The Resurrectionist

20

At some point while reading, Sweeney fell into a heavy sleep. And sometime after that, he came awake, slowly and partially, into what he thought, for just an instant, was a dream. But when he opened his eyes, he saw a figure perched above him, sitting on top of him with its head thrown back so far that he couldn’t see a face. He was still out of breath and he could feel his heart racing. He blinked and tried to sit up and the figure came forward and its arms pushed him down and he was too weak to fight. In that moment, sinking back into the bed, he realized he was fucking someone. That he’d been fucking someone for some time and that he was about to come. And the brain shut down and his buttocks and thighs tightened and he drove upward. And the person on top of him responded perfectly, speeded up the pace of her own rocking, began to gallop, short, hard slaps down onto his cock, her own noises increasing. In the midst of it, she drew one arm up to her throat and then used a hand to push her mane back behind an ear. And in the orange light, he saw that it was Nadia Rey.

She looked down at him, understood that he was fully awake and that he knew what was happening and who it was happening with. He put a hand on either side of her waist and adjusted their rhythm. They were grinding up against each other now. He could see the sweat on her forehead and cheeks. She was wearing her nurse’s uniform, the skirt hiked up. She sat back for a second, rested her ass on his legs, and he heard her take a deep breath. And then she came forward again, put her hands on his shoulders, pinning him against the bed. She began to ride him faster and her mouth formed itself into an oval and she looked as if she could blow a smoke ring. Her nails went into his shoulders. He bore upward, felt her tighten, and saw her start to shake her head in little seizurelike motions.

He began to pump as fast as he could. Within seconds she came and reared up and back and then crumpled down on top of him. When he felt her full weight on his chest, felt her hair against his mouth, he let himself go and bit down on his bottom lip to keep from crying out.

The intensity ran to the edge of catastrophic. He felt as if his body would collapse through the mattress and the steel frame, fall through the whole of the bed to the floor below and fall through the floor into the basement, into the bed in his apartment and then through that bed as well and into the dirt and rock of this mistake of a city. And then he fell back into a dreamless sleep.

He was out for at least as long as it took for the drool around his mouth and the jism on his legs to dry. He was woken by a tap — and then a slap across his cheek. He reached up before his eyes opened, still stupid with sleep, and touched Nadia’s face and felt the stubble of a new beard. This brought him to full consciousness at once and his head jerked off the pillow and his eyes opened. And he looked up at Buzz Cote, who was grinning and nodding and biting in on both of his lips. He pinched Sweeney’s cheek until it bruised but his voice was low and excited when he said, “Well, we’re brothers now, kimosabe.”

That combination of friendly tone and rough physicality set the pattern for their exit from the Clinic. Buzz stood, grabbed Sweeney’s shirt and pulled him into a seated position. And then he punched Sweeney, this quick jab that landed where the shoulder hinged under the breastbone. It connected perfectly and Sweeney felt as if the bone had chipped. But then it was another round of backslapping and arms locked as if to promenade.

“Nadia will meet up with us later,” Buzz said. “You ready for your initiation ride?”

Sweeney didn’t answer, but it didn’t seem to matter. Buzz threw an arm across his back and gripped the bruised shoulder on the other side. Then he proceeded to waltz Sweeney out the front door of the Peck, past the delighted eyes of Romeo the janitor, who was dusting in the reception area.

In the predawn quiet, their steps crunched on the driveway gravel. Buzz was moving quickly, spieling something about Nadia being one in a million, yes sir, and all the Abominations agreed about that and you haven’t known a jones till you’ve had a piece of that honey there. The words mattered less than their speed, their charged tone and the way they jumped from Buzz’s mouth. Sweeney had known a neighborhood speed freak in high school and had studied the symptomology in college. So he felt fairly certain that while he’d been dream-fucking Nadia, Buzz had spent the night injecting some high-test crystal meth.

They circled the west wing of the building and climbed the hill that led to the rear parking lot where Buzz’s hog was waiting.

They came to a stop before the bike and Buzz said, “The boys are pleased, I can tell you that. The boys are very excited about this.”

