She nods. That would be a right thing.
The sun goes down, and she turns on the headlights and one of them still works so she can see the road ahead of her but in a lopsided way. There are some lights in the distance, a glow on the horizon that must be a city, and she drives in the direction of the glow.
But on the road at night, you start thinking ugly alone thoughts. She remembers, it must have been five years ago, driving through Alabama with Malcolm in the seat beside her. She was very young then, she must have been, because she remembers having to push the seat all the way forward—and even then she had to sit up on the edge of it to reach the pedals. And Malcolm was younger still.
Malcolm was quiet for a long time. He liked to chew that gum that was too sweet for her, and he liked to put two pieces in his mouth at once. For a while she could hear him chewing next to her—then it was silent, and he was just looking out the window at the big black nothing.
What happened to Uncle Jackson? Malcolm said.
He’s gone, she said. We ain’t going to see him no more.
He said he was gonna teach me how to shoot.
I’ll teach you. He wasn’t your real uncle anyway.
To get the memory out of her head, she rolls down the window and lets the wind play in her hair. When that doesn’t work, she decides to sing a ditty she once knew by heart and it takes her a while to remember all the parts of it.
Oh, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
Yes, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
A kiddley divey doo, wouldn’t you?
It’s on a long stretch of country road that the car dies, and she pulls over and pops the hood to look. It’s probably the fuel pump, but she can’t be sure without getting under the car and poking around, and the engine’s too hot to do anything for a while. And she doesn’t have any tools to poke around with anyway, but she can see a house set back away from the road down a little dirt drive—and there might be tools there.
She looks into the dark horizon toward the city lights. Distance is difficult to determine at night—it’s possible she could walk it by morning.
Still, that house. It might hold something worthwhile.
She’s been out of the game for a long time now and she’s feeling bold—and anyway she wants something to distract her from her night memories. So she straps the gurkha knife to her thigh and jams the pistol in the waistband of her pants—two rounds, emergency use only—and takes the flashlight and walks up the packed dirt driveway to the house, where she’s ready to kick the door in except she doesn’t have to because it’s standing open.
There’s a stink in the house, and she recognizes it. Flesh mold. Could be corpse or could be slug. Either way, she tells herself to breathe through her mouth and make it quick.
She finds her way to the kitchen, where there’s an overturned and rusting formica table and peeling wallpaper with a strawberry vine pattern. Because of the humidity, patches of furry gray-green mold are growing everywhere. She opens the drawers one by one looking for tool drawers but there’s nothing. She looks out the back window. No garage.
There’s a door in the kitchen, and she opens it and finds wooden steps leading down beneath the ground.
She waits at the top of the steps for a moment, listening for any sounds in the house, and then descends slowly.
In the basement there’s a different smell, like ammonia, and she sweeps the flashlight around to a table in the middle of the room cluttered with bottles, burners, rubber tubing, and one of those old-fashioned scales with a long arm on one side. Some of the bottles are half filled with a yellow liquid. She’s seen this kind of setup before. Meth lab. They were big a few years before when some people were taking advantage of the slug distraction.
She finds a workbench against the wall and roots around for a phillips-head and a wrench, but what she’s really looking for is a pair of pliers.
She sets the flashlight down on the tabletop but it rolls off and falls to the floor where it flickers once but stays lit. Good thing—she wouldn’t want to have to feel her way back to the car.
But when she turns, she sees something she missed before. By the stairs, there’s a utility closet—and while she watches, the door of the closet, illuminated in the faint glow of the flashlight, shudders once and flies opens as if someone has fallen against it.
Then she can smell it, the flesh rot, much stronger now—it was masked before by the ammoniac smell of the lab.
They stumble out of the utility closet, three of them, two men in overalls with long hair and a woman dressed only in a satin slip, which has been ripped open to expose one desiccated breast.
Temple has forgotten how bad they smell—that muddy mixture of must and putrefaction, oil and rancid shit. She sees a fecal ooze falling wetly down the back of the woman’s legs. They must have fed recently, so they will be strong. And they are between her and the stairs.
She puts her hand on the pistol and considers. Her last two bullets.
Not worth it.
Instead she sweeps the gurkha knife out of its sheath and kicks over the man in front, sending him crashing down to the cement slab of the floor. She swings the knife and buries it in the skull of the second man, whose eyes cross absurdly before he drops to his knees. But when she tries to pull the blade back, it’s stuck, bound up in sutures of wet bone.
