Enoch screamed and screamed, but he made no noise. Thrashed, but could not move. Only the eyes spun above him, pinwheeling like sparklers in the hands of children. In the hands of a child. Of a firstborn son.
The voice of HaShem shook the darkness. “Son of Man, prophecy over these bones.”
As before, Enoch wept at the words.
“On one of the mountains which I will tell to you.”
Enoch opened himself to the voice, and soothing fire washed all his pain away.
***
When he awoke, the darkness remained. Wind brushed across his skin, and the rattle of snare drums filled his ears. “What…” He tried to sit up.
The boy hushed him and pulled his head back down onto something soft. “It’s only rain on the tarp.”
Enoch thought about that and brought a hand in front of his face. Of course. Nighttime. No deeper dark. He groaned.
The boy touched his arm. “I’m collecting water. Just like you would have done.”
“Yes. Good.” His voice cracked. “Get me some.”
He felt the boy move, and soon a Styrofoam cup touched his hand. The water tasted of ash and old coffee, but it was cold. Enoch shivered. “How far did we get?”
“Not far. You fell over, so I stopped.”
Enoch shivered. The darkness seemed blacker yet. If Roger comes… he reached out for Rua, but he felt nothing. Not even Tall Man. Had they left him? Fear roiled in his belly. Belly. Oh yes. Summoning all his courage, he eased his fingers down to his stomach. But he found no wadded up cloth. Only bare skin, with no hole. He tried to make sense of that. “My stomach. What happened?”
Silence.
“Well?”
The boy’s voice was so small the rain nearly drove it out. “It was them. I… saw them this time. When it got dark they came.”
Enoch understood. The eyes in the darkness. The touch of fire. Gratitude washed over him. Fifteen more years. “Ah, baruch atah, Adonai.” He sighed. “It is good you saw them. HaShem blesses you with sight.”
The boy was silent for a while. Then he bent down and whispered in Enoch’s ear. “I think you shouldn’t talk to them anymore. I think they’re bad.”
Unbidden, the memory of Arakiel returned to Enoch’s mind. Standing over Roger. Could Enoch have been wrong? Had Arakiel deceived him? His rabbi had said… well. Rua had warned him of a demon in there, hadn’t she? Demons could take many forms. That couldn’t have been the true Arakiel. And Rua had saved him. “I know your fear.” Enoch reached up and cupped the boy’s cheek. “So felt Daniel beside the river.”
The boy shook his head against Enoch’s hand. “But she laughed. I heard her. When they came and she touched you and you screamed. She laughed.”
Enoch listened to the rain, hoping to hear the right words. “The joy of heaven beholds all things. An ending can make the middle sweet. You see?”
The boy did not answer.
Enoch sat up and pulled him into an embrace. “You suffered much before HaShem led you to me. Bitter things. But that was how we are together. And you have saved my life. You could have driven on. But you didn’t.” Enoch hesitated. “Beni. My son.”
The boy wept then, as he had before, great sobs that shook his tiny frame.
“Beni,” Enoch said as he rubbed that skinny neck and kissed that wet hair. His own tears came, and this time they felt like strangers in his eyes. “My boy.”
Lightning flashed, and in the glow Enoch saw a shadow stretch across their tarp. The form of a man. Long and black.
Tall.
***
In the morning Enoch drove while the boy watched the road behind them. They wouldn’t make it far, Enoch knew. The gas gauge needle drew too close to the red god Empty. But Enoch and the boy drew closer to their destination too. Closer to the green field of his vision. To the waiting army.
Enoch’s stomach ached. In a way the hunger was worse than the gunshot had been. More subtle, but insistent — like the dripping of gasoline onto a hot radiator.
Enoch worried more about the boy. He needed food and rest, beyond what Enoch had provided.
Enoch’s heart ached too. Everything had gone wrong. He’d meant to bend the men at the station to his will. Send them to find the betrayers at the Colony. But now? He couldn’t even get food for the boy HaShem had sent.
