The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  In the glove compartment she finds the die-cast fighter jet she got in the toy store. She turns it over and over in her hands.

  Hey, Maury, come here.

  She holds it out to him, but he doesn’t take it.

  Look, she says. It’s an airplane. Like up in the air.

  She points to the sky and then illustrates how the jet fighter would fly through it, making swooshing sounds to accompany the demonstration.

  Here, you can have it.

  This time he takes it and holds it in his palm, staring down at it as though waiting for it to take off on its own power.

  Don’t lose it now, she says. Put it in your pocket.

  She also finds, pushed all the way into the back of the glove compartment, the plastic bag with the tip of her finger in it. It’s gotten shriveled up like a raisin and gray all over except the nail, which is still painted soft pink. She looks at her other nine fingernails, and there’s not a trace of that cotton candy polish left anywhere. Instead, there’s blood caked black and hard under the tips of her nails, as though she has claws meant for digging instead of fingers.

  She rolls the plastic bag into a cylinder and stuffs it into her pocket.

  Say goodbye to the vehicle, she says to Maury. We’re hoofin it for a while till we can find us some new wheels.

  They skirt the town on their way back, but in the distance they can hear hollering and wailing—deep cries of anger and mourning.

  I guess they found the mess we left, she says. You suppose they’ll come after us, Maury? We gotta watch our backs. I wonder what they done with ole Mose.

  A couple miles out of town they pick up the railroad and follow it east so they can stay off the main road but still be able to move quickly and to see if anyone’s coming up behind them. Temple uses the gurkha knife to cut Maury a walking stick, and he lets it drag along the wooden ties, producing a rhythmic tap of wood on wood like the cycling of an ancient pedometer measuring the unfolded distance of their journey.

  The sun dips lower in the sky ahead of them, and their shadows are the only things that follow them, stretching long and distorted behind. Their feet crunch on the gravel of the rail bed, and she notices that the rails themselves are not rusted brown but shiny, and she wonders if they are still in use by someone.

  The sun goes down but the sky stays bright for a long time as though they are walking along the very perimeter of a flat earth. It is still light when the dry kudzu-choked trees on their right thin to reveal a river running parallel to them.

  Ain’t that a sight, she says.

  The water is broad and slow moving, and the verge is thick with reeds. She looks hard into the distance behind them but sees nothing.

  Come on, Maury. You need a bath almost as bad as I do.

  So they strip off their clothes and walk into the water as the grimy supplicants of a desecrated earth—the man’s body pale and thick, almost hairless, sitting like a sunken stone in the shallows, motionless as the water finds its course around the simple obstruction, and she, like a tiny despoiled innocent washing away the marks of her ruin, dunking her head under the water as if there she would find the baptismal kingdom of heaven, and rising up again with the pink of her flesh beginning to show through the mask of putrefaction. She runs her fingers through her hair and watches the water sweeping away the clots of blood and tissue, the splinters of bone. From above she might be seen to carry a tail like a comet, she the bright head followed by an elongated swirling deltoid of red-brown muck. Afterward, she sits waist-deep and picks away bits of glass buried in the skin of her face and hands, and she rinses her cuts in the cool water until the burn ceases.

  Then she takes her clothes from the grassy shore and soaks them in the water and wrings them until all the crustiness is gone out of them—though the rusty stains won’t come clean and, she supposes, never will.

  By the time they emerge purified from the river, the sky has grown an inky purple, and stars are visible between the smoky night clouds.

  They gather twigs and slash from the woods, and she piles it up and uses a tangle of dry grass to light a fire behind a rocky outcropping, where it won’t be seen from the direction of the town behind them. She drapes her clothes over the rocks near the fire and watches the steam rise from them in wispy gray tongues while they dry. The night wind comes cool and her skin prickles all over with goose bumps.

  She watches the fire and feels sleepy, and when she pokes it with a stick, the embers fly up into the air like a crazy squadron of insects and then simply disappear as if they’ve gotten lodged in one of the many folds of the night.

  She looks at the man sitting next to her, his flat eyes brimful of contemplation of the flames. There is only so much room in that head of his, and right now the space is occupied with the shape-shifting vision of the fire.

  The thing that happened back there, she says. I mean, it ain’t like you asked—but anyway.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off the fire.

  I mean I guess I been around meatskins too long, she continues. Sometimes it happens where I’ll lose it. Like a switch got flicked somewhere in my brain, you know? And then my hands’ll start rippin and tearin and they don’t care about the whys or wherefores.

  The fire pops and sizzles with the sap from the branches they found.

  And it’s wrong, it’s a sin as big as the world we live in, bigger even—to lay your hands on a creation of God’s and snuff it out. It don’t matter how ugly a thing it is, it’s a sin, and God will send a terrible vengeance down on you for it—I know, I seen it. But the truth is—the truth is I don’t know where I got off on the wrong track. Moses, he says I ain’t evil, but then if I ain’t evil . . . If I ain’t evil then what am I? Cause my hands, see, they ain’t seem to got no purpose except when they’re bashin in a skull or slittin a throat. That’s the whole, all around truth of the matter. Them meatskins, they kill—but they ain’t get any satisfaction out of it. Maury, you sure are wanderin a lonely earth—full of breach and befoulment—but the real abomination is sittin right next to you.

