The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  “She came up to me from behind and pressed her fingers into my temples. She said, ‘you know you’re the bravest person in here?’ I laugh and I spit up blood on her fingers. ‘I can see you with my eyes closed,’ she said, ‘you glow like an atomic bomb. Your energy makes this whole place tilt on its side.

  “‘Does this seem brave to you?’ I asked Hadley, ‘sitting in the corner like a dog, trying to kill myself? I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be human.’

  “She was younger than me, and her body was small and straight like it hung off a clothesline, her skin like talcum powder or white freesia. The machines churned out a blizzard and I heard the moaning and crying of our fellow prisoners, somewhere out in the storm. Their bodies were dissolving too fast for me to catch. Their skin blew away with the snow.

  “When Hadley looked at me I saw that her eyes were iron weapons, heavy and sharp. If she wanted to she could have killed me with those eyes. She said, ‘most people here don’t believe in death. They think dying is like falling asleep and waking up the next morning in the same hell. But you believe, and that’s brave. How do you do it?’

  “I tried to tell her about the voice that I’d heard since a child, calling out to me through the waves, but the machines rained down on us, slammed our ribs with noise until we couldn’t breathe. We lost each other in the storm and I hunkered down in the corner, chewing on my fists to try to cure my hunger. I tore off chunks of my fingernails and ate them, I would have eaten my hair if I had any left.

  “And that entire time I sat alone in the blizzard and the snow, all I could think of was the sand plum cake my mother baked for me on my 18th birthday, decorated with sepia colored caramel frosting and violet flowers. It was one of the only cakes I remembered my mother baking, because of the sugar shortages, and when they gave me my slice I trembled because I could feel my skin sliding underneath my dress, 17 flowers too overweight. I licked the caramel frosting off my fork and out of sight, fed the rest of the slice to the dogs. I just thought, if only I could have that cake now, I would never go hungry again. It was the only thing I could think of, a special memory God dredged up to torment me. I started to think I was in hell because I didn’t eat my mother’s cake.

  "After the storm subsided, the machines forced the heretics of block six to dispose of the dead. We dragged them to the end of the final hallway, all the way through the ice, and threw the dead down into a chute. I assumed the bodies were incinerated, disposed of somehow. But Hadley, after I found her again, she said the bodies weren't destroyed - but stored for a time before they were re-animated for God's army.

  "'How do you know this?' I asked her, and she said he'd seen it herself, armies of our dead emerging from the earth. She said it might possible to jump through the chute and emerge out the other side, but she didn't know for sure." I thought of the night long ago when Ezekiel took Chicory and me out to the machine fields and Ezekiel raised the dead.

  Leda scratched a figure into the sand. The number six

  “But I think the real reason was because of Hadley,” Leda said, “when I met her I realized I’d never loved anyone before. God had to take me away from the ocean and sent me down into the place without hope for me to realize what love meant. Before Hadley I had been like a child and I loved like a child.

  “I started to lose my mind. Well, maybe that’s not completely true. I didn’t lose my mind. It just grew rigid and thin and small. That’s what hell does. The starvation and the pain turned people into selfish demons, the kind of demons that would kill for food, step on their neighbor’s skull to keep their feet from burning on the floor. Hadley was different. Hadley kept her sanity when everyone else was falling apart. She was like a guardian mother, the night watch when we were pitched against the floors and crawling through heated oubliettes searching for a place to rest. She told me I was the bravest one in there, but it wasn’t true. It was her. Throughout the endless night she let me rest my head in her lap, too weak to cry, and she’d kiss my forehead, my cheeks, and my tattoo. She asked me, ‘why do strangers no longer kiss?’ and kissed me full on my bleeding mouth. She said, ‘I want to hold you because this is all we have left.

  “I told her sometimes, ‘I don’t deserve to be held. I didn’t eat my birthday cake.’ She only held me tighter though she was so thin and hungry her bones shook.

  “She told me, ‘baby, it doesn’t matter. Just let me hold you.’

