It wasn’t much cooler in the office, but there was beer and shade. The kid settled onto my ratty, floral-print sofa, and I opened two Yanjings, thinking maybe he was used to the fancy stuff. I still couldn’t get a fix on him, but he dressed like a big spender. He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the knee, glancing at the old gas station signs on the wall.
“What do I call you?” I said.
He frowned into his beer. “P. K.”
“All right, P. K. You want to tell me about your deathwish?”
He shook his head.
“No deathwish. I just want to see my old man again.”
My turn to frown. “Your old man.”
“Yessir. He’s outside.”
I slid my bottle across the desk, back and forth from one hand to the other.
“How far outside?”
“Cherokee North. Between here and Johnson City.”
“That’s a lot of forest.”
He shrugged.
Some guides don’t like to get nosy. Take the job, don’t ask questions. Lot of those guides develop a nasty case of dead.
“You want my help,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what he was doing there.” If Coroner had sent him, I didn’t have many choices here, but maybe the boy didn’t know that. He nodded, answered without hesitation.
“We were out harrowing.”
Christ, I thought. And then: Of course—P. K.: Preacher’s Kid. Should’ve caught that earlier. I finished off the Yanjing, then opened the cooler and unscrewed a jar of whiskey. I’d heard of harrowers before, but never met one alive.
“You were with him,” I said.
“Yessir.”
“He preaches, you shoot. That how it works?”
The kid looked embarrassed. “I haven’t learned to bless yet.”
“And you got separated?”
He inclined his head. “Pack of wolves surprised us. We were running, and my father—” He paused. “He fell. Over a ledge. I saw him roll, heard him call out, but the slope sharpened and—I didn’t see where he landed. I searched until sundown. I love my father, but—” he pursed his lips “—but I’m not stupid.”
“You did right.” I leaned forward. “But you understand he’s dead.”
The boy was silent.
“I ain’t gonna sell you false hope. Your daddy’s gone. I’ll take your money, I’ll take you out there, and I’ll help you make whatever amends you want to make. But I want us both to understand what’s going on here. I don’t want any confusion between us. You have to show me that you know we’re not going to find him smiling.”
“I have to find him,” he said. “I know the odds.”
I wasn’t sure he did. “I ain’t cheap. And I ain’t stupid either.” I told him the deposit. “I need to see triple the advance in a credit account, and I need the account linked to my feed. In the event of my death, the triple transfers automatically to my family.”
Little joke, there. Family.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And if I die?”
“We link your feed to my account. The deposit transfers back.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a feed.”
I’d forgotten. Mark of the Devil. I smiled through a stir of jealousy. The little metal nub in my neck let me work in the city, let me spend and collect credit, but mostly it just felt like a warm seed of debt, always itching beneath my skin, waiting for me to die or default, always threatening to grow.
“We can go to my credit agency and set up a timed withdrawal from my account,” I said. “If you’re not around to cancel it in three days, the advance’ll transfer to the account of your choice.”
He nodded. “Works for me.”
“I think we understand one another, P. K.” I took the Colt from my drawer, set it on my desk. The old, faded sticker on the grip said Keep Asheville Weird. “If you got the yuan, I got the yeehaw.”
And just like that, we were in business.
No one ran outside the law in Asheville without owing money to Coroner. He found you when you were down, desperate, earthless. He fed you, paid your rent. If you wanted to be a guide, he made it easy: Set you up as a company mechanic, pulled all the right bureaucratic triggers to assign you to truckers on his payroll, to divert shipping routes. Last Christmas, he’d bought me a suit of skintight armor straight out of Cupertino. Sometimes it was hard to figure out where the companies ended and Coroner began, but it was absolutely clear who owned you.
Coroner had placed me and Xin Sun together so often that I could tell you her granddaddy’s favorite singer (Johnny Cash) and the city where her mama was born (Raleigh). She was short, wiry, somewhere in her forties, with a line of faded hearts tattooed around her wrist. Her rig was a behemoth, a messy cross between a Humvee and an old furniture truck. I sat in the cab, behind the old automatic rifle mounted on the hood. P. K. huddled in the cargo crawlspace with the liquor.
