by James Morrow
She yanked on the emergency brake, opened the door, and, without bothering to shut off the engine, escaped into the crisp September air.
“You were right to jump ship,” said Quincy, joining her on the shoulder. “That species is famous for its neurotoxic venom.”
“Give me back my goddamn steering wheel!”
“One bite, and the victim becomes so stiff, he makes the average stage-two abulic look like Fred Astaire in Swing Time. Let’s watch the battle, Mrs. Burkhart If a cavalcade of organized killing has nothing to teach us, I don’t know what does.”
Nora shuddered. She had to say this for the fetches: they weren’t phony. You could, if so inclined, organize an incandescent cult around them. Death, when done right, became as grand and fierce a religion as anyone could want. Look at ancient Egypt Look at Christianity. On this Prufrock I shall build my church.
Even if it were not occurring on a golf course, the Battle of Paramus would have initially seemed more like a team sport than a military engagement. For twenty minutes the armies attempted to outflank each other, but the intimidating presence of the Jews’ ontos and the Anglos’ equivalent machine—a Brinks truck bristling with machine guns and emblazoned with an amateurishly painted Crown of Thorns shedding droplets of blood—prevented either force from securing any ground. Although most of the fighters were foot soldiers, a few platoons had managed to improvise vehicles. One Christian Brotherhood unit controlled a squadron of steerable hot-air balloons, their various commercial logos (Blockbuster Video, Tru Value Hardware, Burger King) partially hidden by the Crown of Thorns insignia, while another Anglo group had converted thirty aluminum mulch barrows into war wagons, each pulled by a team of Rottweilers and outfitted with crosscut saw blades projecting from the hubs. On the Jewish side, a full brigade mounted on apprehensive-looking quarter horses unfurled a banner reading TEANECK RIDING ACADEMY. Another such detachment, proud possessors of a hundred electric shopping carts, prepared to do battle under a flag heralding the BLOOMFIELD CONSUMERS LEAGUE.
“Did I tell you the big news?” said Quincy. “I’ve decided to write a joke book. What do you think of Charnel Chuckles as a title?”
Upon realizing that their flanking maneuvers had failed, the armies decided to engage each other head-on, and the Battle of Paramus turned bloody. The first clash pitted the mulch barrows against the shopping carts, both divisions of latter-day charioteers charging across the fairways with elemental antipathy and primal rage. For ten minutes the golf course darkened beneath a merciless storm of bullets, buckshot, grenades, Molotov cocktails, arrows, bottles, and stones. “Kill the plague bringers!” screamed the Anglos. Bodies fell everywhere, littering the links—the wounded, the dying, the dead, the fear-frozen. The two sides seemed equal in firepower, and Nora guessed that the outcome would depend on the vehicles themselves, with the mechanized troops quickly outclassing their biological counterparts. She was right Ignoring their drivers’ commands, the Rottweilers ran off madly in a dozen directions, whimpering and yelping. If the Jewish charioteers drew any satisfaction from besting a German breed, their countenances did not betray it; with grim lips and steely eyes they accelerated their shopping carts and fired at the retreating mulch barrows, systematically slaughtering the drivers and gaining all the acreage from the tenth hole to the Bing Crosby Tavern. The links ran red, a deluge of blood blotching the fairways and staining the sand traps.
Beholding the fallen troops, Nora gasped at the monstrous inadequacy of the post-theistic world. All these wounded soldiers, and no resources to treat them—no antibiotics, disinfectants, plasma, morphine, anesthesia, or surgical instruments. A sour wave of nausea washed through her. Her knees buckled, and she embraced the nearest road sign, SPEED LIMIT 45.
As the Jewish charioteers regrouped, the Anglos deployed their hot-air balloons. The pilots guided their craft in low, a maneuver that left the squadron vulnerable but turned the shopping carts into easy targets. “Death to the plague bringers!” At first the tactic worked, the bombardiers dousing the charioteers in flaming sheets of charcoal lighter. “Kill them all!” Shrieking like the victims in Firebombing a Synagogue, the burning charioteers leaped from their shopping carts, tore across the links, and hurled themselves into the Saddle River. Now the Teaneck Riding Academy joined the fight, rupturing the balloon bags with volleys from their assault rifles. One by one the gondolas succumbed to gravity, hitting the ground and splitting open like pumpkins dropped from skyscrapers. Pilots and bombardiers spilled forth. The majority suffered broken legs, and the Teaneck cavalry exterminated them on the spot. Struggling to their feet, the remaining balloonists retreated toward their lines, a futile move that merely inspired the equestrian rifles to gun them down.
