Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

Taking a breath, she shifted position and said, “You okay?”

Sweeney sat up slowly and pulled down the sleeves of his shirt. He eyed Buzz cautiously and said, “You’re sure it was enough?”

She took her hand off the neck, wiped her palm across Buzz’s back, and said, “He’s in Limbo. And he’s never coming back.”

It took about an hour to give the Harmony a mediocre wipe-down. They worked in silence and spent most of their time packing what Nadia said she needed from the factory. They crated a hodgepodge of equipment, left it on the dock, and sat down in the rocking chairs.

“Do I want to know what was in my spike?” Sweeney asked.

“Saline,” Nadia said. “And some food coloring.”

“And you’re sure you won’t have any problems with the others?”

“I can handle my boys,” Nadia said. “Even the dumbest of the bunch knows he needs me more than Buzz.”

Sweeney thought about this for a few seconds, then asked, “How long will it take us to get there?”

For a while, he didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she said, “I’d like to make it to Tampico by Sunday. But you know, you can’t really open up a hearse.”

And as if on cue, they heard engines in the distance and looked out across the ruins to see the Abominations approaching. Near the end of the line of bikes he spotted his Accord. And bringing up the rear was the hulking, antique hearse. Both vehicles were spewing black smoke but managing to keep up with the convoy.

“I can’t believe,” Sweeney said, “they got the hearse up and running.”

“That’s been your problem from the start,” Nadia said. “This is a talented family. We can fix almost anything.”

“You’re sure there’s room,” Sweeney asked, “for both of them?”

“There’ll be plenty of room,” Nadia said. “There’s a lot of space when you take out the casket.”

Then the engine scream got too loud to talk over and they sat in silence as the bikes and the hearse and the Honda fell into a semicircle before them, idling, rumbling. The bikers glanced expectantly from one to the other and then all eyes turned up toward Nadia and Sweeney. And the nurse and the pharmacist gazed down on this collection of freaks, overgrown children with the names of creatures, all of them looking as if they had been woken, too suddenly, from a sleep that was heavy with the odd logic of dreams.

Nadia leaned over the dock railing and let a small smile spread over her lips.

“Okay, kids,” she said, “it’s time to rise and shine.”

. . They came from the city of Quinsigamond, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, a land of bad dreams and rubble. They crossed the American continent in a southwestern arc, traveling in a convoy that fragmented and regrouped over a run of days and states. And they became a family in the way that only renegades can, by embracing their difference and taking the hard-line against consensus reality.

Make no mistake, however: traveling with the comatose is a complex undertaking. But Nadia had planned well and thoroughly and on those rare occasions when her plans failed to consider an eventuality, she was a genius at improvisation.

Fueled on amphetamine and fast food, the Abominations kept pace with their leader, gunning their bikes through the night, some of them blocking for the hearse, some of them covering its rear. Sleeping rough, out in the fields and forests, they huddled in their leathers. They torched the Honda and abandoned it in Newark. They lost the Fluke to a state cop somewhere in Delaware. They lost the Piglet to a county sheriff someplace in South Carolina. But Nadia had no worries. The boys would either catch up or disappear, she said, and there wasn’t much anyone could do either way.

As for the hearse, it was left undisturbed, as if, in this land, death was always the final authority. The nurse and the pharmacist took turns driving, Danny and Buzz stretched out in the back. Nadia monitored her patients, tended their lines and sponged them down each night. She drew fluid from Buzz’s makeshift shunt. Beneath the beer cans in a Styrofoam cooler at his feet, she stored the vials — the Sheep’s new source of meat for the soup they’d consume while in transit. Danny’s fluid she dumped out the window.

Behind the wheel, Sweeney was pleasantly surprised to find a radio in the dash. He fiddled with the dial until he found the Chi-Lites or the Stylistics, then he would let himself daydream. And when he rode shotgun, he transcribed the daydreams on the back of his son’s medical reports, using Dr. Peck’s surgical marker.

From his perch on the dashboard, Rene, the salamander, acted as compass, herald, and mascot. Once or twice, when passing through a rural stretch, Sweeney pulled over and collected some beetles and aphids for the newt. But Rene didn’t seem interested in the grub and he began to eat less and less as the journey progressed. As if he were moving beyond food. As if he were preparing for a new kind of sustenance.

After a time, Sweeney started to follow Rene’s lead, foregoing the greasy burgers and fries and reducing his intake to the speed and the beer. In this way, the trip became more and more like a story as they pushed southward and began to zero in on the border, made themselves ready to cross out of their homeland forever. And at some unnoticed point on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere, Sweeney succumbed to a profound repose. And he understood that this was what it felt like to believe.

Unlike Sweeney, Nadia remained insatiable. The hearse became littered with her refuse, crumpled and stained paper bags piling up amid crushed aluminum cans and Danny’s issues of Limbo, which were now in a condition somewhat less than pristine.

Late in the night, as Nadia speeded along, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a can or a bunful of meat, chattering about what they would find at the end of their journey, Sweeney would page through one of the comics, reading by the glove box light, searching out a needed name or nugget of history. Then he’d close the box and scribble in the dark on the back of a med sheet, sometimes right on an x-ray.

By Augusta, he came to feel, at last, that he understood the story of the freaks. By Tuscaloosa, he understood that the story was deficient. And by the time they crossed the border at Brownsville, he found that he was reading solely for reference.

To many, it might seem crazy to travel west in order to move east. But the only freighter bound for Old Bohemia that would consent to carry this troupe of misfits was the Wyznanie, an ancient Polish tramp with a crew of convicts and a captain who napped through much of the passage.

The ship departed from the Port of Tampico and steamed out of the gulf, headed for the old world. Nadia paid a fortune for transport, but they were able to drive the hearse right into the hold, where the Abominations set up camp.

The bikers stayed below deck throughout the journey, eating and sleeping among the freight — barrels full of colored inks and embalming fluid, crates full of barbiturates and the pulpiest of paper. They spent the nights curled together in blankets, rolling with the waves and dreaming of the castle on a hill outside of Maisel. Nadia had described it as the last clinic they would ever need. But Nadia never came down to the hold.

She remained, day and night, at the bow of the ship, Buzz in the deck chair behind her, wrapped in quilts, his eyes covered by sunglasses. Studying the Atlantic, Nadia searched for other ships that might be carrying other dreamers striving toward the same castle, that final clinic, the healing church of all sleeping freaks.

And like a mirror at the ship’s stern, Sweeney watched everything recede. Behind him, Danny lounged and dreamed, wrapped in alpaca.