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In life Martinez had been an attorney, a es, defended the accused before juries of their peers Death row cases were his specialty, his professional forte He had acquired a particular brand of fareat Julio Martinez, Esq, come to the aid of such-and-such? Could he be persuaded to swoop into action? The rock star who had bashed his girlfriend’s brains out with a lamp The state senator with the dead whore’s blood on his hands The suburban mother who had drowned her newborn triplets in the tub Martinez took them all They were insane or they were not; they pled or they didn’t; they went to the needle, or the tiny cell, or scot-free The outcome was irrelevant to Julio Martinez, Esq; it was the draainst its inevitability-that was the fascination Once, as a boy, in the field behind his house, he had co and teeth Its iron jaws had cla flesh to bone The creature’s small, dark eyes, like beads of oil, were full of death’s wisdom Life ebbed from it in a series of spasmodic scuffles The boy Martinez could have watched for hours, and did just that; and when the rabbit failed to perish by nightfall, he carried it to the barn and returned to the house and ate his supper and went to bed in his roo, when he could watch the rabbit die solorious days
Thus, his life and its dark investigations Martinez had his reasons He had his rationale He had his particularof spirits, the loyal cord and infinitely pliable duct tape, the dank, unseen co learning or culture, not because he despised them or secretly wanted them but because they were easy to ensnare They were no match for his beautiful suits and ue They were bodies without name or history or personality, and when the moment of transport approached, they offered no distraction The ti was all, the orchestrated, si
A certain amount of practice had been required There had been misfires There had been, he was forced to admit, a certain amount of accidental comedy The first one had died well but too soon, the second had kicked up such a ruckus that the whole thing had dissolved into farce, the third had wept so pitiably that he could hardly pay attention But then: Louise Louise, with her corny waitress uniform and sensible waitress shoes and unsexily supportive waitress hose How beautifully she’d left her life! With what exquisite rapture in the taking! She was like a door opening into the great unknowable beyond, a portal into the infinite blackness of unbeing He had been eradicated, pulverized; the winds of eternity had blown through hiined and then soh of it
As for the highway patrolave and took away To wit: the Jag with a broken taillight, and Martinez with the woed body in the trunk; the cop’s slow saunter toward the car, his hand resting lide of the driver’s ; the patrolhteousness, his lips saying the custo In the harried aftered to dispose of the body in the trunk, his nighttime practices thus to remain forever unknown, unconnected to his fate But a dead police recorded by his dashboard video ca went, was for the great Julio Martinez, Esq, champion of the unchampionable, defender of the loathsolass of thirty-year-old single-ue while the s of the house twirled with the lights of justice and coiven the way things had worked out, hadn’t turned out to be such an unlucky turn of events, actually
Martinez couldn’t say he cared much for his fellows With the exception of Carter, who struck him as purely pitiable-the man didn’t even seem to knohat he was or what he’d done; Martinez hadn’t heard somore than common criminals, their deeds randoone bad Barroo in their own psychological waste had done nothing to improve the aspects The never quite being alone The endless hunger always needing to be filled The ceaseless talk-talk-talk inside his head, not just his brothers but Zero, too And Ignacio: there was a piece of work Theexcuses I didn’t s It’s just the way I was built After a hundred years listening to the , Martinez wouldn’tattractively berserk about Babcock, though You had to hand it to theout his mother’s larynx with a kitchen knife; in another life, he surely would have been a poet Over the decades, Martinez had mentally sat in that foul kitchen about a million times, and it was true: the woman would not shut up There was a kind of person in this world who needed you to paint a picture, and Babcock’s one, his signal silenced, like a television station suddenly off the air The corner of Martinez’s ristly nubbin of his mother’s voice box, was empty All of them knehat had happened; their collective, blood-borne existence ordained it One of their brothers had fallen
God bless and keep you, Giles Babcock May you find in death the peace that eluded you in life, and what came after
