Black & Orange

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  “Hush, hush!” Her hand floated above the baby’s mouth. I’m not much of a foster parent, am I? The baby boy punched himself in the eye as she slid the wipe once more for good measure. The train already smelled of salt and urine and mildew, so the scent of baby powder was welcome. The other babies rolled around on their blankets but were otherwise calm. Perhaps they felt they’d returned to the womb.

  She positioned the diaper under the baby and began to stick the tabs down. Every Heart she’d met had been old enough to later carry memories with them of the Halloween that almost did them in. To think these babies would never relive this, one way or another, brought her comfort, strangely enough.

  She swaddled each in their blankets and took out her radio. Leaning against an empty drum, she folded her legs inward for warmth. Hours had passed and the possibility of Martin’s plan working seemed more tangible with every minute.

  Until cars pulled into the yard and the sounds of shoes hit the gravel.

  ~ * ~

  I have to say this isn’t at all what I expected.

  As bewildered as I was that Halloween, the Inner Circle that drove into that train yard arrived to outmatch my befuddlement. Chaplain Cloth would be there shortly, and they could wait for his arrival, but if they waited any longer the Hearts might slip away. What would Cloth do if they let that happen? The first Church limo at the scene was abandoned. Cordite already hung on the air. Blood was already speckling the dirt and rocks. It wasn’t a promising start. The newly arrived formed into squads.

  One squad went around a cylindrical tanker car that had once been used to transport high fructose corn syrup. Fifteen different trip mines had been placed just around the corner, buried in dirt and shrouded in standing weeds—and the mines went off, one and two and three and death, death all around.

  The remaining suits retreated between two boxcars. This led to the other squad, which approached their target head on. Another trap sprung. Two mantles raced toward each other: one gathered a mass of church members and the other crashed into them like two silver palms clapping dead a swarm of hornets. Most perished in an instant, crushed into leathery bonebags; functional people one moment, turned into husks dribbling colon particulate the next.

  Five minutes had passed since they separated and their number had been halved. The consensus, not surprising, was to retreat to the limos. It was a wise decision, better than the original plan. What might have made it even better would have been a different route. Thirty mines had been staggered on the main slope and the adjoining slope near the gate. Swift red wings rose and settled. Suits fell in the dirt. Some rolled. Some dropped right there.

  Only four made it back to the limos. A young man recently brought up through the Church called his former boss. The phone rang four times before the automated message came on. He shouted his message: “Bishop Szerszen, this is Jake Weins again. If you didn’t get my message before. We need help. The Nomads have gone to the train yard near the treatment plant off Rancho—We’ve taken casualties. We...” He gave up and his phone came away, shaking in his hand. He pushed END and noted how fitting the button was. Jake Weins tripped a mine a few minutes later.

  Now, I’ve never met Martin Eric Larson. Watched him from a distance, truly, and I’ve written many letters to him over the years, to him and Teresa both, and I have a clear sense of the man. I’ve watched him. He wasn’t a cold, calculating killer. He just knew what needed doing. That’s why I picked him to accompany Teresa. I think I did well. Why, oh why, are our greatest works only appreciated posthumously?

  ~ * ~

  Teresa heard another car pull up not long after the screaming lulled. The hungry sounds of the children came soon after. They would not enter the Void, but she could hear them smacking their lips at the boundary.

  Cloth spoke musically, “Oh TEEREEESAAAA! You in there, somewhere? Coughing up your lungs?”

  He was just outside the train car. Teresa shook her head in disbelief. She’d heard the other mines going off but not the large collection Martin planted just outside. How had Cloth gone around them?

  She waited for the grand explosion but nothing happened. Cloth walked around, crunching gravel, his every step making her edge back toward the Hearts. Even if Cloth knew the mines were there, wouldn’t he have set them off with a mantle to get them out of his way? Could he really be stepping around all of them, oblivious?

  Or were they duds?

