The Crooked God Machine (30 page)

“What does it matter if he is or not?” Jolene asked, “you know what to do next.”

“And you?” I asked, “what are you going to do next?”

Jolene looked back at me, her eyes placid, mouth dripping with wings, and said nothing. Then she turned back toward the water.

Jolene lowered her arms and walked into the ocean waves. The dark water washed over her, swallowed her up in a mirror of clouds and stars. She continued walking until the ocean completely submerged her. Leda and I stood together in the silence for a long time after that, embracing each other in the cold. The black moon rippled on the surface of the water in the place where she disappeared, like a locked gate that kept us from following her down.

Chapter Twelve

When we arrived at the pagan temple in the desert, the plague machines were waiting for us with a black cloud brewing.

A few days before, Leda, myself and the others met up with more heretics in the desert. We found them sitting on the top of an overturned bus, eating paste rations from tin cans while taking bets on how long it’d take for one slaver’s corpse to stop kicking. They’d just finished raiding another underground slave trader base, and the kicking corpse lay on the top of sandstone steps descending down into the earth, hamstrung and torn open with black bullet holes. When I saw him I reached for the gun on my hip to make sure it was still there.

One man sitting on top of the bus, a thin man with spider-web hands and a face the color of terracotta, saw us and waved. He jumped down from the bus and embraced Leda in a bear hug.

“They call me Wires,” the man said, “I forget my real name long time ago. I don't remember why they call me Wires. Is that you Leda?”

Leda smiled. “You remember me?”

Wires took Leda's hand and kissed her on the cheek. “Of course I remember you. You're a good girl. Polite to old men. A real good girl.”

“This is Charles,” Leda said.

“Yes, I heard about him, you said he could find us the room,” Wires said, “we're finishing up here. Been recruiting wherever we can, getting prepared to go to the capital. We're really doing this. Winning this would almost make it worth it that I forgot my name.”

I heard the plague machines coming from miles away. The clouds above churned heavy.

“You think they know what we're doing?” I asked.

“Oh, they do, champ,” Wires said to me, “When the original fourteen broke through from hell, you can bet the people in charge took note of it. And we've been recruiting people for months now, destroying slaving operations. For sure they know.”

“We should break into two groups,” Nina said, “one goes toward the temple, the other heads to the capital. More of our people are waiting there. We'll have a better chance of reaching them if we all don't rush headfirst into the plague machines.”

“That's the best idea you've ever had,” said Shooter.

“We better go fast then,” Camp said, “They're probably cooking this storm special for us.”

“Charles, you'll take half of us to the temple,” Leda said, “And we'll meet you in the capital city, Wires?”

Leda and Wires continued speaking, but I could no longer hear them over the blistering noise of the machines. I pressed my hands over my ears. I thought I saw Wires mouth, “you're a good girl.” to Leda before patting her on the shoulder and heading off toward the city.

Several people joined Leda and me before we headed off for the temple, including a hard mouthed man named TJ, or Tommy Jones, depending on what he felt like being called that day, and Sunray, a woman with arms a latticework of rope burns and black bird tattoos. Her blond hair, catch the sun hair, seemed to swallow her face whole.

The first time I walked through the desert, it took me weeks to reach the ocean. The desert stretched through my mind, vast, rolling, endless. But this time we were chased by the pounding noise of the machines.

***

It only took a few days to arrive at the temple entrance.

Several yards away from the entrance plague machines with hard eyes and swollen nests full of breeding plagues towered up over the horizon line. The machines extended their necks and reached up into the sky to pull down a storm. Beside them lay a prophet of God wracked with seizure. Around them stood God’s dead army stirring their feet in the dirt. Some were newly dead, their skin only bloated with a tinge of gray. Most were in further stages of decomposition. Their skin flaked away at the blue bones hung together as if by strings. Their heads were obscured by swarms of insects that hovered around their skulls.

“Where did they come from?” I asked.

“Hell or the machine fields, what does it matter?” Nina asked, “see anyone you know?”

The prophet, twitching and hacking blood, shouted at us.

