The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  And she tells how her mind went after those imaginings so far that she got lost in them and did not notice how dim and red the light filtering through the murky windows had become, how much time had passed. And that when she did become aware of herself again, running panicked back outside where she had told Malcolm to wait, she saw there a whole cluster of meatskins, fifteen or twenty, moving toward him and one of them already there. One already gotten to him. Already gotten him, the boy, Malcolm, her given charge. They could have come from anywhere. She had not heard his screams because she had become deaf to all but the throb of her own pixied brain.

  And that’s when she laid hell upon them, the slugs, slaughtering them, one at a time, every which way, without thought or reason or heedfulness. And she tells that while she was doing it her blood went crazy—the blood in all her veins boiled and beat like a drum and made her see black hell everywhere she looked, and made her monstrous with the sin of vanity, the sin of thinking herself immortal like the iron giant. She tells of bringing the gurkha blade down and relishing the thunk of it getting buried in a skull, the wicked enjoyment of it, the heinous illusion that her death-mongering was righteous, that her touch was a sword of light—and the passion, the deep down lust that drove her to strike out to the right and left, as though her body were hungry for death—as though she had become one of them and would consume black death and eat the very souls of the living if she knew where to find them. Such is the demon in her.

  And when it was finished, her clothes soaked through in blood and bile and crusted with graying tissue, she wiped from her face the gore she had ripped from the bodies of the dead—the issue of her own feral cannibalism—and only then was she able to open her eyes full to the stinging, punishing orange light of the failing day.

  It was too late. The boy Malcolm was torn open, neck to navel, and it was as good as if her own vicious claws had done the ripping.

  She tells the old woman how she held the body of the boy, rocking it and trying to close with gory fingers the zipper seam down his middle. She tells how she sat so long with the boy in her arms that the sky rained down its tears and baptized him and washed him clean for the grave, and how she dug the grave with her hands in the mud at the base of the iron giant and laid him in it, and how she prepared him for heaven by cutting off his head with the gurkha knife so that he wouldn’t get lost and wander back to the surface of the earth like so many had done—and how the brutal task caused her no suffering because she knew by then there was evil in her and that no action however grotesque or unholy could be ill-suited for the thing she had become.

  She tells then of wandering lost, of isolating herself from the eyes and hearts of good men, of shutting herself away in abandoned houses and, when she was discovered by the generous of spirit who came to save her, escaping even farther into the evacuated wildernesses of the country. Weeks at a time without seeing another living person. Exercising her voice with raspy song so as not to go mute.

  She tells of moments when she would forget, when her own simmering evil would seem to dissipate and let through the clear spectacle of life. One had to be careful of those moments, because they were fleeting and intended not for her but instead for the delectation of other children of God. Or, if they were meant for her, they could break her heart as easily as mend it, because all that beauty in the suffered world was the same kind of beauty that had gotten her lost and made her forget her charge and held up for her loathing gaze her own selfish soul.

  She tells of the island, the lighthouse, the moon, and the Miracle of the Fish.

  She tells the old woman these things while those ancient fingers work the clattering needles against each other, but Temple leaves her there in the outspreading shade—because the only common language between them is the argot of desolation, whose words are really just meant for the deafness of the wide, wide sky.

  PART III

  13.

  The road south from Nacogdoches is clear and straight, leading them over flat and rough-hewn terrain. In the distance ahead, the horizon is darkened to the color of coal by a long, thick line of clouds.

  Looks like rain, Maury. To tell you the truth I wouldn’t mind a bit of coolin down.

  The man stares out the window.

  You ready for the big homecoming, Maury? Ready to deliver yourself from this crazy girl you got tied to?

  His eyes are focused on the asphalt ribboning out before them.

  Yeah, well, you ain’t ever been much company anyway.

  By the time they get to the massive urban sprawl she assumes must be Houston, the clouds have crowded out the sky and a dense drenching rain drums resonantly on the roof of the car. She drives slowly, because the roads are unreliable and any puddle could conceal a fatal pothole.

  The freeway she’s on, the one numbered 59, takes her straight through the middle of the city. Looking down over the guardrails of the roadway, she can see the slugs out there wandering in the rain—some looking curiously upward only to get rain in their eyes. Others sit in the overflowing gutters watching the small rivers of water course over them. Sometimes the dead can seem clownish or childlike. She wonders how people could have let such a race of silly creatures push them into the corners and the closets of the world.

  She comes to a collapsed overpass, the rubble of one roadway fallen onto the surface of another, and she has to turn the car around and find an exit and navigate the city streets to pick up the freeway farther ahead. It seems there are no survivors in this city. The slugs crowd around her as she drives through the streets, pawing at the car when they can get close enough, lumbering behind at a snail’s pace, goaded on by instinct rather than logic. She wonders how long they continue after her once the car is out of sight. They must keep going until they forget what they are after, until the image of the car has evaporated from their minds. And how long is that? How long is the memory of the dead?