  Until then she had no idea what kind of mantle traps her partner had erected. The mines were not working but obviously the mantles were. Chaplain Cloth toiled to disassemble one. It was really complex. Five, no six feet deep—Goddamn you Martin! It would have taken Teresa half a day to create a mantle like that.

  Although stymied, Cloth didn’t seem impressed.

  Teresa began reinforcing other mantles in the interior. Cloth quickly made progress, breaking the outer shell like cracking an egg. She placed her hands on the doors. Martin would return soon. He would figure out his plan had failed. Then they could die together.

  ~ * ~

  Teresa wanted to check her watch. Either she’d be delighted or disheartened, but at this point she was willing to accept anything. Cloth had torn down Martin’s mantle around the train. This had taken him a few hours. In that time, she put the Hearts in their papooses and practiced carrying each over her shoulder. The weight was hardly manageable but when the last of the mantles came down, she would have few options.

  Singing songs, talking, formula, changing diapers—none of it worked to keep them quiet anymore. She didn’t have much time to donate. She had to concentrate outside; she had to stay put, stay by the door, stay and give birth to new mantles. As she put ten up, Cloth tore twenty more down. The strength of the barriers lessened.

  An orange eye stared through the slit in the train car’s door. Moonlight outlined Cloth’s too-perfect teeth and gray gums.

  “I’m awed, Teresa. Truly.”

  She said nothing and set up another mantle, a floppier one than the rest. Cloth continued to talk, but did not pause in deconstruction.

  “You’re sick honey, and perhaps you already know Martin is dead. He’s done well out here but I do believe his well ran dry with the effort.”

  She stiffened. He was trying to get her to let her guard down.

  Cloth hummed then, taking down thirty and forty mantles simultaneously, like he’d just been fooling around until now.

  She wanted to grunt out in dismay, but kept silent. She could hear the gateway behind him, growling for the babies. “If I were lying, wouldn’t Martin have returned by now?” he said. “I might have made up a story, told you he was out here with me, but I respect you too much by now.” Cloth’s voice didn’t hint at any sarcasm.

  Teresa readied to grab the babies and cloak a tight mantle around them. She could go out the opposite doors—foamy blood coursed out from under her fingertips and the sides of her eyes.

  Cloth sounded nonplussed. “You know it’s the babies I want, not a dying Nomad. Come now, will you make Martin’s noble sacrifice all for naught?”

  The look of hunger in the eye seemed from disease rather than need. Something dropped outside the train and Teresa looked through the slit. Moonlight defined the puka shells. They were freckled in dark red spots.

  Her breathing came harder as the necklace came into focus. No! Don’t think about that. Her duty was to the Hearts.

  She said, “Come inside and get them, fuckhead.”

  “This is exhausting, my dear,” said Cloth. “How about this deal? Give over the Hearts and I’ll tell you who the Messenger is. You’ve always wanted to know, haven’t you? Then you can die without it being a mystery.”

  “You’ve mistaken me for an idiot.” Okay, she thought, no more talking. He wants that.

  “Hardly! After all these years, I’m sure you’d like to know. Add a little meaning to the end. The end is coming Teresa. It’s just a matter of how quickly or painfully you choose.”

  Darkness swirled. She
was still.

  The Chaplain sighed. “Very well.”

  He reached out and melted through the mantles like spider webs set aflame. Teresa sent out a heavy mantle and it felt like her spleen collapsed. Through the train door, Cloth had his slimy eyelids shut, concentrating on breaking through. It would not be more than a minute or two.

  She unlocked the back doors and hauled up the papooses on both shoulders. Wobbled at the weight. The babies burbled at the swaying. She toed the door open.

  A bolt struck her shoulder from behind. She smashed into the iron wall with a hollow thrum. The door had come off its hinges. Cloth’s jaw had gone gruesomely slack with glee. Even at several paces she could smell rotten sugar and cotton soaked in death.

  A knot of black suits rounded the tanker trains, rifles raised. Their breathless laughter ratcheted up in the night. Across an alley, the children launched off the ground, eager as can be, moonlight peeling back in their demigod eyes.

