by Lynn Cesar
“Yeah,” said Sal. “Thanks.”
“Arm yourselves!” cried the wild woman perched in midair. “Cut them to pieces!”
XXIV
Of perhaps three hundred people assembled there, a few dozen collapsed lying fetal on the ground or stood moaning and shaking, gripping their faces and masking their eyes in denial, or crawling to hide in their vehicles. But the rest of the townsfolk, rudely snatched out of their known world by the sheer power of impossibility, found themselves stumbling to the gutted stores for weapons, and charging— and not just the young and strong among them— charging to the fight with axes high.
The four square blocks around the police station were treeless, though curbside grass and trees surrounded them. The grass now poured into the streets in ropy sheaves near twenty feet long, serpenting across the pavement, so that townsfolk both ghostly and fleshly danced around its tricky weave with flailing machetes and weed-eaters, amputating the leg-seizing, foot-piercing tentacles. Meanwhile from the heart of the embattled square, the police station radiated danger. The vines that engulfed it poured out in all directions, seizing men at the middle and dragging them back into the cubic jungle where they, faces enraptured, melted into the verdant seethe. Ghost-wielded machetes lopped vines almost as swiftly as they grew, but the dragons slithered all the while from the station’s front and rear, and before these the human forces, even with ghostly help overhead, had to fight in retreat, axes flashing and green blood spraying.
A lunging dragon engulfed a combatant to his waist. Kyle and Sal brought their chainsaws down across its spine, had its torso halved in moments while, still wolfing its meal down past the kicking thighs, the dragon’s foreclaws tore through the pavement, through the earth beneath, and dragged its meal below-ground, abandoning its hemorrhaging hips and legs to destruction. And everywhere, dragons seized bodies and, indifferent to damage, snatched them underground to the green god’s smithy, where new dragons were forged and, rising from the forges, swelled the assault. Before such onslaught, ghosts and men inexorably fell back.
Amid green spray, their chainsaws sinking through a dragon’s legs, Kyle with his eyes directed Sal’s eyes skyward, where the witch had paused, her attention captured by something in the east. There, where the Gravenstein River ran through town, they saw the crests of the big old grandfather oaks that lined its banks, violently quaking and thrashing side to side.
When next they could spare a glance, they saw the witch directing two county buses to the single gas station within their embattled perimeter. Now the witch’s will wove through the melee like quick stitchery in a grand tapestry. Others with axes and chainsaws stepped in while Sal and Kyle fell back to the gas station to refill their tanks. A team of women and children worked the pumps there, filling spouted gas-cans which human chains distributed to needy tanks of chainsaws and Weedwackers. “Jesus!” Sal looked river-ward at the convulsing oak trees. “They’ve grown ten feet!”
“No!” shouted Kyle. “They’re climbing the bank. They’re coming towards us!”
Lurchingly, seeming to topple leftwards, then right, the oaks advanced. Kyle and Sal saw the witch’s fearful look around. From all directions, the riverside trees climbed toward them, shaking the earth with their tread.
Men carried boxes and bags of rags from the stores. Converging on the gas station, from the boxes they drew empty bottles, began filling them with gas, and fusing them with rags.
Two men died blazing before the sparse army got the hang of these weapons. Flame bloomed on the writhing vines that poured from the police station and dragons twisted and thrashed in fire. But though dragons blazed, the flame was smutty, their green blood damping it, as if the green god’s vital sap could choke even petroleum’s ardor. Fire was everywhere, but no conflagration could take hold.
A forty-foot oak had thundered on clubbed roots within half a block of the fight’s perimeter. Stiffly it stooped, seized up a parked pick-up in one crooked bough, and hurled it into the battle’s midst, crushing three soldiers with the dragon they were fighting. Blazing cocktails flew like fire-birds into the oak’s branches and flame-fruit bloomed there. It swayed and writhed in undiminished strength, even as its fellow giants lumbered nearer. One of these seized a parked car and hurled it. Its landing struck no one, but its gas-tank detonated and half a dozen died.
