The Reapers are the Angels

by Alden Bell

  Royal begins to breathe heavily, clenching and unclenching his fists. His eyes move back and forth between Moses Todd and Temple.

  Goddamn you both—goddamn you straight to hell. You ain’t part of this family. You got nothin like what we got. There’s the holy and then there’s what you are, and you don’t watch out I’d just as soon pop your little heads like—

  Royal! Bodie shouts. Royal!

  Royal checks himself but doesn’t take his eyes off them.

  I got the retard, Bodie says and leads Maury over to the chair. Whyn’t you get the girl out and we’ll do her next. Just for kicks. After she sees up close what her doggie does under the needle.

  Royal smiles and runs his tongue along his teeth. He opens the door of her cell and says, Come on, sweetness, we gonna have some fun.

  You best not touch me, she says, going rigid all over.

  But he throws his huge form through the door and grabs her by the hair and turns her head around so that it’s either go with him or get her head twisted off like a bottle cap.

  Do what you want, Moses Todd calls from his cell, but you kill her and I’m gonna rain hell on you.

  Royal pulls her by the hair to the other side of the room and turns her around to face the chair where Maury sits gazing at her with his blank, uncomprehending eyes and moaning loudly.

  Hush up, Maury, she says. I’m all right. They ain’t hurtin me.

  Royal is behind her, pulling her back against his body with one hand gripped around her left wrist, pulling it up behind her back so hard she expects her shoulder to pop out any second—and the other hand still seized on a thick twist of her hair, which he uses to manipulate her head on the bearing of her neck like a marionette. He pulls her face close to his and laughs, and she can smell his breath, rancid, and she can see the little red tears at the perimeter of his skin where it’s peeled back from his skull, and she can hear his eyeball rolling around in its gelatinous cavity.

  You the monster, he hisses at her. You the monster. And I’m gonna eat off your eyelids and then we gonna gaze on each other and you gonna see who the monster is.

  He tugs at her hair again and turns her head to face the chair where Maury continues his long low wail—a spectacular and feeble lament like a creature grousing at the brightness of the inviolable moon.

  He does not resist as Bodie holds him down and Doc holds aloft the syringe.

  She says something, barely audible. It’s a whisper, even to herself, and another part of her mind listens close to hear what the words are. It’s like a message coming from somewhere else, and she can’t make it out. She says it again, a little louder this time—but it still doesn’t register.

  What’s that? Royal says. What you sayin?

  She’s thinking of a thousand things—waterfalls and lighthouses and record players and men who travel with wonder and the deafening mumble of cicadas in the dry grass of the plains. She’s thinking of corpses piled high and all the dead things that still move and the hard rain that falls and drives the mud and waste into all the corners and seams of the world, and she’s thinking of airplanes and little boys and grown men with grit teeth and beards and others with soft moans that bleat on and on without cease unless you find the right song to sing and you fill the car with your voice so that he doesn’t have to hear his own loud crying.

  He ain’t mine to save, she says.

  What’s she say? Bodie asks. He and Doc are both looking at her now.

  Do it, she says. I don’t care. He ain’t mine to save.

  And she’s thinking of iron giants—tall iron men with hardhats, resting their hands on the tops of oil derricks, and she’s thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up all her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.

  She has been there before. She promised never to go there again. God heard the promise. He showed her the island and the vast sea and the peacefulness that was so pure and lonesome it was wider than anything.

  He ain’t mine to save.

  She says it loud this time.

  He ain’t mine to save.

  She says he ain’t hers to save, Royal says.

  I heard her, Bodie says.

  What’s she mean?

  She means, Moses Todd explains quietly, survival ain’t a team sport.

  But she hears none of this, because the rain in her ears is coming down too hard, and the iron man, symbol of progress and strength, is towering over her, and she is kneeling by the shape of a small boy, holding it to her. And what she is saying to this shape of a boy that is no longer a boy is this: Malcolm I’m sorry Malcolm Malcolm I’m sorry the planes are flying Malcolm I’m sorry Malcolm look at the giant Malcolm look at the planes I’m sorry Malcolm Malcolm don’t go away you can’t go away.