Enoch grimaced and glanced out the window. Tall Man ran alongside the jeep. No sign of Rua. Low clouds boiled over the bare-fingered trees, hiding the sun and washing out all colors. Rain had turned dust to mud, and clumps of it sprayed from the jeep’s wheels.
Enoch felt a tingle even before the boy spoke.
“There’s one.”
Enoch glanced in the rearview mirror. He didn’t see it, but he didn’t need to. Roger had kept spirits on them all day. Nothing strong, just bird-size demons that skulked and scried. But that alone told Enoch of their master’s purpose.
Enoch hissed, and Tall Man reversed direction like a shadow off a mirror.
Enoch kept his eyes on the road and waited for the shudder in his spirit. When he felt it, he smiled. One less humming-rat. Would that longhaired Balaam feel the pain? He hoped so.
Just then the jeep’s engine missed a beat.
The boy turned and looked at Enoch.
Another misfire.
The jeep rolled to a halt beside the bones of an old greenhouse. They sat unmoving, listening to the sighs and clicks of the cooling engine.
“What now?” The confidence in the boy’s voice filled Enoch with pride.
Enoch reached over and drew the shiv from the boy’s waist. “Knife the tires. Then we walk.”
***
The boy collapsed three hours later.
They had struck off through a forest, so that if Roger’s men got the jeep running they couldn’t use it to follow. It was harder going through the woods. Most of the trees had toppled over, and picking through the deadfalls would have been exhausting even with full bellies.
Finally they made it out, but when Enoch got to the top of the gully beyond the forest, he stood alone. He spun around and saw the boy sprawled at the bottom. Tall Man was kneeling beside him.
“Get back!”
Enoch slid down the dirt as fast as he could go. No. Please.
But when Enoch pressed his hand to the boy’s neck, he felt life. He rolled the boy onto his back and unscrewed their water jug. The boy groaned and half the water ran down his cheeks, but he drank.
Enoch glared up at Tall Man. “Go, damn you! Find him some food.”
Without watching to see whether the spirit obeyed, Enoch picked the boy up in his arms. The boy tried to resist, but Enoch shushed him. “Lie still now.”
The incline was twice as bad with the boy’s dead weight, but Enoch ground his teeth and strained upward. They needed to make it farther before they dared rest. From Gaza to Hebron. Mt. Carmel to Jezreel. My boy.
The sun burned away the clouds, and the temperature rose.
***
Enoch staggered along until he found shelter from the heat in a broken-off culvert. Tossed there in the floods, the concrete tunnel now lay cockeyed at the bottom of a washout. Enoch lay the boy within and felt his forehead. Too warm. “Can you hear me?”
The boy groaned, but did not open his eyes.
Enoch tried to make him comfortable, and as he turned the boy, the yellow truck fell out of his pocket. Enoch picked it up and looked at it for a long time. Finally he tucked it back into the boy’s clothes and began gathering sticks for a fire.
Just as the flames grew, he heard a rustling. He looked up to see a swarm of creatures running up the washout — squirrels, a starving cat, rats and mice. They darted back and forth, squeaking and tripping to escape the shadow behind them, the thin shepherd who herded them along. Tall Man grinned as he came, and bats fluttered around his head like Roger’s demons.
Enoch choked at the sight of all the unclean creatures, and he spat out a rebuke. The words punched into Tall Man and drove him
to his knees. The vermin scattered, vanishing into cracks and rocks and hidden places.
“You mock me?” Enoch hit him again. Tall Man spun backward. Dizziness washed over Enoch, and he leaned one shoulder against the culvert.
Tall Man picked himself up, stared at Enoch, and strode away down the washout.
“Be gone then.” Enoch spat out over the fire, before turning back to the boy. Beads of sweat clung to the boy’s forehead, and his small hands felt limp and clammy.
Enoch gave him the last of the water and lay down between the boy and the culvert opening. The light reflecting from the rubble outside stabbed into his eyes, so he closed them.
In his mind he went back to Hebrew Union, to the room outside the dean’s office where he had waited for the verdict. Old Bloch came out, looking troubled. “I’m sorry, Michael.” And that had been that. But kinder than what his own rabbi had told him. What his own wife told him. An abomination.
