And Moses can make out one more graffito – a series of words painted in neat white around the top of one of the tanks. The motto says, simply:
AT DESTRUCTION AND FAMINE THOU SHALT LAUGH.
Moses recognizes the quote, for it was one he has said to himself at times over the past fifteen years of his life – usually in quiet places, under roofs with rain falling on them, or on sunless days when it seemed the road may have no end. He knows the quote, and he completes it under his breath:
Neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.
Moses knows it to be true – that the words are the best and the worst of everything.
Around the base of the six tanks are other structures, squat wide buildings that must contain the machinery that once processed and refined what was held in the tanks. And among and upon the structures of the gasworks, there is a war going on.
Figures run every which way, calling out or pointing their guns or hiding in some enclosed niche or collapsing to the ground with a bullet gone through them. And here is the full-blown bathos of it all. Moses can see now that there are four distinct factions at battle down in the bowl-shaped valley. There are the soldiers in their pressed uniforms, engineering precise manoeuvres around the tall metal structures, fighting with the cold confidence of a reborn civilization striking out against the filthy reminders of its own wild past. Then there are Fletcher’s men, a ragged collective, a mobile army which has gathered guns from all corners of the country. They have experience on their side, for every day on the road is a battle for them. They live conflict. Then there are the bandits who have been residing at the gasworks. These are almost indistinguishable from Fletcher’s men – but if one looks, one can see that they are even more ragged, embattled by stasis and starvation. They wear more the look of survivors than marauders. And they do not fight in tandem with Fletcher’s men but against them as well as the soldiers – perhaps in retaliation for Fletcher having brought this battle upon them in the first place. And the final faction is the dead themselves. Some rogue has set free all of Fletcher’s monstrous sideshow dead, and it seems the bandits may have had some caged dead on hand as well. Now they all roam free, feeding on the newly dead and the not quite so dead, pacing slowly through the combat, without rush, without malice – possessing the neutrality of parasites on a larger body. Some of them are struck down, and they fall with the same implacable calm with which they walked a moment before – but most are ignored since their threat is the slower one. Almost insect-like, some of these anthropophages sit cross-legged on the ground, the sounds of death and destruction coming to bear all around them, while they slowly munch away at the leg or arm of a fallen combatant and let the snow collect gently in their hair.
Good lord, Moses Todd says from his perch above the valley. As he watches, a bandit woman with a longrange rifle hunched atop one of the tanks is pierced by a bullet that sends a quick atomizer mist of blood out from her back – then she topples over and falls to the ground, crashing once over a railing that cracks her body and folds it backwards unnaturally so that when she comes to rest the heel of her foot is up by her ear. Then a slug wanders over without haste to the bent body and digs into it with unhurried and brute fingers, opening the abdomen of the woman and pulling thick ropes of viscera free from the cavity. As the slug chews on the rubbery intestines of the woman, he looks around him with patient, ruminative eyes.
Moses Todd turns his gaze away from the fray and looks behind him – into those empty mountains and the grey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond. For a moment it looks as though he will turn his back on it all, as though he may give a shrugging refusal to it all. He is a mountain man, as he is other things. A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore – and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them.
But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye.
*
He remembers his daughter. His girl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair. How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in his arms. He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because it meant shelter for her from the world. Her tugging at his beard with her little grasping hands. His fear of crushing her, because his brute arms were not built for such delicacy as daughters offer.
And his wife, too. A woman who presented herself as beyond the knowing of any in the world but him. The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast. He was nobody’s master when he was with her – but just an overgrown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle smile. She did not know how she was wound around everything in him, as though his lungs and heart and stomach were gripped tight by the burning gaze of her.
And there was no goodbye for them either. Even after he stopped looking for them. Even now, years later, there is no goodbye. A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut it behind doors.
*
So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back to the battle below. Something in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of purpose and movement. He scans the structures, mapping them in his mind, determining which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal.
Then he clambers down the face of the hill, sliding much of the way on the dirty ice, controlling his fall by grappling onto the tree branches and dragging the truncheon behind as a kind of brake. He slides to the base of the hill behind one of the wide, flat buildings where piles of chopped wood are stacked against the cinderblock wall.Before he can think what to do next, one of the foot soldiers speeds around the corner and comes to a halt three feet from where Moses stands. The soldier, little more than a boy, aims his gun instinctively at Moses’ head – but there is fear and trepidation in the boy’s eyes, and he does not pull the trigger immediately.
