[Danger Days] The Wasteland - Chapter 7
Title: The Wasteland
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “We must set our houses in order,” Prester John said. “For we shall die and not live.”
Master Post
Chapter 7
At first, they holed up in an old ranch house back in the hills. The windows were all broken and one corner of the roof had caved in. The door had long since fallen off its hinges and into the dust. But all of that mattered very little. It never rained in the wasteland.
A clean cow skull hung above the entryway, and a lot of filthy ones littered the desert for a couple of miles in all directions. They made Ghoul nervous; he’d never really had much experience with animals, dead or live ones. Once he got past that, however, the place was nice enough. They had drinking water to spare and plenty of food, so they all went to bed early and slept late into the day. Ghoul couldn’t seem to get enough sleep, as if this were his first real chance at peace. As if he had years of lost rest to make up.
Some nights, in the full-dark before the moon rose, Poison would feel his way over to where Ghoul lay curled up in his blankets. Then, Ghoul didn’t mind being awake. They’d fool around in a clumsy half-dreamlike way, never getting much beyond handjobs and dry humping and lazy drawn-out kisses. Ghoul still came about as hard as he ever had in his life.
There didn’t seem to be any sense or reason to Poison’s visits. Sometimes he would come three nights in a row; sometimes three nights would go by with nothing. Ghoul wondered if Poison was testing him somehow, or opening an invitation to him, but he never quite managed to get himself together enough to cross the empty stretch of floor to where Poison lay, unmoving in sleep or patient anticipation.
Besides, Poison always came back to him. In time, Ghoul would always feel the weight of his cool darkness bending over him; his voice, with its dry urgency, whispering, “Shh, it’s me. It’s only me.” long after Ghoul had figured out that much. There would be the blazing cipher of his kiss, branding itself once more on Ghoul’s neck.
There were times, Ghoul knew, that they weren’t quiet. Ray must have heard them, but he never said a word, nor even gave Ghoul one of those shrewd barracks looks that would have indicated he knew everything. Ghoul was grateful for that, though sometimes he thought it must have been pretty hard on Ray, with his wife dead and all. Alone for all those long months…
Ghoul never followed that thought to its logical conclusion. Ray was too paternal, too lamely fatherly, for Ghoul to think about him that way. It was like that time back when he was still in the PUF, when that stacked blonde Belorussian arms dealer had shown up trying to unload two tons of C4. The Manskinner had gotten all squirrelly and conducted a lot of private conferences in his room with Irina. It was enough to make your balls crawl up inside your abdomen and die.
At the ranch house, they didn’t have much to fill their days. Poison started to refer to the time they spent there as Operation Thoreau. He seemed to regard it as a kind of limbo, a kind of stasis into which they had all willingly entered.
Ray tried his hand at hunting, and he proved to be a pretty good shot. He brought down a massive milk-white three-headed snake, a mangy coyote with a row of boney spines protruding from its back, and finally something that would have been a fish were it not for the fact that it had a lizard’s legs and crawled on the sand.
No one felt much like trying the meat from any of them, and that was the end of their experiment in self-sufficiency.
Slowly, mistrustfully, almost unwillingly, they began to talk to pass the time. They talked about the present sometimes, the past often. Never the future. Ray told them that he had been hired at an investment firm in Battery City right out of college, that he’d married at the respectable age of 31, that they’d had a son and daughter and that it had been his idea to move out of the city. His idea, but for the kids’ sake. Then, he told them how things had been when he was alone; the traps he had laid in the desperate hope that someone would come along to trip them, the supplies he had set aside like a distress beacon to the outside world.
All for profit, Ray had said. He’d had a lot of time to think it over, and he knew now why they had cut the suburb off. The gas rationing and the food shortages had hit Battery City hard, and to keep the outlying areas of the Zones supplied cost more than it paid in. Best, then, to excise the cancer draining the life from the city. It was in the best interests of the shareholders.
