Ashes (26 page)

Time passed real slow and the bread was long
gone and nobody come to church. I never figured so many people that
I used to pray with would end up turning gray. Like church didn’t
do them no good at all. I thought of all the prayers I said with
them and it made me scared, the kind of scared that fills you up
belly first. I wondered what the Lord thought about all them
sinners, and what kind of words the Lord said back to them when
they prayed.

Daddy’s fingers had gone stiff and I about
had to break them to get the shotgun away. He’d used up the last
shell. The door was unlocked but nobody set foot in the church. I
was hoping whoever had knocked the other day might come back, but
they didn’t.

The gray people didn’t come in the church. I
figured if they was eating live flesh they would get me sooner or
later. Except maybe they was afraid about the church and all, or
being in plain sight of the Lord. Or maybe they ain’t figured out
doors yet. I wondered if you go through doors to get under
Hell.

Night come again. Daddy was dead cold. I was
real hungry and I asked Daddy to tell the Lord about it, but I
reckon Daddy would call that a selfish thing and wouldn’t pass it
on. I kept trying to pray but I was scared. Preacher Aldridge said
you got to do it alone, can’t nobody do it for you.

Maybe one of them Aye-rab bugs got in while
the door was open. Maybe the gray people ain’t ate me yet because I
ain’t live flesh no more. Only the Lord knows. All I know is I
can’t stay in this church another minute. Daddy’s starting to stink
and the Lord’s looking right at me.

Like I’m already gray.

I don’t feel like I am, but Daddy said ever
sinner is blind. And it’s the kind of hungry that hurts.

Outside the church, the morning is fresh and
cold and smells like broken flowers. I hear footsteps in the wet
grass. I turn and walk, and I fit right in like they was saving a
place for me. I’m one of them, following the ones ahead and leading
the ones behind. We’re all headed in the same direction. Maybe this
entire world is the place under Hell, and we’ve been here all
along.

I ain’t scared no more, just hungry. The
hungry runs deep. You can’t live by bread alone. Sometimes you need
meat instead of words.

I don’t have to pray no more, out here where
it ain’t never dark. Where the Lord don’t look at you. Where we’re
all sinners. Where you’re born gray, again and again, and the End
Times never end.

Where you never walk alone.

###

PENANCE

It caught Gran next.

Small red sores appeared in the wrinkles of
her neck and face. In the candlelight of the kitchen, the sores
sparkled like jewels. Father wouldn't look at her anymore. I'm sure
he would have locked her in the spare bedroom, except the beds were
already occupied by the corpses of Bobby and Mother. The house
smelled of corruption and ointment.

Father had started wearing his mask again. He
sat in the living room, watching the Web screen, hoping the misery
of others would ease his own. At least they hadn't cut our
electricity, though our water service had been terminated. I guess
they figured that the Penance wasn't transmitted by electrons. But
Father made us use the candles anyway. He said the fire was God's
purifying light, now that we had been robbed of the sun.

Gran sat at the kitchen table, her eyes
glassy, the candle's flame reflecting off her pupils. I dipped a
towel in the bowl of gray water, wrung it out, and patted Gran's
face.

"Don't waste it, Ruth," she said.

"Shh," I said. "It's no time to be
brave."

"The saints may not bring any more."

"Have faith," I said.

The saints hadn't brought food or water in
three weeks. Maybe the army had finally wiped them out. Maybe the
Penance had caught them. Or perhaps God had called them home.

Gran's eyes welled with tears that she
couldn't blink away. I wiped at the fluid that leaked down her
face.

"You should be wearing your gloves," she
said, her voice raspy.

I kept wiping. I hung the towel over the back
of a chair and squeezed some ointment from a rolled-up tube. The
gel was cold on my finger. I touched it to Gran's sores, at least
the ones that hadn't burst open.

"You're warm," I said.

"The fever." She shivered under her dusty
blanket.

