Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  Rua led them from water to water, and they made good time.

  “What is your name?” Enoch finally asked, as he used a plastic butter knife to sever the neck of a pigeon Tall Man had driven down. They had taken shelter from a dust storm inside a ruined gas station, and the yellow light from outside washed over them.

  The boy didn’t answer. He sat beside their fire and stared at the pigeon, unblinking and hungry.

  “I am Enoch. But you will call me Navi.” Enoch wrung the pigeon like a dishrag, squeezing the blood out of it. “That means prophet.”

  The boy finally lifted his eyes. “I’m Rail.”

  “Rail?”

  The boy shrugged and looked into the flames.

  Enoch turned his gaze to Rua, and the spirit slid over. Her fingers brushed the boy’s head, and Enoch’s mind swelled with vision. He saw a pale woman in a bikini pushing a stroller at the beach, coaching a soccer team, tucking a boy into bed. “Johnny,” she whispered. “My Johnny.” He saw other things too. Hiding under a bed when the earthquakes came. Running hand-in-hand through alleys filled with fire-shadows. Goodbyes. Screams. A teddy bear lying in the corner of a basement. Men. Being tied down to a picnic table. An old banister, sharpened and slick with motor oil.

  Why they called him Rail.

  Enoch dropped the pigeon and reached out to cup the boy’s cheek.

  The boy flinched away from his hand, and the fear in those young eyes filled Enoch with sorrow. He tugged at Rua and she spoke through him, mimicking the woman’s voice. “My Johnny,” they whispered together.

  The boy’s jaw dropped open, and his eyes filled with tears.

  Enoch nodded and gathered him into his arms.

  As the boy sobbed, Enoch rocked him back and forth. “Shalom, ben katan, shalom beni. Shalom shalom.” Enoch slid one hand to the back of the boy’s neck. With a finger still slick from the pigeon’s blood he traced a mark. “Shalom.” The boy sighed and dropped into a deep sleep.

  The light from outside flickered as a shadow swelled at the door.

  Ugly had returned.

  Enoch frowned and demanded an accounting. Ugly swirled tighter and Enoch saw the colony lawn and playground. Blood and screaming.

  Enoch laughed and nodded. “Good. Well done.” He flicked his hand at the spirit. “Go. Seek some arid place.” He laughed again.

  Ugly dove outside, and after a moment Tall Man rose from the shadows and loped after him.

  Rua read Enoch’s mind and tilted her head.

  He nodded. “Yes.” He stroked the boy’s forehead. “Find whoever did this.”

  Rua bowed and faded away.

  Enoch set the boy down beside the fire and covered him in old trash bags for blankets.

  He stood up and thought about possibilities. To cleanse the Colony he would need an army. Killing the rebels one by one would never serve. The innocent must see his power over the unrighteous. And this, this poor boy.

  He thought about the kind of men who would do such evil to a child. Men corrupt as old bones. Men dead even while they lived.

  Enoch needed men. As many as he could get.

  And who better than those already dead?

  ***

  When evening came and the dust storm had passed, Enoch and Rua faced each other outside the gas station.

  “HaShem will provide.” Enoch turned his palms to the darkening heavens. “What is lacking will be met.”

  Rua swirled about herself, and Enoch frowned to see the spirit’s irritation.

  The boy stared openmouthed from where he sat on a drywall bucket, a half-eaten candy bar in his hand. He still couldn’t see the angel, Enoch knew. But the boy could feel the electricity in the air.

  Rua warned Enoch again, showing him a vision of the long road back to the boy’s captors. The miles spun out in a rippling sheen. Several days south. Dry creek beds. Black sludge. No water. No water. She showed him the starving men inside the old police station. How they fought over meat and drink and catamites. Those men would soon die anyway. What was the point? The Prophet should return to his Colony. The rebels had learned from Sarah’s death. Some would join Enoch against their new priest. Arakiel would come. They could return to their rightful place.

  Enoch nodded. “And we will.” He pointed at the boy. “But this one deserves to see his abusers undone.” He laughed. “And I have plans for them, oh, yes indeed oh yes.”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide. “I don’t want to go back.”

