Consumption (26 page)

Javier didn't see what tripped him. The ground came to meet him with a rush, and the side of his face hit it hard. Spit, expelled from his mouth by the impact, shot forward and landed on the offending foot. It was white, with delicately painted pink toes.

“Hello, Javier.”

Mabel Joyce stood watching him as he struggled to sit up. Star. Where was Star? The impact had confused him, but only for a second. Now he unsheathed his ax, charging Mabel. He ran toward her, but instead of trying to stop him, Mabel raised a finger to her lips.

“Shh,” she said. “If you're too loud, you'll disturb them. I want them to have some alone time. A little girl and her father deserve that, don't you think?”

“What the fuck are you talking about,
puta
?” Javier asked. He stood only two feet away from her, but he could not bring himself to lower the ax. “Where's Star?”

Mabel smiled, and pointed a finger toward the sky. “Up there.”

“Where?”

“Up there,” she said again, and giggled. Javier looked up and saw that there were natural stairs cut into the hill that led up to what looked like a plateau. From his angle beneath it, he could not see the top.

“What's she doing up there?”

“I told you. Her dad's up there. Put the ax down, Javier, huh? What do you say?”

“What are you doing here?” Slowly, Javier began to lower the ax.

“That's better. Come closer.”

Javier took a step toward her. Mabel still wore the scanty dress from church, and now she reached up to untie the knotted top. It fell around her shoulders and then off her breasts, hanging at her waist, revealing the top half of her body perfectly. “There's a few things we left unfinished, isn't there, Javier?” Mabel smiled at him and licked her lips. “I'd like to eat you, but I think I'll let you make me come first.”

“You fucking bitch,” Javier whispered. “While you were doing your mind-fuck with me, that thing killed my family.”

Mabel blinked her eyes, pouting her lips at him. “Oh, Javier. Let's let the past stay in the past.” She reached a hand up and under her skirt, where she began to rub, tilting her head back with a moan. “Fuck, it feels good. So good, Javier. Don't you want to feel good? Aren't you sick of all the bullshit? Aren't you sick of feeling bad? I can make you feel good. Only good.”

With her free hand, Mabel reached out and clasped hold of Javier's left hand, placing it under her skirt and up.

He felt the warm moistness of her, and his right hand, the one holding the ax high above her head, faltered, dropping some.

It had to end. Why not go this way?

“That's it,” Mabel said, pressing herself to him further. Using her own hand, she guided his, letting him stroke the softness of her downy hair, helping him to part her lips, and then guiding his fingers up and into her. She gasped as they plunged inside, and then removed her hand to grab him, grab his already hardening penis. He felt himself sinking into the filth of this, of her, and this time, he let her do what she wanted.

“Does it feel good?” Mabel asked, leaning in to whisper in his ear. A shudder went through his body. It did feel good. Amazing, in fact, to finally let everything go. What was the point in holding on, in wearing the mask of the good kid, the good son? Who was left to pretend for?

“Yes, Javier. Oh, yes!” Mabel's head was thrown back all the way now, and he felt her moving on him. Moving up and down on his hand, her whole body trembling. He watched her, fascinated. “That's it, Javier. Now I want you to go down on me. Go down on me. Eat me and you can always feel this way. Always. There won't ever be any reason to think of your family again.”

Mabel pushed him away with her leg, and his hand came out of her. “Now,” she said. “Do it now.”

The ax fell to his side, and Javier dropped to his knees, watching as Mabel lifted the skirt of her dress, the gauzelike black material crinkling in her hand, her fingernails painted a startling candy blue to match her toenails. He felt Mabel's hand on the back of his head, pushing him toward her, toward the sweetness of her that he'd dreamed about for so long, toward the place that was wet, the red hair glistening from the work his fingers had done. He leaned in.

“Yes!”

With his right hand, Javier brought the ax around, a splinter digging itself under his nail from the fierceness of his grip as, with one fluid motion, he buried it in Mabel's sex.

The ax went in smooth and clean, up neatly through the split in her lips, and then up still more, hitting bone. Javier stood, grasping the handle with both hands and forcing it upwards.

“No! You can't!” Mabel screamed, riding the ax now as she'd ridden his fingers but trying to free herself.

With one last furious yank, Javier moved the ax up and through the bone, and into Mabel's stomach.

