The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  Without thought, she draws the gurkha knife from its sheath and spins around, raising it over her head and ready to bring it down.

  And that’s when she sees the rifle barrel pointed directly at her face.

  Whoa there, mister, she says and lowers the blade. I was preparin to chop you for a slug. What’s the idea sneaking up on people like that?

  As soon as he hears her speak, the man lowers the rifle.

  I thought you were one of them, he says. You were standing there for so long doing nothing.

  Well excuse me for takin a perusal.

  He looks around, a good-looking man, in his thirties, she would say, with straight blond hair that falls into his eyes. He’s freshly shaved and has a look of alertness that makes her think of a cat or a rodent, some animal that is always hunched for running.

  It’s not safe here, he says to Temple. Come with us.

  Who’s us, golden boy?

  At that he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles, and from around the corners of buildings and out of alleys rushes a small army of men—maybe twelve all told—and they circle around her.

  One man, wearing glasses, approaches her and begins examining her arms and the skin of her neck.

  Are you hurt? he asks. Are you bitten anywhere?

  I’m dandy. Lay off me.

  He puts both hands on the sides of her head and looks into the pupils of her eyes. Then he turns to the blond man.

  She looks all right. We can do a full exam when we get back.

  Not if you’re fond of breathin, she says.

  Come with us, the blond man says. We’ll take care of you. You’ll be okay.

  You got ice?

  What?

  You got ice to put in drinks?

  We have freezers, yes.

  Okay, then. Lead away, mister man.

  They guide her through the lofty towers of downtown, shooting a couple slugs in the head on the way.

  To keep the population down, explains the blond man, whose name is Louis.

  Louis is at the head of the group, and the others trail along behind scanning the area in all directions.

  Temple follows, but off to the side, keeping a fixed space between herself and the others. There’s one man in particular she doesn’t like the looks of. He’s skinny and has an oily mane of hair kept in place by a baseball cap—and he seems to be distracted by her. She can see his gaze on her, heavy, reflected in the dark shop windows. She slows her pace and falls to the back of the group to try to get away from him, but he simply does the same until they are together at the rear of the line.

  My name’s Abraham, he says to her. What’s your name?

  Sarah Mary.

  Sarah Mary what?

  Sarah Mary Williams.

  How old are you, Sarah Mary?

  Twenty-seven.

  He looks her up and down, his eyes lingering with a little sneer over every part of her.

  You ain’t twenty-seven, he says.

  Prove it.

  My brother Moses says I got an intuition for truth and lying. He says I can sniff out a liar at a hundred yards. It’s my secret talent. I can sniff you out, Sarah Mary.

  She looks straight ahead, grinding her teeth and thinking about a tall glass of Coke with ice in it from top to bottom and a bendy straw.

  Let’s see, he goes on. I would say you’re sixteen, seventeen at the outside.

  I lived some years. Don’t guess it matters how many.

  Where’d you come from, Sarah Mary?

  South of here.

  See, that’s how I know you’re not bein truthful with me. There’s nothing south of here. That’s creeper country all the way down to the Keys.

  She can feel his eyes on her, trying to shimmy up under her clothes and press against her skin.

  So what’s your story, Sarah Mary? You runnin away from a boyfriend? Lookin for someone to take care of you? You can tell it to me true—I’ll make sure you’re all right.

  She bites the inside of her lip to keep quiet and trots ahead to the one who seems to be the leader, Louis.

  Where we goin anyway? she asks.

  Look up, he says.

  Above her rise four identical towers, each taking up a full city block. There are retail stores on the ground level and most likely business offices on the rest of the floors. The four buildings are connected, about six stories up, by enclosed footbridges to create one massive insular complex. You could safely house a thousand people in such a structure.

  Louis leads the group around one of the buildings to the alley behind it where the concrete dips down to a loading dock. They approach a small door by the steel gate and look around once to make sure there are no slugs following—then Louis quickly unlocks the door and ushers the others inside.

