Chronister Desert Creatures

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80336-500-8
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

A young girl and her father take a desperate pilgrimage through a blasted post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert to the Holy City of Las Vegas in this vivid and uncanny tale of outsiders in a dangerous world, perfect for fans of Lucy A. Snyder and Jeff Vandermeer. An unknown devastation has swept across the United States, a sickness causes the dead to flower and sprout fruit, and the promise of miracles draws pilgrims from all over to the Holy City of Las Vegas. Magdala and her father flee their home in the Sonora Desert, setting out across the wasteland in search of a cure for her disability. As they pass through blasted cities and ruined towns, they are forced to join with a group of survivors making their own pilgrimage. But the road to Las Vegas is filled with danger, strange cults occupying the wreckage of towns, and uncanny stuffed men roaming the desert. As a strange sickness begins to take hold, the band of survivors grows ever thinner, and months turn to years. Magdala finds herself placing her trust in the most unlikely of places, and the closer she gets to her holy destination, the further from salvation she seems.

Kay Chronister is the author of THIN PLACES (Undertow, 2020) and DESERT CREATURES (Erewhon, 2022). Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Originally from Washington State, she has spent time in Virginia, Cambodia, and Arizona. She now lives outside of Philadelphia with her dogs and her husband.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chronister, Kay

Leseproben

I WAS A YOUNG MAN of twenty-five, freshly reborn from my baptism in a shallow dish of twice-recycled holy water. “Don’t open your mouth, whatever you do,” someone had warned me. “It’ll poison you.” The church had faux velvet carpeting and faux walnut pews and faux stained glass in the windows. Someone told me that in the old days, they used to officiate marriages there: ill-suited couples wearing party clothes, reeking of tequila, staggering to the pulpit where some underpaid Rent-A-Minister stood with his collar wrinkled, a Bible open in his hands but not to be read, only there for visual effect, shorthand for covenant. I was the third person they baptized that day. They were baptizing everyone they could get their hands on back then. Afterwards, there was a party in a casino. Someone had found a few helium balloons. We sipped moonshine from champagne flutes and sang hymns with our hands lifted, our eyes shut, all very pious, everything in order. Someone fell on the floor in spasms and spoke in tongues and I listened obligingly, although in secret I despised him as a show-off. I would have died before I told the other converts what I was capable of; I wanted desperately to tell them what I was capable of. I was a farm boy from Sonora; I knew I didn’t belong. Late at night, when we were all so drunk that I thought no one would remember, I told them I had healed a boy possessed with demons. I told them I had healed an entire field of blighted melons. I told them I had healed my mother when she was sick enough to die. My fellow converts laughed uproariously and toasted my name. Arturo! The living saint! In the morning, the priest admonished me not to make jokes about that sort of thing. “The Church, you understand, does not recognize the existence of the saint-touched,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke like the word itself was contraband. Not long after that, I went to seminary. You had to eat somehow. In Vegas, it was the priesthood or life as a blackjack dealer in a casino, a ticket-taker at a peep show, a waiter pouring jimson coffee in some greasy spoon. And the Church had grand ambitions back then. A franchise every fifty miles throughout the Remainder; licensed trail guides to shepherd pilgrims down the ’93; official branded merchandise produced in the old tire factory outside town. Opportunities for advancement for any man who proved himself worthy, or so they liked to say. That was forty years ago now. *   *   * When the girl found me, I had been living for a long time as a scavenger in the desert. I subsisted on the beloved possessions of the dead and the discarded trash of the living. I had a shack of ocotillo sticks, a vinyl sleeping bag, a tin lunch box full of Zippo lighters. I spent my mornings tracing the paths of wild burros to watering holes and my afternoons following the carrion birds that flew in low, dense packs through the desert, settling down in a heap when they found an animal carcass. They never ate what the desert had already taken hold of, so they were safe to glean from. I’d stand a few paces back from them and wait until they had finished, then approach. In all my years in exile, I never killed any creature, and I never ate the fruits of the desert. I crept through the landscape like a thief in the night, wanting not to be seen or felt. I cooked scraps of thigh meat and coils of intestine in the coals of low fires. I boiled bones until the marrow streamed out and sipped the broth the marrow made. I went days without eating. I caught a glance of myself in a cracked mirror and would not have recognized the skeleton staring back at me if he hadn’t borne my own brand on his forehead. In every way that mattered, I considered myself dead. I was only maintaining the sack of bone and flesh allotted to me out of some vestigial Catholic terror of the sin that can never be uncommitted. Alive by a technicality. Whenever I