Ashes (33 page)

The knocking stopped and I didn’t hear no screams so maybe whoever it was didn’t get ate up.

I listened to Daddy read the Bible. The sun come up higher and I wondered about the cows. Did the gray people eat them all? It wasn’t like they ain’t enough sinners to go around. I didn’t for a minute believe that everybody was gray. There had to be others like us. There’s a hymn that says you’ll never walk alone. I don’t reckon the Lord breaks promises like that but I was way too scared to ask. Daddy’s eyes were getting bloodshot, like he hadn’t slept a wink, and he was whispering to hisself again.

I drank water from the plate that Preacher Aldridge passed around on Sundays. The water tasted like old pennies. Daddy didn’t drink nothing. I asked him if he wanted the last can of sardines but he said man can’t live by bread alone but by the word of the Lord. I wondered what the Lord’s words tasted like. I wondered what people tasted like. I ate the sardines by myself.

That night was quiet, like the gray people had done gone on to wherever they were headed. I woke up in the morning plenty sore and I asked Daddy if we could take a peek out the door. Daddy hadn’t moved, stood up there at the pulpit like he was getting ready to let loose with a sermon. He had the shotgun raised toward heaven and I don’t reckon he heard me. I asked it louder and he said you can’t see the gray people because ever sinner is blind. I said I ain’t no sinner but he said you’re looking mighty gray to me.

I said I ain’t gray, and then he made me prove it. Said get on your knees and beg the Lord to forgive you. He pointed the shotgun at me. I didn’t know if he would use it or not, but the way his eye twitched I wasn’t taking no chances. I got on my knees but I was scared to close my eyes. When you close your eyes and pray it’s just you and the Lord. You’re blind but the Lord sees everything. I asked Daddy to pray with me.

Daddy set in to asking the Lord to forgive us our sins and trespasses. I wondered if we was trespassing on the church. It belonged to the Lord, and we was here so we wouldn’t get ate up. I didn’t say nothing to Daddy about it, though. I added an extra loud amen just so Daddy would know for sure that I wasn’t gray.

Later I asked Daddy how come ever sinner is gray. He said the Lord decides such things. He said Momma was a sinner and that’s why she was gray all along and her soul was already under Hell. I didn’t say nothing to that. Sometimes Daddy said I took after my Momma. I wished I’d took after Daddy instead and been able to pray all by myself.

I said it sounded like the gray people was gone. Daddy said you can’t trust the Devil’s tricks. Said the only way out was through the Lord. I said I was getting hungry again. Daddy said get some sleep and pray. 

I woke up lost in the dark and Daddy was screaming his head off. He was sitting where the moon come through the window and he said look at me, look at my skin. He held up his hands and said I’m gray, I’m gray, I’m gray. Said he was unfit to be in the House of the Lord. He put the shotgun barrel up to the side of his neck and then there was a flash of light and sounded like the world split in half and then something wet slapped against the walls.

I crawled over to him and laid beside him ‘til all the warm had leaked out. I was scared and I wanted to pray but without Daddy to help me the Lord would look right into me and that was worse than anything. Then I thought if Daddy was in heaven now, maybe I could say a prayer to him instead and he could pass along my words to the Lord.

The sun come up finally and Daddy didn’t look gray at all. He was white. His belly gurgled and the blood around his neck hole turned brown. I went to the door and unlocked it. Since it was Sunday morning, I figured people would be coming to hear the sermon. With more people in the church, I could pray without being so scared.

I stacked up some of the hymn books and stood on them so I could look out the window. They was back. More gray people were walking by, all headed in the same direction. I figured they were going to that place under Hell, just like Daddy said, and it made me happy that Daddy died before he turned gray.

Time passed real slow and the bread was long gone and nobody come to church. I never figured so many people that I used to pray with would end up turning gray. Like church didn’t do them no good at all. I thought of all the prayers I said with them and it made me scared, the kind of scared that fills you up belly first. I wondered what the Lord thought about all them sinners, and what kind of words the Lord said back to them when they prayed.

Daddy’s fingers had gone stiff and I about had to break them to get the shotgun away. He’d used up the last shell. The door was unlocked but nobody set foot in the church. I was hoping whoever had knocked the other day might come back, but they didn’t.

The gray people didn’t come in the church. I figured if they was eating live flesh they would get me sooner or later. Except maybe they was afraid about the church and all, or being in plain sight of the Lord. Or maybe they ain’t figured out doors yet. I wondered if you go through doors to get under Hell.

  Night come again. Daddy was dead cold. I was real hungry and I asked Daddy to tell the Lord about it, but I reckon Daddy would call that a selfish thing and wouldn’t pass it on. I kept trying to pray but I was scared. Preacher Aldridge said you got to do it alone, can’t nobody do it for you.

Maybe one of them Aye-rab bugs got in while the door was open. Maybe the gray people ain’t ate me yet because I ain’t live flesh no more. Only the Lord knows. All I know is I can’t stay in this church another minute. Daddy’s starting to stink and the Lord’s looking right at me.