The witch on her whirlwind stood stricken and slack, her seamed face wet with tears. She cried out, “Xibalba forgive us! Our race has defaced us, but we must preserve our lives.” When men rushed en masse and flung an orange hailstorm of gas-bombs into the oncoming oaks, she said nothing. Drawing her stone knife she swooped down on a dragon Sal and Kyle were sundering from either side, and drove her blade in the base of its skull. As its eyes dulled and it stilled, she gestured at the oaks and shrilled: “They come too fast! Their roots!”
Chainsaw troops, Sal and Kyle foremost, dodged sweeping boughs to amputate the clubbed feet of the giants. Some fell, hammering earth with their boughs, but a dozen thundered forward undeterred. A flying tow truck killed three men, while dragon after dragon dove underground with kicking human food between its jaws.
Near the gas station a woman’s scream went up. The asphalt ruptured by her feet, a green tongue wrapped her legs, jaws as long as she was tall engulfed her and pulled her under. Then they were erupting everywhere, dragons larger, quicker than before, eyes less crude, slit-pupiled now, more lethal predators which suddenly accelerated the human harvest.
The witch saw the battle had turned and instantly shared her knowledge. Perhaps two hundred souls survived and her altered strategy swept through their minds. They responded instantly. A gasoline brigade formed chains and sent filled gas-cans to the tanks of the toughest, most terrain-ready jeeps and trucks within the perimeter. The gassed-up buses were brought forward and the convoy-vehicles driven into formation before and aft of them, with a few of the gnarliest flanking them on both sides, the youngest and oldest were conveyed into the buses, many of them lifted by ghosts and borne out right through the air.
Now the trickiest part of the withdrawal: the fighters had to fall back before a phalanx of near a hundred dragons, the green predators grown so quick and fierce that half the fighters would have died in the moment of turning to climb into their vehicles, had it not been for the ghosts, who rained a storm of airborne steel upon those scaly skulls as the axe- and saw-men broke contact and turned for their vehicles. Kyle and Sal were last to turn, falling back, their saws slashing desperately, when the witch dove and planted her knife in the base of their attacker’s skull.
As its eyes dimmed, she fixed Kyle’s eyes with her own. “I know where you mean to go, but first you must fight for us here. Ella tiene que luchar sola. She has to fight alone. If you go to her before the moon has risen, she will surely die.”
He stared at her, trying to possess her mind through her eyes.
“My strong son,” Quetzal told him.
“Grandmother,” and he fell back with Sal to the caravan.
“What about your women and the boy?” he asked Sal.
“They’re taking care of those older folks there.”
Cherry gave them a high-sign with her machete from the back of a stake bed. Helen and Skip were similarly armed at opposite side of the bed. A number of graybeards filled the rest of the bed, with their middle-aged wives protectively gathered at the center.
The witch arrayed her spirit-troops above the caravan. The highway ahead was flanked by high trees. Their destination was fifty miles north of the Gravenstein Valley where, on the relatively barren slopes of hardscrabble ranchland, lay the town of Dry Creek. En route they would pass Gravenstein’s outlying homes, where scores of citizens might survive.
At Quetzal’s signal the caravan rolled out. Their blade-wielding airborne contingent engaged the outreaching boughs and branches of the flanking trees, while from the beds of trucks and the roof-racks of buses, fighters with shotguns and saws sprayed green blood from the viperous vegetation.
As the column advanced, the witch hung in its wake a moment, and beckoned one of her spirit soldiers to her. They hung there for a long moment, the leaf-fingered hands in the witch’s fleshy ones, face to face, while Quetzal spoke, and listened. They seemed to kiss and the ghost sped southwards through the air, shedding, as she went, her leafy envelope, leaves fluttering from her, till she was nothing visible at all.
For hours, the fighting convoy crept along, evolving tactics as they went. They learned from their first forays up side-streets. At the first, several trucks detached, Sal’s and Kyle’s among them, to penetrate the extensive cul-de-sac. A bull-horn elicited, here and there, the shouts of residents trapped in their homes. But the first two of the four pick-ups were seized by muscular undergrowth gripping their engines from beneath. The woman and two girls they brought out were crowded into the second-to-last truck, Kyle’s. At the last house of the street, a supplicating voice brought them into a living room where a head and shoulders, protruding from the jaws of a dragon, smiled at them. Another dragon dropped from the ceiling, seized one of the rescuers, and took him straight underground.
They got the mother and daughters back to a bus, with only one truck left of their original four, though with the addition of two chopped hogs parked outside a house with no survivors. Kyle and Sal were astride the hogs.
Thereafter, they rode the Harleys with their chainsaws slung from their backs by rope hawsers, and Molotovs and gas cans in their saddlebags. As the hours wore on, the rescuers’ casualties diminished as they learned the ropes, and as the caravan crept north, the buses filled with refugees.
* * * *
In Bushmill, as the sun sank past the zenith, the cottage door at the Bide-a-Nite Motel swung open. A tired-looking woman in a T-shirt and jeans stepped out, untied her honey-blond hair and shook it loose. She stretched and leaned wearily back against the sun-struck stucco wall. Closing her eyes against the brightness, she pressed her arms against the wall, obviously relishing that heat through her thin shirt. It was obvious what Karen was in that moment: a woman who wanted simplicity, escape, who wanted to merge herself with the sunlight, and simply be free of everything else.
A breeze rolled through the foliage near her and stirred her hair. A second later, her eyes snapped open and, wonderingly, she touched her lips. Karen had felt it: a soft contact, cool as a breeze, and yet just like a kiss. She thought of Mom, Mom’s dear face in the rippling oak leaves. But this was not Mom’s kiss she had felt. It was more like Susan’s.
Turning her back to the road, she went to her knees, still leaning against the sun-warmed wall, and she wept, muffling the sound with her hands. At length she got up, dusted off her knees and went back inside. She brushed her hair and tied it back. Took up her little gym bag of belongings, paused to pick up Dad’s letter, and folded it back into its envelope.
Karen felt a sudden ache within her cast. Not the cracked metacarpal, but under the cast’s sleeve that covered her wrist. Slipping the letter into her bag, an image floated up from it: a skull-blown soldier climbing a cenote wall. And her wrist ached more sharply as she saw then her skull-blown father, face dead as a Mayan mask, while his icy grip crushed her wrist. Was this ache memory, or a new pain? She thrust her fingers into the cast, probed, and could not tell. She was drowning in death, that was the heart of it. The dead had her surrounded. But amidst all this horror, Kyle had come to her, had held and comforted her like he would a child. Thinking this, her tears welled back up, because it struck her that she had loved her sweet Susan, had loved her, but never enough.
Once again, she knew that her home was the orchard, she had to struggle to get past the terror of this revelation. Her previous home before had been Susan— not San Francisco, but Susan herself. Now, she must go home and face her dead. Had to wait the weeks or months it took till Wolf was clean bone and then scatter his skeleton far and wide. Had to go home and know that Dad was dead, had to know, finally and forever, that he could come to her after death only when the brandy’s sick magic had given him life. She set out down the street towards the heart of town.
* * * *
The man in the tiny county bus-line office shook his head when she named her destination. “We’re a trunk line from Gravenstein. Nothing’s come out all day, so nothing’s going back.”
“But when… ”
“They don’t answer the phone! I plain can’t tell you when the next bus’s coming.”
Back at the gas station, the same pale-eyed young goon sat at the register, but a different voice answered her ring, a gravelly voice, brusquely alert. “Kyle. Yeah. He left early this morning. Shoulda reached Gravenstein this morning. You know Kyle?”
This intrusiveness startled her. “Why?”
“Why do I ask?”
“… Yeah.”
“I felt like it.”
“You’re a hotel. What do you care if I know him or not?”
“We’re not a hotel. We’re a halfway house. He puts up here for his parole hearings.”
“You’re really willing to tell his personal shit to strangers, aren’t you?” It was bizarre, how fast this was accelerating.
“Yeah, I am. I guess I just don’t give a shit.”
“Hey, I know he killed someone who tried to kill him and I don’t give a shit!” Death. Was she meant to drown in it from here on out?
“Well, of course, he’d blow that smoke up your ass, wouldn’t he, honey? But the guy he killed was a friend of mine and what Kyle says is a fuckin’ lie.”
“I bet you didn’t have the balls to tell him that to his face.”
“You must be trippin’, bitch! I tell him that every time I see him. But if you mean I wouldn’t front him in a fight, you’re absolutely right, because that fucker is one stone-cold killer. And even though you’re sweet on him, sunshine, I’d advise you to keep that in mind.” And the guy hung up.
