“You good?” she asked.
“Golden. P. K.?”
“Up top.” She gestured toward the roof with her head. “Looks like they hit us with rocks.”
I unbuckled the safety straps, stood up shakily. Almost fell, but steadied myself against the driver’s seat.
“Kid have a gun?” I asked, fumbling for my holster.
“He’s got the rifle.”
“So why isn’t he shooting?”
Xin bit her lip. I flicked off the safety on my Colt, and we pressed our way to the back, kicking aside boxes of designer boots, finally stepping outside. It looked like Xin had killed the last of the orange-suited dead: there was nothing but breeze and the glare of afternoon light. The truck was caught between two large trees; we hadn’t rolled all the way to the bottom, maybe hadn’t rolled that far at all, which meant we were still on a sharp slope.
Also, P. K. wasn’t up top.
I ripped the handset from my belt. Prayed it wasn’t broken.
“Where the hell are you?” I hissed.
There was a long silence. I wondered what Coroner would do if I lost the boy. Lost the money. “Down the hill a bit,” P. K. answered at last, his voice crackling on the handset. “To the east. You can probably still see me.”
And there he was, through the trees: A dot.
“I already sent the SOS,” Xin said, leaning into my handset. “Company’s coming. Maybe thirty minutes. We just got to wait here.”
P. K. said, “My old man’s close. I can find him in half an hour.”
“Wait here for the rescue,” Xin said. “We’ll all go out and look for him.”
He gave a sad little laugh. “The company’s not going to send out a search party. You know that. All they care about is their cargo and whatever they can salvage from the truck. My father’s less than meaningless to anyone but me.”
Well, I wanted to say, he is dead. Instead, I started down the hill.
“Slow down,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”
“What?” said Xin.
I took my thumb off the handset.
“Kid can’t die,” I said, wondering how much honesty I could afford.
“You mean you need the money.”
I held on to a low tree limb with my free hand. Moved ahead, grabbed hold of another tree, all the while trying not to slip on leaves or trip on roots.
“Jesus, Ez.” Xin was flushed, agitated. She took a step forward, not following me so much as making sure I could hear her. “We all need the money. But it’s no goddamned good if you’re dead.”
“Not true. Boy owes me a pile if I die.”
“Yeah? What if you both get eaten?”
“That’ll be complicated. May have to hire an accountant.”
“I save your life and you’re going to leave me alone. All those times we rode together, you’re going to leave me alone.”
I forced myself to keep walking, to fix my eyes on the kid. “You know guilt don’t work on me, Xin. Lock yourself in the crawlspace. Pour a few shots, drink to our health, and don’t let the rescue team leave without us.” I stepped over another corpse in an orange jumpsuit, pale and gaunt and forest-scratched, its face little more than a skull beneath skin. These were the desperate dead, the old and ravenous. The fatter, younger, brighter ones favored the night, when the sun wouldn’t rot muscle from their bones.
“Ez,” said Xin. “The boy’s lying.”
I stopped.
“I don’t know what’s truth and what’s lies,” she said. “But I seen him before. Back home, at the New French. Playing cards and throwing back shots.” She lowered her voice, spoke in a high-speed hiss. “That no-ma’am-I-don’t-drink business was horseshit, and I reckon he’s been in Asheville a lot longer than a night. I don’t know what his game is here, but I don’t feel like dying for a lie today. Just stay back. If the kid gets himself killed, well, we lose a little money. We’ll have another job tomorrow.”
Was she telling the truth? Or just trying to keep me from getting myself killed? As long as Coroner was knocking on my door, it didn’t really matter.
“Tomorrow’s too late,” I said.
She shook her head and stepped back. She said, “You stupid asshole.”
I worked my way down.
P. K. waited in a hollow where the ground flattened out. There was a creek nearby, invisible but mumbling. He forced a smile, cradled the M-16. His clothes were sweat-soaked, weighted down with ammunition. The air smelled smogless and new. Like God had just invented it and still thought it was good.
