The Crooked God Machine (19 page)

"That should have been me in there," I said as the shuttles drove off, “Lucy never did anything I wouldn’t have done.”

Jeanine sat on the bus bench a few feet away from me, her skinny bent legs resting on top of her duffel bag. She wore half-moon sunglasses and one of Leda's summer dresses, the one with the electric blue flowers against cream white.

"Well, it wasn’t you" Jeanine said.

Jeanine reached up to touch the scar on the forehead.

"Do you think your brother can really help us?" I asked Jeanine.

"He's a prophet," she said.

"Yes. I know. But do you think he can help us find Leda?"

"If God wills it," Jeanine said.

I said nothing.

"What was the color of her eyes?" Jeanine asked me.

"I don't know,” I said.

I only remembered the shiny whiskey sheen of Leda's eyes, her head tilted back toward the ceiling with the bottle between her knees.

"You didn't really know her very well, did you?"

"What does it matter? That doesn't mean a damn thing."

The bus arrived. Jeanine and I gathered our bags and boarded. We were the only passengers.

"Where you folks headed?" the driver asked.

"The capitol," Jeanine said.

"For the Slim Sarah parade, I bet," he said.

I opened my mouth to respond, but Jeanine interrupted me.

"Yeah, you guessed right," she said, "for the parade."

We paid the driver and moved to the back. The bus hitched forward. Jeanine and I took seats opposite of each other. I lay down and used my duffel bag as a pillow. Jeanine sat up on her knees and looked out her window as we drove out of Edgewater.

I almost expected the world to be different outside of Edgewater - as if the town I'd lived in all my life was nothing but an accident, a strange little curse in a normally friendly universe. "God is not real", the ELECTRIC BABY 4000, the plague machines, the swamp monster presiding over a host of bones - all of it would disappear like a bad dream once we left the county lines.

It didn’t.

We drove underneath the same ash gray sky. We passed the same gray towns with buildings all marked by flood damage.

"Maybe you’re right," I said to Jeanine.

"Right about what?"

"That I don't know much about Leda," I said.

"Maybe she was like you," Jeanine said, "maybe she just needed someone."

"It was more than that,” I said.

"Was the sex better with her?”

"Jeanine. Don't ask me that."

"Come on, you can tell me."

"What does that matter?" I asked Jeanine, "that was so long ago. I don't even know. It doesn't matter."

The bus stopped. More people boarded on, including a gray-haired woman carrying a baby in a sling close to her chest, a couple of wild, purple stained children, and a deadhead girl in wrist chains led by a slip doctor.

"Move over," Jeanine said, "I don't want to be next to a deadhead." She grabbed her bags and sat down in the seat beside me.

The bus lurched forward again. I glanced at the glowing map above the seats that tracked our destination. Jeanine and I had a few days of travel before we would reach the capitol.

After a while of looking out the window at the grey landscape, the crumbling buildings, I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

***

When I awoke it was night. Jeanine leaned against me, asleep, with her sunglasses drooping down her nose. I draped my Daddy's coat over her shoulders. The bus halted and a man with the mark of Cain came onto the bus.

"I'm not letting that man sit near me!" someone shouted, "look at his forehead!"

"Sit down and shut up or I'm throwing you out!" the bus driver said, "he can sit wherever he damn well pleases. God's orders."

The man slung his bag in an overhead compartment and sat opposite Jeanine and I. Then he took out his knife collection, set it on his lap, and cleaned the blades with a dirty, oiled rag. He shoved a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth and balanced his plastic spit cup between his boots. A baby started crying. Jeanine twitched in her sleep.

“There’s nothing more I hate than crying babies on public transportation,” the man said, “some people just have no consideration for others.”

I heard the mother make “hush, hush,” sounds to her child, but the child continued to cry. Several people shifted in their seats to turn back and stare.

Jeanine reached out for my hand in her sleep and pressed her fingers into my palm. I closed my fingers around her hand. Squeezed.

“Hello folks,” the bus driver said over the intercom, “looks like we won’t be at our next stop until well after dawn, so strap in.”

