Authors: Alden Bell
Moses Todd turns his gaze away from the fray and looks behind him – into those empty mountains and the grey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond. For a moment it
looks as though he will turn his back on it all, as though he may give a shrugging refusal
to it all. He is a mountain man, as he is other things. A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore
– and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them.
But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye.
*
He remembers his daughter. His girl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair.
How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in
his arms. He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because it meant shelter for her from the world.
Her tugging at his beard with her little grasping hands. His fear of crushing her, because his brute arms were not built for such delicacy as daughters
offer.
And his wife, too. A woman who presented herself as beyond the knowing of any in the world but him. The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast. He was
nobody’s master when he was with her – but just an overgrown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle smile. She did not know how she was wound around everything in him,
as though
his lungs and heart and stomach were gripped tight by the burning gaze of her.
And there was no goodbye for them either. Even after he stopped looking for them. Even now, years later, there is no goodbye. A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut
it behind doors.
*
So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back to the battle below.
Something in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of
purpose and movement. He scans the structures, mapping them in his mind, determining which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal.
Then he clambers down the face of the hill, sliding much of the way on the dirty ice, controlling his fall by grappling onto the tree branches and dragging
the truncheon behind as a kind of
brake. He slides to the base of the hill behind one of the wide, flat buildings where piles of chopped wood are stacked against the cinderblock wall.
Before he can think what to do next, one of the foot soldiers speeds around the corner and comes to a halt three feet from where Moses stands. The soldier, little more than a boy, aims his gun
instinctively
at Moses’ head – but there is fear and trepidation in the boy’s eyes, and he does not pull the trigger immediately.
I ain’t with them, Moses says.
I’m shooting you, the boy says, his voice trembling, as though a declaration of violence were the same thing as a bullet.
You ain’t got to, Moses says. I ain’t one of them. I’m here for my two charges is all. My brother and a red- head lady.
After I got em, you can burn this place to the ground
with my good wishes. You seen em?
The boy’s hand shakes, the pistol remains fixed on Moses’ forehead.
Hey, Moses says. You hearin me? Let go that trigger. Come on now.
Something in the boy’s face twitches. He is paralysed. He could fire or not fire at any moment. Moses does not like his fate to be at the hazard of nervous chance.
Goddamnit, Moses says.
Then he raises his own pistol with practised speed and fires two shots at the boy that make charred holes in his chest and cause him to convulse as if suffocating on air that is no longer
breathable. The boy’s hand, in extremis, squeezes and fires too, but Moses drops in the same motion and lets the bullet fly over his head.
Then the soldier boy collapses face
down on the ground. Wisps of his hair are stirred lightly by the wind.
It didn’t have to go this way, Moses says to the corpse.
There is arbitrary death by nature, which Moses recognizes is everyone’s equally shared hazard. And then there is arbitrary death by the foolishness of man. And this is something Moses
cannot stomach.
He checks the magazine of his pistol, and he hefts the
massive bladed instrument in his opposite hand – and then Moses Todd leaps out from behind the building and into the fray. And
that’s when he begins to fight.
*
The icy earth melts with the steam of warfare, the hot spilled blood mingling with the snowy mud in rivulets of dirty pink like the stain of old wedding roses. The ground is
slippery with gory melt as Moses moves forward
through the battle, swinging the cudgel this way and that, firing his pistol with the other hand. He sends the cudgel in a wide arc to his left,
knocking a slug’s head clean off its shoulders, while with his right hand he fires twice at a bandit wielding a sword – the first bullet thunking into his chest and the second piercing
his neck, sending a plume of blood splashing to the ground.
He swings the cudgel back around and catches a ragged rifle-carrying woman in the stomach. When he pulls the weapon free, most of her
guts, tangled in its blades, follow. The next time he swings it upwards, it catches a massive, thick-headed slug under the chin, and a rain of shattered teeth go tip-tapping to the puddled
ground.
Moses does his best to avoid the uniformed men, for he knows
them to be soldier instruments of a wider order and that they would not kill him if they knew who he was. But he also knows that to
them he looks like one of the bandits, one of Fletcher’s men – and it is a circumstance of war that you cannot stop to palaver about the whys and wherefores of things. So when the
soldiers do threaten, he kills them too. And, he supposes, this is as right as anything
– because it is just as likely that, on any given day, he would be on one side as another. He is a
soldier and a reprobate, a lawman and a transgressor. So it makes no difference, at any moment in time, who dies by whose hand – as long as there is some line, capricious and invisible though
it may be, for the combatants to reach across.
Death is everywhere. His ears are deafened by gunfire
and screaming voices.Women and children, too – for the bandits have raised their kind to be warriors. Women with throwing knives that
lodge deep and true, children with sharpened teeth that have been taught to climb your body and rip out your throat as though they were feral animals. Moses slashes his way through them, digging
his heels into the muck for leverage against the ugly onslaught.
Everywhere is the music of slaughter, shrill swords fifing their way clean through the air, the deep baritones of surprised death
cries, the airy percussives of bodies falling to the ground and giving up their final appalled breaths. And who is the conductor? And who waves the baton? And who stitches together these crescendos
of grotesque majesty?
And, too, the battle is manifold – because
the chaos is too thick for the combatants to end things right, to make sure the dead stay down, and so the slaughtered everywhere on the field of
battle begin to rise again – and Moses finds himself killing again those he already killed once before. Death begets death, and it is no wonder that the world is overrun so. They rise slowly
amidst the pandemonium, overlooked because of their calm
in the middle of such frenzy. A corpse lying face down in a puddle of bloody snow melt will twitch first in the arms, a shiver will run
through the torso and all the way down to the legs. Then an arm will straighten itself, find a handhold on the ground and gently leverage itself with fresh muscle to hoist the rest of the body face
up. And there it might lie for minutes at a time, opening its
eyes anew to the sunlight and the noisome activity going on around it. The orbs of its eyes roll lazily to and fro until, at last, it
inches itself upwards, first on its hands and knees, and then rising to full height, standing tall in sudden mockery of life itself.
