But maybe that was just a machine—in all the years they’ve been down here, no one’s broken through those steel doors. Now, in every hour of this endless night, Kingston prays that someone will. Because no matter what she’s tried, she can’t break out. The keys are missing, secreted away by that old country bitch in a fit of grief after her husband died. Maybe she figured if her man could never leave the shelter, none of them would. Whatever her reasoning, she damned them all.
Kingston walks into the library—a few crates of books stacked next to a moldering upholstered chair. Kingston points her flashlight at the first crate, and pulls out a large photo album. Has she checked this before? The pages crackle with age as she opens them. The album is old, but some of the photos are recent—picnics and holidays, births and weddings. Kingston sighs. Tables laden with Kodachrome-colored meals. Children, radiant and laughing in sunny rooms. Thick-furred dogs, plump cattle, glossy mares—
The album slips from her hands. Quick, before the thought races from her head like a horse slipping its reins. She lopes into the hallway, heading to the farthest end of the shelter, where the storage rooms sit. Several times she pauses, hands trembling against crumbling walls. She took a journey like this, once before. All she’s ever done is race down empty highways, with no destination in sight.
In the last room, next to a half-dug exit tunnel, the man lies on a cot, dead almost two years now from the cancer that ate him down to nubs. The last time Kingston was down here, the woman’s weapon had just fallen from her mouth. She’d refused food and water for days, just sat there in silence after he’d died. Kingston had left her alone, figured she’d stop mourning eventually. She couldn’t. A bullet did it for her.
Kingston’s fingers feel for the light switch, click it back and forth several times. The bulb must have burned out long ago. Kingston gives her flashlight several shakes to reactivate the cells. A circle of faint blue pops onto an empty chair.
“Shit.” Kingston falls back against the door. “No fucking way.” Steadying her hand, she points the beam over the man’s desiccated body, then moves it down. The light hits a pair of withered feet.
A shaky laugh erupts from her mouth. The body slid off the chair onto the floor, that’s all. No ghosts or ghouls here. Kingston pushes the chair aside, then kicks the body with her boot. It rolls back, revealing a wizened face, empty eye sockets, and a broken nose to compliment the teeth.
“I hope you’re in hell.” Kingston kicks the body again as she turns to the man—skeletal and crippled, with a face locked in pain. She and Ephraim had listened to his screaming for days. Oddly, the sounds hadn’t upset Ex at all. She’d been the most well-behaved she’d ever been. Kingston should have recorded his death howls, to play them back for her as lullabies.
Kingston pats him down. “Please let it be here,” she says, as she pushes his body over and rips the stiff fabric from his flesh. The old photo of her relative—Kingston had hidden it away in her room, but it vanished not long after. She told herself he’d stolen it, an easy lie to live with. Easier than thinking she’d lost the one thing that meant more to her than anything else in the world.
“No.” It wasn’t anywhere on him. And this was the only place she hadn’t searched. Kingston sits on the edge of the bed, her shoulders slumping as she runs the light over the woman. She stares at the weapon. The woman’s finger still laces through the trigger—one brown digit has separated from the hand, pointing to the woman’s head like a twiggy arrow. Kingston reaches down, and the flashlight catches the glint of the barrel, a silver filling, and—
No, not a filling. A beaded chain—two, created for one purpose: to hold something.
Like keys.
“You swallowed them. You shot them into yourself.”
Kingston tugs at the chains. They run deep into her head, where the bullet rammed them. She hears the faint clink of metal, and a strange rasp—she’d swear the woman was choking even now. Well, fuck her. Kingston pulls, hard. The woman’s head lifts, and inside, cartilage and tendons crack. It sounds like the saltwater taffy pulls her mother used to buy for her at the fair, the ones that broke in sharp pieces if you whacked them just the right way. Kingston lets go of the chains. All that hot metal and blood and brains have fused into a single stubborn mass.
Not a problem.
