by Alden Bell
I don’t see anything.
Your vision is of a different sort. Get in.
So what are we gonna do?
Moses shrugs.
*
They drive further, making headway through the cactus-lands, passing quiet and slow through the rusted-out ghost towns, looking for aught of interest.
That night, they set up camp out in the open where they will be able to see trouble coming from a distance. They will sleep in shifts, so one can hold vigil while the other rests. But not long after dark, they see the headlights of a car approaching from the direction they came.
The car slows and stops on the road near their campfire. A lone figure emerges and walks towards them.
You best announce yourself, Abraham says and reaches for a pistol.
I’m not carrying any weapons, the man says. He gets closer, and his face resolves itself in the firelight. He is a tall man, gaunt but still strong, the fortitude of a steamroller succumbing to rust and waste. A fortitude that will succumb but has not yet succumbed.
Evenin, Moses says.
Which one of you defiled that girl? the man says.
You’re from them? Abraham asks. It was bought and paid for.
The tall man looks at Abraham. He has his answer. Moses can see his jaw clamp down, as though all his muscle were behind those teeth and he would gnaw his way through the world. Then the man reaches into his pocket and pulls something out – a small brown cylinder. Moses can see it by the firelight, a prescription-medication bottle.
You did us a service, the man says, and you have the right to compensation.
He tosses the bottle to Moses, who catches it. It is full to the top with pills.
Amoxicillin, the man goes on. It’s the one thing we have more of than we need. It should be of some value wherever you’re going.
Who are you, Abraham asks, her daddy?
I’m a concerned citizen, he says to Abraham. They shouldn’t have offered her in the first place. You took her, that’s on us. But you didn’t have to defile her.
Abraham looks at his brother and chuckles, as though to share in the quaint pedantry of this character before them. Moses says nothing and keeps his eyes on the man.
That’s to pay you, the man says and points to the bottle in Moses’ hand.
We already been paid, Moses says.
No, the man says. It’s to compensate you for the renege of our deal.
What renege? Abraham says. What’s he talkin about?
This renege, the man says and strikes suddenly, punching Abraham hard on the jaw. Abraham goes down with an expression of stunned disbelief that quickly turns to animal fury. Then he’s back up and flailing his arms at the man. The two clobber at each other, and Moses watches. He watches while the tall man beats his brother to the ground and then kicks him twice in the stomach. That’s when he steps in, pushing the man back.
That’s enough, Moses says.
The man puts up his hands and begins to back away.
Like I said, that’s payment I’ve given you.
Like I said, Moses counters and tosses the bottle back to the man, we already been paid.
When the man has driven away, Moses carries his brother to a spot away from the fire where the cool desert breezes can succour his wounds. One eye is bruised shut, and his upper lip is busted open. Bruises cover his torso, but Moses can feel that no ribs are broken. Abraham will mend.
He coughs once, painfully, and takes deep breaths, his one good eye cast up at the sprent of stars overhead.
Hey, brother, Abraham says. Is that the divine justice you were lookin for?
That was it, Moses nods.
Was it enough?
Moses uses his fingers to brush away the dirt from his brother’s cheek. It is a light touch, delicate and studied. Then he says:
Get some sleep.
Three
The Airport in Tucson » A Meditation » Terminal » A Guessing of Names » A Massacre » Harlequin, Tinkerer » A Discussion of Philosophy » Gifts » A Mission
The next day they come across a massive derelict airport.
Where are we? Abraham asks.
Tucson, says Moses. The international airport.
Let’s hop us a jetliner to gay Paree.
Moses wanders the runways and the hangars, admiring the monolithic machines. The fences are mostly intact so there are almost no slugs to interrupt his constitutional, and he wonders at what a vast museum the world has become.
The paint on most of the planes has been bleached to dull fade by the desert sun. Many are docked at their gates, long hollow gantries connecting them to the body of the terminal itself. Others are abandoned at random places on the tarmac, their doors gaped wide, some with their deflated yellow emergency slides spilled flaccidly on the ground. Moses raises his palms and feels the long, smooth underbellies of the aircraft.
