Snakeskin Road (15 page)

The doors held again, were hit. And again. Then they buckled. The person walked closer and yanked until the doors flew open.

Pure black. The van had been opened up, a vastness into an even larger vastness, and the wind curled inside and something, though they could not see it,
something
lunged into the black air and filled the van.

It was that second or half second of uncertainty: that was all Jennifer had before Mazy was pulled from her. Jennifer let her body be pulled, or else she lifted her body up—she was never sure what happened exactly, but her body shifted up and over and down, and she brought the knife down and down again. Finally, the body she was stabbing turned before she could pull the knife out and knocked her against the wall. Something clattered, and whatever, whoever, was inside scrambled toward the broken doors and out.

Mazy had yelled and was crying, just like the person Jennifer had stabbed had yelled, but those sounds were just slowly starting to seep in, to make sense, and match up with what had happened. Just like the curls of wind and sand started to make sense again, covering her in a sheet, a blanket, a thin cooling.

“Did I hurt you?” Jennifer asked. She had stabbed into
the black air and anyone could’ve been under her—Mazy, herself—but she hadn’t stabbed herself. There was no pain, no blood soaking her jeans and shirt.

“Did I hurt you, Mazy? Talk to me.”

“No,” the girl said, trying to stretch her breath out longer and longer. Jennifer moved over to Mazy, put her hands on the ground, felt the tire where the rations were, where her black box was. She fumbled with the lid, dug into the bottom for the sharp piece of glass, but no one was coming. They would’ve already come by now. Time still hadn’t pulled itself back together completely, and there was no coherence of what should happen, what had happened, what would.

“We need the flashlight. Help me find it, Mazy.” Both of them put their hands to the floor, the heat still rising from the metal until Jennifer knocked against the tube, grabbed the base, and clicked it on, and there was Mazy holding the knife, a flare of blood on the blade, but the girl didn’t drop the knife, didn’t jump away from it.

“Clean it off,” Jennifer told her.

Slowly, Mazy wiped the blood on her dress, one side, then the other, and Jennifer kept shifting the flashlight to the broken doors. The light flickered on the chrome of the junked cars outside, the blowing sand.

“It was your mother’s knife,” Jennifer said. “You need to keep it. Can you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mazy nodded. “What’re we going to do?”

“You can’t cry any longer. You understand?”

Mazy nodded again.

“And you have to hold that tight.” Jennifer moved forward on her knees, grabbed Mazy’s hand around the hilt of the knife and squeezed like Mazy had squeezed into her wrist earlier. “No one can take it from you.”

   Jennifer shoved the contents that had overturned back into the stationery box—letters, envelopes, pictures—and
tied the box inside a blanket with the rations and two bottles of water. She gave Mazy the yellow can—a small amount of water was still sloshing inside, not much to worry with, but they would need it at the food drop.

Then she took the long ends of the blanket and tied them across her hips, shifting the knot in front, and they headed to Linn Park to the consulate. Jennifer decided she wouldn’t leave until the government workers accepted their visas and let them go north.

Down Sixth Street the sand flew against them in clips and stung. They didn’t come across any walkers, only fallen bodies. Occasionally, someone rose off the ground enough to cough out the strong wind before leaning back to the earth, but that was the only movement besides the sand. It sheered down, polishing buildings, metal poles, so hard to see. She made Mazy grab hold of her shirt and wrapped a rag over the girl’s face. Mazy wrapped a cloth for Jennifer and she sucked a piece into her mouth, bit down, and held it. Then they came upon the reflecting pools that led up to the fountain, that led to the tents, everything so dry, but the crowd had dispersed, the storm had driven them into the buildings, and just the reflecting pools were left with dead bodies.

They walked alongside the pools to the fountain to where she thought the red line was, but the tents had vanished, the national guard, the Crosses. Those in the makeshift hospital were still on their wheeled beds, calling for nurses and doctors that had slipped out on mille-copters. The dust and wind swallowed up their voices. In the aisles she saw one figure, then another—collectors like locusts busy dismantling the sick.

