The Crooked God Machine (15 page)

"I thought you said we would be safe," I said.

"Oh, fuck you," Ezekiel said, "fuck you and that fucking hooker you got there."

I followed Ezekiel as he cut a swathe through the rioting crowd.

“Prophet coming through!” he shouted, “get the fuck out of the way!”

An Apocalypse Brigadier in a crocodile mask tried to block Ezekiel’s way. He shoved the Apocalypse Brigadier away with a flourish, and he cracked his nose against the pavement.

Ezekiel led me away from the streets and out into the woods. The hairy trees surrounding us exploded in firework bursts. Their spindly branches fell all around us and caught fire to my shoes.

“I think we’re being chased,” I said.

“Oh, no kidding,” Ezekiel said as he dodged machine gun bullets.

We ran deeper into the woods but the bullets and the fire continued on after us, beating at our backs, doing a crazy backwards dance.

Jeanine fell down into the grass trembling and clutching at my father's jacket. I rolled over her ribs and my face struck the dirt. Ezekiel stopped and turned around. I looked behind my shoulder to see two figures approaching us through the woods with their fingers spitting sparks. I got onto my knees and pushed Jeanine down into the hollow of a tree.

“Don’t make a noise, okay?” I said, and pressed my fingers to my lips in a “shh” motion.

She curled her knees up to her chin, and she hugged my father's jacket to her chest.

I stood up aching and watched the first figure approach through the trees. He wore a long trench coat that couldn't hide the skinny parabola of his body. He lifted his head and the black moon struck the electrical nodes where his eyes used to be, struck the curving shine of the plastic wrap around his bald head.

"Smarts?" I whispered.

"This asshole?" Ezekiel shouted.

"I've been looking for you," Smarts said as he approached Ezekiel.

A young woman trailed behind him wearing a teddy bear pink slip and holding a machine gun. Both of them wore armbands with the number six.

"I should have known it was you who blew up the slip clinic," Ezekiel said, "you being such an asshole and all. You couldn't do us all a favor and stay dead, could you? And you ruined my shoes."

I placed my head against Jeanine's hiding tree and its trunk trembled underneath me.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Are you apologizing to Smarts?" Ezekiel asked me.

"I'm sorry I didn't have five thousands to save you," I said, "If I could I would have saved you all."

The young woman lifted up her machine gun. Ezekiel whipped a pistol out from underneath his coat and shot her in the chest. She stumbled backwards and fell to the dirt. The machine gun fire burst up above us through the trees and then stopped.

"What?" he said as he turned to look at me, "I'm a prophet. I'm allowed a deus ex machine every once in a while."

Smarts opened up his trench-coat. Inside were rows of taped explosive.

Smarts clicked on his lighter.

"You're blind," Ezekiel said.

The shiny sphere on the back of Ezekiel’s head flared up and Smarts’ electrical nodes busted. The lighter snapped off. Smarts trembled and touched his broken artificial eyes. Then Smarts searched for his taped explosives with shaking fingers, patting at his coat until he dropped the lighter in the dirt. He got onto his knees to search for it.

Ezekiel kicked Smarts in the ribs and knocked him on his back.

"What are you?" he asked Smarts.

Ezekiel straddled him and grabbed his plastic-wrapped head. He leaned down and screamed into his empty face.

"I have God on my side, you idiot!"

Ezekiel pulled off Smarts' coat and threw it away into the grass. Then he started beating Smarts, tearing at his clothes, biting at his unraveling head. Smarts twisted and scratched at Ezekiel's face but his nails left no mark. I stood and watched them beside the tree, transfixed in the gleam of the sphere in the back of Ezekiel's head. All my limbs slowed into calcified trash. I could hear the blood in my ears flowing down through me like the blood that God churned through the kitchen taps.

"You worthless asshole," Ezekiel said to Smarts, "you're dirt compared to me. You're dirt and what you did to the slip clinic is all for nothing. Now you're going to die like all heretics die."

