After Death(59)

Now, after the inexplicable events in the orchard, in his weary and disheveled condition, the hundred-dollar bill in this unlikely place conjures from his memory the axe work that he performed with such satisfaction in his late teens and stirs in him something akin to superstition. In movies in the genre of The Portent, this vast and lonely acreage of dead trees and abandoned buildings is a place where a deformed psychopath wearing a leather mask is as unstoppable as any robot terminator.

Aleem reminds himself that he doesn’t believe in omens or in karma. In the manner of an old dog, he shakes himself to cast off the stupefaction that has overcome him. He raises his eyes from the money and regards his homeys. Gathered before him, they are familiar yet mysterious in some way he can’t explain. “Hakeem, Carlisle, go round the far end, block that big open door. You’re in position, signal with a flashlight. Jason, Kuba, and me—we come in from this end, clear the place. Nina shows with her trey eight, don’t take no shit. Try just to cap the bitch’s knees. Leave the face shot for me. I done earned it.”





WHIRLED IN A VORTEX




Michael is guided by the stylized compass glowing in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision, in a manner similar to the way that battle data is projected onto the windshield of a fighter jet. He hurries through phalanxes of death-smitten trees that stand like faceless totems of some race long extinct. The ground is muddy here where grass has failed, sucking at his shoes as if the earth itself is sentient and malevolent and wishes to pull him deep underground and entomb him among the rotting roots that once conveyed sustenance to the countless limbs of the orchard.

As he passes between two haggard trees and into yet another harvesting alley, he nearly collides with a fast-moving figure so poorly revealed in the rain-slashed gloom that it might be either a man or a woman, perhaps a boy, although too tall to be John or Nina. The individual startles, nearly falls on the slippery mat of dead grass, regains balance, and issues a name and query in a voice male and unfamiliar—“Orlando?” Whoever this might be, he’s no innocent happening through the apple grove on this night of all nights. He’s one of Aleem’s crew, an experienced murderer. Even as the stranger speaks, Michael reverses his grip on the AR-15 and closes the last step between them and chops the butt of the rifle at the other’s head. The contact is solid, and the man collapses.

Michael drops to his knees on the stranger’s chest, hears a subtle crack and a plosive exhalation, but still the man has the power to buck and twist, to reach out with both hands, trying to find his attacker’s face. Turning his head to the side to protect his eyes, Michael holds the rifle by barrel and stock, employing it as a crushing tool, pressing down with all his weight and strength on the throat. He is gripped by an awful, primitive desperation that is born not from fear for his life but from an intrinsic regret that he has been reduced to this brutality, yet he does not relent, must not relent. None but a gargling sound escapes the stranger, and as his strength wanes, his hands flutter down onto the rifle and find Michael’s hands. He does not claw for relief, but presses Michael’s hands as if this encounter has resulted in an unanticipated bonding, his touch soft and supplicant, expressing a plea for mercy, though he himself has perhaps never granted the same to anyone. Michael bears down even after the limp hands slide off his, bears down with prudent respect for the deception that is so often the human way. When at last he lifts the rifle from the throat, the only response from the stranger is the rising odor of the blood and vomit that fill the mouth that shapes a silent scream.

Michael rolls off the corpse into a muddy puddle, where he lies on his back for a moment, rain beating on his face, the rifle held across his chest. The swift wind has many voices, skirling over him as though with varying opinions, at once forgiving and unforgiving, speaking of righteous necessity but also of penitence, the heady wine of violence and the sobering bread of peace, and it seems to him that there is truth in all of it.

He gets to his feet and hesitates, considering the corpse. No nearby ditch exists in which to roll the body. In the immensity of the ruined orchard, the likelihood is low that one of the dead man’s companions will stumble across him. As he seemed to have been on an urgent task, however, he is sure to be missed soon. His unexplained disappearance will alert the others to the existence of a potential threat.

Shaken, in no way reassured by the outcome of his first two skirmishes, with a sense of time running out, Michael moves forward. He is guided by the virtual compass, which proves only that Nina’s phone is switched on and signaling, not that she remains alive. The wind diminishes significantly as he makes his way to the next tree line, as if the storm might be in the process of exhausting itself, but though the rain now falls in plumb skeins, it descends in no less volume than before. He passes between trees so disfigured that they seem not formed by nature, but rather assembled by some avant-garde artist working with the splintered bones of numerous species both Earthly and alien to sculpt mockeries of creation. Beyond lies open territory, a complex of buildings—and five men clustered in the pale backwash of two flashlight beams that are aimed at the ground. They are standing in front of the largest structure, at a doorless entrance above which Michael can make out the words WHOLE FRUIT in ghostly white letters against dark weatherboarding. The virtual compass glowing toward the periphery of his vision points directly at this packing plant and now changes in color from amber to red.