Jennifer took the yellow can from Mazy—they wouldn’t need it now—and led the girl to Nineteenth Street. North was Nineteenth where Lavina had gone and not returned. Fifth took them east, seven blocks to Chesson. The directions twisted through her mind like vines choking up a tree.
Jennifer made sure to keep walking, keep moving away from the collectors, but she paused when her light glimpsed the mound of cocooned bodies like dead wood, melted into one another, getting buried in the falling sand. By morning they would be completely buried, a sand dune in the landscape. And those bodies in the reflecting pools would be covered over—a field of upturned dirt—the homes and signs of the city blanketed.

“What’re you doing?” Mazy said. When Jennifer didn’t respond, the girl let go and walked a step back. “Jen?”

But how could Jennifer explain this familiar desperation, the sand thickening in her ears, dulling and persistent, the storm too big. Even if they escaped Birmingham, the desert would come looking. Jennifer had known this all her life, and the girl would come to know it.

“If we go north, we can get to my cousins and mama,” Mazy said.

Take care of Mazy
, Lavina had written, and already the woman’s face was becoming something less real, grained as the weather, even those large eyes and rounded cheekbones. But she had asked Jennifer to take care of her daughter, and Jennifer had promised herself to do so, and her own baby. She had to get them out.

   Jennifer and Mazy ran up Fifth. Still no walkers, no one. Here just long stretches of nothing, except, occasionally, the sky lighting up with an explosion or lightning from the dust storm. She wasn’t sure what to attribute these moments to, but for every illumination, nothing moved toward them, no collectors or bombing gangs, bishop gangs roaming, nothing except mille-copters that used their own floodlights to cut into the sand wall.

Then they came upon a group of dead bodies, the blood still pooling. Some had clothes taken, and one woman, all her teeth had been dropped on the ground, waiting for
someone to pick up and sew back into place. One man’s leg had been sawed clean.

Jennifer had seen men and women sawed in half at the carnivals that came through the mining camps. Each summer a magician raised his hands or her hands and said, “Relax. Your friend is fine. Absolutely fine. I just need to put the pieces back together,” neatly and always with no blood spilled.

At any moment someone would appear, attach the missing leg, reinstall the teeth, reverse the tiny holes in the foreheads and chests, tiny like deep wells in a sink, the blood pools gathering up pools of sand, mouths dusted in peach fuzz beards. Someone would emerge,
abracadabra
, and undo what had been done. The people would jump up and bow, surprised at their luck, happy to be alive and whole.

But not here, not these bodies scattered across the highway. Whoever emerged would come for the remaining legs and teeth and for them.

Jennifer turned off the flashlight. “Hold on to me,” she said, gathering her shirt up and clamping Mazy’s hand down. She stepped toward the wall, another wall in Gail’s onion, high, rough, and felt along it, going as fast as she could with Mazy pulling her shirt. That pebbled feel—clay rocks. They were the rocks that Mat had dug out of the earth, everyone in the camp along the Alabama River smelling of iron when they came to bed, even the dishes holding on to the residue of the mines. Their work was here, cemented into these walls.

Keep moving
, she told herself, and tried to keep track of how many blocks she had come, six or seven. Somewhere in the distance, a flash of light. Luck. A split second that allowed her to see the street name: Chesson. At the corner she turned along the wall, one block, another block. She tapped the flashlight on and off to read the numbers, but there was nothing except the cemented clay rocks and the horizontal sand. So they kept going until they found an opening, one of
several places where the wall had been broken through, and inside there was a mirror Chesson Street in front of a row of houses. She read the numbers—2000, 2041, 2053, the sky lighting up—until they came to a gate for 2607 Whatley, opened.

The sand died and brought itself back. “Lazarus sand,” Terry always called it. They moved carefully to the front door, everything dark, and she knocked, but nothing; so she turned the doorknob and pushed in; they both pushed in as a light flashed up from the ground into their eyes. There was a click.

“Don’t shoot us,” Jennifer said.

“Put down the knife,” someone said out of the dark, and Jennifer stepped in front of Mazy. “What’re you doing here?”

“I have a note from Teal Dennis,” she explained, spitting the clump of rag out and pulling it to her neck, “for Mazy.”

“Put down the knife,” the man said. It was definitely a man’s voice and growing stronger.

