The Crooked God Machine (21 page)

I went outside back into the paper storm. The machines were louder this time. I pressed my hands to my ears but the noise kept drilling into me.

I reached the hotel and entered the lobby. I ignored the man sitting at the desk and ran up the stairs to search for the room six5. The stairs were built like coffins, and the ceiling slipped down over my shoulders like a devouring fungus. The plague machines opened their floodgates and a flood spilled through the windows. I reached the top floor of the hotel drenched in a soup of black water and sour spit.

I wrenched open the door and found the man sitting up in bed, his hands, engorged and snow white crab claws, fell over the side of the bed and dipped down into the high rising water. Jeanine lay across his lap with her orange and blue hair stuck to the headboard, her ribs rising out of her skin like plaster molds.

"Jeanine, we have to go," I said, "it's time to go."

"There's nowhere she needs to be," the man said. The slips of paper, each one with the tiny "repent", spilled through the open window and stuck to the man's skin, to his crab claw hands.

"Can't you see I'm dying, Charles?" she asked me.

I shouldered my bag and waded through the lacy mold draped water, past the floating desk, the undergarments swirling in a maelstrom.

"Jeanine," I said. I pulled her out of the man's lap and she slipped off the bed and down into the water below. She came up gasping. I squeezed her wrist tight, grabbed her bag off the bed, and pulled her out into the lobby.

"My heart," she said, "can't you feel my heart is about to explode?"

She grabbed her shirt as it floated past and pulled it over her head. Then she dredged up her panties. The windows inside the room busted and a paper storm surrounded us. Repent. Repent. Repent. The wailing of the machines and the people outside all screamed "repent."

We left the hotel and went out into the streets of Sodom. The papers were tinged pink with blood. Faces came in and out of the storm, faces of everyman and everywoman, the face of Daddy, Momma and Sissy, the faces of those who went into the woods and never came back out again. "Repent" peeled to my nose. It scavenged Jeanine's wound. I tried to keep going forward without being pulled away by those familiar faces.

We found the bus stop by following the faint light that reared up out of the earth, a dying beacon. We boarded the crowded bus and were pushed against the windows. Jeanine's panties pressed a wet outline into the glass. I enveloped the both of us in my Daddy's jacket as we were jostled on all sides as paper bust through the doors and the machines shook the earth.

"My heart's going to burst," she repeated, "my heart's going to burst."

The bus pulled out of the stop and left the city.

"What was the point of all that?" I asked her, shouting so that she could hear me over the roar of Sodom going up into flames, "do you feel any better after going to that hotel? After having those drinks?"

"What is the point of any of this?" she asked.

She hissed steam through her teeth. She drew an angry face onto the glass.

"Was there a point to what we did?" she asked.

"What did we do?"

"I took you into my freezer," she said, "I showed you my swans. My secret place. Was there a point to that?

"I don't know," i said, "you left, so I guess you didn't think so."

"It doesn't matter," she said, "we're all dying. In a single moment I fell asleep and woke up old. One more second and I'll be dead. It doesn't matter if I left or not."

"It mattered," I said, "you were the one who wanted to go to the capitol. To look for Leda," I said, "you begged me to go."

"Fuck you," Jeanine said. She tried to slap or hit me, but we were so tightly pressed against the window she couldn't move to face me.

"Stop."

"You told me you wanted to go back," Jeanine said, "when were on the bus. I was half asleep, but I remember you saying that. Asking me to go back. Why don't we go back?"

I leaned my forehead against her wet hair.

"I was kidding myself," I said, "there's nothing to go back to. If you could turn around to look you would see there was nothing there at all."

Chapter Four

After safely escaping Sodom, the bus driver sold all of us to slave traders.

A bag was put over my head. I was torn away from Jeanine and ushered off the bus. We went down into a twisting labyrinth, and when the bag was taken off my head I found myself in a room without windows, except for a lone chair and several men and women standing in the corners of the room.

