The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  I spotted some coils of rope in the luggage, and I beckoned to a couple of farmers crowded behind me. “Tie him up,” I told them, and gesturing at Tracy: “Her, too.”

  “I ain’t gettin’ near the son of a bitch,” said one farmer, a skinny redhead peppered with freckles. “Seems to me, you oughta just finish him.”

  “Amen!” said Marie, pushing her way to the front of the bunched passengers. “Somebody’s talkin’ sense at last.”

  It wasn’t so much compassion as curiosity as to how the Swede might continue to change that made me want to keep him alive. Curiosity wasn’t that strong in me, but I would be judged, damned, and fried to a turn before I’d let this little redheaded puke tell me what to do. I aimed my gun at him and cocked it. “Tie ’em up,” I said. “Then get rid of that.” I gestured at the man the Swede had clawed; he was lying facedown, and it was obvious that his act of foolhardy courage had been the final signature of his life.

  Gunfire sounded from the adjoining car, and the passengers surged forward, bumping and tussling, knocking one another off their feet. I forced them back and stood guard while two farmers tied up the Swede, dumping him into a seat, and then did the same for Tracy. She made no objection to being treated so roughly, just gazed out the window, refusing to answer when I asked how she felt—or maybe she didn’t hear. Her eyes were black as bullet holes, muscles twitched in her jaw. It hit me hard to see her all trussed up, but I was terrified that she would end like the Swede, staggering along the aisle, spitting blood and fury. Marie caught my eye, triumph in her expression, and went to scribbling in her little book. In the panic she had popped most of the buttons from her blouse, and her breasts bulged from their lace armor, quivering like sick pudgy animals.

  The train had slowed, chuffing up a steep grade. I peered out the window, searching for refugees, but all I could see were snow-laden pines and darkness and stars aligned into unfamiliar constellations. Most of the passengers sat staring at the seats in front of them, and a few were praying for some mercy of the world to rain down. Looking at Tracy, netted in rope, I couldn’t tell if the pain I felt was for her or for myself at the prospect of losing her. The whole time we’d been together I’d been able to persuade myself that I must love her a little bit anyway. All my life, it seemed, I’d been trying to exert control, to do something for love, to create a miracle of being, one clean act, and yet all it had come to was a sense of spoilage and shame, a thickness clotting the flow of my thoughts. I was still certain that love was in me, buried beneath the topsoil of my character. Pools of it, dark reservoirs of crude compassion and caring. But now I knew that what I’d been calling “love” was merely the comforts of sex, the security of having a shoulder to cry on, childish dependencies, strident needs, and none of the generous emotions of a man. I could swear then I felt my life blow past me, like a train blowing past somebody standing on a weedy embankment, just that—life—just a fast freight with a roaring cargo, a streak of darkness with a hot wind behind; and you barely saw what it was before it was by, and only too late did you understand how you could have fleshed it out, all the things you could have noticed and savored. And at the end, if you were lucky, you might know the measure of your failure. I overheard one of the farmers mutter, “Oh, God, I’d do anything…” So would I have given anything, but in exchange for what? A fiercer determination, or something to blot out my conscience, something that would weaken my desires? Those weren’t the sort of things a good man is supposed to want, and even if I could escape the moral rule, the things I wanted were things weighed out from the dross of experience, not something you could pick up in a trade like you could with a gun or a pair of boots. I wondered if you decide to love, if love wasn’t just an act of will, one I’d never chosen to make. Well, I chose to make it now, and although I was more wishing than choosing, crossing my fingers and whistling in the dark, I swore I would try to protect Tracy beyond the limits with which I’d fenced in my heart.

  About halfway up the grade I forced myself to examine the Swede and Tracy once again. The Swede was still alive and had not undergone further changes. This gave me hope for Tracy, but when I checked on her, I found that she was smiling—a fixed, irrational smile—and as I watched, a black trickle leaked from the corner of her mouth. She flicked out a long slender tongue, crimson and rough, and licked it clean. Her skin had grown white, pulpy-looking, and was rippling under her dress. When she flexed her fingers, straining at her bonds, they appeared to be either boneless or many-jointed.

  “Jesus!” I said, edging away, and Marie, who had come to peer over my shoulder, squealed, “You gotta kill ’er!”