For a minute, she only looked at him, her eyes wide and filmed with moisture as her hips continued their bucking on the ax. Javier dropped his hands. Mabel fell to her knees, and then forward, trapping the ax's handle between her face and the ground. She gave a final shudder and was still.

Javier paused for only a second, watching the ends of Mabel's gloriously red hair catch the wind and blow upwards, then fall down again against the stillness of her back.

He wiped the moistness of her that still clung to his hand against his leg. Wiped until he felt the skin rubbed raw against his jeans.

Without another look back, Javier began to climb, mounting the inset rock steps of the hill, toward Star.

“Daddy?”

When she rounded the hill, there he was, standing solid as truth with his policeman's uniform on, the sunset's orange glow highlighting the holster at his hip. Star felt her step falter. What was he doing here? What was he doing alive?

Tentatively, she approached him. “Daddy? Are you okay?”

She couldn't tell if he was smiling, because he stood in the shadow of the hill's mound, but she thought he was. Yes. She thought he was smiling.

Was it really him?

As Star took the next step forward, her father turned away from her and placed a hand in the earth of the hill. He lifted his foot, found a steady place in the rock, and began to climb. Within seconds, he'd mounted the small hill and disappeared to its plateau.

What could she do but follow? She began to climb.
Her father was alive. Her father was alive!
The words sung in her mind, a joyous celebration of possibility. Her hand dug into the earth, soft and warm, the sandstone steps acting as fingerholds for her hands. Who had put the stones here? Teenagers looking for a quiet spot? Settlers trying to get a view of the land? Or was it someone much, much older? She raised her left foot, found a hold, removed her right hand to the next stone. She was already halfway up the hill. What would she do when she reached the top?

A gust of wind rushed across the landscape and came straight past Star's ear, knocking against her vulnerable body and giving her pause as she clung to the hill. It wasn't tall, maybe only twenty feet high, but a fall would still hurt. She waited for the wind to pass, and as she waited, her mind lost some of its shock at seeing her father and began to question.

Why had she thought he was dead in the first place? Because she'd left him? Because she'd heard some internal monologue of advice from him back in the church? Because others were dead, so he must be, too? All of it was ridiculous. She should have known he was alive. Why hadn't she tried to find him immediately when all hell had broken loose in Cavus?

Because he was dead, Star. Maybe not his body, but your father was dead when you left him. He was a Feeder already. You know it and he knows you know it.
These thoughts, cold, calculating, but with the ring of truth, slapped her away from her daydreams. She raised another hand and found the stone, her fingernails digging into the sand. Only two more steps to the plateau, and she'd be to her father.

Then what? She couldn't keep pretending. One more stone, her left foot moved up, and then her left hand was on the top of the plateau. If she really loved her father, there was only one thing she could do.

Using all of her strength, Star yanked herself up and onto the edge. She felt a few seconds of panic as she was forced to bend her head down to heave her legs over the plateau's edge. In those seconds, she knew, she was completely and utterly vulnerable. Her father had only to give her one push, had only to bend and bury his mouth into her neck, had only to do any number of things to kill her.

Then she was up. Star stood quickly. The view took her breath away.

She could see for miles. The sun, which was rapidly descending in the sky, hung there now, big and red as a blood orange. The dim shadows of clouds that threw themselves in the way of the light picked up the color and became sheets of purple gauze, leaving their splotches of color like rips over the blue and orange. Below, the grass on the mounded prairie lay untouched and unused, except for the single feeble path that had been cut between the town and factory, and this looked like no more than a child's scribble on a map in a book—a useless, removable thing. The rest of the hills picked up the sun's sinking light and were a pure, glowing gold.

Against all of this, Star's father stood. Star ran to him.

Together, they sank to the ground in a tight hug, and Star felt the heat of his body as he pulled her close. As one they rocked against all that emptiness, all that beauty, each pressing into that small hill on their knees and both of them crying, crying, crying. Moments passed, many moments, until Star felt her father gently push her back. He held his hand out, palm up, toward her, as if asking for something.

Star met his eyes, and his gaze was cool and blue, but in the brilliance of the sunset the blue lost some of its intensity and became silver. Star looked from the silver to the white-pink of her father's palm, the palm beneath which blood still ran, beneath which, her father's soul still resided. Must surely still reside. Star looked at the palm and then, without clear thought but only the need to do, do, do, to obey the command of her father, to believe that the man in front of her was, indeed, her father, she raised the gun that she'd pulled from his policeman's holster during the hug.

