Reapers Are the Angels (3 page)

She closes the spyglass and stows it in her pocket. Then she goes back to the cooler and takes out the pistol, checking the rounds to make sure they haven’t gotten wet, and puts on the sheathed gurkha knife, which hangs from her belt and straps to her thigh with two leather ties.

By the time she’s finished, the nurse is twenty yards away, her hands reaching out before her. Instinctual desire. Hunger, thirst, lust, all the vestigial drives knotted up in one churning, ambling stomach.

Temple looks one last time at the nurse, then turns and climbs the concrete stairs up toward the road.

The other slugs are still in the distance, but she knows they will catch sight of her soon enough, and that a few have a
tendency to turn quickly into a pack and then a swarm—so she walks directly to where the cars are parked and opens the door of the red compact. The keys have been left in it, but the engine’s dead.

She searches the jeep for keys and can’t find any, but there is a screwdriver under the front seat, so she uses it to rip away the cowling from around the ignition and prise out the cap on the ignition barrel. Then she feels for the notch at the end of the barrel and puts the head of the screwdriver into it and turns.

The engine coughs a few times and starts, the gauges on the dash rolling to life.

Okay then, Temple says. That’s a boon for the girl. Half a tank of gas too. Watch out great wide open, prepare to be motored on.

T
HE WORLD
is pretty much what she remembers, all burnt up and pallid—like someone came along with a sponge and soaked up all the color and the moisture too and left everything gray and bone-dry.

But she’s also glad to be back. She’s missed the structures of man—which are pretty wondrous when you put your mind on them. Those tall brick buildings with all their little rooms and closets and doors, like ant colonies or wasps’ nests when you bust open their paper shells. She was in Orlando once, when she was little, and she remembers standing at the bottom of this terrific tall building and thinking that civilization’s got some crackerjack people working for its furtherance, and kicking at the base of the building with her foot to see if the whole thing would topple over, and seeing that it didn’t and never ever would.

In the first town she comes to, she spots a convenience store on the corner and pulls up onto the sidewalk in front of it. Deep slug territory—there are meatskins milling around everywhere she looks, but they’re spread out, so there must not be anything for them to hunt around here. And they’re slow, some of them even crawling. Nothing to eat for a long time, she figures. This place is written off—she’ll have to go farther north.

But first she goes into the convenience store. She discovers a whole box of those peanut butter crackers she likes, the ones made like sandwiches with the bright orange cheese crackers. She rips open one of the packages and eats them right there in the store, standing in the window and watching the slugs inch their way in her direction.

She thinks about her diet on the island.

Ain’t a fish swimming in the ocean, she says, could beat these crackers.

She takes the rest of the box and a twenty-four-pack of Coke and some bottles of water and three canisters of Pringles and some cans of chili and soup and some boxes of macaroni and cheese and some other things too: a flashlight and batteries, a bar of soap in case she gets a chance to wash, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a whole spindle of scratch-off lottery tickets because she likes to see how much of a millionaire she would have been in the old times.

She checks behind the counter for a gun or ammunition, but there’s nothing.

Then she notices the slugs are getting closer, so she loads up the passenger seat of the car with her haul and gets back on the road.

When she’s out of town, on a long stretch of two-lane road, she opens a Coke and another package of peanut butter crackers, which taste like cloudy orange heaven.

While she’s eating, she thinks about how smart it was for God to make meatskins not interested in real food so there would be plenty left for regular folk. She remembers an old joke that makes her smile—the one about the meatskin who gets invited to a wedding party. At the end of it they have twice the leftovers and half the guests.

She chuckles, and the road is long.

S
HE TAKES
the coast road for a while, shaggy palm trees everywhere and overgrown beach grass coming up through the
cracks in the road, and then she turns inland for a change. Gators. She’s never seen so many gators before. They are sunning themselves on the black tarmac of the highway, and when she approaches they skulk out of the way in no particular hurry. There are other towns, but still no signs of regular life. She begins to imagine herself as the last person left on the planet with all these meatskins. The first thing she would do is find a map and drive the country to see the sights. She would start in New York and then adventure herself all the way to San Francisco, where they have the steep driving hills. She could find a stray dog or tame a wolf and have it sit next to her and put its head out the window, and they could get a car with comfortable seats and sing songs while they drive.

She nods. That would be a right thing.

The sun goes down, and she turns on the headlights and one of them still works so she can see the road ahead of her but in a lopsided way. There are some lights in the distance, a glow on the horizon that must be a city, and she drives in the direction of the glow.

