by Alden Bell
Back down on the beach, she combs out her hair with her fingers and from under the screen of her hair she can see a figure on the shore in the distance. She doesn’t need the spyglass—she can tell by the way it lumbers. Slug. She finishes tugging the knots out of her hair and ties it up into a ponytail.
Then she takes her clothes from the cooler and dresses.
The slug has spotted her and is headed in her direction, but its feet keep getting tripped up in the sand.
She pulls out the spyglass and looks through it.
The dead woman is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. Her top is medical green, but her bottoms are brightly colored, like pajama pants. Temple can’t tell what the pattern is, but it looks like it could be lollipops.
She closes the spyglass and stows it in her pocket. Then she goes back to the cooler and takes out the pistol, checking the rounds to make sure they haven’t gotten wet, and puts on the sheathed gurkha knife, which hangs from her belt and straps to her thigh with two leather ties.
By the time she’s finished, the nurse is twenty yards away, her hands reaching out before her. Instinctual desire. Hunger, thirst, lust, all the vestigial drives knotted up in one churning, ambling stomach.
Temple looks one last time at the nurse, then turns and climbs the concrete stairs up toward the road.
The other slugs are still in the distance, but she knows they will catch sight of her soon enough, and that a few have a tendency to turn quickly into a pack and then a swarm—so she walks directly to where the cars are parked and opens the door of the red compact. The keys have been left in it, but the engine’s dead.
She searches the jeep for keys and can’t find any, but there is a screwdriver under the front seat, so she uses it to rip away the cowling from around the ignition and prise out the cap on the ignition barrel. Then she feels for the notch at the end of the barrel and puts the head of the screwdriver into it and turns.
The engine coughs a few times and starts, the gauges on the dash rolling to life.
Okay then, Temple says. That’s a boon for the girl. Half a tank of gas too. Watch out great wide open, prepare to be motored on.
THE WORLD is pretty much what she remembers, all burnt up and pallid—like someone came along with a sponge and soaked up all the color and the moisture too and left everything gray and bone-dry.
But she’s also glad to be back. She’s missed the structures of man—which are pretty wondrous when you put your mind on them. Those tall brick buildings with all their little rooms and closets and doors, like ant colonies or wasps’ nests when you bust open their paper shells. She was in Orlando once, when she was little, and she remembers standing at the bottom of this terrific tall building and thinking that civilization’s got some crackerjack people working for its furtherance, and kicking at the base of the building with her foot to see if the whole thing would topple over, and seeing that it didn’t and never ever would.
In the first town she comes to, she spots a convenience store on the corner and pulls up onto the sidewalk in front of it. Deep slug territory—there are meatskins milling around everywhere she looks, but they’re spread out, so there must not be anything for them to hunt around here. And they’re slow, some of them even crawling. Nothing to eat for a long time, she figures. This place is written off—she’ll have to go farther north.
But first she goes into the convenience store. She discovers a whole box of those peanut butter crackers she likes, the ones made like sandwiches with the bright orange cheese crackers. She rips open one of the packages and eats them right there in the store, standing in the window and watching the slugs inch their way in her direction.
She thinks about her diet on the island.
Ain’t a fish swimming in the ocean, she says, could beat these crackers.
She takes the rest of the box and a twenty-four-pack of Coke and some bottles of water and three canisters of Pringles and some cans of chili and soup and some boxes of macaroni and cheese and some other things too: a flashlight and batteries, a bar of soap in case she gets a chance to wash, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a whole spindle of scratch-off lottery tickets because she likes to see how much of a millionaire she would have been in the old times.
She checks behind the counter for a gun or ammunition, but there’s nothing.
Then she notices the slugs are getting closer, so she loads up the passenger seat of the car with her haul and gets back on the road.
When she’s out of town, on a long stretch of two-lane road, she opens a Coke and another package of peanut butter crackers, which taste like cloudy orange heaven.
While she’s eating, she thinks about how smart it was for God to make meatskins not interested in real food so there would be plenty left for regular folk. She remembers an old joke that makes her smile—the one about the meatskin who gets invited to a wedding party. At the end of it they have twice the leftovers and half the guests.
She chuckles, and the road is long.
SHE TAKES the coast road for a while, shaggy palm trees everywhere and overgrown beach grass coming up through the cracks in the road, and then she turns inland for a change. Gators. She’s never seen so many gators before. They are sunning themselves on the black tarmac of the highway, and when she approaches they skulk out of the way in no particular hurry. There are other towns, but still no signs of regular life. She begins to imagine herself as the last person left on the planet with all these meatskins. The first thing she would do is find a map and drive the country to see the sights. She would start in New York and then adventure herself all the way to San Francisco, where they have the steep driving hills. She could find a stray dog or tame a wolf and have it sit next to her and put its head out the window, and they could get a car with comfortable seats and sing songs while they drive.
She nods. That would be a right thing.
