He showered in the bathroom where Rosa had had her miscarriage. Finished, he got dressed in their bedroom, gazing down at a street dotted with the botched births of the larger Miscarriage, then sat on the living room sofa, biting on a washcloth, as Charlie sewed shut his wound. He told Charlie he’d stay on watch while she showered, but a minute after he lay down on the sofa, he fell asleep. He awoke to orange morning sunlight needling through slats of lumber, and also to Charlie. She was asleep in his arms.
Her hair was fluffed in his face, soft as angora. She smelled indescribably sweet, a degree of cleanliness he realized he’d never expected to smell again, Rosa’s soap, Rosa’s shampoo, but not Rosa’s fruity, flowery skin. Charlie smelled like maple syrup. Luis wondered if it was residue from all the wood she’d so recently handled, sunk deep into her pores.
Rosa’s clothes swam on Charlie like medical scrubs. Luis felt a spasm of grief for his wife. Rosa had invested time and care in selecting them. Her clothes knew her; to cradle her curves, fabric had expanded and seams relaxed. Saturated in her preferences and insecurities, the garments had mattered. The instant Charlie had dumped them from the dresser to claim the wood, Rosa’s clothes became rags, no more significant than the towel Charlie had tied around his hand.
In the quiet morning birdsong, Luis accepted the unlikelihood he’d see Rosa del Gado Acocella ever again.
He peered through Charlie’s thick hair to her sleeping face. Without her usual heavy makeup, she looked vulnerable. Her lips, thin and unpainted, were pursed, and a snore whistled from her sinuses. Earth had ruptured, dropped whole continents into ocean trenches, swapped the qualities of life and death. Nearly unnoticeable amid those marvels, his wife had been replaced by Charlene Rutkowski, no questions asked, no returns accepted. Charlie wore Rosa’s clothes, slept on Rosa’s sofa, had already remodeled Rosa’s house.
Charlie was ready for this role, he had no doubt. Was he? Every second awoke bad sensations: the dull throb of his hand, the shudder of a still-sick stomach, the thickening of his feverish head, He would not be going anywhere soon. It was possible he might never go anywhere again.
This could be a forever situation.
Charlie woke up yawning and stretching, as drowsily sexy as he’d imagined, and she gave him a tired smile before snuggling her warm forehead into his neck. For a long time, they breathed together, nothing more. Luis, who had never had a one-night stand in his life, wondered if this was what one felt like, the steam of the night before slowly evaporating in the light of day.
“Breakfast?” she murmured.
The kitchen, the sink, his mamá—he gagged.
“Oh, right, sorry. I’m going to scrounge up coffee. You just stay here.”
Rosa’s oversized T-shirt fluttered along the bottom of Charlie’s buttocks as she left the room. Luis sat up. He might be a doctor, but he still held the stubborn belief he could will himself healthy. He pushed the sofa parallel to the TV, kicked aside wood scraps until he found the remote, and turned on the device. The screen was black, no signal. He flipped through channels, Nothing, nothing. At last, far into the double digits, a signal popped up, bright and crisp. A good-looking man was slouched over a desk, his eyes bright despite the pouched exhaustion of his face.
Charlie sailed into the room, carrying two mugs, Somehow, she’d managed to choose his usual one, which she offered to Luis, and Rosa’s favorite, which she kept for herself.
Joining him on the sofa, she gestured with her mug at the television. “What do we got here?”
Luis pointed at the WWN logo.
“Oh, that’s a good sign.” Fudged enthusiasm for the benefit of the sickie.
Charlie held her mug by the handle, while Rosa had always cradled it in both hands. A small difference, but enough small differences added up to a major change. Sinking into the sofa, Luis pretended to watch WWN, feeling increasingly ill.
There were plenty of good reasons to keep quiet, but Charlie, true to her nature, got fired up by everything the anchor, Chuck Corso, reported. Through Luis’s distending headache, he heard only Charlie’s half of the conversation.
“Why the hell are they sending DMORT? There’s no bodies to sort! The bodies are getting back up, morons!”
“This isn’t a ‘virus-based mass psychosis.’ The CDC can kiss my ass!”
