s locked fingers and letting him lift me.

  I caught the rotted edge of the floor above and it came apart in my hands. I flipped backwards from the inertia of my flight, and I landed on my back—half on the boards and half in the mud. The mud half hurt less.

  “You all right?”

  “No, but I will be. ” I accepted his hand when he offered it, and I let him help pull me up, back onto our little island of detritus. “Try again. It was close. ” I shook my shoulders, trying to loosen the pain that knotted there, coiled between the bones in my neck and my arm.

  He held his hands back down and I took a deep breath.

  He threw, I grasped. I caught the edge again and it held, or part of it held. Part of it fell away. I scrambled, digging in with fingernails, with fingertips, with slapping palms and kicking feet, pumping knees.

  Beneath me, Nick’s hands were fighting to help—to give me something to push against. But it wasn’t working. I could feel myself sliding; too much weight remained over the edge and there wasn’t enough to cling to. And the floor above wasn’t stable enough. It wouldn’t hold me. I knew it wasn’t going to hold me.

  Then, bursting through the window where we’d all made our entry, came Malachi.

  “Get low!” I told him. “Lie down—spread your weight out! It won’t hold us otherwise!”

  He did as he was told, and he did it fast—lying as flat as he could and holding out his hands just in time to give me one last thing to grab before toppling back into the pit. His fingers wormed their way around my wrists, and he’d anchored his feet somewhere beyond where I could see. He wiggled me back away from the edge. The floor objected like mad. The boards cracked and threatened collapse with every elbow jab and every knee knock.

  But it held, and he had me out.

  “Where’s Harry?”

  “Couldn’t find him!”

  “That’s all right—that’s fine. We’ll do without him. Help me—help me get Nick, he’s still down there. ”

  “Okay—what do I do?”

  Frantic but determined, I stalked the perimeter of the pit.

  “Throw me the flashlight,” Nick said. It seemed like the least I could do, so I dropped it down and he caught it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Get out of here. ”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Get out of here!” He was rummaging with the duffel; he was pulling the shells out of the towels that wrapped them. He set the shell on a board.

  “Tie them together! Tie them together, we’ll use them as a rope. Throw them up and we’ll pull you out, goddamn you!”

  “Not long enough,” he said. “The floor won’t hold us, anyway. ”

  “It’ll hold,” Malachi insisted, creeping around the opposite side of the lip. “Man, tie the towels together!”

  Below us, Nick flexed an arm and there was a ripping sound where he’d pulled off the hem of the towel. He held the strip of fabric in his teeth and pointed the flashlight down at one of the sheets of paper we’d swiped from beneath the ball park.

  He read quickly, then dropped the paper and examined the shell, all of this so fast, like he didn’t know what he was doing but he figured he’d better learn in a hurry. “We’re not going to get more than one chance at this. Keep looking around up there. Look for something—a ladder or a rope, something real that might be useful. I haven’t got but another minute or two and I’m going to make it count!”

  Now well beyond frantic, I stood up and stared around at the storage—at all the trash, all the warped crates, and the disused leftovers of long-forgotten cleaning instruments and construction tools.
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  Nothing looked promising, but Malachi was rifling through the stash on the other side of the room with the pure tenacity of a terrier on a rat.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, stopping and turning to dash right back outside.

  “What are you doing? Get back here!” I shouted, but he was already gone so I kept thrashing around, looking for something—anything.

  Seconds later my brother returned with a long red cable wound up around his arm. “Like this?”

  “Like that!” I reached out and took them from him. “Jumper cables?”

  Big, long jumper cables—good ones. “I saw them inside a car on my way here. I broke the window, but I figured this was an emergency. ”

  “Indeed. Good job,” I mumbled, unwinding them and looking for a solid spot to brace myself. “I’m going to need your help here,” I told him. “We’re going to do this the long way, the stretchy way. I don’t think the floor will put up with anything else. ”

  “Just tell me what to do. ”

  “Back to the hole. Back to solid ground—lie down and grab my feet. ”

  I put myself belly-down on the dusty, muddy, messy floor and twisted one end of the cables around my wrist, then for further leverage, I clamped the alligator jaws to my leather belt.

  Then I used the other end like a lasso and threw them over the edge. “Get my feet, Malachi—get my feet!”

  He took them and held them hard.

  “Nick?” I called, almost glad I couldn’t see what he was up to. “Nick, do you see the—”

  “I see them. Just a second. ”

  “Have you got a second?”

  “Yes, shut up. Hang on. ” He tugged at the cable end, and he was quiet for a moment before hollering more. “When I say ‘now,’ do your damnedest—but if it doesn’t hold, or if I let go, you’ve got to run. ”

  “No way!”

  “Way, or I’m not taking the cable. Because when I say ‘now’ I’m going to light this wacky improvised wick and we’re going to see what happens—and it’s going to be loud, and it’s going to be messy, and you don’t want to be on top of it. ”