Black & Orange

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  “I’ve had nothing but potato chips and beer. I’m about to shish kabob a kangaroo rat with some cactus chunks.”

  “We’ve eaten worse.”

  He thought about this and added, “And you’ve had nothing but cloves. I haven’t even seen you drink a glass of water.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Teresa—”

  “Drop it, Martin.”

  “Teresa—”

  “Drop it.”

  He fell back against his seat and stared at the hanging fabric on the roof of the van. It looked like the overhead of a circus canopy—one lousy circus at that. “It’s just—” he began, appearing uncertain as to why he even bothered. “Can’t you ever let me help?”

  “I told you about the weapon cache.”

  He sat up straight. “I may be twelve years younger, but I know enough to know what’s good for you. I ain’t a spring duck—or chicken, whatever.”

  “If this is about eating that seaweed shit again, I don’t know how many times I need to tell you that I don’t believe in that Eastern stuff.”

  “Fine, but can’t you give me some credit? Can’t you trust me and try new things? For me?”

  He could tell she wanted another clove right then and thought hard about lighting one up. She was wise enough to know it would only make things worse.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said, trying to soften his tone, “I remember one morning my father went to kiss my mother goodbye before going to the station. Shit, it’s been so long the memory seems to belong to someone else—but he bends down, puts his lips on hers and accidentally steps on her foot. She screams. Loud. So you know what my father does?”

  Teresa shook her head.

  “He went to his patrol car all red-faced and nostrils flaring. He was pissed off like he was the one who had his metatarsals crushed.”

  “Why though?”

  “It was like he had suddenly confirmed something about my mother. That was his kiss and it didn’t blow her away like it should have, maybe like it did when she was younger. She should have still enjoyed the kiss, even through the pain. She didn’t though. She decided to scream in his face.”

  “But he stepped on her toes.”

  “He didn’t speak to her for three days—he never said sorry either.”

  “What a jerk.”

  “But she’s the one who really messed up. Even hopping around with a taped-up foot and crutches, she wouldn’t see something extremely obvious. She refused to believe my father had done anything wrong—she even told me he apologized when I knew damn well he didn’t. My mother didn’t want anybody to think she was unhappy. Because being wrong would mean the pain was a truly real thing. And that’s what you’re doing too Teresa. You’re pretending nothing’s wrong when it suits you, and you despair the rest of the time.”

  “Nice psychoanalysis.”

  He closed his eyes. “Do whatever then, smoke yourself silly,” he whispered. “With everything else we go through every year, I’m so through with this shit.”

  “Let’s concentrate on the matter at hand,” Teresa said, straightening in her seat. “Somewhere out there a new Heart waits for us. We have to do it right this year. Cloth can’t take another one—if he does, that gateway is getting a whole lot larger. I think that’s a bigger deal than one person’s bad habit. Don’t you think?”

  Martin didn’t answer, just kept his eyes closed, practiced breathing at first, and then pretended to be dead.

  ~ * ~

  Teresa didn’t deserve Martin sometimes. She hadn’t deserved David either, for that matter. So many years passed where she couldn’t bring herself to even think about David. Lately it felt like he was standing before her with his cool, bright smile, smelling like spicy incense with a scandalous electric look in his eyes. David Wessing had taught her everything she knew about being a nomad, made her who she was. There was no blaming him for her faults though. How could she? David’s last word had been a screaming plea that went unanswered. It echoed in her heart still.

  She knew how to push a horrible memory away—it was simple. Just think about the job ahead. It had actually been easier right after David died. She focused only on Martin; they went to see the Messenger’s small special operations group: Ramson CuVek, Bill Masters, Li Chu, and Robin Escal. They worked Martin down to the core and some of the mentors, self-defense mentor CuVek especially, hadn’t taken it much easier on her. The mentors knew what was at stake and what they were up against. They had all once lived in the Old Domain, after all. The only way to help was to train them well.