It had grown inexplicably, unbearably, heavy. She placed it in his hand.

From the moment John took the first step away from Erma, the events that followed happened in less time than it took the sun to put itself fully to bed.

John did not dare turn around to say another goodbye. He felt the weight of Erma watching him go, and he knew to turn would leave him as unable to move forward as Lot's wife.

Ahead of him, he saw the lights in the factory and shapes flickering across the door. God, he had to hurry or there wouldn't be a chance. Probably even now there wasn't a chance, not really. But maybe…

How did the old saying go? “If you can't beat 'em, join 'em,” John whispered to himself, and had to clap his mouth shut as a wild giggle followed this. It was a mad sound, and John felt a strong urge to turn around and run back to Erma. He almost did. He felt his leg twitch with the longing; all he had to do was turn around. Turn around, for fuck's sake, and he'd be back to Erma. They could just leave, both of them could find a way out, leave this town. They could run and keep on running.

And then what, John?
The cold rationality of his old self, of the John that made him John, stopped him.
What happens if you run? Do you just keep on running? Is that it? What happens next?

But he knew, didn't he? He'd known all along. The image of the girl galloping along the truck beside them, sprinting ahead of them and away to the factory like a twisted prairie spider.

He was going to become like her. There was no way around it, none that John knew, but there was, maybe, a way that he could use that change to his advantage.

The idea had come to him in pieces, beginning itself back at the house, like a blister will begin under the skin and then, before you know it, is there, fully formed. When the child's bent body scuttled past them in the truck, the idea was fully there, ready in all its hideous detail to be popped and juiced.

He had to descend.

He had to become one of them. Give himself to them. Not just a little, but all the way. He had to become and pray to whatever God or goodness there was in this world that he could come back.

It was not a foolproof plan, not by any means, but it was all he had.

Little by little, he let the old John, the John he'd tried to put behind him, out. With each step away from Erma, he tried to let a piece of the good and happy things in his life that held that darker John at bay, fleck away like dry skin. There went the memory of their wedding, and with the next step, one of himself at twelve, riding a horse alongside his brother on a family vacation. The next step he left behind him the smell of Erma on a freshly laundered pillow, her hair wet from the shower, her face damp from making love. Gone. One by one he cast them out. In their place, he let the blackness of The Feeder fill him.

He let The Feeder in.

What did he, the new John, want? What did the John that The Feeder was interested in want now? No. What had he always wanted? What had been there all along that he'd just been too goddamned ashamed and scared to admit to himself?

He wanted to hurt someone.

Yes. There it was.

He wanted to hurt and harm and just…be angry! He wanted to feel his anger and not put any restrictions on it.

Life was unfair, goddammit. Why shouldn't he be angry?

He let the anger overtake him and opened himself to the seed already inside him.

Doesn't have to be, John.

The voice crept in, calm and soothing and yet invigorating somehow. Calm like the air before a storm. Calm but charged. Calm and inviting.

Join us and you can do as you please. You can have what is yours.

All those times, all those times he'd been fucked over. He'd done everything he was supposed to, hadn't he?

You did. Everything, John.

The voices were a chorus now. Men and women both, uniting behind him. Supporting him, as no one ever had before. Not even Erma.

Especially not Erma.

He'd gone to school. Gone longer than he needed to, gotten a master's, worked his ass off to get experience teaching at no-name podunk places for nothing as an adjunct just so that he could, maybe, someday, get the job he wanted. He'd specialized in writing articles that he didn't want to write, articles about despotic rulers instead of about the waterways and aqueducts of Rome that he loved, just so he could get something motherfucking published, get it put on his resume. He'd done everything—

Everything!

—humanly possible. Goddammit! He'd kowtowed and swallowed his pride as he swallowed the bullshit of the people around him—the academics, the nobodies in the real world who thought their name behind the stone walls of their college made them gods, assholes who had gotten into the game when it was easier and then thought he was lesser because he had to work so hard—and he had, he'd worked so goddamned hard. All he'd wanted was a family, a means to support them.

It was stolen from you, John. We'll give it back to you.

