Christopher Golden - The Monster’s Corner - Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

“Just today?” she asked, and tried to screw a crooked smile into place. Gallows humor.

Embers still fell like gentle stars. Both of them looked up to see burning fragments peel off of the roof of the cathedral. The cathedral itself would be burning soon. Sparks floated down like cherry blossoms on an April morning.

The woman looked down and slowly pulled together the shreds of the T-shirt. There was not enough of it to cover her nakedness, but the attempt was eloquent.

“You won’t hurt me, too, mister,” she said softly, almost shyly, “will you?”

“No,” he said, and he was surprised to find that his mouth was dry.

“Will you … let me go with you?” It was an absurd question, but he understood why she asked it.

He shook his head. “I’m not a good companion.”

“You helped me.”

Helped, she had said. Not saved. The difference was a thorn in his heart, and he hated that he had allowed himself to care.

He said nothing, however. It would be impossible to explain.

The woman crawled away from the dead men and huddled behind a corner of the car. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” he countered. He prayed that it would not be something symbolic. Not Eve or Mary or —

“Rose,” she said. “My name’s Rose.”

“Just Rose?”

She shrugged. “Last names really matter anymore?” She coughed and spat some blood onto the street.

“Rose,” he said, and nodded. Rose was a good name. Simple and safe. Without obligations.

“What’s yours?”

She asked it as he rose to stand in a hot breeze. The sheets he had wrapped around his body flapped in the wind.

“Does that matter?” he asked with a smile.

“You saved my life.”

“I ended theirs. There’s a difference.”

“Not to me. You saved my life. They’d have raped me again and made me do stuff, and then they would have killed me. The big one? He’d have killed me for sure. I saw him stomp another waitress to death ’cause she didn’t want to give him a blow job. She kept screaming, kept crying out for her mother.”

“Her mother didn’t come?”

Rose shook her head. “Her mom’s back in Detroit. Probably dead, too. No … Big Jack got tired of Donna fighting back and just started kicking her. It didn’t make no sense. He’d have worn her down eventually. They had us for almost a week, so I know.”

Saint John closed his eyes for a moment. A week.

Rose said, “I’ve seen what happened with other women. There’s only so long you can fight before you’ll do whatever they want.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “Donna was just nineteen, you know? Her boyfriend was in Afghanistan when the lights went out. He’s probably dead. Everybody’s dead.”

“You said everybody gives in. You kept running. Kept fighting.”

Rose looked away. “I got nothing left. These pricks … this was all I had. They won.”

“No,” he said softly. “You have life.”

She cocked an eye at him. “ ’Cause of you.”

Saint John wanted to turn, to look up and see if the angels were still watching from the shadowy doorway, but he did not. Angels were shy creatures at the best of times, and he did not want to frighten them off. If “frighten” was a word that could be used here. He wasn’t sure and would have to ponder it later.

When he noticed the woman studying him, he asked, “Would you have given in? Stopped fighting them, I mean?”

“Probably. If I did they would have treated me better. Given me food. Maybe let me wash up once in a while.”

“Would that have been a life?”

Rose looked up at the embers and then slowly shook her head. “Don’t listen to me, mister. They gave me some pills to make me more attractive. No — that wasn’t the word. What is it when you cooperate?”

“ ‘Tractable’?”

“Yeah.”

“They gave you pills?”

“Yeah. I can feel them kicking in now. Oxycontin, I think. All the edges are getting a little fuzzy.”

Saint John gestured to the knives. “Do you want these?”

She looked at the bloody blades. Embers like hot gold fell sizzling into the lake of blood that surrounded the three dead men.

Rose shook her head.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

A nod.

“These men,” he said gently, “there will be others like them. As bad or worse. There are packs of them running like dogs.”

“I know.”

“Then take the blades.”

“No.”

“Take one.”

“No.”

They sat and regarded the things that comprised and defined their relationship. The embers and the smoke. The blood and the blades. The living and the dead.

“Not everyone’s gone bad,” she said.

“No?”

She managed a dirty smile. One tooth was freshly chipped, and blood was caked around her nostrils. “There are guys like you out here.”

“No,” he whispered. “There is no one like me out here.”

They watched the embers fall.

After a while, she said, “You came and saved me.”

“It was someone else’s moment to die,” he said, but she did not understand what that meant.

“You saved me,” she insisted, and her voice had begun to take on a slurred, dreamy quality. The drugs, he realized. “You’re an angel. A saint.”

He said nothing.

“I prayed and God sent you.”

Saint John recoiled from her words. He felt strangely exposed, as if it were he and not this woman who was naked.

Then he felt the eyes on him again. Saints and angels from the doorway.

He stood. “Wait here for a few seconds.”

“Where are you going?” she asked with a fuzzy voice.

“Just around the corner. I’ll be right back, and in the meantime the angels will watch over you.”

“Angels?”

“Many of them.”

Her eyes drifted closed. “Angels. That’s nice.”

Saint John hurried to the corner and around it to a side street filled with looted shops. He did not linger to shop carefully; instead he took the first clothes he could find. A black tracksuit made from some shiny synthetic material, with double red racing stripes and a logo from a company that no longer existed. There were no sneakers left, but he found rubber aqua shoes of the kind snorkelers and surfers used. No underwear, no medicine. The last item he selected was a golf club. A seven iron. He smiled, pleased. Seven was God’s number.

With the clothes folded under one arm and the seven iron over his shoulder, Saint John left the store, stepping over the rotting bodies of two looters who had been shot in the head. It was impossible to say whether they had been killed by the police or other looters, and even if that information had been known, Saint John doubted that there was anyone still alive who cared. Certainly he did not.

He rounded the corner and stopped.

The woman — Rose, he reminded himself, her name was Rose — was gone.

Saint John set the clothes and the golf club down and ran the rest of the way, the streamers of his bedsheet clothes flapping behind him. The three dead men were there. His wheelbarrow of weapons was there. She was not.

Saint John looked for her for almost half an hour, but he could not find her.

As he walked back to the cathedral he found that he was sad. Saint John was rarely sad, and almost never sad in relation to a person. Yet, dusty and crumpled as she was, Rose had touched him. She had been honest with him, of that he was certain.

Now she was gone. He wished her well, and when he realized that he did, he paused and smiled bemusedly at the falling embers. It was such an odd thought for him. Alien, but not unwelcome.

“Rose,” he said aloud.

SAINT JOHN GATHERED up the weapons — knives, a club made from a length of black pipe, a wrench caked with blood — and carried them up the stairs to the church. There were guns in the wheelbarrow, and even a samurai sword that the former owner had not known how to properly use. Saint John had obliged him with a demonstration. The wheelbarrow was heavy with them; it had been a fruitful week. He carried them, an armload at a time, into the church, counting out his ritual prayers with each slow step. He wanted to get everything right; there was no need for haste, though. This was the end of the world, after all. To whom would haste matter? Inattention to details, however, could have a profound effect. Saints and angels were watching.