  A year had passed before she could get close to Martin. Under a strict time constraint, Bill Masters had tasked them to set eleven mantles and something like sixteen C4 charges around an abandoned metal finishing plant. With Martin backing her, they passed the test, even with a time limit of twenty-three minutes. They even found time to have a first kiss in the slanting shadows beneath a rusty scaffolding.

  The first encounter had been intense and welcome, but she hadn’t known then if she could love Martin the same way she’d loved David. Martin had kept her hope alive through difficult times. Then one day she’d gone to pick up road supplies but got halfway before remembering her wallet—back at the motel she found Martin with some woman. A waitress, she wagered, from the Denny’s uniform spilling over a chair.

  That was a long time ago. Now Martin wouldn’t seek anyone else—that brand of carelessness wasn’t in him any longer. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. Breaking some emotional ties might make this failing thing between them easier to watch disintegrate. That was what her heart told her, despite the endless miles stacked against the notion.

  She had slept on and off all today and now that it was pitch-black her body bounded with energy. She considered building a modest mantle tent around the van. Something freezing dripped over her neural receptors and she shook away the idea. She was happy not being exhausted for a change.

  She ducked into the back of the van and took up a Black Belt magazine Martin bought her a few months ago as a joke. Lying down on the full size mattress, she could still see his shape lounging in the front. Boredom had gotten the best of them. Reading, she tittered at a side panel featuring a man in camouflage GI gear hammer-kicking a wood board. The first few paragraphs were actually intriguing, if technically flawed, but then any true content fell away as the writer began to recount a past tournament in New York. Teresa’s chest cinched with pain anyway and her stomach bubbled with hunger. Having nothing else to keep her mind occupied, she’d be coughing soon and probably wake Martin up.

  She needed to write a will for him. It would be the first step in accepting this with a modicum of dignity. Dying was easy for Teresa. Leaving the pain behind for someone else wasn’t. David had done it to her and now she’d do it to Martin—and just like with David, there’d be nothing left behind, no money, no property, no assets of any kind. Just a body, and the indelicate task of disposal.

  A Sam Cooke song flowered in her ears, a gospel ditty, “Hem of his garment.”

  If I touch it, I’ll be healed...

  Something moved outside the van.

  Her body shifted. She pulled Martin’s M1911 from under the mattress. It felt good and heavy with singular purpose. Flicking off the safety, she glanced back. Martin still slept. Take it slow, she thought. Calm. It could be a coyote.

  Or black suits.

  She edged sideways. Her legs trembled as she hunkered down, gun clasped in both hands. She stopped. The cold desert night seeped in through the sides of the doors. There was another long, scraping sound—a claw over glass.

  Now came a tapping. The world rocked. Teresa wanted control back, just to tell herself this was her nerves, but there seemed to be no end in sight. She brought her gaze over the back window, through the pane. A tumbleweed edged along the bumper, scraping it with a sound like steel on steel.

  Martin came awake and twisted out of his seat. She felt him summon a mantle but she shook
her head and signaled all-clear. With a slow unfolding of her arm, she dropped the gun down on her hip and moved the safety into place with her thumb.

  Martin blew some air out and released his mantle. He slumped against the threshold. “You okay?”

  “I’m so hungry I think I’m getting the jitters.”

  He nodded groggily. “We don’t know when the next letter will arrive.”

  “Or if there will be money,” she added.

  “He gives us some every year.”

  “Maybe this time’s different. Did you feel the displacement at the bar?”

  He slowly nodded, although it seemed he didn’t want to admit this for the sake of it being true. “It probably has nothing to do with the Messenger.”

  It started to rain outside.

  “We can’t go on this way. What if the letter doesn’t come until the 30th? Do we starve until then?”

  Martin closed his eyes, trying to fall back to sleep. “We’ve used the mantles to steal before. It’s all right. Nobody’s going to hell.”

  “Too much exposure, I think we need to make a stop in Flagstaff.”

  His eyes opened and his face colored now. “That’s not on the way.”

