The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  Then a voice she recognizes—a man’s voice—calls out from behind them.

  Just one goddamn second, the voice says.

  The hands let go of her, and she drops to her knees and keels forward. Her head turns in circles, and her stomach, and the gravel on the street digs into her palms. It takes all her effort, but she turns and lifts her head enough to see.

  Moses Todd, she says.

  It’s him, sure enough. There he stands, like some kind of cowboy, in the middle of the intersection, a broken stoplight swaying slightly over his head and in his outstretched arm a pistol leveled at the man standing over her.

  Step away from the girl, Moses Todd says.

  But something happens, and the man with the sewn-shut eyelid moves behind her suddenly and closes his hands around her skull like a vise and lifts her upright so she has to reach up and grab his wrists to keep her neck from snapping.

  Put yer gun down, the man says, his voice wet and loud just behind her. Put it down now or I’m gon kill her.

  Moses laughs and keeps the gun steady.

  Look at the pickle you got yourself in, little girl. Seems like everybody in the world wants a share of your final breaths.

  I swear hell I’m gon kill her, says the man again, wrenching her head slightly to the side.

  Then Moses Todd raises his gaze from Temple to the man, and a serious look comes across his face.

  She ain’t yours to kill, he says. She’s mine.

  And the gun explodes and she feels a wetness spray the back of her head and the hands holding her up go slack and she drops to the ground and looks behind her and sees the body of the man collapsed on the tarmac, the back of his head spilled open and a soft mushy hole in his face where his left cheek used to be.

  The girl Millie who was standing on the other side of her is already running away around the corner of the brick building.

  Temple manages to lift her body up to a sitting position, her knees numb beneath her.

  Moses Todd walks over and towers in front of her. He looks down at her, almost sadly.

  Now it’s your turn, little girl. I told you you should of killed me.

  You did, she says, trying to find out where in her body all her strength was hiding at the moment. You sure enough did.

  I reckon your life is mine twice over now, he says. Once by debt and once by forfeit.

  I reckon it is.

  You got anything else you want to say?

  Her head swirls like a stirred pot. She feels for any spare force in her arms, but it’s not there. They hang limply at her sides. She’s tired. She’s never been so tired, and that’s saying something because she’s been tired a lot in the stretching span of her lifetime.

  Don’t worry yourself about it, she says. I guess I could of seen Niagara Falls once—that would of been nice. But it don’t matter much.

  Niagara Falls. How come?

  Beats me. It’s just big is all I know. One of God’s marvels.

  Moses Todd nods his head.

  Yeah, he says.

  She looks up at him, and the corners of his mouth creep up into something like a smile, a smile that says, It’s okay I’m with you there in your smoky little girlhead, and he sighs heavily and looks on down the road into the distance.

  All right, then, he says and raises the pistol to her forehead. It’ll be quick—you’ll start dreamin of heaven before you feel a thing. But you might want to close your eyes.

  She does, she closes her eyes and thinks of all sorts of things, Malcolm and Maury the dummy and the lighthouse where you could see the vastness of the ocean, and she thinks about flying over that ocean and watching it unfold under her for ever and ever, skimming the surface and going faster and faster until everything blurs from speed and up and down don’t mean anything and the air becomes thick and solid around her and the face of God is right there too, nuzzling up against her, and amen she says, amen, amen, amen—

  She hears the shot—and something’s wrong, because she knows she shouldn’t hear anything. But her head is mixed up, and she’s sweating a lot now, and part of her mind is still flying over the surface of the ocean—and she opens her eyes and sees Moses Todd before her, dropping the pistol to the ground and gripping his shoulder, blood coming out brown from between his fingers.

  Son of a bitch, he says and starts to back away from her.

  Then, from behind, a number of figures, there must be six or seven, large and malformed, move around her and tackle Moses Todd to the ground where he continues to shout out, Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, until she’s breathing so hard that she can see little light explosions in her eyes, and she eases herself to the ground and wonders when she will actually die because she’s awfully tired, so terribly tired, and Moses Todd is right—there are debts she owes to the perfect world and she feels like she has cheated them for too long already.

