He shared some whiskey with them that they drank out of tin cups. After they stared into the fire for a long time and bullshitted about their pasts, Balor came up. Robbie said he’d seen him. There had been a gathering at the fairgrounds in Salem and Balor fed them before taking the concert stage, speaking with an evangelical rise and fall to his voice about their country. That’s what he called it, their country. And their country would grow.
Another few miles and the girl’s bike begins to wobble. “My legs hurt,” she says. The sun sinks lower in the sky and retreats behind some clouds and glooms the air. A part of Claire wants to tell Roxana to suck it up and keep pedaling. She feels the need to get as far away as she can from the fresh mound of dirt in the cemetery, the town that swallowed Matthew. But another part of her knows she needs to stop, and stop soon, find a place to hunker down for the night. On her own, she might ride until her muscles cramp or her tire flattens, not caring where she ended up, only wanting to move, to sweat out her sadness, her feet spinning in circles. But she has someone else to worry about besides herself.
Soon after Roxana says, “Now my legs hurt and my butt hurts,” they find a farmhouse a quarter mile off the road and dump their bikes behind it and check the rooms for bodies, dead or alive, then sit on the porch swing and watch the sky darken.
Claire digs a Baby Ruth out of her backpack and asks if Roxana wants a bite. The girl holds out her hand and says, “Please,” and Claire breaks off a piece and tosses it to her and she eats it with smacking openmouthed chews. She smiles, her teeth just a little buck, and Claire tries to make her smile as genuine as hers and cannot.
They take swigs from a Nalgene bottle—the water soured by iodine—and it is then, when the girl throws back her head and drinks greedily, that Claire notices the raw red necklace encircling her throat, like the imprint of a leash. “What happened?”
The girl screws the bottle shut and touches her neck and says nothing. Just as she said nothing when Claire first asked how she ended up separated from her family, only shook her head, hid behind her hair.
The house is thick with dust that makes them sneeze into their elbows. Claire snaps on her flashlight. It carves away the darkness. The kitchen has an apple theme—apple wallpaper, apple dish towel, apple hot pad—that makes her imagine a woman with a silver helmet of hair clapping flour off her hands and humming church hymns. Flower-bordered dishes mucked with mold remain in the sink. They walk a short hallway, to the living room, where her light flashes off the screen of an old Zenith television and then slides across an oak coffee table, a ratty recliner, a couch with a red-and-yellow afghan draped over its back. “You sleep there,” Claire says and the girl asks why, why not on a bed?
“All the bedrooms are upstairs.”
“So?”
“Only sleep on the ground floor. Better exit strategy. Just in case.”
The floor isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why Claire can’t sleep. She can’t sleep because of Matthew. She imagines the grayness of his skin when she flopped that first shovel of dirt on him. She imagines the worms tunneling toward him like so many eager tongues. She imagines what he looked like when she found him on the front stoop, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O. She wonders what the hot rush of metal felt like when the bullets pricked his skin, and then the internal blossoming of blood as flesh gave way and bone shattered, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he have time to hurt? Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavities before he lost consciousness?
Every time she falls into dreams, the image of him emerges from the dark, and she wakes with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing her hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut little half-moons of blood into her palms. She recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs.
For a while Claire just lies there, listening. Then she says, “Shut up,” her voice barely audible, a quiet curse. Then she gets up and stumbles to the bathroom and pees in the empty toilet. She checks the locks on the doors, peers out the windows into a blackness that tells her nothing. Then she stands over Roxana and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Hey? You okay?” But the girl won’t respond. She goes on moaning and Claire goes back to pacing.
After another hour of this, she wants so badly to silence and comfort the girl that she scoops her up and holds her in her arms, tight against her chest, rocking her, saying shhh. She doesn’t know if the girl wakes up or not, but her complaining softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes Claire sets her down and covers her with an afghan and falls asleep kneeling beside her.
The next day, in the midafternoon, they find the farm without too much trouble. Roxana knows it is near a river, knows it runs up against a big woods she pronounces Aching Knee. Claire consults the map until she finds the Ankeny refuge—and now they circle the roads around it until the girl says, “There!”
A gravel driveway cuts through a wall of oak trees. Beyond it are newly disked fields, the dirt as black and porous as the heart of a chocolate cake. The driveway is lined by what first appear to be decorative fence poles, every ten feet or so, with no barbed wire strung between them. These turn out to be pikes run through severed heads. Their mouths hang open. The sharp ends of the sticks sometimes peek out of their sockets or pierce the tops of their skulls like horns. Flies buzz and taste the rank flesh and explode like the spores of a black dandelion when Claire and Roxana pedal past them.
Her hand teases the brake. The bike coasts. “What the hell is this?”
Roxana says, “Those are to keep the bad people away. The wolf people.”
“Is that what your uncle said?”
“Sí.”
She did not ask for this. She did not want to help the girl. And now look at what she has gotten herself into. Everything in her body tells her to spin around, hammer away from here, but her feet and her mind spin alike when the bike carries her up a grassy rise on top of which squats the house—two stories, black shutters, white siding with the paint flaking off—like a mildewed skull. There is a faded red barn, a whitewashed cinder-block milk house, a pole shed for machinery, a woodpile, three grain bins. Claire can see people working the fields, maybe two dozen of them spread out over ten acres. Two trucks are parked in the driveway and Roxana drops her bike next to them and takes off running for a vegetable garden in which crouch two men and a woman.