Xin caught my eye as she eased toward the gate. “You’re a bad person, Ez.”
“Yeah?”
“The daddy’s gone,” she said. “Boy don’t need to see that.”
“I told him. He can make up his own mind.”
She shook her head, scratched her neck. “He’s green as shit. The dead on the moon can see it. You ought to know better.”
“He’s shot his share of dead. He don’t need a mama, Xin.”
She stared straight ahead, gripped the wheel.
Asshole, said the silence.
The traffic light changed, and Xin eased forward again. Bluecoats crowded around us with rifles and pads. My feed ran hot, so I could almost feel their fingers in the back of my neck, sifting through my licenses and permissions, my employers and outstanding debts. The bluecoat captain read through our manifest while his grunts looked over the cargo. Xin ignored me, and I tried not to touch my gun or crack my knuckles or otherwise announce that I was scared turdless. I listened to the clang of footsteps in the back and wondered what the kid was thinking, hidden down there with the liquor.
The footsteps in the back receded. The door slammed shut, and the captain waved us on. I tipped an invisible hat and Xin told him to have a good one.
The gate opened, and we drove outside.
There’s something about leaving a city that makes you want to get drunk and scream. You ride out into the emptiness of the frontier and you can feel the weight of gazes falling away with every mile. Debts, shopping centers, manifests—all that headsmoke recedes until it’s just you and the quiet, the clouds wrapped around road-carved mountains. I watched the trees as we rode out: The leaves were only just tinged with orange. Ahead, the Interstate wound through the broad swells of the Blue Ridge, all steep slopes and sharp drops. If you rode fifteen miles outside of Asheville, you could hardly tell that anyone had ever bothered to live on the mountains. Even the billboards were scarce and choked by kudzu.
“Want to let him out?” said Xin.
“Guess I ought to.”
I pulled myself out of the gunner’s seat, grappled my way to the back and ducked past stacked pallets marked in Portuguese, Italian, Chinese. All the world’s shit packed up in crates. You couldn’t see much by the emergency lights, and as often as I’d navigated Xin’s rig, they packed it a little different every time. I pushed a box of canned soup off of the hidden door, rapped three times, waited, rapped again. I heard the door unlatch from his side, and I pulled it open. P. K. stared out from the crawlspace, his arms crossed over his chest like an old-fashioned corpse, mason jars shifting slightly around him. He was red-faced, his hair sweat-wet against his forehead.
“Thank you,” he breathed.
I offered my hand. “Everything all right down there?”
He blinked. “Are we out?”
“Yessir.”
I helped him up, guided him to the front. “Have a sit-down,” I said, waving him into the gunner’s seat. Xin glanced over her shoulder and smiled at the boy.
“Hope you didn’t sample the whiskey,
” she said. Gently, teasing. “I don’t want Coroner to come knocking.”
He flushed. “No, ma’am. I don’t drink.”
I tried not to imagine Coroner at my door.
Xin laughed. “That so? You’re either wise or insane. Not sure which.”
“Out here,” P. K. ventured, smiling nervously, “I think it’s for the best.”
“Out here, you may be right.”
On the side of the road, empty signs. Words scraped and weathered away. A lone dead woman, one-armed and skeletal, limped along the side of the road, stumbling now and then into the guardrail, threatening to tumble over and down into a far hollow. Xin and P. K. fell silent, and I watched the sky for birds.
I still couldn’t work out what Coroner was trying to say, sending me this job. When I’d called to line up the ride, I asked about the kid, but the minder only told me that the operation was important to the boss. “Make sure the boy and his daddy come back with you,” he’d said. “Finish the job, you’ll be fine.”
Coroner wasn’t an idiot—he knew the preacher was dead by now. Was he trying to play the kid for money? That didn’t make sense; this was small change for him. He wanted the job done, but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know the stakes, didn’t understand what I stood to lose.
Xin braked hard, lashing me out of my thoughts.