  And she can’t hear anything in the room because the cacophony in her ears is too much, and her voice making the words:

  He ain’t mine to save. He ain’t mine to save. He ain’t mine to save.

  Royal jerks her neck around again and this time she sees something new in his face, panic distilled out of dead laughter. And she focuses on his gaping eye and thinks, Please, please, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, he ain’t mine, please don’t—but it’s too late, and before she knows it her right arm has shot up and the fingers of her hand have latched on behind the decaying skin of his ear and her thumb like a spike drives itself into that lidless exposed orb and it feels like a ripe peach, clear fluid trickling down her palm and her wrist, and then the blood starts coming.

  But he is screaming now and lets loose of her hair and her left arm and covers the gory socket with both hands, his whole body careening backward against the cinder-block wall.

  So loud in her head. The blood, when it flows, flows dense and diluvial over the earth—first red like tomatoes then brown like mud then black like char. So loud. She sees herself move, as if from a distance.

  Her gurkha knife is on the other side of the room, and she topples the metal autopsy table, sending it crashing to the floor. Doc drops the syringe and backs away, but Bodie rises up to face her.

  I’m gon swallow you whole, he says.

  But she doesn’t slow down. Flinging herself against him, she rips at his face and strikes out with her fists everywhere at once. He’s huge, and hard like a tree stump, and he picks her up and flings her against the lab table, where she feels glass shattering all around her. The gurkha knife is out of reach, but she looks for something else and grabs the butcher knife they used in the operation, swinging it up just as Bodie descends upon her. It cuts him across the middle, and his shirt gapes open and she can see a surface of tiny bone plates grown over the muscles of his stomach.

  He looks down and sees the blade did nothing to the skeletal shell of his midriff, and he grins at her, a deliberate murderous grin. He comes at her again, and she takes the handle of the butcher knife with both hands and braces herself, shoulders to knees, and thrusts the blade forward as he approaches—and this time it goes in up to the haft.

  It misses the heart, but his eyes go wide and there is unleashed from his gullet a choking cough filled with whole marshlands of boiling blood. He halts, frozen in midstrike, his fingers and the corners of his mouth curling. She uses her weight and pushes downward on the handle of the knife as hard as she can, the ribs between which the blade is jammed acting as a fulcrum and driving the metal higher into his chest, ripping through lung and artery. He coughs again, this time vomiting a spray of blood and bile over her hair and face, and falls over sideways, dead.

  Mama’s gon kill you, Mama’s gon kill you.

  She looks up and Doc has her gurkha blade raised up, ready to strike her down. But he’s no fighter. He swings and misses, and she kicks the blade out of his hand and takes it herself and swipes him with a sideways blow that takes his left arm almost completely off. The limb dangles there by a thin string of muscle and tendon.

  Another strike, and
she’s aiming at his skull, but she misses and the blade lands to the left, between his neck and shoulder.

  She wipes the blood from her eyes with the heel of her hand and wants to tell Doc to stop screaming, if he could just stop screaming so she could concentrate and do it quick, but her voice doesn’t work, her voice is somewhere else with that other part of her brain, and the flood in her head can’t be stopped.

  She unjams the blade from his shoulder and swings it again, backhanded left to right, and it swipes clean through his skull just at the bridge of his nose. When he falls over a gray mess spills out of the overturned cup of his cranium.

  Letting the gurkha knife fall clattering to the ground, she hears a whimpering behind her. It’s Royal, holding his eye and cursing softly at her.

  Goddamn you, goddamn you, you ain’t got nobody.

  She says nothing. Amid the mess on the table she finds a bunsen burner with a heavy metal base and, gripping it tight around its rusted chrome stem, takes it over to where Royal lies shrinking on the ground.

