Something moved at the back of the Preacher’s cage, and I saw a big orange eyeball open up. Even though I was me, I still felt part of my guts seize up.
“That there’s Rexie,” said Valerie casually. “She’s roosting over a clutch.”
The dinosaur clucked and moved her tiny arms a little, looking at the Preacher. I wondered if she was going to eat him. I felt less worried about myself than I might have. The cage looked strong, and the Tyrannosaurus in it looked sleepy.
“How many of those you got?” I asked her.
“Ten. We’ve been traveling in a caravan. The Preacher’s in charge of mucking out their henhouses. Mission from above says we have to do some things to the Earth.”
Rexie shuffled herself around. I could see a little heap of eggs underneath her. Her head was maybe ten feet long, and her ears were pinholes. Her fangs were as yellow as Valerie’s gloves.
The Preacher looked pitiful beside her, and I was glad.
“It’s not my fault, girls,” he said. “You’re alive, and that was all my doing. I saved you. I took mercy on the children. You gotta help me get out of here.”
“What are the wages in heaven?” I asked Valerie.
“True believer,” she said and grinned. “Room and board. But it’s not bad up there.”
“Was this a screw-up?” Scarlett asked. “You know dinosaurs are extinct, right?”
Valerie sighed. “The rules are complicated. Geekshow full of pterodactyls. Henhouse full of Rexes. Some of them wanted to come down, and this was how it had to be done.”
“Even heaven doesn’t have its shit together,” Reese said, and rolled her eyes.
“Nowhere does,” said Valerie. “But the new administration wanted to get in touch and give you the opt-in. Things are changing.”
Even miracles were messes. We’d been helping the mess along since the suicide. We’d never have admitted it to anyone but each other, but we had some skills, the three of us together.
Out behind the carnival was the lake where everyone’d risen up and walked on the water back in 1913. It was a green-algae slime-covered pool, and theory went that it hadn’t actually hosted a real miracle. Instead, the miracle had been lake overturn. Poison gases had asphyxiated the original swimming devoted and then brought their bodies back up from the bottom, perfectly preserved. There were photographs of them floating naked and pale after the limbic eruption. All those bodies stayed inviolate for a year, bobbing on top of the great green lake, and that was the everything of Heaven’s Avengers. It was why we were where we were, who we were, and what we were. A bunch of dead people. Nobody ever rose, not really, but call it risen and you get worshippers in from all over.
People hallucinated here still, and the lake got the blame, those poisons pushing up into the air.
If the wives were in heaven—and I wondered for a moment about the Rexes; there was something about the look of them that reminded me of my mothers—they’d won, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up there. I didn’t mind being cultless. I liked life among the living.
We joined hands, me, Reese, and Scarlett. We were sisters and wives. We were widows.
“Did you know chickens used to be a remedy for black plague?” Reese said. Reese had worked in the infirmary. She knew a lot about bad ways to heal things. “You’d pluck a chicken’s ass and strap it to the bubo, and then the sick person and the chicken would just walk around together.”
“Did it work?” I asked, kind of knowing the answer.
“The chicken would get replaced until the chicken and the patient both died. You know what I like about the modern world, Natalie? You know what I like about it, Scarlett? Vaccinations and antibiotics.”
“Me too,” said Scarlett. “I don’t mind being alive.”
“We have to vote on him,” I said. I had another look into the hen cage and saw Rexie put a claw out in the direction of the Preacher, her mouth opening a little. The eggs shook beneath her, and her orange eyes shone. The Preacher moaned.
“Honor thy father,” he whined.
“And thy mother. You poisoned the soda,” Reese said. “You don’t deserve honoring. What if they weren’t in heaven? What if they’d just died?”
We thought about that for a moment. The real thoughts. The way our mothers’ bodies had been put in the high school gym. They way they’d been covered with sheets. The way the smoke smelled in Miracle, and the way no one cared. The way the town got swarmed with evening news for two weeks.
The way we’d been brought up to take everything down.