He shoved Smarts face down and stuffed his mouth with grass and dirt. Smarts head seemed to balloon up, as if it might pop off his neck. The dirt came spilling out of his mouth as fast as Ezekiel could shovel it in, bits of blood and dandelion fluff coming up from Smarts' throat and being pushed into his empty eye sockets.

Smarts lifted up his head in my direction and I thought those empty eyes looked straight through me.

I ran.

“Charles!” Ezekiel called after me, “where are you going? Come back here!”

I didn’t stop running.

Monsters chased after me on all sides. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel the heat of them as they uprooted the trees and tore wide lines into the dirt.

I ran into town and became swept back up into the street riot. Someone in a bear mask grabbed me by the lapels.

“You’re the heretic!” He said.

He hit me and bruised my jaw. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders to keep me from falling down.

“Let me go!” I said, “there aren’t any heretics anymore. Not anywhere now. Can’t you see that?”

“You did this to us all!” he said as he hit me with his fists again and again, “you killed my baby girl! You damned everyone!”

I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but when I spoke I said:

“I saw two good men die tonight. Please hit me again.”

He raised his fist again, his knuckles raw.

“I left someone I loved all alone in the woods. Please hit me again,” I said, nearly sobbing, “hit me again and again.”

“You’re crazy,” he said, laughing to choke.

He let me go.

The monsters started grabbing people and dragging them off into the night. My eyes stung with sweat and blood, and soon I couldn’t distinguish the Apocalypse Brigadiers from the monsters that swept in and out of the crowd.

“This is your punishment for your disobedience!” one of the Apocalypse Brigadiers shouted.

“Tell us something we don’t know!” someone shouted back.

I struggled through the crowd with one hand over my eyes and the other held out in front of me. Someone grabbed onto my arm and screamed in my ear. The screaming stopped abruptly when a monster ripped their body away and dragged it headfirst through the crowd.

Several feet away I pried the severed arm off of me and dropped it onto the ground. I never took my hand off of my eyes. I felt that if I looked I would die.

I wanted to drop to my knees and smash my head into the concrete. I could lay there until the heartbeat of the plague machines became my heartbeat, and the dirt piled on top of me.

But then I thought of Leda, alone in my room while a lonely death slithered onto the porch, and I kept going.

The plague machines smashed their fists down and ruptured the street. The street broke into a hill, and I tumbled backwards into an Apocalypse Brigadier, knocking her mask off. Before she could say or do anything to me, I was crawling back up the hill, hand out in front of me.

I got to the top of the hill and the air cracked with heat. People reached out to grab me, but quickly slipped away. I descended the hill. At the bottom I slogged through a pool of tar where people thrashed and reached out for my ankles. I stepped on a girl’s hand on accident, and when she cried out the tar bubbled out of her mouth and her cry seemed to be coming up from underwater.

I wanted to reach down and pull her up out of the tar, but instead I thought of Leda, kneeling on my bed, the little birds like scars detaching themselves from her and flying away. I left the girl and kept going.

When I reached the end of the street I let my hand drop from my face and I ran down an alleyway away from the riot. Teddy in God’s black mask pointed at me with an accusing finger through every open window. The plague machines and the monsters built a chasm for me to fall into, but I climbed out of it. I peeled the gore and charred remains of the Apocalypse Brigade off my face. I choked on the dust of buildings falling around me. I made it to the edge of the town with all of my limbs intact, and when I saw my house at the edge of the swamp, I sucked in a cry.

I crawled up the porch. I crept inside the front door.

“Leda!” I called out over the blare of the television. No response.

I went up the stairs past Sissy and Momma sitting on the couch with their hollowed out bones and cigarettes. I panted so hard I thought my bones might break. My bruises stuck to the wall where I reached out to keep myself from falling.

I opened the bedroom door and found Leda gone.

Chapter Seven

She never came back.

I went into the woods, in our old meeting place, and waited for her there. I touched trees and tried to pull them into my hips to dance, because I thought Leda might’ve really turned into a tree, and she was calling for help inside their bark. I scratched and scratched at the roots looking for her face. I crushed flowers searching for her smell.