  INSIDE THE town hall are rows of desks scattered with the detritus of a different age. Dusty computer screens, mugs full of ballpoint pens, framed photographs, ceramic pots with viney plants long dead, their dry tendrils snaking along windowsills—here and there smears of black-brown dried blood across the blotters.

  The screen of one of the computer monitors is broken out and propped up inside, grinning and still bespectacled, is the ancient dried head of a man.

  They take her to the back of the building, through a pair of swinging doors and down a flight of marble steps into the basement, a large central room with a row of five or six jail cells against the back wall. Against another wall are two tables built high with teetering lab equipment—the kind she’s seen in meth dens, but not exactly. In the middle of the room there’s a metal table with high edges and a drain—an autopsy table—except this one is jury-rigged with belts to help keep the body down. And next to the autopsy table is something that looks like a dentist’s chair. The linoleum floor is crusted over with flaky blood and dried bits of gore.

  They put her in one of the cells and slam the barred door shut. She falls to her knees and climbs on top of an old cot against the wall. She can hear sounds of movement and grunting. There are meatskins in one of the cells, shifting around one another like nervous animals.

  There’s a barred rectangular window high up on the wall in her cell, and she looks at the light coming through it and feels sleepy. The glass of the window is opaque with grime and crazed with fractures, and one small wedge of glass pane is missing altogether. Through that tiny opening she sees the sunlight bright and clean.

  God reaches you even in a basement, and she can’t keep her eyes open.

  9.

  Hey, little girl. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.

  She is dreaming of nice things—of pastures with dried grass coming up to her waist, of lakes where she can float stretched out on the surface, her skin tickled by the taut skin of the water, she like nothing but a little scurrying waterbug whiling away her time between the sea and the sky.

  Time to wake up, little girl.

  She knows the voice even before she opens her eyes. She shades her eyes and cracks them open, and the first thing she sees is the light coming through the rectangular window above her. Still daytime—she hasn’t been out long.

  Rise and shine, lollipop. We’re in a fix.

  Moses Todd is in the cell next to her, holding his bleeding arm.

  She sits up. Her head is pounding, but the spinning has stopped. She can stand up all right. She stretches herself and walks in circles around the cell a few times to clear her head.

  Then she hears a moaning from the cell beyond Moses Todd’s. She recognizes it.

  Maury, she says and looks past Moses.

  And there he is, her dummy, reaching his arm out to her through the bars and moaning plaintively.

  I figured they got you, Maury, she says. She can feel her face smiling even though it hurts her head. I reckoned I was out one dummy.

  Maury’s dense, flat eyes gaze back at her.

  In the cell between them, Moses is using
his teeth and his good arm to rip the sheet from his cot into a long strip.

  This is touching, he says and holds out to her the strip of fabric through the bars. But why don’t you give me a hand before I pass out.

  She backs away from him.

  I ain’t helpin dress your wounds, Mose. You’ll just try to kill me again.

  You knew I was comin after you.

  It don’t matter. You bleed out, and I got one less hassle to deal with.

  He chuckles, shaking his head.

  I guess that’s right, he says.

  He takes the strip and sits down on his cot and proceeds very carefully to circle his arm with it and knot it with his teeth.

  Then the door at the other end of the room opens and two men come in—massive, like the others she’s seen. They have to duck to fit through the doorway. One has no shoes on—instead his feet are encased in a growth of chalky bonelike shell articulated with tendon between the plates that spread and contract when he walks. She wonders how far up the legs that bone goes. The skin of his face is half gone, revealing one eyeball, unblinking, rolling in a jellied socket. He looks like a corpse, like a meatskin, but he moves like the others—with human purpose and alacrity.