The fools had misunderstood. Thought his powers to be witchcraft. But they hadn’t seen the end that was coming to the earth. Enoch had. He’d seen the signs. I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your young men will see visions.
Enoch tightened his hands into fists. He’d already lost one young man. He wouldn’t lose another.
***
The voices woke him sometime after dark.
Enoch jerked upright from the cold concrete, and his muscles screamed in protest. The boy moaned and wiggled closer. Enoch pressed a finger to the boy’s lips and leaned toward the opening, straining to hear in the darkness of a starless night.
He heard them talking. Breaking branches. Coming closer.
Light flared behind him, and he flinched. But when he recognized the glow he grinned. “My love.”
Rua’s face shone in the darkness, and her eyes made him weak. “This way,” she whispered. “You are close now.”
He reached for her, but she drew back. She superimposed two images over his vision, one of Roger behind a line of men with rifles and torches, the other of a green field with warriors in bronze who looked at Enoch with eyes full of promise.
Enoch nodded and gathered the boy in his arms.
And followed Rua into the darkness.
***
Enoch struggled onward for hours, with the boy like lead in his arms. Rua gave him eyes of the night, and he could see the terrain outlined in silver. Still he stumbled, tripped. Once his foot caught on a chunk of concrete, and he landed full atop the boy, who awoke thrashing from the midst of some fevered nightmare.
Enoch too felt trapped in a nightmare.
His head pounded from the dehydration, the lack of sleep, the stress. His legs trembled, his stomach churned. And behind him he heard the pursuers. All night long he heard them. The crashing of men in the underbrush, on the road, the curses and gunfire. He even heard Ugly back there, straining against the hand that now held his leash.
Tall Man was keeping them busy, Rua told him. Buying time.
They pressed on.
Enoch’s mind fractured and split and spun. He knew nothing but one foot in front of the other, the shifting of the boy from arm to arm, shoulder to hip. Only the boy kept his heart alive. Only Rua kept his path straight, guiding him to where he knew they went.
West.
To the field of hosts.
***
The sun was rising behind them when they reached the chasm. One minute Enoch was ducking under uprooted trees and picking his way along jagged rock, and the next minute he almost stepped off into nothing.
He looked up.
Before him lay the slit throat of the earth. He’d never been to the Grand Canyon, but he’d seen pictures. This was like that… but not as old, and more gray. When the earth’s crust buckled and broke in the earthquakes, the Great Lakes had emptied into the cracks, and the water had forced them even deeper.
The morning mists clung to the opposite bank a quarter mile away, drawing back from the sun. Enoch leaned over the edge and looked down. Water lay trapped there, a thousand feet down. Black and still and silent.
Rua moved around in front of him, hovering six feet out over the abyss. She held his eyes and turned south.
So did he.
***
Roger must have sensed the end coming, because Enoch heard howling now, cries no human could make. More gunshots. Hoots and laughter.
“What’s going on?” The boy’s voice was only a tremble as he lifted his head, but hearing it made Enoch glad.
“We’re getting close, Beni.” Words were pain to Enoch’s straining chest, but he made them his prayer, his confession. “It’s going to be alright.”
Rua beckoned him on.
Enoch ran faster.
***
The downed trees and rubble opened up before him, and Enoch moved out onto a ledge of bedrock swept clean by the floods and rains. A few hundred feet ahead lay another drop off. To the right, the Great Canyon. Yes, yes. It matched what he’d seen in his dream. The Green Field.
Up by the edge he saw a pile of stones arrayed like a waist-high cairn. Branches lay scattered all around it, and a fire burned in a small pit beside the rocks.
He felt a moment of confusion at the fire. But then he remembered. Of course. To light their torches.
He ran up beside the flames and looked over the edge of the drop off.
It was not a field. Though it was green.
When the floodwaters had swept over the land they had done so in a wide swath, but not so strong as to carry everything far. Some places had higher rock underneath, where the current swept in but not out, where the water could eddy like the corners of a rapid. In these places the floods deposited their flotsam. Here the water lay trapped and moldering, breaking down organics into green-black sludge.