  “Everything started going dark as it does in the end, and I’m sure I was close to death. I felt like I was looking out of pinholes instead of eyes. My head felt like it was too swollen and huge on my neck to lift. I became so clumsy that I was no longer in control of my arms or my legs. They seemed to disappear right into the floor. And then a strange thing happened.

  “Another prisoner stole Hadley’s food. A little bit of soup in a stone bowl. He kicked her and scraped her face and tore her scalp. That was the first time I ever saw Hadley cry. We were all so tired. We were all so sick. I thought Hadley could never break down like that but she was human just like the rest of us.

  “So I told Hadley about the voice. I dragged her to the corner of our cell and I held her and I said do not be afraid. They are coming to save us. I don’t know when, but we still have a chance. Do not be afraid. And I stroked the back of her head and I kept swallowing because I couldn’t cry.

  That’s what I had to hold on to in the end. I stopped thinking about myself. I stopped thinking about hunger or pain or my mother’s cake. I held onto Hadley and I thought of the voice washing through me. It blocked out the voices of the plague machines. It blocked out the cold and the hunger. I curled around that voice and held it to my stomach like a little glowing seed until all other thoughts disappeared. And I think that’s what saved me. That’s why I didn’t die.”

  “So the next time block six took out the dead, fourteen of us jumped down into the chute with the corpses.”

  “We fell down several feet and landed on a pile of bodies in the dark. I thought I could feel the dead reaching out to grasp me in the dark. And the smell, this fetid smell that stained my skin, burned my throat. I don't know how long I flailed in the darkness looking for the way out. Someone began to yell that we were trapped in there, that the walls were closing in on us, and I started to believe him. I could feel the darkness squeezing my bones like concrete, the walls shuddering with sweat.

  "Hadley found the way out through a shaft. She talked to us until we found our way to her in the dark. I reached out and she took my hand. She pressed my fingers against the cool metal of the shaft. She said to me, ‘we’re almost home, darling,’ as if she knew.

  “We crawled up the shaft and out into the daylight. The first thing I saw was a crooked sign with the word “Edgewater” in yellow paint. Then the field of sleeping machines, as if paralyzed by sunlight. I went into hell knowing I’d never see daylight again, but here it was, bursting off my fingertips, lying in lazy ropes around the trees, falling like golden flakes on my tongue. I stepped out into the field and the smell of the grass and the woodlands, seedy pine and fennel and sap, gushed out and hit me like an explosion. Hadley caught me before I fell. I laughed and I thought it might crack my ribcage.

  We ran into the woods out of sight. Some of us embraced each other. Others lay stunned in the grass. Hadley took my hands like she was going to lead me into the waltz and we spun each other around until we were sick. We devoured the heads of yellow flowers and collapsed underneath the tree bowers. Hadley and I lay together, limbs entwined. I’d forgotten what it was like to be warm. She touched my shaved head, my paper translucent skin, and told me she’d never really seen my skin before, that I had skin like honey.

  “I said, ‘Come over here and let me look at you, let me see how beautiful you are’ because I couldn’t move my limbs. I called her my vanilla girl, ice-cream girl, with skin cool as falling. She said, ‘I’m here, don’t you know? I’ve always been here.’

  “We talked about our future together. We would run
away from the towns and the plague machines to a meadow of yellow flowers, and make our home from saplings and conifer leaves. We’d grow our own vegetable garden and make our clothes from butterfly cocoons At night we’d write philosophy by candle light, things we’d seen and things we wanted to see.

  “Some of the other people in the group talked about going back into hell and rescuing the others, or breaking into the prophet headquarters and stealing their records. But it couldn’t be done, we didn’t have the power to do any of that. Others you could tell that hell warped them, made them bent spined and angry. One woman broke her legs trying to fly away from the top of a tree. And there was this man, a bald man with no eyes, just holes in his head, like his eyes had been gouged out. He told me he was going to go out and kill everyone who wronged him, something about a kidnapping and a ransom nobody would pay.”