But on the road at night, you start thinking ugly alone thoughts. She remembers, it must have been five years ago, driving through Alabama with Malcolm in the seat beside her. She was very young then, she must have been, because she remembers having to push the seat all the way forward—and even then she had to sit up on the edge of it to reach the pedals. And Malcolm was younger still.

Malcolm was quiet for a long time. He liked to chew that gum that was too sweet for her, and he liked to put two pieces in his mouth at once. For a while she could hear him chewing next to her—then it was silent, and he was just looking out the window at the big black nothing.

What happened to Uncle Jackson? Malcolm said.

He’s gone, she said. We ain’t going to see him no more.

He said he was gonna teach me how to shoot.

I’ll teach you. He wasn’t your real uncle anyway.

To get the memory out of her head, she rolls down the
window and lets the wind play in her hair. When that doesn’t work, she decides to sing a ditty she once knew by heart and it takes her a while to remember all the parts of it.

Oh, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,

Yes, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,

A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?

A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?

It’s on a long stretch of country road that the car dies, and she pulls over and pops the hood to look. It’s probably the fuel pump, but she can’t be sure without getting under the car and poking around, and the engine’s too hot to do anything for a while. And she doesn’t have any tools to poke around with anyway, but she can see a house set back away from the road down a little dirt drive—and there might be tools there.

She looks into the dark horizon toward the city lights. Distance is difficult to determine at night—it’s possible she could walk it by morning.

Still, that house. It might hold something worthwhile.

She’s been out of the game for a long time now and she’s feeling bold—and anyway she wants something to distract her from her night memories. So she straps the gurkha knife to her thigh and jams the pistol in the waistband of her pants—two rounds, emergency use only—and takes the flashlight and walks up the packed dirt driveway to the house, where she’s ready to kick the door in except she doesn’t have to because it’s standing open.

There’s a stink in the house, and she recognizes it. Flesh mold. Could be corpse or could be slug. Either way, she tells herself to breathe through her mouth and make it quick.

She finds her way to the kitchen, where there’s an overturned and rusting formica table and peeling wallpaper with a strawberry vine pattern. Because of the humidity, patches of furry gray-green mold are growing everywhere. She opens the drawers one by one looking for tool drawers but there’s nothing. She looks out the back window. No garage.

There’s a door in the kitchen, and she opens it and finds wooden steps leading down beneath the ground.

She waits at the top of the steps for a moment, listening for any sounds in the house, and then descends slowly.

In the basement there’s a different smell, like ammonia, and she sweeps the flashlight around to a table in the middle of the room cluttered with bottles, burners, rubber tubing, and one of those old-fashioned scales with a long arm on one side. Some of the bottles are half filled with a yellow liquid. She’s seen this kind of setup before. Meth lab. They were big a few years before when some people were taking advantage of the slug distraction.

She finds a workbench against the wall and roots around for a phillips-head and a wrench, but what she’s really looking for is a pair of pliers.

She sets the flashlight down on the tabletop but it rolls off and falls to the floor where it flickers once but stays lit. Good thing—she wouldn’t want to have to feel her way back to the car.

But when she turns, she sees something she missed before. By the stairs, there’s a utility closet—and while she watches, the door of the closet, illuminated in the faint glow of the flashlight, shudders once and flies opens as if someone has fallen against it.

Then she can smell it, the flesh rot, much stronger now—it was masked before by the ammoniac smell of the lab.

They stumble out of the utility closet, three of them, two men in overalls with long hair and a woman dressed only in a satin slip, which has been ripped open to expose one desiccated breast.

Temple has forgotten how bad they smell—that muddy mixture of must and putrefaction, oil and rancid shit. She sees a fecal ooze falling wetly down the back of the woman’s legs. They must have fed recently, so they will be strong. And they are between her and the stairs.

She puts her hand on the pistol and considers. Her last two bullets.

Not worth it.

Instead she sweeps the gurkha knife out of its sheath and kicks over the man in front, sending him crashing down to the cement slab of the floor. She swings the knife and buries it in the skull of the second man, whose eyes cross absurdly before he drops to his knees. But when she tries to pull the blade back, it’s stuck, bound up in sutures of wet bone.

Then the woman has her by the wrist in a tight fleshy grip. She can feel the brittle nails digging into her skin.

Leave go my arm, Temple says.

She can’t get the knife out of the man’s head, so she lets it go and watches the body drop dead backward with her blade still stuck in it.

The woman is leaning in to take a bite out of her shoulder, but Temple drives her fist hard into the slug’s head, first once, then twice, then a third time, trying to dizzy the brain out of its instinctual drive.

But now the other man has gotten to his feet again and is coming at her, so she spins the woman around to get her between them and the man barrels into both with a bear hug that sends Temple crashing backward into the workbench.