“You ain’t a tourist,” I said.
He shrugged a shoulder, then turned away and raised his rifle toward the trees. Skipped over a rocky outcrop and made toward the sound of the creek. “I told you. I’ve spent every day outside for as long as I can remember. We should keep our mouths shut.”
Ordinarily I’d have welcomed the caution. There was a certain flavor of tourist who hooted his glee every time he pulled a trigger, or almost pulled a trigger, or thought about pulling triggers. But silence seemed ridiculous now, and I didn’t appreciate the boy hushing me. “We’re the only game in town, kid. Every corpse for miles around already knows we’re here.”
He gave another half-shrug.
The creek was low enough that we didn’t bother walking on stones. Tadpoles flitted around our boots. On the other side, we started moving uphill again. The leaves here were shot through with streaks of red, as if we’d stumbled our way deep into autumn.
“You’re a hell of a good son,” I said. “Boy your age usually wants to strangle his daddy.”
He looked back. “Did you strangle yours?”
“Never knew him. But I wanted to.” I paused. “Strangle him, I mean.”
He chewed that over a while. “Where did you grow up?”
“Richmond.”
“Never heard of it.”
“That’s because it ain’t there anymore.”
The flutter of birds overhead. You could depend on birds. They died and stayed dead. Twigs snapped underfoot. The climb sharpened.
“I have to be honest with you,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Sometimes, I think I’m not a good enough person.”
“I know I’m not.”
“I mean to speak the tongue. The angels’ language.”
“Are you an angel?”
“No.”
“There you go.”
P. K. pursed his lips, looked like he wanted to say something. Instead, he pointed up. I followed the line of his finger to the purpling sky ahead and the silhouette of an old fire tower. When clients wanted to hunt, I took them to towers like that. Tall, ancient, sturdy. Dead folks are slow climbers.
“That’s where he’ll be,” said the boy. “I should warn you—”
I raised my hand to cut him off. Listened.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered.
The strongest argument against talking when you’re outside is that your voice masks important warnings. Like the sound of feet against dirt, running.
We sprinted up the hill. P. K. scanned the woods ahead, his rifle following his eyes, and I glanced back over my shoulder. My lungs felt like someone had balled them up, pissed on them, and stapled them into my ribcage, but I pushed on, legs dragging underneath me. My feed was hot with its broadcast of I am alive, I am still alive, I will pay my debts, and a tendril of shame shot through the middle of my fear, because this was the only reason anyone cared that I was alive, to earn and owe money. We made it halfway to the tower before I saw our pursuers, and realized I’d been wrong about the sound.
It wasn’t just feet against the dirt.
There were also paws.
The wolves were ragged, skeletal things, ribs half-exposed beneath gray and white fur. They wove like steel needles through the trees. A man and a woman trailed the wolves, wearing tattered green uniforms. I fired at the closest animal. Missed.
“Behind us,” I rasped.
P. K
. twisted around as he ran, took aim, tore the front legs off the wolf I’d missed. I couldn’t tell how many were left—they ducked in and out of sight, gray-green blurs, faces of the forest. One appeared a body’s length from P. K.’s left side; I got it in the head, almost fell over the body as it crumpled. Caught my footing and squeezed off a shot at the man in green.
The dead didn’t breathe, didn’t growl or hiss or groan. They watched and lunged and snapped, silent. Eyes flashed ahead. They flanked us with a kind of brutal grace, closing from every side with each footfall, and I had one of those idiot epiphanies that seem profound when you’re dizzy with adrenaline and about to be eaten: It’s like they’re dancing. Every lunge in concert, every bite. We were going to die because the dead were dancers.
The kid stopped.
I was running too fast, too close behind him. We hit the dirt. Someone shouted, but I didn’t understand the words. I smelled rotted meat. I tried to stand but my legs were tangled; someone was still shouting. My shoulder throbbed. Each breath was a suckerpunch. I gripped the Colt, braced for the bite, and someone was still shouting. I looked up.
