The Reapers are the Angels

The woman leans back, satisfied.



But, Temple continues, that don’t mean I can stay here and be your pet. You can keep old Moses—he ain’t nothin but trouble anyway. But Maury and I, we got places to be.



To everyone else they’s a curse, the woman says with a wave of her chalky crusted arm. To us, they’s a blessing.



Who you talking about? The meatskins?



After the plague, we come down out the hills and took up our place in our rightful homes. And the shells of the lost, them that walk a foolish death, they contain the blessing for us as knows how to pluck it out. Our family, we’s nourished on the blood of God and the foolishness of the past—and we grow as giants on the earth.



Okay, Temple says. You got your ear to God’s lips. I got it already.



The woman’s hand shoots out and grabs Temple by the neck, tightening its bony claws around her throat. The fingers are huge and encircle her neck completely. Temple struggles to breathe, but Royal holds her arms behind her.



You’re a mouthy girl, the woman says. You don’t be careful, it gonna get you kilt.



She releases her grip, and Temple falls to the floor, gasping.



Then the woman’s gaze falls on Maury.



Bodie, she says, there’s somethin special about this one. He’s a bright light in the firmament. Blank as any child of God lookin for a home. You look you can observe that pureness in his eyes, sure as anything. I wanna see what the family blessing does for him. Get Doc.



THEY ARE returned to their cells, and she blinks her eyes to adjust them again to the dark.



How’s Mama? Moses Todd says.



She’s a big white lobster.



So what’s the story?



They’re the inheritors of the earth. Used to be they were just hillbillies. Now they’re the inheritors of the earth.



And what else?



And we best get ourselves out of here, toot sweet. Whether they like you or hate you, it seems like things might culminate in unpleasantness. Oh and also, I think I figured out what they’re shootin up.



At that moment the door of the room swings open and Bodie and Royal come in followed by another man, smaller, more human-sized, with glasses and long wisps of hair circling the crown of his bald head. He has a peevish, sneering expression on his face, as of a man who dislikes the company he keeps.



This time I want me a full dose, he says to the other two.



Come on, Doc, Bodie says. You know it ain’t our choice. Mama don’t like you messin round with your fine motor skills. You’re the only one knows how to harvest the stuff. From what I can tell you can’t get it just by squeezin their heads like lemons. You gone, we ain’t got nothin.



The one called Doc sneers and examines the array of slugs tripping over one another in the cell.



That one, he says, pointing to a woman with dried blood caked on her chin in a way that makes her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I reckon she looks fresh.



Good choice, Doc, Royal says, unlocking the cage. We just picked her up day before yesterday.



He leads her out and pushes the others back and swings the door of the cage shut. Then, while Doc sorts through a bunch of instruments on the table and preps the lab equipment, Royal begins to play with her, offering his arm up like a bone for a dog, leading her around the room and laughing.



She opens her mouth and lunges at him, and he steps back out of range of her teeth. He laughs shrilly.



Come on, he says. I know you want a taste of Royal in yer belly, dontcha?



Having led her around the room twice, he gets her to the foot of the autopsy table and with a quick movement takes her by the back of the neck and twists her around and pushes her back onto the metal surface, where she squirms trying to rise. Then he takes the leather belt straps and flings them over her torso and legs and fastens them tight so she can’t move.



You’re a lively thing, ain’t you? Hey, Doc, you ready to go yet?



Gimme a few goddamn minutes. It ain’t carvin a pumpkin, it’s surgery.



It’s okay—this one’s a downright pretty one. Seems like she could get used a little before we get started.



He looks at her lasciviously with his one rolling eyeball, and then Temple looks away. This is one thing God has nothing to do with.



TEMPLE’S PERSPECTIVE is obscured, but from what she can tell the operation seems to involve splitting the slug’s head open and extracting something from it. Bodie holds the head straight between his hands while Doc gingerly makes a cut using an electric bone saw. Temple wonders why they don’t just kill her first and not have to contend with a wriggling body—but then she determines that it must make a difference whether the thing is active or not when they do the operation. They take pains to go only so far into the slug’s head, and only in a particular place near the base of the skull. It isn’t until after the procedure is over that Doc says, Okay, and then Bodie takes a long blade, a butcher’s knife, and drives it up into the hole they made in the skull until the woman stops moving.



