Blood filled my mouth. My palms scraped raw against the pavement.
“Slim Sarah! Slim Sarah!”
I crawled away on my hands and knees to avoid being crushed by a parade float. Someone laid me out flat with a kick to the ribs. The pain shuddered up my bones and my stomach. I called out for Jeanine again, even though I knew she couldn't hear me.
“Slim Sarah! Slim Sarah! Slim Sarah!”
I glanced up and saw Slim Sarah on a red parade float. She sat hunched over on a plastic throne, her dog face even more bloated and jaundiced than I remembered from the television. She wore a crown of white flowers and a purple robe. Her sole remaining child, shy Meadow, crouched at the foot of the plastic throne in a stained white gown.
The more the people cheered the further Slim Sarah sank down into her plastic throne.
I reached the edge of the street and 88managed to get up and push past the women lifting up their skirts and showing me the wasp hives glued to their thighs. I dodged past the men shoving charbroiled plastic body parts into my face, my chest and I ran out of the city toward the trees.
The sun sunk down into the western desert sands, leaving the sky cold. The black moon emerged to eclipse the sun. Behind me the parade continued to rage. I ran into the woods.
“Jeanine!”
A low groan answered in response. The trees shivered.
“Jeanine?” I whispered.
I walked deeper into the trees. Between the leaves metal flashed. The trees opened up into a clearing, and in the middle of the clearing I found a cage.
The cage was full of prophets and saints.
They stood together naked and stripped. Their hair was cut away and their magic staffs and flamethrowers pried from their hands. All of the whispering machines were ripped out of their chests and their shiny spheres pried out of their heads, leaving them hollowed out for the wind to blow straight through. I approached the cage from across the clearing.
"Charles, is that you?"
“Who said that?” I asked.
“In here,” came the response.
It was Jonah, speaking to me from inside the cage. He motioned for me to come closer, and then pressed a finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. I reached out to touch the bars. They were so cold my fingers stuck to the iron. Jonah pressed his forehead against the bars, leaving sharp red marks against his skin.
"Where’s Jeanine?” he whispered.
"I don't know. I lost her back in the parade."
"Is she dead?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
The prophets and saints huddled together, trying to cover their nakedness. Some were brain damaged from the removal of their implants. They scratched marks at the corners of their mouths and plucked at the tender wells of their wrists, or they sat on the floor of the cage with their heads between their knees in half comas, states of delirium and bad dreams.
"What are you doing in a cage?" I asked.
"I've fallen from grace," Jonah said, "I told you I was behind quota. Couldn't keep up the demands of being a prophet of God. I haven't slept for months, you know, not really. Or maybe it's been years. Hard to tell."
I said nothing.
"Anyways, since you're here now, I wanted to tell you I was sorry for kicking you out of my office. It wasn't your fault, or Jeanine's, for that matter. I knew I was going to be punished like this for quite a long time."
"Punished?" I asked, "I don't understand. You're a prophet. Prophets don't get punished."
"If you want to ignore the evidence," Jonah said. He tilted his head and pointed to the empty space where his shiny satellite used to be. "See this? Now Jeanine and I both have holes. We can never go back to who we used to be."
"Charles?" someone else called from the cage, "Charles from Edgewater? Your sister is Theresa?"
"Yeah," I said, my voice hoarse and scratchy, "yeah. That's me."
Another prophet appeared beside Jonah at the bars of the cage.
"Ezekiel?" I asked.
"Yep, that's me," he said, "nice to see you again, Charles."
"What are you doing in here?"
"I fucked your mom."
"What?"
Ezekiel laughed. "Just kidding. You should have seen the look on your face. Got any cigarettes?"
"No," I said, "sorry."
"Too bad. Well, if you want to know the truth, I've fallen from grace. Just like Jonah, Just like everyone else in here. Daniel and Elijah over there didn't have high enough conversion rates. Moses forgot to circumcise his baby. The women over in the corner? Saints who couldn't perform enough miracles."