  This your fortress? Temple asks.

  When everyone’s in, he shuts the door, locks and bars it.

  This is our fortress, he says.

  THEY HAND her over to a woman named Ruby, who feeds her and gives her new clothes from the barricaded department store on the ground level of one of the buildings and shows her a place she can sleep on the sixteenth floor where the offices have been converted to residences.

  Ruby tries to dress her in a sky-blue gingham dress, but Temple insists on cargo pants like the ones she already wears except not torn through and not covered in dried brown blood. Ruby examines them when Temple hands them out to her from the dressing room, and the woman shakes her head and titches her tongue like some kind of desert bird.

  You poor thing, Ruby says. It must have been a tough road for you to get here.

  The road was all right, Temple replies. It was the meatskins were the problem.

  Oh this world . . .

  It seems like Ruby may have more to say on the subject, but she trails off as though despair has gotten the better of her.

  Hey, Temple says. You got ice here, right? I’m thinkin a tall ice Coke would hit the spot right about now.

  So Ruby brings her a glass of Coke with ice in it and the two go down to watch the children playing in one of the lobbies. A swing set and plastic slide have been dragged over from one of the department stores and hopscotch squares are drawn on the floor with chalk.

  We have a school too, Ruby explains. My sister Elaine runs it. Six days a week in the mornings. Education is the most important thing, of course. So we can rebuild when all this is over. Did you go to school?

  I learned some things.

  I was just a young woman when it started. I guess you weren’t even born yet.

  No, ma’am.

  This must seem like a strange world to you.

  No, ma’am.

  No?

  The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you’re not fightin against it.

  Ruby looks at Temple and shakes her head, sighing. She’s a chubby woman, Ruby is, with a round face and eyes that wrinkle on the sides when she laughs. Her hair is done up in a style that Temple has never seen before. It’s piled on top, mostly, but some of it hangs down too. She wears a long shapeless dress and sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted a pretty shade of burgundy red—exactly the same color, Temple thinks, as spilled blood when it’s about twenty minutes old.

  The sounds of the playing children echo off the marble walls of the lobby. There are twenty of them, of different ages. The windows are painted over so that, Temple assumes, the slugs don’t see them in here and start congregating outside. Large yellow floodlights are set up around the perimeter of the lobby to help out the diffuse sunlight absorbing through the thin layer of streaky brown paint.

  She thinks of Malcolm, picturing him here among these other children. No doubt he would have wanted to go outside—he would have scraped the paint off the windows so he could see. But that was two years ago. He would be older than a lot of them now.

  How many people you got here? Temple asks.

  We have seven hundred and thirteen spread out between all four neighborhoods. You make seven hun
dred and fourteen.

  Neighborhoods?

  The four buildings. We like to call them neighborhoods.

  Is this all the kids?

  Most of them. It’s hard for people to have children here. We have a doctor, but our medical facilities are limited. But also, it’s just hard for people to be . . . optimistic.

  Oh.

  Ruby smiles broadly at her, as though she herself is the prime emissary of optimism.

  I like your hat, she says, nodding at Temple’s panama. We don’t have any hats like that here.

  Thanks. I like your nail polish.

  Do you? Do you want some? Most of the women here don’t bother to paint their nails, so we have a lot left.

  Ruby takes her back to the department store, to the cosmetics area, and shows her a rack of dusty glass bottles with a hundred different colors and names on the bottom that describe the colors. Temple settles on a kind of pink Ruby says is called Cotton Candy, even though she has no idea what cotton candy is—but it puts her in mind of lollipops made out of T-shirts.

  Then Ruby rides the elevator with Temple up to the sixteenth floor, where Temple’s room is, a little office with a mattress on the floor and a table with a lamp and an artificial plant.

  The bathroom is down the hall by the elevators, Ruby says apologetically. We have to share.

  Thanks, Temple says. For the soda and the nail polish and the food and everything.

