The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

by Margaret Killjoy

  “How does this work? You’ve got meetings every morning?”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” Brynn said. “We get together, hash out the kind of stuff that needs doing. Update everyone on news. Once every couple of months, we make decisions. Mostly, we just kind of share information. And bicker.”

  But it turned out I didn’t care. I should have cared. The functioning of a leaderless, informal commune on land stolen from the bank should have mattered to me a great deal.

  Like I was watching the video on Vulture’s phone, I saw Anchor die, again and again. That took up way too much of my mind.

  The assembly hall was the school’s auditorium. Half the building was collapsed, which didn’t really bode well for the rest, but Brynn assured me that the auditorium was, you know, more or less structurally sound.

  We walked through the doors and took seats near the back. A hundred people at least were in that room, and half as many more filtered in after us. Vulture was already there—nocturnal by choice, he hadn’t slept yet and had gone out the door at dawn after stacking the table high with pancakes and taking a picture of the result for Instagram.

  A middle-aged black man climbed up to the empty stage, and someone closed the doors to keep down the sounds of the kids playing tag out front.

  “We’re not doing a normal meeting this morning, y’all know that, right?” He paused. No one objected. “I’ve been asked to facilitate today, because apparently I’m one of the only folks on the facilitators’ council that isn’t pissed as hell at one half of you or the other. If anyone has any objections to my process, just let me know, now or at any point.”

  “You’re great, Mike!” someone shouted.

  “I’m pissed at both halves!” another person chimed in.

  “Last night, things got pretty heated in the graveyard,” the facilitator continued. “We buried a man a lot of us loved. A lot of us are worried about secrets that man might have been keeping, bad things he might have done. A lot of us are worried about Uliksi, about him going rogue. Most of us are worried about this fight tearing us apart. We’ve put a hell of a lot of work into Freedom, Iowa. However sure you are that your side is right, keep in mind the other side is just as sure, and both sides are so stubborn because they’re convinced their way is the only thing that can save this town. You’re fighting because you all want the same thing, you all want to save this town. That’s what I’m asking you to keep in mind as you’re thinking over what you’re going to say. I’m going to ask one person from each side to frame the debate, we’re going to hear from the room, and then we’re going to settle this reasonably and come up with a plan of action. Eric?”

  Eric stood up, strode onto the stage. He was an imposing figure with his smile and his punk jacket. In a clear, loud voice, and at moderate length, he told the town that Uliksi was benevolent to those deserving of benevolence and vengeful to those who weren’t. I sympathized. I saw myself as someone who was the same.

  Vulture spoke next, hopping up on stage full of his manic, nervous energy.

  “We’re big kids and we can handle our own problems.” That was all he said. He hopped back down and took his seat.

  The crowd erupted after that, and the facilitator did a magnificent job of keeping people focused on the issues at hand, ruthlessly cutting down ad hominem attacks and preventing the conversation from descending into a simple back and forth between two people. But it stayed a pitched debate between entrenched sides, and the core of each faction had no interest in listening.

  “Can I get a quick show of hands?” the facilitator asked, after half an hour. “Just a temperature check of the room, to see what people are thinking. Raise your hand, one hand only, if you think we should give Doomsday and Rebecca our blessing to dismiss Uliksi.”

  More than three-quarters of the room raised their hands. No one counted—it wasn’t a vote.

  “Now, raise your hand, one hand only, if you think we shouldn’t let Doomsday and Rebecca dismiss Uliksi.”

  Ten hands went up.

  When they went down, Brynn rose to her feet to speak.

  “There’s a part of me that just wants to agree with what some people are saying, about how great it is having Uliksi around. There’s a part of me that’s always going to be sympathetic because holy shit there’s magic here and isn’t that what we’ve always wanted, all our lives? There’s a part of me—the greater part of me, yeah—that thinks we’ve got to get rid of it because it fucking murdered someone last night. But that’s not what I’m gonna go on about right now. Instead, I want to say something about process.”

  She took a deep breath. Public speaking clearly wasn’t her favorite thing.

  “What are we trying to do right now? Are we trying to reach consensus about what we can do, today, as a community? Consensus decision-making isn’t supposed to be one side against the other. It’s not some masochistic form of voting in which you try to convince everyone to have the same desires and goals. It’s a tool for finding out where people agree and where people disagree, a tool for finding out what we can do together and what we can’t.”

  “Do you have any suggestions about what we might be doing instead?” the facilitator asked. The man seemed to have no ego attached to his work.

  “No,” Brynn admitted. “I guess, and I’m sad to say it, we’re at an impasse. We, the whole town assembly, can’t officially encourage Doomsday and Rebecca. But three-quarters of us can and will.”

  Eric stood up. “That we can’t solve this here is the first thing you all have said that I agree with. Her and her lot would have us just talk, just talk and talk until it’s solstice and it’s too late to stop them. When someone’s doing something wrong, and talking won’t do any good, you don’t just keep talking it out. You fight.” He stormed out, Kestrel in his wake. Vulture watched them go, his eyes full of sorrow.