When daybreak came I wandered through the ruins of the previous night’s riot calling out her name. There was no response except for the cries of people trapped in various stages of dying, the rumble of the plague machines returning to the field. I went to the flower shop where she worked and approached the old woman who sat behind the counter picking dandelion fluff off her wrists and painting red roses blue. She didn’t look up when I went to the counter.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said to her, and then rapped on the counter.

The old woman looked up startled. She dropped the paintbrush. Her face was an ashy blank.

“Has Leda been to work recently?” I asked.

“Do you work with the government?” she asked me.

“Let me guess,” I said, “she doesn’t exist, right?”

The old woman picked up the paintbrush again and gave me this knowing, sardonic smile - a smile full of weeds.

“You got it,” she said.

I went back home when night fell.

I left the light on at night so that she could find her way home.

I rubbed the teeth marks Leda left on the back of my neck. I picked up the flowers ground into the carpet, and emptied her suitcase so I could hang all her dresses up in my closet. I discovered a butterfly Leda breathed on the bathroom mirror, and I stood there for hours tracing its shape until it wore away. In the middle of the night I thought I heard her creeping down the stairs, so I'd get up and run down the hallway to greet her, only to be met by the endless face of the empty stairway.
When I returned to the bedroom alone I threw open the window and the black moon came down from the sky to stay with me. The black moon slept in the warm spot on her side of the bed and cast against the wall the shape of her.

Teddy and Delilah stood at the foot of my bed with an ocean of television static swirling at their feet. The noise rose and my bed floated off its legs toward the ceiling. I gripped the sheets to keep from falling down into the waters below, and I turned my face toward the light. If I wanted Leda to return to me, I couldn't let the light go out.

I remembered something Sissy once told me, back when flowers still grew in her garden, about how the cells in our bodies are completely replaced every seven years. The cells of my body were all igniting and dying and being reborn, and soon, I thought, I would have fingers that had never touched Leda's hair, her warm skin. Soon I would have eyes that never saw her face.

Momma told me Leda was gone for good, but I knew she didn't know one way or the other. Teddy told me the only way to fix a broken heart was to not have a heart at all. Delilah only stretched out on her gray bed and quivered as she watched some invisible monster on the ceiling in their small room.

I called the police about Leda's disappearance and they took me down to the station where I sat in a colorless room underneath a leper colored light. They kept me there alone for two hours, until the sheriff shuffled in, wiping at his nose and twitching.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“I wanted to report a missing person.”

He snorted.

“Your wife?” he asked.

“I suppose you can say that.”

“We don’t investigate missing persons anymore,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said, “you’re the police. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

The sheriff leaned back in his chair.

“You know what? I think I’d like some coffee,” he said, “would you like some coffee?”

“What?”

“Don’t you know what coffee is, son?”

“Yeah, I know what coffee is,” I said, “Why aren’t you taking this seriously? I need someone to help me.”

The sheriff stood up from the desk.

“I’m going to go get some coffee,” he said, “you wait here.”

“Hey!” I called out, but he’d already left the room and the door banged shut behind him. I waited in the room for another half hour, counting the granules on the ceiling. The sheriff came back into the room empty-handed.

“How was the coffee?” I asked him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, “what coffee?”

“Never mind,” I said.

The sheriff sat back down at the desk.

“What were you here for again?” he asked me.

I tried to make out the sheriff’s face in the dim light, but no distinguishable features rose up out of the gloom. For all I could make out, his face was a swarm of insects. I tried to clear my throat before I spoke again, but my words came out hoarse and thick anyways.

“I wanted to report a missing person,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said, “your wife.”

“Yeah,” I said, “there has to be something you can do.”

“Did she commit adultery?” the sheriff asked me.

“What?”

“You know, adultery. Was she fucking someone else?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

The sheriff sighed and looked down at the desk, which was empty, and then back up at me.