  “I haven’t seen mom and dad in thirty years, Martin. They’ll give us money when they see how badly off we are. Besides, they need to know about what’s happening to me. You said I should own up. Well, here you are.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? There’s no time Teresa. Your parents might not even be alive anymore. And the Messenger said we couldn’t go back—”

  She hit the lever and the back doors popped open. The tumbleweed hopped into the dark brown emptiness. Rain snapped loudly against the pavement. She lit a clove anyway and sucked in. In the rain the smoke struggled for shape. Her lungs suddenly burned with relish.

  “The Messenger has never missed a letter yet,” said Martin, following.

  A mouthful of smoke fell out and stung her eyes.

  “Is this really about telling them the truth?” he persisted. “Be honest with me, goddamn it. We don’t have the time to piss away.”

  The smoke started to hurt. She smashed the half-smoked clove under her tennis shoe. He watched her a long time, seeming unsure how to proceed. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Moonlight bent over the glistening road and made everything look bathed in tar. Martin finally dropped outside and took her waist, pulled her close. His heart thumped quick underneath his t-shirt. She laced her fingers around his puka shell necklace and toyed with one shell for a few moments, then rested her face on his warm chest.

  “We’ll go,” he told her.

  ELEVEN

  Paul Quintana reflected on the recent past, and not fondly. It was a change from dwelling on the nightmare of his distant past: the smell of his mother, her bright eyes when he flipped the lamp on, the sound of her startled cry, the heat in her skin from the pleasure she thought her boyfriend Freddy had given her—that whole sequence of events was a hateful ambrosia Paul drank daily. But today he couldn’t taste it; things had been reconfigured and he couldn’t decide if that was good or not.

  He thought perhaps it wasn’t black and white. Or orange.

  The rectory sentinels had draped him over a granite coffin. Paul wagered it belonged to some old witch who wrote a Tome or two in her day. The catacombs beneath Mojave chapel had the distinction of housing thousands of Church members, all in hand-sculpted tombs. The brisk winds from lower corridors blew through them in wild trajectories, sounding like wraiths maiming each other.

  Paul’s eyes flicked to turning, bleeding shapes that wound around helixes of darkness. The smell of liquefying meat, a death-reminder smell, hovered around him. If the power of the marrow seeds did not wear thin soon, his heart would not last against the intensity.

  You know why we’re here? sang a dissident chorus. Don’t you?

  The black feast.

  “Hello?” he cried into empty space.

  The song crept back into his ears: Everyone knows why we’re here. Thanksgiving to the black feast.

  A fetid thing leaned over him now and extended what looked like a set of dangling keys. As they poked through the darkness, closer to the soft surface of his eyes, he distinguished bladed fingernails atop dark orange fingers. Paul turned away. His jaw chilled against the stone coffin. The claw-tips grazed his scalp and down his neck before lifting. Instinctively, he pulled his knees up to his chest and clutched them there.

  Thanksgiving to the black feast.

  The food. The salt of old times.

  Thanksgiving to the bleeding feast.

  He tried to disregard the chorus. In the morning he would be alive and well, maybe resting among cadavers, but still breathing air and living and needing. This torment was no longer for the mother he’d fooled in the soft, wet darkness. This torment was a purer kind. He didn’t have to pretend he was someone else with the Priestess of Morning. She could change him. He knew she could.

  Paul’s mind ripped him backwards, back to the meeting with the Archbishop. Both Archbishops…

  Raymond Traven’s dead lips were syncing with a man’s from the Old Domain.

  “We have a new Bishop, brother,” the Archbishop of Midnight said into the cone.

  The Archbishop from the other world gasped with delight. “Another Bishop, already brother? Slippery business, so, so slippery there. I smell red.”

  “His name is Paul Quintana.”

  Raymond’s lips bubbled with each syllable and his dead eyes moved to Paul. “Welcome Bishop. The Church of Morning recognizes you.” The eyes went back to Sandeus Pager. “Have you dispersed the seeds amongst any others?”