“God has found you unworthy of life! You have rejected the gifts of the trinity and will pay eternally for your crimes!”

“Let's be quick,” Camp said.

Leda and I went first down into the temple, followed by Camp and TJ, Nina and Sunray, then the others, about twelve in total.

The prophet’s voice barreled its way into the ruins of the temple after us, and the eternal torrent of the machines smashed against the temple’s foundation. Black edged rain struck the sides of the walls. Behind us the dead army surged forward.

“How is that even possible?” TJ asked, “how do they move the bones without any muscle?”

“With God all things are possible,” Shooter said.

We took a flight of stairs further down into the dark, sprawling expanse of the temple ruins and a thought hit me in a panic. I couldn't remember where the room was. The first time inside the temple I’d been dragged through its rooms half unconscious, and now I couldn’t orient myself to the right direction.

“Where's the room?” Leda asked.

“I don't remember,” I said, “I'll find it.”

“What did he say?” TJ shouted. No one responded.

We wandered through rooms I couldn't remember from before, rooms containing bloodstained baths and broken computers, rooms with words written on the wall in spider languages and others with empty pools full of coins, statues with their faces smashed in. My body pulled itself in six directions, a swollen wreck. Every time I looked down I couldn't see the floor. I only saw empty space. In my absence the temple must have shifted its rooms. It must have changed its identity and become part of another history, one which erased my experience from its memory.

God’s voice smashed through the temple ceiling.

“There is no escape from the almighty God! You shall be punished for your transgressions and burn for all eternity in hell!”

I nearly fell to the floor of the temple with the force of those words.

“Come on!” TJ said, “we don't have much time.”

We turned a corner into a hallway full of the dead. They stood upright, holding makeshift weapons and scratching the walls with their nails and teeth, bones shifting to the noise of the machines above. The prophet stood among them. He was a bow-backed, dark haired man with eyes the color of warm spit. When he smiled blood spilled out of his mouth. He was too old to be a prophet for much longer. The shiny sphere in the back of his head sucked out his life and spit back cerebral palsy.

“Hello motherfuckers,” he said.

“And looks like we're out of time,” TJ said.

We ran back the way we came and the dead ran after us. Nina took her rifle off her shoulder and fired a few shots, but a dead man killed her with a sledgehammer blow to the side of her head. Sunray screamed and tried to pull Nina's body away from the oncoming horde, but a dead woman grabbed her sunlight hair, dragged her down onto the floor, and broke her neck.

We became separated soon after that. I ran without looking behind me, through the ever-rotating channel of rooms, through claustrophobic hallways and tilting chambers. I reached out for Leda, thinking she was still behind me, only to find no one there. I went into a room where a swarm of insects with lion’s faces and red teeth waited for me. They stuck to my face and arms, scratched and bit and pinched. I cried out, ran out of the room, and fell down in the hallway.

In the hallway I passed the sandstone pictograms, the ones depicting once-glittering machine shells surrounding the black moon, and the monsters with pumice red nails and eyes waiting on the black planet below. Then the shells growing tails of fire as they hurtled to the planet. After that, the machines fighting the monsters, tearing them apart.

At the end of the hallway I came to pictograms I’d never seen before. Even with the army behind me I couldn’t help but notice the field of yellow poppies where the monsters lay down to die and decompose. Above them shone the black moon, and from its rays sprang more flowers, cities, humans.

The ceiling behind me broke when a plague machine stuck its fist through the stone. Its fingers, caked with plaster, unfurled against the floor and a cloud of locusts streamed forth.

I escaped into an adjacent room. On the floor lay the remains of the dead girl in the black vellum dress, her caved in face now strewn in pieces. I saw once again the pagan altar, the corner of the room where the dead girl once slept and ate from clay wine bottles.

“Charles!”

Leda crouched in the corner of the room behind the altar. She’d lost her gun and her clothes were torn and stained with blood, hanging off her body like strips of skin. She tried to stand up but her body shook too hard.

“Don’t move. Please. Where’s Camp?” I asked, “where are the others?”