  Cloth stepped up the side. “You’ve lost. Again,” he added. “But at least it’s the last time. Right?”

  There were only a few more mantles. None were strong. In Teresa’s mind she saw the faces of the Hearts, the hope that Martin had for them, years on the road, Octobers where they put everything out there. She could say what the hell and give up now.

  But that was when Teresa decided she had something else left.

  Something more.

  And her feet hit the ground and the papooses rocked over her back. The quick mantle she’d popped around them quickly went as Cloth attacked it with the shark teeth of his mind. Every step hurt like fire and ice slamming to the bone. Inner Circle followed and the children vaulted madly as she went toward them. A hoarse shout came from Cloth.

  Teresa turned a corner and tripped over a forty ounce beer bottle. She used her knees for the fall and the earth numbed them. Standing up, hard on her feet, babies coughing and gagging, she drove on, outside the boundaries of the Void. At once the children poured over the trains. Chaplain Cloth was the black eye of their storm.

  Teresa ran between to train cars. The path ended at a block wall. Her long journey finished there.

  The pathway to the Old Domain sucked opened in a sidecar. Arms pulled and pried at the apple sized opening far down its corridor. Marble pillars stood behind them.

  Savage growls turned her. The children swarmed around Cloth’s legs and went straight for Teresa. She kicked at them as they crawled up her legs and grappled her hair. She tried to summon another mantle. Her mind failed and the surge increased. Teresa crawled back against the block wall. The Children slowed, sizing up an opportunity when to attack.

  “Chaplain!” someone shouted through the madness. “Chaplain Cloth!”

  The man limped through the crowd, a walking mass of scab and bleeding wounds.

  The children dove in at Teresa. Some of their teeth sank in and stripped the papooses off her arms and she collapsed under their increasing weight. There was no strength left to scream.

  “This is what has come to be!” she heard the man rumble over the fray. It sounded like his mouth was full of mucus and blood. Teresa throttled the Children on her and more eagerly moved forward. In the crowd, the big bleeding man elbowed past the others. “She’d still be alive. Melissa might have lived! In the tome The Tides of Loss and Martyrdom—it has said ‘he hath the worthiness of the Church of Midnight and shall move into power through a blessing from the Knight of the gateway, or through immolation.’”

  Cloth moved for Teresa.

  “Chaplain! Did you hear me? Melissa might have lived!” The man clutched Cloth’s suit and suddenly halted his progress.

  The Chaplain whipped around, ready to kill. “Szerszen!”

  Caked blood cracked over the man’s forehead. “I wanted you to know I’m worthy.”

  Cloth pushed out violently with his mind. In a split second the big man and two Inner Circle women roared into flames. The big man stumbled once with a drunken grin, his fiery coat blowing open to reveal a jungle of wires. Over his bloody stomach, some of Martin’s landmines had been cannibalized. The image was brief in Teresa’s sight. A green-red-orange-white light brightened on top of the wiry muddle. A blink.

  Then the space between the trains erupted.

  Cloth brought a mantle. It flickered inside the explosion, brought about too late. Pieces of the chaplain’s wormy flesh tossed into the air and bone fragments rained down with black fabric and fire. A number of the children were taken as well, fulminating pieces like spiced intestines.

  Unmoved, the remaining children that had dragged off the papooses pressed forward to the gateway. Slobber fell over their fangs and they licked the points as the babies drew closer to the opening. The gateway widened inside the train’s steel and the arms down its hall quickened to pull the tiny aperture wider. “Come to us! The Archbishop of Morning demands you!” a deep voice sang.

  The explosion still rang in Teresa’s ears so loud to make her nauseous but she had enough clarity to rip her gun from her jeans and cap each creature in their orange skulls. Jelled orange blood squirted neatly with each shot. They fell limply off the papooses. With strength that came from somewhere completely foreign, Teresa hauled all four Hearts over a shoulder. Holding her gun out, she tramped through the fleshy debris made of Cloth and the Church members. Clear across a collection of ghost trains, there was a mottled green caboose. It was not in the Void area but something told her that was the place. She told herself it was Martin, to trust him above everything else. Her feet crushed the broken glass and litter. More fatherless Children came sliding out of the shadows. The night air was hot now and burned her lungs.

