hear.
You come all this way to meet God and the guy mumbles.
“Shad?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“You… are you hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Will you come see me now? Are we going to be together again?” Her face brightened.
“No, Mama. Not just yet. You have to help me.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you have to show me the way out.”
He saw himself now, coughing on the ground. Speckled black phlegm coated his lips. He’d read somewhere that it indicated liver damage. You might survive for a while, but it pretty much meant you were through. Maybe the liver wasn’t on the left side the way he’d thought. Terror seized him again and he looked at Jesus.
No chance at mercy there. Hellfire Christ had a lot on his mind, his burning eyes glancing side to side as he paced around the woods like a prowling animal. He didn’t want sympathy and wouldn’t give any either.
He was as bad as Barabbas, wanting to kill tyrants, cut the throats of soldiers. He stared down at Shad’s body and glowered. Hellfire Christ wasn’t smiling and looked like he’d forgotten how to.
“Shad?”
“Mama, you have to help me!”
He didn’t know which was worse-the fear of dying or the humiliation he felt hearing the squeak in his voice. He gritted his teeth and the frustration yanked at his belly and became something much more awful. He just didn’t want to die up here without getting the answers he was after. He didn’t want to die.
“You should’ve brought Lament,” she said. “The hound might’ve helped.”
Even the ghosts had to get in potshots when they could, say that they told you so.
“Son?”
“I’m here, Mama.”
“Son?”
“I’m still next to you.”
Tears dripped down her cheeks. He’d never seen his mother cry before. She held her hand out to him but he couldn’t touch her.
“I said you should listen to me, son.”
“I know. You were right.”
Her gaze skittered past, then fell on him once more. “The harlot. He lay with the harlot. I still had skin, the earth wasn’t cold, and he sanded his stone and cleaved to another.”
“Enough about Pa. Tell me how to get back to the road.”
“There’s bad will on the road.”
“Just guide me back to it.”
“You can’t return that way. You’ve come too far. You can’t go back. You’ve got to go on. To the harlot.”
Hellfire Christ, his eyes brimming with vengeance, whispered to Shad’s mother again.
She said, “I don’t want to tell him that.”
Oh, Jesus.
Hellfire Christ actually put his hand on Mama, gave her a little shove forward. She said, “No. Please, no.”
“What?” Shad asked.
“Behind you,” she told him. “There.”
Shad had been wrong. Hellfire Christ still knew how to smile. His teeth were tiny and sharp and his leer kept getting wider until you knew for sure he was insane. He must’ve given it to them that way when he was on the cross, spitting down on them, smiling in his scorn. In his last moments, Christ took a piss and really let them know what he thought.
Shad turned.
He didn’t see anything for a second because he was scanning too far ahead. He took a step and hit something at his feet.
Hart Wegg’s corpse had been laid out before him like an offering.
Without a scratch on him, and with his lips tugged into a scant grin.
Hart was twined around the rifle the same way a sleeping child might hold on to a beloved toy. Like the snakes that should have been wreathed around the figure of Hellfire Christ on the Gabriels’ cross.
“But he was your man,” Shad said to the mountains. “And Jerilyn was your woman, she loved you. They died smiling.” And then hissing, so much louder than any of the rattlers. “But not my sister! She wasn’t yours!”
He spun back and his mother was gone. Hellfire Christ stood a yard away, and then a foot, and then an inch until they were nose to nose, and this Messiah stared into Shad’s eyes. His rage was no different than what Shad felt himself. It had nothing to do with fighting for freedom or redemption or heaven’s love. You were simply crazy with hate.
They both reached for each other’s throat, and when he touched God, Shad woke in agony and retched black blood across his own chest.
SOMETIMES HE STOOD OUTSIDE THE MISERY AND watched his body lurch and crawl through the woods.
It had stopped raining. The rags around his belly were gummy with red mud and stuck with foliage and moss, which helped to seal the wound.
His sister’s hand appeared only once, on an incline as he began to flounder downhill. She waved him upward through the brush and he turned and followed and kept stumbling on.
His tenacity proved more powerful than his dread. The fear that had overwhelmed him earlier had slowly been replaced by the understanding that death had already dipped down for him but had chosen not take him. He wasn’t finished yet with what he had to do.
Why had Hart Wegg been killed? Or Jerilyn? Or Megan? What purpose did it serve to keep Shad alive in the face of so much murder?
The woods thinned and shifted into a sparse cherry orchard. A note of memory chimed at the back of his mind and he began to move faster. Everywhere he touched the diseased bark of the spindly trees his hands came away covered with runny purple sap. The fruit was dying.
A surge of strength filled him and he pushed on until he broke into a clearing. He heard the truck horns nearby, wailing on Route 18.
Shad went to his knees for a minute, panting heavily, tried to get back to his feet, and couldn’t make it. He rolled over onto his back and let out a gurgling cry. He had nothing left and hoped he’d come far enough for them to find him.
It took a while but eventually the pumpkin-headed kid appeared, staring down into Shad’s face. The boy made a flat wheezing sound like calling an animal. It brought out another child, this one with arms like flippers and no bones in his legs, who hopped and crept closer, mewling. The distant corners of the yard stirred. A spineless kid with slashes for nostrils came squirming through the high grass.
Megan had led him back to Tandy Mae Lusk’s farm, to the ill children, to her own mother.
PART III. December Preys