  The man with him is less decayed. His skin is cracked open in places, and his hair has fallen out in tufts, but there isn’t any growth of bone that she can see.

  The one with no shoes strides over to the bars of Temple’s cell, his bony feet clacking against the linoleum as he walks.

  The girl’s awake, Bodie, he announces. He grips the bars of the cell and addresses Temple. Girl, you frighted Millie near to death. Why you wanna terrify a nice girl like her for? Why you wanna go messin around in her nursery? She got the makins of a true-hearted mother woman in her mini soul. It’s just lowdown spitefulness to want to trample on that. You jealous cause she’s got a family what loves her?

  His eye rolls back in its socket, moistening itself.

  I got no interest in her baby nursery, Temple says. She was the one with the weapon.

  Oh, he says, pointing to her gurkha knife where it lay on the table amid the lab equipment. I guess that there’s a passel of wildflowers. Mama ain’t too happy with you, girl. You’re jealous is what I think. But the family, it’s a iron fierce thing. It ain’t for snatching up by strangers.

  Hush up, Royal, Bodie says. We just here for a dose. Sit down.

  The one called Royal stares at Temple awhile longer with his unclosing eye and then walks to the dentist chair, where he straddles it backward, embracing the back of the seat with his arms, laying his face in the headrest.

  At the table, Bodie takes a syringe and fills it with clear liquid from a beaker that was positioned under one of the valved pipettes. He flicks the air bubbles out and goes over to where Royal sits.

  You ready? he says.

  Stick me, says Royal.

  Bodie leans over and carefully injects the needle into the back of Royal’s neck, up near the base of the skull, then presses down the plunger, slow, while Royal’s whole body seizes up like one contracting muscle.

  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck, Royal says through clenched teeth when it’s over. His whole body looks strained to bursting, and his thin, ill-fitting skin shivers and tears a little with tiny wet pops. After a few minutes, his body relaxes and his breathing returns to normal.

  Now me, Bodie says, and they exchange positions.

  When Bodie is injected, he says nothing but she can see the muscles quivering with tension beneath his clothes.

  Oh lord, Royal says, marching around the room in circles. I got a fire in me, Bodie. Right now? Right now I could fuck a hole in the world. I swear to God a’mighty, I could fuck a new Grand Canyon all by myself.

  Settle down, Royal. We got things to do. Bring one of those for Mama.

  Royal goes back to the table and fills a syringe with about twice as much of the clear fluid as either of them took themselves, then, yelping and clacking his feet against the ground, follows Bodie out of the room.

  SO, MOSES Todd says when the two men have left, you wanna take a guess what that was about?

  I ain’t ever seen anything like them before.

  I can’t say as I have either.

  They ain’t slugs.

  Nope.

  Then what are they?

  He shrugs.

  Mutants? he says.

  Well, she says, they ain’t the prettiest things I’ve ever seen.

  We’re in agreement there, lambchop.

  Hey, she says, what you suppose they’re shootin up? It ain’t meth.

  Some concoction of their own invention looks like. Whether it’s got something to do with their size and their looks is what I’m wondering.

  What you saying, they metamorphosed themselves?

  I ain’t saying nothin except you won’t find me puttin that stuff in my morning coffee.

  She looks behind her. On the other side is an empty cell and then the cell with the meatskins, seven of them, wandering around in circles, bumping into one another like blind people.

  What do you think they’re corralling slugs for? she asks.

  I don’t know, he says. Could be they’re using them for somethin. Could be they’re eatin em. I seen it done before.

  Yeah, she says. So have I.

  You want to talk about an abomination, there’s one, he says, shaking his head. The food chain’s supposed to go one way if you ask me.

  She hushes. She remembers the hunters she met. The plate of salty meat that tasted like rosemary.

  Moses Todd sighs.

  Well I’m tired of speculatin, he says. I’m just about ready to get out of here.

  What you gonna do, bend the bars?

  I don’t know. I’ll do somethin.