"Tell me about the mountains," I said, both
of us needing her stories. Gran had grown up in the Appalachians of
Virginia. Now the mountains had become a mecca as hundreds, maybe
even thousands if that many were left, escaped the city. Some of
them were already infected, carrying in their hearts the thing they
were fleeing. From the Web news, back before the army had taken
control of transmissions, we had learned that people were killing
each other there, too. But when Gran lived in the mountains, it was
a place of peace.

Gran drew the blanket more tightly across her
chest. "We had a little cabin," she said. "In the morning, you
could see for miles, the high ridges like islands above the ocean
of fog. The air was so clean you could taste it, maple and oak and
pine, with just a touch of woodsmoke from the chimney. Your father,
he looked so much like Bobby—"

Her voice broke. The tears welled up again at
the mention of my brother. I fought back the water that threatened
to pool in my own eyes. I reached for the towel, but Gran shook her
head and smiled. "The tears don't sting anymore."

The curtain over the doorway parted and
Father came into the kitchen. The mask made him look like an
insect. His eyes were large and frightening, distorted by the
goggles. He went past us without speaking and opened the
refrigerator. The buzz and murmur of the Web screen protected us
from the awful silence of the room and the world outside.

We watched as he thumbed through the stack of
cheeses. He pushed aside the packages that had been opened. He
found one he liked, put it in the pocket of his coveralls, and
pulled a bottle of wine from the lower shelf. Then he rummaged
through the cabinets.

He pulled out a can of tuna. He looked past
Gran to me. "Have you touched this?" he said, his voice muffled by
the filters of his mask.

I shook my head. Father dropped it in his
pocket. He had his own can opener, fork, and knife. No one could
touch his utensils. He even slept with them.

"What's on the screen?" I asked, hoping to
get him to stay for a moment.

"The army says the war with the saints and
scientists is nearly over," he said. "I should have joined the army
while I had the chance."

My heart spasmed and then sank in my chest.
The extermination of the saints meant there would be no more
midnight deliveries. "What will we do for food?" I asked him.

"We shouldn't expect others to spare us God's
punishment," he said. I waited for him to deliver another sermon,
parroting the Commander-In-Chief's press conferences. About how we
had brought the plague among us by our sinning ways, how the world
had to be cleansed, how the scientists conspired with Satan to
deliver us unto these dark ages.

Instead, Father went back through the
curtain, the wine bottle tucked under his arm. He couldn't even
spare us a sermon.

"Your father used to go into the woods with
his hatchet," Gran continued, as if recalling fond memories at a
funeral. Like Father was already dead. "He'd cut me a little pile
of twigs and say, 'Here, Mommie, these are for the fire.' I made a
big deal of putting them in the fireplace and rubbing my hands
together, then blowing into the flames."

She shivered again, either from nostalgia or
fever. "I'd say, 'It's a magic fire.' And the next day, frost would
be thick on the trees and grass and creek stones. We would put on
our mittens and go walk in the woods, the leaves like a crisp
carpet under our feet. Our breath made clouds in front of our
faces." She glanced at the curtain that hung over the entry. "He
believed in magic, back then."

"Blue heaven," I said, trying to make her
forget her pain. Gran used to say, "When I die, Lord, take me back
to blue heaven."

"Looks like He'll be taking me there
soon."

"Do you want to go?" I asked.

Her eyes narrowed and her mouth collapsed
into creases. "Only the Lord knows the proper hour."

I felt for her hand. Her skin was like damp
tree bark. "No. I mean, do you want to go now?"

"Don't tease an old woman," she said.

I leaned over the table and lowered my voice,
even though Father was in the warm cocoon spun by the Web screen
and alcohol. "I found a way out."

She looked at me, her eyes cold, dead of
hope. "No. I heard the hammers and nails. The soldiers buried us.
In here with the Penance."

The Penance had started in the cities, New
York, Los Angeles, Miami. We watched on the news, the videos of
hospitals and people in ambulances and doctors trying to explain
the Penance away. Father would shake his head and say that the
sinners had brought God's wrath. When the army closed off the roads
leading from Charlotte, my parents shared a prayer of thanks that
we had been spared.