  Downtown. The business district, towered over by monoliths of glass and steel. The rain continues, and some of the intersections are flooded, great urban seas as deep as the undercarriage of the car. Garbage collects in small flotillas—stained rags of clothes, plastic wrappers, and cardboard containers, sheets of old, withered skin, the follicles of hair still intact, fragments of paper, business documents by the thousands that have settled onto the streets like autumn leaves falling from the demolished offices in the skyscrapers above, thick gray fecal matter, gluey and bubbling, even a clump of fake yellow flowers, floating in the midst of it all like a nightmare bridal bouquet.

  She looks up at the office buildings. The shattered windows leave black gaps like missing teeth in an old man’s grin. Out of one pours a miniature waterfall, and she guesses that the roof of the building must be caved in. She pictures the rainwater streaming through the structure, down the concrete stairwells, across the dense carpeted expanse of cubicles, finally finding its way to the exploded glass window. She would like to see it up close. She wouldn’t mind climbing up in one of these wrecked buildings and exploring. But at the moment she has circumstances.

  She looks at Maury in the passenger seat.

  You do keep a girl so she ain’t quite livin her own life. You know that don’t you? A big heap of trouble is what you are.

  She looks at him. He’s fascinated by the way the rain circulates around the stationary city, the shapes the water makes as it finds its direction.

  Maybe Jeb and Jeanie Duchamp will be able to make you eat bingberries, what do you think?

  His eyes blink slowly, his mouth hangs open a little.

  Maybe they know what to do with you, cause I’m at my wit’s end. Your granny must of been a woman of endless patience. I’m glad we gave her a right burial. What you chewin on, just your own tasty thinks?

  His jaw moves in small slow circles like the jaw of a cow.

  Anyway, she says, turning her attention to the flooded road ahead. Maybe I’ll stop here on the way back—put on my explorer’s hat once I unburden myself of you.

&nbs
p; She comes to a big building like an opera house or something, and the streets become a confusing tangle in the deepest part of the downtown area. She turns this way and that with no time to stop and think. She has to keep the car moving so the slugs don’t have a chance to collect in one place.

  The rain comes down hard and there is no sun by which to navigate, and she passes some buildings twice and even three times, and she looks for signs with the number 59 on them. Once she arrives at a large intersection and cannot decide which way to go. On the side of one of the buildings, she finds a fellow traveler’s message hand-painted in dull red. There’s an arrow pointing down one of the roads, along with letters scrawled as tall as a person:

  SAFE ROAD

  What do you reckon that says, Maury? she asks. I wish sometimes people would write in pictures. A skull or a happy face or somethin. That alphabet, it just ain’t friendly to my cause.

  Warning or invitation, she doesn’t like the looks of that sign, so she chooses one of the other roads and follows it straight down the rain-soaked avenues, and the desolate city towers over her and tolerates her creeping through it like an ant. Eventually, she begins to spot signs that say 59, and she follows them and finds the freeway that continues to take her south.

  The city has seen other lost travelers like her, seeking safe passage from one end of its labyrinth to the other. Too far south, its population could not hold against the plague of the dead—and its inhabitants fled to other cities leaving this one a forgotten husk of a place. Some groups have tried to establish a foothold here and been overrun. Once, even, a band of twenty raiders made their home in a gutted movie theater in the heart of the city. They set traps for other travelers, painting signs on the sides of buildings to lead them toward dead ends where the raiders would attack and plunder their supplies and leave them to the neutral army of slugs swarming the streets.

  If one were to follow these signs, one would come upon cul-de-sac graveyards, aged skeletons, whole or in pieces, hanging out the windows of automobiles, jammed partway into the gutters so that the rainwater has no place to drain, some even arrested in pathetic gestures of escape, clawing with wasted fingerbones at the barred doors of empty shops where their lower halves had been consumed while their hands had locked in moribund spasm around the door handles.

  But now, in following the signs, one need not fear the hostilities of the raiders, for they too were overrun, years before, in the theater they had been using as their home, where they had learned how to run the projector, and where they had all watched the ancient reels of Gone With the Wind over and over until they knew the lines by heart and wondered, each individually, if it weren’t possible for such an era to come again on this earth.

  THE RAIN comes down like something incontestable. It rains as though it were going to be the last rain ever—Noah’s flood, a rain of oceans, like the seas have been picked up into the clouds and dumped on all the land. It rains through the night, sometimes so hard that she has to bring the car to a halt because she can no longer see the road.

