by Alden Bell
You mean, the pastor says, she’s immune?
Immune? Moses says and looks to the Vestal. I don’t know if you’d call it immune. If she died would she not come back? Beats me. But they’re not interested in makin her a meal. I reckon we could give you a demonstration if you got any slugs around. I don’t know if it means anything.
If what you say is true, sir, says the pastor, then this young lady means a great deal indeed. But maybe more to science than to the Church. Please follow me. I would like to introduce you to some of my friends.
Moses doesn’t like being called sir. He can’t remember the last time it was done. It fits him ill. He longs suddenly for the barren wilderness, the brokedown country roads, the collapsing structures, the wandering dead. It is there, in that place of ragged leftovers, that he knows how to behave.
But the old man seems kindly, and he offers them coffee, which Moses hasn’t had the delight of in a long time, and he loans them coats to wear as they cross the wide expanse of the snowy courtyard again. And so he follows the man, and the Vestal, still skittish, follows Moses. And when they are inside the buildings of the compound it is almost possible to forget that the world ever became the wilderness it did.
*
It is a community. A whole functional community, clean and calm behind guarded electrical fences and concrete walls. There are soldiers, yes, marching with neat precision, but there are others, too. Civilians to be observed in the glowing windows of bunkhouses, even children. Technicians tinkering with machines, sitting in front of computer monitors. And scientists and doctors walking busily to and fro in white lab coats.
Moses wonders if this is the order he has been craving – if this is what order looks like. It has been so long. So long. He keeps a hand near a pistol on his belt in case of a trap. He looks warily around corners before he turns them so that he won’t be taken by surprise. The Vestal, too, seems to wither under the fluorescent lamps lining the ceilings of the compound. She cowers against Moses’ chest.
Strange, he thinks. The girl has been through so much. She has been beaten and lost and whored and imprisoned and broken and put back together – but she has never been simply safe. It must taste sour to her. Unnatural.
Yes, Moses thinks, that is what the girl must feel.
They are led by the pastor to a research wing of the compound and introduced to men and women who are cordial and businesslike. They smile politely and disbelievingly when Moses tells them about the Vestal. But then the Vestal does give a demonstration, three soldiers standing by ready to shoot the female slug in the head when she goes for the girl. But she doesn’t. The Vestal walks right up to the slug and stands before her. In the bright lights of the lab, everyone watches as the two lock curious, pitying and befuddled eyes. A long string of drool falls from the lip of the dead woman but she makes no move to wipe it away. Then Moses sees the Vestal’s lips move, as though she were speaking to the slug – just briefly, a phrase. But he is standing behind glass with the scientists and cannot hear what she says. Later he asks one of the soldiers who was in the room with the Vestal.
What did she say? Moses asks. To the slug, I mean.
The soldier shrugs, still stunned by the demonstration.
She said it soft, the soldier says. I couldn’t really hear it. But it sounded like, Where are you?
After the demonstration, the scientists sit the Vestal down and proceed to ask her a series of questions, many of which have to do with the things she has eaten or the drugs she has taken or the places she has been.
While the interview is taking place, the Vestal keeps glancing over at Moses, who nods seriously. It is a reassuring nod, but also one that says she is obliged to continue.
After a while, Pastor Whitfield himself approaches the desk where the scientists are talking with the Vestal, and he suggests that they give the girl a break.
She’s travelled a long way to be here, he says to the others. Let’s give her some supper and some time to herself. Can we resume at another time?
The scientists agree and begin to discuss their notes among themselves. Whitfield takes Moses and the Vestal to a dining hall, where they eat hungrily. Around them, at other tables, are civilians who do not even notice the newcomers. This place, it must host many travellers. Children run around the tables, screaming happily, their cries echoing from the raftered ceiling. It is nice, this place, and yet Moses winces as though prickled by the sounds of joy.
How do you enjoy our food, my dear? Whitfield asks the Vestal.
It’s lovely, thank you, says the Vestal in her most formal and subservient voice.
Then she excuses herself to the restroom.
Pastor, Moses asks when she has gone. You’re a man of God.
I am.
A true man of God?
The pastor smiles gently.
I am a man of a true God, he says. We all endeavour to be true men, but our successes on that front aren’t to be measured here in this place.
Moses considers this and finds it a fair response.
And this place, he says to the old man. It’s safe?
As safe as any I’ve—
For her, I mean.
I see. You wish to be reassured that we will not hurt her. Because the girl has been hurt enough, yes? For someone who identifies himself simply as her delivery man, you are generous to be concerned about her. I assure you, Mr Todd, we are not in the business of hurting people. We are a sanctuary here. There are still some of those left, you will be happy to hear.
Moses nods.
One more thing, he says.
Whitfield opens his hands palms up as if to offer himself for service.
When I told you about her, Moses says, you took her straight to the doctors.
The pastor nods.
Is that cause—
Moses starts to ask his question but stops short and looks around as though someone were spying on them. He shifts and leans in closer to the pastor and continues.
Is that cause you don’t believe she’s holy? Cause you believe it’s just a thing with her body rather than her soul?