  “Smarts,” I said, “I knew him. His name was Smarts. He came to Edgewater the night you disappeared.”

  “Everyone went their separate ways, except for Hadley and I. We lay there until nightfall, holding each other until we fell asleep.

  “I dreamed of hell. I dreamed of the machines in hell, with their proboscis sparkling like glaciers, the steel of their teeth tearing my skin away. Hadley shook me awake and I thought I was still in hell but then the sun splattered on my face, my hair. All morning I kept murmuring, ‘this isn’t real, this isn’t real.’ Hadley pressed her lips into my hair. She kept repeating, ‘we’re never going to go back there.’

  We snuck into an abandoned home and stole clothes to wear. I felt like I was slipping into someone else’s body. That whoever I was had died in hell and a ghost had emerged from the ruins. Maybe Hadley was right. We never had to go back there, because we’d never really left.”

  “A monster killed her, didn’t it?” I said, “otherwise you would still be with her.”

  Leda’s hands tightened. Her veins knotted up underneath the skin.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Because that’s how all stories end.”

  “Yes,” Leda said, “Out in the woods, we passed a pagan temple. Kali came out of the ruins, like she’d peeled herself off an icon. Her blue powdered skin was dull as paint, her tongue cracked and crumbling. She saw Hadley’s tattoo, then broke her neck and flung her against the stone. I ran away, back into town, and that’s when Lucia found me, huddled on her porch steps. She took me inside, fed me, gave me a place to stay.

  “That’s why you came to Edgewater. You were looking for a place to hide,” I said.

  “Yes,” Leda said, “but I found you.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I didn't want to. But then the night you were gone with Ezekiel, Jolene came to me.

  “She told me she knew who I was. She told me that the prophets and the high priests all talked about us, the people who escaped from block six. That she could help us. She said some of the other people in block six were gathering down at the ocean, that someone would meet me at the bus that night and if I wanted to go, there was no time to wait.”

  “I don't understand,” I said, “why would Jolene help you? And with what?”

  Leda lifted her head, and her eyes were shiny and dark. I could see the ocean waves breaking in her eyes, the white foam cupping her eyelids like hands. She brought my ear close to her mouth, whispered.

  “We're going to kill God.”

  For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. The distant mountains seemed to scuttle close and crush my limbs against the ocean. The tower from which the voice emanated seemed to rise like a reanimated corpse from the water and then fell back again. When I closed my eyes I could see my rickety, dark-creak house sliding over into the swamp, my father’s hands around a slick jar of formaldehyde.

  “Please don't say things like that,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Charles,” Leda said, “you've heard the voice. Did you see the tower? Out there in the water? When I was a child, I used to swim out there and hold onto it as long as I could, because it was the only thing I could hold onto. Our whole lives have been a construction of fear. Our families are engineers of terror, because they too were constructed by fear, made brittle by fear. The tower was the only place that felt different. Hope was a forbidden word in our family, but here it sprung out from the ocean, from the voice, as if from some eternal other - from a place that couldn't be destroyed, that existed beyond fear. It's real.”

  She pressed her fingers against my heart.

  “Somewhere out there is a place that exists beyond God's control. I know it's real because that's where the voice came from.”

  “And where is this place?” I asked. I choked on a tight knot of anxiety. The memory of Jolene’s shadow crawled up my knuckles.

  “Home,” Leda said, “can't you feel that this isn't where we're supposed to be? Doesn't the wrongness of this rise up in you like a sickness, grip you in the night? The monsters, the killings? The slip implants and being afraid and the hell shuttles and hell itself? But you heard the voice, and you know it feels right. You know it's coming from a good place, the place where we should be. Our home.”

  “But where?” I asked, “where is it?”