Sweeney didn’t try to escape the embrace but he said, “Fuck you,” in a clear, emotion-free voice.

“We’ll see about that later,” Buzz said without any smile or hesitation. “Right now, we got to get you initiated. And seeing how you don’t have a bike, there’s only one way that can happen.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Sweeney said.

Buzz rubbed and picked a bit at a nostril with his free hand and said, “The thing is, Sweeney, you are. And you’re not stupid. So you know you are. I can kick your ass from one end of this lot to the other and tie you to the back of this thing like a bitch. But neither one of us wants that. So just get on. You’ll be glad you did. At some point, you’re going to have to trust me.”

Sweeney looked back to the Clinic.

“I can start screaming.”

Buzz nodded. “You can. That’s true. You could get a scream out. But two things, okay? First off, nobody in there likes you very much and they’re not going to do shit to help you out. Okay? And second, I’d bust you in the throat as soon as you squealed and you’d end up puking and maybe passing out. I know you, Sweeney. You don’t want Nadia to see that. She’s watching you right now.”

His eyes scanned the windows on the back of the building but he didn’t see any shadows.

“So just get on,” Buzz continued. “And let’s run this fucker the way she’s meant to be run.”

Sweeney thought about bolting and then stepped up to the bike and mounted it. Buzz was delighted.

“You’ve made me happy,” Buzz said. “It’s gonna be much better this way.”

Buzz mounted in front, kicked over the engine and throttled up a few times. Sweeney wrapped his arms around the driver’s trunk and yelled, “What about helmets?”

Buzz thought this hysterical. He yelled, “You are the shit, man,” put the bike in gear, and sprayed gravel to either side as they rode out of the lot and down to Route 16.

SWEENEY HAD NEVER owned a bike. But he’d ridden a few over the years, usually smaller rice burners loaned by friends and usually in empty parking lots or off road. And though he couldn’t remember who gave it to him, he did recall one piece of motorcycle wisdom: sooner or later, everybody has to lay his bike down.

This occurred to him about ten minutes into his kidnapping, as Buzz negotiated a series of blind curves without reducing his speed in the least. Sweeney leaned into Buzz’s back, turned his head sideways and watched the run of pines blur.

He kept waiting for the speed or the noise to decrease but they would not. When a new set of bends and curves appeared in the road, Buzz refused to slow down. And that was when Sweeney discovered a new breed of fear. Buzz was angling the bike to the road at suicide velocities, and Sweeney became convinced they were seconds from the kind of death that teenagers turn into legend. And with each instant that they did not die, Sweeney learned more about the fear. It was a living panic and in this way it sat in opposition to the dead panic he’d inhabited for the last year. There was a juice inside this terror, a surge, part electric and part chemical. The dead fear left him numb in its wake. But he knew that, should he survive this ride, he’d be anything but numb. He’d be overloaded and fused, twitching in the aftermath of maximal stimulation.

It went on this way for what seemed a long time, though the rush never faded. Sweeney’s sense of time became degraded and then, irrelevant. Whatever Buzz was planning on doing to him at the end of this ride seemed, in those moments, unimportant. Because, for a while, it felt as if the ride would never end. He felt certain they’d passed out of the city, possibly out of the county, and maybe out of the state. Afterward, he realized that not once during the entire experience had he thought of Danny or Kerry or the accident.

Something changed when the scream of the engine’s work became a chorus and Sweeney understood that they were being joined by the rest of the Abominations. The others came out of the wooded bluff on either side of the road. They appeared solo, falling in behind Buzz, one by one, a new addition every mile or two. When all twelve had surfaced and converged, they took over the route, riding on either side of the dividing line. The first car they encountered had to roll up the bluff to avoid them.

When the sun became fully visible over the trees to the left, their pace seemed to slacken a bit and Sweeney allowed himself a look behind for the first time. He expected to find Nadia Rey straddling the rear of a machine, but there was no sign of her. He swung forward just as Buzz kicked back into high, lurched ahead of the rest, and pulled the bike right, suddenly, off the highway, over the shoulder, and up a dirt trail that cut through the pines.