“Listen, shithead, if you didn’t scroll through tragedies at the bottom of your screen 24–7, maybe we would have recognized this problem faster, you know?”
“Rapture, It’s a rapture. Sure. Whatever. Idiots. Now that’s God shit.”
“A dirty bomb? A dirty bomb? This guy wouldn’t know the truth if it bit his thumb off! Oh, sorry, Acocella.”
Luis smiled, but couldn’t manage the Mmmmm he knew she’d appreciate. He was losing cohesion. His placeholder sarcophage had been superseded by the WWN anchor’s ghoul—that was about all he could handle right now. He’d started seeing things. Bluebirds flying in slow motion along the ceiling. Lush, soft grass growing from the carpet. That was all right. He would shut his hot, aching eyes and wrap a blanket around his freezing body. He could do these things because he realized he could, in fact, love Charlene Rutkowski. He already loved her a little, how she railed against an injurious world as hard as she ever had.
How’s it look?
The question lingered. Living with Charlie was one thing. Dying with her was another.
The Second Civil War
For the first few hours after leaving Conan (and Qasim), she’d been a good, civilized girl, bicycling from town, the tar-patched, potholed two-lanes continually bopping the duffel bag from her back. But the civilized path had been shit. Minor thoroughfares had been stoppered by vehicle smashups Greer circumvented by swooping Fadi Lolo’s Schwinn through ditches, Elsewhere, a telephone pole had fallen across the road. She’d had to lift the bike over that one.
She was two hours into pedaling south when she’d come upon triplet adolescents heading up the two-lane. Even fifty yards off, Their eyes burned white. They looked hungry, Their arms waved with unusual want, and rather than risk being snagged, Greer swerved off the pavement to ride through the sun-crisped crops. Bicycling on grass, though, sucked hard, reducing her speed so radically one triplet lost a finger in the spinning of the Schwinn’s back wheel.
That was the goddamn world telling her foolish ass to stay off the highways, where every white-eye in the world could see her, She took to the side roads, little strips of blacktop or dirt, and though the biking was tougher, she was cool with it—until a man atop a barn started shooting at her. She skidded the bike, started screaming she was alive. The guy kept shooting. She turned and pedaled like she’d never pedaled before, shouting aloud, so she’d remember it, that she was other things too: Black, a girl, a threat to whatever the man was hoarding.
After that, fuck roads. She walked the bike. It slowed her way down, but also forced her to take more careful stock of her surroundings. She needed to eat, and a cautious casing of a farmhouse allowed her to verify it was vacated. She’d wheeled the bike right into the kitchen and strapped it with as many bags of dry food and containers of water as she could. The Schwinn had become a beast of burden.
While stockpiling, she’d switched on the TV and gotten drawn into a full hour of the only active channel, WWN. Judging by the amateur video clips, things were in the toilet everywhere. People climbing from cyclone ruins in Shamrock, Oklahoma, looking like miracle survivors until They attacked. YouTube videos, hashtagged #DroneTheDead, of hobbyists piloting drones into crowds of white-eyes, the money shots of Their faces being sliced up by drone blades—it’s funny, right? Tragicomic absurdity from Disney World, as the pack of Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan fell upon children, each red bite a boutonniere.
Greer swiped a sleeping bag, left the house, spent a couple of hours putting distance between herself and the structure, then slept in the woods, She slept in the woods again the next night and the next. Tough nights, every snapped twig Qasim, guts flopping from his abd
omen, desiring her more than ever. Today, she awoke with a face half-frozen from leaked tears, weighed down with morning dew, smelling of bark, and doubting her ears: plink-plink-plink.
It sounded like rain dropping onto tin siding. But she was nowhere near anything with siding, and the last three days and nights had been clear and cold.
Greer rolled her bike through an unkempt acreage of weeds, her socks and jeans soaking through, and weighed theories. It was the plink of wire fencing being unrolled to keep people like her outside a safe zone, It was the plink of someone loading a crossbow capable of assassinating her from a mile off. It was the plink of white-eyes gnawing slivers from bone. Just before she saw the source, the plink was joined by a long, low wail she first thought was the creak of a rusted fence. It turned out to be a voice.