The dead all stared at the man in black.
He was tall, pale. He wore a day’s gray-brown stubble and his eyes were hidden by the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat. His voice was hoarse but commanding as hunger—every nonsense syllable he shouted was a slap, a crack, all thunder and hard edges. The dead folks slumped as he spoke, cowed or subdued or enraptured. The wolves pawed the dirt, uncertain, saliva dripping from their mouths, their eyes never leaving the preacher. Joseph took off his hat and stared down at his son, his blue eyes blunt, and then he spoke English instead of the babble of Heaven.
“Go on and shoot ’em,” he said. “My throat hurts like a bitch.”
When I first came to Asheville, I’d lived for six months with an ex-Pentecostal poet from the mountain collectives south of Blacksburg. Once, after a night of smoke and sweat and Blackjack, she’d given me slurred lessons in glossolalia, giggling as she coached me on tongues. There were, she said, patterns in the babble. Sounds that looped and recurred. Subtle cadences. The language of Heaven was poetry without meaning, empty words taking shapes.
There was an art to it.
Silently, I wrapped my tongue around the syllables of Joseph’s sermon. Nalumasakala, sayamawath, shit like that. Kidsounds, but they’d tamed the dead. The man had reached out with his tongue and controlled them. I tried to memorize his rhythms and words that weren’t words. I wanted to beg him to preach again.
Joseph wasn’t lost. He wasn’t stranded or waiting for saviors. He was at home, at ease.
There was a reinforced steel stable at the base of the tower—a horse grunted inside. After we killed the last of the dead, Joseph lit a cigarette and gestured to a rope ladder. Invited us up for coffee. “I ain’t got much to offer,” he said, “but I can boil you some beans.”
P. K. didn’t move. “You need to come with us,” he said, terse and low. “Rescue’s coming soon, but we have to meet them on the other side of the creek.”
“Already told you. I ain’t going nowhere.”
P. K. gripped his rifle. “Father. You can’t live out here.”
Joseph snorted. “Missed you too, Christopher. How you like the city? You going to introduce me to your friend?”
“He’s a tour guide. He’s here to help. You’re sick. We want to help you.”
Christopher. The kid glanced at me, frowned.
“My name’s Ezekiel,” I said. Held out my hand. He eyed me carefully, then shook it.
“You from around here?” he asked.
“No, sir. Richmond.”
He grimaced, exhaled smoke. “You had people there?”
My joke, my family. “I did.”
“I passed through, once. Few months after Christopher left.” He flicked ash into the dirt. “You see that place, you have a hard time looking the Lord in the eye.”
I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Yes, sir.”
“Father,” Christopher pressed. “You need to come with us now.”
Joseph shook his head. “It’s good to see you, son. I’m happy to drink a cup of coffee with you, and you can tell me what it is you really want. Grace Baptist took up a collection last month—you need money, we can talk. But I ain’t going to live inside of walls for you.” He turned around, started to walk back to his ladder.
And P. K.—Christopher—hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle.
The preacher crumpled.
My instinct was to reach for the Colt, but I balled my fist and stood very still. Christopher kneeled and fumbled in his father’s jacket, withdrew a ring of keys.
“He doesn’t want to leave the wilderness anymore,” he said. “He’s senile. He needs saving. If you want to help him, the best thing you can do is help me get him on the horse.”
You could smell the bullshit in every word. I watched him as he searched through his daddy’s keys, and I remembered Xin’s story about the New French. I remembered that the minder told me to bring back the old man, and a nasty hunch worked itself out in my head. I would have shaken my head in grudging admiration, but no one had told me, and that left me scratching the nub in the back of my neck. Feeling the dim heat of my feed, the constant heat of debt and return. Coroner had sent me into this blind, and now I was stuck, choiceless. Why had he chosen me? Because I was dependable? Or because he thought I was stupid, expendable?
Finish the job and you’ll be fine.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll get this arm, we’ll hold him up together.”