  Rua moved toward the boy, but Enoch raised his hand.

  He turned to the boy. “Yes you do.” He drew the shiv from the boy’s waist. Honed with a rock and bound with athletic tape, it was sharp as sin. “You left your soul with those men. We must go and reclaim it.” He pressed the handle of the blade into the boy’s hand.

  His chin came up, and though his lips trembled, he nodded.

  Enoch ruffled his hair and smiled.

  Rua crossed her arms and stared at Enoch with unreadable eyes.

  ***

  That night HaShem sent him a vision.

  He was carried upward by a luminous spirit — into the air and toward the setting sun — and together they soared over the shattered land. Below him rolled cities, forests and hills — all pounded low by the fists of Heaven. Soon Enoch saw a splinter grow in the face of the earth, a wedge of darkness that split the land in a north-south furrow.

  He nodded. He had heard of this.

  When he met the black canyon he looked northward, to where the Great Lakes once had stood so blue and bloated. He looked into the canyon which had emptied them, and as he did the spirit turned him south.

  In the rising darkness, down on the east bank, he saw a patch of green amidst all the black and brown and gray. As he passed over, a voice thundered across the land, a voice that split the rock and made the earth tremble. “I am going to open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.”

  Enoch wept to hear that voice.

  “And you will live, and I will put you in your own land.”

  The spirit brought Enoch lower, and encamped in a field of green grass Enoch saw an army — rank upon rank of men in shining bronze and iron. As Enoch flew above them they raised their swords and smashed earthen jars held overhead. Torchlight flared in the darkness, and to the music of breaking pottery the men cried out as one, “For Adonai! For Hanokh!

  Enoch’s heart sang.

  ***

  Rua came to him before dawn.

  He had slept all night beside the boy, but Enoch awoke when he felt Rua’s warmth pressing against him. He did not open his eyes. Sometimes when she did this she felt like a real woman.

  Her lips brushed his eyelids as she whispered visions. That Green Field. Would he go? He saw himself leading the warriors against the Colony, saw the gate opened from within and his men moving among the shelters like a purifying fire.

  He opened his eyes. Rua lay atop him, and her blue eyes burned into his from inches away.

  “Soon,” he said.

  Her mouth tightened and she slid off him.

  Enoch tried not to let his anger show. He elbowed the boy and stood up. “Time to go.”

  ***

  By the third day of their trek, Enoch wondered if he’d made a mistake.

  The sun burned in the pale sky, and a scorching south wind pelted them with dust and gravel. They drank their water faster than Enoch thought and found none to replace it. Rua was aloof, Tall Man silent, and Ugly his hateful slippery self.

  The boy trudged along with head bowed and eyes full of ghosts.

  Enoch prayed as they negotiated a debris field from one of the floods — trees and splintered buildings piled up like tinder. Did I misunderstand? Presume too much? Guide me, oh Shepherd of Israel — beside pools of water for your Name’s sake.

  That afternoon as they passed through the parking lot of a collapsed mall, the boy jerked to a halt. “Navi. I know this place.” He took one step toward the mall and hesitated. “May I?” When Enoc
h nodded, the boy ran across the lot toward the missing doors of an anchor restaurant.

  Bemused, Enoch hurried to follow, and his spirits trailed after.

  The boy led him inside to a food court now open to the sky. They took stairs down and crawled into an elevator shaft. At the bottom they found an underground stream that had broken through the concrete wall, a stream of water cold and clear.

  When Enoch saw it, his stomach twisted. He turned to Rua. “My love?”

  The spirit stared at him. Then she sank into the ground.

  That night as they huddled around a fire of old paperbacks, Enoch thought about that a long time. No water, she had said. It troubled him. He thought of Ahab. Of Ramoth Gilead. Of the things his rabbi said when they kicked Enoch out of the synagogue back in Cincinnati.

  But then he remembered. Of course. Rua’s no lying spirit. Just wrong. All spirits were finite save one. Only one Seer saw all.

  That night he did not dream.

  ***

  “Did you have kids?” The boy sat with his back to the crooked wall, sipping from his water jug and staring at the yellow toy truck Enoch had found for him.

