The Monster's Corner Read online

  The Jock and the Naked Man stared in awakening horror as everything froze into a bubble of time in which they all floated. The woman lay supine, her mouth strained open to cry out for mercy from a God who most of the survivors of the plague believed was either dead or mad. The Big Man knelt between her thighs in a mockery of a supplicant. On either side of him crouched the Naked Man and the Jock, their hands pressing the woman’s wrists to the ground as above them an angel spread its glittering wings.

  Saint John stepped down onto the pavement, and two steps brought him to the curb. The Jock could have reached up to strike him. But he was unable to move. In his mind the pack was gone, transforming him from predator to prey.

  “Thy will be done,” whispered Saint John, and a sob of joy escaped his throat as his arms folded like wings and the knives flashed a crisscross before him. Rubies of hot blood splattered the steps and his clothes and his face as veins opened to his touch. Before the Big Man could look up again, Saint John swept his arms back and forth, each movement ending in a delicate flick of his artistic wrists.

  The Big Man finally looked up as blood slapped him across the face. Saint John appeared not to have moved, his arms held out to his sides. But on either side of him the members of the Big Man’s pack sagged to the ground in disjointed piles.

  Saint John watched the man’s eyes, saw the whole play of drama. The brutal lust and frustration crumbled to reveal shock. Then there was that golden sweet moment when the Big Man looked into the eyes of the cruciform saint and saw the only thing more terrible and powerful than the portrait of himself as postapocalyptic alpha that he had hung inside his own mind. Here was the sublime Omega.

  “No,” the Big Man said. Not a plea, merely a denial. This was not part of his world, not before or after the Fall. He had survived the plague, God damn it; he had fought through the riots and the slaughters. He had become more powerful than death itself, and he expected to rule this corner of Hell until the End of Days.

  Yet the Omega stood above him, and the pack lay drowning in their own blood. So fast. So fast.

  The Big Man tried to fight.

  But before he could close his fists he had no eyes. Then no hands. No face.

  No breath.

  The Big Man’s mind held on to the last word he had spoken.

  No.

  Then he had no thoughts and the darkness took him.

  3.

  ACROSS THE STREET the nervous little junkie was backing away, one hand clamped to his mouth, the other still clutching at his crotch. When he reached the corner he whirled and ran. Saint John did not give chase. If the little junkie and these dead men had friends, and if those friends came here, then there would be more offerings to God. If it happened that the offering included his own life, then so be it. Many saints before him had died in similar ways, and there would be no disgrace in it.

  Saint John turned suddenly, aware that he was being watched. He looked up the stairs to the church. The doors stood ajar, and the faces of saints and angels watched him. Stone saints from the carvings around the arch.

  But the angel faces? They watched from the open doorway. Cherubim and seraphim, hovering in the darkness. Saint John lifted a hand to them, but they were gone when he blinked.

  Saint John wiped blood from his eyes.

  Still gone. There were only shadows in the doorway. He nodded. That was okay. It was not the first time something had been there one moment and not the next. It happened to him more and more.

  Even so, he let his gaze linger for a moment longer before turning away.

  “Angels,” he said softly, surprised and pleased. He had only ever dreamed of angels before. Now they were here on earth, with him. And that was good.

  4.

  THE WOMAN LAY CURLED in pain, drenched in the blood of the three monsters who had hurt her, her faced locked into a grimace; but the scream that had boiled up from her chest was caged behind clenched teeth.

  She stared at Saint John. Not at his knives, because even in her horror she understood that they were merely extensions of the weapon that was this man.

  Saint John took a step toward her. Blood dripped from his face onto his chest.

  “God,” she whispered. “Please … God.”

  Red splattered onto the cracked asphalt.

  The saint knelt, doing it slowly, bending at ankle and knee and waist like a dancer, everything controlled and beautiful. The woman watched with eyes that were haunted by lies and broken promises. If she had possessed the strength, her muscles would have tensed for flight; but instead there was a weary acceptance that she was always going to be an unwilling participant in the ugly dramas of men.