“I’ll bet the Third Division could really use their ontos now,” said Quincy. “Too bad it’s out of fuel.”
“I gave them what I could spare,” said Nora.
“I’m sure. If you’ll go back to the truck, Mrs. Burkhart, you’ll find that our reptile friend has decided to become a steering wheel again.”
Having foiled to win the day at a distance, each army now undertook to destroy its enemy in hand-to-hand combat. As the carnage unfolded—a noisy welter of shouts, screams, gunfire, hemorrhages, and dismemberments—Nora staggered toward Phaëthon. The gearshift lever was free of snakes. The steering wheel had returned. She climbed in.
“Your ethics elude me,” said Quincy, joining her in the cab. “Aren’t you aware that leaving the scene of an accident—”
“Ten thousand accidents.”
“—is both illegal and immoral?”
“Don’t speak to me of morals, you demented slug.” She stomped on the accelerator.
“My Nora Burkhart dossier reveals that you learned first aid in Girl Scouts. If you act quickly, you can save somebody’s life.”
“If I act quickly, I can save my life.”
“Tourniquets, splints, CPR.”
Nora glanced toward the golf course and winced. The fetch, God damn him, had a point.
She stopped the truck.
It was an Anglo bombardier who delivered Nora from her conscience, a barrel-chested, apish man whose hot-air balloon displayed the Wal-Mart logo. Gliding past the beech trees that lined the Saddle River, the aircraft headed straight for Phaëthon. The bombardier leaned over the edge of the gondola, his right hand gripping a Molotov cocktail.
“Plague bringer!” he howled. “Christ-killing Jew plague bringer!”
Putting Phaëthon in gear, Nora gritted her teeth and zoomed down Prospect Road. The bombardier hurled his cocktail. It landed thirty feet behind the truck, the explosion filling Nora’s side-view mirror like a Florida sunset. She jammed the transmission into second gear, floored the accelerator, advanced to third, then fourth, soon putting five miles between herself and the Wal-Mart balloon.
“If you don’t like Charnel Chuckles,” said Quincy as the interstate ramp appeared, “maybe a better title would be Funny Bones. What’s your opinion?”
Nora guided Phaëthon down Route 80.
“Funny Bones,” repeated the fetch. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think the Lucido Clinic terrifies you, Quincy Azrael. I think it gives you nightmares.”
Nora got all the way to Hackensack before realizing she was driving in the wrong direction. She turned around and headed west, eventually crossing the Saddle River Bridge. Dead soldiers clogged the stream, their wounds tinting the water the hue of Hawaiian Punch. The nearest Jew lacked a body from the waist down. The chest of an adjacent Christian Brotherhood infantryman had a crater instead of a cardiopulmonary system.
She stopped, jumped from the truck, and approached the bridge rail, eyes locked on the river. God’s reflection rode the water, His grin folding and stretching as the crimson current flowed south toward the Passaic. Crazed with hunger, a stray dog sniffed the heartless Christian.
Nora looked down. A lithe female form in a motorcycle jacket floated amid a stand of catt
ails. Her forehead displayed a black pendant: crusted blood surrounding a hole the size of a bottle cap. Rachel’s Uzi lay across her chest Everything about the scene shocked Nora, and nothing about it surprised her. In the age of abulia, there were no happy endings.
“You really believe the answer lies in Mexico, don’t you?” said Quincy as Nora, weeping, settled back behind the wheel.
“I don’t know what I believe.”
“Give up, Mrs. Burkhart. There is no Mexico. It doesn’t exist. The ants have devoured the jungles. The condors have stolen the children. The cities are on fire.”
As Quincy descended into his host, Nora turned the ignition key. No Mexico. The wraith made sense. She could see it all. Ants and condors, quite so. Burning cities, yes.
She depressed the clutch, shifted into first gear, and headed toward Pennsylvania.
