The Reapers Are the Angels (Reapers 1)

When the silence becomes too much, she walks over the footbridge to building four, where she finds the men playing cards for pills. They are on the sixth floor, gathered in a large space that takes up two floors and amplifies in echoes all their sharp laughter and gravel voices. The lobby of some company headquarters, she supposes, some monolithic company that used to occupy multiple floors in the building.

At first the men look at her begrudgingly, as though she were an augur of their own embarrassment for themselves. The boisterous laughter dies down quickly as they, one by one, notice her. Then she says:

Go on. I can’t sleep is all. I ain’t here to gum up the works.

So the game goes on, tentatively at first, then building in volume and vulgarity as they lose their suspicion and forget her presence altogether. She likes the smell of their cigarettes and the clink of their liquor bottles and the crude language that tumbles like quarry stones from their hairy lips. New men arrive, coming in from night patrols, and she watches them go through a metal reinforced door off to the side carrying pistols and AR-15 rifles and 20 gauges and come out again with their hands empty. Then they go to a table set up like a bar where a man with an apron pours them drinks.

Louis, the patrol leader, finds her.

How do you like the game? he asks.

I’m studyin it up, she says. It’s like poker with a little pooch mixed in.

Pooch?

It’s a game I used to play when I was little.

You following it?

Like I say, I’m studyin it up. What’s in the pot?

Uppers. Sleeping pills. Some painkillers. Speed mostly.

Uh-huh. Where’s a girl get some currency like that?

You want to play?

I could go a hand or two.

Louis laughs, a big friendly laugh. Then he digs into his pocket and takes her hand and slaps three blue pills into it.

Hey, Walter, he says to one of the men at the table. Why don’t you take a break. Shorty here wants to sidle up.

The men laugh and she takes her seat, saying, I don’t know what’s so sidesplittin. Any moron can turn a card.

Oooh, they say.

She loses one of her blue pills on a bad first hand, but ten hands later they give her a Ziploc baggie to carry away her winnings. Three Nembutals, five Vicodins, twelve OxyContins, seven Dexedrines—and four Viagras she uses to repay Louis for fronting her.

What’s your name again? Louis asks.

Sarah Mary.

Well, Sarah Mary, I’m impressed. I’m impressed as hell.

All right, then how bout lettin me patrol with you all tomorrow?

He laughs again, jolly and warm.

You’re something else, he says. But why don’t you let us handle the dirty work?

From what I seen, you keep pretty clean.

Sarah Mary, let me buy you a drink.

He sits her at the bar and gets her an ice Coke, and she stays there awhile watching the game until that skinny rodent of a man, Abraham, comes in and sits down on the other side of her and begins getting his eyes all up under her clothes again. And he’s with someone big who he introduces as his brother Moses, and Moses shakes her hand and nearly breaks her knuckles in his big fist—and the two of them together look like the before and after of some kind of growth serum. Moses isn’t interested in talking. He sits at the bar and drinks and looks straight ahead like he can see through to the ugly other side of everything. He’s no man to be dallied with, she knows. She’s seen men like him before, dangerous because they’ve already come back from places these other, convivial men have never been, and the souvenirs they bring back from those places exist everywhere in them, in their wet ruddy eyes and under their fingernails and in the dark patina on their very skin.

Moses just sits and stares, but his brother Abraham wants to talk, starts telling her about this girl that one of the other men nearly choked to death because she teased him and got him into one of the storage rooms and wouldn’t let him have any. And when he says it, his tongue slithers across his lips, and she can see spittle dried white in the corners of his mouth.

So she gets up and goes to the other side of the room and sits on the edge of a marble planter and watches the game and tries to ignore Abraham’s gaze, which she can still feel wanting to bite on her.

Fifteen minutes later, one of the men at the game accuses another of pocketing pills on the ante, and a fight breaks out, the two men clawing at each other over the tabletop and others trying to hold them back, until the table is overturned and a colorful spray of pills scatters across the marble floor and a wild grab is made for whatever anyone can get.

Temple’s seen enough, and she leaves the lobby and climbs many flights of stairs—until she’s out of breath—to a dark quiet floor where she can feel a curious breeze that she recognizes as authentic night air and not just the recirculated air from the ventilation system. She follows the breeze until she finds the source—a hole in the building itself. At the back of one of the wide-open office spaces there’s one set of windows, floor to ceiling, about eight feet wide, that has been broken out entirely. There are some chairs set up in front of the hole. An observatory.

There’s no one around, so she goes to the hole and, bracing herself with both hands, looks out across the rooftops of the city. She must be twenty-five stories high, and it makes her dizzy, but she forces herself to look anyway. Down there, in the yellow pools of the streetlights that are not yet broken or burned out, she can see them moving lethargically, the dead, without direction or purpose. They move, most of them, even when there’s nothing to hunt—their legs, like their stomachs and their jaws, all instinct. She raises her gaze and her eyes blur teary in the cool wind and all the lights of the city go wild and multiple, and she wipes her eyes and sits in one of the chairs and looks out beyond the periphery of the power grid where the black rolls out like an ocean. It’s a place she knows—knows beyond the telling of it.

She must be gone deep down the well of her brain, because she is not even aware of the man until he sits down beside her—a massive bearded figure who makes the chair groan metallic when he leans back on it. Moses, Abraham’s brother.

I was just looking is all, she says, glancing around and finding that the two of them are alone. I wasn’t doin anything.

The big man shrugs. He takes a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and bites off the end of it and spits it out the hole and strikes a match with his thumbnail and puffs the cigar into life. When he’s done with the match he flicks it out the window, and she watches the pale red ember disappear down into the dark.