Snakeskin Road (6 page)

Jennifer clutched it and didn’t answer.

“Besides, can’t you tell something’s changed—I feel it all the way through me, a nervousness—don’t you have it?”

And Lavina saying that made Jennifer worry about the death on the road, that it could be her, her baby. She saw a piece of glass, clear glass, a triangle broken clean, and stopped to pick it up.

“That’s good,” Lavina said. “Find something yourself, Mazy. Don’t just look at the road. Look at the bodies.”

Mazy nodded, “Yes, ma’am,” and looped her brown hair into one hand and started to kick gingerly at the wrists of the dead. They all did the same. Mazy had a pale blue dress like a faded cornflower and the skirt of it lifted when she kicked.

“Open them up like clamshells,” Lavina said, her eyes widening full and lazy into moons, and the only thing on her face bigger were the knotted bones that stuck out against her pared cheeks. Mazy had those same features. “Open them up. Kick harder. Come on, they can’t feel.”

One hand of the dead had tangled a necklace of black beads, and on several others, the fingers had been cut off.

“Someone’s taken their wedding bands,” Jennifer said, and checked hers, turned it, the metal suddenly cold; then she looked into the white. The white smog gave nothing back except the burning.

“Taken the phones, too.” Gail tapped her boot under someone’s ear where a peel of skin hung, where the phone had been implanted. Jennifer had seen those cuts in the bottom of the skull, faces pulled to the side, and thought it was a marking of the dead, the first cut of a scalping, and that whoever did it would be back once the bus group left.

“Collectors,” Gail called them. “Filthy scrap hunters, I tell you.” She shook her head and stretched the neck of her small body.

Mazy pried a half bottle from a hand, and fitted her own hand around the green neck.

“Good. That’s good. Keep it until you find something better,” Lavina said.

“Where you from?” Gail asked.

“The Milner plant—I’m a coal blaster, but we have relatives in Birmingham and all the way to Nashville. My cousins live in Hooper City. My aunt.” Lavina pointed up Highway 11, then slightly to the left as if she had divined the location exactly. “That’s where we’re going. My cousins said we could stay with them if I got out of Georgia.”

“My mother’s in Chicago,” Jennifer offered. “My husband’s down at Miller’s Ferry.”

“Clay rock miner?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why isn’t he with you?” Lavina asked.

“I don’t know,” Jennifer said at first, but that wasn’t the real truth. “He had a visa, but I couldn’t make him leave.”

“A visa? He could leave and he didn’t? Crazy.”

Jennifer wished she hadn’t said anything. Since Mathew’s father died, Mathew had barely talked to her. The desert had overtaken his mind like she had seen it do to other people. He was lost. Still, she didn’t like hearing Lavina say he was crazy, and she didn’t want to think about the other possibility—that he didn’t love her enough to come along.

“I’ve been all over the Georgia and Alabama Zones,”
Gail told them, and coughed into a blue rag. Her wrinkles squinched tight, so many wrinkles stacked on top of one another above the brown sandsuit—not at all like Delia’s crossed face, or even Lavina’s narrow one. “My company’s Kile, water filtration.”

Jennifer had seen those people. They kept the huge filters changed, the machines carrying the sluck from the mines working. There wasn’t a Kile woman at the Miller’s Ferry camp though. They lived with the rest of the government agents, separate from the miner families.

“I live just north of Birmingham, in Fultondale. Gone for a year, and I tell you, Birmingham didn’t look like this. It’s a mess.” Gail blew her nose. “These walls weren’t broken. That’s for sure. They were still protected zones. Now, in the east it was different—Redmont and Crestline Heights—you didn’t want to live in those places. Collectors would start digging at your skin the minute you stepped in the open.”

The walls had started at the Birmingham gate and continued along 11, turning at every intersection—but how far did they go? Jennifer wasn’t sure. Then an emptied restaurant would appear, the Alabama Tearoom, Dexter’s Barbecue, or a store selling catfish bait, and a street sign for Avenue Y and Hullman, and then the wall in long, empty stretches. In some places, the wall consumed the sidings of factories and offices, their windows and doors bricked up or boarded up.

“I wish I could see over them,” Lavina said. “It’s making me claustrophobic—I hated that about coal blasting, too.”

“They’re no good now. Everyone’s stuck and crashed, even the rich.” Gail kicked hard at a shoulder. “That’s why I live in Fultondale. Birmingham has too many damn sections. The city’s an onion, walls wrapped inside more walls, I tell you. It all started in Tarrant after the riots in the twenties. Tarrant built this concrete fence around themselves twenty feet high.” She raised her arm. “Lastis, which was next to them, did the same, only they made it twenty-two
feet and barbed wire on top, and then Killough Springs and the neighborhood next to them, until the whole city became an onion of higher and higher walls. A damn onion.” She opened her hands at the sky, shooed the sky and smog away. “These walls are worthless. Looks like a bull’s-eye spiraling out if you get up in a mille-copter. I’ve seen it before. You ever been up in a mille-copter? And the poor got squeezed between the walls, the open pockets that were left.

“Two years ago, some neighborhoods were quarantined with Martz disease. I had friends in Vestavia, but I couldn’t see them. The people there died off and no one goes in those places now except for collectors, and the poor who’ve got nowhere else to go. If you get down one of these side streets, you’ll see what I’m talking about. They don’t stop—the walls just keep going until you hit a gate, and the guards’ll let you in if you have the right credentials. Otherwise, they’ll send you packing. But Fultondale is just one walled city, the whole city, I tell you. Here, every part is segregated—Vulcan, Tarrant, Center Point. They bricked up the old downtown so people could mille-copter to work—the roads have gotten dangerous. And on the south side is the city border to keep people from crossing in from the desert, the Birmingham gate where we came in. They thought it might keep the desert back, too.” She laughed, breathy, and that started her coughing into the rag, choppy like bits of gravel like Terry used to do, and Jennifer shut her mouth, clicked the dust with her tongue until Gail breathed slower and fluidly.