The trail threaded up a hill that might have qualified as a small mountain. Engine scream echoed farther and louder the higher they climbed and Sweeney could feel Buzz willing the hog skyward. They reached the far side of the rise and what had been hardpack turned into granite and though the trail became narrower, the climb got easier. Sweeney made the mistake of glancing to the right and saw the road’s shoulder gave way to a plunge, maybe five hundred feet into a rocky chasm. After that, he kept his eyes on Buzz’s back.

It took about a half hour to reach the plateau, a lip of rock that jutted out from the last wall of granite. The riders parked in that same formation that Sweeney had first seen outside the Harmony factory. They idled until Buzz cut his engine and dismounted. Then the rest of the pack followed suit. Buzz pulled Sweeney into a shoulder hug as soon as the passenger’s feet touched granite. No one spoke. Buzz walked Sweeney to the edge of the plateau. Depending on one’s feelings about height, the view was either spectacular or agonizing. The air held a hypnotic clarity. But looking down revealed a fatal plummet, the kind that, in movies, allows a human scream to echo into seeming infinity.

“You impressed?” Buzz said.

Sweeney nodded and Buzz slapped his back hard enough to make him pitch toward the brink, but held onto an arm to keep him in place.

“This where you do all your victims?” Sweeney said, staring at his own feet.

“Victims?” Buzz said and sounded genuinely surprised. “Ain’t you got a complex? You fuck our woman and you’re the victim?”

“I didn’t,” he started to explain and gave up immediately.

“You’re no victim, Sweeney,” Buzz said. “You gotta stop telling yourself that. That’s one of your main problems. You are what you think you are. No one ever tell you that?”

“Why’d you bring me here?”

“For your own good, son,” and there was that trace of down-home accent again. “You needed some air. And this is where you come when you need some air. You feel it?”

He let go of Sweeney and tilted his head back, took in a deep noseful, closed his eyes and shook his head.

“This is one of my favorite places. Thought I’d share it with you. You got to get out of the tombs from time to time, son. You’ll become one of those people.”

“My son’s back there,” Sweeney said, then regretted mentioning Danny.

“Yes, he is,” Buzz said. “And it’s one thing to want to be with him. And it’s another to want to be like him.”

He took Sweeney’s chin and cheeks in his gloved hand and said, “You’re one of us now, son. And you’re starting to make some bad choices. For you and for the boy.”

“I’m not one of you,” Sweeney said.

Buzz squeezed in on the cheeks. “You fuck our woman,” he said, “you’re one of us.” Then he started to pull Sweeney’s face forward over the lip of the cliff. “Otherwise,” he said, “what you did would be a problem.”

He let the words hang, then he released the face and patted the bruised cheek, grabbed the front of Sweeney’s shirt and pulled him back to where the others were standing next to their bikes, waiting.

“I think you know most of the family,” Buzz said and he started pointing to each in turn. “Mouse, Turtle, Monkey, Rabbit, the Elephant — also known as Tubby — Crabs, Bear, Fluke, the Ant, Roach. And this here is Piglet. You be good to Piglet and Piglet will be good to you. That right, Piglet?”

Piglet was small and a little sick-looking, with ashen skin and thin, straggly hair. His eyes were too small for his face, but it was probably the stubby, upturned nose that accounted for the name. In general, he looked greasier, more feral than any of the others by a factor of two or three.

Piglet didn’t give an answer and Buzz smiled as if he really hadn’t wanted one.

“Boys,” Buzz said, “you all remember Sweeney.”

Nobody moved except for the one called Monkey, who bobbed his head and showed some caramel teeth.

“Once we get to know you better,” Buzz said, “you’ll get your name.”

Sweeney looked around the precipice. There was nowhere to run but back down the trail and they’d be on him in an instant. He had a sense that Piglet would love an excuse to toss him off the mountain.