But the Penance didn't stop among the
highrise buildings, and barbed wire and barricades couldn't hold it
back. It reached the foothills where we lived, just as surely as it
stormed the beaches and jetted across the oceans. And the army
chased it, growing in might along with the Penance, two great
careening forces. They both came to Barkersville and hemmed us
in.

In the beginning, it was only one house.
Megan, from my eleventh grade class, came to school one day with
the sores on her face. The school officials sent her home. After
school, as I walked down her street on the way to our house, the
trucks pulled up. Soldiers in gas masks got out, carrying guns,
boards, ladders, and tool belts. They nailed the doors and windows
shut, then added a layer of plywood over the boards. Megan's father
tried to fight them off, but they hit him with the butts of their
rifles and pushed him back inside. Megan screamed as they boarded
her window.

I heard her screams every day, even when I
crossed to the other side of the street. On the fourth morning, I
tried a new route to school, one that took me well out of my way.
On those other streets, more than half the houses were boarded up,
an "X" spray-painted in red on each barred door. A thin dog rooted
in the garbage that covered the sidewalk. The few people that were
out looked at me warily, and moved away as I passed their
yards.

I ran the rest of the way to school, anxious
at being late. Soldiers covered the playgrounds, their shouts the
only sound in a place once filled by games and laughter. They were
sealing off the building, chaining the doors closed. I hid in the
trees and watched as students tried to escape from the upper
windows. The soldiers climbed their ladders and hit the kids with
hammers. I went home, my stomach aching, my hands trembling.

The next day, Mother came home, her face in
her hands. She was a doctor, and we thought she was crying over the
misery she witnessed as the Penance devastated her patients.
Prayers hadn't helped them. Neither had medicine.

Father pulled her hands apart. She had sores
on her face. Father slapped her. "Wicked whore," he said. "You have
brought the pestilence among us."

She was packing her clothes when soldiers
rolled their trucks into our yard. Father had called them, hoping
they would take her away and spare the rest of the family. After
all, why should we suffer for her sins?

The soldiers grunted from behind their masks.
Father held his arms wide in welcome. He was a big disciple of the
Commander-in-Chief by that time. The army was doing God's holy
work, only following orders, he said.

They drove their nails even as Father cursed
them. He pounded on the door that had been slammed in his face. He
kicked at the wood that surrounded and bound us. He picked up his
Bible and slammed it against Mother's head. He fell to his knees
and wept prayers.

The soldiers drove away. Gran and my younger
brother Bobby hid in the bathroom until Father's rage subsided. I
helped Mother to her room. She collapsed on the bed.

"I'm going to hell," she said.

"No, you're not."

"I have sinned." She shivered and grabbed my
hands.

"We have all sinned," I said. "But God is
merciful."

"I helped them," she said. "I worked with the
scientists and I prayed for the saints."

"Just try to get some rest. I'll bring you a
cold drink."

Her face was raw and red, her eyes wide.
"What have I done?" she gasped to the ceiling. "What have I done to
deserve this, O Lord?"

God may have forgiven her, but she never
forgave herself. She died two weeks later. Then Bobby got the
sores.

"What did I do wrong?" Bobby asked. He was
ten years old. He was Father's favorite, everybody's favorite. Even
mine. But then, he was the son, and I was only the daughter.

"Nothing," I said. "Sometimes even God makes
mistakes." God would forgive me this blasphemy, because my intent
was pure.

I kept him hidden from Father. By then,
Father was so obsessed with the Web reports that he didn't even
notice Bobby was sick. When Bobby died, I put him in the spare
bedroom with Mother.

Gran stayed in the kitchen most of the time.
The saints had chopped out a small hole in the kitchen window, just
large enough for Gran and me to send out whispered confessions.
Sometimes at night, cheese or canned foods or bottles of water
would be shoved back through the opening. Some nights, the streets
were filled with the noises of trucks and gunfire. On those nights,
no food arrived.

One time, just as the sun was sinking and
throwing its red light through the opening, I heard a scratching
sound outside the wall. I thought it was a saint. I whispered, "All
have sinned and come short of the glory of God."