Enoch stared, unbelieving.
The hollow place had become a swamp. It sat chock-full with uprooted trees and power lines and houses. He saw smashed cars upthrust from the surface, dented and rusting. Moss covered the trees at the waterline, and fingers of white rot crawled up the trunks. But everywhere — everywhere were the bones. Gray-white bones, splintered bones, bones in the trees, on the shore, floating bones in matted beds of dead leaves. Bones of men, of beasts, of children — bones and bones and bones. Enough for an army.
Enoch staggered.
He looked at Rua, who met his eyes unblinking.
The answer hit him, as sure as must have hit Ezekiel of old. These weren’t dry. But they were bones. Yes. The voice in his dreams.
Enoch stepped to the edge and cradled the boy tight against his chest. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth, and the words singed his tongue on the way out. “Thus says Adonai to these bones! Behold I will make breath to enter you, and you will live! And I will place sinews upon you, and I will make flesh come upon you, and I will spread skin over you, and I will put breath into you, and you will live!”
Enoch closed his eyes and lifted his face to heaven, waiting for the rattle, the clatter, for the whispers of resurrection.
Instead he heard voices. In the trees behind him. Coming closer.
He opened his eyes. The bones lay unmoving in their watery sepulcher.
Panic clawed at Enoch. From his arms, the boy stared up at him.
Enoch turned to Rua. “What… what are we to do?”
She looked past him. To the cairn.
No, he realized. The altar.
A chill went through him. Every stone was jagged. Uncut. The wood. The fire. The realization made him dizzy, and he almost fell. No, no, no. He tried to come to grips with it. A patriarch and a prophet. The patriarch comes first. My Isaac. Because you did not withhold your son, your only son.
Tears welled in Enoch’s eyes as he lowered the boy to the ground. I and the boy will go there, and we will worship, and we will return to you.
“What’s going on?” The boy sat up and looked around. “Where are we?”
“Don’t worry, Beni.” Enoch
picked up the first piece of wood and set it on the altar. “Be brave now.”
The voices kept growing closer, and before long Enoch could hear Roger over the others now. Chanting. Cursing.
Enoch ground his teeth together and moved the wood faster. When Enoch glanced at Rua, she nodded once. And stepped closer.
The boy watched Enoch with wide eyes.
***
When it was time, Enoch knelt behind the boy and seized him by the hands. He used the twine that had once held the rags to his feet, and in a few short twists he had the boy’s wrists bound tight.
“Navi,” the boy cried out. “What are you doing?”
The hurt in that young voice drove knives into Enoch’s heart, but he steeled himself. “My son. Do not fear. HaShem will provide.”
Enoch scooped the boy up and laid him on the altar.
The boy understood then, and he began to kick and scream.
Enoch grabbed him around the waist and held him down.
Enoch wept as he drew the boy’s own shiv.
He raised it up overhead.
And held it.
The boy kicked and screamed and twisted beneath Enoch’s left arm.
Enoch waited for the voice. Come on, come on. Enoch looked all around, above him, over his shoulder. For rams. For Arakiel and the heavens opening. Anything.
Rua moved in closer, standing beside the altar. She leaned over the boy and brushed his cheek with one finger.
The boy’s eyes rolled white in their sockets as he shrieked, looking back and forth between Rua and the blade above him.
Enoch heard crashing from the bushes now.
They could hear the boy screaming.
It wouldn’t be long.
Enoch saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Tall Man emerged from the tree line. The spirit walked straight toward the altar and stopped about fifty feet away. He looked at the boy. Up to Enoch.
And nodded.
Still Enoch waited.
He couldn’t do it. He must do it.
He would never defeat Roger alone. He needed an army — the army HaShem had promised. It was the only way to save the boy. The only way to go back. He groaned, an animal noise that came from his lips like a prayer.
The boy stopped struggling and just looked at him. “Please,” the boy said with tears flowing down his cheeks. “Please.”
Ruined Cities Page 31