  “Well,” Brynn said, as much to herself as to me, “I think I just fucked that up.”

  * * *

  After the assembly, Brynn and I joined a lunch queue at the Everything for Everyone and sat at a table on the patio between the store and the garden. My plate was piled high with tamales and fresh-picked salad. I could get used to this place.

  Everyone was in a sort of collective daze, unable to process everything that had transpired. On edge about Uliksi, on edge about Eric, but trying their hardest to make it through the day like everything hadn’t just gone to shit.

  “So is it everything you’d dreamed it would be?” Brynn asked, sweeping her arms open.

  “Oh yeah. The best demon-infested town I’ve ever been to, as a matter of fact.”

  Brynn put down her fork and looked me in the eyes. A family—three punks, two kids, two dogs—walked past our table, and the adults waved hello and a little kid, not more than four, darted out to wrap his arms around Brynn’s legs. She patted him on the head, and he ran back to his family.

  “Here’s the thing, Ms. Cain,” Brynn said. “This place? This is the best place most of us have ever had. Even when Desmond was at his worst, he wasn’t half as bad as most cops. No one I’ve ever known has ever been as free as we are, standing here right now. That family that just walked past us? Homeless. In Chicago, they’d been homeless. We grow most of our own food, we generate our own power. We make our own rules, we ignore our own rules when we feel like we’ve got to. We are the kings of the fucking earth, in Freedom, Iowa. No evictions here.”

  “You paint a pretty picture,” I said. “And I know this just sounds like I’m being all salty, but that picture don’t look like what I saw last night.”

  “No,” Brynn agreed. We went back to eating. “It doesn’t look like what I saw either. If we can’t stop that thing, well, I guess we’re all going to have to run. No more Freedom.”

  She took a few more bites, then put her sandwich down again.

  “You know what really gets me? About Eric? Besides that we were friends. What gets me is that I don’t know what he’s going to do. I don’t know if he’s go
ing to hurt someone. And his whole goddammed point is that he’s the one who thinks we need an outside arbiter of justice. If he hurts someone, as likely as not Uliksi will get him too.”

  “How’d Daniel and Danielle die? You’ve got five graves. Uliksi kill them all?”

  “Daniel fell through the roof of the school doing some repair work. No one had been here longer than a week. His family came for the funeral, then stuck around. They still live here.”

  “And Danielle?”

  “Overdose. No one knew her family. People tried. Vulture spent a month trying to track down her past, checked every missing person’s report. We had two suicides too. Just this spring. Lovers’ pact. Their families came for their bodies.”

  “That’s a shockingly high death rate for a town of two hundred,” I said.

  “It is,” Brynn said. “But it’s not because of Uliksi. He only killed Desmond, and now Anchor. That’s it. He’s never needed to kill anyone else, because no one acts up.”

  “They’re too afraid.”

  “People should be afraid to prey on others,” Brynn said.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Doom is going through her books, trying to figure out how to dismiss Uliksi. The rest of us, we’re just trying to keep her safe a few more days until solstice. Thurs is guarding the house, Vulture’s up on the lookout rock. We should probably swap out with him, let him get to bed. We’ll talk about it all at dinner, probably, figure out the next step.”

  Maybe Doomsday was doing more than researching how to dismiss Uliksi. Maybe she was researching summoning something worse. Maybe I should convince Doomsday to leave. The thought came unbidden to my mind—I had no reason to believe a word Eric had said.

  “Alright.” I took the last bite of my last tamale. “Show me this lookout rock.”

  We left the patio and made our way to the top of the town. A few people, I realized, were packing up into pickup trucks and station wagons and vans. They didn’t look like they were in a hurry. Just in case, you know.

  We took a stone path through a yard almost entirely carpeted in flowers. The gray stone was laid artfully, the yellow and white blossoms sending up heady scents. Past the yard’s comparatively lackluster house, the path turned to dirt, with stairs reinforced by logs staked into the earth. I was proud of myself—at the top, a couple hundred feet higher, I was barely out of breath. Brynn, she was still breathing through her nose.

  Vulture was up there, sitting on a finger of rock that jutted out from the cliffside that had to be the lookout rock. He was shirtless in the heat, his back covered in blackwork tattoos, wearing only blue jean short shorts. He stood and turned when he heard us. Huge on his chest, black ink against black skin, was a satanic goat’s head. At least it only had two horns. Amongst the linework was thin surgical scarring under his pectoral muscles, where his breasts had been.

  “Seen anything?” I asked.

  “A couple hundred people who shouldn’t be so happy, going about their lives,” Vulture said. “But everyone I’ve seen has his or her or their ribs attached to his or her or their spines, so it’s not all bad.”