  They were hiding from the sun inside a house that had been washed into the street. Tall Man was out looking for food. Rua had been absent since the mall.

  Enoch nodded. “A boy. Would be about your age.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy set the truck in his lap. “How?”

  Enoch’s fists clenched, even after so long. “Because of his mother. She took him away from me and so he died.”

  The boy dropped his eyes. “In the earthquakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was his name?”

  Enoch stood after a few seconds and looked outside. “Come. It has cooled off some.”

  ***

  The boy led Enoch to the station with Tall Man and Ugly in tow. Rua still had not appeared. The boy alerted them to a sentry tower in the rubble of an old Bank of America, and Enoch sent Tall Man to paralyze the guard. After Ugly finished him off, they searched the body and found a pistol and Buck knife. Enoch took the gun and handed the knife to the boy. It would serve better than his shiv.

  Enoch smelled the smoke and excrement before he saw the camp.

  The police station had once sat at the corner of a strip mall parking lot, but fissures forty feet wide had opened along the two roads beside it. Now the station squatted between them like a slum castle, with graffiti its only banners. A moat ran around the unprotected side, complete with spikes of sharpened rebar. A bunch of planks spanned the moat in place of a drawbridge. In the yard sat crates and boxes and a yellow jeep with air in the tires.

  Enoch looked at the jeep a long time. “How many men?”

  “Maybe ten.” The boy tried to sound brave.

  As Enoch watched, he felt a tingling along his spine. “They have spirits.”

  “Yeah. Says he’s a shaman.”

  Enoch tried to hide his irritation at not being told. “What is his name?”

  “Roger.”

  Enoch laughed, heedless of being heard. “Roger.” He shook his head and laughed again.

  The boy looked stricken. “He is a… he is…”

  As if summoned Rua rose from a pile of rubble, and the boy grew quiet. Rua’s arm looked watery in the sunlight as she reached for Enoch’s hand. You should not go.

  Enoch tried to hide his surprise. She almost never used words. Why?

  She faced the station. A demon waits there. A dark prince.

  A tingle of excitement ran down Enoch’s spine. “Then I will pray to HaShem for Arakiel. This demon will come to nothing.”

  The boy flinched at mention of a demon, and Enoch realized he had spoken aloud.

  Tall Man turned toward Enoch, and the spirit’s eyes were dark pools.

  Rua shook her head. He will not come. You must not do this.

  Outrage flared through Enoch. Who was she to say what or would not be? His were the words of power. His was the prophecy and the insight and the divination. And where had she been these last days? I will do as I choose. He turned to the boy. “This Roger. Was he the one who violated you?”

  The boy’s eyes went dead, and that was answer enough.

  Enoch reached out with his will and jerked Ugly forward. “Come. We’ll kill this Roger and take his men.”

  Enoch took two steps, but his legs turned to ice. He looked down to see Rua’s arm sweeping out of him.

  My love, she said, you must hear…

  He snarled and set Ugly upon her. The dead thing hammered into Rua, driving her back in a splatter of white droplets that sizzled when they hit the ground. Enoch pulled back on the leash, and Ugly jerked to a halt, still reaching for her as he cursed in his black-oil tongue.

  Rua shook herself and wings spread from her back, white and clawed like a bat’s. So be it, she hissed. Seek your prince. Her wings drove downward once, twice, and she streaked upward like a geyser, dissolving into sunlight as she went.

  Enoch took his rage and used it to stomp out his fear. Even angels err. “Come,” he said to the boy as he raised the pistol and stepped toward the moat. “Come,” he said to Tall Man and Ugly.

  They came.

  ***

  Once across the moat, Enoch pressed himself against the wall beside the police station door. The boy looked scared. Ugly swelled and churned. Enoch felt a thrill of excitement.

  He motioned to Tall Man. Get us inside.

  The spirit slipped through the concrete, and a minute later Enoch heard the lock click.

  He eased the door open.

  One of the men stood just inside — upright and paralyzed. Tall Man had taken him, and the spirit’s form trembled along the edges of the man’s body. Tall Man stepped back, and the man jerked along to match. He had short blond hair, and his eyes were wide and rolling.