When he was young, and the world was not as it is today, there was a great deal he took for granted. He was a young man when things went sour, only two decades old – and for all the seeing he did, he might as well have been blind. He does not allow himself to think frequently of those times – and not out of fear or cheap lament, but rather because that gone world exists for him in faint outline like a childhood storybook that remains in memory as patches of colour, or deceptive fragments of images that are shuffled so by time you can’t seem to reassemble them into any coherent picture.
There were people everywhere you looked. So many of them – you wouldn’t believe how many. And all full to stinking of life and sin. Boundaries were murky, borders were crossed willy-nilly, the abundance of riches and luck so overflowing that parsing it out was a fool’s game.
Even the dead seemed not quite so dead. People died, and they were hidden away from the eyes of man – enclosed in boxes or burned to subtle ash, kept present in the form of photographs on mantelpieces, home videos that denied death, counteracted it. Technology a contraindication of death. To swim in radiant pools of life, death made abstract and commercial. A notion of the mind, Moses recalls. A pretty little idea spawned in goddamn kid dreams.
But now the dead are everywhere as the living were before – and now can be observed all the fleshly moods of death, the tearing skin, the bluish hue of rot, the muddy eyes, the crustiness of dried sputum, the salty white of chancre and peel, the acrid, biting smell of organic decay. Now, even though the dead walk as the living do, the lines are clearer between death and life. You may know little, you may know next to goddamn nothing, but at least now you can see what you are and what you are most definitely not. Moses is intimate with death – he lives in its company every day, and what he knows is that death ain’t a floating up to cloudy heaven, no angel wings and toiletpaper-soft robes and dulcet harp-playing. No, instead it’s a slow crawl of atrophied muscle and the vestigial instincts of our most piss-poor appetites. That’s the face of death.
But still and all – now there is meaning in the goodness of things. Now does order signify, because now it matters. Now you can see with clear vision the difference between good and bad, between life and death, between should and shouldn’t. And there are forces, ambling armies on the earth, that are there to take a bite out of your soul at your electing to transgress.
And it’s true – the right has never been more beautiful, has never been bolder in the colour of sunrises over the blasted plains.
Moses was blind to it before, but now he runs his palms along the underbellies of the aeroplanes, like an honest supplicant to the altar of righteous ingenuity. People didn’t use to be able to fly, and so they built wings. And now those wings are clipped, people gone to ground – but the artifacts of majesty remain, all the more beautiful for their inutile splendour.
Now there is much to appreciate in the perfectly curved surfaces of human architecture. And so he wishes he were an artist or a craftsman – someone to build things and name them names.
What’re you doin? Abraham asks.
Nothin, Moses says, startl
ed. Come on. Let’s collect what there is to collect.
*
At the end of one runway is an overturned plane, its fuselage bent and cracked in the middle. There are bodies, long ago dried up, but they have been taken care of. Every one of them has a gunshot wound in the skull. They hunch over, some still buckled in, even though they and their clothes have become indistinguishable from the upholstery upon which they sit.
A breeze blows through the massive metal straw, and Moses can see the filaments of hair on these dead skulls whipping to and fro like blades of summer grass.
Bleak pastoral.
But the broken plane has been picked through before. Abraham finds some packets of ibuprofen in one of the seat-back pockets and a set of dried-up watercolour paints in the pink backpack of one of the little girl corpses.
What’re you gonna do with those? Moses asks.
I don’t know. Maybe take up paintin. Maybe it’s an artist’s eye I got.
You mean the one eye that ain’t beat shut from your debauchery?
But Abraham remains unfazed.
That’s the one, he says.
Emerging again from the fuselage onto the tarmac, Abraham runs a hand over his scruffy chin and considers the massive terminal in the near distance.
I bet there are some treasures to be found in there, he says. All shut up tight away from prying hands other than ours.
Moses too looks at the terminal.