She calls out to them and they stand and shade their eyes with their hands and then let out a cheer and embrace her one by one and then Roxana points at Claire and they study her and raise their hands in hesitant waves and cram together in a huddle and finally decide to approach her, slowly, nodding too much and smiling too big, as if trying to convince themselves she isn’t a threat.
They wear revolvers and so does she. The gunmetal catches the light on this sunny morning, advertising the possibility of violence, but they only want to talk, telling her thank you, thank you, for bringing the girl back to them. “How is this possible?” says one of them, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with a gap between her teeth. “Tú eres un fantasma.”
They stand in awkward silence another moment before asking Claire in their broken English what news she has from the outside, if any.
“No sé nada,” she says. Which is true. She knows nothing. No Internet, no TV, no radio, the newspapers moldering on porches and in kiosks all dating back to November 6. Which sometimes makes it hard to believe that the world continues to spin, that a thousand miles from here somebody might be drinking a latte in a coffee shop and updating their Facebook status on their smart phone.
Once they realize she speaks Spanish, they all start talking at once, their hands gesturing, flapping like brown birds, which to Claire is what they sound like.
She says, “Lento, por favor. Lento.” They are too quick and too complicated for her, but once they slow down, she can mak
e out their halting queries about where to find food, gas, whether or not the military will hunt them down.
They don’t seem capable of evil. They simply appear trampled. One is an old man whose sun-weathered face could use an iron and whose hand rests on his revolver as if comforted by it. The other is a young man—just a teenager, really—with lamb-chop sideburns and radiation lesions on his face. His arm is in a sling and blood-soaked gauze has been duct-taped around his biceps. He says his name is Jorge and when Claire asks what happened to his arm a silence sets in like after a dish drops at a restaurant. Jorge brings a hand to the bandage and says, “I try to save Roxana. When the wolves take her.”
Roxana drops her gaze. The gap-toothed woman makes a clucking sound and pets the girl. Now Claire understands. The bruises around her neck. The whimpering nightmares.
“You are not a wolf, yes?” the woman says. “No es posible.”
Before Claire can say anything, a rumble comes from overhead and they all squint up into a sky filled with cirrus clouds that look like pale fish bones. Here they spot a fighter jet. Its sound strikes Claire as sad, something far away and going farther. A moment later the plane vanishes over the coastal mountains, its contrail dissipating behind it.
How safe and beautiful everything must look from way up there, Claire thinks, even if it’s not.
“You are not a wolf,” the woman says again. “You are not a wolf, no?”
Beyond the farmhouse, behind the barn, next to a grain bin, on a spread of pasture, there is a chapel of bones. The walls are made of skulls stacked one on top of the other, mortared together with cement, some of their jaws propped open in mute snarls. Femurs have been fitted into benches, heavily lacquered to a slick yellow color. Eyeteeth and molars and finger bones braid the pillars and crossbeams. In the corners stand candelabras made from tibias and fibulas. There is a pulpit made entirely of vertebrae, fitted together like some morbid puzzle. On it sits a communion basket built from a rib cage.
Claire has been told to wait here. Not asked. Told.
She tried to tell them she must be going. She tried to move toward her bike and pedal off before they could stop her. But their smiles dropped from their faces and their hands gripped their revolvers and they said no. She could not. She had to speak to Tío.
They have her backpack, all her weapons except a knife tucked into her boot. She should have left the girl on top of the crypt. She should have known better than to do good, to believe that any sort of moral code applied to a world turned upside down. Now she waits in a cage of bones and tries not to imagine herself ripped apart and cleaned and made into a chair.
She hears Tío long before she sees him.
At first she believes the noise belongs to another fighter jet, a sharp tearing, like a blade slicing the fabric of the sky. Then it grows closer and she can distinguish it as belonging to the earth—stones biting, soil grating—what turns out to be a dragged pitchfork, the tines scraping the ground. He appears in the doorway, blotting out the rectangle of sunlight. His head is shaved, his brow a swollen shelf beneath which two black eyes regard her. He steps inside and the pitchfork emits a sound that makes her skin tighten all over.
She stands in the middle of the aisle. He walks the perimeter of the chapel, circling the pews that surround her. He wears boots, jeans, but is shirtless and sweating, with pieces of hay stuck to his skin. He is thick, not muscled. Hairless except for a stripe running up his belly. A tattoo of a splintery cross reaches across his back. The tissue along his shoulder is raised, a lighter color, a scar in the shape of a mouth. She searches for more injuries and finds them: claw marks ribbing his belly. She can barely hear his voice over the pitchfork’s screech when he says, “I am grateful to you.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“You’re not dead. Yet.” The grating continues until he reaches the pulpit and pauses there to lean against the pitchfork. “For that you should be grateful too.”
“Why would you kill me?”
“Because you’re one of them.”
She nods at the scar gumming his shoulder. “So are you.”
