Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

past the ordinary. You’re a right person, like a queen or somethin.
    Go on now, Ruby says, looking worried and teary. I suspect you’ve got more troubles ahead of you than behind.

    S HE DRIVES north an hour, but she can’t find the place Ruby told her about. The signs are no help. Once she was a safe distance outside the city, she stopped by the side of the road to study a sign and she found the name of a town that was forty-one miles awayand thought that might be Williston because that would be about an hour’s drive. So she memorized the look of the name and followed the signs, but now here she is and there’s nothing like a compound at all.
    Then it starts to rain and she pulls into the parking lot of a strip mall and shuts down the motor and listens to the drops drumming on the roof of the car.
    The rain is bad luck. It stands to reason, she thinks, that the rain ought to come and wash away the impurities of the world. A cleansing like the holy flood was, to slough away the dead and bring dandelions and butterflies to bear every which way on the ruined surface of the world. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, it just gets cold and damp and shivery in your collar, and afterward, when the sun comes back from behind the clouds, there’s just more mold and rot than there was previous, and the stink rises like gas from every soil and stone.

    T HE RAIN comes down hard, and she would rather wait it out inside somewhere. There is a warehouse-sized toystore in the strip mall, the colorful sign over the glass doors with all the letters still intact—which she takes as a sign of good things.
    She reaches into the duffel and takes out one of the pistols, an M9, and ejects the magazine to make sure it’s topped off. Then she pulls the car up onto the sidewalk under the store’s overhang right in front of the wide glass doors and gets out.
    The smell of the air is already worse—ozone and canker mixed. The pestilence dribbling to the surface and oozing into puddles of decay on the asphalt. A film coalesces over the water, a waxy skin that splits like gelatin when you tread on it.
    Inside the electricity is out but the tall windows in front cast a workable gray light over most of the store. She walks up and down the aisles, fingering the dusty packages and trying to imagine a family room filled with colorful plastic dolls and cars, abstract magnetic construction kits, spacecraft adorned with stickers, miniature pianos with keys that light up when youpress them. Silly, the casual and disposable fantasy of such objects.
    In one aisle she finds a rack of miniature die-cast toys. She takes one, a fighter jet, and tears the plastic open and holds the thing in the palm of her hand. She remembers the boy earlier this morning asking his parents about airplanes. And she thinks of something else from a long time ago.
    Malcolm in the passenger seat, on their way to Hollis Bend, him pointing at something through the windshield.
    What’s that, he said.
    She looked up and saw a streak in the sky like a sliver of cloud and an object at its head like a tiny metal lozenge.
    It’s a jet, she said. An airplane. You’ve seen em before on TV. Must be from that military base back a ways.
    I never seen one for real before.
    Well now you seen one. Not too many around anymore.
    How come?
    Hard to fly, she says. Takes a hell of a long time to learn, I expect.
    How do they stay up there?
    What? Listen at what you’re sayin. Birds don’t have any trouble staying up there. They do just fine.
    Sure, but they flap their wings. How come the jet don’t have to flap its wings?
    Cause a jet, it rides the wind.
    How does it do that?
    It just does, she says. It’s how they build it.
    Oh. What if there ain’t no wind?
    You get movin swift enough, you make your own wind.
    How?
    Here, look, roll down your window. All the way. Now make your hand flat like this. That there’s your wing. Now keep your hand like that and stick your arm out the