Doc holds in his hand the little gray piece they removed from the woman’s brain and takes it to the table, where he looks at it under a lamp with a big magnifying glass. Then he puts it into a little machine with some kind of chemical and turns it into a thick liquid that can be poured into a beaker and lights a bunsen burner underneath it.



Through much of the procedure, Temple sits on the ground with her back against the bars of the cell looking up at the broken rectangular window and the tiny shaft of sunlight illuminating a stream of dust motes in the stale air of the basement. She remembers again the Miracle of the Fish—the silver-gold bodies darting in circles around her ankles as though she were standing in the middle of another moon—the way things could be perfect like that on occasion—a clear god, a god of messages and raptures—a moment when you knew what you were given a stomach for, for it to feel that way, all tense with magic meaning.



It has become something to her, that memory—something she can take out in dismal times and stare into like a crystal ball disclosing not presages but reminders. She holds it in her palm like a captured ladybug and thinks, Well ain’t I been some places, ain’t I partook in some glorious happenings wanderin my way between heaven and earth. And if I ain’t seen everything there is to see, it wasn’t for lack of lookin.



Blind is the real dead.



Through the tiny broken-out place in the window above, she sees a touch of movement. She focuses on it, watching it inch along, little more than a finger shadow against the daylight. It’s a green caterpillar, and it pokes its way through the hole in the glass and along the sill of the window.



And she thinks:



Ain’t no hell deep enough to keep heaven out.



THE MIXTURE on the lab table makes its way through various pipettes and spiral tubes and beakers where Doc adds teardroppers full of other ingredients and then boils those and stirs them and checks their color against the light of the lamp until finally a valve is opened at the far right and a clear distilled liquid begins drop by drop to empty into the bottle from which they had filled their syringes the day before.



Royal unstraps the immobile corpse and slings it over his shoulder and carries it off. When he comes back, he and Bodie sit in two folding metal chairs and wait for Doc to finish the process.



How’s it goin, Doc? Royal asks.



Goin fine. That was a juicy one you got there. We gon get plenty product outta that one.



Royal slaps his knee.



I knowed it, he says. I tole Bodie when we found her she was gonna be a ripe one. Didn’t I say just those words, Bodie? Didn’t I say she was gonna be a ripe one?



Bodie doesn’t answer. He is leaning over the lab table, and his eyes are fixed on the bottle filling slowly with the clear distillate.



Royal’s lidless eye rolls back in his head and he chuckles to himself and mumbles again, Sho enough, those is the words I said.



Finally Bodie stands at his full height, and he points to Maury.



All right, then, he says. Get the retard outta his cage. Lord knows why, but Mama took a likin to him, wants to see him jacked up.



Royal goes to the cell door and opens it and says, Come on, Mr. Buffalo, you gonna get a shot of the high life.



Temple wants to stay back. She wants to watch the shaft of light coming through the broken window. She wants to watch the progress of the caterpillar as it makes its way across the windowsill. She wants to shut down her mind to so many things. But she can feel the panic blooming in her like something that had been planted a long time ago. She feels it blooming in her stomach and chest, and there ain’t nothing that ever bloomed so fast and so forceful.



Hey, she says and grabs the bars of her cell. What you wanna go and do that for? That dummy never hurt you.



Shut up, girl, Royal says. Stop bein a pest.



Yeah, she says. I get it. Inheritors of the earth, and you spend your time beatin up on dead people and dummies.



Royal’s lidless eye quivers in its socket in an absurd mimicry of anger.



You best shut your mouth, girl.



What you gonna do, eyeball me to death? You got me beat in a staring contest, I’ll give you that.



Moses Todd chuckles in the cell next to hers, stroking his beard.



You shut up too, Royal says, looking back and forth between the two.



I promise you one thing, Mr. Royal, Moses Todd announces, she ain’t easy to kill, that one.



Royal begins to breathe heavily, clenching and unclenching his fists. His eyes move back and forth between Moses Todd and Temple.



Goddamn you both—goddamn you straight to hell. You ain’t part of this family. You got nothin like what we got. There’s the holy and then there’s what you are, and you don’t watch out I’d just as soon pop your little heads like—



Royal! Bodie shouts. Royal!



Royal checks himself but doesn’t take his eyes off them.



I got the retard, Bodie says and leads Maury over to the chair. Whyn’t you get the girl out and we’ll do her next. Just for kicks. After she sees up close what her doggie does under the needle.



Royal smiles and runs his tongue along his teeth. He opens the door of her cell and says, Come on, sweetness, we gonna have some fun.