Ravenous Dusk (29 page)

It was a stillness even God dared not break into, and for that she was most grateful.

From the moment she'd broken down in the cafeteria, she'd lost her old instincts for repression and bitterness. The people here were kind to her, as kind as they'd been in Bishop, but they knew the worst of her, and loved her still. When she slipped and unsheathed her verbal claws now and again, they were forgiving, they understood. It made no difference that He was behind all their eyes, as He was behind her own. For a long while after her first breakthrough, He was completely silent. She began to talk about her life. Babbling to Dr. Echeverria, to the children who came to the clinic for minor injuries they often invented in order to get sweets. She apologized, babbling even more, but they understood. Even the children, with their wizened, hell-and-back gazes, accepted her life, folded her pain in with their own and took it away, left in its place laughter and love.

When she looked at herself in the mirror at the end of that first day, she was startled by how her face had changed. The scowl lines carved into her face, along her mouth and between her eyes, the swells of stress-clenched muscle at her jawline: all gone. For a second, she'd gone electric with rage, as if someone had erased her birth certificate, had negated
her
. And in that flicker of anger, her old, fierce face had materialized, and she frightened herself away from mirrors for a while.

That night, a big silver bus came and delivered fifty-two terminal cancer patients. A platoon of residents came streaming out into the driving icy wind as to a family reunion, pushing wheelchairs, brandishing extra blankets and big, broad smiles.

The passengers pressed against the glass eagerly, those who could rise from their gurneys. Sunken, sallow death-masks, spidery, clawed hands fluttered behind the fogged glass as the loading doors were thrown open and three wheelchair ramps unfurled.

Stella froze on the front steps, overwhelmed. She hugged herself in shame. Each of them had suffered far more than she had. When she was changed, the tumor in her liver had been of sufficient mass and strategic location to seal her doom, but had only begun to spread and leach away her vitality, and she had refused treatments that would have ravaged her at least as badly as her disease. These people had come in the last hours of a losing battle that had hollowed them out, left them so wasted that the subtle glow of their naked souls shone behind their yellow eyes and through the eggshell smoothness of their skulls, like a feeble flame guttering in a paper lantern. So frail and shrunken were they that she couldn't tell the children from many of the adults, and there were so many children, with not a healthy loved one among them to hold their hands.

They glowed now, as three by three they were carefully rolled down the ramps and across the salted parking lot to the medical center entrance. Glowed like blessed pilgrims at the steps of Lourdes, glowed with faith and hope and awe. Stella felt a warmth growing in her, and she let herself smile. Their faith would not be dashed by an indifferent God, here. If the miracle of this place was more than anyone bargained for, if it was a pact with a different order of soul-collector altogether, where was God to put a stop to it? It worked.

The other residents moved in a well-drilled procedure, no one giving orders or faltering, flowing around her like a human tide. When she let go of her brooding, she found her body knew where to take her. She followed herself onto the bus and down the aisle to the back, where Dr. Echeverria checked the vitals of a young Asian girl pressed against a window. His face was knitted in concentration, and when she got closer, Stella could understand why. The girl's throat was obscured by malignant wattles, pendulous masses the Doctor had to palpate aggressively for several minutes before he stood and shook his head. "A few minutes more and she would have made it," he said.

Stella was shaken, despite herself. The still, waxen face looked like the flesh of a dehydrated apple, but the eyes still stared out the window. Stella understood all too well the determination that had etched itself in the dead girl's gaze. "I'll get a corpsman. Is there—do we have a morgue here?"

Dr. Echeverria looked at her gravely. "Just get a gurney for her, please."

She picked her way carefully across the lot to the breezeway, where a convoy of gurneys was parked just alongside the double doors to the reception hall. Through the glass, she saw her fellow residents arranging the pilgrims on burgundy vinyl couches in the huge solarium. The ceiling of the room reached up through the building to a skylight built into the roof. Up on the third floor balcony, she spied a few children peeking over the rails, sly smiles and glittering gray eyes. They spotted her and ducked down, but their mischievous giggles echoed through the vast open space. She looked up through the skylight, saw only a black rooftop of clouds.

She grabbed the gurney and hurried back. All of the other passengers had been unloaded, and Dr. Echeverria waited patiently for her, seated beside the dead girl as if he were only waiting for her to wake up. She clamped her nose shut against the medicine smells, the sickness smell, as she and the Doctor gently lifted her body, so light it almost floated out of their hands, and laid her on the gurney. Stella cinched a strap across her midsection and laid a wool blanket over her, but Dr. Echeverria stopped her when she went to drape it over her face.

"Put her in with the others, Nurse Orozco."

"But she's—dead."

"You have a lot to learn about how we practice medicine, up here, Nurse Orozco. Cellular activity goes on for hours after death, in some parts of the body, for days. Her cancer is still viable."

Stella touched the girl's hand, splayed out across her concave chest. It was as cold as the window she'd been looking out of when she died. What could be left of her? Only her cancer was still alive in her, greedily sucking up the last dredges of life left in her sad husk long after the world had stolen away her breath, her heat. What would rise from this deathbed, when the light touched her, when she ascended the Moon Ladder?

She pushed the gurney down a ramp and across the lot, but her eyes were on the sky until she passed inside. The residents had finished arranging the pilgrims on their couches, filling less than half of them. With hand pats, hugs and whispered assurances, the residents retreated back into the bowels of the center. A hush fell over the solarium, broken only by those who breathed with mechanical assistance, and quiet prayers.