And it was wrong, Ray went on. But maybe it was wrong of us, too. To set ourselves apart from people, to act like we did not need their labor more than they needed ours. I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it into words exactly. I don’t know…
It was then that Poison had gotten up and stormed out. Neither of them had made a move to follow him.
As he listened to him talk, Ghoul knew that Ray was holding some things back. He never said what had happened after the quarantine of the suburb; he never let on what had become of everyone else. In his calm and articulate account, there was no sign of the man who had taken a lighter and a can of gasoline and reduced that part of his life to ashes.
Ghoul didn’t mind, though. He was holding back quite a bit himself.
Only Poison didn’t say much. He sat with them, and he listened and he chain smoked. It seemed that sometimes Ghoul could detect a kind of sadness in his expression, a kind of obscure yearning, as if Poison had no stories to tell except those that must be self-censored and silenced.
Still, they had their nights together, and Ghoul was afraid when he thought of how long and how well those might sustain him.
As the days stretched into weeks, Ghoul noticed that Poison’s mind began to wander. That he stared at the horizon and sometimes walked out to the Trans Am just to rest his hands upon its baking hood.
One afternoon, Ghoul came out of the house and found Poison standing like that, his fists clenched against the car, his eyes fixed on some point in the far distance. And he remembered what Poison had told him once - back when he was still Gerard - that he would take them away. As far away as he could.
Ghoul knew that they weren’t there yet.
He came up behind Poison and put an arm around his waist and pressed his lips to his shoulder.
“Want to head out tomorrow?” he said.
“Yes,” Poison replied distantly. “Tomorrow is good.”
“I’ll let Ray know.”
“Thank you.”
In the morning, they awoke early and packed the car and headed for the highway.
***
For several days they travelled the desert without seeing anyone, though they came across frequent signs of habitation. In every abandoned gas station, diner, or roadhouse where they stopped to spend the night there were fresh cigarette butts, empty cans with the pasty residue of food inside them still damp. Once, they even found a set of tire tracks, new and crisp-looking in the dust.
Ray had grown taciturn and sullen. Poison maintained his elegant silences. Caught between the two encroaching walls of quiet, Ghoul felt himself stifled and choked. By the third evening, he was glad to get out of the car for the night, even if it meant leaving the comfort of the AC behind.
Poison had settled on a doublewide trailer set back from the highway. It had once been a restaurant, but little remained except for the stainless steel shelves in the kitchen and a huge scarred billiards table, too sturdy to break down for firewood, that dominated the dining room.
Night came on quickly. Ray lit a kerosene lantern and they crowded superstitiously into the halo of light it cast. Ghoul sifted listlessly through the cans of food he had brought in, not bothering to try to read the labels. He wished he could think of something to say to break the silence, but nothing came to mind. He snatched up one of the cans at random, tore the lid off and vindictively began to shovel miniature ravioli and congealed tomato sauce into his mouth. It tasted good, but it had no substance. It seemed to disappear as soon as it was inside him.
Something moved outside the trailer, scratching along the tin wall.
Ghoul’s eyes came up, and he knew he was not the only one who had heard it. Ray had the Glock out of its holster, and he held it at twitching readiness. Poison was already on his feet, making a cutting motion with one hand for them to keep still.
He moved across the floor so stealthily that he seemed not to be taking steps at all. It was as if he floated above the ground. The scratching came agin just as he reached the door, and Poison’s pistol was at the ready when he flung open the screen.
There was a beat of silence, and then Poison let the gun drop back to his side. “I could have killed you,” he said.
“I’m glad that you did not,” came a voice that Ghoul recognized. “I don’t make it a habit to go armed.”
Poison came back inside. A small shadow trailed meekly behind him, its hat in its hands.
“It’s that preacher,” Poison said.
“Prophet,” Prester John corrected, but wryly, as if it were part of a joke he and Poison shared.
“I remember,” Ghoul said. “Come on in. Have something to eat. I owe you. This is Ray, so you know.”
Prester John came into the light. He sat down carefully, straight-backed, and placed his hat on his knees.
“What are you doing here?” Poison asked.