  A blast of pain lanced through her neck. A child forced her to the ground. Teresa snuggled her gun into its eye and fired. It dropped off without a squeal.

  She clamored inside the caboose and laid the sobbing babies inside. A rolling orange spate seethed outside. She grasped the heavy door. It was rusted shut. She put her entire weight there but it held in place. The orange jack-o’-lantern faces became more distinct, closer. Putting her legs against the wall of the train, putting her whole body into the work, the caboose inched close. She could see some of the children flaked in the gore of their father.

  The door shut and opened again—a muddy padlock lay on the floor. Her fingers grazed it and the lock spun away. The door pulled wider and a rawboned arm swept inside. Using her foot, she brought the lock within reach and rammed the door shut, snipping off the little orange arm at the elbow. The lock’s horseshoe snapped around the bar.

  Teresa edged back, almost tripping over the babies. For a long while she examined them for injuries. It was very dark, but she believed they were all right. They were breathing and their hearts were beating. But everything was not fine in the world. No, she wouldn’t think of Martin. She wouldn’t address that yet.

  Disturbed thoughts kept her afloat for some time, until, finally, the Hearts’ power faded. Outside the children simultaneously shattered, one after another, like bursting bladders full of orange poison. She could feel the vitality leave the babies instantly and the bond with it. The Hearts were ordinary again; the god-touch had departed, which meant only one thing.

  We did it, Martin.

  Teresa fell asleep at once. The Jordons joined her.

  And daylight burned off the shadows.

  EPILOGUE

  November 1st

  The trip on the bus wasn’t long, but was. A young Japanese woman with blue hair, fishnets and slightly running mascara sat cattycorner to Teresa, head against the window. It was difficult to tell if she dressed this way all the time. The look fit her insouciance.

  Hangover-eyes fresh with morning crimson. “Proud mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Jordons had not protested since boarding. All of them were perfect little soldiers. They’d survived something many wouldn’t, and would likely never remember any of it. No serious injuries could be found. Only little Rebecca had sustained a yellow, sta
r-shaped bruise over her right cheek. Teresa occasionally rubbed her thumb over it, as though a touch could heal.

  The walk from the bus stop to the Happy Moon Travel Lodge lasted twenty long minutes. Teresa couldn’t get excited when she saw the Wrangler parked out front. In a different frame of mind, being less weary and less baby-burdened, she might have gathered hope. She knew the truth though, even before she spotted the Messenger’s white envelope under the windshield wiper.

  She didn’t bother taking it. Maybe that was a mistake. She guessed she’d find out. Right now, I can’t give a fuck. She just couldn’t.

  Upstairs Enrique paced outside the room. He looked feverish with worry. Dirt and cuts crusted his face and arms. He grinned and nodded as she approached, all of the pain and anguish vanishing. He took one papoose, not saying a word, maybe thinking he’d jinx the moment if he did.

  They went into the motel room, which smelled of cloves and old vinyl, and sat on the bed. The Bearer changed each child and from his knapsack made them bottles. He fed two at a time. Teresa wanted to help but her pulse was racing. She unearthed a well deserved clove and opened the door. She popped the spicy Djarum in her mouth and let it hang from her lip as she pulled out a disposable lighter. “What will happen to them? Will they go back to the Jordons?”

  “They have different homes waiting for them. Different destinies. I will see each of them to their new parents.”

  “What will you do then, Enrique?”

  The unexpected heartbreak in his face almost compelled her to go put an arm around him. It was one of the most pathetic expressions she’d ever seen. “I will try,” he told her, “to pick up where I left off back home. I do not expect I will be so lucky. But I will try. One must carry on, right?

  “Right,” she blandly answered.

  “What will you do now?”