All those jobs he'd been turned down for even though he was qualified, because he was a man or because he was white or because he was too attractive, causing the others to feel uncomfortable, or because he dared to speak witty or intelligent things. It wasn't fair. Before, he'd been ashamed of himself for feeling this way, deemed the thoughts ugly, but by God, it wasn't fair.

No!

And when he'd finally gotten the job, what then? What then?

Stolen!

Stolen. Like his child.

John approached the door to the factory and peered inside, saw the circle of voices, saw the man in the yellow jacket holding Pill. The man held his hand out toward John and beckoned him forward.

COME.

The man did not need to speak this aloud. John heard it.

COME.

The other voices joined the first. He went. John stepped forward and saw the old man looking at him. The fucking bastard who'd gotten him into this in the first place, the asshole who'd led them all here.

“Pill.” He spoke the word aloud.

John walked toward the man in the yellow and all the other Feeders, their eyes lit up in a bright circle as they danced in anticipation, pawing at the earth. John saw a door open to a back room, and there he saw stack upon stack of burlap bags full of sugar, full of
them,
ready to go out. To take over the world.

Yes! You can take it with us,
the voices breathed.
Take it with us!

He saw Pill looking, with a wobbly head, up toward him. “John? That you? John? What are you doing?”

Yes.

Grady let go of Pill and kicked him in the leg, then watched the old man pull himself back toward the truck.

Fool.
For the first time, John let his thoughts fully merge with the others'. Let his mind open to them.
He's trying for the explosives,
John told the others.

And just like that, he had their trust. He was all the way and fully in.

A middle-aged man, his belly fat and dragging against the ground, jumped in front of the truck, arching his back and hissing, his penis unnaturally large and dragging against the dirt as he did so, the skin covered in a filth and a pus-like substance dripping from its end.

John turned his head away in disgust but then looked back, intrigued. Why were humans always taught to turn away from what fascinated them? Turn away from the sick and the dirty images that brought pleasure.

That's right, John. Look!

John did. The bit of puss dripped to the dirt and John's head filled with a picture of this man, his fat and hairy belly swinging against the backside of a young girl, no more than thirteen, and then the girl flipped over and it was a new person, this one with large and ponderous breasts, her face painted with makeup, and then she smiled and her face melted into that of the thirteen-year-old girl once more as the man above her thrust himself again and again in between her legs. Her face broke open in anguish and horror, and John watched.

This can be you, John. This is yours for the taking.

Let me kill Pill.
John sent the thought out, looking at the tall Feeder who'd greeted him.

Let me stop him and kill him and come to you. I want to HURT him. HURT him, KILL HIM. MINE. Let him be MINE.

With a wave of his hand, Grady motioned the fat man away from the truck to which Pill was crawling. Oblivious, the old man crawled on.

John stepped toward him. Pill made it to the truck. He grabbed the now doorless side and tried to pull himself up.

John looked behind him. Grady stood tall and ugly, his jacket ripped, his face twisted into an unnatural expression—one of greed and hope and triumph that could fit no human face.

Go on,
Grady said.
I give you this.

John reached down and hefted Pill by his pants, yanking the man upward. Beneath his hands he heard something crack. Bone.

It felt good.

John lifted his foot and kicked the old man hard in the face. He watched as Pill crumpled onto the seat. On the floor of the driver's seat, wedged almost unseen, the edge of the six sticks of dynamite peeked out.

“John,” Pill said. When the old man spoke, John saw that he'd broken most of Pill's teeth. Blood leaked between their jagged edges.

“Shut up, old man.”

John reached into his pants and pulled out Riley's gun from his pocket, which had ridden beside him, like a familiar friend.

Yes!
the voices screamed around him.
Yes! Yes!
The Feeders stared at him with eyes that glowed, their mouths agape, pressing against the railing, against the truck, pressing toward him like a mass at an orgy.
Do it!

John brought the gun forward and clicked the lock off. He fitted his finger into the trigger and, oh! How good it felt! Such release to finally and completely kill all of this, to rid himself of this pain and anger, to have power! Finally! Instead of railing helplessly against everything, to always be on the losing end. He didn't, as just John, know how to shoot a gun. Never had. But he was no longer just John. He was more. Oh, so much more, and he knew all that his brothers and sisters did, all that Grady knew, all that was necessary to know. He knew all.

