She collapses the miniature telescope and puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold.
SHE TAKES the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in the middle of the road. She hums tunes, and the big man hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it. He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep.
The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbecue shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages. In the middle of town is a square that must have been the site of some final showdown. There’s a huge marble fountain, long dry, filled with eviscerated corpses gone to bone and black. In the middle of the fountain is a marble statue of an angel, her wingtips pointing still unbroken toward the sky, and a dead man hangs slung around her neck as though he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over something holy.
The slug population is dense. Temple has to slow down to avoid hitting them, and she has to keep moving to keep them from congregating.
Downtown the city is overrun, a grotesque panorama. They walk, some of them, in twos and threes, sometimes even hand in hand like lovers, lumbering along, slow and thick, blood crusted down their fronts, stumbling over the bony remains of consumed corpses. Their gestures are meaningless, but they hearken back with primitive instinct to life before. A slug dressed in black with a white preacher’s collar lifts his hands toward the sky as if calling upon the god of dead things, while a rotting woman in a wedding dress sits open-legged against a wall, rubbing the lace hem against her cheek. Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Temple has never seen before. A slug with no arms nestled up against the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its mother. These, the desperate and the plagued, driven to consume beyond their usual ken—a swarm of them pulling apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal from the backside of the bristly skin. Some even so bubbling with abomination that they turn on one another, by instinct preying on the weak, pulling them down, the children and the old ones, digging their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers some purchase, a mob of them backing a pale-faced girl against the concrete base of a building. She opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the arm of one of her attackers, but there are more, a groaning, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain. And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic.
They collect, the horde, and she eases her car through them, pushing them out of the way or down under her wheels, which crunch over their limbs or torsos. If she stops, if the car stalls, she is dead, she knows. To go faster would be to risk damage to the car, so she pushes through at a steady pace, while the man sitting next to her watches with blank eyes the crowd of walking bodies in the pool of light ahead of them.
This is a sight indeed, Temple says. We got armageddon every direction it looks like. They got a plague of meatskins here, don’t they? I don’t know about you, dummy, but it’s been a long time since I been reminded so of the end of things.
She leans forward in the seat and grasps the steering wheel more firmly.
Still and all, she says, this does give us one advantage. Brother Todd is gonna have a nightmare time following us through this mess—especially after we stirred em up like we’re doin.
She drives the car forward, and the city of the dead moves in jerks and eddies around them.
BY THE time the sun comes up, they have made it to the outskirts of the city, a series of rolling hills capped by multistoried gable houses with stone entries and marble steps. She has turned off the main road and is now traveling west as best as she can figure it, and the slugs have thinned out considerably.
Beyond the clusters of houses, the road opens up and they find themselves in estate country—wide tracts of grassy land with mansions set way back in the distance. Most of the fields are enclosed by sturdy white horse fences that circle the property. Many of the fences are worn and broken through in spots, and now slugs graze where horses used to.
The road climbs up over a rise and reveals a valley on the other side. To the south of the road is untended grassland, but to the north is the largest estate she’s seen yet. Even from this distance she can see the size of it, that mansion of gloating white, built up on the top of the hill as though it were crowning majestically the earth itself.
She pulls over.
Ain’t that something, she says. Let’s take a look.
There are eight columns in the front, she can count them from where she stands in the road, and a driveway that leads from the gate straight up to the house with a circle out front and a fountain in the middle of the circle spitting water high up into the air.
Look at that fountain, dummy. I’ll be damned if there ain’t someone livin there. And I got an idea about how they keep them meatskins away.
The fence surrounding the property is different from the others in the area. Instead of being white wooden planks, it consists of metal wires strung horizontal about six inches apart.
You stay away from that now, she says. You probably don’t even know what an electrified fence is, and I guess it’s best you don’t find out firsthand.
She tells the man to stay by the car, and she approaches the wide gate and discovers that it too is wired.
Doggone it, she says. How we gonna get in there? Here, wait, I got an idea.
She goes to the car and gets a pistol from the duffel bag in the backseat.
You’re lucky I’m the brains of this operation.
She points the pistol in the air and fires three times in deliberately paced succession. The reports echo loud through the canyon.
Now, she says, that’s gonna draw somebody’s attention. Let’s just hope the residents of Castle Cleanteeth up there get curious before our local meatskins do.
A few minutes later, she can see a figure come around from behind the house rather than from the front door. It’s a black man, and he’s wearing a green smock, the full kind of smock that has a bib and ties neatly around the waist. He’s tall, but she notices as he gets closer, taking his time walking down the driveway with a delicate step, that he seems even taller than he actually is because of a quality of pride that emanates from him. Around his temples, his close-cropped hair is graying, and his half smile is polite but distant.
Can I help you, miss? he says through the gate.
What’s your name?
Johns.
Johns? Like John except more than one?
That’s correct. May I help you?
That your house?
Belle Isle belongs to Mrs. Grierson.
Well I don’t know what you just said, but how about lettin us come in and get some rest? We’re just travelin through, and it looks like you got some hospitality to spare.
I’m afraid this is a private residence, miss.
Private residence? Where you from anyway? I don’t suppose you been informed that your downtown’s got the worst slug infestation I ever seen. There ain’t no private residences anymore, mister. There’s just places where slugs are and places where they ain’t.
I am sorry, you’ll have to try somewhere else.
He begins to turn away.
Wait, hold up now. Mister, do you know how old I am?
I do not.
I’m fifteen years old. You gonna feed a defenseless fifteen-year-old girl to the meatskins just to avoid setting another couple places for supper? How’s that gonna sit with your conscience? Because I know it would sure enough bother me.
He looks at her for a long time, and she does her best to put on her truant waif look.
Then he lifts a panel on the stone column and punches in a code, and the two sides of the gate roll back automatically.
Thanks mister, you’re a right guy.
And this gentleman is . . .
Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s just a dummy. He won’t steal nothin of yours.
Johns presses a button once they are through and the gates close behind them.
She has a desire to run up to the circle and bathe herself in the fountain and cry out to the mistress of the house, Yoohoo, Mrs. Grierson, I’m here for a visit! But she decides to play it safe and not make anyone nervous. These people seem to have it pretty good, and she doesn’t want to spook them. So she holds her hands behind her back like a little lady should, and she follows Johns up the driveway to the house.
6.
Inside, the house looks like something she’s seen in movies—metalwork frilly like lace, the whole place kingly and oblivious. The front entrance opens onto a long hall that extends all the way through to the back around a central staircase that winds in a circle up to the second floor. Descending from the ceiling like a shower of ice is a chandelier that seems to hold the light locked selfish in its crystals rather than giving it out. The floor of the entry is marble in black-and-white diamonds and along the walls are grandfather clocks and half-circle tables with model ships and mahogany sideboards with sprays of flowers or ancient yellow dolls under glass bells.