Look at all those windows, he says.
So? his brother asks.
We’re off the grid here. You notice any lights last night?
No.
Me neither.
Moses knows that where the population is dense enough to be strategic, there are people barricaded in power stations, keeping segments of the power grid alive. There are even a few who have managed to recapture and run refineries. Corpus Christi is one Moses has seen with his own eyes. Gas and electric. Infrastructure. Humanity clawing back some of what was taken from it.
But between those oases of civilization, there are vast wastelands of dark – and it is in these places that the settlers have reverted to primal frontier living.
If you were gonna take up residence in this area, Moses continues, wouldn’t you want to do it in a stronghold that’s got unbreakable glass walls and all the light you need?
Oh, Abraham responds. You think there’s people in there? People who don’t care for the scavenging likes of us?
What do you think, little brother? You feelin watched?
Always, Abraham says. But usually by you. Anyway, if it ain’t been co-opted, that makes it prime co-opting for us.
So they find a way in, bashing in one of the maintenance doors and climbing their way up an unlit concrete stair until they come through a door and into the terminal building proper. Inside, there are very few signs of disturbance – almost as if the place were shut up and made relic before the chaos of the dead had a chance to crumble it.
The light coming through the tinted panes of glass all around is dimmed to a faint blue that’s almost like sweetness, and over everything is a thin coating of dust, the settling of the air itself as though time makes all things – even breath – palpable and falling.
They pass a number of gates until they arrive in an open area that Moses recognizes as what used to be a food court. Above is a mezzanine level, but both escalators leading up to the balcony are barricaded with heavy chairs, tables, vending machines, barbed wire and other debris.
What’s all that for? Abraham wonders.
Don’t know, Moses replies. Ain’t no other signs of skirmish. Could be this was a last stand. But if it was, then where’s the bodies?
Et up?
You ever seen a slug eat someone so clean and mannerly they leave no trace? They ain’t the napkin-usin type.
So what’s all this then? Abraham asks again.
This time he’s answered not by his brother, but by a megaphone voice from the balcony above.
I’ll tell you what it is, the screeching voice says. It’s a couple of addlepates tryin to elbow in on what’s mine.
*
The brothers cast their gazes upwards through the grimy light filtering in through the windows. But there’s nothing to be seen behind barricades of airport furniture. The voice comes first from one place and then another – and the megaphone projects it loud, even though they could have heard the man easily without it.
We ain’t here to pillage, Moses calls out. We’ll work for food and shelter – if you have a mind for it. Otherwise we’ll take our leave.
You’ll take nothing! the voice says from above. Now it seems to be coming from the far left, and there are clanking sounds, as of bolts being drawn and chains unwound. You’ll take nothing! I gave no permission!
What’s that sound? Abraham asks his brother in a low voice, pointing to the left where, on their level, is a double set of maintenance doors. As they watch, the doors shudder slightly, and then there’s a sound like rat’s feet on cold stone.
How many of you are there? Moses calls up to the man with the megaphone.
How many? the voice calls back. He wants to know how many! I been here three years. I got a big marble floor. All I use it for is a calendar. You count the days, don’t you? That’s how you know.
Do you think he’s the only one? Abraham says to Moses.
Could be.
More activity comes from behind the double doors, and another metallic sound, like a metal bar being shifted aside and clanging to the ground – like a barrier being drawn.
We better get, Abraham says.
What’s your name? Moses calls up to the balcony.
My name? comes the voice. Then Moses can see some movement behind the furniture barricades. The small shape of a man dressed in colourful clothes moving back and forth in a frenetic way. He catches glimpses of the man through the niches in the stacked furniture.
My name? the man continues. He wants to know my name now. If you guess it right I’ll let you live.
Let us live? Abraham calls up. Man, you best learn some manners or you’re gonna—
We’ll just leave, Moses calls up, not liking the sound of what’s behind that door. We’re leaving now.