No one cares about dead mothers. No one cares about dead women, period; that’s what we learned when our cult suicided. The women weren’t on the news. Reese’s boyfriend was on the news because he was good at sports. Everyone just thought the women were dumb as rocks to fall in with a person such as the Preacher. But we weren’t dumb. We were adopted and born into this. We were daughters and wives. We were supposed to be killed, but we knew how to kill, too. Vulnerable softnesses. Skulls and bones.
We were just little girls—that’s what people thought about us, the Sisters Stuart. Give any of us a drawing of the human body, and we could map the veins, the likely points for access. Give any of us a list of plants, and we could tell you what the poisons were and how to mix them. We could give you a dose of goldenseal that’d make you hallucinate walking on the surface of a dead green lake, rising up and diving down through the green mire and into the muck, over and over, for the rest of your life. We had kill skills; that’s what the Preacher called them. Did we want to use them? Did we want to be known for that for the rest of our lives? We had other plans. Killing wasn’t the only thing to do on Earth.
Reese shook her shoulders back and looked at the Preacher. “You’re shit out of luck. I’m going to be a pilot.”
“I’m going to run the country,” said Scarlett. “You’re dead officially, and unofficially, you’re in a cage with something hungry.”
“Join us,” said Valerie, but she looked only at me. “Come up to heaven.” My sisters rippled with white light. It wasn’t bunk. I didn’t want the crystals and the prayers anymore. I didn’t want to be good. I wanted to war. I wanted to kill. But I didn’t want to die to do it.
“When I was seven,” I said to my sisters, “and I was made Littlest Wife, do you remember what happened?”
“All the chickens died of pox,” said Reese.
“All the eggs were full of two-headed chicks,” said Scarlett.
“And you stood in the middle of the henhouse, with all them dead, and took out the wishbones with your pocketknife,” said Reese.
It was a legendary moment in Heaven’s Avengers history.
I was a miracle. I was a sign from somewhere that everything would be okay, that we were winning. I was only a kid, but I cut and cut.
I opened up my purse and showed them my collection. I hadn’t broken them. They were precious. I had forty-seven. I fetched up the dead pterodactyl and sliced into its sternum with my pearl-handled blade, and within a moment, I had forty-eight. There was a ritual to do. I brought out a packet of matches and a little bit of tobacco. I set a small fire and sprinkled the tobacco on, and then I started breaking bones and wishing.
“Gotta get to the end sometime,” said Reese. “Gotta call in the wishes, real and fake.”
“Good girl,” said Scarlett, and smiled at me.
“It’s time to get our vehicle,” Reese said, and walked out from the circus grounds, her pale hair shining in the backlights. I was here, breaking bones and making wishes on them, and none of my wishes were pretty. Scarlett took one end and broke a wish with me. Her eyes were shut and so were mine, and we felt that bone give. All bones will give if you ask them.
I looked at the Preacher. We were here together because of him, but that didn’t mean he was a good thing. I whistled and the orange eyes opened. Back in the dark, I could see other cages.
Scarlett whistled too. Other orange eyes. The eyes of the hens. We’d both worked in
chicken houses. We knew what hens were like. We knew what mothers were like in general.
In the cage where the Preacher was, Rexie shifted. The man was seventy years old and full of sham.
“Sisters,” he said, in his supplicating voice. “Sisters of Heaven’s Avengers.”
“Daughters of a dead guy,” said Scarlett. “Wives of a dead guy.”
Rexie poked her head out, bending the bars. All over the carnival grounds, dinosaurs emerged from their cages, tottering, that high-kneed bird walk, their chests full of wishbone. Behind us, the lake simmered and a bunch of 1913 ghosts trotted around on the surface of the water. The Preacher looked scared.
The dinosaurs started to tromp harder, thunder-footing, and the Preacher looked even more scared.
“I’m just a simple man,” he said, and then tried to make a run for it. Valerie lassoed him and dragged him back by his ankle, him scrabbling all the way.
“And I’m just a cult kid,” I said. “You set your henhouse on fire. You made some bad mistakes.”