The pastor smiles, folds his hands and leans forward as if he would meet Moses in conspiracy over the tabletop.
I’m a man of God, says Whitfield. You said so yourself. It’s my business to believe that God has a hand in everything. It’s an article of my faith that things are the way they are because they are supposed to be that way. Is the girl divine? Absolutely. And so are we all.
But—
But the two things are not mutually exclusive, the pastor continues. Her body may have some divinity it can share with the rest of us. The soul, the body . . .
Whitfield waves a hand as if to dismiss them.
. . . Our desire to distil one from the other is a child’s game. For good or bad, you are your appetites as well as your expiations. You are just as much what you would eat as what you do eat. Look around you. The dead risen. The body has its harmony, too. Where is the soul?
Whitfield knocks against his own sternum.
Right here, he says. In our playful and meagre guts.
The pastor sits back, and so does Moses, considering what Whitfield has said. After a few moments of silence, Moses speaks.
Faith sure has changed, he says and shakes his head.
Not much, Whitfield says and smiles. It’s just got a little bigger. Things tend to do that when you open your eyes to them.
*
We have rooms for you, says Pastor Whitfield after they have eaten. He shows them into what looks like a dormitory wing of the compound, but there don’t seem to be civilians living there. Moses wonders if they will try to keep them locked up, but the rooms they are shown are snug and clean and have unbarred windows opening onto the courtyard.
We can make you both very comfortable, he goes on. We didn’t know whether you were . . . together, so we’ve found two adjoining rooms. Use them as you see fit.
The Vestal looks up at Moses. He sees her white face out o
f the corner of his eye, but he does not return her gaze.
Actually, Pastor, Moses says, I can’t stay. It’s my brother. I left him in a bad state – told him I would come back. He needs help. He got shot, and the wound’s got infected. When he’s took care of I’ll come back. Abraham and me – both of us will.
Whitfield says he understands and goes to gather some antibiotics from the medical wing.
Do you trust em? asks the Vestal when Whitfield is gone.
She sits on the edge of one of the beds, her arms crossed over her chest.
They seem all right, Moses says.
They’re too nice.
Some people are just nice, I reckon.
I don’t want to be an experiment.
You ain’t an experiment. Everybody just wants to know why you’re different. They figure that out, maybe they can put things back to the way they were.
I don’t care about things going back to the way they were.
Moses opens his mouth to demur then realizes some thing.
I don’t really care much about it either, he admits. Some worlds you’re just made for, and I’m made for that one out there. But it ain’t everybody so adaptable. You might do somethin for those people.
She keeps her arms crossed and looks out the window, the snow falling in hard streaks against the darkening sky.
I don’t want to stay, she says stubbornly.
I’ll be back, he says. Two days. Then we’ll figure things out.
Let me go with you, she says. We’ll fetch Abraham and then we’ll all come back, all three of us.
They ain’t going to hurt you, Moses says. The sooner they get their research done, the sooner all of us can leave.
Your job’s done, she says. You can leave now. Ain’t no obligation bringin you back.
There is a challenge in her voice. She wants to be corrected. She wants a promise from him. Moses wonders if this is a woman he can make promises to. He wonders how much of her is a lie. Even now. The fear in her eyes – it could be just another performance.
I’m comin back, Moses assures her. I ain’t entirely done with this place. Abraham’s gonna want to see it with his own eyes. And maybe we can recuperate here for a bit. Besides, you’re my beheld responsibility. Even though you’ve been workin contrary to it, it’s my thought to keep you safe till the full stop of this journey. Maybe this is it, but anyway I got to make sure I ain’t delivered you into hazard.
Fine, she says.
But she won’t look at him.
He goes to the door of the room and turns around once more before going out.
I’m comin back, he says. Two days. You’ll be okay.
Then she does turn to him, the full blaze of her eyes whipping sharp at his.
See, she says. Whatever I am, so are you – but worse, cause you can’t admit to it. You ain’t no gentleman, Moses Todd.
He looks at her a moment longer. Some part of him desires to take that crazily cut redhaired head and hold it against his chest as he would a small, shivering animal. Yet another part of him, a confused and muddy and thickly despairing part of him, would like to wrap his hands around the girl’s neck and squeeze until she is quiet, until her witchy words no longer have the power to sink him so low.
No, he says. I guess I ain’t so much of a gentleman. Guess I never have been much of one.
He waits a moment longer, but she has nothing more to say. She turns again and looks out at the pelting snow. Their voices have been muffled and wrong in this building of plaster and concrete.
I’m comin back, he says one last time.
Then he turns and goes.
*
Whitfield brings him a bottle of pills.
Biaxin, he says. It’s an antibiotic – a powerful one. The doctors tell me it should keep your brother’s infection from spreading. But you’ll bring him back here? We have the facilities he needs.
Moses agrees and stuffs the pills into the pocket of his jacket.
I thank you, Pastor, says Moses. I’m in your debt.
Whitfield clears Moses’ debt with a wave of his hand.
The world we’re living in now, Whitfield says, nobody owes anybody anything except kindness.