“Now, listen,” Buzz said, moving between Sweeney and the rest of the clan. “This is not gonna work out unless you trust us. What you got to do here, you got to make a leap. You got to ignore your own common sense and throw in with us, son. ’Cause whether you believe it right now or not, we’re the best thing that’s happened to you in a long goddamn time.”

Buzz waited for an argument but Sweeney kept his mouth shut.

“And we’re the best thing that’s happened to your boy. We’re sure as hell a shitload better than those fuckers down in the tombs. That shithead Peck and his little bitch of a daughter. They are poison. They’re the last people can help you and Danny.”

He was baiting but Sweeney wouldn’t rise to it.

“Couple days, you’re gonna look back and see that Buzz was right. And you’re gonna thank me for doing what I had to do. You’re just lucky we found you in time. You trust me, Sweeney, things are gonna get better. You’re one of us now. Isn’t that right?”

Buzz didn’t bother to look, but Sweeney was sure that all the Abominations were nodding this time. Even Piglet.

“’Course you’re one of us,” Buzz said. “You helped yourself to a piece of Nadia and you had your first ride. Just one thing left for you to do.”

Sweeney had been waiting and now here it was. Some kind of initiation. Something awful and lasting. They were going to take turns beating the life out of him or they were going to pin him down and cornhole him. They were going to cut him or brand him or maybe drag him down the mountain, tied to the back of Buzz’s hog.

“It’s nothing major,” Buzz continued. “And it’s nothing to be scared of. It’s symbolic, s’what it is.”

Sweeney picked out Fluke because he looked like the slowest and the dullest. Piglet was smaller but it was obvious he was pure psychotic. He tried to play it out in his head. He’d wait till they pulled out their knives or their ropes, then he’d charge the Fluke. He’d run head down and try to hit him midsection, drive the wind out. Then he’d go for the knife and, if there were any chance, mount the Fluke’s bike and head for the trail.

But no one took out a knife or a rope and no one unhitched his jeans. Buzz came up to him and once again draped an arm over his shoulder. He began to walk Sweeney to the opposite side of the precipice, where some scrub brush was growing against the wall of shale that stretched another hundred yards into the sky.

“See, Sweeney,” Buzz said, “we come up here every now and then. Get some fresh air and commune, you might say, with the natural world. Now last time we come up, we left something here.”

He let go of Sweeney’s shoulder and sank into a squat. He picked up a fallen branch and used it to push back some of the overgrown scrub. And in the mountain face behind, Sweeney saw a small hole cut into the granite, a little hollow that led into a cavity of some kind. It wasn’t big enough to be called a cave. It was more like a burrow, a lair of some sort, fit for a fat possum or unusually small bear.

“We need you,” Buzz said, “to scoot on in there and get it.”

Sweeney stared at him.

“Don’t worry,” Buzz said. “You won’t get stuck. It opens out once you get inside.”

“What is it?” Sweeney asked.

“That,” Buzz said, “would ruin the surprise. You gotta trust me.”

Sweeney took a step forward, went down on one knee and tried to peer inside the hole.

“You want me to climb in there?”

Buzz nodded. “Like I said, it gets bigger once you’re in.”

“I bet it does.”

“You go in. You get what we want. You come out.”

“I come out.”

“You come out. Right. What the hell you think?”

“I think,” Sweeney said, “that once I’m in you’ll block up the entrance and laugh your asses off while I suffocate.”

Buzz looked back toward the tribe.

“You really got a low opinion of us,” he said. He reached in his boot, pulled out a small box of kitchen matches, held them up for Sweeney to see, like he was about to do a magic trick. Then he tucked them in Sweeney’s shirt pocket and said, “You’re a real paranoid fucker. Nobody’s going to block you in there.”

“I’m not going in.”

Buzz smiled and said, “Like you weren’t coming with me in the first place. But here you are.”

Sweeney just shook his head.

“Time you understood something, son,” Buzz said. “I can be your savior. Or I can be the scariest fucking nightmare you ever had. I’ll go either way. Whatever’s required to take care of my family. So get in the fucking cave. ’Cause if I have to, I’ll send Piglet in there with you.”