found anything that surpassed my barest needs, I went to the house of Mrs. Whitemorning with a sack on my shoulders. She did not make any grotesque attempts at genuflecting or expressing gratitude; she stood stone-faced in the doorway as one of her charges, a girl of sixteen or so, older than the rest of her children, loaded the things I brought onto her shoulders and struggled into the secret depths of the house with them. The girl never spoke to me before the day she held me at gunpoint. At twilight, stoking my fire, I looked down and recognized her by her clubfoot. When I felt cold gunmetal on my neck, I lifted my hands. My fire stuttered and died beneath me. “I’m going to the shrine of Saint Elkhanah Fleetfoot in Las Vegas,” the girl said from behind me. Her voice was low and flat and strange, as if she were unaccustomed to using it. “I saw the letters on your forehead and I know H E R E T I C is just a priest who got found out. So you can bring me through the desert, or you can get a bullet in your brain. Which will it be?” I could not contain my laughter. I had been expecting a demand for food or valuables. A wholesome and reasonable stickup. She wanted me for a pilgrimage? For that pilgrimage? I entertained the notion that the girl was a demon, sent to tempt me as the devil had tempted Christ during his forty days in the desert. Leap and see if God doesn’t kill you. But I had already succumbed to temptation. I had been weighed and found wanting. I had leapt and fallen, and God was even now killing me slowly. There was nothing left to see. “You’re wasting your time,” I told her. She didn’t dignify that with an answer. She walked around me, keeping the gun to my head all the while. Standing before me, she was taller than I remembered, her face still soft with half-shed childhood, dark flyaways crowning her head. I could have fought her off and possibly won. I could have told her to just shoot me and possibly she would have done it. And in either case, I would not have faced the prospect of returning to Las Vegas, nor the absurd and profoundly tedious trial of a pilgrimage meant to end in a miraculous healing. But some part of me, patient and perverse, had been waiting through ten years of exile for even the thinnest wafer of an excuse to go crawling back and find out if the archbishop had meant it when he said on pain of death. I did not protest when the girl slipped a lasso around my neck. She tightened it until I gagged, loosened the rope a little, then tightened it back up with a nervous jerk as if regretting this show of conscience. She had a tattoo on her neck, brash lowercase letters rendered in whitish-pink: Xavier. “I’ll kill you if you make a move,” she assured me. I did not make a move. The moon rose and I followed her lead. She was heading north, not toward the pilgrim highway but toward the old state road, which passed through two hundred miles of uninhabitable country. I hadn’t met with that part of the desert since I had come stumbling away from Las Vegas with a fresh brand on my forehead, drunk with grief and too tenderfooted to know better. “Other roads to the city,” I said to her. “Been on the other ones,” she said. “Didn’t like them. This way, we won’t meet with anybody.” “Nobody human.” The girl scowled at me, twisting the dark, thin line of her mouth. “That’s what I want,” she said. “Be quiet.” By dawn, we’d made at least ten miles; I wondered at the girl’s endurance, though I could see the strain in her legs, how she trembled when she lowered her clubfoot to the dirt. Still, I was tiring faster than she was. I could feel the desert on my lips, in my throat. Sand has a taste, distinguishable, depending on where you wander. I was breathing strange dust now. She wouldn’t hear me when I spoke of thirst. She seemed to be immune. People in the Remainder had been telling stories, longer than I’d been living, of people born in the desert whose bodies craved unworldly things: they grazed on the stubble of cactus, sipped from ewers of wind. I began to wonder if she was one of them. She never asked for directions. She squinted at the sun or at the crown-shaped shadows of the yuccas to determine her course. Twice I thought I saw her inhale the wind like a predator catching a scent. Eventually she heard my breathing grow raspy and halted, and she surprised me by looking sorry. We ascended an abrupt red slope and she inhaled again, wrinkling her nose, then led me a little higher. In the crack between one ledge of rock and another, a little stream of water opened to us, murky stuff, infested with life. She nodded at it. “You want to drink,” she stated. I nodded. By then my voice had left me. “Then don’t move while I dig,” she said, and so desperate was I from thirst that I could only conceive of obedience. I sat down on an outcropping of rock and observed the girl, digging with her hands formed into clubs, half-fists, little paddles that pushed through the dirt and the rock. Old scores of scratches already crisscrossed her knuckles. No telling what her life had been before Mrs. Whitemorning. “Come here,” she said to me. I had never left my suspicion of groundwater behind, and I knew that the clearest water was oftentimes the most dangerous. If we drank from the vein she’d unearthed, years from now we might sprout tumors. If the girl had children, if she still could have children, they would be born weak and sick. The animals one saw in these stretches were like living warnings. Two-headed or three-eared, stumbling on legs that ended at the knee. Were I stronger, I would have refused the water and died of thirst amid the...