Then the woman has her by the wrist in a tight fleshy grip. She can feel the brittle nails digging into her skin.
Leave go my arm, Temple says.
She can’t get the knife out of the man’s head, so she lets it go and watches the body drop dead backward with her blade still stuck in it.
The woman is leaning in to take a bite out of her shoulder, but Temple drives her fist hard into the slug’s head, first once, then twice, then a third time, trying to dizzy the brain out of its instinctual drive.
But now the other man has gotten to his feet again and is coming at her, so she spins the woman around to get her between them and the man barrels into both with a bear hug that sends Temple crashing backward into the workbench.
The smell, as they crush against her, is overpowering, and her eyes flood with water that blurs her vision.
She reaches behind her and feels around for anything and comes up with a screwdriver, which she grips hard and drives into the man’s neck. He lets go and totters backward, but the angle of the screwdriver is wrong, it goes straight through rather than up into the brain, so he begins to walk in circles gurgling liquidly and opening and closing his jaw.
The woman who has hold of Temple’s wrist opens her mouth again as though to take a bite of her cheek, but Temple swings her around again and slams the woman’s forearm against the edge of the workbench so that it cracks and the grip on her wrist loosens.
Then she ducks and moves to the corpse, putting one foot on his face for leverage, and pries her gurkha out with both hands.
The woman is close behind her, but it doesn’t matter. Temple swings hard and true, and the blade whips clean through her neck and takes off the head.
The last man is distracted, clawing awkwardly at the screwdriver in his throat. Temple moves around behind him to catch her breath. His hair is long and stringy with flakes of paint in it as though the house has been crumbling to pieces on top of him. She lifts the knife and brings it down hard, two quick strokes like she learned long ago—one to crack the skull and the other to cleave the brain.
She picks up the flashlight from the floor, which is now slippery with blood and excrement. Then she finds a clean part of the woman’s slip and rips it off and uses it to wipe her gurkha clean.
Meatskin tango, she says. Godawful messy business that is.
SEE, THERE’S a music to the world and you got to be listening otherwise you’ll miss it sure. Like when she comes out of the house and the nighttime air feels dreamy cold on her face and it smells like the pureness of a fresh land just started. Like it was something old and dusty and broken taken off the shelf to make room for something sparkle-new.
And it’s your soul desiring to move and be a part of it, whatever it is, to be out there on the soot plains where the living fall and the dead rise and the dead fall and the living rise like the cycle of life she once tried to explain to Malcolm.
It’s a thing of nature, she said to him while he chomped down on a jawbreaker he had squirreled in his cheek. It’s a thing of nature and nature never dies. You and me, we’re nature too—even when we die.
It’s about souls and open skies and stars crazy lit everywhere you look, and so she makes a decision to take a few things from the car and hoof it the rest of the way toward those lights on the horizon. And soon she sees a street sign and shines her flashlight on it, and the letters she can’t decipher and they don’t look like the name of any city she’s been before that she can recall, but the number is 15.
And if it’s got a light fingerprint on the sky that can be seen fifteen miles distant then it must be no small town, and that’s the place for her, a place where she can make the acquaintance of a few people and catch up on goings-on on God’s green earth and maybe get a cold soda with ice in it. And fifteen miles, that ain’t nothing. That’s three, four hours of night vistas and deep cool thoughts, barring the sad ones.
She’ll be there in time for breakfast.
3.
The streets are deserted save for slugs and wild dogs. The city is too large to fence and its avenues too snaky to patrol, but, Temple reasons, the electricity is being kept running for someone other than the slugs. The inhabitants must be hidden.
She climbs up on a billboard by a freeway on-ramp and eats a pack of peanut butter crackers while she scans the horizon.
On the way north she passed through a beachside community where all the buildings were sleek and pastel-colored. The main strip was cluttered with restaurants that had once featured outdoor seating on the wide sidewalks—places where rich people in cream-colored shirts must once have drunk cocktails. Now, though, most of the plate glass windows were broken through, the crazed white reflection of the sun lighting up all the jagged points of glass like fangs around the gaping black of the interiors. The pastel paint was chipping off in flakes and exposing the crumbling concrete underneath. And in front of some of the restaurants, the wrought iron tables and chairs had once been piled up in defensive barriers that had long been breached.