"I don't understand," I repeated, my voice a whisper, "I thought you stopped seeing me back in Edgewater because you thought I was a heretic. But you're here. Inside a cage. I don't understand."
Ezekiel shrugged.
"They took me away the night I killed Smarts. Seems I’d been on God’s shit list for a long time. We all fall from grace sooner or later," he said, "Maybe one day you forget to look both ways when you cross the street, and then it's all over for you. God casts you out of his sight forever."
"What about forgiveness?"
Both Jonah and Ezekiel laughed.
"Do they still teach that to the kids in school," Ezekiel asked, "forgiveness?"
I said nothing.
"Hey, can I ask you something?" Jonah said to me, "if you ever see Jeanine again, can you tell her something? Tell her... tell her that-"
"-that you loved her, right?" I asked.
"No, don't tell her that. It's too late for that."
Another groan shook the earth and the trees. Closer this time. The sound barreled through my chest.
"Time to leave, Charles," Ezekiel said.
"What should I tell Jeanine?"
"Oh, I don't know," Jonah said, and laughed, this miserable, dry laugh, "Tell her I still don't give a damn about her."
Ezekiel spoke again. "Didn't you hear me? Leave. Do you want to die? Charles. Look at me. You need to leave."
I ignored Ezekiel and pressed my face against the cold bars. I tightened my grip until my nails cracked against the steel.
"I need to know what God wants from us."
"If we knew that do you think we would be in here?" Jonah asked.
"Where do monsters come from?" I asked, "why do slip implants exist? And why did that murderer get a giant parade thrown for her?"
Ezekiel threw up his hands.
"Okay, I'll tell you what I know. Seeing as how we've got about three minutes left to live, I might as well make the best of it. And I actually liked you, Charles. You know, before you started hanging out with that crazy ass bitch and avoiding me.”
"We don't know anything, except that the end times are approaching," Jonah said, “God threw Slim Sarah a parade to set an example for others. To cow us into obedience.”
"Oh, but you make it sound so foreboding when you say it like that," Ezekiel said, and rolled his eyes.
“I've never known a time when the end times weren't approaching,” I said.
“Jonah is partially right,” Ezekiel said, “we really don't know anything. We're given the quotas by the high priests, how many sinners to damn, how many miracles to perform, etcetera, and even they really don't know anything. Except that soon the earth will be destroyed in a display of holy wrath.”
“You decide who gets sent to the shuttles?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ezekiel said, “but it's completely arbitrary. A random process. We just have to fill the quotas the high priests give us, and it doesn't matter how. When you get put into a shuttle and sent to hell, just consider yourself unlucky.”
“Everyone's a sinner, right?” Jonah said.
Another groan. Closer this time. Several of the prophets and saints inside of the cage cried out and held onto each other.
Ezekiel reached through the bars of the cage and grasped my shirt.
“Get out of here, Charles.”
“Why are you so worked up?” Jonah asked him, “he'l
l be dead soon enough. He's searching for his girlfriend or something like that. Couldn't even see that my sister was in love with him.”
I heard footsteps now. Slow and lumbering. With every step the ground shook underneath us. The force of it threw me against the cage. I held onto the bars to steady myself.
“What?” I said.
“My dumb sister was in love with you. Do I really need to say it again? Why else would she be risking her life coming all the way here from Edgewater to help you? You're looking for someone who's probably dead, when you had Jeanine all along. But now she's gone too, and it's all your fault.”
“Maybe if you would have helped us this wouldn't have happened,” I said.
“I hardly had a role to play when it came to you dragging my sister halfway across the world on a mad quest to look for a dead woman.”
“Why do you even care?” I asked, “you were so concerned with yourself you wouldn't speak to her after being estranged for over ten years.”
The heavy footsteps continued to flow through my ears like blood.
“You know I couldn't have helped you,” Jonah said.