  “What do we do if we see anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, right,” Vulture said. He unslung a hunting horn from his belt. An honest-to-god hunting horn, like the kind that comes off an animal, with the tip cut off so you can blow through it. “Blow this. Or, you know, call someone. There’s decent cell signal everywhere in town and on this side of the hill. Maybe do both. I would do both.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re looking for cops on the highway, large gatherings of undead animals, or I guess in this case very tall figures running around with my no-good ex-boyfriend or especially making their way toward the house.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  Vulture put his arm around my shoulders. “Did you floss?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Flossing is super important. Some people say it’s more important than brushing your teeth. It’s easy to forget to floss at times like this, but you’ve got to live today like you’ll survive till tomorrow.”

  He was being serious. Kind of scarily so.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I floss.”

  “Good!” Vulture said, then turned and started skipping down the hill.

  * * *

  “You never really answered my question last night,” Brynn said. An hour or so had gone by, and the sun was on us. She was sweating from the heat, and her odor was good. Like, animal instincts good. “What brings you here?”

  “You heard what happened to Clay, right?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Brynn said. “Just that he’s dead.”

  It should have been easier between her and me. We both liked one another, that much was obvious. But for some reason, everything felt off, like we were actors reading from different scripts.

  Still, I needed someone to talk to.

  “Clay was my best friend,” I said. “About a month ago, he slit his own throat.”

  “Fuck,” Brynn said. “That’s hardcore.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t fuck around,” I said. “But he also taught me everything I know. About traveling, squatting, politics, all of it.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “We used to travel together, starting back when I was a runaway and he was risking some serious felonies by helping me out. He wasn’t into girls, and he wouldn’t have creeped on me anyway, but I’m glad we never had to try to explain that to a judge. Our lives kept intersecting as I got older, and eventually we were some of the only dumb bastards still living out of backpacks. He hit his thirties, and I think he was kinda in a crisis for a while. Then he ended up at this place. He’d write me, say, ‘You gotta come here, Dani. It’s our dream.’ He’d say, ‘It’s the revolution, the real revolution. The one where we take power away from our oppressors, not become them ourselves.’ I was always planning on it, but always had something else going on. No, that’s not it. I always put it off because Clay, he was traveling to try to find home, I was traveling because traveling was home. He wanted something like this, I was afraid of something like this. Someplace that would lure me away from the road. I’m more afraid of growing roots than I’m afraid of anything.”

  Brynn put her arm around me. I let her.

  “A year ago, we fell out of touch. He didn’t get back to my texts much, didn’t call. Then he left Freedom and slashed his throat in Denver. Did it in a hotel room, on some plastic sheeting he’d pulled from the trash. He left two notes. One was for whoever found him, saying he was sorry about the mess. He left a tip. The other note had my number on it and two sentences: ‘These are the winds that cast us together, these are the winds that cast us apart. They cast as they wish, and we have naught but to follow.’”

  I put my head between my knees for a moment, just a moment, took a few deep breaths.

  “So yeah,” I said. “I only just left Denver like a week ago. Some of the old gang made it out for the funeral, most didn’t. I called around, reached some people, not everyone. Most people I reached had some excuse or another. Of the ten of us who were there, everyone was too drunk to process with. A few days after the funeral, it was just me and Clay’s mom, shooting the shit for a week until there was no shit left to shoot. Looking around for scraps of him, journals, notebooks, anything. There was nothing.”

  “You angry at him?” Brynn asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m angry, but I’m not angry at him. Angry at the world, maybe. I might have shown up here looking for someone to take it out on. Find out who’s to blame.”

  “You know the answer is ‘no one,’ right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know. But it’s something I feel like I’ve got to do. For him, and for his mom.”

  I skipped a rock down the hill, listened to it hit other rocks on its way down.

  “Why are you all
being so nice to me?” I asked. “With everything going on?”

  “Clay used to talk about you, did you know that?”

  “Yeah, that’s what people have been saying.”

  “He talked about you like you were one of the endless spirits yourself. You weren’t a traveler. You were the traveler, in his eyes. And . . . I can’t speak for everyone else here, but I was being nice because I thought you were cute.”

  I laughed a little.

  “I have this wicked crush on you,” Brynn continued, “but also I’m celibate, at least for now. So I guess I wanted to just get both of those things out there before I get too hung up on you or lead you on. Also there’s a non-zero chance we’re both going to get eaten by a demon sometime soon.”

  “I haven’t let anyone in for a while,” I said, after thinking about it. “You’re a total badass and you’re a babe. I mean, you’re everything I should want. But yeah, walls. Lots of walls. I probably can’t be with anyone while I’m like this.”

  “A perfect match,” she said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Want to keep hanging out?” she asked.

  “Until we get eaten by a deer.”

  FIVE

  My second night in Freedom began far more somberly than my first.

  It was well after dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back to the lookout rock. The Days and Brynn were in the living room working through plans, which left me alone to cook.

  I was happy to spend some time in the kitchen. It had been a long time since I’d been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live, and I was almost able to convince myself that things were going to be fine. I’ve got a long history of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst of hardship, and cooking is great way to do that.

  I cubed the potatoes and, alongside lots of garlic and oil, set them in a pan in the oven. I went through their spice rack and realized half of what they had had been grown, dried, and chopped there in town. I let myself get lost in the smells of fresh and dried herbs.