  Hey, Royal says. What you doin? Stop it—I ain’t done nothin to you. I ain’t done a goddamn thing to—

  She gives her fist a backward swing and slams the rounded base of the bunsen burner against his jaw. She hears a crack, and his upper and lower teeth no longer meet the way they should.

  Then she starts in on his head, watching herself from behind the curtain of torrential rain falling in her brain, and she doesn’t stop until long after the body stops twitching.

  10.

  Amid the hot stench of fresh offal, she rises to her feet like the dreadful ghost of a fallen battlefield soldier, her hands tacky with the thick pulpy dregs of death splayed wide. The echoes of clamor having died on the puddled ground, the only sound in the room is the thin insectoid buzzing of three exposed bulbs suspended in ceramic sockets from the ceiling overhead. Even the imprisoned slugs themselves have paused in their perpetual movement to gaze with acquiescent eyes upon the scene of the massacre, as though in harmony with the inexorable and silent melodies of grim decease—as though in deferential recognition of the community of the extinct.

  She rises to her feet and blinks, and her eyes are like bleached wafers set against the brown mizzle of blood already drying in flakes on her cheeks and lips and neck. She raises no hand to cleanse herself, marked as she is with a violence ritualistic and primitive as those hunters who would decorate themselves with the ornamental residuum of their prey.

  Maury seems unfazed by the destruction surrounding him. When she approaches him, he touches his fingertips to her face as though to wipe away the mask of gore and recognize again the girl he knew before.

  Well I’ll be go to hell, little girl, Moses Todd says in an awed whisper from his cell. Do you mind tellin me what that was all about?

  She says nothing. She helps Maury from the chair and kicks away the blood-spattered debris on the floor so he won’t step in it.

  I mean, Moses goes on, you opened up enough killing for twenty people on those three bastards. I ain’t complainin, I’m just sayin.

  She picks up the gurkha knife and stows it under her arm and leads Maury toward the door.

  You got a burnin flame in you, Moses says. I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to come between you and your chosen path. But I guess I am that one, ain’t I?

  She ignores him.

  You got kinda fond of your new acquaintance there, he says. Maury. That’s a good name. I had a cousin named Maury once. Truth be told, I don’t know what happened to him. Probably got eaten.

  She looks at him, and he is sitting on the ground with his back to the wall looking mighty comfortable.

  I’ll be seeing you, little girl.

  She says nothing and leads Maury out the door and up the stairs to the big central room of the municipal building. She sets him down in a chair away from the window and looks out into the street. There are some of them out there, not many. One of them is the girl, Millie, who is drawing pictures with chalk on the tarmac in the middle of the intersection.

  Maury, she says. You stay here. You hear me? Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.

  He sits silently, squinting his eyes against the sunlight coming dusty through the windows.

  She goes back down the stairs. She steps over Royal, whose head is crushed like the afters of a pulpy melon, and stands in front of Moses’s cell. She stands there a long while, just the two of them looking at each other, before she speaks.

  I got somethin wrong with me, Mose.

  What’s that, little girl?

  Look.

  She gestures to the congealing carnage behind her.

  You just defending your friend, Moses says.

  It wasn’t—, she says, and she can feel her voice getting whispery now, as though the dead behind her were great listeners of secrets. She says, It didn’t have to be so much. It didn’t have to be like that. I got a devil in me.

  Come here, Moses Todd says. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes to the bars of his cell and he reaches through them toward her. He puts his fingers on the side of her head by her ear and rubs his thumb across her gore-spattered cheek, then he holds his thumb up to show her the smear of brown blood.

  Look, he says. It comes off.

  She nods and breathes in deep once and looks around the room again.

  All right then, she says, and she feels like she’s agreeing to some contract with the natural world except that she doesn’t know what it says because she can’t read it.