He moves in the direction of the corridor down which they originally came. But before they get there, a demented laugh comes from above, and a steel gate comes smashing down over their only exit from the food court. Abraham runs to lift it, but the gate is solid.
All right, listen, Moses calls up to the shape moving back and forth above them. We ain’t here to cause any fuss. We’ll just go peaceful.
Now the voice comes from directly above, in the middle of the balcony.
It’s the work of months behind those doors, the man says. Rounding them up, one at a time. Using myself as bait. Months of work. And when you two are dead – well, then, the work starts all over. But that’s just the nature of time, ain’t it? It goes on ahead, and we follow. Now guess! Guess my name!
Jesus Christ, Abraham says.
No, it ain’t Jesus Christ, says the man.
Then the doors open. There is no drama, no bursting. They sway open slowly, inch at a time, because what’s behind them is in no hurry. Instinct can afford to move slow, because it moves with a surety of purpose foreign to most things.
Slugs. A lot of them. They push through the door, stumbling over each other. The first few fall to the ground and climb back to their feet slowly. The ones behind begin to lumber in the direction of the brothers.
Okay, Abraham calls upwards. Okay. How about James? Robert? Michael? Frank? Richard?
Abe, get straight, Moses says and brings a pistol out from his satchel.
Goddamnit, Abraham says. How many of em do you reckon?
Fifteen, twenty. Don’t shoot wild, we’re low on ammo.
Abraham drops his satchel on the ground and unzips it. From it he pulls a blunted shotgun, the barrel sawn off just beyond the stock.
The first few they take out with qu
ick head shots to thin the herd. Then Abraham circles around the side of the group and begins tossing obstacles in their way – tables and light aluminium chairs, artificial plants in clay pots, light-weight kiosks. Anything that will stumble them up and make them easier to deal with one at a time. As he does this, Abraham continues to cry derision upwards to the man on the balcony.
We’re gonna get you, you asshole. Billy, Fred, Simon, Lee, Gary, Paul, Albert, Roger, Carl, Michael.
You already said Michael, the man above says through squealing laughter.
Prick.
Abraham grapples with one slug that’s got behind him somehow. The dead man is dressed in grey overalls with his name embroidered on them. He has a stringy beard and milky eyes – and when Abraham turns, the slug’s mouth is already open and ready to bite. Abraham takes aim with the shotgun and pulls the trigger, but he has miscounted the shells and realizes he’s out. Stumbling back against a metal counter, he reaches behind him to a canister filled with plastic utensils, grabs a handful of plastic knives and shoves them into the dead man’s open maw. Then he uses the palm of his other hand to ram the knives in deep, where they lodge with thick wetness in the back of the slug’s throat.
Unable to bite down, the slug claws at Abraham with his useless cold hands, and Abraham pushes him backwards, sending him tumbling along the floor.
On the other side of the food court, Moses has taken an iron adze from his satchel and backed himself against the metal gate. There are four slugs shambling towards him. He looks in their eyes. Humans made animal. He, too, has been animal on the earth. He feels no hatred towards these things, nor pity neither. They – the slugs and Moses himself – are objects in contention for space. That is all. And which object ultimately holds sway, he knows, is more a matter of nature’s hazard and caprice than the will of any bearded Overseer with a mission for humankind.
Still and all, there’s got to be an order. There’s got to be.
All right, he says. All right.
He rushes forwards, raises the adze and, putting all his weight behind the swing, buries the curved blade of the instrument in the skull of one of the slugs. It is a woman, and her head hinges apart as though made to do so. Then Moses wrenches the adze out of her head and, in the same motion, swings it across the face of the next slug, whose jaw shatters. Fragments of teeth and bone fall to the cold tile floor like a smattering of summer hail. Another woman already has her teeth on Moses’ forearm, but he wears a leather jacket for just such a reason, and she has trouble gaining purchase. Instead, she leaves a long smear of rancid drool on his sleeve. He pushes her back and cleaves the side of her skull with the adze. Instantly, the life goes out of her, and she collapses to the ground.