“I don’t know,” Leda said.

She held her arms out to me. I reached out for her and she smelled of plaster and crushed paint and black ichor. The swarm of insects crawled into my ears and burrowed into my skin.

“This is what happens when you defy the almighty God!” the shouted, “This is what it feels like to watch everyone you love be destroyed. How does it feel? Is not God a beautifully just god?”

Leda pressed her bloodied hands to her ears. I pulled the gun from my hip holster.

“Charles,” Leda said, her lips swollen purple, insect wings spilling out of her open mouth, “you can’t do that. You need to find the room.”

“It's gone,” I said.

But I didn't mean the room. I meant the floor and the walls. My fingers and feet, the rupturing earth. In another part of the temple, someone screamed. I pulled the insects off my skin but they stayed in the walls, hissing and turning the plaster into boiling water and clacking their red teeth.

I ran down the hallway once more to find the pictograms defaced and the sandstone eaten away by tiny insect mouths. God’s voice slithered down through the ceiling.

“You should have known better! Did you think I wouldn’t find you and destroy you? Did you think you could get away with attempting to rebel against me? Those on the side of God are always triumphant.”

I ran past God’s snake voice on the beam of light, out through the swarm of locusts spewing volcanic ash, beating their brains against my head. On the other side of the wall I heard the prophet’s hacking cough. He laughed like a garbage disposal.

Around the corner a dead woman reached out for me with hands buzzing clouds. Fingers sprouted out of the stone like flowers. I tried to run, but I slipped down into a pool of dark hair.

The dead woman grabbed my neck. She smelled of rot and ginger, and when I closed my eyes her nails dug into my arteries.

“Where’s the pretty dark haired girl?” the prophet spoke from the other side of the wall, “where is she hiding? I can hear her crying.”

The prophet spoke in a sing-song melody, and as the woman pulled back my head I imagined his words splattering red against the walls like engorged butterflies. Like frozen meat.

I stuck the gun muzzle into the rictus of the dead woman’s mouth and squeezed the trigger.

Her head snapped back and I reared up. Her fingers whipped against my face and left an angry mark, and then she let go and I watched her fall, silent, down into skin and flowering bones below.

I ran.

More of the dead lifted their bodies off the floor to reach out for me. Their limbs in time with the plague machines.

“Where are the rest of you motherfuckers?” the prophet yelled.

I followed his voice. He coughed and I gripped the gun tight. It throbbed in my hands like a headache. As I ran the walls around me collapsed and the storm above kicked like a bad baby. The walls pushed me forward, the ceiling’s belly scraped against my forehead. The end of the hallway opened its jaws to let me through, honey-comb colored stone, dirty animal skins hanging down from razor strops.

The dead burst through the walls, riding hot off the waves of the plague machine. A maelstrom blew through the temple that lifted me off my heels.

I felt the heat coming off the prophet’s shiny sphere. I ran.

“Come on out lost little lambs,” the prophet said, “I’ll take good care of you.”

Then I was on top of him. We flew into the walls and rocked up to the ceiling. Then we came down onto the floor and my knees crashed into his ribcage. He tried to cry out, but before he could make a noise I smashed the butt of my gun into his temple. The dead reached for me, but they couldn’t pry me away. I hit the prophet again and again. His shiny sphere cracked. Black fluid seeped out of the back of his head.

When the prophet was dead the army collapsed and they didn’t get up again.

Yet the plague machines continued to rock the temple from side to side. I ran back toward Leda.

I found Camp crouched over her with his head a swarm of insects, his rifle clutched in his dragon purple arms. The temple lurched and I slid across the floor toward them. Camp caught me before I hit the wall.

“What happened?” Camp asked, looking down at my hands. They were covered in black fluid.

“I killed the prophet.”

“You what?” Leda said.

I reached down and lifted Leda up from the ground. I pulled insect wings off of her lips and stingers out of her cheeks. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut.

“We have to find the room,” I said, “can you walk?”

“The others are dead,” Camp said.

“We’re not,” I said.