We pulled his father to his feet, draped his arms over our shoulders and carried him to the stable. Christopher unlocked the steel door, and we hauled Joseph inside. The place was cramped and thick with shit-stink. Bars of light slanted through the grates, and the ground was covered with hay. The horse huffed, stepped back. It was gaunt, its fur as black as Joseph’s coat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such a large animal alive. Rodents tended to stay dead, but most mammals bigger than cats were liable to come back. You didn’t see them much in the cities.
The horse was calm; it let us push Joseph onto its back without much fuss. We swung the preacher around by his legs so that he was sitting more or less upright, his head hanging forward. Christopher climbed onto the horse, inclined his head to me. “Thank you,” he said.
Then he shot me in the chest.
The blast knocked me into the dirt. Even with the armor under my coat, it felt like someone had jackhammered the breath out of me, and I fought to suck down air. Christopher’s horse charged into the woods, and for a beautiful, adrenaline-soaked moment, I stopped worrying about money and consequences and Coroner. I raised the Colt, fired.
The first shot missed. The second hit its mark, and the boy toppled from the horse. The animal panicked, reared back, and knocked off the preacher, who fell on his side and rolled.
I winced and climbed to my feet. Staggered outside in time to see the kid duck behind a tree, weaving and heavy-breathing but alive, the M-16 in hand. I pulled the trigger again, splintered bark, took cover behind a fallen trunk.
It looked an awful lot like Coroner had bought the kid Californian armor, too.
“So,” I called, “You want to sell your old man?”
Christopher coughed. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “Is that why you’re shooting at me? Because I’m a bad son?” His shot grazed bark, burned moss, whistled over my head. “Or do you want to sell him yourself?”
“Didn’t plan on it,” I said. I slid down the length of the log, listened for footsteps or tells. “I just make a point of shooting folks who shoot me.”
He was silent.
“I want to know if I got this right,” I shouted. I willed him to make a move while I talked, willed him to peer out and try to find me. “You were sick of it, weren’t you? The preaching. The wilderness. You were sick of it, and you were sane, and you wanted to go live with the living, so yo
u ran off to the city and got caught up in cards and whiskey. Do I have it right so far?”
Wind in the leaves. The snap of a reloaded magazine. I focused on the snap, raised the barrel of the Colt over the log.
“You play the tables long enough in the New French, you start owing money around town. Which, in the end, really just means you owe Coroner. I bet it wasn’t long before Coroner came calling, and you started to wonder what you could give him to get him off your back. Then you remembered your daddy, and it all—”
He cut me off with a thundercrack. I fired twice over the log.
The Colt clicked.
Christopher must have heard it. He coughed and fired into the dead tree, tearing through moss and bark and wood as if he were hacking with a machete, moving closer and coughing and ripping apart the air—
And then he stopped.
There was a snap, and the woods fell silent.
I peered over the log.
She held him like a lover. His head hung limp, twisted. Her forearm was mangled, her mouth bloodstained. She was still covered in the powder from the airbag. Three dead rescue workers in camouflage armor staggered through the trees behind her.
I gave up, then.
Those armor suits, so bulky and futile. Xin Sun with blood in her mouth. Everyone was dead. No one was coming for me. And even if I found my way home, Coroner would be waiting.
Xin pressed her lips against the dead boy’s throat. At first, it looked like a kiss. And then it didn’t. She opened the artery, ripped away muscle. Her eyes flicked to the side and met mine; she seemed torn between finishing her meal and moving on to me. The boy’s blood ran down the front of her shirt. The rescue crew’s legs were all bent into painful angles—maybe they’d wrecked—but they still hitched toward us, inch by inch.
“You were right,” I said softly. “I’m a stupid asshole.”
She watched me, shifted her weight. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.
“I can’t go back to the city. Don’t know why I’d go back, anyway. I ain’t got no family, no daughter in California. All I got is a landlord and some funerals I ain’t paid for.”
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