Reapers Are the Angels
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Authors: Alden Bell
THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS
a novel
ALDEN BELL
A Holt Paperback
Henry Holt and Company
New York
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holt Paperbacks
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright © 2010 by Alden Bell
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, Alden.
The reapers are the angels: a novel / Alden Bell. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9243-1
ISBN-10: 0-8050-9243-9
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Survival skills—Fiction. 3. Life—Fiction. 4. Human beings—Philosophy—Fiction. 5. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.A9859R43 2010
813’.6–dc22
2009048158
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First Edition 2010
Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Megan
Every marriage tends to consist of
an aristocrat and a peasant.
—J
OHN
U
PDIKE
,
Couples
I pity the man who can travel from
Dan
to
Beersheba
, and cry, ’Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.
—L
AURENCE
S
TERNE
,
A Sentimental Journey
Sometimes dead is better.
—Pet Sematary
God is a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.
Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighter than daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing
under
the moon and
in
the moon at the same time. And that was something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, and she’s never seen that before.
And you could say the world has gone to black damnation, and you could say the children of Cain are holding sway over the good and the righteous—but here’s what Temple knows: She knows that whatever hell the world went to, and whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed misfortunes brought her down here to this island to be harbored
away from the order of mankind, well, all those things are what put her there that night to stand amid the Daylight Moon and the Miracle of the Fish—which she wouldn’t of got to see otherwise.
See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness firsthand.
S
HE SLEEPS
in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff. At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot. The first night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opened into a dank storage room. There she found candles, fishhooks, a first aid kit, a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds. She tried one, but it was dead.
In the mornings she digs for pignuts in the underbrush and checks her nets for fish. She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse, she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet. The Florida beachgrass between her toes. The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze.
At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing at the middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top, she walks the catwalk once around—gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, toward the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered with a thousand square mirrors.
She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.
Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she’d found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been—crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone
in a long black car, people in white suits reclining on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls, women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white—where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.
It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going and pulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.