  I eased my gun out, half-convinced she was right, and held it with the muzzle up. The skin on my face thrummed as if covering hot wires instead of muscle and bone. But I had no heart for shooting Tracy.

  “She’s gon’ be all right,” I said.

  A heavyset man with a thick shock of gray hair, wearing a threadbare corduroy jacket, shuffled forward and said, “I sympathize, friend. But this ain’t no time to be takin’ chances.”

  I kept my eyes on Tracy, recalling her fire and stubbornness, the wild look she got whenever she wanted me. I didn’t care about any man.

  “You can die for her, mister,” I told the heavyset farmer. “It sure don’t matter to me.”

  Another one came sneaking up on my left. I whirled and took aim at his face. “Take another step,” I said. “Just one more’ll do.”

  My frustration turned to anger, and I yelled at the rest. “C’mon and see what I got for ya! What you waitin’ for?”

  “Calm down, friend,” said the heavyset farmer.

  I laughed at that and gestured toward the rear of the car. “Get on back there, all of ya. And don’t even think about tryin’ me.”

  I herded them into the back, then sat down next to Tracy. Her eyes had gone a blazing yellow; membranes slid back and forth across them. The delicate lines bracketing her mouth had deepened, blackened. It looked as if her face were a white mask that was about to crack into pieces.

  “Tracy?” I said. “Can y’hear me?”

  She made a growly noise in her throat. Her torso rippled as if the muscles were sliding free beneath the skin, and as a result, the ropes were loosening. Her fingernails had turned dark blue. Like death, death’s color, dark blue. I remembered the sight of her body naked in the light of a red dawn, rumpled sheets banked snowy around her, her breasts pinked with gleam, and the soft curve of her belly—as pure a shape as the sweep of a spring meadow—planing down to the dark swatch of her secret hair. I was dead inside, my thoughts like bitter smoke from a damped fire. I could feel the brimstone emptiness through which the train was tunneling, grinding along up the grade, and I wanted to throw back my head and howl.

  “Tracy?” I had the urge to touch her, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Her skin would be moist, her flesh a cold tumescence like the flesh of a tomato worm. The ropes were getting slacker by the second, and though it was an agony to me, I knew it would be more merciful to shoot her now than to wait and watch her grow monstrous.

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Another goddamn farmer creeping up on me. The bastards were getting to be like mice. I half-turned to him, but said nothing, and after a moment’s hesitation he scuttled back to the others. The elderly lady stretched out her hands to me.

  “Don’t let her hurt us…please!” she said.

  “Y’gotta do it!” shrilled Marie. “Long as she’s alive, she’s a danger to us all.”

  The others murmured their assent.

  With their skins all pasty and yellowed by the light, their gawping mouths and bugged eyes, they looked to have changed in some pitiful fashion. And maybe they had, I thought; maybe there’s changes and then there’s changes. There was a metallic taste in my mouth. I could feel a killing rage bubbling up inside me, and my head was full of terrible noises, a screech of metal being torn, of a hungry hawk screaming in frustration. I wanted the world to end, I hated
these people so. I felt sick, dizzy, hot. The corners of the coach seemed to be pulling apart, as if the yellow ugly light had grown solid and was forcing back the walls. My eyes skidded across faces and shiny boards and gold lockets and glass—like everything had gone slippery and insubstantial. No place for my vision to catch on. It must be a change, I thought, a bad one. I fought against it, squinting, reducing the car to a fierce rippled brightness and a dark surround. That made things easier, and after a bit my vision steadied.

  I got to my feet, rested a hand on the grip of my pistol, and told the passengers to stay back and stop their whimpering. “I don’t give a frog’s ass what you people want,” I said. “You don’t mean a thing to me, none of ya. So you might as well swallow that bullshit you’re gettin’ set to spout.”

  Saying this, I felt a swell of cold satisfaction, like a charge working inside me—it seemed not a change, but rather the expression of an attitude that I should have expressed long before, one that had been restrained in some way.

  “Nobody’s goin’ to do nothin’ to this woman here,” I said, nodding at Tracy. “Not so long as I’m kickin’.”