Do it!
the Feeders coursed.
Now! Now! We're hungry, John. We want to eat!

John placed the gun against Pill's temple, looking into the man's battered face. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the other looked at John.

And then it looked beyond him.

“Jessi,” the old man said, his voice ragged.

John spun around and saw, standing just outside the truck, a woman dressed in white. Her hair, too, was white, and her eyes were so light as to seem colorless. Yet, she was beautiful.

John looked at her and beyond her, to the Feeders. They did not see her, he understood. None of them saw her at all, only he and Pill. She reached out to John and placed a hand on the one of his that held the gun. Gently, she brought it away from Pill's head and pointed it toward the floor.

And when she touched him, just for an instant, John felt himself returning, felt his mind going from a
THEY
to an
I,
and he was John. John, son of Adam Scott. With his empty hand, he reached into his pocket and felt the outline of a piece of paper poking from his wallet. He didn't have to look at it to know what it was. Jonesy. The picture of dear Jonesy.

And knowing that, he again knew himself. John, husband of Erma. John, father of the baby that never was but would always and forever be. John.

On the floor of the car rested the ancient sticks of dynamite, their sides sweaty with nitroglycerin. With a hand no longer trembling but steady as could be, John pointed the gun to the floor and pressed its muzzle against them.

The creature that was Grady screamed. Even returned to himself, John felt the voice of the thing rip into his mind.

No!
it screamed.
No fair. TRICKED!

The woman in white smiled at him, and John was filled with both an overwhelming sense of love and the unmistakable feeling that he
knew
this woman, had known her all along…and then he pulled the trigger and everything was a beautiful and blinding white.

When it saw the man pull the gun, The Feeder knew He might need to leave. Most of his children were in the factory. Most of them. This was a fact and one that it couldn't change, though it realized that it had been greedy and, if it could admit it to itself, somewhat stupid, putting all its eggs in one basket, as its last premier had liked to say—and they were, quite literally, his eggs. His children, ready to fertilize the world with themselves.

There was always a premier. A first. Somebody who woke the earth with its blood, and opened a way into it for The Feeder. A skin that housed the beginnings of The Feeder. This time it was Grady Anderson. The man in the truck pulled the trigger on the gun just a little bit tighter, and The Feeder took a last look at its Grady skin. The left arm was split open along the front, bone and bits of The Feeder's own gray skin poking through. The legs had been stretched to the breaking point, and the left one hung at an odd angle, hardly connected at all to the Grady man's torso. The back was the worst. Always, those stubs of his wings tried to poke through. They were the hardest to hide, although they would never again grow. With a gesture that was both tender and unusual for it, The Feeder brought the hand of his Grady skin up and kissed it, like a courtier might kiss a king's hand.

With that final gesture, the Feeder let himself go. Just before the flash of the explosion, the Feeder reached out, felt beyond the walls of the factory, beyond it all, to the other part of itself. Yes. There it was. Not far. The girl and the man.

The explosion came, and the Feeder was released, the screams of its children nothing but dead whispers on his back. Through the air He came, and all He needed was a body. A single body that had a part of him in it, and there was the girl, almost…and then…

The Feeder screamed, and the air turned black with its wrath; the scream shook the skies, and somewhere, up above, The Feeder thought that for the first time in a thousand years, its father was listening.

The red-haired girl, his child, was dead. The Feeder in its form of nothing, its form that could not exist outside of the earth under its Maker's curse, not without its wings, not without a body, flew toward the last hope, the names of all its children on its breath, the only kind of prayer it knew.

First there had been Mamo of the Tired People and then Sweet River and then a long time of nothing, and then White Horse and then Crazy Foot, and then the settlers came and it was good. Yes, Lucy, and yes to the sweet miners with their coal-blackened faces and then Grady and from Grady to them all, to Holly to Thad to Sam to Eve to Betty to Susan to Megan to Tom to Tilly to Bob and on and on He had spread himself, beginning without end—
Hallelujah!
—until now there was only the one, only Thad left on the top of that rock and it was almost there! Almost there! And then it was tap, tap, tapping at the man's skull, at its last child, its only child.

It would not go back. Could not.

Let me in
, it said.

Let me in.

In.

In.

In!

LET ME IN!