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 Prologue:
FRAGMENTS FROM THE REVELATION OF JOHN
I. Take it and eat it up,
and it shall make thy belly bitter
The crow was dead, like the others. It had been dead for some
time, but there were no maggots or flies. John poked at it with a
fingertip for a moment, picked it up and began to eat.
He was hungry, so hungry, and even if the
feathers tasted wrong on the first bite,
he no longer cared. The bones snapped
too easily. The blood was sour on his
tongue. Still, he finished it.
That was a few hours ago. John is
throwing the bird up right now. He
panics, asks himself aloud if he is dying
between retches and gasps of air. He imagines
his guts forcing themselves up through his mouth
the same way that the half-digested remains of the bird have.
He half-walks, half-crawls into the shadow of a rock. He curls into a ball and passes out.
II. His face was as it were
the sun, and his feet like pillars of fire
He comes to himself. He’s sitting up. A hand is supporting his neck, another
holds a bottle of water to his mouth. He gulps down a few mouthfuls, then he
pushes the bottle away, lurches forward onto his hands and knees, throws up
again.
He wipes a hand across his mouth. With his head still bowed, he says,
“I’m not supposed to do this. The Lord didn’t make me to do this kind of
thing.”
“The Lord didn’t make you,” says a voice, a high-pitched, slightly
nasal voice with Texas in its rhythm. “Didn’t make me.”
John rocks back onto his heels and looks over his shoulder. He looks
at her, and feels that prickling on his tongue, the same prickling he got
when he met the Old Man the first time, so many years ago, the same
as when he met the doctor and the shaman and the girl. She’s sitting
down on the ground, leaning against the rock. She’s a short, stocky woman
in jeans and sleeveless tee, a blue nylon rucksack over one shoulder. She’s
young-looking, like she’s in her late teens, and she’s got skin so pale it’s a
wonder it’s not burnt bright red under the sun. Her eyes are so dark there’s
no difference between pupil and iris. She has no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes.
The haze clears; John realizes that her skin is translucent, that he can see
the movement of the blue and gray blood through her flesh. He can see silvery
wires running just beneath the skin, emerging from the skin here and there. At
her temple, on her sternum, one shoulder, a wrist, the wires meet in little round
nexuses, from which surround spun metal sockets or terminals. Where the wires
poke through, the skin around them looks like it has the first signs of gangrene.
He has her Measure. He shows no surprise.
“He might not have had a hand in making us, sister, but His purpose governed it
all. His provision watches over us all.”
She cocks her head to one side, and the metal socket at her temple catches the
sunlight. She says nothing for quite some time. Then she blinks, slowly. “Over you, maybe,”
she says.
III. Seal up these things and write them not
They sit out the afternoon heat. This is wrong, John explains. “Folks like us, we weren’t
never made to be sick,” he says.
“The bird was poisoned,” says the Skin Girl. “You’re in a Blight.”
“A what?”
“It’s when someone
—
like me, maybe like you
—
stays somewhere too long. It irradiates
the land. Animals die.”
John nods, clasps his hands around his knees. “A Wasteland, was what the Old Man called
it.”
“Old Man?”
“He didn’t have no proper name neither. Made of patches of skin and lumps of
flesh from all manner of folks like some kind of crazy quilt. Ugly like you ain’t never
seen. He’d been going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, like
the Devil himself. And suffering like Job. For a hundred years before I was made.
Maybe more. Man had a name for everything except his own self.”
The Skin Girl bites at the nail on her thumb. “And he left places... like
this?”
“He caused a fair deal of havoc, sure, but none of the places he
stayed ended up like this.”
She’s fidgeting now.
John wipes his mouth again with the back of his hand. “This
place... did you do this?”
IV. I know thy works
“How did you get here?” she says, at length.
“I was by the border,” he says. “Heading north. Thought I’d go to Truth
Or Consequences.”
“Why?”
“Liked the name.” He licks his lips, savors the taste of clay. “Jeep full of Minutemen saw me,
thought I was some sort of immigrant.”
“You don’t look Mexican.”
He shrugs. “Don’t look like their kinda folks, neither. Took a bullet. Didn’t want
to kill anyone. Ran. Climbed over the fence. It’s a day’s walk south of here.
That fence.”