  I was about to tell them what would happen if they challenged me when the rear door of the car blew open, a bitter wind gusted along the aisle, and the refugees came in. Three men—or almost-men—wearing crudely sewn skins and furs. Everything was frozen. The refugees grouped by the door; the suddenly intensified noise of the wheels; the passengers standing in their seats, their eyes round with fright—all these things seemed elements of a vast tension that, I thought, must spread far beyond the car and the train, throughout the entire Patch. Apart from the raw cold, I felt a crawly sensation along my spine, and I recalled what Marie had said about how you could sense the magical power that enlivened the refugees.

  The three of them eased forward, their shadows kinking over the warped floorboards, sliding flat as black silk over the smooth places. The passengers—ranged between me and the rear door—cowered in their seats. One of the refugees was a hunchback with a brutish heavy-jawed face, bulging prominences above his eyes, tufted eyebrows, and yellow teeth like an ape’s. A second hid behind him. The third was a big man with grayish skin and a strangely unfinished face—a gash of a mouth and black eyes that were almost perfect circles, like holes cut in a dirty bed sheet. His domed skull was bald, ringed with maybe half a dozen bony knots, each the size of a baby’s fist, as if he were growing a king’s crown under his scalp. There was a hunting knife slung at his hip. I felt I knew something about his character—I couldn’t define it, but if I could have made a stab at definition, I would have done so in terms of strength and intelligence and tenacity.

  He spoke to me in a language whose words had the sound of a horse munching an apple. It might have been a question.

  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t follow Cole’s advice and shoot straightaway. Could be I had some hope for the big man, or at the bottom of my soul I felt he had the right to live, that I wasn’t the one to be his executioner. And also I wondered if his question signaled a willingness to negotiate, if he wanted to bargain or trade. But I couldn’t think how to communicate with him.

  “Get on outta here!” I waved at the door. “Just go on, and there won’t be no trouble.”

  He spoke again—the same words, I believe, but with a touch more intensity. He gave me a searching look…or so I took it. Meeting his eyes, I felt I had made a connection, that what lay behind those black surfaces was not inhuman.

  The gray-haired heavyset farmer made a threatening move, and the big man held up a hand by way of warning. He spoke to me a third time. I eased my hand toward my gun and said, “Get on out! I ain’t gon’ be tellin’ ya again.”

  I think the big man smiled, though he might just have been trying to frighten me by showing his filed teeth. But I do believe it was a smile, for when the hunchback scuttled toward me, moving with a peculiar crabwise gait, he made a grab for him, trying to haul him back. Then three of the idiot farmers went at him, and my options dwindled to one.

  My heart was empty of caring, of fear, and the gun leaped easily in my hand. I punched out the hunchback’s left eye with one round, opened up his belly with a second, and still he staggered toward me. My last shot, squeezed off at a range of no more than a couple of feet, cracked his chest. His shirt caught fire from the muzzle flash, and the flames danced merrily, so pale in the glare, they were almost invisible. I turned the gun on the big man, who was about to finish off the last of three farmers—half-conscious in his grasp—with a fist the size of a cannonball.

  “Hold it!” I yelled, but he did not let the farmer fall. He stared at me, grave and unflustered, as if measuring the distance between himself and death. I was still reluctant to shoot him.

  “Aim at his throat!” somebody shouted. “Or the eye! You shoot him anywhere’s else, and y’can’t kill him! There’s too much bone.”

  I couldn’t see the man who had shouted, but I didn’t think it had been a passenger—they were crouched down behind the seats, those who were still capable of crouching, and not a one of them was displaying the poise of an expert. I lowered my aim to the throat as the voice had instructed, and the big man let go of the farmer and backed toward the door.

  I put a bullet into the floorboards at his feet. “Go on!” I said. “You got the idea.”

  He kept on edging backward, but as he reached the door he stopped and roared at me. That was how it seemed—a roar, but one with words embedded in it—and I couldn’t help but admire the purity of his rage. I had thought he was going to leave us to heaven and go back to his wilderness, but I had underestimated his desperation. He half-turned as if to jump from the car, but then plucked the hunting knife from its sheath and hurled it at me. It sang past my ear as I fired. The bullet took him in the Adam’s apple and spun him down onto the floor. He flopped about, clutching at the wound, but still fixed me with his eyes, which remained bright with regard. He tried to talk, but blood was all that came from his mouth. Words of blood, trickles of lost meanings. Then he went all unstrung. Nothing violent or spasmodic. Just like he was laying down his head for a little nap. I holstered my gun. Outside, the snow and dark looked clean and inviting, and the idea of taking a long walk in it seemed for an instant to offer a more hopeful prospect than completing the ride to Glory.