A woman approached me from the opposite end of the room. At first she seemed to be nothing but a silhouette that peeled itself out of a hazy gray fog. But then the woman leaned over me and the shadow lifted from her face. She was all sharp lines, with the veins in her forehead cut like crab meat.

"Sit down," she said.

“Where am I?”I asked.

She raised her hand and slapped me across the face. The back of her hand was braised like metal rivets.

"Sit down," she repeated.

Shocked, I fell back into the chair, nearly rocking it off its legs.

"Do you have any friends or relatives we can contact?" the woman asked, "anyone who would pay good money to have you back?"

“Please,” I said, “I just want to know where I am.”

She slapped me again. My check swelled with the force of it. As she hit me everyone else in that room remained silent and frozen-faced. Still.

"Do you know anyone who would pay good money to have you back?" she asked again.

"Everyone is dead," I said quietly.

The bag went back over my head. Just as quickly as I was escorted into the room, I was escorted out and back into the labyrinth.

"Where's Jeanine?" I asked, "what did you do with her?"

A door slammed shut and locked behind me, and I was left alone.

When I pulled the bag off my head I found myself in an underground abattoir. Dirt pushed its way through the wooden slat walls and dead animals were piled up underneath a chute. Suckling pigs, spine wrenched cattle, broken-necked swans. Two concrete killing slabs were set in the center of the room, and blood ran in trenches through the floors.

I pressed my hand over my mouth and noise to keep from gagging and leaned against the wall.

The room trembled and dirt rained down on my head. More dead animals tumbled through the chute. The bottom of the pile squirmed, and a man emerged from the dead, wearing a stained apron and clutching a pig by its hind quarters.

He threw the pig down on one of the killing slabs. It landed against the concrete with a crack of bone, a thud of wet and congealed flesh. The pig lay supine on its back, head peeled back. The man picked up his butcher tools and sliced the pig in two so that its body ruptured, its skin deflated, and its blood and fluid poured down the corners of the slab.

My lungs grew tight and I breathed inside my hands, but I could still smell the pig's blood and shit.

"You'll get used to it," the man said to me without looking up, "everyone gets used to it. Come over here and help me with this, will you?"

With my hand still pressed over my nose and mouth, I stepped over the trenches of blood and walked over toward the killing slabs

"What do they call you?" the man asked me.

"Bubba," I said, the word muffled by my hand.

He laughed and said, "Bubba? Strange name."

"No," I said, peeling my hand away from my mouth so I could speak more clearly, "that's not what I meant. My name's Charles."

"But they call you Bubba?"

"Not anymore," I said, "just Charles."

He told me to call him Number Seventeen.

"Why Number Seventeen?"

"It's how I keep track of time in this place. I count the number of people who come in here and die, or get taken away, or what have you. So I'm Number Seventeen, and when you're gone, I'll be Number Eighteen.

I said nothing.

"You're trembling all over, Charles, what's shaken you up?"

"The smell," I said, "I'm just not used to the smell."

"You'll get used to it," Number Seventeen said once more, "The guy who was here when I came in, back when I was still Number One, he said the human body has an enormous capacity to adapt to its surroundings. He was a crazy bastard. I'll always remember what he said."

Number Seventeen handed me a knife.

"You ever butchered a pig before?" he asked me.

I said no, so he taught me. When he was finished, the pig lay on the killing slab in several bloody, quivering chunks. Its heated blood and gore dripped down my arms, and its scent clung to my tongue. I could hardly recognize what it used to be.

"This is your job now," he said, "until you disappear. We butcher the animals. Then we push them through the flap over there, to be collected. You don't get to know what happens after that."

I glanced over at the flap. It was a small, blood-stained metal sheet cut out of the wall opposite of the chute. It hung slightly open like a deflated mouth, dripping from its edges.

"What happens when you run out of animals?"

"You don't," he said, "there are so many dead things. You never run out."

“But in Edgewater, we hardly ever ate meat,” I said, “they told us there was a shortage.”