  Overhead, the moon is just a sliver in the sky, like a candle flame, delicate and tenuous against the irreducibility of night. Like you should hold your breath for fear of blowing it out altogether.

  If the big man next to her has comprehended a word of what she has said, he does not show it.

  She nods to herself.

  I guess what I’m sayin is, she announces at last, we better get you to Texas so you can get shut of me.

  11.

  Days of waft and wayfaring. They follow the tracks and keep the morning sun behind them. Maury walks beside her, his feet trammeling along invariably—a gravitational movement, he is given direction only by her. When she walks into the woods because she thinks she hears something coming, he follows without question or confusion. When she stops to look at the sun or soak her feet in the river that still runs parallel to them, he stops also.

  When the crackers are gone, they eat berries and fish caught from the river in a burlap sack she finds among the rubble of the railroad tracks. Where the tracks cross roads, she looks for cars suitable for driving, but the railroad has taken them out beyond the urban areas, and she considers trying to get back to the main highways but decides instead they may be better off where people are unlikely to follow. Besides, it’s peaceful here with the tracks and the river running straight and twinned. They go for hours at a time without seeing a single meatskin—and the ones they do find are sluggish from hunger, some not even able to stand.

  Once, in the morning, while she is splashing water on her face, she sees a figure floating aimlessly down the river. It’s a meatskin, flailing about with slow movements, unable to right itself or keep its head above water, carried forward by the slow current—perhaps, she imagines, as far as to the sea.

  Another time, in a clearing next to the tracks, they come across a pile of cremated human corpses. The brittle mass is higher than she is, and all the tangled, burnt limbs fused togeth
er and petrified into something resembling a black igloo. When the wind blows, the charred flakes of papery skin whip back and forth like tinsel. There are no signs of life anywhere, and she wonders what such a construction could mean out here away from the common flow of human discourse.

  On the third afternoon, they are passed by a motorboat going upriver carrying ten or fifteen people, including two children who look at her through oversized sunglasses. The driver of the boat swings it around but does not cut the noisy motor. He waves to Temple, and she waves back. Then he does a dithering thumbs-up, thumbs-down gesture with his hand, questioning her status. She gives him a thumbs-up in return, and he signals back, circling his thumb and forefinger into an okay. Then he swings the boat back around and continues to drive it upriver.

  During the day, the dry dust is kicked up under their feet, and they have to keep moving so it stays behind them. If they stop, the cloud of their own passage catches up to them, and they choke and cough and sputter.

  Sometimes they find caved-in shacks in overgrown clearings, and they search these for useful items and curiosities.

  At night she boils water in old cans she finds by the tracks. She adds berries and aromatic leaves she knows are not poisonous.

  Riverwater, she says. It ain’t the elixir of the gods, but it goes down all right when you’re thirsty.

  Sometimes she sings to keep herself company.

  She was light and like a fairy,

  And her shoes was number nine.

  Herring boxes without topses

  Was sandals for that Clementine.

  Drove her ducklins to the water

  Every mornin just at nine.

  Hit her foot against a splinter,

  Fell into the foamin brine.

  Ruby lips above the water,

  Blowin bubbles clear and fine.

  But alas I weren’t no swimmer.

  Neither was my Clementine.

  In a churchyard near the canyon,

  Where the murple do entwine,

  Grow some rosies and some posies,

  Fertilized by Clementine.

  In my dreams she still doth haunt me,

  Robed in garments soaked with brine.

  Then she rises from the waters,

  And I kiss my Clementine.

  How I missed her, how I missed her,

  How I missed my Clementine,

  Till I kissed her little sister

  And forgot my Clementine.

  And she laughs and laughs, kicking at the dry dirt with the toes of her shoes.

  Get it, Maury? Clementine’s sister, she must be a peach!

  The clouds come, and then the rain, and the scorched earth swallows it through every pore. It could rain for days straight and never collect a puddle, so ashen and raw is the hard dirt they tread. They do not take shelter but continue to walk, liking the tonic feel of the droplets on their skin. She turns her face to the sky and sticks out her tongue and lets the rain trickle down her throat. The low tintamarre of thunder in the distance sounds like a medieval cannon reaching them not just over a stretch of miles but over a stretch of centuries—as though they are following the river back into their own primitive pasts. When it gets too close, the lightning turning the sky stark white for photographic instants, Maury begins to moan and refuses to move farther, his hands opening and closing on air.

  It’s okay, Maury, she says. That shivaree ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s just God makin a spectacle of himself at the marryin of earth and heaven. He’s gotta do it every now and then so we don’t forget who’s in charge. Come on, just keep your eyes on the tracks, and give a listen to my vocal melodies. I’ll sing you through it.

  She takes him by the hand and the two march on, her voice carrying high and far into the gray sky above until the clouds pass and the sun shows through in long straight ribbons so clear and defined it looks like you could slide down them if there were a ladder that could reach that high.