“The light in your window looked welcoming to this weary clay. I pray that I have not intruded.”
“No,” Ghoul said, and Poison gave him a sudden curious look. He set his jaw against it. “We’ve got some drinking water and a place for you to sleep. That’s about it, though.”
“Also, if I recall, it is long past time for those stitches of yours to come out.”
Ghoul rubbed the ridge of scar tissue at his temple. “To tell you the truth, I completely forgot.”
“I shall remove them,” Prester John said. “As it was I who put them there.”
“Does that mean you were looking for us?” Poison asked.
“Far from it. It was but Providence that brought me to you this night, as it does in time guide me to all the far-flung goats of His flock.”
“You’re nothing but a small-time con artist,” Poison said haughtily. “You act humble. Ingratiate yourself to everyone. All for what? A free meal?”
“Poison…” Ray said.
“No, let him speak,” Prester John said with a faint smile. “I should aspire to be nothing greater in his eyes. Though you don’t seem to like me much, Brother. I hope that I can one day give you cause to reevaluate your opinion.”
He stood up, a swift decisive motion, and picked up the lantern. “I think the light will be better over here. Come.”
Lowering his eyes, Ghoul followed him to a spot near the kitchen, where a low-hanging partition did make the light fall differently over their faces. While Prester John took out a little penknife and fastidiously cleaned and sterilized it, Ghoul found himself painfully aware of Poison’s voice, a hot indistinct whisper coming from somewhere back in the darkness.
“Anyway,” Ghoul managed, just to have something to say. “Anyway, it’s good to see a familiar face.”
“Yes.”
“I guess you know all the people who live out here pretty well, don’t you? How many of us are there?”
“Fewer than there once were. It is slow work replacing those who have gone ahead to wait. But that isn’t what you really want to know, is it?”
“I just-Ow!” Ghoul flinched. Prester John had moved in quick while he was busy looking towards Poison and had severed the three small sutures on his temple.
“Please, go on,” Prester John said as he began to remove the threads.
“It’s just that we haven’t met anyone since we left The Killjoy. No one but you. And I think Poison is starting to get impatient.”
“Impatient for what?”
“I don’t know,” Ghoul said. “For something to happen, I guess. He probably gets bored easily, knowing him.”
“Could it be that they are all avoiding you,” Prester John said with a shrug.
“Do they do that a lot? Avoid people?”
Prester John laughed, a sudden and unexpected sound. “If they avoid me, I don’t know about it. But I’ll put in a kind word for you amongst the good people.”
“Thanks,” Ghoul sighed. The stitches were out, but all at once he found that he did not want to go back right away. Prester John was watching him with a gentle interrogative expression, as if he understood all without being told.
“Listen,” Ghoul said. “Do you really believe in all that stuff you talk about? Prophecy. I mean, that’s like psychic powers right?”
“It’s not quite like that. The knowledge comes from within, not without. I have not, to my knowing, seen the face of our Lord yet to come. But, yes. I do believe.” He gave Ghoul a knowing look. “Not everyone does.”
Ghoul hesitated. “I don’t want to start shit with you. You seem like a good person, and I don’t want to make you upset, or whatever.”
“It is difficult to upset me with words alone,” Prester John said. “One of my functions is the Confession, after all.”
“So you’re, like, Catholic?”
“I am whatever is required of me.” He folded his hands on the counter, interlacing his long fingers. He had the broken nails and bulging knuckles of a laborer. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Nothing, really,” Ghoul said. “I guess I was just thinking about you. About what it must be like to be you. I’ve never believed in anything. Even when I was a kid, I knew there wasn’t a god. Nothing like that could possibly exist. I still know it, even now.”
“Sometimes I think,” Prester John replied, “that God, such as He is, must exist only in relation to the individual. Absent from the hearts of they who proclaim him most ardently, but ever beside his most adamant deniers.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. But it doesn’t really make it any more real.”
Ghoul knew even as he said the words that they had come off more cruel than he had intended them. Prester John only laughed. “No, it doesn’t. But people will believe all the same.”
