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She collapses the miniature telescope and puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold
SHE TAKES the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in theman hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep
The next city she coanic Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old tirow beards of Spanish round and float their ancient white tails in the breeze Spreading out fros froive way to brick lanes, brittle barbecue shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the coarages In the middle of town is a square that e one to bone and black In the el, her wingtips pointing still unbroken toward the sky, and a dead h he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over so population is dense Te the
Don the city is overrun, a grotesque panorama They walk, some of them, in twos and threes, so, slow and thick, blood crusted down their fronts, stuestures are less, but they hearken back with pri 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 woainst a wall, rubbing the lace heainst her cheek Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Teainst the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its ued, driven to consu apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal fro with abo on the weak, pulling the their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers soainst the concrete base of a building She opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the ar, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, ahour by hour, its old-ti out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own ar platfor in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles--and the ones who succeed and cli with the endless ut enuity And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illu and roiling against one another like enerate hted earth--beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we haveand rotted and crusty and eeously pathetic
They collect, the horde, and she eases her car through the 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 dah at a steady pace, while thenext to her watches with blank eyes the crowd of walking bodies in the pool of light ahead of theeddon every direction it looks like They got a plague of meatskins here, don’t they? I don’t know about you, du tis
She leans forward in the seat and grasps the steering wheel ive us one advantage Brother Todd is gonna have a nighth 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
BY THE time the sun comes up, they havehills capped by able houses with stone entries and marble steps She has turned off the ure it, and the slugs have thinned out considerably
Beyond the clusters of houses, the road opens up and they find therassy land with mansions set way back in the distance Most of the fields are enclosed by sturdy white horse fences that circle the property Many of the fences are worn and broken through in spots, and now slugs graze where horses used to
The road climbs up over a rise and reveals a valley on the other side To the south of the road is untended grassland, but to the north is the largest estate she’s seen yet Even froloating white, built up on the top of the hill as though it were crowning majestically the earth itself
She pulls over
Ain’t that soht columns in the front, she can count them from where she stands in the road, and a driveway that leads froht up to the house with a circle out front and a fountain in the h up into the air
Look at that fountain, dumot an idea about how they keep the the property is different fro white wooden planks, it consists ofhorizontal about six inches apart
You stay away from that now, she says You probably don’t even knohat an electrified fence is, and I guess it’s best you don’t find out firsthand
She tells the ate and discovers that it too is wired
Doggone it, she says Hoe gonna get in there? Here, wait, I got an idea
She goes to the car and gets a pistol fro in the backseat
You’re lucky I’m the brains of this operation
She points the pistol in the air and fires three times in deliberately paced succession The reports echo loud through the canyon