You’ve been more than generous to us. I ain’t so accustomed to it. I don’t expect I know how to act around it.
The pastor smiles.
I’ve seen rougher than you, he says. This country hardens people.
*
Back on the road, travelling the inverse of his former journey, the world looks reversed. There have not been many times in his life that Moses has retraced his steps. He is defined by forwardness – a true frontiersman, foraging the wilderness, chopping through the untamed tangles, burning to ash the road behind him. And there is ever more. There are an infinite number of roads – an embarrassing possibility of directions to travel. You can keep moving your whole life and never cross the same intersection.
Not wishing to meet them face to face, he looks for signs of Fletcher and his caravan. But he finds no trace of their immense footprint. Perhaps they have lost the trail – or perhaps they have gone a different way.
Back at the citadel, they filled his tank with gasoline, so he drives straight through without stopping. He knows, having just come from them, which roads are good and which are bad – and he takes detours where necessary. Still, travel is slow. He remembers, in his youth, when miles and minutes were commensurate. On the freeways of the nation, you could measure the one against the other with modest accuracy. But now, with the crumbled tarmac, the piles of abandoned cars, the collapsed overpasses, everything moves more slowly. The traffic of the dead and gone – there is no more dense population anywhere.
The sun goes down, and he makes his way in the dark. Normally he would stop rather than risk damage to the car by driving at night. But his brother is waiting for him, his leg rotting away by the hour. He can see it, the rot, spreading through Abraham’s body. A creeping rot gripping his heart and lungs, greening his brain with sour fungus. His brother, a creature of rot and decay. And so he is – and so he ever was.
He drives, and the muffled silence of the car is powerful. He has not, in his life, been much alone with his thoughts. It has been him and his brother. But now, by himself in the car, his large body balking against the small seat, driving this desolate road under a sky full black like drowning – now he perceives entire the eminence of the unbreathing lacuna in which the world has found itself.
He thinks about his wife, his daughter – and he does not wish to. He steps on the accelerator, trying to outpace his own memories. He will run from them where they cannot follow. He swerves between the mountains of wreckage on the road, faster and faster, clipping abandoned vehicles, shearing off the rearview mirror on the passenger side. Still, the thoughts follow him. And they come with other thoughts: his brother, that blasted-out shell of a man, all yellow teeth and grotesque appetite – and the Vestal, too, that pale luminous face like a moon behind clouds, her red hair spilling in chopped locks around her, a madwoman gone tricksy in the manners of the earth, the gorgeous get of a blighted world, so perfect in her lying everything, so—
And would she be . . . would she stay? . . . So pliant as the road takes her – so false and calamitous—
Suddenly there’s a figure in the road, ambling towards the centre line, and Moses turns the speeding vehicle but strikes it anyway. The slug’s body fractures and spins madly, its legs propellering up into the air, a macabre carnival act, the head swinging down and forward to crash with a wet thunk into the windshield right in front of Moses’ face, a grim explosion of wasted meat, a spiderweb shattering of glass.
Moses jams the brakes, the car skids on the icy surface of the road, flings the slug off, spins around two full times before coming to a rest in the dead centre of the road.
And he’s breathing fast and heavy now, leaning forward and resting his forehead on the wheel.
The impossible raucous silence of everything. Nothing
sounds more like annihilation than deafening quiet.
He throws open the car door and looks back on the icy road where the body lies. There is no need to put the slug down – his head is split wide from the impact. He looks down the road, the pool of light cast by the car’s one unbusted headlamp.
Lord, Moses whispers. Lord, lord, lord.
As a prayer it isn’t much, but it is as good as any on this lightless plain.
*
The car still runs. He gathers a handful of snow from the ground and uses it to wipe the gore off the windshield. Then he continues. He drives through the night, more slowly now, the calamity in his head dampened again by his own iterant voice filling the small space of the car, his voice repeating over and over something he learned as a child in school:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . .
He speaks it in its brief entirety as he learned it by rote. The words, he knows, speak of a war that is meaningless to him, even though they seem to evoke – in their notes of endurance and the brave men, living and dead, who consecrate this ground – the bleak road on which he finds himself travelling. Still, he does not think about the words but simply utters them. They quiet his mind. They are comforting because they feel stitched into the very back parts of his brain where things are archival, peaceful, resolved.
And so he drives and fills the space with uttered words and makes his way back into the mountains where the sun is cresting up over the horizon when he finds the place where the small path winds up into the woods. He climbs out of the car and listens to the morning birdsong and draws the icy cold deep into his lungs where it might purify him.
He climbs the path between the trees and sees the cabin ahead of him. It is dawn, and the light casts long shadows on the snow. He does not know what he will find in the cabin, whether he will find his brother alive or dead. Abraham said he could last it. It’s true – he said those words – but life can be a tricksy thing itself. Sometimes it just runs away from out between your grasping hands.
Moses does not know what he will find as the cabin comes into sight. But what he does not expect to see, sitting there on the collapsing front porch and drinking something from a steaming mug, is a man who is not his brother.