“I'm really glad I get to spend the last few seconds of my life listening to you two bitch at each other,” Ezekiel said, “this is a real great way to kick things off, let me tell you.”
“I'm not finished asking you questions yet,” I said to Ezekiel.
“I'm not going to be able to tell you what you want to know,” Ezekiel said, “but I can tell you this.”
Ezekiel squeezed my shirt between his fists then, as if to keep himself from falling. He pressed his forehead against the bars as if to touch my forehead. His dark eyes were shiny and hard as glass.
“The human brain has the unique ability to doubt the reality presented to itself. To comprehend the dissonance between ideas and the truth of the surrounding world. God knows this, and it infuriates him. It terrifies him.”
“There's no point in telling him” Jonah said, “he's going to die like everyone us.”
Ezekiel ignored him and continued speaking.
“This is why from the moment we are born we are forced into fear. Even the prophets and saints, even the high priests. A human in fear can be easily manipulated.”
I breathed heavy, as if I couldn't force enough air through my lungs. I grasped the bars of the cage until I thought the bones in my wrists might break. The footsteps pounded into my brain. The musky scent of a dirty animal, oak and rot and hair, blew through the trees.
“Remember that,” Ezekiel said, “remember why you shouldn't be afraid.”
“Don't tell him things like that,” Jonah said, “it won't do him any good when he goes back to Edgewater and the flood waters rise up to his neck.”
“I'm not going back. I'm going to search for Jeanine. And if you're right about her, if she really does love me, then I'll quit and go home. I won't put her through anymore of this. But if I can't find Jeanine, then I'm going to keep searching for Leda.”
“She’s dead, and you know it. You've run out of options.”
“Maybe. It doesn't matter,” I said, “I'm going to the sea.”
A chilled shadow crossed over the iron cage. Several of the prophets and saints looked up in its direction.
“One more thing,” I said, “is God real?”
“Oh, he’s real all right,” Ezekiel said, “and you better hope you never meet the son of a bitch.”
I turned and saw a monster approach with his body expanding between the trees as if to fill the entirety of space, his hooves scraping crescent shaped wounds into the dirt. He had an elongated deer face, with a quivering brown nose and blue woman eyes. His velvet tipped antlers, draped in kudzu and bloodied clothing, rose upwards like the branches of a tree, snarled and bent and growing forever and ever.
The monster groaned.
“Get the fuck out of here, Charles,” Ezekiel said. He released my shirt.
The monster ripped open the door of the iron cage. He grabbed a prophet in his enormous, leathery hands and crushed his spine. Blood spurted from out between the monster's fingers and the prophet died with his spine piercing his tongue.
“Thank you,” I whispered to Ezekiel as the monster tore off half his head. Ezekiel's face went blank and his eyes turned pale. He slumped face down to the floor of the cage and the empty space in the back of his head filled up with blood. The monster then grabbed Jonah and ripped his spinal cord out with his teeth.
As I ran I expected for the screaming to start, as it always did. But I only heard the quiet chuffing of the monster's breath and the breaking of bones.
Chapter Seven
When I got back to the city I found that the parade had already ended. Floats and masks lay discarded in the streets. On the television, Teddy hovered on a string over Delilah's body.
“I declare this parade a smashing success!” he said. Delilah laughed and laughed.
I roamed the streets searching for Jeanine, calling her name. The police approached me shortly afterwards, biting their masks.
“You need to leave,” one of them said, “the parade is over.”
“I’m looking for a girl,” I said, “I think she loved me.”
They laughed at me.
“Go home. People get lost all time. And she probably didn’t love you anyways.”
I tried to squeeze my hands into fists, but I had no energy left. They lay limp and sick by my sides. I thought of protesting, but then I remembered the horned monster in the forest, his slumped and spattered head.
“Why are you still here? We already told you, she didn’t love you.”