  You’re very welcome. I’m glad you’re here with us. We’ll take care of you, Sarah Mary.

  Temple says nothing. She tries to imagine staying here, in this place, with these people, and she is surprised to find the idea is not entirely objectionable to her. She wonders if this means she is growing up.

  Oh and one more thing, Ruby says. You can go pretty much anywhere here, but it might be a good idea to avoid neighborhood four. That’s where most of our men stay, our unmarried men—the ones who go out patrolling—the ones who brought you in today. They’re very nice men, most of them, very considerate and gentlemanly. But sometimes when you put them together they can get a little rough. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about us, that’s all. We’re a nice community.

  Then Ruby leaves, and Temple finds herself alone. She locates the bathrooms—there’s a communal one, but she enters the single next to it, the one meant for wheelchairs. She puts her gurkha knife on the edge of the sink and strips down to nothing and has a good wash with the cloth and towel Ruby has given her. Then she puts her head in the sink, letting her hair soak in the hot soapy water for a long time. Afterward, she combs it out and looks at herself good and hard in the mirror.

  Blond hair, lean face with long eyelashes framing two bright blue eyes. She could be pretty. She tries to look more like a girl, holding herself in the way she’s seen girls do, pouting out her lips and lowering her chin and raising her eyebrows. Her little breasts aren’t much of anything, and her bottom is flat—but she has seen glamorous women in magazines with bodies like hers, so she supposes it’s all right.

  She dresses again with the new underpants Ruby got for her. They are cotton with roses all over them. Ruby also got her a brassiere, but she doesn’t put that on.

  Back in her room, she paints her fingers and toes cotton candy pink—but she is sloppy and doesn’t have much patience so it gets all over her skin. Then she stretches herself out to let her nails dry and looks through the window at the darkening sky. The lights of the city come on as she watches. Some of them are on automatic timers, she supposes. But a few are real people like her.

  She gets right up to the window and sees her breath cloud the glass, and she says good night to the sunlit world and feels the intense gravity of sleep press down on her, so she lays down on the mattress and puts her palms together and whispers a prayer and listens to the low hum of the building until her mind goes wide and dreams take her into the vast mazy open.

  THE NEXT day she walks the buildings, smiling politely at the greetings she receives from the residents. They are happy to see a new face, they are happy to have their ranks swelled by one—another brick in the bulwark against the tide crashing against them from the outside. Some of them tell her stories of where they came from, the older ones spinning yarns about the world before. She has heard many versions of this story, but mostly they involve children riding bicycles down tree-lined streets in the afternoon. Picnics in parks. Going to grocery stores and meeting friendly people. Or camping trips without a care in the world except mosquito bites.

  These stories have always sounded suspect to Temple—gilt-dipped in nostalgia. In her own experience she’s learned that happiness and sadness find their own level no matter what’s biting you, mosquitoes or meatskins.

  She offers to help in the kitchen, where a bunch of women are making what seems to her an elaborate meal. They tell her she can crack a bowl of eggs—they have chicken coops and gardens on the roofs—but when they see how long it takes for her to pick out all the shells from the bowl they shoo her away, telling her just to relax and get acquainted. She can help in the kitchen another time.

  That night she goes to the conference room that they’ve set up as a theater, and she sits in the dark with everyone else and watches an old movie they are projecting on a big screen. It’s a movie about spaceships and planets that look like deserts, and she watches, and a girl next to her hands her a bowl of popcorn and she takes some and passes it along.

  The next day, though, she gets bored and antsy. She looks out the window on the third floor and watches the patrol leave the building and wind their way down the street like a tactical serpent. She likes the way they move, those men, like one body with many parts.

  She can’t sleep that night and strolls the silent corridors of the buildings feeling her insomnia like a disease.

