The Resurrectionist

23

The Abominations had built a little campfire inside a massive stew kettle. They’d placed the pan on the floor in the center of the lunchroom and were sitting around it in a semicircle. Buzz was prodding the makeshift kindling with a tire iron. Opposite him, Sweeney was staring at the faces, all of them warped by shadow. The bikers looked like kids on Christmas morning, made silent by a panicky desire for a specific gift and a concurrent terror that it might not be under the tree.

The Sheep was in the middle of the semicircle, on his knees, holding a tin beer tray that held a pile of syringes. While everyone watched, he began loading the spikes with the contents of the saucepan.

Buzz put down the tire iron and said, “Looks a little thin.”

The Sheep shook his head.

“Looks,” he said, and snapped a finger against the last needle, “can be deceiving as a motherfucker.”

Buzz smiled but he let his voice go low when he said, “Careful there, Alvin.”

“How ’bout you take a taste, Buzz,” the Sheep said, “and then tell me how thin it is?”

Sweeney had watched his son receive countless injections but this was something else. Something disconnected from the medical, and tied, entirely, to the ritualistic.

Buzz extended his arm. The fire lit a coating of sweat across the bulge of muscle and vein. It was cool in the room but Buzz was stripped to the waist. He made the Sheep come to him. There was no rubber tie-off, no alcohol swab or sterile gauze. The Sheep put two fingers in his mouth and wet them with his tongue. Then he popped them free and slapped them across the underside of Buzz’s forearm. It was a sound that would stay with Sweeney.

The Sheep hugged the arm against his stomach, picked his line. He waited a second, concentrating, then looked up. He and Buzz stared at each other. Then he forced the tip of the needle under the skin and into the channel. He pushed until the hilt of the syringe came flush to the arm, then thumbed the plunger, forcing the soup into the bloodstream. Buzz didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But Sweeney thought he saw his lips tremble.

After a while, the Sheep pulled the needle free and threw the syringe into the fire. Buzz sat back on his heels. The Abominations studied him. He put his head in his hands, pulled in a long breath. He said something to himself. It might have been, “Oh, Jesus.”

The Sheep gave a self-satisfied nod and handed the beer tray to the Ant, who took a syringe and passed the tray down the line. The rest of the crew fixed themselves, messy or neat, but all of them relatively silent. When the tray got to Sweeney, he handed it back to the Sheep.

“Your turn,” said the Sheep, holding up a syringe. He smiled and thumbed the plunger just a bit to make the needle spurt.

“I don’t think so,” Sweeney said.

“I can’t fix,” the Sheep said, “until you fix. Buzz’s orders.”

“Buzz,” Sweeney said, “is incapacitated.”

“True enough,” the Sheep said, glancing down at his leader, who was moving his mouth but failing to emit any sounds. “But he’ll be better than new tomorrow. And he’ll be disappointed if he finds out we didn’t follow orders.”

“Well,” said Sweeney, “there’s at least two ways around that.”

The Sheep smiled but it was forced.

“Should I even hear them?” he asked.

“The simple way,” Sweeney said, “would be for us to tell him what he wants to hear.”

The Sheep shook his head, disappointed, patience exhausted.

“That won’t work,” he said. “For reasons you won’t understand unless you take your medicine here.”

“That leaves the second way, then.”

And though the Sheep didn’t want to ask, he said, “Which is?”

“Which is,” Sweeney said, “I go outside and drain all the petrol out of your tanks. Then I come back inside and pour it all over these scumbags. And then I drop a match and run the fuck out of here.”

The Sheep finally let the hand that held the syringe drop into his lap.

“I know we just met,” he said, “but I don’t think so. You’re a fuckin’ pharmacist from Cleveland.”

Sweeney stood up, loomed over the Sheep, and said, “I’m tired of people who don’t know shit about me thinking that they do.”

The Sheep wouldn’t back down.

“So you’re saying,” he said, “that you’d rather incinerate all of us than take a chance and find out what this is all about?”

“You’re threatening my son. The only reason I wake up every day is to take care of my son.”

“And you can’t believe that we’re here to help you both?”

Sweeney stared at him. The Sheep held up the syringe halfheartedly and said, “C’mon, take the leap.”

“Take it yourself.”

Which is what the Sheep did. He found a vein, low, on his left arm, inserted the spike and flooded himself with the soup.

“What is it with fathers,” he said, eyes fluttering a little, voice slight and soft, “that they can’t make the leap?”

Within a minute the Sheep went into a fetal crouch. The sight of it made Sweeney flinch. He looked at all of them, immobilized, lying on their backs or sides, faces waxy in the firelight. One of them — he thought it was the Ant — was drooling. Another, maybe the Rabbit, was twitching his hands in some logorrhea of signing.

Sweeney stepped over the Sheep, toed Buzz’s body and got no response. He put his foot on Buzz’s chest and started to apply pressure. Nothing. He kneeled down and put a hand to Buzz’s face, pinched the nostrils closed and fixed a palm over the mouth. Buzz didn’t struggle. Buzz didn’t make a sound. Sweeney took his hand from the face and knew something was wrong.

The Abominations had gone to the trouble of kidnapping him, of sending him into the cave to find the Sheep, of making sure he was present for the creation of the soup. They’d told him about the origin of the fluid. They’d seated him around the fire and let him watch while they fixed, and then collapsed into something beyond stupor. And now here they were, unconscious, harmless, helpless. Entirely vulnerable. Temporarily comatose. He could do anything he wanted right now. He could baptize them in gasoline, as he’d threatened. Turn them to ash if he wanted.

And Buzz would’ve known that. Buzz would have taken precautions. He could have tied Sweeney down and shot him up. He could have waited until Sweeney was unconscious before he let his crew fix.