I barely caught myself from toppling headfirst into the windshield. Ahead, an eighteen-wheeler lay on its side, its head curled into the median and its ass blocking half of the Interstate, splayed out like a sleeping cat. The semi’s rear turret was shredded, the cow-catcher banged up and twisted into bad art. Gathered around the cab was a cluster of red bears—dead, from the look of them—ripping the skin from the rig. In unison, the bears looked up from their work.
Some people call dead eyes dull, but I’ve never understood that. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.
When guides and truckers get together to drink, you hear talk of road churches that worship the red bears. We’re not a very spiritual lot, but I believe it. Sometimes you got to pray to the thing that scares you. And if you ain’t scared of a twelve-foot, three-thousand-pound monster bred to consume as much flesh as possible, you’re already underground. The companies engineered the red bears to clear the forests of the dead, and on paper, it still sounds like a good idea: Carnivorous cyborg weapons, carrion-eaters with titanium-reinforced skeletons. They were supposed to be uninfectable, a walking immune system for the world outside.
Problem was, they got infected anyway.
I grabbed P. K.’s shoulder, tried to pull him out of the seat, but he shook me off. Four of the animals broke off from the pack, loping toward us. Xin gripped the wheel, shifted the truck into reverse. The approaching dead split into two groups, flanking us; the ones that stayed behind tore open the cab of the downed rig—
Crack.
The nearest bear lurched to the right as blood sprayed from the side of its head. His face blank, P. K. swung the barrel of the rifle toward the next animal, then frowned slightly when he noticed that the first bear was still coming, its jaw hanging loose and swinging side-to-side as it ran. Xin watched the mirror and held the wheel steady, pushing the truck backward as fast as it would go, but the bears moved faster, hardly slowing as P. K. shot them in the chest, in the head. Finally, the one with the loose jaw stumbled and fell forward, as if it was dizzy or out of breath. At first, I thought P. K. had worn it down, but no: its hind legs had collapsed.
The other three bears were close enough that I could see the meat between their teeth. I leaned into P. K.’s ear, shouted over the gun: “Shoot them in the legs.”
He nodded once and concentrated his fire on the space in front of the animals. There was less flesh around the joints where their forelimbs met their paws; red fur and muscle fell away, and bone-alloy gleamed underneath. P. K. didn’t waste a shot, but we’d have to reload soon. The tallest bear staggered and hit the pavement, scraped away its snout as it fell.
The last hurled itself forward and hit our hood. The rig shook, but Xin kept it steady. The bear slumped and fell away then lay still on the road. Xin slowed, and we watched the rest of the dead in the distance. There were seven or eight bears circled there, maybe more. They’d already pulled apart the cab of the fallen truck, and now were eating.
“I can turn us around,” Xin said quietly. “Get off the last exit, bypass the Interstate for a couple miles.”
I wondered about the folks in the middle of that circle. Other truckers. Other guides, maybe. I wondered if I knew them.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”
“I hope they were Christians,” P. K. said softly.
We talked about our families. Xin’s mother, half out of her mind in a nursing home in Charlotte. She didn’t mention her ex-husband and sons. My daughter, grown and living on a Monsanto farm colony in the Pacific, still writing every couple months for money. Xin had heard the story a dozen times before—often enough that she ought to have pegged it for bullshit—but she still watched me with something between warmth and bitterness.
P. K. told us about his father, Joseph. At first, the kid spoke hesitantly, responding to Xin’s questions with short, one-word answers, but finally he relaxed into his story, seeming to surprise himself with the pleasure of the telling.
Joseph hadn’t always harrowed souls in the wilderness. As a young man of the Lynchburg Watch, he’d walked the walls and killed the dead. Joseph had mumbled his prayers since he was a boy, the town being what it was, but he didn’t find religion until a circuit rider passed through in the summer of his twentieth year. He’d only recently become a father, and the death he’d dealt out weighed on him with new urgency, even if it was only the long-rotted he’d sent to their final repose. The circuit rider preached that the souls of the dead still resided in those wasted bodies, that for all their hunger and decay, they could always receive or reject the love of Christ. He preached that the living death was an opportunity, a flesh limbo, and that it was the duty of all Christians to speak the gospel to lost souls and offer them salvation. Just as Christ had descended to Hell to harrow pagan souls, the faithful were bound to travel the wilderness and minister to the dead.