  Listen, Moses says. He sees she is preparing to leave, and there is a sudden pragmatism in his voice. I can’t promise you I ain’t gonna kill you. That would be a lie, and I can’t tolerate a lie. But I can offer you a deal you’re probably too smart to take. You get me outta this cell, and I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour head start. You got my word.

  She studies him for a moment.

  Did you hurt those people? she says.

  What people?

  The Griersons. Did you hurt them?

  Little girl, you misapprehend me if you think I go around hurtin nice folk. The old woman even made me a sandwich for the road.

  I ain’t playin with you, Mose.

  You think I wanna tangle with you and you still slick with blood from your butchery? It was ham, the sandwich, with mustard and tomatoes from her own garden.

  She looks at him sideways, but he has never lied to her yet.

  I figured somethin out about you, she says.

  What’s that?

  It’s the car. The car I been drivin all the way from Florida. You got an electronic tracker in it. It’s true, ain’t it? That’s how come you keep findin me.

  He gives a hangdog smile and strokes his beard.

  They put trackers in all those cars, he says. The woman who gave it to you, Ruby, she didn’t know that.

  Uh-huh. I knew it. I knew you wasn’t that good.

  He laughs, hearty and ursine.

  I’ll still find you, he says. If this here cell ain’t my grave, I’ll find you. Count on it, Sarah Mary Williams. Mutants or no, we still got business.

  She nods. I know it.

  Their eyes meet, and it is possible that what they see in each other is the eerie inversion of themselves—like coming face-to-face with some bent-up carnival mirror.

  She sighs and turns away from him. She goes to the corpse of Bodie and leans down and takes the haft of the butcher knife and tugs hard until it comes loose and slides out from between his ribs. Moses watches her as she hands the knife to him through the bars of his cell.

  Take it, she says.

  He doesn’t move. He sits there, his back against the wall, considering her. There is something in his face that she doesn’t want to look at. Loathing she can handle, she knows what to do with antipathy. But affection she can’t abide.

  I ain’t givin you the keys, she says. This knife, it don’t mean nothin. It’ll give you a fightin chance, but I hope they put you in the ground, you understand?

&nb
sp; He rises to his feet, and, without changing his expression at all, he dusts off his hands and takes the knife from her.

  I ain’t savin you, she says. This ain’t savin you. You somehow make it outta here and track me down, you best come with a furious rage—because I got no use for your sympathy.

  He nods, his eyes on her like he’s reading a book he’s just getting to the end of and can’t be interrupted.

  I ain’t savin you, she says again, even though she doesn’t want to and even though each time she says it it sounds to her less like an oath and more like a plea. I ain’t savin you, you understand me?

  Those eyes on her, brutal and profound and even paternal. And when he says it, he says it like signing a grave contract:

  Understood.

  She turns to leave, but before she reaches the stairs, Moses calls out to her.

  One more thing, he says, and even though she stops to listen she doesn’t turn around. His voice has a challenge in it, as though he would diminish her. I’ve seen evil, girl, and you ain’t it.

  Then what am I? she says, still not looking at him.

  She waits for a moment longer, but when he doesn’t respond she continues up the stairs, feeling his eyes follow her all the way out.

  TEMPLE FINDS a window in the back of the place that leads out onto an alley, and she steals away, taking the big lumbering man by the hand and pulling him along to keep pace with her as she sprints from one coverture to the next, until they are far enough out of town that they can slow their pace.

  They keep the road on their left and follow it until they arrive back at the place where the car is. Someone has pushed it into a ditch where it sits angled downward into the weeds, and the driver’s door hangs agape.

  The duffel bag full of guns is gone, but she finds one pistol with a full clip she stowed beneath the driver’s seat. There’s a burlap sack wedged in the corner of the trunk, and she takes that and fills it with whatever she can salvage—some clothes, including the yellow sundress Ruby gave her weeks before, some maps she was using to navigate her way west, a half bottle of water, a lighter, and the remains of a large package of cheese crackers.