Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

“So go,” he said. “Just go and leave me and my boy alone.”

“It’s not so simple. Buzz isn’t up for the trip. He’s hopeless. The eternal nomad. He wants to keep moving. I try to tell him — movement for the sake of movement is just another trap. It’s reductive after a while. I want to take my boys to the next level. Where we won’t even need the soup to move through the membrane.”

“And what about Buzz?”

“I’m working,” she said, “on saving Buzz. On saving everyone.”

Sweeney took a few steps into the middle of the pile of Abominations. He rested a foot on the Elephant’s hip and said, “Yeah, they look saved.”

“Like the Sheep said, looks can be deceiving. Are you scared of it?”

“Am I scared? Of ingesting brain fluid and whatever other shit this idiot cuts it with?”

Nadia smiled and looked back to the comic book, shaking her head above her bottle.

“He’s not an idiot, Sweeney. Trust me on that.”

“Well, you should know. You’re the one who found him in Phoenix.”

“He told you?” she asked, unfazed, taking another sip of beer.

“He told me you’re their pimp,” Sweeney said. “You’re the one who finds the fresh victims.”

“Victims?” Nadia repeated. “Little dramatic there, don’t you think? Who’ve we victimized?”

He stepped off the Elephant and moved to the table and looked down over her.

“Danny to start with,” he said. “And me.”

“You? Jesus, Sweeney, you live to be a victim. Did you feel like a victim last night? While you were fucking me?”

He put his hand around her throat and started to squeeze. She looked up at him, unafraid, giving away nothing.

“I’m leaving now,” he said, but he kept the pressure constant. “I’m getting my son and I’m getting the fuck out of this city. And if you come after us, I’ll kill every one of you.”

Now she started to make the choking sounds. She dropped the beer bottle, reached up and put both hands around his wrist. He let go of the throat, but she held onto the hand. Pushed it down from her neck and inside the robe and across her right breast. He tried to pull away and she held firm.

And then he was untying the robe with his free hand and she was leaning back on the bench and pulling him down on top of her. The kinetics of it were fast and brutal. No grace, no tenderness. His mouth went down on her neck. She arched her back, pulled his hair. He pushed her legs open. She pulled off his shirt and threw it, pulled the T-shirt beneath out of the pants. They worked together to unbuckle and unzip, got his pants down past his knees and left them there.

Then he was in her and they were both bucking, working for the rhythm. He dropped his head. A nipple fell into and out of his mouth. She made a sound, grabbed at his shoulders. He got his hands up under her arms, felt her sweat, tried to lift her, reposition her. He felt her hands under his balls, on his ass, up his back. The speed and force of his thrusts increased. He looked at her face. The eyes were open but squinting. He looked down at the floor, saw the Abominations, immobile, staring at nothing. He looked at the fire, felt himself starting to come.

And then felt the stab of the spike.

He ejaculated but the orgasm broke off, went numb before climax. He yelled, tried to pull out and roll away but she had her legs wrapped around his waist and his own legs were strapped by his pants.

Then she released him and he fell to the floor, trying to turn around and look at his backside, hands flailing behind him. He was on his knees, turning from side to side. He heard her say, “I don’t agree with Buzz,” and looked up, saw her holding a syringe. Her legs were still splayed, her face shining, sweaty in the firelight. Her head was resting on the lunch table and she’d pulled the robe closed over her breasts.

She threw the syringe past him into the campfire. There was a bloody smudge across her fingers. She brought herself up to sitting, seemed to swoon a little before she steadied herself with her hands.

She looked at Sweeney and said, “I don’t think you have to save yourself.”

She pulled the comic book into her lap, leaned toward him over her knees. Her face started to fade and there were flashes of light behind her as if someone were taking pictures.

The last thing Sweeney heard was, “I’ll see you on the other side.”

. . The freaks rode in steerage out of the interior plains, packed in the darkness and stench of the elephant trailer. At night, they slept in open fields, under a moon that looked too big and clear to be real. And if they had heard the collision with the Resurrectionist, none of them spoke of it.

Though there was traveling money, they chose to scavenge their food from the wilds in order to avoid seeing others. They shared a need to be alone for a time, as family. To bind into one another in preparation for whatever lay ahead. And as they moved toward the western shores, they found even more untamed territories in which to hide. Much of Gehenna, it seemed, lay unconquered. The troupe spied the occasional sign of civilization, towns and villages that had sprouted around railstops. But from a distance, these settlements appeared more outposts than anything else, precarious — and maybe temporary — havens for the restless and the pursued.

Again they kept to the back roads and the wooded pathways. The chicken boy told Bruno when and where to turn, made all the forkin-the-road decisions. His seizures were getting more severe if less frequent. And when he returned from Limbo, he rarely had much to say about what he had learned. He studied the sun and the stars, gave directions to the strongman, and withdrew more deeply into himself. Kitty was both hurt and worried. She watched as Chick scribbled ferociously in his diary. She tried to ignore his nighttime wanderings away from camp and into the dense forests where the troupe hid.

The chicken boy’s confession finally came on the night that Aziz first smelled the salt of the ocean. They had pulled into a grove of enormous trees and were moving through the usual camp-making routines when the human torso tossed his head back, pulled in air through his nose, and announced, “I think we’ve reached the shores.”

All of the other freaks froze in place and began to imitate Aziz. And after a moment they started to nod and then murmur their agreement. In the wake of the murmuring came the celebratory sounds of a homecoming — though, of course, none had ever been to the western shores before. Their joy and hope were born of a sense of destination achieved. The fact that this destination was an unknown landscape didn’t matter very much at first.

Durga, Jeta, and Antoinette danced together in a small circle. Vasco and Marcel did their own little jig. Nadja and Milena embraced and hooted. Aziz hopped around on his knuckles like a frog. Only Chick maintained the gravity of the road, opening his beak in an effort to taste the salt that hung in the air. As if needing to confirm something.

Seeing the look on the chicken boy’s face, Bruno tamped down the revelry and called the troupe to a meeting. When they were all settled on the ground, the strongman put his remaining hand on his hip and spoke.

“It seems,” he said, “that we’re very close now. The ocean is less than a day away. And, believe me, I’m as anxious as all of you to get off the road and rest for a while. But I think, right now, that the one who brought us here should say a few words.”

He lowered himself to the ground with only marginally less grace than he’d once possessed.

Chick looked hesitant as he stood before the clan. He toed the earth as he thought about how best to begin. He scratched absentmindedly at his feathers and avoided eye contact.