The sun goes down, and she turns on the headlights and one of them still works so she can see the road ahead of her but in a lopsided way. There are some lights in the distance, a glow on the horizon that must be a city, and she drives in the direction of the glow.
But on the road at night, you start thinking ugly alone thoughts. She remembers, it must have been five years ago, driving through Alabama with Malcolm in the seat beside her. She was very young then, she must have been, because she remembers having to push the seat all the way forward—and even then she had to sit up on the edge of it to reach the pedals. And Malcolm was younger still.
Malcolm was quiet for a long time. He liked to chew that gum that was too sweet for her, and he liked to put two pieces in his mouth at once. For a while she could hear him chewing next to her—then it was silent, and he was just looking out the window at the big black nothing.
What happened to Uncle Jackson? Malcolm said.
He’s gone, she said. We ain’t going to see him no more.
He said he was gonna teach me how to shoot.
I’ll teach you. He wasn’t your real uncle anyway.
To get the memory out of her head, she rolls down the window and lets the wind play in her hair. When that doesn’t work, she decides to sing a ditty she once knew by heart and it takes her a while to remember all the parts of it.
Oh, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
Yes, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
It’s on a long stretch of country road that the car dies, and she pulls over and pops the hood to look. It’s probably the fuel pump, but she can’t be sure without getting under the car and poking around, and the engine’s too hot to do anything for a while. And she doesn’t have any tools to poke around with anyway, but she can see a house set back away from the road down a little dirt drive—and there might be tools there.
She looks into the dark horizon toward the city lights. Distance is difficult to determine at night—it’s possible she could walk it by
morning.
Still, that house. It might hold something worthwhile.
She’s been out of the game for a long time now and she’s feeling bold—and anyway she wants something to distract her from her night memories. So she straps the gurkha knife to her thigh and jams the pistol in the waistband of her pants—two rounds, emergency use only—and takes the flashlight and walks up the packed dirt driveway to the house, where she’s ready to kick the door in except she doesn’t have to because it’s standing open.
There’s a stink in the house, and she recognizes it. Flesh mold. Could be corpse or could be slug. Either way, she tells herself to breathe through her mouth and make it quick.
She finds her way to the kitchen, where there’s an overturned and rusting formica table and peeling wallpaper with a strawberry vine pattern. Because of the humidity, patches of furry gray-green mold are growing everywhere. She opens the drawers one by one looking for tool drawers but there’s nothing. She looks out the back window. No garage.
There’s a door in the kitchen, and she opens it and finds wooden steps leading down beneath the ground.
She waits at the top of the steps for a moment, listening for any sounds in the house, and then descends slowly.
In the basement there’s a different smell, like ammonia, and she sweeps the flashlight around to a table in the middle of the room cluttered with bottles, burners, rubber tubing, and one of those old-fashioned scales with a long arm on one side. Some of the bottles are half filled with a yellow liquid. She’s seen this kind of setup before. Meth lab. They were big a few years before when some people were taking advantage of the slug distraction.
She finds a workbench against the wall and roots around for a phillips-head and a wrench, but what she’s really looking for is a pair of pliers.
She sets the flashlight down on the tabletop but it rolls off and falls to the floor where it flickers once but stays lit. Good thing—she wouldn’t want to have to feel her way back to the car.
But when she turns, she sees something she missed before. By the stairs, there’s a utility closet—and while she watches, the door of the closet, illuminated in the faint glow of the flashlight, shudders once and flies opens as if someone has fallen against it.
Then she can smell it, the flesh rot, much stronger now—it was masked before by the ammoniac smell of the lab.
They stumble out of the utility closet, three of them, two men in overalls with long hair and a woman dressed only in a satin slip, which has been ripped open to expose one desiccated breast.
Temple has forgotten how bad they smell—that muddy mixture of must and putrefaction, oil and rancid shit. She sees a fecal ooze falling wetly down the back of the woman’s legs. They must have fed recently, so they will be strong. And they are between her and the stairs.
She puts her hand on the pistol and considers. Her last two bullets.
Not worth it.
Instead she sweeps the gurkha knife out of its sheath and kicks over the man in front, sending him crashing down to the cement slab of the floor. She swings the knife and buries it in the skull of the second man, whose eyes cross absurdly before he drops to his knees. But when she tries to pull the blade back, it’s stuck, bound up in sutures of wet bone.
Then the woman has her by the wrist in a tight fleshy grip. She can feel the brittle nails digging into her skin.
Leave go my arm, Temple says.
She can’t get the knife out of the man’s head, so she lets it go and watches the body drop dead backward with her blade still stuck in it.
The woman is leaning in to take a bite out of her shoulder, but Temple drives her fist hard into the slug’s head, first once, then twice, then a third time, trying to dizzy the brain out of its instinctual drive.
But now the other man has gotten to his feet again and is coming at her, so she spins the woman around to get her between them and the man barrels into both with a bear hug that sends Temple crashing backward into the workbench.