Kingston brings her boot down, hard. A satisfying crunch fills the room as bones and tissue grind beneath her heel. “Someone walking on your grave, bitch?” She raises her foot, and stomps on the head again. A loud crack: the entire jaw breaks off, and the rest of the face caves inward. Kingston smiles.
Her boot comes down again. The head is pulp now, a sticky-dry mash of brain and bone slivers. The woman’s hair lies on the floor like silver-threaded silk, beaded with ivory teeth. Kingston admires it as she reaches down.
This time, the chains lift freely, clusters of keys swinging from looped ends. Most will open electrical lockers, weapon and drug caches—keys Ephraim and Kingston already have duplicates of. But six of them should unlock the entrance door. Kingston runs a ragged fingertip over serrated edges. She thinks of the town she and Sanders drove through, the sleepy houses and the soft sound of leaves rustling in the cool night air.
Maybe it’s not too late.
Kingston’s halfway back to her room when she stops. Flakes of concrete crinkle onto her face as she listens. At the end of the hall, Ephraim sits behind the curtain, holding that thing she birthed. She hear snatches of words and phrases, and an occasional squeal or grunt as Ex replies as best she can.
Kingston’s fingers steal up to the tangle of dog tags and launch keys resting between her flat breasts. They’ve rubbed the skin down to red cuts and rashes, thumping at her chest every time she breathes or moves. A vision of the girl as she might have been hovers next to them, staining her soul. She’s always there, inescapable.
Unless….
Before she has a chance to ask herself could I?, her feet are backtracking away from Ephraim, away from— Away. Kingston glides in quiet steps past the decontamination rooms, past a reception area that’s never received anything other than dust, and up the conveyer belt ramp to the thick metal door. After so many years, this is it. She’s free.
The locks are dusty, but undamaged. Kingston picks out the cleanest key, trying to work it into the lower lock. It doesn’t fit the first keyhole, or any of the others. She moves to the next key, slightly bent but intact. It fits the fourth lock. Kingston turns the key and the sound of the tumblers clicking fills her with such joy that she almost passes out. One down, five to go.
And then the rest of the keys, and then—
She doesn’t know how long she’s been leaning against the door, sweat dribbling into her boots. She only knows that at some point, the only keys left are the mangled lumps of metal that the bullet destroyed. If she could rip the bones from the woman’s body and whittle them into the two missing keys she needs—but, it’s no use. They’re here now till they die, and long after.
Kingston slides to the floor. The thought of walking back into that maze, back to that child, of spending her final days trapped in the earth—she can’t do it. Kingston wraps the chains tight around her fingers until they turn blue. She stares at them, blinking hard.
“Two door keys on each chain. Two chains.”
She pauses, the headache dissolving.
“There should be three chains, each with two keys. One for the man. One for the woman. And—”
Kingston stands.
“And one.”
Decay
Death
Pale
…skin floats up through the dark, as if a swimmer is breaking the surface of the ocean. Kingston tightens her grip on her weapon. Hold onto that, she thinks, don’t go away again. There’s nothing for her in that mindless black.
Ephraim stands before her, stripped bare, skeletal. Black and purple bruises smudge his decaying skin. He’s at the end.
“Satisfied?” Tears trickle down his face,
but his voice is calm. At his feet, Ex clings to her bear. “I told you, the keys aren’t on me. Or in me.”
“But you have them.”
“I had them.”
“If you had them, what the fuck where you pretending to look for all this time?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing for us out there.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point? All we’ll do out there is die.”
“But we’ll die outside, under the sky—we’ll be free!”
“We stopped being free the day a bunch of assholes in uniform dropped the bomb.”
Kingston’s finger jumps against the trigger.
“Fine. You and that—” she points to Ex “—can stay here as long as you like. Give me the keys.”
A peaceful look steals over Ephraim’s face, giving him an almost sculptural beauty. He’s preparing himself. She can tell.
“No.”