Number Seventeen went back to the pile of dead animals and retrieved a black swan with a bolt running through its brain. He laid it out on the killing slab just like he'd laid out the pig, with a crack of bones, a slap of skin and feathers. The black swan lay on its back with its tongue unrolled out of its mouth and its feathers soldered into the congealing blood.

“The meat goes to the priests and the favored of God,” Number Seventeen, “and that ain’t either one of us.”

"How do I get out of here?" I asked.

"You don't," he said, "you've always been here."

"Where did the others go?"

"There's no one else."

He chopped the swan's head off, and it rolled silently off the killing slab. I expected the swan's severed neck to spurt blood, like a great fountain, but its blood only dribbled out onto the concrete.

"You don't understand," I said, "I need to get to the capital. I was with a girl. Do you know if she's somewhere in here?"

"You aren't getting out of here until they come for you," Number Seventeen said, "and they might not. Nobody ever came for me."

I heard a pounding against the wall. A tight, rattling pounding as if someone in another room was trying to get our attention.

"What was that?" I asked

Number Seventeen ignored my question and went back to work butchering the swan. The pounding continued. I stepped over a trench of blood and moved toward the wall. I pressed my hand against the pounding wall. It reverberated through my skin.

"You better work," he said, "if you don't work they won't give you anything to eat."

"I need to talk to someone," I said, "I need to get out of here. I have somewhere I need to be."

"No you don’t. Didn't I tell you that you've always been here?"

"You don't understand. I need to get out. I can't stay here working with you."

Number Seventeen tapped me on the shoulder and held out a butcher's knife for me to take.

"Only when you realize you're trapped do you want to be freed, but you've been trapped all along. They took you into the dark room, they took you out of the dark room, and there's no going back. Now work, or they'll hurt you. I want you to work because if you don't I'll be alone again."

I hesitated for a moment, watching the spattered surface of the butcher's knife quiver in his grip. Number Seventeen stared straight through me like a ghost would.

I took the butcher's knife from Number Seventeen's grasp, and helped him cut up the black swan.

***

I spent weeks, maybe months, in that underground abattoir, butchering the dead animals that kept piling up underneath the chute. We pushed the butchered parts through the chute, and food was pushed back through the chute. At first I wouldn't eat, because I couldn't eat without thinking about the bloody mouth of the chute, the grip of those sick and broken dead creatures. But I got too hungry soon enough.

Number Seventeen taught me how to use the knives, how to turn my face away when I sliced the heart so the blood wouldn't spurt into my eyes. He taught me how to forget that I ever existed anywhere else but this black iron prison, this lonely underground abattoir.

Every time we went to sleep against the wall, Number Seventeen told me another year would soon pass us by. We no longer knew day from night. Every time we woke up and went back to work, Number Seventeen would say that the world above us had been destroyed and rebuilt during the time we dreamed.

The pounding against the wall continued. Number Seventeen told me it was the pounding inside his head. He told me that pounding was his heart sliding down into the grease trap of his bowels.

"I used to wait for the day when they would come and get me," he told me, "like they came for everyone else. But that day never came."

I cracked the breastplate of a newborn foal, a hoofed mass with a blue tongue. Its fluid spilled out onto my fingers hot as gasoline. The pounding in the wall cracked against the back of my head. Despite what Number Seventeen said, I'd never gotten used to the smell.

Number Seventeen continued speaking.

"I started looking for myself in the guts of these dead animals. One day an animal will come down that chute, and I'll slit it open, and I'll find who I used to be inside of it, curled up and small. Bloody and red, like an unborn fetus. The last part of me that ever hoped to escape this prison."

"What then?" I asked him.

"I'll know there's nothing left to hope for."

The pounding in the wall continued when I slept and when I woke. Even in this underground abattoir, buried deep within a labyrinth, the noise never stopped.

"I saw the person you used to be," Number Seventeen told me once when I awoke. He stood at an empty killing slab, smiling.

"What?" I asked.

"I found the unborn fetus of you. It was cradled inside the stomach of a black swan."