  Smoke hung on the air in the car, like misty trails winding through invisible mountains; the rattle of the wheels had acquired the rhythm of an enormous telegraph. I noticed that the Swede’s head had slumped forward, and I could tell from the blood on his mouth and chest that something had busted inside him and he was dead. My head ached, and in my heart I felt the sick weight of killing. I searched around for the third refugee. Marie peeked over the top of a seat, staring dazedly at the blood rivering the floor. She had a lump coming beneath one eye. The others had started picking themselves up. Then a man called out, the same voice that had instructed me to aim for the throat.

  “Don’t shoot!” he said. “I won’t hurt nobody, I swear!”

  The voice was issuing from behind a rear seat. I aimed at it. “Stand up and lemme see ya,” I said.

  “I promise I won’t hurt nobody! Didn’t I help you? Don’t that prove I’m on your side?”

  “I hear ya,” I told him. “Let’s see your hands. Right now, or I’m gon’ put a bullet right through that seat you’re hidin’ behind.”

  “For the love of God!” he said, his words rushing forth in a torrent. “Don’t you unnerstand? The others, they were crazy. This is their home, this goddamn hole. They just wanted to kill you. But me, I’m hardly changed at all. I never wanted to kill nobody. I went along with the rest of ’em so’s I could get on the train. I tried to help you, didn’t I? I ain’t after nothin’, I just wanna live.”

  Though I had been listening to him, during his spiel I had become entranced by the bodies, the stink of gunpowder, the blood and the smoky yellow air. I was amazed to recollect my lack of fear, the ease with which I’d killed…all ent
irely out of character. I wondered if I looked in the mirror whether I’d see black eyes like Cole’s, pupils in the shape of pentagrams or coiled serpents. And I wished I was my old, flawed, cowardly self once again.

  “Last chance,” I told the refugee. “Get your hands high, and then let’s have a look at ya.”

  After a second he complied. He was a puny thing, several inches short of five feet, with a shaggy head of graying black hair. He had a pinched face the color of an old pumpkin, all seamed and wrinkled. I assumed him to be an old-timer, but then I noticed that his hands were those of a young man, that his neck wasn’t crepey, but firmly fleshed. And I realized that what I had taken for wrinkles was actually ropy veins darker than the rest of his skin, and that his features were those of somebody my own age. What would he do out in the world, I wondered, looking like that?

  “Don’t trust him,” said a farmer; and Marie chimed in, “That’s right! Even the innocent-lookin’ ones can be terrors.”

  What she had said had no influence upon me, but I wasn’t about to trust the refugee; he had turned on his companions, and monstrous though they had been, it was nonetheless a betrayal. Besides, I wasn’t certain that the big man had intended to hurt anybody.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “God, it’s been so long since anybody asked me my name,” he said. “I been livin’ with them animals, pretendin’ to be one of ’em…” He gave himself a shake. “Name’s Jimmy Crisp. I was a farmer over in Glory till this no-good son of bitchin’ wife-stealer tied me up and put me on a handcar and set me rollin’ into the Patch. It’s been six years…six goddamn years.”

  A couple of the farmers urged me to shoot Crisp, and I told them to stuff their holes, that I was more likely to be shooting them if they gave me any more grief. Then I noticed Marie, her jaw dropped, staring at something behind me. I turned around just in time to see something whippet-thin and blue-black in color leaping across the aisle and down in back of a seat. In reflex, without thinking what it might be, I blew a hole in the seat and heard a pining cry, birdlike, yet more piercing than that of any bird I knew. And from that cry I realized that I had fired at Tracy—it was the perfect, pained expression of the trapped thing she had mostly been. I fired a second time at the seat, not wanting to know how she had changed. The next moment, as the cry sounded again, drilling through me, Jimmy Crisp grabbed my arm and prevented a third shot. The others yelled for me to shoot, but Crisp, his wizened face looking up close even more like a rotted vegetable, shouted them down.