“You tell me where those motherfucking keys are or I’ll kill you, you fucking fag piece of shit!”
The girl begins crying, howls that make Kingston cringe. Something hot and hard burns in Kingston. Columns of smoke and flame, pluming up—
“No.”
“Tell me!”
“No.”
It’s like he’s already gone, and she’s still stuck inside the rotting cunt of the world. Kingston points the weapon up, and fires. Sparks shower over them like fireworks. Ex convulses against Ephraim’s leg.
“TELL ME!”
Silence, then:
“All right.”
Kingston feels a cold finger press against her soul.
“I’ll tell you on one condition.” Ephraim touches Ex’s head.
“Give your daughter a name.”
Kingston opens her mouth.
“Give your daughter a name, and I’ll give you the keys.”
Nothing comes out.
“You won’t,” Ephraim says. “But you don’t need them anyway. You’re already dead, Angela. You’ve always been dead.”
Ephraim leans in, smiling.
“Pale rider.”
Kingston slams the weapon handle into Ephraim’s head, and he hits the floor with a wet crack. A crimson crown surrounds his head, expanding like the corona of the summer sun. Kingston drops onto his chest, crouched like an animal. His eyes are open, but she knows what they see is not in this room or world.
“Where are the keys? Where are they, you bastard!” She slaps his face, but only the faint traces of a last breath slip from his lips, then nothing more. He’s gone.
“Get up, you son of a bitch. Get up, don’t leave me here alone!” Ex begins to cry again, and Kingston whips around. “Shut up, just shut the fuck up and let me think for one goddamn second!”
The girl’s mouth opens wider. That noise, that fucking noise—
Kingston grabs Ex hard, fingers clenching down on flesh and bone. “SHUT UP YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT I NEVER WANTED YOU I NEVER WANTED YOU—”
Ex’s eyes roll back, body going hard. Her face is a bright cherry of broken blood vessels and puffed flesh. And she doesn’t stop howling—
Kingston screams. Again and again, colossal screams lurch out of her like the limbs of some primeval monster unfurling from the dead void inside. She sits before Ex, hands reaching out, grasping for something incomprehensible, something beyond the sorrow, beyond the pain. Ex raises her hands as she rages in reply, but Kingston’s fingers stretch past her, only holding empty air like reins.
But this fire can’t rage forever, can’t feed itself. Kingston feels it wilting, falling away. She can’t say what is happening—she’s never had the words for things like this. She’s always avoided things like this. Ex chokes, gasping. Half-fallen against Ephraim’s body, glossy ringlets of black hair soaked with sweat, her head barely rises from his grey flesh. Kingston stares, the sounds fading in her throat. In Ex’s sorrowful face, she sees the faint memory of summer, the sounds of leafy night sifting through the screens. Her mother smelled like fresh bread, and it lingered on Kingston’s skin long after she’d left the room. Kingston would drift to sleep with her nose in her palms, safe in the dark. The feeling was in that smell.
Exhausted. She can’t go on like this anymore. Kingston wraps her hands around the girl’s trembling body and pulls her close. The girl’s shit herself, it runs down her legs in stinking clumps. Kingston ignores it. Still howling, almost singing the sobs in one mournful note, Ex shivers, but doesn’t draw away. Kingston buries her face in Ex’s wet hair, breathing deep. Sweat, shit and soy, traces of hard soap and metallic water, and—
And.
Tears gush from Kingston’s swollen eyes: it’s there, soft and delicate, the scent that tells her that, no matter how hard she denies it, how far she tries to run, this child has always been, will always be, her daughter.
“Ensley,” Kingston whispers into her hair, letting the word wash over the girl.
“Your name is Ensley.”