“She was a deadhead, huh?” the man with the mark of Cain asked me.

He continued to clean his collection of knives. He held up an alligator-gutting knife, a jagged fanged looking knife with a silver handle and a wicked curve hook.

"What?" I asked him.

"That cut on her forehead. She was a deadhead, wasn't she?"

"Yeah."

"My sister's a deadhead," he said, "is she your sister?"

"No," I said, "a friend."

"Damn shame."

The baby let out another high pitched wail.

"Will somebody shut that damn baby up?" he shouted, waving his alligator-gutting knife over his head.

The mother, sitting somewhere in the middle of the bus, continued to make “hush, hush,” noises. The man lowered his knife into his lap and turned back to me.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Charles."

"And her?"

"Jeanine."

The man with the mark of Cain didn't offer up his own name. He spit a wad of chewing tobacco into the spit cup balanced between his boots and went back to cleaning his knives. The baby eventually quieted down. From his control station at the wheel the driver flicked on the televisions mounted above the seats. Teddy and Delilah were on. Teddy stood in front of Delilah’s bed, waving his arms like a magician, and Delilah’s bed spun around and around.

“Oh, turn that shit off!” The man with the mark of Cain yelled. The driver flicked the televisions off.

“I can't handle that bullshit,” the man said, “That's all they play these days. Day in and day out.”

“It's God approved!” a man in the seat ahead of mine said. I couldn't make out his face. He wore a coat stretched over his head and face like a cowl and there were owl feathers glued to his arms.

“Yeah?” the man with the mark of Cain said, tapping his scarred forehead, “well, so's my ass. Now shut the fuck up.”
Silence. The man with the mark of Cain turned toward me once more.

"So where you folks headed?"

"The capitol," I said.

"Yeah? What's there?"

"I don't know."

He laughed. "You're not going to find much there, Charles. That was your name, right? Charles?"

I nodded.

“Whatever you're chasing, you won't find it. That's how they get us, you know. Make us chase something when there's nothing there at all.”

The man with the mark of Cain put away his knives and his spit cup. He hunkered down into his seat with his knees pressed into the back of the seat in front of him.

“Where are we?” Jeanine asked when she roused from sleep.
“We have a ways to go,” I said, “rest a little longer if you can.”

“Charles,” she murmured, leaning down and laying her arms across my lap. For a moment I thought the mouth of her wound spoke to me, from some inner recesses of her irreparable brain, but I felt her lips move against my shoulder, and I rested my hand on the back of her head. The wound wilted under its stitches and Jeanine became still.

The baby began to cry again. I looked over at the man with the mark of Cain to see if he would do anything, but he'd fallen asleep with his head bent against his chest.

I cupped Jeanine's chin underneath my palm.

“Let's go back, Jeanine,” I said, “let's just get off at the next bus stop and go back. We're not going to find her. Let's go back.”

That strange man knew more about me than I ever could, that man with the angry mouth on his forehead and the wad of chewing tobacco tucked between his teeth. I wouldn't find Leda at the capitol, or anywhere else, for that matter. She hadn't left me. She had been found out by God, or Ezekiel's shiny sphere, or the roaming monsters, and been sucked into the maw of the machine.
I could go back home practice becoming a soft skeleton, a mild-mannered suitor for a local alcoholic. Leda wouldn't come back - beautiful and strange people never came back - and I could linger for the rest of my life in the bower of the swamp waiting for Jolene to drag my bones to the bottom of those green waters.

“Jeanine?” I whispered. She'd fallen asleep again. I shook her. “Jeanine, did you hear me? Let's go back.”

Jeanine roused herself from sleep with a groan. She pressed her hand against my shoulder and turned her face into my coat.

The front glass of the windshield shattered and the bus careened off the road.

Chapter Two

After the bus crashed into an abandoned farmhouse we found the driver dead, a striped spear driven through his chest that pinned him to his seat.

The man with the mark of Cain sent a distress transmission through the bus driver's radio.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Nothing to do but wait,” he said.