In Allamuchy, Nora decided that her top priority, more important even than her son’s next physical therapy session, must be to remove the Stars of David from Phaëthon’s panels. She parked, soaked a diaper in Gansevoort premium, and got to work. The gasoline made a reasonable solvent, and after fifteen minutes of strenuous rubbing she’d become a less tempting target to whatever Anglo brigades might lie between the Delaware River and the Rio Grande.
Over the next two days, she managed to put six hundred miles between herself and Paramus, but the battle still cascaded through her mind, one searing tableau after another: an infantryman from the Passaic Art Appreciation Guild impaled like an insect specimen on a Christian Brotherhood stake, a male flag bearer from the Norwalk Irregulars chopped to pieces by the serrated hubs of a mulch wagon, a female shopping-cart charioteer running across the golf course with flames shooting from her hair, a sharpshooter from the Stratford Spearshakers clutching his externalized intestines like a housewife holding a grocery bag. Nora’s sin tortured her. It tied her soul in knots. The Way of the World, slide number fourteen: Half-Jew Hoarding Diesel Fuel.
She lived by her wits and on her toes. No danger eluded her senses; no resource escaped her gaze. Whenever another vehicle appeared in her side-view mirror, she immediately improvised a detour. Each time a babbling brook or an unharvested apple tree emerged from the landscape, she stopped the truck and reprovisioned.
All along Route 81, from Pennsylvania to Maryland to West Virginia to Virginia, America’s death throes presented themselves in grisly detail. For every abandoned McDonald’s restaurant there was a funeral pyre; in some cases the McDonald’s was the pyre, jammed with corpses and set ablaze, the golden arches rising above the inferno like the haunches of a dead abulic. Starving livestock roamed at will, searching for the meals their deceased keepers could no longer provide. Unmilked cows lowed. Ecstatic carrion birds ruled the sky, convinced that some vulturine paradise, a corvine Second Coming, was at hand.
About half the roadside billboards were painted over with ads for local treatment methods.
ALDERFER FARM THIS EXIT
FETCHES PERMANENTLY EXTRACTED
FOR CANNED GOODS
DRINK FROM OUR WELL OF WELLNESS
And six miles later…
107 CURED SO FAR BY MIRACLE HEN GERTRUDE
SWAP SURPLUS GAS FOR RESURRECTION
OMELET AND COFFEE
ELSIE’S DINER TWO MILES EAST
And just beyond the Virginia town of Mount Jackson…
JOIN US UNDER THE BIG TENT!
REVEREND DOCTOR SILAS CONNOLLY’S
CHRIST-O-RAMA
&
24-HOUR HEAL-A-THON!
(ALL FAITHS WELCOME IN JESUS’ NAME)
LET SISTER ABIGALE MASSAGE AWAY ABOOLIA PROBLEMS!
Five miles south of Route 64, Nora recalled that, while the Stars of David no longer decorated Phaëthon, both panels still displayed the name FELDSTEIN. She pulled over, climbed into the cargo bay, and looked around for an implement capable of defacing the Tower of Flowers motto, quickly settling on the scissors jack.
No sooner had she finished scraping away the F in the driver’s-side FELDSTEIN than an enormous war machine appeared, popping out from behind a crumbling stone bam. Kudzu vines drooped from the cannon barrel. The turret sported a Crown of Thorns insignia. Firing repeatedly, each shell exploding closer to Phaëthon than the one before it, the deadly tractor moved parallel to the highway, rolling through a cabbage patch and across a moribund cherry orchard. Nora knew what she was up against, an M-46 Patton tank: her brother had given Kevin a radio-controlled replica for his ninth birthday.
She could identify her enemy’s weapon, but could she read her enemy’s mind? When it came to blowing away a Jewish soldier versus blowing up a Jewish panel truck, which target would the Anglos choose first? The truck, she decided. A Jew was just a Jew, but a truck these days was an unending inspiration.
Heart thumping, she sprinted to the rear doors, flung them wide, and leaned into the cargo bay. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom, settling on the diesel fuel. The keys to Lucido’s kingdom, and now she must abandon them. No, not all nine. She stuffed two jugs inside her backpack and shouldered the load.
Ten feet away, a shell detonated, gouging a pit in Route 81.
The manufacturers of the Posturpedic mattress had equipped their product with handles. She wrapped her fingers around the closest pair and dragged the pad to the edge of the bay. Sliding one hand under Kevin’s back, the other under his knees, she lifted him free of the truck and turned toward a field of cornstalks: a difficult objective, blocked by a drainage ditch and a barbed-wire fence, but the field and its adjacent haystack were the only sanctuaries in sight.