“But why did the patrollers bring us to the gate, send us into Birmingham, if no one wants us here?” It was only the second time Mazy had spoken since they started walking.

“It’s crazy what they did. I agree with you. They might as well left us in Talladega,” Gail said.

“We need to be in Birmingham. Our cousins are expecting us,” Lavina said.

Mazy rolled her lower lip under her teeth and bit down.
“They don’t want us,” she said quietly. Lavina walked up, stood over her daughter, and “Yes, ma’am,” Jennifer heard Mazy say. “No, ma’am, I don’t have any more sass.”

“The desert’s here,” the driver shouted from up front. “You heard the patroller. They’re keeping us locked up
here
so we can’t go north or anywhere else.” He didn’t look back when he said it, just flung his arms at the sky like Gail had done, then let them drop and his whole body seemed to drop again. So loud. Would the noise bring people from behind the walls? Jennifer squeezed the clear glass in her hand until the edges started to cut.

Of course, it was the desert. It had made its way to Birmingham like it had always threatened to do. No one said anything after that. Those lights she had seen in the dark, those lights that were stars and would be maps—they had vanished. Nothing to guide them except a car smoldering, or a home in the distance still in flames. Jennifer wondered, was everyone crazy now? Setting fires? Cloistered behind walls until the sky and smoke settled back? Not everyone could be dead and vanished. Any second they might appear and come after her.

Three mille-copters dove in and they had to duck. She had seen mille-copters on TV—rescue vehicles that hovered just above roads, but could also sail higher. Tiny. They held four people—two in the cab, two facing the other way in the backseat, the rumble seat, open to the air with legs dangling out. The engine was sandwiched between the box-cab and the short blades. Sometimes the copters were hooked together into trains, the lead mille-copter cutting a path for the others to dip into and follow like water channeled into a sluice. And so here they were, flying, blue lights flashing, speeding over the dead bodies and smoke and traffic jam, so close to the ground that Jennifer and the others had to duck out of the way.

They’re heading to the consulate
, she decided, her heart cutting out and back in as if the blades might reverse her
exhaustion, its speed might lift and make her better—so close—if she reached up, she’d touch a dangling foot. It seemed possible. Everyone in the group, they looked up, too—the wind from the blades rushing, cooling, something of the dust and the sky in this. The mille-copters shot ahead, the faces of the patrollers in the rumble seats—they continued to look out, fixed and tired and dirty. The wind eddied, then a crosswind turned the other way.

The mille-copters became like the other noises in Birmingham, the gunshots and explosions, buildings collapsing—something was being destroyed in the white haze, but always at a distance. The whir fell to a hum, then vanished, and only their steps echoed through the wreck of bodies.

At one point they came upon a man, his left arm missing, sawed down at the shoulder, his right hand cradling a gun. Darl pulled it free and pulled the chamber. He squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Squeezed it again, with the same result, and grasped the stock more firmly, kept it in view.

“I used to drive this street all the time,” the driver told them. “Drove up 11 last week, through all the checkpoints, all the way to the downtown, and then the airport on East Lake Boulevard.” He shook his head, kept walking though it was hard for him. No one stopped walking. Jennifer’s heart stayed with the girl with the purple and blue face. Someone destroyed like that—she couldn’t force that girl from her mind.

It was afternoon, and more people had fallen, marked by purple spots the size of quarters where dehydrated blood had come to the skin’s surface. The Red Crosses took the ones breathing to the hospital and later culled through, tossing the dead into harvesting machines that rotated the bodies in sheets of plastic, spit them out for the Crosses and
guards to turn with poles, turn the cocoons toward wheel loaders engulfing and lifting the dead into gravel trucks and driven away.

“Like mummies, these POCs. Wrapped so tight, they can’t stink,” a guardsman said, leaning on his pole. “Spooky.” He twitched his fingers at the train of plastic bodies, then jumped back against his partner.

“Stop fooling,” the other guard said, and shoved him out of the way.

“All right, all right. You don’t have to hit so hard. I mean, shit.” He brushed at his vest, tugged his collar down, dust swirling the air.

The other guard shook his head. “Could you help me? Because I don’t know about you, but I want a break.” Together, they stabbed their poles like long river oars on top of a cocoon, pinning the feet and head until the wheel loader had troughed six bodies, taking theirs last.

They walked down six more bodies. “This is spooky shit.”

“Shut up.”

They leaned on the poles and waited for the loader to return.

For two days, Jennifer had hidden under the oak, then at night moved to the entrance of the consulate and food drop where the guardsmen were stationed. At night they cut the whirring fans off and set up a barricade. But as soon as the noises in the park swelled with high-pitched cries and gunshots, the fans were turned back on, and people who could make it to the front, bleeding, injured, did.

One man walked to the barricade, his hand against the side of his throat, his body pressed to that side of himself like the flat bottom of an iron. The crowd had parted around him like a sea, everyone afraid his bad luck might rub off.

“She’s cutting me,” he said, and turned halfway, pointing into the crowd, one face, then another—but which one?

A guardsman stepped up to the thick cables and rails. “You can’t come in here. This is a sanctuary until tomorrow.” He had a yellow patch on his sleeve and vest and stood like the patrollers at the Birmingham gate—would not lean forward, would not give.

“If it’s a sanctuary, let me in.”

“Tomorrow.”

“But I’m dying,” the man argued, and that’s when Jennifer noticed the black diarrhea seeping, wherever he turned, a glistening down his clothes. And he didn’t say “I’m dying” loud. He didn’t have the energy to say anything more.