He fingers the scar as if he wishes he could peel it away. “Not long and not by choice. I’m just sick. That’s what I am.”
“Plenty of us who don’t believe in what Balor believes. Even here in the Ghostlands. Not everybody lets the dog off the leash.”
“Then why not leave?”
“Same reason as you. I’m trapped in this pen.”
He starts toward her, not in any sort of hurry. There is enough room in the aisle for him to circle her, and the tines sketch a shape like a noose around her. She can smell him, the musk of his sweat. She imagines him swinging the pitchfork, skewering her. She has wished for death, but she always imagined it coming swiftly, her neck wrenched by a rope, her body vaporized by a missile. She won’t die here—not like this.
“I’m going to kill Balor,” she says, almost at a yell. Saying it aloud makes it feel real for the first time and not an idle fantasy.
Tío is behind her now. She can feel his breath gusting from his mouth, across her neck, when he leans toward her. “Do you know where he is?”
“Not exactly.”
“I know where he is.”
“Then you’ll help me.”
Again he circles her, his eyes crawling across her body, and then bullies up against her. His belly sticks to her arm. He pinches a lock of hair between his fingers and sniffs it. He whispers in her ear, “Who are you, telling me my business?”
“I’m the one who saved your niece, asshole.”
She hears the damp crackle of his mouth opening and then the click of his teeth closing around her hair. He sucks on it a moment, tasting her, before stepping back, lifting the pitchfork, and stabbing it into the dirt floor. It shivers between them.
“Do you know what I noticed the other day?” he says. “That I do not pay attention to the things I used to pay attention to. When I used to walk down a street, you know what I would see? I would see houses or cars. I would think, man, look at that place. With that wraparound porch and that leaded glass and all those gables and shit. I would love to live there. I would think, look at that sweet ride, look at those rims, listen to those six cylinders thundering. I want one of those.” He reaches a finger into his belly button as if feeding it. “You know what I look for now? Movement. My eyes are always hunting for movement. For animal life. All those things I used to care about no longer matter. What matters is hunger. Appetite. In this way I have become what I behold. Don’t call me human. Call me animal. I no longer live in a world where people sit around the television like some cold fire that conjures images of what I supposedly need. What I need is food. What I need are claws to tear my food and teeth to gnash it.”
She is convinced that this is her only chance, that she has only moments before he tires of her audience. “I’m going to kill him. Are you going to help me or not?”
“This is what you think when you are an animal. You think, am I predator or am I prey? Am I climbing into a mouth or am I widening my jaws?”
“Your niece—”
He yanks the pitchfork from the ground and holds it before his face and stares at her through its silvery tines. “I am widening my jaws.”
Chapter 61
MIRIAM KNOWS she is in a basement, but she does not know where. The room is twelve paces by twelve paces. The walls are concrete. When it rains, water dribbles from a crack in the corner. The floor is slick there from mildew. Light leaks from a shallow window made from glass blocks.
There was a short-lived time when they merely kept her locked in the room. She picked at the glass-block window until one fingernail broke and another peeled back. Then she swept off the mattress and wrenched up the frame and slammed one of its posts four times against the window, chipping it, cracking it, but by then two lycans rushed in and wrestled her down and taught her a lesson. That’s what they call it: teaching her a lesson.
She never seems to
learn. She bit the eyeball of one guard, blinded him. She crushed the windpipe of another with her elbow. That was when they began handcuffing her to the bed. First her hands. Then, when she scissored her legs and broke someone’s nose, her ankles too.
She bucked her body and rattled the bed frame and strained against the cuffs until they cut her skin. And the men would come in, one after the other, and teach her a lesson. Months pass in this way. She is a hole. She is a hole into which a knife fits.
Now her body feels as if it is collapsing inward. She stops spitting and yelling at them. Her eyes are dry but her bedsores weep. They feed her through a straw or with a spoon and she pisses and shits into a pan. She lies as still as a corpse. Her stare goes unfocused and settles on some middle distance beyond the drop ceiling. Every now and then she will hear the shrill voice of a mouse or the shuddering of a pipe or the groan of a footstep overhead. Otherwise, there is nothing to occupy her but the possibility of what exists high above and beyond the gray faces of these walls with mold vining across them—and how she might escape, how her life depends on fleeing this room, her future so much easier to study than a past in which crouch the shadows of her child and husband.
She hears someone enter the room but does not turn her head. She can smell him—the cologne applied thickly as if to hide some stink. And she can hear him—the openmouthed smack of bubblegum. Puck leans over her. She keeps her gaze unfocused even when he leans in and sniffs her.
He picks up her hand, lets it fall. The hand he sliced the fingers from. To make them even. This was more than a month ago, when he plugged an iron into the wall. Then pulled out a pair of garden shears. He opened and closed them, opened and closed them, making a rusty song. He was watching the iron. When it began to hiss and burble with steam, when the orange light on its handle blinked off and indicated it was ready, he took her hand and snipped off one finger, then the other, right at the knuckle. The blood sizzled and the flesh cooked when he pressed the iron to the stumps, cauterizing them. The wound has healed but remains an angry red.
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