Pulling Kevin’s limp body tight against her chest, she started across the road. Her bad knee spasmed. The Patton tank rumbled behind her. As she reached the gully, the Anglos scored a direct hit With a thunderous roar Phaëthon exploded. Nora screamed but kept on moving. Everything lost. Groceries, gasoline, wheelchair, Mexico. Smoldering hunks of panel truck fell to earth, a hail of crashing glass and resounding metal that lasted almost a minute.
But then: a straw to grasp. In destroying Phaëthon, the Anglos had inadvertently obscured their quarry. A screen of thick black smoke rose from the burning chassis, enveloping Nora and Kevin as it blew across the gully and drifted through the barbed-wire fence.
“Bastards!” cried Quincy, climbing out of Kevin and facing the Patton tank. “He’s not yours! How dare you think he’s yours?”
As much as Nora loathed the leveler, she was not above accepting his help. Together they lifted Kevin over the fence and, still cloaked in the dark cloud, carried him through the cornfield—the stalks brown and withered, their husks crinkled like parchment—to the haystack. Nora wasted no time. As the smoke dissipated, revealing the skull above and the mud below, she buried Kevin in the hay, shoring up the airway with a dead branch and a discarded hoe handle.
“I suppose I ought to thank you,” Nora whispered as she and the fetch joined Kevin inside the stack.
“Our rapport will improve significantly,” said Quincy, “when you realize that death is actually a blessing. But for the gift of oblivion, you humans wouldn’t be here.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Ask Charles Darwin. Without death, life on planet Earth remains a carpet of pre-Cambrian slime: immortal, unchanging, and as boring as the rushes for Last Year at Marienbad.”
“Quiet!”
For the next sixty minutes, an eternity, Nora breathed as quietly as possible, but she could do nothing about Kevin’s wheezing. Sweat trickled down her chest and arms. Her knee throbbed. Besides being intolerably hot, the haystack was horribly alive, home to ladybugs, aphids, crickets, and weevils. Stoically she brushed the insects from her limbs and face, crushing them when they ventured inside her ears.
Nora would never know why the Anglos abandoned the hunt. Perhaps they were simply embarrassed about destroying one of America’s few remaining fossil fuel supplies. In any event, when she finally peeked outside, the only evidence of the Patton tank was the flattened cabbage patch
and charred truck.
“This calls for a joke,” said Quincy. “Harry answers the telephone, and it’s an emergency-room doctor. The doctor says, Tour wife was in a serious car accident, and I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that she’s lost the use of both arms and legs, and she’ll need help eating and going to the bathroom for the rest of her life.’ Harry says, ‘My God. What’s the good news?’ The doctor says, ‘I’m kidding. She’s dead.’” The fetch plucked a ladybug from his hair and flicked it into the core of the haystack. “One of these days, Mrs. Burkhart, I’ll get a laugh out of you.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“It may interest you to know that the Army of Northern New Jersey has accomplished its objective. They defeated the Christian Brotherhood handily.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
“I bring plague, but I never lie, The Anglo regime will fall in less than a year.”
“Wonderful.”
“If you want my opinion—”
“I don’t.”
“—those nine gallons of diesel fuel would’ve cut Jewish casualties in half.” Chuckling, Quincy began his customary descent into Kevin. “Did I ever tell you how much that Harvey Sheridan fellow offended me? If there’s one thing we spirits can’t stand, it’s spiritualism. The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who trivialize death.”
As the wraith and the child became one, Nora left Kevin to the safety of the stack and advanced gingerly across the deserted highway. With mounting despair she surveyed Phaëthon’s remains. The melted wheelchair was easy to identify. The adjacent black glob had probably once been the carburetor; the amorphous mass, a tire; the carbonized threads, Kevin’s mattress, possibly his monkey. It made no sense to continue south—not when a huge population center lay only ninety miles east on Route 64. There must be kind and generous people in Richmond. Surely the entire city hadn’t succumbed to plague-era selfishness. Perhaps she would find a fellow wayfarer, some resolute parent preparing for the pilgrimage to Coatzacoalcos. With any luck, this person would have a stalwart heart, an iron will, a functioning car, and a hundred gallons of gas.