“Yeah. I know it.”
“Boys in the jeep saw the sign on the fence and turned right back. No point in backing off.
Thought I’d go across, see what I could. Here I am.”
“How are you alive?” She leans forward. “In the Blight?”
“Same way you are, I guess. I’m like you. Got the same thing keeping me going as you.”
She shakes her head, slowly. “No. You’re not like us. Not really.”
“Us?”
“It’s just me. There was someone else. He isn’t here now,” she says. “He made the
land like this, and he moved on.”
“So why are you here?” he says. He pushes himself up against the rock.
“I’m here for the hot cell,” she says.
V. I have set before thee an open door,
and no man can shut it
The Skin Girl gets to the top of the rise first. She stands at the top,
pointing.
John joins her. The building is low and rectangular. It has no windows. It’s
the same neutral gray as the apparently sunless sky and the angular, dusty hills
surrounding it. Only the green of the overturned jeep by the fence and the dark
of two bodies on the ground near the half-open door gives any sign that there
might be other colors in this world. John, not normally one for aesthetics, fails
to appreciate the landscape’s ugliness. Its wrongness, however, impresses
itself upon his perceptions strongly enough that the layer of earth bonded
with the skin on his forearms rucks up into little terracettes, like clay
gooseflesh. It becomes more acute as John half-climbs, half-stumbles down
the hill towards the empty checkpoint.
The sunless heat and the oppression in the air become stronger
the closer they get to the building.
VI. Many men died of the waters,
because they were made bitter
The Skin Girl pushes through the gap, stepping over the
body. John, too, steps over the body, but once inside crouches
beside it. It’s lying face down, in the doorway. The door slides
back and forth a few inches, again and again, blocked by the
uniformed corpse, growling and trying again with no success.
Grasping a shoulder in his left hand, John turns the body over. The
body’s lightness, like an abandoned wasp’s nest, surprises
him, and he pulls too hard, cries out, flips the man
over, sending the body flying a few feet into the
corridor. The body rustles. The door, freed,
slides shut, quickly, plunging John and
the man into darkness for a moment,
before fluorescent tubes above his
head bang on, one after the other,
illuminating a dusty corridor, leading
down into the bowels of the building.
The Skin Girl, several paces down the corridor, turns around. He beckons her
over.
John shakes his head for a moment, and then goes to see the corpse. Its lips are
pulled back over blackened teeth. The eyeballs have dried up completely, leaving
behind optic nerves that stretch across dry sockets like cobwebs.
“Do you
…
?” His voice tails off.
She shakes her head.
The other bodies, further down the corridor, are the same: the one slumped over
the checkpoint desk, head buried in a box of security passes; the uniformed woman
sitting with her back to the checkpoint wall, dust in eye sockets and mouth; the two
men lying on the floor of an office, next to the remains of smashed, blasted computer
terminals.
John concludes that the rustling sound he can hear is the sound of the wind on the
paper-dry corpses. Then he looks back over his shoulder. The door’s still shut. There’s no
breeze in here.
He looks up. There is a closed circuit camera above John’s head. Its red light is
blinking.
“Hey,” he says, beckoning the Skin Girl over. He points.
The Skin Girl looks up at the camera intently. Then she screws her eyes up, lowers
her head, presses the heel of her hand against her forehead.
“You OK?” says John.
She shakes her head from side to side, as if to clear it. “Just a headache,” she says.
“Say what?” says John.
VII. And they sung a new song
The staff canteen is full of dead men and women in uniform, lying on
the floor, still holding trays, slumped over plates of long-dried food, white-clad
caterers on the floor, their arms lifted, their shriveled hands still clutching the
edge of the counter. John begins to feel something not unlike the sickness in his
stomach again. He crosses the hall, ahead of his companion, and begins to sing,
his voice distorted by the place’s strange acoustics.
When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of Death and Hell’s Destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side!
Songs of praises,
Songs of praises,
I will ever give...
He trails off. The Skin Girl says, “What is that you’re singing?”
“It’s about my hope,” he says.
She laughs, once, sharply.
VIII. I know thy works
More of the fluorescent tubes flicker on and off, the further
down they go.
The installation’s corridors are full of dead bodies, sometimes so
many that they have to climb over them.
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