We could hear the humming of a crop duster now, and Scarlett and I whistled louder at the dinosaurs. All over the grounds, pterodactyls pecked and Rexes stamped their feet, and the eggs from the henhouses wobbled and shook. I thought about what would hatch.
Everything. The thought made me so happy, I could hardly stand it. I wanted to yelp and whoop and run around, but I stayed still.
The surface of the lake trembled, and out there in all their glory, ghosts danced on the green, victims of tremors, like these dinosaurs had been back when.
The crop duster landed beside me, Scarlett, and the angel in the yellow bikini. I could see Reese in the pilot’s seat, and I said, “Heaven’s just a plot of land.”
The angel looked at me and grinned.
“I might stay down here myself,” Valerie said. “We’ve got no monopoly on good these days. I got sent like somebody’s secretary, down here to recruit. I was thinking I might want to be a truck driver. Maybe I’ll run into you out there.”
“Might do,” I said, and shook her hand. She was an angel in a bathing suit, and I was a kid in a bloody dress. I looked at the rest of the feathery Rexes and figured angels didn’t look like most people thought.
Reese leaned out the window of the plane and beckoned us inside; we hopped up, me and Scarlett.
“Little Widow,” Scarlett said. “Little Widow.”
The Preacher was squatting, a Rex standing over him, looking at him with her head tilted.
Scarlett hung out her window as the crop duster took off, down a little runway in the dirt, past the dinosaurs, and up into the sky. The dinosaurs started to dance, all the hens of the world, a circle of them stepping high, clawfooted, their feathers standing up.
I watched the Preacher get snatched up into the teeth of Rexie, and I watched her rooster come running, a gleaming, green-feathered gigantic. The Preacher’s head was in Rexie’s mouth, and his body went into the mouth of Rexie’s mate. We watched as they wishboned him, tearing him into two sections, one bigger than the other. We watched the angels make certainties of his bones.
The dinosaurs surged up in a roaring wave of feathers and scales, stampeding, a henhouse from heaven, and maybe they were our avenging mamas and maybe they were not. Maybe they were just heaven’s livestock. But down here, they’d been livestock too, and so were we. We didn’t truck with that anymore. We weren’t for breeding. We weren’t for feeding. We were our own flying things.
From the cockpit of the crop duster, the three Sisters Stuart smiled as we flew just over the surface of the Earth, low enough to see it, high enough to consider our futures.
“Little Widows,” I said, with solemnity. We weren’t broken. We were human like everyone else was human. “Now’s the time for us to bless the dead.”
“Bless them,” said Reese.
“Bless them,” said Scarlett, and we took each other’s hands and blessed.
Below us, Rexes ran rampant, a beautiful flurry of greens and blues and reds, flapping and strutting, eggs hatching in the dirt.
“Bless the dead and keep them dead,” I said.
I dropped the head of the pterodactyl out the window, a spinning thing like an axe blade, twisting beaked and toothed to plant itself in the corn.
No one living had ever heard dinosaurs singing before, their trilling lark roars, their falcon wails, but they heard them now, these heavenly lizards, these glorious angels closest to God.
Out we went, my sisters and I in our little crop duster, flying together, us three, up and up, into the clear sky, and out of Miracle.
Out went the dinosaurs, a flock of them from our old town, for a hundred hungry miles, their bellies full of meat cows, sheep, and one old man with no wives left to his name. They ran over blood-drenched ground, singing as they went.
THE BAD HOUR
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
The hiss of the hydraulic doors dragged Kat Nellis from an uneasy sleep and she came awake with a thin gasp of hope. Her neck ached from the way she’d been huddled in the corner of the bus seat, her skull canted against the window, but at least the dream had come to an end.
The same fucking dream.
It wasn’t an every-night sort of thing, but frequent enough that whenever she went a few days without having it, she began to feel not relief but a creeping sort of dread. Ironic, because what made the dream verge on a nightmare was that same feeling, the inescapable knowledge that something terrible was about to happen.