“It doesn’t matter, whether she did or not,” I said, my voice hoarse, “it doesn’t matter. I still loved her. At least, I did once.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” was the response.
I left the capitol and collapsed in the desert.
A girl in a vellum dress found me face down in the sand. She circled around me for a long time, making noises like a vulture. I tried to get up and speak to her, but I couldn’t move. The heat ensconced me like a second skin. I thought perhaps, if I didn’t move I could sink straight through the ground. But eventually the girl grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me down into the ruins of an abandoned temple.
Inside the temple she hauled me up onto a slab of concrete, and then rolled me over onto my back. I opened my eyes half-lidded and saw a mosaic of a blank faced monster waiting above me.
She stripped off what remained of my clothes and drew symbols on my chest with red paint.
“Damn you,” I said, “I'm not dead yet.”
“Yes you are,” she said.
She tried to hook her fingers into my mouth. I bit the tip of her nail and she jerked her hands back.
The girl pulled her hair away from her face. Her face had been burned away. Her eyes were nothing more than caverns of empty space. Her cheeks were chasms full of powder. When she turned her face I saw the gleam of her teeth visible underneath her translucent skin.
She pulled a knife out from beneath the folds of her dress. I gripped the edges of the slab. A sacrificial stone, I realized. A sacrificial altar.
“Let's not hurt each other,” I said, “please. Please don't do this.”
She growled and lunged at me. I kicked her face and it collapsed in on itself. The knife clattered away and the girl's body hit the floor. I rolled off the concrete slab and dragged myself across the floor toward her. She had ceased breathing, and her collapsed face no longer resembled anything human.
“I'm so sorry,” I said, burying my face in her dirty hair, “I'm so sorry.”
For a long time I lay beside her on the floor, shaking and stroking her burnt neck and shoulders and arms. I called her Leda. I called her Jeanine. She just crumpled into the floor.
When I finally let her go I found her living space in the corner of the room, underneath the icon of a monster with seven heads and seventeen arms. She had slept on a thin pallet, and the only other possessions s
he owned were a few bottles, syringes, candles, and some rations. I drank her water and ate what little rations she had left. Then I retrieved my bloodied clothes from the floor, put them back on, and stepped over the burnt girl's dissolving body toward the exit.
I soon found myself lost in the ruins of the abandoned temple. It stretched out in all directions, larger than the pagan temple Ezekiel and I once explored outside of Edgewater. The mosaics on the walls depicted the same sort of strange monsters; many legged, many armed, with lash whip tongues and scepters of light. But this temple also contained bowled out ceilings that rose like skies, and what seemed at the time to be a never-ending labyrinth.
Looking for the way back into the desert, I uncovered abandoned room upon abandoned room. One with a fountain and a headless stone monster with wings and a hovering halo crouching over the dry spout, another empty except for the blood stains splashed upon the ceilings and the walls. I found a small room with a sacrificial altar drenched in long dried black and red fluids, vegetable husks scattered onto the floor.
Occasionally I came to a window looking out across the desert like an open door to the sky. Yet even though I could see the outside world, inside the pagan temple I felt at the center of the universe, outside of time. Inside the temple, searching for the way out, falling backward into step and passing the room with the dead girl over and over again, I'd finally found a place swept aside by God and abandoned by the circle of eternity.
I came across sandstone pictograms in the hallway. In the first pictogram was the black moon, threatening to swallow the earth, hovered over the black planet. Once-glittering machine shells floated around the black moon like birds. Monsters waited below with open mouths.
In the next pictogram the machine shells were hurtling to the planet below. In the next, the machines fought the monsters and tore them apart.
From the beginning we were taught that nothing changes. The bones that went down into the darkness forever. The butterflies pinned inside shadow boxes. Inside the pagan temple I knew that the world had once been different, and I'd never even realized it before.
Nobody had, yet the evidence existed all around us. I’d seen it for only a moment as a child in the temple out in the woods, and now it’d come back for me.
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