And so the valley quickly fills with the mangy slubberdegullions of death. They reach out pathetically for those alert bodies moving by them with the speed of survival – but when their hands grasp nothing, they drop again to the ground to feed hyena-like on the stillwarm corpses of the newly dead. And if a man, along his way to other death than this, should happen to put a bullet through the slug’s brain as it eats its first meal, then in a travesty of sacred stygian rites that call for dim ferrymen to cross slow between the shores of life and death, these creatures will have died twice in the space of an hour.
Now Moses confronts one of Fletcher’s surgical abominations, a slug dressed up like a sasquatch, its body patched all over with the scalps of other slugs sewn on its skin – a motley of hair, some long, some short, some blond, some brunette, some curly, some straight, much of the hair crusted hard by ooze and blood. Moses dispatches the thing quickly, one bullet to the brain, because it is a sign too distressing to look upon – humanity inverted somehow.
For a moment, Moses Todd, having killed everything around him that moves, finds himself in a wide radius of stillness. The other combatants occupy themselves at a distance, and he breathes deep the stench of wasted biology that hangs cloudy in the air. He stands, a droll on an empty stage, waiting for a response from the darkened seats – laughter or applause, it makes no difference – raising his brutal weapon to examine it against the spotlight of the sun. The bladed cudgel is tangled with gore. Like a nightmare Christmas tree, its welded limbs are ornamented with human viscera, tinselled with hair and stringy offal, flaps of torn flesh that hang from the tips, sticky bile that is already beginning to crust over in the metal interstices. It is a thing that does not soften to the human condition. People explode against the weapon, undeniable. It is a force, like the abstraction of American industry itself, a machine whose gears care not what they grind.
Moses whips the weapon down and flings off some of the loose numbles that splash onto the watery ground. Then he takes a moment to reload his pistol while scanning the structures around him.
There is a series of low metal buildings, indistinguishable from one another. He walks to the first one and kicks in the door, aiming his pistol through the doorframe and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light inside.
The place is mostly empty. There are the skeletons of massive refining machinery, long ago frozen and rusted into position. Atop and around this dead machinery there are strewn blankets and slop buckets and filthy mattresses. In the corner he finds three women huddled against the corrugated metal wall. They are not fighters. They are nothing but mice caught by their tails and starving to death.
You with them? Moses asks.
They respond in a language that Moses does not recognize. Their voices quaver, and their eyes are fixed on the dripping weapon he carries in his hand.
He lowers the cudgel.
You best get, Moses says. Ain’t nothing to gain by stayin. Here, I’ll show you.
But they won’t move until Moses has put down both the cudgel and the pistol. Then they follow him to the door, and he points them in the direction of the hillside where he came into the camp.
Go there, he says. Climb. Don’t come back. Everybody’s dead here. You understand? Dead.
He finds his own voice not angry or sympathetic but simply flat with the ugly ungentleness of truth.
They go, and he watches them until they are safely into the trees. Then he picks up the pistol and cudgel again and moves on.
He scans the row of buildings again. The doors are all closed neatly, but none of them with very heavy locks. Then he spots a metal shed attached like a lean-to to one of the buildings. The door to the shed is held shut with a thick chain and a padlock. He moves quickly to the shed, which is on the perimeter of the valley against the base of the hills that cup the gasworks.
There is no one around – the brunt of the battle has moved to the mouth of the valley. He uses the blunt handle of the cudgel to pound on the metal door of the shed.
Abe! he calls out. You in there? Vestal?
For a moment he hears nothing, so deafened is he by the cacophonous violence around him. But then he hears it – a small, weak voice climbing to panic.
Moses? Is it you?
The voice belongs to the Vestal Amata. Holy woman. Tricksy thief. Fair beauty of the wild plain.
The chain and lock are too heavy to break, so Moses jams one of the blades of the cudgel down behind the hasp and yanks it free of the door. The lock and chain fall useless to the ground. The door swings wide, and there’s the Vestal – dressed like a nymph of the woods. The fabric stretches and shimmers absurdly, and bright diaphanous ribbons hang off her everywhere. She has a glittering tiara in her hair, and her face is painted with glitter also.
The sight so completely baffles Moses that he cannot speak for a moment.
What— he says.
It’s my costume, she says. It’s what Fletcher makes me wear. Oh, Mose – I didn’t know if you would come.