And so from Twelve, Eleven A loss, a chink in the armor, but ultimately a matter of lesser concern in the vital period to coood century, on the whole, for Julio Martinez He recalled the early days with poignant fondness The days of blood andof his kind upon the earth To kill was one thing, one glorious thing; to take was another A banquet richer still in its satisfactions From each one Martinez had taken a flavorful bite of soul, drawing the his dominion His Many were not merely part of him, an extension of him; they were him As he, Julio Martinez, was one of Twelve and the Zero also, concomitant and coextensive, united with one another and with the darkness in which they permanently dwelled
Brothers, brothers, it is time Brothers, brothers, the hour is at hand
For it was inevitable; they had built a race of pure rapaciousness Their Many, created to protect the in their wake Feast had yielded to famine, summer’s bounty to winter’s scarcity; they would need a home, a zone of protection, of rest To dream their dreams To drea They will bow before you; you will live as kings
Martinez liked the sound of that
He discarded them without cereether from all the hidden places and said to theered hand over the horizon They pointed their faces blindly toward it They showed no hesitation; all that he co toward theht over the earth Lie down, hters; lie down in the sun and die
There followed a certain aht he made his way east, across the exhausted land His instincts were acute The world rippled with sensuousness, caressing hirass The wind The subtlestall He had been away too long He called to his fellows, their voices threading with darkness as they made their way from every corner to the place of their renewal
-We are Morrison-Chavez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Laht-Martinez-Reinhardt-Carter Eleven of Twelve, one brother lost
And Zero replied in kind:
Oh, reat as your own But you will be Twelve again For I have made another, one to watch and keep you in your place of rest
-Who? they asked, each as one and then together -Who is the other you have made?
And Zero spoke from out of the darkness:
Our sister
Chapter 36
Everywhere people hispering: there had been another boray and cold, tasting of the winter to come Sara awoke to the blare of the horn, followed by a chorus of coughing, throats clearing, bones cracking ambivalently to life Her eyes and mouth were as dry as paper The roo powder, a biological vapor of huh Sara barely noticed Some of the smell, she kneas herself
Another pitiless sunrise, she thought Anotheras a citizen of the Hoer on her bunk One minute late to the ration line and you could find yourself dragging through the day without a scrap in your stomach A bowl of corn mush trumped a few slender rowling, she unwrapped her threadbare blanket and swung her weight around, ducking her head, to plant her sneakered feet on the floorboards She always slept wearing her sneakers, such as they were-a ragged pair of Reeboks inherited fro stolen Who took ing through the lodge, begging and accusing and eventually cru to the floor in hopeless tears I’ll die without them! Somebody help me, please! It was true: a person would die without shoes Though she worked at the biodiesel plant, word had gotten out in the flatland that Sara was a nurse She had seen the blackened nuts of frozen toes, the scabs of worms burrowed in; she’d pressed her ear to the sunken chests and listened to the pneu; she’d felt beneath her fingertips the drunancy, or si with fever and dressed the weeping wounds that would devour the body with rot And to each person, Sara said, with the taste of a lie in her teeth: You’ll be fine Not to worry In another few days you’ll be right as rain, I pro; it was a sort of blessing You will die, and it will hurt, but you will do it here, a your own kind, and the last touch you feel will be one of kindness, because it will be mine
Because you didn’t want the cols to know you were sick, let alone the redeyes Nothing was ever said aloud, but people in the flatland had few illusions what the hospital was actually for Man or woh those doors and nobody saw you again Off to the feedlot you went
The lodges varied in size; Sara’s was one of the largest The bunks were stacked four high, twenty bunk lengths in each row, ten rows: eight hundred souls crammed into a room the approxi their children’s heads into hats,with the heavy docility of livestock as they sha the area to make sure she wouldn’t be observed, Sara knelt by her bunk, lifting thethe other beneath it She re place and secreted it in the pocket of her tunic Then she drew herself upright