Jennifer turned, and Mazy squinted, moved into Jennifer’s shadow. As she did, she dropped the knife. It scattered to the baseboard, into the darkness there, lost from them.

“Everything you’re holding, too. Put it down.”

Jennifer set the glass piece and the flashlight on the floor.

“The note,” the man said.

She had it in her pocket with the map, and her hands shook so much, it was hard to get them out without tearing, but she managed and held the strips up in the light that kept hurting her eyes. They watered, tears coming down, trying to wash away the sandy grit.

Then the light and the man came forward.

We should run
, Jennifer thought,
this one moment, we could back out into the yard into Birmingham
. But they stood there, and the light bobbed in his hand. He came up to them and around them slowly and shut the door.

“Don’t touch me,” Mazy said.

“I have to check you,” he said.

“Let him, Mazy. It’s okay.” A few moments later, he took the strips of paper from Jennifer.

“What’s all this?” He tugged at the knot around her waist, and Jennifer loosened it, laid the blanket down, slowly untying each end.

“Rations and water,” she said, picking up the box.

“You need to leave that here.” He tapped it with the gun barrel.

“They’re letters and pictures, that’s all.” She opened the lid, and he shined the light down, fished through with the barrel and shut the lid.

“Come on,” he said, pointing the light in front. Jennifer and Mazy eased forward until they were in a room where it was dark and the door was locked behind them.

   They didn’t speak, except Mazy breathing jagged and too fast. “Shh,” Jennifer said, rubbing the girl’s hair, the full length to the back of her dress, where it came down to her waist, combing through it. “Shh.” The room was pitch and black and all she could smell was wood and coal and some of the grassy smell from Mazy’s hair.

They had to come here, had to. The consulate no longer existed, and Lavina had never returned. That left trying to get through the storm on their own. Or Teal Dennis. But if Mazy had been her child would she have made the same choice?

You don’t have a choice
, Jennifer kept telling herself, yet she didn’t quite believe it; there had to be something she hadn’t figured, another way out of Birmingham like those who slipped into the sewers. The woman with the burnt scalp had claimed she knew how to get to the end of the city, certain that she could find a passage underground, and that
kept gnawing at Jennifer. She was giving away three years of Mazy’s life, and possibly her own if the
guia
would take her, too, and her baby.

She just hoped Lavina’s instincts had been right, that Teal Dennis wasn’t an organ dealer, that he was what he promised: a
guia
who had swept the desert for a long time and had plenty of contacts in the Saved World.

The door opened and shut as someone hurried past them, sat down. Jennifer let go of Mazy’s hair.

He put the flashlight on the floor so they could see his face, the edges of the room, a small room with a table and chairs against one wall and paintings hung against the plaster. One painting was of a tree—silver-blue leaves and an orange sky, a path cutting through the sky in yellow-orange strokes, layered, swirling, the tree in silver-brown, green, the grass green and blue. The grass strokes pointed to the sun, the branch-shade, and the sky swirled and swirled until the silver leaves and their branches began to shift, began to rise.

“Who’s Mazy?” the man asked. His face was bearded, and the only thing in his hand was the note and the map. He spread them on the floor, tapped them down.

Neither Jennifer nor Mazy budged.

“Come on. I’m Teal Dennis, and one of you is Mazy. Though it ain’t Wednesday and it ain’t five o’clock.” He chuckled, pressing the tip of his finger onto the paper he had written on and handed to Lavina days ago. “But,” he groaned, “I haven’t been able to get out of here ’cause this damn storm.” Then he rubbed the thick front of his neck and wobbled his large body into another position.

“Always the Birmingham weather that turns sour. I tell you, you live in a hell of a place.” He howled again, scratchy-deep as his talking, and easy. It calmed Jennifer though she didn’t want to be calmed by it. “Storm’s going to end soon though, and we’ll be getting out. So you’re in luck, Mazy. If you’ll tell me who you are.”

Jennifer waited on Mazy, then took the girl’s arm so they faced each other. “Mazy, we’ve got to do this.”

“You’re the girl,” he said.

“No,” Mazy said and stiffened. “What’re you doing?” she whispered.

“Trust me,” Jennifer said. “Where you taking her?” she said to Teal Dennis, and the man picked up the light and flashed it on them.