Like I’m already gray.

I don’t feel like I am, but Daddy said ever sinner is blind. And it’s the kind of hungry that hurts.

Outside the church, the morning is fresh and cold and smells like broken flowers. I hear footsteps in the wet grass. I turn and walk, and I fit right in like they was saving a place for me. I’m one of them, following the ones ahead and leading the ones behind. We’re all headed in the same direction. Maybe this entire world is the place under Hell, and we’ve been here all along.

I ain’t scared no more, just hungry. The hungry runs deep. You can’t live by bread alone. Sometimes you need meat instead of words.

I don’t have to pray no more, out here where it ain’t never dark. Where the Lord don’t look at you. Where we’re all sinners. Where you’re born gray, again and again, and the End Times never end.

Where you never walk alone.

###

PENANCE

It caught Gran next.

Small red sores appeared in the wrinkles of her neck and face. In the candlelight of the kitchen, the sores sparkled like jewels. Father wouldn't look at her anymore. I'm sure he would have locked her in the spare bedroom, except the beds were already occupied by the corpses of Bobby and Mother. The house smelled of corruption and ointment.

Father had started wearing his mask again. He sat in the living room, watching the Web screen, hoping the misery of others would ease his own. At least they hadn't cut our electricity, though our water service had been terminated. I guess they figured that the Penance wasn't transmitted by electrons. But Father made us use the candles anyway. He said the fire was God's purifying light, now that we had been robbed of the sun.

Gran sat at the kitchen table, her eyes glassy, the candle's flame reflecting off her pupils. I dipped a towel in the bowl of gray water, wrung it out, and patted Gran's face.

"Don't waste it, Ruth," she said.

"Shh," I said. "It's no time to be brave."

"The saints may not bring any more."

"Have faith," I said.

The saints hadn't brought food or water in three weeks. Maybe the army had finally wiped them out. Maybe the Penance had caught them. Or perhaps God had called them home.

Gran's eyes welled with tears that she couldn't blink away. I wiped at the fluid that leaked down her face.

"You should be wearing your gloves," she said, her voice raspy.

I kept wiping. I hung the towel over the back of a chair and squeezed some ointment from a rolled-up tube. The gel was cold on my finger. I touched it to Gran's sores, at least the ones that hadn't burst open.

"You're warm," I said.

"The fever." She shivered under her dusty blanket.

"Tell me about the mountains," I said, both of us needing her stories. Gran had grown up in the Appalachians of Virginia. Now the mountains had become a mecca as hundreds, maybe even thousands if that many were left, escaped the city. Some of them were already infected, carrying in their hearts the thing they were fleeing. From the Web news, back before the army had taken control of transmissions, we had learned that people were killing each other there, too. But when Gran lived in the mountains, it was a place of peace.

Gran drew the blanket more tightly across her chest. "We had a little cabin," she said. "In the morning, you could see for miles, the high ridges like islands above the ocean of fog. The air was so clean you could taste it, maple and oak and pine, with just a touch of woodsmoke from the chimney. Your father, he looked so much like Bobby—"

Her voice broke. The tears welled up again at the mention of my brother. I fought back the water that threatened to pool in my own eyes. I reached for the towel, but Gran shook her head and smiled. "The tears don't sting anymore."

The curtain over the doorway parted and Father came into the kitchen. The mask made him look like an insect. His eyes were large and frightening, distorted by the goggles. He went past us without speaking and opened the refrigerator. The buzz and murmur of the Web screen protected us from the awful silence of the room and the world outside.

We watched as he thumbed through the stack of cheeses. He pushed aside the packages that had been opened. He found one he liked, put it in the pocket of his coveralls, and pulled a bottle of wine from the lower shelf. Then he rummaged through the cabinets.

He pulled out a can of tuna. He looked past Gran to me. "Have you touched this?" he said, his voice muffled by the filters of his mask.

I shook my head. Father dropped it in his pocket. He had his own can opener, fork, and knife. No one could touch his utensils. He even slept with them.

"What's on the screen?" I asked, hoping to get him to stay for a moment.

"The army says the war with the saints and scientists is nearly over," he said. "I should have joined the army while I had the chance."

My heart spasmed and then sank in my chest. The extermination of the saints meant there would be no more midnight deliveries. "What will we do for food?" I asked him.

"We shouldn't expect others to spare us God's punishment," he said. I waited for him to deliver another sermon, parroting the Commander-In-Chief's press conferences. About how we had brought the plague among us by our sinning ways, how the world had to be cleansed, how the scientists conspired with Satan to deliver us unto these dark ages.

Instead, Father went back through the curtain, the wine bottle tucked under his arm. He couldn't even spare us a sermon.

"Your father used to go into the woods with his hatchet," Gran continued, as if recalling fond memories at a funeral. Like Father was already dead. "He'd cut me a little pile of twigs and say, 'Here, Mommie, these are for the fire.' I made a big deal of putting them in the fireplace and rubbing my hands together, then blowing into the flames."