  She shuts off the engine and makes sure the doors are locked and sleeps until she is woken by the crackling explosions of thunder that leave the air smelling of mineral and burn. In the lightning flash, she can see the line of the horizon, impossibly long, impossibly distant, but clear and distinct like the edge of a stage she might stumble off if she isn’t careful.

  She rubs her eyes and drives on.

  Every so often, she looks in the rearview mirror thinking to find Moses Todd there, his headlights, pursuing her still. Truth be told she doesn’t know whether she fears it or desires it. But she knows it’s impossible. Even if he had survived, she has left behind the car with the tracker. There is no way for him to follow her—no way for him to imagine that she would come down here into a blasted wilderness long ago given up by civilization.

  And the rearview mirror remains empty.

  Because the rain has slowed her down, it is morning by the time she reaches Point Comfort, the weak light of day filtering cold and cadaverous through the rain clouds that are still spitting drizzles of water down from the sky.

  It’s a small community on the edge of a lake, block after block of square two-story houses with patches of lawn in front that have long since turned to weed. Other than the restoration of nature to its more primitive form, the area is untouched by devastation. It’s one of those places that must have been evacuated early on—emptied out so that the slugs had no reason to come there—and so far removed from safe society that it remained undiscovered by looters and raiders.

  Ghost town.

  Looking down the residential streets, she sees that the mailboxes are intact and form a pretty little line like tin soldiers—some of them even with their flags raised. The streetlights, too, are still lit from the night before, which means that the town must be contained on the periphery of a power grid that’s still operational.

  There are cars still parked in the driveways, bicycles still overturned on the sidewalks. One of the houses must have been undergoing renovation at the time, because its back half is covered in plastic sheets that funnel the rain down into puddles in the bare mud of the backyard. Some of the garage doors stand open, and she can see the appurtenances of suburban life lined up along the inside walls: the mowers and lawn chairs and kayaks, gardening implements whose functions she cannot interpret, hammers and saws and drills hanging from hooks on large holed boards suspended over workbenches.

  The white doors are wide and welcoming, though the shrubbery has grown tall and blocks out many of the first-floor windows.

  She looks at the man in the passenger seat beside her.

  This is one lonesome place, Maury, she says.

  He stares ahead and seems agitated, a tiny whine building in his throat.

  You recognize any of this?

  The quiet whine continues—song or lament, it is impossible to tell. His eyes are blank and untelling.

  I’ll tell you one thing, Maury. It ain’t lookin so good for the Duchamps. Looks like your relations got out of here right quick when the first alarm bells rang. Smart, I guess. But that means they could be anywhere in the country now. If they’re still alive at all.

  The whine becomes louder.

  Somethin’s eating you all right. You recognizing this place? Or you just wailin at that old gray sky? Sometimes I wish you could talk, you big dummy. It sure would be easier on the both of us.

  She looks around. The rain has tapered off, but the windshield wipers still clear away a thick muzzy moisture like dew that blurs her view.

  Well, she says, I guess we could at least find the house while we’re down here. It’s good to make a hundred percent certain in these cases.

  So she drives around until she matches the name from the green street sign with the name written on the fragment of paper from Maury’s pocket. Then she continues down the street until she finds the number of the right house, 442, and pulls to the curb before it.

  That’s when she notices, distinct as anything, and unlike any of the other houses in the area, a strange flickering glow coming from the front windows.

  YOU READY for a miracle, Maury? she says. Cause it looks like we got the makings of one right here.

  But it feels, if she lets herself admit it, not quite like a miracle. They sit in the car and she watches the house for twenty minutes straight—that strange flickering glow that looks like firelight. She waits to see if it will spread, to see if the house is on fire, maybe struck by lightning in the last storm. But the light remains steady. She starts the car and drives around the block, and then she drives around the other block, circling the house from behind. Then she pulls up to the curb again and sits for ten minutes longer watching the glow. There are no figures in the streets, dead or living, no other houses that have any signs of life, and nothing else about this particular house that seems out of the ordinary.

  Come on, Maury, she says finally. Let’s go take a look and see if the Duchamps are home. You stay be
hind me—I ain’t exactly sure about this.

  She unsheathes her gurkha knife and moves slowly up the walkway. Rather than going straight to the front door, she crosses the lawn and peers tentatively into the front window. The source of the glow is indeed a fire, burning steadily in the living room fireplace. Otherwise there are no signs of life.

  Not knowing what else to do, she knocks on the front door and stands rigid, the gurkha behind her back, held in a quivering grip, poised to strike.

  She waits and knocks again, louder this time.

  They ain’t answering, she says to Maury, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  She tries the door. It’s unlocked, and it swings inward with a noisy echoing creak. In the still of the neighborhood, as the rain lifts and leaves behind a pillowy silence, she feels like the sound of the door opening can be heard all the way up and down the street.