I ain’t with them, Moses says.
I’m shooting you, the boy says, his voice trembling, as though a declaration of violence were the same thing as a bullet.
You ain’t got to, Moses says. I ain’t one of them. I’m here for my two charges is all. My brother and a red- head lady. After I got em, you can burn this place to the ground with my good wishes. You seen em?
The boy’s hand shakes, the pistol remains fixed on Moses’ forehead.
Hey, Moses says. You hearin me? Let go that trigger. Come on now.
Something in the boy’s face twitches. He is paralysed. He could fire or not fire at any moment. Moses does not like his fate to be at the hazard of nervous chance.
Goddamnit, Moses says.
Then he raises his own pistol with practised speed and fires two shots at the boy that make charred holes in his chest and cause him to convulse as if suffocating on air that is no longer breathable. The boy’s hand, in extremis, squeezes and fires too, but Moses drops in the same motion and lets the bullet fly over his head.
Then the soldier boy collapses face down on the ground. Wisps of his hair are stirred lightly by the wind.
It didn’t have to go this way, Moses says to the corpse.
There is arbitrary death by nature, which Moses recognizes is everyone’s equally shared hazard. And then there is arbitrary death by the foolishness of man. And this is something Moses cannot stomach.
He checks the magazine of his pistol, and he hefts the massive bladed instrument in his opposite hand – and then Moses Todd leaps out from behind the building and into the fray. And that’s when he begins to fight.
*
The icy earth melts with the steam of warfare, the hot spilled blood mingling with the snowy mud in rivulets of dirty pink like the stain of old wedding roses. The ground is slippery with gory melt as Moses moves forward through the battle, swinging the cudgel this way and that, firing his pistol with the other hand. He sends the cudgel in a wide arc to his left, knocking a slug’s head clean off its shoulders, while with his right hand he fires twice at a bandit wielding a sword – the first bullet thunking into his chest and the second piercing his neck, sending a plume of blood splashing to the ground. He swings the cudgel back around and catches a ragged rifle-carrying woman in the stomach. When he pulls the weapon free, most of her guts, tangled in its blades, follow. The next time he swings it upwards, it catches a massive, thick-headed slug under the chin, and a rain of shattered teeth go tip-tapping to the puddled ground.
Moses does his best to avoid the uniformed men, for he knows them to be soldier instruments of a wider order and that they would not kill him if they knew who he was. But he also knows that to them he looks like one of the bandits, one of Fletcher’s men – and it is a circumstance of war that you cannot stop to palaver about the whys and wherefores of things. So when the soldiers do threaten, he kills them too. And, he supposes, this is as right as anything – because it is just as likely that, on any given day, he would be on one side as another. He is a soldier and a reprobate, a lawman and a transgressor. So it makes no difference, at any moment in time, who dies by whose hand – as long as there is some line, capricious and invisible though it may be, for the combatants to reach across.
Death is everywhere. His ears are deafened by gunfire and screaming voices.Women and children, too – for the bandits have raised their kind to be warriors. Women with throwing knives that lodge deep and true, children with sharpened teeth that have been taught to climb your body and rip out your throat as though they were feral animals. Moses slashes his way through them, digging his heels into the muck for leverage against the ugly onslaught. Everywhere is the music of slaughter, shrill swords fifing their way clean through the air, the deep baritones of surprised death cries, the airy percussives of bodies falling to the ground and giving up their final appalled breaths. And who is the conductor? And who waves the baton? And who stitches together these crescendos of grotesque majesty?
And, too, the battle is manifold – because the chaos is too thick for the combatants to end things right, to make sure the dead stay down, and so the slaughtered everywhere on the field of battle begin to rise again – and Moses finds himself killing again those he already killed once before. Death begets death, and it is no wonder that the world is overrun so. They rise slowly amidst the pandemonium, overlooked because of their calm in the middle of such frenzy. A corpse lying face down in a puddle of bloody snow melt will twitch first in the arms, a shiver will run through the torso and all the way down to the legs. Then an arm will straighten itself, find a handhold on the ground and gently leverage itself with fresh muscle to hoist the rest of the body face up. And there it might lie for minutes at a time, opening its eyes anew to the sunlight and the noisome activity going on around it. The orbs of its eyes roll lazily to and fro until, at last, it inches itself upwards, first on its hands and knees, and then rising to full height, standing tall in sudden mockery of life itself.