Kingston sits in the shower stall, stripping her daughter’s clothes off her tiny body. When she pulls the shift over her head, revealing a braided yarn necklace holding a soft felt pouch, Kingston doesn’t need to open it to know what’s inside. If she’d held her daughter just once all these years, she would have known. Ephraim’s final gift, perhaps, his faith that she would do one right thing, someday. Kingston runs bits of yellow soap over Ensley’s limbs, careful not to get it in her eyes. Ensley sleeps most of the time, but sometimes her eyes flutter open, and she stares into Kingston’s face with a look of dazed wonder. Each time, Kingston steels herself, waits for Ensley to realize that she isn’t Ephraim, to recoil in fear from the monster. Instead, she only curls back into her mother’s arms, as if she’d been doing this all her short life.
Long after the last of the water runs out, Kingston sits in the stall, listening to the slow beat of her daughter’s heart. They can’t go on like this. She can’t go on. There’s no place for them, below or above. Even after all that’s happened in this small pocket of time, she’ll never be a good mother. A monster cannot change what she was born to be.
It is too late, after all.
Kingston carries Ensley back to the room. She leaves the two keys behind. Ephraim’s body lies under a blanket—he’d want to stay close to them, right up to the end. She dresses Ensley in a t-shirt for a nightgown, smoothing it past her naked rear. Diaper—she’s never put one on a child in her entire life. How did Ephraim do it? Where did he get them? It doesn’t matter. In a few hours, nothing will.
The lock to the medicine room is broken, and there’s not much left inside. Kingston inspects each bottle label, searching for the right combination to toss in the box she cradles, empty except for a carton of vanilla soy. She thinks about the pill that Sanders shot away, as the skies erupted around them. She should have dropped to her knees, scoured the earth for it. Well, she’ll make do. It’s the most compassionate she can be for the both of them. Then again, if it doesn’t work—she stops in the weapons room on the way back to reload her side arm. She can be both quick and dead, if she has to.
As she places the side arm back in its holster, a thin screech rolls down the corridor like a sigh, followed by a massive crash—metal being bent and torn apart. Every hair on the back of Kingston’s neck prickles. She pulls out her weapon, and takes another from the cabinet. Maybe it’s a machine breaking down, the generators are long past falling apart. She glides down the hallway, knowing it’s not that at all.
At the junction where the conveyor belts lead to the loading ramp, Kingston stops. Goosebumps erupt on her arms. She takes a deep breath.
Night air.
The door is open.
Kingston creeps up the hall, hugging the conveyor belt as she rounds the corner, raises her weapon and fires a warning shot into the florescent tube overhead. Ahead, several figures halt in the doorway, their silhouettes outlined by the cobalt of an early morning sky.
The sky.
“Hey!�
�� A man’s voice calls out. “We’re unarmed, don’t shoot!”
Kingston points her weapons out, starts up the ramp. “I am armed, so don’t move—one step closer and you’re dead.”
“Sure, fine—we just—”
“Who are you and what do you want?”
One of the men drops a massive pry bar to the ground with a clang as he steps forward. She sees a hard, thin face, desperate eyes. Is that what she looks like to him?
“We’ve been traveling; we need a place to stay. We didn’t think anyone lived here.”
“The door was bolted and locked.”
“We didn’t see any signs of life. Listen, we just need shelter, a little food and water.” He points at the men behind him. All men, no women. “Hard times, right?”
“There’s nothing here. You have to leave.”
The man takes another step down the ramp, his hands raised as if in peace. He smiles, a yellow-fanged Stonehenge rising up from scab lands of skin. “Well, maybe we can just rest a while, away from the sun. Gonna be another scorcher today.”
Kingston doesn’t move. “Look at me,” she snarls, “does it look like I have anything? Come back in a week when I’m dead.”
His smile fades. “Put down the guns, honey. Ten of us, one of you. No need to die. Not just yet, that is.”
Overhead, stars wink. She sees them now, clear and high, calling to her like beacons in a storm.
“Is it—how is it, out there?” She has to ask. “Did we win? The radiation, did it kill everything? Is this still America?”
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors Page 3
