Free Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell Page B

their fronts, stumbling over the bony remains of consumed corpses. Their gestures are meaningless, but theyhearken back with primitive instinct to life before. A slug dressed in black with a white preacher’s collar lifts his hands toward the sky as if calling upon the god of dead things, while a rotting woman in a wedding dress sits open-legged against a wall, rubbing the lace hem against her cheek. Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Temple has never seen before. A slug with no arms nestled up against the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its mother. These, the desperate and the plagued, driven to consume beyond their usual ken—a swarm of them pulling apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal from the backside of the bristly skin. Some even so bubbling with abomination that they turn on one another, by instinct preying on the weak, pulling them down, the children and the old ones, digging their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers some purchase, a mob of them backing a pale-faced girl against the concrete base of a building. She opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the arm of one of her attackers, but there are more, a groaning, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain. And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging androtted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic.
    They collect, the horde, and she eases her car through them, pushing them out of the way or down under her wheels, which crunch over their limbs or torsos. If she stops, if the car stalls, she is dead, she knows. To go faster would be to risk damage to the car, so she pushes through at a steady pace, while the man sitting next to her watches with blank eyes the crowd of walking bodies in the pool of light ahead of them.
    This is a sight indeed, Temple says. We got armageddon every direction it looks like. They got a plague of meatskins here, don’t they? I don’t know about you, dummy, but it’s been a long time since I been reminded so of the end of things.
    She leans forward in the seat and grasps the steering wheel more firmly.
    Still and all, she says, this does give us one advantage. Brother Todd is gonna have a nightmare time following us through this mess—especially after we stirred em up like we’re doin.
    She drives the car forward, and the city of the dead moves in jerks and eddies around them.

    B Y THE time the sun comes up, they have made it to the outskirts of the city, a series of rolling hills capped by multistoried gable houses with stone entries and marble steps. She has turned off the main road and is now traveling west as best as she can figure it, and the slugs have thinned out considerably.
    Beyond the clusters of houses, the road opens up and they find themselves in estate country—wide tracts of grassy land with mansions set way back in the distance. Most of the fields are