Joseph found his calling. He rode with the circuit man for three years, preaching in the walled cities and preaching to the dead outside, returning now and then to Lynchburg to give his wife and son the money he’d collected from churches throughout the South. When P. K. was seven, Joseph came home to find his wife lost to pneumonia, his son motherless and afraid. For almost a year, Joseph gave up the circuit and raised the boy, working the wall as he’d done before, now hollering salvation as he delivered bullets into creeping bodies.
It was on the wall that he had his Revelation. As he fired his rifle at a cluster of dead in army camouflage, an angel of the Lord seized his tongue and set it ablaze with the language Enoch knew, the words spoken in the Kingdom of Heaven. The dead paused to hear his ministry, and he saw the light of Christ in their eyes. He killed them all immediately, before they could move or doubt. He was ecstatic.
His fervor restored, Joseph resolved to return to the wilderness, this time with his son. P. K. was already a fine shot, a junior watchman. The circuit rider had traveled in an armored truck, declaiming over loudspeakers, but Joseph now understood that glass and metal separated him from the souls he meant to save; he bought two horses and taught P. K. to ride.
“Wait,” I said. “You rode horses? Out here?”
P. K. shrugged. “They’re fast.”
“You’re fucking with me now.”
“No, sir.”
I glanced aside at Xin. She focused on the road, negotiating the sharp, mountainside S-curves of Cherokee North. We had to drive at a crawl, but P. K. said we weren’t far from the last place he’d seen Joseph.
“How do you survive something like those bears?”
He smiled tightly. “I got lucky last night. But the dead stand aside for my father. He
preaches as he rides.”
They stand aside, I thought. Of course.
“What happened next?” said Xin. “He taught you?”
P. K. seemed reluctant. “That’s all there is to tell. He taught me to ride, and we rode. We visited churches often enough to keep food in our stomachs, but his heart was never much in ministering to the living. We spent more and more time in the wild, released thousands of souls to the Lord. Father’s done his best to teach me the tongue of Heaven, but I lack . . . ” He trailed off, stared out the window. “The Revelation,” he finished quietly.
The tires whined as the road wound back around on itself, almost a three-hundred-sixty degree turn. I gritted my teeth, tried not to see the sheer drop to my left or the rock face to my right. P. K. leaned forward, pointed at a graffiti symbol on the rock. “I recognize—”
Something hit the side of the truck. Hard, on the right side.
We screeched toward the side of the road, mangled the guard-rail. “The hell—” Xin shouted. I swung behind P. K.’s seat, pulled on the safety straps and curled into a ball. There was another deep, metal-rending crash, and another, and then the world rolled and blurred. A rank, cloudy explosion as the airbags deployed and then gravity fell out from underneath me, snapped back in brief, vicious cracks against my knees and elbows. I covered my head the best I could, but suddenly it felt hot, and then everything was heavy and dark.
Metal ground against metal, keening.
“Wake,” shouted Xin, “the fuck up.”
Two gunshots. I took a breath like a knife to the chest, opened my eyes. The cab was pillowy and white. Almost heavenly, except for the bent metal and bloodstains. There was a sour stench, piss mixed with sulfur. My feed burned. I moved my fingers, feet, blinked blood out of my eyes. Felt like maybe I’d bruised a rib, but I could sit up, breathe. Limbs intact. Head was wet, but it was a shallow gash.
Xin stood over me, covered in white powder from the airbags. A pleasant, middle-aged phantom with a Desert Eagle. There was a wide hole in the back of the rig. Jeans and soda and high heels, all strewn around like Christmas in the Asheville Mall, not that I’d ever had the yuan or self-loathing to step in there. Three dead men in faded orange jumpsuits peered inside the truck, eager in the instant before Xin shot them down.
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