  Enoch stepped in, and the boy followed. Ugly he kept bound outside for now. He took a look around in the dim light. This had once been a reception center, but the windows were boarded over and mattresses covered the floor. A couple of shut doors stood off to the right, and voices murmured from down the hallway in front of them. The air stank like piss.

  The boy pressed himself against a boarded-up window and stared at the possessed man before them.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Enoch whispered. “He can’t hurt you now.” Enoch took the boy’s Buck knife and slid it into the man’s throat, as easy as a spatula into cherry pie. Tall Man let the body down as it bled out, and Enoch wiped the blade on the dead man’s cheek. “See?” He handed the knife back to the boy, who took it without blinking.

  Enoch listened and realized the voices had stopped.

  Enoch waved his pistol toward the hallway. “Now, let’s not kill all…”

  Many things happened at once.

  The doors to the right burst inward, and men leapt through with guns and machetes in hand. More rounded the corner at the end of the hallway and charged toward them.

  At the far end of that hall darkness swelled as Roger the shaman stepped into view — with t-shirt and no pants, and long, long hair.

  Shadows flitted around his head like bats.

  And Enoch did not laugh to see him.

  The plan changed.

  Enoch raised his pistol and snarled, releasing Ugly even as he shot at the men charging down the hall.

  Tall Man took the ones on the right, darting across them in an arc that paralyzed their arms and drove them backwards.

  Ugly spun down the hallway, flinging men aside like broken toys.

  Enoch knew a moment of triumph as he dropped the spent pistol and prepared to watch Ugly unmake the shaman.

  But Roger raised his hand and Ugly jerked to halt. Roger spoke a word, and Enoch felt his hold on the spirit snap. The shaman bound Ugly, turned him, and sent him shrieking back at Enoch.

  No.

  Enoch prayed as he stumbled backward, crying out with the four letters of the sacre
d name burning on his tongue. He summoned Arakiel, called upon him to come and strike down this Baal, this Chemosh, this Molech.

  Thunder shook the room, and Arakiel descended with sword in hand. But the angel touched down behind Roger and spread his wings above him.

  Roger smiled.

  And Arakiel’s eyes flickered with black flame.

  Only Rua saved Enoch then, intercepting Ugly as he came and driving him down beneath the tile floor. Tall Man threw up a wall of shadow, and Enoch ran out the door — past the boy who screamed and flung his Buck knife end-over-end at the shaman.

  Enoch heard the blade clink against tile instead of flesh.

  “Shoot them!” someone screamed, and bees buzzed past Enoch as he ran toward the jeep, blooming into dust where they hit the dirt around him.

  The jeep’s door was unlocked, and he and the boy dove into it — but one of those bees bit Enoch in the belly.

  “Drive,” he yelled to the boy.

  ***

  Enoch tried to staunch the bleeding as they drove, but his hand jostled at every bump. “Go easy.” The pain was a white buzzing that almost kept his questions at bay.

  “I’m sorry.” The boy looked terrified. He couldn’t reach the pedals from the seat, so he stood on the floor, leaning backward with both hands on the steering wheel. Every time he turned the wheel he would overcorrect, the jeep would lurch, and Enoch’s stomach would erupt in new agonies.

  Enoch tried to keep his words calm. “They’re on foot. You can slow down.” That was true, as it went. He and the boy had a head start. But it wasn’t the men on foot that worried Enoch.

  He lifted his wadded-up shirt for a look. The hole in his belly leaked red, and the sight made him dizzy. Enoch pressed the cloth back down and closed his eyes, feeling cold and sweaty all at once.

  The boy’s steering improved as the minutes passed. Enoch’s belly did not.

  The last thing he saw through the window before passing out was the mall where they had camped. Where they’d drunk from the spring in the elevator. Where Rua had told him was no water at all.

  ***

  In the darkness his dreams pressed down in black spirals, pierced by a thousand flickering eyes. The spirals tightened and his pain sharpened. They were burning him. Pinching at his belly. Laughing.