He circles the rag lightly over his genitals a few times.
Close enough, she says. We find a place to stow you, and someone else can teach you about personal hygienics.
A few blocks away, in a commercial strip, she finds a hair salon and bashes in the window and takes him in the back where the sink is and shows him how to wash his hair. For a long time he just sits in the chair with his neck leaning on a sink with a semicircular cutout, letting the water wash over his scalp.
It can’t hurt him to have a good long soak, so she spends the time washing her own hair and combing it out and using the scissors to trim off the ragged ends.
When he’s done in the sink, she puts him in one of the swirling chairs before a mirror and takes the electric clippers and cuts his hair down to the scalp. Then she shaves his face and finds some good-smelling cream to slather all over.
Look at you now, Dapper Dan. Now you won’t befoul our ride.
Across the street she spies a tall office building, higher than anything else in the area. They cross and find a way in and take the elevator as high as it will go. Then they walk through the empty corridors until she finds what she’s looking for: fire stairs leading to the roof.
She climbs atop a large metal air-conditioning unit, and he sits next to her. Then she takes out her small spyglass and scans the horizon all around. The sun is low in the sky and the clouds are deep orange and look burnt at the edges.
Let’s take in the view for a little bit. What do you say, dummy?
She looks at him, a big man with a physical density to him, a thickness of body and shape. His eyes look like they are peering out of deep wells in the earth. The skin of his face is worn and leathery.
How old are you anyway, dummy?
He looks out at the sun descending behind the clouds.
I’m guessin you’re a solid thirty-five. That means you were around before all this slug mess started happening.
He puts his hand to his newly shaven face.
I wonder if you remember it. Does that gone past still haunt up your dummy skull? Do you remember the first time you saw a meatskin? Did you recognize it as somethin different, or does everything walkin on two feet look the same to you?
She looks at his eyes, and they seem to be staring at nothing.
You know something? I knew another dummy once before. It was in the orphanage home where I grew up. He was my age, though, and he wasn’t a nonspeaking dummy like you. He could talk, but not very good. And he was runty—born to be slug food, if you ask me. Not like you, you’re like a bear or somethin. Downright fortitudinous is what you are. Anyway, Malcolm and I, we liked to take him around with us. Malcolm especially—he was always trying to teach him things, like how to blow bubbles in his soda with a straw.
She looks down at her hands, the pink polish on the nails, the stump of her left pinky finger wrapped up in gauze. It aches, and the aching seems like a symbol of something.
Anyway, she says, I don’t wanna be talkin to you about Malcolm. Forget I mentioned it in the first place. What we gotta do, we gotta find a safe place to unload you. Cause followin me around everywhere is a sure way to get yourself eat up. That’s our mission, dummy, to find you a new home.
She looks through the telescope onto the horizon. In the distance she can see a black car approaching on the same road she came into town on herself.
See now, she says, I knew I was feelin something not right. You gotta trust your gut to guide you true, that’s lesson number one.
She looks through the telescope again and the car dips behind a foothill.
See, it’s possible that that’s just anyone—but you know what my gut tells me? My gut tells me that’s my old friend Moses Todd who’s got some business he’s gonna want to finish up with me. It’s a wonder how he’s trackin me, but you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.
She collapses the miniature telescope and puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold.
SHE TAKES the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in the middle of the road. She hums tunes, and the big man hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it. He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep.
The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbecue shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages. In the middle of town is a square that must have been the site of some final showdown. There’s a huge marble fountain, long dry, filled with eviscerated corpses gone to bone and black. In the middle of the fountain is a marble statue of an angel, her wingtips pointing still unbroken toward the sky, and a dead man hangs slung around her neck as though he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over something holy.
The slug population is dense. Temple has to slow down to avoid hitting them, and she has to keep moving to keep them from congregating.
Downtown the city is overrun, a grotesque panorama. They walk, some of them, in twos and threes, sometimes even hand in hand like lovers, lumbering along, slow and thick, blood crusted down their fronts, stumbling over the bony remains of consumed corpses. Their gestures are meaningless, but they hearken back with primitive instinct to life before. A slug dressed in black with a white preacher’s collar lifts his hands toward the sky as if calling upon the god of dead things, while a rotting woman in a wedding dress sits open-legged against a wall, rubbing the lace hem against her cheek. Here, the monstrous and the perverse, the like of which Temple has never seen before. A slug with no arms nestled up against the swollen belly of a corpse recently dead, chewing away at its exposed viscera like a piglet at the teat of its mother. These, the desperate and the plagued, driven to consume beyond their usual ken—a swarm of them pulling apart a dead horse with their hands, using their teeth to scrape the offal from the backside of the bristly skin. Some even so bubbling with abomination that they turn on one another, by instinct preying on the weak, pulling them down, the children and the old ones, digging their teeth first into the fleshiest parts to give their clawing fingers some purchase, a mob of them backing a pale-faced girl against the concrete base of a building. She opens her mouth to defend herself, sinks her teeth into the arm of one of her attackers, but there are more, a groaning, howling brood like coyotes on the concrete plain. And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic.