Its whine grew in ferocity and pitch.
I chanted louder, sobbing as I moved near where Peter lay on the ground, groping at the hole in his chest and the desert sand leaking out between his fingers.
*****
The funnel, which Natalie feared would rip itself apart the moment Peter died, crept toward her. Her mother, sensing a change, snapped again, pried at Natalie’s chin, trying to push it away from where it was tucked and what it protected. She could feel every drop of blood flowing through her body. She leaned forward, with a great amount of effort, her daughter’s forearm digging into her neck and choking her, until they were nearly nose to nose.
Natalie face was wet with tears and with blood from her fight in the church.
Brooke licked her daughter’s face, tasted it, and Natalie cried harder, grabbed her mother’s hair and jerked it as hard as she could, expecting Brooke to show some sign of pain, but it hadn’t phased her.
She held her mother back, the muscles in her arms and shoulders aching.
The carousel spun on.
I knelt next to Peter, the whirlwind of sand slowing, filled with the sound of spider, and monsters above us.
But slowly the carousel slowed, as well, and Peter lay still and pale and empty in the night.
I cried, wiped my eyes, stood, and approached the steps.
The strength in Brooke’s grip on Natalie lessened.
She shifted so suddenly in direction that the child had no time to respond, at first succumbing to defeat that her mother had somehow bested her, she waited for the teeth to sink into her flesh.
But her mother shoved up and off, standing in the street shielding her eyes from the blowing sand, all of her attention on the carousel.
I walked slowly toward the babe lost in all of Julian’s clothing, trapped by the chainmail shirt, crying in frustration or simple hunger.
The man who had caused us so much grief was a tiny child, an infant now, I thought, and if the vampires didn’t stop us in time, we could end it. We could win.
And the child felt it too, and it hurt so much to hope, but Natalie scooted back to the motel’s door and pushed herself up.
The vampires in the cloud flew out as it lost steam, its thickness diminishing, its speed already half what it’d been only a moment ago.
Without thinking, Natalie ran forward and shoved her mother from behind. Brooke flew forward and landed next to Peter, but Natalie took the opportunity she’d made for herself and dove onto the platform, wheeling around in the gloom until she found the sword, heard the babe cry loudly, slashing with its horribly small hands at my wrists as I smiled to myself, lifting him above my head.
Natalie barely had strength left to walk, let alone lift the sword, but she forced herself. She swung the blade at a horizontal angle, just below my arms and the skin of Julian’s stomach parted and his intestines uncoiled like lengths of soggy, red rope.
His face grew pale.
Mine brighter.
Brooke screamed from the edge of the carousel, doubling over, hunched, crying.
I dropped Julian into his own bodily mess and whispered, my eyes turned away, back toward where Peter lay, “Kill it.”
Natalie, braver than she ever expected she could be, nodded to herself.
She didn’t know for certain if ending Julian’s life would return her mother to normal, or if the disease eating her away would continue to do so, but she held the sword with both hands and swung it with all her strength and Julian’s head flew from his body out into the darkness.
She sank to her hands and knees among his viscera, smelling nothing else, seeing nothing else, as she drove the tip of the sword into the center of his torso.
There was no thunder or lightning. No monumental sign that it was over, but she pushed back and found her feet, shakily, and saw me waving her closer from the other side of where Angel’s corpse lay on one of the motionless demon’s backs that powered the carousel.
Bodies flew from the sky and hit the ground with horrible sounds: gasps, breaking bones, the slap of flesh giving way to impact…
A human rain that went on for nearly a full minute until the street was clogged with their shivering mass.
Natalie wiped her eyes, thinking, I will never be able to cry again, as she joined me.
I wrapped my arms around the child, and the child, crying harder than she’d ever cried before, with relief and with grief, embraced me back.
Both of us believed that we’d won, even if it had come with a great cost, but the hundred bodies littering the dusty street were unmoving.
*****
We stayed up the rest of the night finding those that were still alive.
Natalie wondered if the angels rebuked by god were mirrored here: where many perished as a result of their fall from the heavens. Those towns’ folk who had survived the fall were not much better off than the dead. They were riddled with broken bones and lacerations, their clothing shredded and their flesh puckered by bites. They sat or laid or leaned, numbly, their faces blank, their mouths slack, their eyes vacant.
Yelling at them, slapping them, punching them… none of it registered a response.
It was exhausting work to pile the dead, and there were many times Natalie had to stop during the night, hunched over, gagging at the smell of all their blood, shit and vomit.
The mountain of shattered bodies swam in her vision like an illusion every time tears pricked her eyes, and she’d turn away from it, exhaling weakly, and once she looked at her mother propped in the motel’s threshold, her tears fell afresh.
The survivors were no help in gathering and moving the corpses; those that could walk stumbled around, not a soul among them able to speak a word yet, even though Natalie had hoped the shock of their freedom would have worn off by now.
Brooke was the same despite being spared the physical damage. It was as if her mind had been wiped clean. While taking breaks, Natalie had tried to speak to her, hoping for the slightest hint of recognition in her mother’s eyes, no matter how inconsequential it might seem to me or anyone else.
But her mother stared through her, her mouth slightly open, drool leaking from the corner that Natalie wiped away with the edge of her shirt, doing her best to hold it together.
And I knew her pain, her loss, because I cradled Peter’s lifeless body every returned trip from depositing another husk to the wall of flesh now blocking the carousel from sight.
Hours of exhausting work behind us, Natalie noticed that Angel’s Explorer seemed to gleam in the first rays of the new rising sun. Earlier, I had asked her what she wanted to do with Angel’s remains, and the child didn’t know, couldn’t, the ramifications it would have in her and her mother’s life to leave him behind, and the questions it would raise if she took him.
Later, the Explorer’s cab glowed with sunlight, Angel’s head propped against the back door window. To a passerby it would appear he was only sleeping. She couldn’t leave him in an unmarked grave here. If her mother ever woke from her stupor Natalie wanted to be able to take her to the cemetery to show her where he slept.
Succumbing to the tiredness racking her body, her mind wandered. Natalie would load her mother in the vehicle and she would drive back to the highway and she’d drive on until they ran out of gas, and she’d hold her deaf and dumb mother’s head to her shoulder and pray that she could feel her daughter’s arms around her, feel her tears on her cheek, the soft dew of her hair, the desperate clutch of her fingers.
I broke her train of thought when I said, “You can stay with us.”
“Do you think they’re going to come back to us?”
I studied the few dozen who had survived, my face hardened with experience and yet soft around the eyes, my lips quivering as I told her the truth since she deserved it…
“No. They’re not coming back to us.”
Natalie nodded, shrugged, wondered what they were to do then.
She’d never dreamed of a day where someone would take her
mother from her. And she knew they would because the child lacked the resources to care for her, which she accepted, though it pained her, and she knew that her mother needed doctors, that there was hope in that at least… if they did not write her off as an invalid. If there was to be any hope at all, they’d find a doctor who could help erase the horrible shocks her body and intellect had endured for a brief but blinding hour.
Natalie held her mother’s hand, praying the fog Brooke now lived in would someday lift, and the sooner the better. She shook her head, looked my way, until our gazes locked, sisters now in a way, and it hurt to know others hurt just as deeply.
“We can’t stay here,” Natalie said, finally. “I want to grow up. I want to only have so much time to do something worthwhile with my life.”
And she didn’t know why, but voicing how she felt made her feel weak, and it made her feel like a liar, because all she really wanted was to see her mom go back to who she had been.
Tears brimmed in her eyes and they burned, so raw and so sore.
I looked away, at Peter’s wasted body lying on the boardwalk, and frowned.
Natalie said, “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What’s that?” I asked, thinking only of Peter, of what he’d meant to me and how much even more so now that he wasn’t there. “Does what bother me?”
“That we won but we lost?”
Survivor’s guilt racked her body with a sob as she glanced her mother’s way, Brooke sitting idly on the boardwalk, her head leaning against a post supporting an awning, her hands pale in her lap.
I said softly, tears in my eyes, “If I had the heart to end their suffering, I’d just kill them all as soon as you leave. But, maybe the state they’re in they’re not hurting at all, and if that were the case I’d only be killing them to unburden myself.”
Natalie nodded, crossed the ten dusty feet and squatted next to Brooke, staring hard into her face for some sign of cognizance.
Nothing lived in her features. And nothing ever would.
She squeezed her mom’s hand and received no response.
Minutes ticked by, the day growing warmer and brighter in the smallest of increments.
She clung to her mother desperately for several minutes, and when she pulled away, she gazed into her mother’s sunburned features, seeing, maybe for the first time, how much she looked like her.
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Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 25