Ahead was the dinkiest crossroads she’d ever seen, two meandering dirt byways only suited for the landowner’s tractors. Deep mud puddles and overgrown weeds suggested it hadn’t been used in ages, except by the man who sat at one of the corners, picking a lonely tune from an ivory-colored guitar. He wore a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, with a scarf of faded American-flag design piled around his neck. Beneath black jeans, a dusty black boot tapped a rhythm into the dirt. His long fingers pulled at the guitar strings with teasing tardiness, each plink barely catching the far edge of the beat. A black fedora hid the player’s face, rocking in sympathy with his song.
Late last night
You crawled o’er my windowpane
Late last night, ooo-ee
You crawled o’er my windowpane
I answered, “Devil, you son of a gun
You done caused me too much pain.”
Here in this blank land, there was nothing to make an echo, and the moist ground stole all reverberation, giving the man’s croon the thin quality of a cheeping bird. The music was haunting; the man had to be a mirage, Greer felt no fear. The man had no belongings with which to attack her, except for the battered guitar case he was using for a seat and the guitar about which he clearly cared too much to risk damaging.
Take my burned old bones
Cool them in the river, y’all
Take my burned old bones, ooo-ee
Cool them in the river, y’all
So all the pitch-black things I done
Slide right down the waterfall.
Greer halted five feet away, The back-and-forth sway of the man’s fedora lifted high enough for him to peek from under the brim. She realized he’d heard her coming for a while, but had opted to reveal himself slowly, maybe so he didn’t scare her. That took balls, she thought. He should have been scared by her.
She expected him to be Black—she could see his agile brown fingers—but she didn’t expect for him to be under twenty-five and the hottest guy she’d ever seen. He arched his eyebrows over small, red-rimmed eyes and twisted his lips into a coy grin inside a short, scraggly beard. Though he’d stopped singing, he kept noodling, pulling the strings hard and letting them snap against frets like rubber bands. His Adam’s apple bobbed in a skinny neck as he improvised a Hmm-mmm-mmm-mmm.
Three days of surviving alone had familiarized Greer with racing pulse and surging adrenaline; she’d already forgotten how those same factors could incite a blush. She remembered was in possession of a two-wheeled dolly loaded with bags of food and water.
“You thirsty?” Her voice was distinctively unmusical.
He quit humming but kept playing. “Need to piss.”
Cute, she thought derisively.
“What about food?” she asked. “You hungry?”
The guy winked. “Got a turkey sub in one of those sacks?”
Greer peered into the closest bag, “Planters Peanuts.”
He slid his fingers up the neck and moaned a lyric: “I got peanuts … I got peanuts on my mind … Mm-mm, Mama, please do me right … and gimme what Planters you can find.”
It had been so long since she’d smiled that it cracked a glaze of crud on her cheeks. Whoever this guy was, he had a charm you didn’t pick up in northwest Missouri. She pulled out the jar of peanuts and gave it a toss. It had “a little spin on it,” as Daddy used to say, but the man’s left hand zipped off the guitar neck to catch it against his jacket, while his right fingers kept plucking the strings, plink-plink-plink. He grinned over the jar’s plastic lid and, with his right fingers still plucking, used his chin to remove the lid.
He poured ten thousand peanuts into his mouth.
“You eat like a dog,” Greer said.
“Woof,” he mumbled past his chewing.
“Is this”—Greer looked around—“your place?”
He swallowed, grimaced, picked up a soup can from behind his guitar case, and drank from it. Liquid, probably rainwater by its hue, streamed down his neck and darkened his shirt. He gasped, coughed, and wiped his lips. His right hand, possessed by a separate spirit, kept plucking. He gave her a teasing half grin.
“You mean, this my doghouse?”
Greer gripped the Schwinn’s handlebars. “I don’t have to share my shit.”
He slid a finger down the frets as he plucked a sinking, regretful note: pluuuunk.
“Nah, This ain’t my place. Just wandering around and, you know, got to feeling Faustian. I’m ready to cut me some Robert Johnson–type deal.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
He lifted an eyebrow and crawled his hand along the guitar neck, a loping progression of notes she was apparently expected to recognize. She shrugged. He licked his lips, rattling Greer with carnal desire, and asked, “What are you doing out here?”