And so the valley quickly fills with the mangy slubberdegullions of death. They reach out pathetically for those alert bodies
moving by them with the speed of survival – but when their
hands grasp nothing, they drop again to the ground to feed hyena-like on the stillwarm corpses of the newly dead. And if a man, along his way to other death than this, should happen to put a bullet
through the slug’s brain as it eats its first meal, then in a travesty of sacred stygian rites that call for dim ferrymen to cross slow
between the shores of life and death, these creatures
will have died twice in the space of an hour.
Now Moses confronts one of Fletcher’s surgical abominations, a slug dressed up like a sasquatch, its body patched all over with the scalps of other slugs sewn on its skin – a motley
of hair, some long, some short, some blond, some brunette, some curly, some straight, much of the hair crusted
hard by ooze and blood. Moses dispatches the thing quickly, one bullet to the brain,
because it is a sign too distressing to look upon – humanity inverted somehow.
For a moment, Moses Todd, having killed everything around him that moves, finds himself in a wide radius of stillness. The other combatants occupy themselves at a distance, and he breathes deep
the stench of wasted biology that
hangs cloudy in the air. He stands, a droll on an empty stage, waiting for a response from the darkened seats – laughter or applause, it makes no difference
– raising his brutal weapon to examine it against the spotlight of the sun. The bladed cudgel is tangled with gore. Like a nightmare Christmas tree, its welded limbs are ornamented with human
viscera, tinselled with hair and stringy offal,
flaps of torn flesh that hang from the tips, sticky bile that is already beginning to crust over in the metal interstices. It is a thing that does
not soften to the human condition. People explode against the weapon, undeniable. It is a force, like the abstraction of American industry itself, a machine whose gears care not what they
grind.
Moses whips the weapon down and flings off some
of the loose numbles that splash onto the watery ground. Then he takes a moment to reload his pistol while scanning the structures around him.
There is a series of low metal buildings, indistinguishable from one another. He walks to the first one and kicks in the door, aiming his pistol through the doorframe and waiting for his eyes to
adjust to the dim light inside.
The place is mostly
empty. There are the skeletons of massive refining machinery, long ago frozen and rusted into position. Atop and around this dead machinery there are strewn blankets and slop
buckets and filthy mattresses. In the corner he finds three women huddled against the corrugated metal wall. They are not fighters. They are nothing but mice caught by their tails and starving to
death.
You with them?
Moses asks.
They respond in a language that Moses does not recognize. Their voices quaver, and their eyes are fixed on the dripping weapon he carries in his hand.
He lowers the cudgel.
You best get, Moses says. Ain’t nothing to gain by stayin. Here, I’ll show you.
But they won’t move until Moses has put down both the cudgel and the pistol. Then they follow him to the door, and
he points them in the direction of the hillside where he came into the
camp.
Go there, he says. Climb. Don’t come back. Everybody’s dead here. You understand? Dead.
He finds his own voice not angry or sympathetic but simply flat with the ugly ungentleness of truth.
They go, and he watches them until they are safely into the trees. Then he picks up the pistol and cudgel again and
moves on.
He scans the row of buildings again. The doors are all closed neatly, but none of them with very heavy locks. Then he spots a metal shed attached like a lean-to to one of the buildings. The door
to the shed is held shut with a thick chain and a padlock. He moves quickly to the shed, which is on the perimeter of the valley against the base of the hills that cup the gasworks.
There is no one around – the brunt of the battle has moved to the mouth of the valley. He uses the blunt handle of the cudgel to pound on the metal door of the shed.
Abe! he calls out. You in there? Vestal?
For a moment he hears nothing, so deafened is he by the cacophonous violence around him. But then he hears it – a small, weak voice climbing to panic.
Moses? Is it you?
The voice
belongs to the Vestal Amata. Holy woman. Tricksy thief. Fair beauty of the wild plain.
*
The chain and lock are too heavy to break, so Moses jams one of the blades of the cudgel down behind the hasp and yanks it free of the door. The lock and chain fall useless to
the ground. The door swings wide, and there’s the Vestal – dressed like a nymph of the woods. The fabric stretches
and shimmers absurdly, and bright diaphanous ribbons hang off her
everywhere. She has a glittering tiara in her hair, and her face is painted with glitter also.
The sight so completely baffles Moses that he cannot speak for a moment.
What— he says.
It’s my costume, she says. It’s what Fletcher makes me wear. Oh, Mose – I didn’t know if you would come.
Then she leaps on him, her
arms around his neck, her eyes squinting against the light outside the dingy shed. Then, from around the other side of the structure, a figure comes running and stops
short when he sees Moses and the Vestal. It’s one of Fletcher’s men – Moses recognizes him. The man raises a shotgun, but before he can pull the trigger Moses has flung the Vestal
away from him and fired a hail of bullets, some
of which plant themselves into the man’s sternum.
Come on, he says to the Vestal. We gotta get out of sight.
Instead of going back into the shed, where there is no light, Moses takes the Vestal by the arm and leads her around to the low empty building in which he found the three women refugees. He
pulls her inside and shuts the door behind them.
What’re we doing? she says. Let’s
just get out.
Where’s Abe? Moses says. They took him.
Something occurs in the Vestal’s eyes – a realization, perhaps, that Moses has larger plans than simply her rescue.