The passengers on the bus talked among each other about our quests of salvation that were doomed from the start.

A yellow man with a body like a beaten flute told us he collected slivers of the black moon - slivers that fell from the sky and dropped down into his metallic bag.

"One day I'm going to build my own moon," he said. Despite several people prodding him to open the metallic bag so they could look inside, he kept it fastened shut and clutched tight to his stomach.

"I'm looking for my lost son," said the woman with the crying baby.

"He's dead," said several passengers simultaneously.

"He's not dead," the woman said, "he sends me dreams through the television telling me where to find him. He was always so bright - I knew he'd figure out a way to reach me."

An abandoned, yellow-eyed child reached out and tugged the sleeve of my jacket.

"I know what you're looking for," he said to me, "you're looking for love."

"Yeah," Jeanine said, "Charles is always looking for love."

"You can marry my cousin," the child said, "she's got tiny shoulders like the naked women in pictures, and a gap in her teeth, and she's always crazy at night. She's looking for love too."

"He'll keep that in mind," Jeanine said, and the child left to go to another part of the bus.

Jeanine hunkered down in the back seat and drew her knees up against her chest and pressed her head to the window glass. She sat there for the better part of the night, barely moving or speaking. Her fingers curled as if holding an invisible cigarette.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

"It's been hours since the bus broke down," Jeanine said, "help isn't coming."

"She's right, you know," said the man with the mark of Cain. He sat down on the seat opposite of Jeanine and once again started polishing his knife collection, “help isn’t coming.”

“Then what have we been doing sitting here for hours? someone asked

Several passengers opened up the emergency exits, clambered out, and disappeared into the night.

"I wouldn't leave just yet," said the man with the mark of Cain.

I heard the nearby chuk-chuk-chuk of plague machines coming from outside. And another sound underneath it, a heavy pounding against the dirt.

A woman wearing three inch thick scars on her cheeks and crashing her arms like battleships came over to Jeanine.

"This is the third time I've been in a bus crash," the woman said, "Isn't it strange?"

"Not really," Jeanine said.

"What's on your face?" the woman asked.

"This thing?" Jeanine said, indicating the wound in her head, "it's my birthday present."

"I know what that is," the woman said, "that's where you get a hot wire spider. Everyone in my family is a deadhead except for me."

"That's nice," Jeanine said.

"Not really," the woman said. "I couldn't stand taking care of them anymore, so I tried to get away. But whenever you want something it's like the universe does everything it can to. stop you Like this bus crashing. I was going to go to the university at the capital - get a degree in something. It doesn't matter what. Anything so I wouldn't have to stay in the house all day wiping the spit off my brother's chin."

The woman leaned against Jeanine's seat. Her eyes were filmy with cataracts.

"What were you going to do?" the woman asked, "I mean, before we crashed."

"I was looking for some bar with a mechanical bull," Jeanine said, "I'm the best bull rider there ever was."

The woman tugged on her sleeves when Jeanine spoke, her battleship arms crashing into the seats. Jeanine continued speaking.

"And if you're going to get a degree, whatever you do, don't get a degree in archaeology. Nobody's an archaeologist anymore."

"Would everyone be quiet?" The man with the mark of Cain said, "listen outside. Someone's coming."

So I hadn't been the only one who heard that heavy pounding against the dirt. Closer this time. I looked out one of the bus windows and saw on the horizon line an organic, seething mass of limbs.

“What is that?” battleship woman asked.

"Those are people on horseback," the man with the mark of Cain said, in a flat voice, "with spears. How anachronistic."

"Yeah," the woman said, "Another damn cult, by the looks of it. I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure they're coming to kill us all."

More passengers jumped out of the emergency exits. A few climbed through the front shattered windshield and down the hood of the bus. I grabbed Jeanine's arm and pulled her close to me. Jeanine tensed and pressed her fingertips into my ribcage. I was about to leave the bus when the man with the Mark of Cain stopped me by placing an arm against my chest.

"Wait," he said, "take this." He handed me the alligator-gutting knife and turned around to take his bag out of the overhead compartment.