The dreams were always of Iraq, of the time she’d spent escorting convoys along the worst stretch of highway in the world. In the dream, she would hold her breath as the truck rumbled over ruined pavement, waiting for a tire to smash down on top of a mine or for a broken-down car to explode with a planted IED, or for an old woman or a child on the side of the road to step aside to reveal a suicide bomber. Kat had done hideous things in the war—things that would haunt her waking hours for the rest of her life—but when she slept, it was the dread of the unknown, of waiting, that plagued her dreams.
“Come on, honey,” the bus driver called back to her. “If you’re gettin’ off, this is the place. Wish I could get you closer.”
Kat stretched her stiff muscles and felt her joints pop as she stood. She’d kept fit in the years since she had left the army, but there were some wounds the human body could heal but never forget. Down in your bones, you would remember. Blown fifteen feet by a roadside explosion, she had survived with little more than some scrapes and bruises and a wrenched back. Kat felt grateful that she still had all of her working parts, that she hadn’t been closer to the explosion, but her back had never been the same. She had no shrapnel, no bullets lodged in her body, but her spine always ached, and in warm weather, she had a tinny buzz in her brain that kept her company everywhere she went.
It was autumn now, though. No more buzzing.
She slipped her backpack over her shoulder and walked to the front of the bus. Passengers studied her curiously, wondering why she would be getting off in the middle of nowhere. A seventyish woman in a head scarf squinted at her, and Kat smiled in response, unoffended by the scrutiny.
“How far is it from here?” she asked when she reached the front of the bus.
The October morning breeze blew in through the open door and a man in the first row muttered something, half asleep, and tugged his jacket tighter around his throat as he nestled back in his seat.
“Gotta be eight or ten miles,” said the driver. He took out a handkerchief and blew his big red nose, then sniffled as he tucked the rag away. “Sorry I can’t run you down there.”
“No worries. I could do with the walk.”
She stepped down onto the road and the door closed behind her. The bus rumbled away, the morning sun hitting the windows at an angle that turned them black. Kat inhaled deeply, calming herself. The bus was on its way to Montreal, but she had gotten off about twenty miles south of the Canadian border. She stood on the side of Route 118 and glanced around
at mountains covered in evergreens and patches of orange and red fall foliage. Most of the leaves that were going to fall this far north had already fallen.
October, Kat thought. She’d grown up in Montana, and though the landscape looked different, the chilly breeze and the slant of autumn light made Vermont feel like home.
Across from the spot where the bus had dropped her, a narrow road led through the trees. The morning sky might be blue, but the trees cast that street into dusky shadow. No sign identified this as King’s Hollow Road, and the bus had already pulled away. No way to confirm her location with the driver. A quick check of her phone confirmed her expectation of crappy cell service out here in the middle of mountainous nowhere.
Kat pushed her fingers through her short blond hair, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and set off into the shadows.
For the first few miles, she doubted she had found King’s Hollow Road at all. She passed several farms and spotted a handful of people collecting pumpkins from a field. No cars went by, but she did pass two narrow roads heading off to the southwest. If the bus driver had left her in the right place, this road should take her right into Chesbro, Vermont, if the town still existed.
Not a town, she reminded herself. Chesbro was officially a village, or it had been the last time anyone had noticed there had been a village at the end of King’s Hollow Road. She’d had no trouble finding its location on the Internet, confirming its existence on Google Earth and studying three-year-old satellite photos of its small village center. But her Internet searching had turned up virtually nothing else—no local newspaper, no listing of obituaries. Nothing of note had transpired there in the past forty years.
At the bus station in St. Johnsbury, she had found only one person who could tell her anything about the town, an old man who ran the kiosk that sold candy and magazines. The skinny fellow had stroked his beard and told her that there’d been a mill in Chesbro once upon a time, but it had been closed for ages and most of the locals had drifted away. That sort of thing happened more often than people knew. Kat understood that, but the only address she had for Ray Lambeau was in Chesbro. If she intended to find him, that was where she had to begin.
What the #@&% Is That? Page 13