  When the silence becomes too much, she walks over the footbridge to building four, where she finds the men playing cards for pills. They are on the sixth floor, gathered in a large space that takes up two floors and amplifies in echoes all their sharp laughter and gravel voices. The lobby of some company headquarters, she supposes, some monolithic company that used to occupy multiple floors in the building.

  At first the men look at her begrudgingly, as though she were an augur of their own embarrassment for themselves. The boisterous laughter dies down quickly as they, one by one, notice her. Then she says:

  Go on. I can’t sleep is all. I ain’t here to gum up the works.

  So the game goes on, tentatively at first, then building in volume and vulgarity as they lose their suspicion and forget her presence altogether. She likes the smell of their cigarettes and the clink of their liquor bottles and the crude language that tumbles like quarry stones from their hairy lips. New men arrive, coming in from night patrols, and she watches them go through a metal reinforced door off to the side carrying pistols and AR-15 rifles and 20 gauges and come out again with their hands empty. Then they go to a table set up like a bar where a man with an apron pours them drinks.

  Louis, the patrol leader, finds her.

  How do you like the game? he asks.

  I’m studyin it up, she says. It’s like poker with a little pooch mixed in.

  Pooch?

  It’s a game I used to play when I was little.

  You following it?

  Like I say, I’m studyin it up. What’s in the pot?

  Uppers. Sleeping pills. Some painkillers. Speed mostly.

  Uh-huh. Where’s a girl get some currency like that?

  You want to play?

  I could go a hand or two.

  Louis laughs, a big friendly laugh. Then he digs into his pocket and takes her hand and slaps three blue pills into it.

  Hey, Walter, he says to one of the men at the table. Why don’t you take a break. Shorty here wants to sidle up.

  The men laugh and she takes her seat, saying, I don’t know what’s so sidesplittin. Any moron can turn a card.

  Oooh, they say.

  She loses one of her blue
pills on a bad first hand, but ten hands later they give her a Ziploc baggie to carry away her winnings. Three Nembutals, five Vicodins, twelve OxyContins, seven Dexedrines—and four Viagras she uses to repay Louis for fronting her.

  What’s your name again? Louis asks.

  Sarah Mary.

  Well, Sarah Mary, I’m impressed. I’m impressed as hell.

  All right, then how bout lettin me patrol with you all tomorrow?

  He laughs again, jolly and warm.

  You’re something else, he says. But why don’t you let us handle the dirty work?

  From what I seen, you keep pretty clean.

  Sarah Mary, let me buy you a drink.

  He sits her at the bar and gets her an ice Coke, and she stays there awhile watching the game until that skinny rodent of a man, Abraham, comes in and sits down on the other side of her and begins getting his eyes all up under her clothes again. And he’s with someone big who he introduces as his brother Moses, and Moses shakes her hand and nearly breaks her knuckles in his big fist—and the two of them together look like the before and after of some kind of growth serum. Moses isn’t interested in talking. He sits at the bar and drinks and looks straight ahead like he can see through to the ugly other side of everything. He’s no man to be dallied with, she knows. She’s seen men like him before, dangerous because they’ve already come back from places these other, convivial men have never been, and the souvenirs they bring back from those places exist everywhere in them, in their wet ruddy eyes and under their fingernails and in the dark patina on their very skin.

  Moses just sits and stares, but his brother Abraham wants to talk, starts telling her about this girl that one of the other men nearly choked to death because she teased him and got him into one of the storage rooms and wouldn’t let him have any. And when he says it, his tongue slithers across his lips, and she can see spittle dried white in the corners of his mouth.

  So she gets up and goes to the other side of the room and sits on the edge of a marble planter and watches the game and tries to ignore Abraham’s gaze, which she can still feel wanting to bite on her.

  Fifteen minutes later, one of the men at the game accuses another of pocketing pills on the ante, and a fight breaks out, the two men clawing at each other over the tabletop and others trying to hold them back, until the table is overturned and a colorful spray of pills scatters across the marble floor and a wild grab is made for whatever anyone can get.