Dr. Echeverria took her by the shoulders and steered her back down the ramp leading to the underground quarters. "It isn't healthy, getting repeated exposures," he said. "We'll come back and see to any who need assistance, but for now, we'll leave them to it."

They waited in the cafeteria, drinking juice and talking in hushed, excited voices. The mood was not unlike that of an emergency room lounge, where people reflect on miracles and on the arbitrary cruelty of God. But it was much more than that. They were like adults who truly believed in Santa Claus, in the healing hand of God, because they'd seen it at work. They'd done all they could. Now it was in His hands—

She wanted to go up and see it now, see it reach down and touch them as it had touched her. As He had entered her. But she knew without asking that it was out of the question, as was her going out into the woods to watch from outside. She burned to see it again, to know what it did to them.

After an interminable hour, they all rose and walked into their quarters, while the medical staff veered off and went back up the ramp. Stella followed them, anxious to see, but they went on up the stairs to the staff rooms on the second floor. Stella stopped, looking around the reception room. All the lights had gone out, and the gloom above was heavier than ever, the forms on the couches only humps of deeper shadow. The room pulsed with the shuddery breaths of the dying. Was it a sham?

The breathing became
breath
, a singular oceanic current reverberating in the suddenly tiny solarium. Stella felt it seeping into her, and she broke down in tears again, goddamit.

She woke the next morning to the sound of trucks. She went to the window just as the last of them rolled out of the lot and crossed the bridge. Refrigerated freight trucks. She remembered them well from days in the field in the Central Valley, just downwind from the monstrous Harris Ranch, which the wittier Anglo farm employees called Cowshwitz. They hauled meat from the slaughterhouses. These ones were forest green, with a white logo of a cross on a stylized mountain peak. Heilige Berg Farms, it

said on the side.

The bus still stood at the far end of the lot.

"What's going on?" she asked, but He was nowhere to be found.

She dressed and ran downstairs, certain that something was wrong, and if she didn't hurry, she wouldn't catch them in their lie, and—

She stopped where the stairs spilled out into the central reception area. Faint liquid sunlight brought the colorful room into achingly bright focus. The trucks hadn't taken them away. They were all here, silent and still as death on the couches. The odorless mountain air carried ribbons of fetid charnel reek past her face.

She looked around at the bodies, all of them blackened and swelled and so very badly decomposed that she wondered how long she must have slept. She heard no breathing, saw none of them stir.

Her scream rose up to the skylight.

Dr. Echeverria peered over the balcony at her. His head bobbed as he went down the stairs.

"What's wrong with them?" she screamed. "Is this your miracle?
They're all dead!
"

The Doctor ran then, took the last five steps in a bound that his plump, low-slung body might've found impossible in his old life. He ran up to her, took her arms, looking spooked. He should've been breathing hard.

"What are you talking about?"

"It didn't work! Look around you! They're—" She choked on a hurtful sob. Another thing she believed in gone to rot—or was it her presence, her curse, that killed them?

He only studied her with that blank, weighing look that told her He was behind those eyes. "This is all part of it, Nurse Orozco. Think of the old body as a womb, and the cancer the fetus, gestating, but shapeless, until they come here. Then the body feeds the cancer, using itself up to give the new body life."

Stella looked around. She still saw only death. She was reminded of the ghastly video walkthrough of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide in San Diego. The ranks of peaceful, purple-shrouded bodies, the occasional exposed, green-gray hand, clutching a roll of quarters. Waiting for a cosmic transformation that passed them by. Would He allow himself to see if something had gone wrong? Was He insane?

She covered her eyes and tried not to cry again.

Something stirred.

A ripe tearing sound cleaved the tomb-like quiet, and when she turned, she saw Seth Napier all over again. The old derelict splitting open, disgorging a new Stephen into the world.

The dead Asian girl sat up on her couch, still shedding the last scraps of dying, benign flesh. Glowing so brightly Stella expected her to unfold great, jeweled butterfly wings. "Please," she said, "can I have a glass of water…Stella?"

And that was when Stella went out to listen to the snowfall.

She could only hold her body and mind still for so long, and almost before she found her quiet center, her anger began to clamor for a voice.

One good thing about His presence. She would never want for someone to argue with.

It's not right, she thought, in a loud inner voice she hoped would rouse Him. People aren't meant to live forever.

You know what I mean. Immortality isn't what we're meant for. Who are we to say who gets to live forever?

She kicked at the snow angrily. If He could read her thoughts, if He lived in there, why did He make her spell everything out, if not to torture her?

She scanned the edges of the field, restless. There weren't too many places to go. Only a few hundred yards from the medical center, the road crossed a bridge over the frozen river gorge and disappeared behind a ridge. Behind the center, the mountain redoubled its vertical aggression in a rumpled pile of peaks that defied casual hiking. Likewise the downhill slope: an old logging road wound down the steep face of the edge of the plateau, but it became a forbidding tunnel through icy forest just beyond the edge of the field. Stella headed for the bridge.

As if to distract Him, she took up the internal argument. Nobody would turn you down, because people are selfish. Everyone thinks they deserve to live forever, but the world is for those unborn, too. If nobody dies, the world will be overrun in a few decades, and even if you stop people from having babies, then the world grows old and insane…

She made better time once she plodded out of the field of powder and onto the plowed roadway. She skidded along in her heavy boots, puffing like a locomotive.

She paused at the bridgehead. The road beyond the bridge scaled the opposing cliff-face in three switchbacks, then went over the ridge. She had no idea what was on the other side.