  On a big rock jutting out over the river, they lie flat on their backs and let their clothes dry out, and she feels the tickle of the droplets on her skin and it feels excruciating and delightful.

  If you close your eyes and look at the sun, she explains to Maury, you can see the miniature animals that live on your eyeballs.

  When she looks over, she sees Maury has fallen asleep.

  She sighs and looks again at the receding clouds.

  My lord, she says, a girl can sure enough cover some ground in this life. I bet I got places to go that I don’t even know exist yet.

  IT IS their fifth day walking when she hears the noise. At first she thinks it’s thunder again, but the sound lasts too long, it just keeps going, not like thunder or a crashing wave, the things of nature that break once and then sputter out. She reaches down and feels the steel rail with her hand.

  We best step to the side, Maury. This could be our ride if they ain’t a trainful of mutants—but I’m guessing the inheritors of the earth ain’t the ridin-the-rails type.

  She takes the gurkha knife from her sack and holds it behind her back.

  Could be trouble, she says, but truth be told my feet could use a break. Stand up straight, Maury, and try not to look so evil of portent.

  A diesel engine comes into view from the east followed by three boxcars, their doors slid open like the black maws of giant fish. It begins to slow immediately after coming around the bend, and when it stops it stops for her, the beast of steel and chain and grease inching to a halt on the tracks just feet from where she stands with Maury, its air brakes coughing and metal straining against metal—and she thinks of David and Goliath or other stories where the monster pauses and kneels down, its limbs creaking, to take the measure of its puny foe.

  She grips the blade tighter behind her back.

  She neither smiles nor frowns. She is aware of all the sounds around her, the chirping birds and the rippling of the river in the distance and the wind through the trees.

  The locomotive engine is shaped like a bulldog, pug-nosed and jowly. It is painted a forest green with a yellow winged emblem across the front of it, but the dust of a thousand journeys has collected on the surface, giving it the look of something that has recently risen from the earth.

  A door in the side of the engine slides open suddenly and the sooty face of an old man emerges. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and he takes it off and fans himself with it as he looks Temple and Maury up and down.

  At the same time, she begins to notice the faces of other men peeking out the sides of the boxcars farther down.

  The old man spits into the dirt and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.

  You two in trouble? he asks.

  I don’t know, Temple says. Are we in trouble?

  Not by us you ain’t.

  That’s good to hear.

  The old man wipes the sweat from his forehead and leaves a streak of black.

  Where you headed? he asks.

  West.

  Good thing. You don’t wanna be goin east. There’s bad business back there.

  Is that right?

  Slugs I got used to. But after a while you see more’n you want to see and you just stop lookin.

  Uh-huh.

  The old man nods his head at Maury.

  What’s his story?

  He don’t talk. He’s just a dummy.

  The old man’s eyes go back to studying Temple—but just in a studying way, not trying to get a bead on her or anything like that.

  How old are you? he asks.

  Fifteen, she says, taking a chance on the truth and the fatherly instincts of the man in the cap.

  Fifteen! You’re too young to be wanderin the countryside. Too young by a mile.

  I tried to be older, she says. But it’s somethin that’s hard to force.

  He chuckles and rubs his eyes and looks out over the shrubby verge to the river below and then back at her.

  What you got behind your back? he asks.

  She reveals the gurkha knife,
holding it up to show him.

  What were you planning on doin with that?

  If you turned out to be trouble, I was gonna kill you with it.

  The old man looks at her with eyes still as toad ponds in the aftermath of a storm when the air is gluey with ozone. Then he begins to laugh.

  THE OLD man’s name is Wilson. He and his men, eight in number, run the rails between Atlanta and Dallas, picking up strays like Temple from the cactusland and delivering them to safer, more populated communities. They also break up clumps of slugs where they come across them, putting nails in their skulls with a butane-powered nail gun, then piling them up and burning the corpses.

  Wilson was an engineer going way back. He was on a run back from D.C. when the trouble started, that first day when the dead began to get up and walk around like living folk. His family, his wife and his two kids, they were already got by the time he reached home. Everything changed all at once. This new world, this world now a quarter of a century old, it wasn’t anything he ever got to confront with his family standing beside him. The world changed and he changed all at the same time, and he aims to keep moving since it seems like there’s nowhere to settle and no one to settle with. He remembers, he says, that Wilson of before—but only just barely.

  The others are ex-military men, mostly. Some mercenaries who floundered without an economy to exploit, opportunists who, having gathered piles of cash, found themselves at a loss for anything to spend it on that couldn’t be taken for free and with the world’s permission. America having changed to benefit them, their accounts suddenly cleared, they reverted to the only actions that still seemed mercenary in this topsy-turvy landscape: They rode the countryside like desperadoes, helping people.

  There they sit, at a rickety card table attached with brackets to the inside wall of the boxcar so it doesn’t spill over with the starts and stops, playing Omaha poker and drinking booze out of tin mugs, or sitting with their legs out the open side of the car, watching the landscape go by and breaking down their guns to clean them, or carving miniature figures out of basswood with pocketknives. There they are, the new knights-errant of this blasted homaloid—lost men who find lost men and carry them to safety by their dusty collars.