floor.
Lucas lifted himself up and blew the smoke from the revolver's barrel. Camp slumped in the chair, holes in his chest. The scent of fresh blood aroused the herd, and heads butted frantically against the brick walls. Camp's eyes flickered, the light in them dying like the last stars of morning.
Lucas wondered how long the herd would mill around. Daylight usually made them get scarce, but one or two of the orneriest would probably hang around. Maybe they'd get rewarded for their trouble, if they just happened to find some fresh meat out on the porch. One thing for sure, Camp would be nothing but gristle and rawhide. Hardly worth fooling with.
Lucas sat at the table. He'd heard that other people had turned to it, but the thought had sickened him. Until he'd run out of kangaroo. Hardly seemed unreasonable anymore, even for a man who followed the Lord. Camp's logic of the food chain fit right in with these balls-up times. And his stomach was squealing with all the intensity of a fresh-branded sheep.
Camp had been a fine butcher. The meat was thin and tender. Lucas stuck Camp's butcher knife into a slice and held it under his nose, checking its scent. Hell, not much different from mutton, when you got right down to it. His belly ached from need, and he wondered if that's how the sheep felt.
He chewed thoughtfully. The taste wasn't worth savoring, but it wasn't so terrible that he spat it out. He speared a second piece and held it up to the candlelight.
'You know, Sister,' he addressed the meat. 'Maybe you were right. Someday might just be here after all.'
Maybe the Good Book was right, too, that the meek were busy inheriting the earth at this very moment. Lucas figured it would be humble and proper to offer up a word of prayerful thanks. He bowed his head in silence, then continued with the meal that the Holy Father had provided.
Outside, in the dark ghost town of Wadanetta, the chorus of sheep voiced its eternal hunger.
THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE
Silence wasn't golden, Katie thought. If silence were any metal, it would be lead: gray, heavy, toxic after prolonged exposure.
Silence weighed upon her in the house, even with the television in the living room blasting a Dakota- Madison-Dirk love triangle, even with the radio upstairs tuned to New York's big-block classic rock, even with the windows open to invite the hum and roar from the street outside. Even with all that noise, Katie heard only the silence. Especially in the one room.
The room she had painted sky blue and world green. The one where tiny clothes, blankets, and oversized books lined the shelves. Wooden blocks had stood stacked in the corner, bought because Katie herself had wooden blocks as a child. She'd placed a special order for them. Most of the toys were plastic these days. Cheaper, more disposable.
Safer.
For the third time that morning, she switched on the monitor system that Peter had installed. A little bit of static leaked from the speaker. She turned her head so that her ear would be closer. Too much silence.
Stop it, Katie. You know you shouldn't be doing this to yourself.
Of course she should know it. That's all she heard lately. The only voices that broke through the silence were those saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this to yourself.' Or else the flip side of that particular little greatest hit, a remake of an old standard, 'Just put it behind you and move on.'
Peter said those things. Katie's mom chimed in as well. So did the doctors, the first one with a droopy mustache who looked as if he were into self-medication, the next an anorexic analyst who was much too desperate to find a crack in Katie's armor.
But the loudest voice of all was her own. That unspoken voice that led the Shouldn't-Be chorus. The voice that could never scream away the silence. The voice that bled and cried and sang sad, tuneless songs.
She clicked the monitor off. She hadn't really expected to hear anything. She knew better. She was only testing herself, making sure that it was true, that she was utterly and forever destroyed.
I feel FAIRLY destroyed. Perhaps I'm as far as QUITE. But UTTERLY, hmm, I think I have miles to go before I reach an adverb of such extremity and finality.
No. “Utterly” wasn't an adverb. It was a noun, a state of existence, a land of bleak cliffs and dark waters. And she knew how to enter that land.
She headed for the stairs. One step up at a time. Slowly. Her legs knew the routine. How many trips over the past three weeks? A hundred? More?
She reached the hall, then the first door on the left. Peter had closed it tightly this morning on his way to work. Peter kept telling her to stop leaving the door open at night. But Katie had never left the door open, not since-
Leaving the door open would fall under the category of utterly. And Katie wasn't utterly. At least not yet. She touched the door handle.
It was cold. Ice cold, grave cold, as cold as a cheek when-
You shouldn't be doing this to yourself.
But she already was. She turned the knob, the sound of the latch like an avalanche in the hush of a snowstorm. The door swung inward. Peter had oiled the hinges, because he said nothing woke a sleeping baby faster than squeaky hinges.
The room was still too blue, still far too verdant. Maybe she should slap on another coat, something suitably dismal and drab. This wasn't a room of air and life. This was a room of silence.
Because silence crowded this room like death crowded a coffin. Even though Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway To Heaven' jittered forth from the bedroom radio across the hall, even though the soap opera's music director was sustaining a tense organ chord, even though Katie's heart was rivaling John Bonham's bass beat, this room was owned by silence. The absence of sound hit Katie like a tidal wave, slapped her about the face, crushed the wind from her lungs. It smothered her.
It accused her.
She could still see the impressions that the four crib legs had made in the carpet. Peter had taken apart the crib while she was still in the hospital, trundled it off to some charity. He'd wanted to remove as many reminders as possible, so she could more quickly forget. But the one thing he couldn't remove was the memory that was burned into her eyes.
And any time, like now, that she cared to try for utterly, all she had to do was pull the vision from somewhere behind her eyelids, rummage in that dark mental closet with its too-flimsy lock. All those nights of coming in this room, bending over, smiling in anticipation of that sinless face with its red cheeks, sniffing to see if the diaper were a one or a two, reaching to feel the small warmth.
And then the rest of it.
Amanda pale. Amanda's skin far too cool. Amanda not waking, ever.
Katie blinked away the memory and left the room, so blinded by tears that she nearly ran into the doorjamb. She closed the door behind her, softly, because silence was golden and sleeping babies didn't cry. Her tears hadn't dried by the time Peter came home.
He took one look at her, then set his briefcase by the door as if it were fireman's gear and he might have to douse the flames of a stock run. 'You were in there again, weren't you?'
She stared ahead, thanking God for television. The greatest invention ever for avoiding people's eyes. Now if only the couch would swallow her.
'I'm going to buy a damned deadbolt for that room,' he said, going straight to the kitchen for the martini waiting in the freezer. Mixed in the morning to brace himself for the effort of balancing vermouth and gin all evening. He made his usual trek from the refrigerator to the computer, sat down, and was booted up before he spoke again.
'You shouldn't be doing this to yourself,' he said.
Julia debated thumbing up the volume on the television remote. No. That would only make him yell louder.