  Saint John bent forward and placed the knives on the edge of the curb with the handles toward her. Inches from her outstretched hands. Dead men lay on either side of her, but she watched this, darting quick glances from the bloody steel to Saint John’s dark eyes.

  He sat back on his heels, letting his weight settle. The movement was demonstrably nonaggressive, and he watched her process it.

  “What … what do you want?” she asked weakly.

  He said nothing.

  “Are you going to hurt me, too?”

  “Hurt you?”

  She jerked her head toward the dead men. “Like them. Like all the others.”

  “Others?” echoed Saint John softly. “Other men attacked you?”

  A cold tear broke from the corner of one eye. She was not a pretty woman. Bruises, battering, and blood had transformed her into a sexless lump. The animals who lay around her had wanted her because of some image in their minds, not because she fit their idea of sexual perfection. She was the victim of smash-and-grab opportunism, and that was as diminishing as being the tool by which men satisfied their need to demonstrate control.

  “How many men?” asked Saint John.

  “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, kep
t 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.

  5.

  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.

  With his first armload hugged to his chest, he stood on the top step. The faces of the saints regarded him, and shadows cast by flickering flames played across their mouths so that it seemed as if they spoke, whispering secrets. Some of them Saint John understood; some were still mysteries to him.

  He did not see the faces of the angels. The open doorway was a dark mouth, but it was filled with empty shadows, and so he entered with his armload of weapons. He paused in the narthex and looked down the long aisle that ran from the west doorway behind him all the way to the altar at the eastern wall.

  The cathedral was vast, with vaulted ceilings that rose high into the darkness. The arches were revealed only by stray slices of firelight through the broken stained glass windows, and in this light the lines of stone looked like bones. Saint John walked to the center aisle and stopped by the last row of pews, bowed reverently, and then walked without haste through the vast nave toward the altar table.

  “I bring gifts,” he said. His voice was soft, but the acoustics of the cathedral peeled that cover away to reveal the power within, sending the three words booming to the ceiling.

  As he walked to the altar the weapons clanked musically, like the tinkle of Christmas bells. He stopped at the edge of the broad carved silver altar table and laid his offering in the center. Then, taking great care, he arranged the blades and hammers and brass knuckles in a wide arc, the blades pointed toward the rear wall, pointing to the base of the giant crucifix that hung on the eastern wall. Jesus, bleeding and triumph
ant, hung from nails. Saint John knew the secret story of this man. Jesus had not died to wash away the sins of monsters like Saint John’s father. No, he had allowed his body to be scourged and pierced as part of the ritual of purification, then he had ascended through the pain into godhood. Saint John marveled that so many people over so many years had missed the whole point of that story.

  Once the knives were arranged—seventeen in this armload—and the rest of the weapons, Saint John bowed and headed outside for more.

  It was on his second trip into the church that he noticed the footprints on the sidewalk. Small feet. A woman. Rose? Surely hers, but there were other prints; much smaller and many of them. They were pressed into the thin film of fine ash that had begun to settle over everything. Delicate steps.

  Angel feet?

  Saint John stood for a moment, his arms filled with bloodstained weapons, contemplating the footprints. Then he went inside.

  However, he paused once more as he approached the altar table.

  On his previous trip he had placed seventeen knives on this very table, arranged by size and type, from a machete to hunting knives and steak knives to a lovely little skinning knife with which he had whiled away an evening last week. There were not seventeen knives now.

  Now there were two. Only the long machete and an unwieldy Gurkha knife remained. The brass knuckles and clubs and guns were still there. Fifteen knives, though, were gone.

  Saint John considered this as he laid his second armload down on the altar. He did not for a moment believe that he had only imagined bringing in those knives. Many material things in his perception were of dubious reality, but never blades. They were anchors in his world, not fantasies. The flying saucers he sometimes saw … those, he knew, were fantasies. Knives? Impossible.

  Nor did he believe that someone—perhaps the little junkie—had snuck in here and stolen the knives.

  He was considering possibilities and probabilities when he heard a soft sound. Barely a sound at all. More of a suggestion, like the sound shadows make when they fall to the ground as the moon dances across the sky. Soft like that.