  “I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. Maybe it doesn't even exist anymore. God wants to us to believe that this is our home, that is the way it's always been, that he is forever and this place he created is all that is in the universe, but evidence to the contrary is all around us. The abandoned temples. The toppled tower. We escaped from hell, which God said couldn’t be done. There was something before God, and there will be something after he is gone.”

  “Someone took us from our home, took us so far that maybe we can never go back, but we have a chance now. There's hope inside of us, the voice speaks to the hope inside of us. We can kill God.”

  “Why do you trust what Jolene says?” I asked.

  “Because if I don't, then we have no chance.”

  “Is that all we have?”

  Leda reached for my hands, my dead starfish hands that were curling up desiccated in the white heat of the sand.

  “You felt it, didn't you?” Leda asked, “You heard the voice and you felt the same way as I did.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “There has to be a way out. You need it to be real, because if it’s not then all that waits for us is hell and the long trip down. Then my body still rots down there, and I’m nothing but a ghost waiting to go back.

  “Can I tell you something?” Leda said, “after I left, I kept having this dream. In the dream, we were sitting out in the desert. You were holding this cow skull in your arms, cradling it like a baby.

  “That's when I begin to realize how hot it is out in the desert,” Leda said, “I know that we haven't had any food or water for days. And I begin to panic. I say, 'we're going to die, Charles. We're going to die out here.' You're still cradling the cow skull, and you look at up me calmly, serenely, and you say 'everything dies. But not us. Not today.'

  “'I'm so thirsty, Charles, I know I'm going to die' I say. I keep saying your name like I'm going to forget it. In that moment, it's the strangest sound I've ever heard. But you just say, 'we're going to get out of here, and I'm going to find you a lake. A cool, wonderful glittering lake. We're going to forget this horrible heat, and we're going to swim out so far we can't touch the bottom. We need to get to that lake, so we're not going to die.' Then I wake up.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “I'm not sure, I think it means life isn't as strange as we were taught. Or that it's right to want this. To want to find the place where we can swim out,” Leda said, “or maybe it means I missed you.”

  I looked out into the water, and though I couldn't see it from where I sat, I knew the tower was out there in the waves, broadcasting the eternal voice.

  “Will you help me?” Leda asked, “will you help us?”

  Three figures walked across the beach toward us.

  They wore gas masks
and crusted military boots and armbands bearing the number six. One of the figures carried a rifle slung over his shoulder. Another, a woman wearing a purple taffeta dress with a butterfly bow, carried a bottle of vodka. Leda and I stood up and interlocked our fingers.

  “Hey, Leda,” the figure with the rifle called out, “sorry we’re late. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve had to deal with out there.”

  He pulled off his mask and I saw his suture wound face, the large jowls and hook mouth. The woman took off her mask as well, so that I could see her dark face and mother bear scowl. When the last man took off his mask I saw he had one mechanical eye, contracting in the sunlight. He pulled the mechanical eye out of the socket, tethered to a thin cable, and tossed it from hand to hand.

  “Hey,” the man with the rifle said to me, “I know you. We met out in the desert.”

  “He’s with me,” Leda said.

  “I should’ve known,” the man with the mechanical eye said, “Nina bet a thousand to one you were going to fall in a sinkhole and die out there. But I said you had crazy eyes, and no man with crazy eyes like that ever died without getting where he needed to go.”

  I looked to Leda. I took her hand, and our fingers interlocked together.

  “I’m here to help,” I said, “just tell me what needs to be done.”

  Chapter Eleven

  They took me out to the cliffs on Elsbury Peak, and taught me how to shoot a gun. Nina, the woman with the mother bear scowl, told me that it’s human nature to search for the edge of all existence, but once we get there we never like what we find.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Keep your eye on the target.”

  Nina steadied my shoulders and pointed my body to the red bull’s-eye painted on cloth, propped up with a wooden frame. The gun felt like an oiled membrane in my hands, runny and about to split down my arms. Leda and the others stood a distance off, talking and drinking from the bottle of vodka. The man who carried the rifle was named Camp. The one with the mechanical eye called himself Shooter.