So what to do now? Calling the police would pull him into the middle of an ugly investigation. Which certainly would delay his departure from the city. And once he was tainted by the story, what clinic would accept Danny? And what pharmacy would offer a position?

But the alternative was to get rid of the Abominations on his own. To go through with his original idea — soak them in gas while they’re incapacitated and incinerate them.

He was picturing the scene when Nadia entered the cafeteria. She was wearing a short robe, green and satin and clinging to her. Her hair was wet and pushed straight back over her head. Her feet were bare and she had a towel rolled around her neck.

She looked over her tribe and then at Sweeney and said indifferently, “Decided not to join them?”

“Yeah,” Sweeney said. “Just like you.”

She shook her head, used the end of the towel to dab some water from her nose.

“I never fix,” she said. “I watch over them. In case they need me.”

She started into the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “You want a beer?”

He didn’t respond. He waited until she returned and said, “Why didn’t they make me do it? Why didn’t they shoot me up?”

She brushed past him, went to a bench and sat down with her legs underneath her. The robe spread open on her thigh. She took a long drink from a bottle of Hunthurst and casually opened a copy of Limbo that was on the table.

“Buzz has this idea,” and the way she accented the word conveyed a little contempt. “He can bring you to the water. But he can’t make you save yourself. He’s kind of earnest like that. It’s one of his best virtues. Not a lot of imagination, but he’s got the passion. For someone like Buzz, you know, the trip to Limbo is an end unto itself.”

“And that’s not your take?”

Nadia shook her head.

“This whole ritual,” she said, “the traveling, the harvesting, the whole communion of the soup, I’m sorry, it’s just bullshit to me. It’s vampire theater. And it consumes too much time and money. At best, it’s a means to an end. Honestly, I can’t wait till we’re done with it.”

“Done with it?”

She put the comic book down, made her voice lower.

“There’s a place,” she said, “where you don’t need the soup. A real place. A clinic in Old Bohemia. Very exclusive. Very hard to find. But I know I can get us there. And I know it’s the last clinic we’ll ever need.”

“So go,” he said. “Just go and leave me and my boy alone.”

“It’s not so simple. Buzz isn’t up for the trip. He’s hopeless. The eternal nomad. He wants to keep moving. I try to tell him — movement for the sake of movement is just another trap. It’s reductive after a while. I want to take my boys to the next level. Where we won’t even need the soup to move through the membrane.”

“And what about Buzz?”

“I’m working,” she said, “on saving Buzz. On saving everyone.”

Sweeney took a few steps into the middle of the pile of Abominations. He rested a foot on the Elephant’s hip and said, “Yeah, they look saved.”

“Like the Sheep said, looks can be deceiving. Are you scared of it?”

“Am I scared? Of ingesting brain fluid and whatever other shit this idiot cuts it with?”

Nadia smiled and looked back to the comic book, shaking her head above her bottle.

“He’s not an idiot, Sweeney. Trust me on that.”

“Well, you should know. You’re the one who found him in Phoenix.”

“He told you?” she asked, unfazed, taking another sip of beer.

“He told me you’re their pimp,” Sweeney said. “You’re the one who finds the fresh victims.”

“Victims?” Nadia repeated. “Little dramatic there, don’t you think? Who’ve we victimized?”

He stepped off the Elephant and moved to the table and looked down over her.

“Danny to start with,” he said. “And me.”

“You? Jesus, Sweeney, you live to be a victim. Did you feel like a victim last night? While you were fucking me?”

He put his hand around her throat and started to squeeze. She looked up at him, unafraid, giving away nothing.

“I’m leaving now,” he said, but he kept the pressure constant. “I’m getting my son and I’m getting the fuck out of this city. And if you come after us, I’ll kill every one of you.”

Now she started to make the choking sounds. She dropped the beer bottle, reached up and put both hands around his wrist. He let go of the throat, but she held onto the hand. Pushed it down from her neck and inside the robe and across her right breast. He tried to pull away and she held firm.

And then he was untying the robe with his free hand and she was leaning back on the bench and pulling him down on top of her. The kinetics of it were fast and brutal. No grace, no tenderness. His mouth went down on her neck. She arched her back, pulled his hair. He pushed her legs open. She pulled off his shirt and threw it, pulled the T-shirt beneath out of the pants. They worked together to unbuckle and unzip, got his pants down past his knees and left them there.

Then he was in her and they were both bucking, working for the rhythm. He dropped his head. A nipple fell into and out of his mouth. She made a sound, grabbed at his shoulders. He got his hands up under her arms, felt her sweat, tried to lift her, reposition her. He felt her hands under his balls, on his ass, up his back. The speed and force of his thrusts increased. He looked at her face. The eyes were open but squinting. He looked down at the floor, saw the Abominations, immobile, staring at nothing. He looked at the fire, felt himself starting to come.

And then felt the stab of the spike.

He ejaculated but the orgasm broke off, went numb before climax. He yelled, tried to pull out and roll away but she had her legs wrapped around his waist and his own legs were strapped by his pants.

Then she released him and he fell to the floor, trying to turn around and look at his backside, hands flailing behind him. He was on his knees, turning from side to side. He heard her say, “I don’t agree with Buzz,” and looked up, saw her holding a syringe. Her legs were still splayed, her face shining, sweaty in the firelight. Her head was resting on the lunch table and she’d pulled the robe closed over her breasts.

She threw the syringe past him into the campfire. There was a bloody smudge across her fingers. She brought herself up to sitting, seemed to swoon a little before she steadied herself with her hands.

She looked at Sweeney and said, “I don’t think you have to save yourself.”

She pulled the comic book into her lap, leaned toward him over her knees. Her face started to fade and there were flashes of light behind her as if someone were taking pictures.

The last thing Sweeney heard was, “I’ll see you on the other side.”