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Do we go around it or through it? Abraham asks.
It’s up to you, brother. What do you feel like?
The sun is getting low on the horizon. The day has been a long one. They have been driving non-stop. Abraham has been drinking from a bottle of whiskey for hours, readying himself for the surgery he will have to undergo. He is sleepy and sputtering.
Hell, he says. Let’s stay in the big city for the night.
So they follow the road into the city, which is uninhabited by the living and dark as pitch when the sun falls. It is possible that the entire state is off the grid, all the survivors having moved on years ago to other, safer areas. Phoenix is a place gone to rust and ruin – massive buildings collapsed on themselves, weeds growing up through the cracked pavement, everything etched to a pale, colourless grey by the sandstorms that whip around the corners of buildings season by season.
The firebird city rises again only in the dead who wander its streets. It is a mystery what they are feeding on, these shambling slugs, for there are no signs of life. It is only when they arrive in the city’s downtown that Moses sees the soot and ash everywhere settled like new snow, the black char on the sides of many structures – and he realizes something. This place is not among the cities abandoned a decade ago or longer. No, this place is newly dead. There were people here not long before.
The gutters are stained with dried blood, and he knows what that means.
He knows from experience how to age blood – how, upon leaving the body and splashing on a brick wall, for example, blood will go from red to brown to black to grey, how it will flake off, eventually, in the desert heat, or how it will rehydrate and run in the rain, how it will eventually disappear altogether, leaving only a stain like the dirt of the earth – and how, long after that, even the stain itself will evaporate, because the elixirs of human life are unstable – because human life itself wants to merge again with the elemental world it was born out of and is kept separate only by the puny will of individual fancies.
This blood, the blood in the gutters downtown, is less than a year old. This place is among the recently fallen, and there is a grim sombreness in the air.
But it explains why there are so many slugs, and why they are so active.
There were survivors here, Moses says. Till not so long ago.
How can you tell? the girl says.
I can tell.
Could there be some left?
Moses shrugs.
There could be, he says. We’ll keep an eye out.
Is it too dangerous? she says. Should we go back?
Moses shrugs again.
Everywhere’s dangerous. Just different kinds is all. Abraham and me, we’ve been through most varietals. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.
They drive until Moses finds what he’s looking for: a hospital. But the place is blasted through, burned down to its empty metal skeleton, unsalvageable. So he looks for the next best thing, a drugstore, but those too seem to have been looted clean a long time since. Yes, this place was a thriving bastion for a long while.
No luck, Moses says to his brother. We may have to do it on pure nerve.
We done it before, Abraham says, taking another gulp of whiskey. I got lots of nerve left, I reckon.
So they find a place that looks shut up tight, a hotel, and they climb up on a dumpster and bust through a second-storey window and hoist themselves in. Then they kick the dumpster away so that they won’t be followed.
Inside, the building is deserted. They sit Abraham down in the big dusty lobby, on a green upholstered couch with a filigreed back, and then Moses and the girl light candles to search the dark back rooms.
In the abandoned bar, they find two whole bottles of Jameson’s.
It’s Abraham’s lucky day, Moses says. He can drink himself straight into anaesthesia.
You think they have any canned food? the Vestal asks. All I’ve been eating is beans and garden fruit for weeks. That’s probably the kitchen back there.
And she pushes through a swinging door into the next room.
Be careful, Moses calls out after her. Don’t get et.
He peruses the bar some more, but many of the bottles are gone or smashed. There’s a register with a drawer full of money – bills that he remembers people coveting in his long-ago childhood – but now they are the last thing the survivors are interested in lugging around. They make good kindling, but that’s about it.
When he pushes through the swinging doors into the kitchen, he spots the Vestal on one end, leaning deep into a cupboard and sifting through its contents. On the other end of the kitchen, on his hands and knees, is a slug. It’s an ancient man, hairless and dressed in an apron. His skin is grey and shrivelled and flaking as though he were made of papier mâché, a crawling stuffed mannequin, a mocking imitation of humanity.
The first thing Moses notices when he steps into the kitchen is that the slug is not making his way hungrily towards the Vestal. It seems he has climbed to his hands and feet with only a vague interest in the sudden movement around him. He stares after her as Moses has seen some slugs stare at night-time stars or at television screens that have not yet burned out or even at each other – simple, animal curiosity.
So it is no trick. The girl is somehow, impossibly, outrageously, beyond their appetite.
And it is just her, because when the slug sees Moses, he immediately begins a jaw-clamping crawl towards him, reaching out his grey bony fingers with the little strength he has left in his desiccated muscles. The thing would consume Moses if it could, would eat him right up. And yet it has no interest in the redhead wearing the white robes.
Moses takes an iron skillet from a hook hanging above him and bashes in the slug’s skull. The head caves in easily, the slug collapses on his stomach, and whatever small amount of blood there is slowly oozes out of its ears and nose.
Startled, the girl emerges from the cabinet.
What was that?
Slug, Moses says, pointing.
Oh, I didn’t see it.
You should be more careful.
I’ll be all right, she says and shrugs. Look what I found.
She holds out a jar of olives in oil.
When was the last time you had an olive? she asks.
I don’t care for olives, he says.
Look at you! she says. Some high and mighty mister with tastes! Well, some of us can’t afford to have picky palates.
She tries to pry the lid off the jar, but it’s on tight. She holds the jar between her knees and leans over, getting her whole back into the project, but the lid won’t budge. Then she knocks the lid against an aluminium tabletop, and all the discarded utensils on the table shudder and rattle like bones. But when she tries again, there’s still no movement.