  Great. When you got a plan, let me know what it is. In the meantime, I’m gonna get some sleep.

  LATER THE girl comes in, Millie, the one from the woods. She has a loaf of bread that she tears into three pieces and pushes through the bars of each of their cells. Then she opens a sack and takes out three raw corncobs and passes those through the bars as well.

  What you planning on doin with us? Moses Todd says.

  But the girl doesn’t respond.

  You know, we can’t stay here. We got places to be.

  She leaves without saying anything.

  Temple calls to Maury and holds up her corncob. She shows him how to shuck it and tells him to do the same with his.

  The sun goes down, the rectangular window darkening. She sleeps.

  DEEP NIGHT, the sound of Maury’s heavy breathing and the inexhaustible shuffling of the slugs, and she lays on her cot, thinking the world around her is so black that it makes no difference whether her eyes are open or closed. Her mind wanders in and out of tangled dreams so shallow they have trouble flinging themselves beyond the walls of the basement where she lies.

  Once, from the carbon black of the cell next to her, she can hear the creak of cot springs and Moses Todd’s voice calling to her, barely more than a whisper.

  Hey, girl. You awake over there?

  Yeah, I’m awake.

  Just this seems to satisfy him for a minute. Confirmation of awakeness, the fraternity of insomniacs.

  Then he says, What you thinking about?

  Me? I ain’t thinking about anything. You want a bedtime story, Mose, you came to the wrong person.

  All right, he says. Fine.

  She waits on his voice again but it doesn’t come, and soon the dark begins to worry her with its fingering in all the corners of her wakeful brain.

  After a while, she says, Why? What was it you were thinkin about?

  She hears him draw a big breath.

  Oh, he says. Just somethin I saw a long time ago.

  What was it?

  It was in a place called Sequarchie, he says, speaking slowly. That’s in Tennessee. I was just passin through, and there was this woman, sittin out front of the hospital on the curb, leaning against a fire hydrant. The
y wouldn’t treat her, cause she’d been bit—had a man’s flannel shirt all bunched up against her neck. It was wet all through, and she kept trying to find a dry part to soak up the blood, but there wasn’t any dry part so she just used it for pressure. This was just after everything started, so there was lots of confusion. And that girl, she must of been eighteen, nineteen, she just come down out the hills where she was livin, and she hadn’t even heard that the dead they were comin back. I was a young man then, about her exact age, I guess.

  He is quiet for a long time. She is beginning to wonder if he has fallen asleep when he starts up again.

  Anyway, he says with a sigh. She tells me that her man, he died the week before, slipped and fell over a rock ridge while he was huntin, broke his neck. She buried him out back in a cedar glade by the stream, his favorite place to go off to when he had enough of the world. She thought that was it for her and him in this world, and so she commenced to mournin. Except—and she tells me this like I couldn’t believe it in a million years—except he comes back to her. He comes back to her one night, and she says it like it’s a revelation of pure love. He comes back to her, and he’s been so hungry with the missing of her that he tries to swallow her whole. That’s what she says. She keeps sayin it. He come back to me. He come back to me. And all the time, I’m lookin at her eyes, how they’re gettin cloudy at the edges—and how her skin is goin gray—and I know what’s happening to her even though she thinks she just needs some stitches and can’t understand why they won’t give em to her. He come back to me.

  What’d you do? Temple asks.

  Moses Todd goes quiet again for a long time. She wonders if she shouldn’t have said anything.

  Finally he says, I left her there. I should of taken care of it. I should of put her down. But I was young. That was before I understood that things have a way about em that needs to be respected, pretty or not. Ain’t no code but one that doesn’t feel like it fits exactly proper.

  She turns on her cot and thinks that what he said is among the truest of things. Sometimes when there’s no light to see by, that’s when everything comes sharp and clear. She listens to Maury’s breathing, and the constant whisper movement of the jailed slugs, and she curls herself up into a tight ball of a little girl.