The smell, as they crush against her, is overpowering, and her eyes flood with water that blurs her vision.
She reaches behind her and feels around for anything and comes up with a screwdriver, which she grips hard and drives into the man’s neck. He lets go and totters backward, but the angle of the screwdriver is wrong, it goes straight through rather than up into the brain, so he begins to walk in circles gurgling liquidly and opening and closing his jaw.
The woman who has hold of Temple’s wrist opens her mouth again as though to take a bite of her cheek, but Temple swings her around again and slams the woman’s forearm against the edge of the workbench so that it cracks and the grip on her wrist loosens.
Then she ducks and moves to the corpse, putting one foot on his face for leverage, and pries her gurkha out with both hands.
The woman is close behind her, but it doesn’t matter. Temple swings hard and true, and the blade whips clean through her neck and takes off the head.
The last man is distracted, clawing awkwardly at the screwdriver in his throat. Temple moves around behind him to catch her breath. His hair is long and stringy with flakes of paint in it as though the house has been crumbling to pieces on top of him. She lifts the knife and brings it down hard, two quick strokes like she learned long ago—one to crack the skull and the other to cleave the brain.
She picks up the flashlight from the floor, which is now slippery with blood and excrement. Then she finds a clean part of the woman’s slip and rips it off and uses it to wipe her gurkha clean.
Meatskin tango, she says. Godawful messy business that is.
SEE, THERE’S a music to the world and you got to be listening otherwise you’ll miss it sure. Like when she comes out of the house and the nighttime air feels dreamy cold on her face and it smells like the pureness of a fresh land just started. Like it was something old and dusty and broken taken off the shelf to make room for something sparkle-new.
And it’s your soul desiring to move and be a part of it, whatever it is, to be out there on the soot plains where the living fall and the dead rise and the dead fall and the living rise like the cycle of life she once tried to explain to Malcolm.
It’s a thing of nature, she said to him while he chomped down on a jawbreaker he had squirreled in his cheek. It’s a thing of nature and nature never dies. You and me, we’re nature too—even when we die.
It’s about souls and open skies and stars crazy lit everywhere you look, and so she makes a decision to take a few things from the car and hoof it the rest of the way toward those lights on the horizon. And soon she sees a street sign and shines her flashlight on it, and the letters she can’t decipher and they don’t look like the name of any city she’s been before that she can recall, but the number is 15.
And if it’s got a light fingerprint on the sky that can be seen fifteen miles distant then it must be no small town, and that’s the place for her, a place where she can make the acquaintance of a few people and catch up on goings-on on God’s green earth and maybe get a cold soda with ice in it. And fifteen miles, that ain’t nothing. That’s three, four hours of night vistas and deep cool thoughts, barring the sad ones.
She’ll be there in time for breakfast.
3.
The streets are deserted save for slugs and wild dogs. The city is too large to fence and its avenues too snaky to patrol, but, Temple reasons, the electricity is being kept running for someone other than the slugs. The inhabitants must be hidden.
She climbs up on a billboard by a freeway on-ramp and eats a pack of peanut butter crackers while she scans the horizon.
On the way north she passed through a beachside community where all the buildings were sleek and pastel-colored. The main strip was cluttered with restaurants that had once featured outdoor seating on the wide sidewalks—places where rich people in cream-colored shirts must once have drunk cocktails. Now, though, most of the plate glass windows were broken through, the crazed white reflection of the sun lighting up all the jagged points of gl
ass like fangs around the gaping black of the interiors. The pastel paint was chipping off in flakes and exposing the crumbling concrete underneath. And in front of some of the restaurants, the wrought iron tables and chairs had once been piled up in defensive barriers that had long been breached.
That was one pretty town, she thinks, empty as it was. Maybe she’ll go back there one day. But that was a low town, none of the buildings over six stories tall. Unlike the city she’s staring at now, whose downtown, from where she sits, looks like a castle on a hill, all silver spires and metal majesty.
She climbs down from the billboard and walks another fifteen minutes toward the tall buildings of downtown, where the long shadows stretch across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk and feel good on her overheated skin. She finds a jewelry shop and stands for a long time staring in the window. There are dusty baubles hung around artificial velvet necks and rings set deep in cute little boxes. Meaningless. These objects once took the measure of value in a gone epoch. She has known people in her past who have collected such things, hoarding them against a future restored to the glory of a trinket economy. They collected them in small boxes contained within larger boxes contained within larger boxes still, and they brooded atop them like envious royalty.
But there is one thing Temple wouldn’t mind keeping in her pocket to put her fingers around and feel on occasion—a ruby pendant shaped like a teardrop, like her island. It has a gold setting attached to a chain, but if it were hers she would tear off the metal bits and keep just the stone, rolling it between her fingers.
Gazing at it, she sees a reflected movement in the glass of the shop window, a shape approaching her from behind.