Then she leaps on him, her arms around his neck, her eyes squinting against the light outside the dingy shed. Then, from around the other side of the structure, a figure comes running and stops short when he sees Moses and the Vestal. It’s one of Fletcher’s men – Moses recognizes him. The man raises a shotgun, but before he can pull the trigger Moses has flung the Vestal away from him and fired a hail of bullets, some of which plant themselves into the man’s sternum.
Come on, he says to the Vestal. We gotta get out of sight.
Instead of going back into the shed, where there is no light, Moses takes the Vestal by the arm and leads her around to the low empty building in which he found the three women refugees. He pulls her inside and shuts the door behind them.
What’re we doing? she says. Let’s just get out.
Where’s Abe? Moses says. They took him.
Something occurs in the Vestal’s eyes – a realization, perhaps, that Moses has larger plans than simply her rescue.
But we got to go, she says. We got to go now.
He shakes his head.
My brother, he says. Do you know where they got him or do you not?
Then she approaches him, getting close, patting his bloody chest lightly with her hands as though trying to soothe a wild child.
Moses, she says. Mose, listen to me. Are you listenin good? Abe’s okay. Your brother, he’s okay. But we got to go now. They’re planning—
But Abe—
He’s safe, I’m tellin you. But you got to take me out of here, Mose. I heard em talking, the soldiers. They’re planting explosives. They’re gonna bring hell down. Nothing left. The whole gasworks, the whole valley. Nothing left.
Safe where? he says.
Moses—
My brother, he says. Safe where?
You don’t believe me, she says. You think—
You left. I told you to stay. I told you I was coming back. You left.
Moses, Moses.
You went back to Fletcher.
It ain’t like that. No, not back to him. He found me.
You left.
Moses. Moses, I’m dying. There’s somethin in me like a poison. I’m already part dead. That’s what they told me, the doctors. That’s why the slugs don’t touch me. I’m dyin from the inside out, Mose.
So’s everybody – part dead.
She recoils from him, her face curling into a fierce snarl.
You ain’t a man, she says.
Likely I ain’t.
She spits at his feet and rushes towards the door and flings it open. Outside, the sounds of warfare continue. Someone lets loose a ripping scream. She pauses.
You best run straight for the trees, Moses says to her back, or they’ll get you sure.
She hesitates a second longer, closes the door and turns back towards Moses.
Take me, Moses. Take me out of here. Please.
Abraham, he replies flatly. I ain’t leavin without him.
I told you, she says.
You said some words all right – but I ain’t sure what exactly you told me.
She comes back over and stands before him, looking up at him as though he were sitting in the very top of a tree – as though he were so high above everything that you had to squint up your eyes to see him against the shining heavens. It’s all a show. She puts it on. He knows now.
I told you he’s safe, says the Vestal. He’s gone. They let him go.
Let him—
He was – he was headed back to you. But his leg, it was in bad shape. He wasn’t movin so good. They didn’t give him a car or nothing. Listen, I saw an empty garage about two miles up the road when we were comin in. He’s probably there – probably he holed up for the night.
Let him go? Why? Why would Fletcher let him—
Moses, please. Please let’s go – the whole place is comin down. We’re gonna die, Moses. I don’t want to – not here.
Why? he says, his voice booming down on her now.
She shrinks back. In her eyes there is a searching, but he does not know for what. She does not wish to say what she says – but her reluctance could mean anything or nothing.
Cause of me, is what she says.
Cause of you how?
She just looks up at him now with an expression that could be hatred or shame or simply goneness.
I acquired his release, she says. I purchased it. From Fletcher.
He looks at her. There are sounds outside the thinwalled structure, clambering echoes of moribund hordes, foolish humanity balking against its own beginnings and its own ends. Half dead. That’s the phrase that throbs in Moses’ brain. Half dead, half dead, half dead. He says nothing to the holy woman in front of him.
It ain’t nothing, Moses, she says. It’s cheap currency. It ain’t a thing of meaning.
No, Moses says.
He shakes his head. He feels the handle of the cudgel in his hand, and it feels right and true and hefty and thick with the logic of order and reason and purpose and all the concrete yeses and nos that could end all the ambiguous sentences on all the pages of the world’s manuscript.
No, he says. It ain’t true. You’re a prevaricator is what you are. You already shown it. You ain’t to be believed.