  Sandeus took a moment and then said, “The other contingencies haven’t any members worthy of accepting their wisdom, brother.”

  Raymond’s eyes went gray. A string of bloody snot coursed from his nose and swung into the crook of his mouth. “You must prepare, brother. Chaplain Cloth is already on his way.”

  Sandeus’s posture changed. “But... it’s not yet the 31st.”

  “The world has changed. The seasons have little power to hold him any longer. The gateway is ready to burst wide and the pillars are at ready. Give thanksgiving to the blood! Drink it from the brain carafe. Drink and drink, brother. The Tomes are read as such. This is our time. The Time of Opening. The Time of Arrival. The time of Tomes with wet script. Thanksgiving to it all.”

  Paul shot up as the memory left him. The snorts and grizzly chuckles slid down his mind in oily black clots.

  A door opened then and a shimmering red glow of torchlight wiggled into the grooves of the distant coffins, illuminating the runes scrolled into stone. Paul’s eyelashes fluttered. The symbols began to make sense, not that he ever learned their complexities, but there were thousands of other little brains growing in his lungs, and they understood the runes—they understood much about the Churches of Midnight and Morning—and the Church Eternal, the house of Chaplain Cloth.

  The marrow seeds grew inside his lungs (slippery black blossoms sprung forth among others boiling orange in color). Paul became sidetracked with the horrible growth, which amplified in a frenzy. He remembered a door in the catacomb opening. Footsteps echoed off the cavernous planes. He thrashed like a snared rabbit and his bladder quivered uneasily.

  Black feast: let us taste the night.

  Orange feast: let us taste the dawn.

  Everlasting: let us taste it all!

  A real voice floated into him and he clenched the sides of the coffin. He wasn’t bound, and though he had full knowledge of this, his other brains would not allow him to slip off the side, gain his feet and run like hell. He was staying. The marrow blossoms said to remain and he would.

  Paul, we’ll set your soul out to rot and slip apart. Paul, when it’s gone she will be the only thing.

  “Who are you?” The bustling wind through the tomb stopped. Silence drove a spike of doubt through him. Was the damage from the seeds permanent? Would t
his never end? “This is bullshit! Who are you?”

  A hand caught his sweaty, cold, ruined suit. Snaps of light danced across his vision. His head must have struck the stone.

  “You know who I am.”

  “Cole?” Paul sighed with relief. The ugly visage bobbed above him.

  “How are things, Paul?”

  Two thick fingers pressed down on Paul’s lips before he could yell something caustic. After a moment Cole slid his fingers off and leaned against an adjacent coffin.

  “They killed Traven,” said Paul.

  “Pricks, I’ll have someone call Val.” Cole sniffed, as though idle conversation had already worn on him.

  “What the hell are those seeds?”

  “The blossoms are now a part of you, like a thousand new organs. You’ve been blessed.”

  “How long do they last?” Paul’s muscles were still confused by general numbness and the retardation of nerve impulses. “Do the blossoms make us... like the Nomads?”

  The Bishop scratched his scarred jaw. “The Nomads have the blood of the Old Domain in their veins. Marrow seeds open doors for us the Nomads already had open at birth. Theirs is a power wasted and unappreciated—the Nomads cannot do what we do, nor can we possess their ability. We are converse to them. Only the Chaplain has full control of the Old Domain’s power. I thought you read the Tomes of Eternal Harvest, Quintana.”

  “Don’t chastise me! I’ve got voices singing in my mind!”

  Cole’s eyes ignited. It startled Paul because there was no light to make them well up with gold, and they managed not only to conjure the sparkling hue, but to hold it. “The children have already called to you?”

  “Who?”

  “You have a natural connection. This is better than I could have hoped for.” Cole tasted something in the air and savored it for several moments. The flavor almost put him into a trance. “Have you any idea what happens every 31st?”

  “The Heralding, the Hunt and the Harvest.”