The pale-eyed kid was staring at her. As she looked for her voice, for harsh words, he blinked, the first time she’d seen him do it. Pointed at his front window. “I saw you at the bus station. There’s a guy in town got a cab. He runs drunks out to their ranches on weekend nights.”
“Thank you. Where could I find him?”
“It’s a green an’ yella cab, parked on the main street usually.”
She found it in front of a saloon, a small joint crudely stuccoed to look like adobe, with two splintery old wagon wheels mounted on the façade. The place was so quiet from the sidewalk that it surprised her on the inside. There were at least two dozen men and women, most of them middle-aged, at the tables and bar. Soft country-western music from the jukebox engaged absolutely no one’s attention. Karen had all of that the minute she walked in and had it in spades when she went to the bar and asked the pouchy old guy polishing glasses, “Is the gentleman with the taxicab here?”
When the cabbie was pointed out, he proved to be the only person not looking at her: a skinny little black guy with shades and a goatee, wearing khaki, and bent on a game of hearts with two fat guys in CAT caps. Studiously not looking at her, it seemed.
“Excuse me.”
“I’m off.” He didn’t look up. “I don’t come on till four or five.”
“Which will it be? Four or five?”
“Five.”
“How much to Gravenstein?”
“’Fraid I don’t go that far.”
“I’d pay you extra. I’d pay you a hundred bucks.” Now everyone’s attention was really focused. This was better than TV. You could tell everyone thought it was a pretty good offer.
“Sorry. I don’ go that far.”
Some real drama developing now. Would the strange, tall, lesbo-looking, muscular blonde offer more?
The street door gusted open slightly and sighed shut again. It drew some curious looks, which quickly snapped back to Karen and the driver.
“Sorry, I’m off.” He fanned and sorted his hand, still not looking at her… and then half his cards sprang out of his fingers. He turned his face to her, bl
inking, amazed, as if he thought Karen somehow responsible. It turned out he had lovely, limpid eyes, which looked not only astonished, but somehow passionate. After an uncertain pause he rose dazedly, his voice hoarse, “Are you ready?” And he rose, awkwardly.
Everyone was really staring now— at each other, then back at him and Karen. Such fickleness was clearly out of character… .
It made Karen edgy, as she followed him out. The little man looked vague; he fumbled as he fished for his keys. Did she really need to go back now, after all? Did she still feel as sure about Kyle as she had before that phone call? But already she was in the back seat. Fuck it! The man swung the car from the curb and rolled out.
She sank back in the seat and attempted no conversation. The sneering voice on the phone nagged at her, describing a man that couldn’t be Kyle! She was sure of him… wasn’t she? Oh God! Everything before her was so dark and doubtful. Could she find the strength? She closed her eyes.
And opened them to find herself rolling down the drive of the Fox orchard, the sun edging down to the western quarter of the sky, the spidery plum trees all burnished copper in the slanting sun. How had the driver known where to bring her? She couldn’t remember telling him.
He sprang out and opened her door. Stood there offering her his hand. His smile as he did this was disorienting, so sweet it was, and he gripped her hand so firmly, so warmly, helping her out. There was something about his hand in hers, that hand not releasing hers as she stood before him. There was something about the feel of this hand in hers… .
And then his face was not his face, was Susan’s face instead, so dear, so close to hers. Karen scented Susan’s slightly musky smell, like a mink or ferret, and Karen saw before her Susan’s violet eyes and brave gamine lips. Karen kissed those lips, kissed them fiercely in her terror that this dear face would vanish before she could do so— in her dread that this irreplaceable little woman, not seized, would die again at once.
Deep within that kiss, Karen discovered joy and grief exactly equal, because as their tongues found each other’s, Karen knew past doubt that this was Susan, was the living Susan, present and knowing her now, knowing and kissing her in this instant. And at the same time Karen knew that within this Susan’s mouth, her lips and tongue were tasting only sky, were tasting only cold, fruitful October air. Karen knew that within this Susan’s face, her lips tasted all eternity, all blue space, all stars, but no longer tasted someone that she could hold, or have. Karen knew she was kissing a Susan who could only be with her in the way that sun on leaves, or snow-melt foaming over rocks could be with her— glories for the heart and mind to hold, but never again for her hands or her arms or her lips to possess.