She shrugged again. “I ran away.”
“From KC?”
She shook her head. “Other direction.”
“What you running from?”
Freddy Morgan’s peeled skull, Conan Morgan’s forsaken grief.
“Town called Bulk,” she said. “About forty miles north.”
“And we run into each other here at the Devil’s Crossroads? That’s like the only two cars in the desert crashing into each other.” He whistled. “You got a name?”
“Do you?”
He tipped his fedora with a flick of a finger. “Mr, Peanut.”
Greer scowled. He laughed and held out the Planters jar. She did the calculus any girl did before getting within grabbing distance of a man and decided to chance it, She stepped in and swiped the jar, but not before she got a whiff of him. She wrinkled her nose before she could think better of it. The guy stank of beer. The liquid in that soup can wasn’t water, Come to think of it, the guitar case he was sitting on wasn’t shaking like it was empty either.
“You’re drunk,” she accused.
“Oh, good. I been working toward it.”
“You know how stupid that is? With those things around? And bellowing songs too?”
“Bellowing. Damn. Been a minute since I had a bad review.”
“Yeah, I get it. You play guitar. I guess that means you get to be drunk and happy while the rest of us are barely staying alive.”
“That’s why I chose here.” He spread his arms at the fields to all sides, and the stoppage of music became the gasp of that lonely world. “Best place to hide, I figured, was right out in the open. Did you tell me your name?”
“Greer. Who are you?”
“Morning, Greer. I’m KK.”
“KK? Like the KKK?”
“That’s right. I’m two-thirds of the KKK. Now that you know the ugly truth, I’ll let you know I have a very, very good reason for being drunk. When I tell you, you’re going to say to yourself, ‘Miss Greer, KK deserved his beer, and from here on out, I’m going to be a lot friendlier to him.’”
“I doubt it.”
He pressed a fret and set the mood with a flamenco flourish.
“Must have been a day, day and a half, after this whole mess started, and where did your boy end up? At the Waterfall Brewery in West Bottoms. Now, you might be tempted to think I went there for the express pur
pose of tying one on. I forgive you for thinking it, Miss Greer, but that just isn’t accurate, I’d just lost Tull, man.” He pulled the guitar strings hard, the woeful thwap of the blues; Greer might have laughed if this guy’s eyes hadn’t dulled in anguish. “I didn’t even know it was a brewery, honest. There was this alley door, guess where they load the barrels, and next thing you know, Mr. Muse King is surrounded by all these giant vats of beer.”
“Muse King? Is that your real name?”
Muse was lost, telling the story with a song’s valleys and crests.
“Now, beer was never my thing, you know? Bourbon, man, and I’m not even picky about it. You spend your nights singing for your supper, voice all torn up, a little whiskey does the tricksy. So I push some boxes over the door and start hunting for a bottle, you can’t hold that against me, and by and by, I notice a sound, a bad sound. Sound is King Kong’s vocation.”
“King Kong? How many names you have?”
“You ever kicked a car, made a dent? You know that metal pop? That was the sound, one little bong, then two little bongs, then three little bongs. Now Tull, he was a beer guy. Ten million miles we drove together, and I swear five million of them he was all malt extract this and mouthfeel that. I used to be like, ‘Yo, we need one of them limos where the window seals your mouth off.’ Anyway, one thing I learned about is fermentation. You know about fermentation, Miss Greer?”
“No. But at least I only have one name.”
“Tull used to talk about brewing beer like it was making TNT. When you’re fermenting beer, you got to ride that heat. Your heat spikes, your pressure spikes. There was a few hundred vats in that brewery hadn’t nobody been watching for days. I’d just found me my bourbon, just like I knew I would, and all’s a sudden—” He slapped the guitar face. “Boom!”
Greer took out a plastic two-liter she’d filled with water and took a long drink. It was a casual behavior, which made her acknowledge how comfortable she felt. She could imagine this man onstage, spinning yarns between songs, taking her mind off whatever bullshit had been bugging her. It made her sad she might never know a scenario like that—clubs, drinks, those adult things that looked so fun on TV. It made her all the gladder she was getting a sip of it now, better than water.
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