“I guess so. But those are just people. What I really want to know is what you believe.”
“I must admit, I’ve never seen this side of you before, Brother.”
“You don’t know me that well.”
“I don’t,” Prester John admitted. His eyes shifted to Ghoul’s face, then away again, looking out over the darkness that crowded the corners as if it stretched on for miles. “Do you remember the Great Fires?”
“Yeah,” Ghoul said. And then, less steadily. “Mostly, I do.”
“It was a time of great suffering. A plague. And all the comfortable people, all the complacent people, who had never before had a need to contemplate suffering, nor know what pities should attend it, in that moment needed a spar to which they could cling. And God was there, but He was not the only god. A rift formed, between the True Believers in Capitalism, who cleaved themselves to Better Living and its wild promises, and the True Believers in Religion, who hid themselves under the shelter of the desert’s wings. And so here I am.”
“You’re one of them,” Ghoul said. His eyes narrowed. “And you don’t really believe it. You don’t believe any of it. But you’d rather be here than there. You really are a scam artist, then. Just like Poison said.”
Prester John’s eyebrows drew together. A shadow gathered in his eyes. “No. It’s not that…”
“It doesn’t matter one way or another to me. I think you’re on our side.”
A hand, skeletal and cold came down on Ghoul’s wrist, pinning it to the counter. Ghoul felt his breath welling in the back of his throat, and he managed to turn the cry that threatened to burst out into a sharp exhalation.
“We must set our houses in order,” Prester John said. His head was bent, and the voice that came from behind the curtain of pale hair seemed not like his own. “For we shall die and not live.”
Ghoul tried to free his wrist, but Prester John’s grip was iron. “In time,” he said, in a voice so soft that Ghoul should have had to strain to hear any of it. Should have, but did not. “In time, we’ll get out of this mess we’ve made for ourselves.”
He let go abruptly, and stood up. Without a word, he turned and went back, leaving Ghoul to fumble with the lantern and trail after him.
When he got close enough, he realized that Poison was scrutinizing them very closely. “What were you talking about?” he said.
“Nothing,” Ghoul said. “Dumb stuff.”
“Come here. Let me see the scar.”
Ghoul leaned over to oblige, but before Poison could get a good look at him, his eyes snapped to Prester John. “You’re leaving?”
Prester John put his hat on. “Do you object to that?”
“You haven’t even eaten,” Ray said. “You’re too young to go around skipping meals like that.”
“I said I knew you to be a scam artist,” Poison said sharply. “Now that you see where you stand with me, I don’t have a problem with your presence here. Sit down.”
“I wouldn’t want to be beholden,” said Prester John in the same wry tone as earlier, the one that suggested he and Poison were simply playing parts in a crude satire. He removed his hat and sat down.
***
Later, as Ghoul was making up a bed for himself on the billiards table, it occurred to him that Poison had been acting strangely. You never could tell with Poison, that was true, but Ghoul was sure that something had changed him while he was off with Prester John getting his stitches out.
Some fierce protectiveness had been aroused in him, or, if not protectiveness, than jealousy. Either seemed absurd. Prester John was wispy, bone-thin, so slight and pale that he was almost translucent. That Poison might have considered him a threat or a rival could have made Ghoul laugh. But he didn’t laugh, he shuddered to his very bones.
“Poison?” he said suddenly, not turning to look at the place where he moved softly in the darkness.
“Yes?” Poison’s voice came back.
“There’s plenty of room over here. Why don’t you share with me?”
The offer was out, and Ghoul felt bold and defiant for having made it, though neither Ray nor Prester John seemed to notice or care in the slightest.
“Of course,” Poison said. It didn’t seem to matter much to him either where he slept, but he came. Folding his jacket into a pillow, he laid down on the patchy green felt of the billiard table. Ghoul climbed up beside him, and he found himself falling immediately, with no forethought at all, into the crook of Poison’s arm.
His head was on Poison’s shoulder, and one arm was flung across his chest. He clenched his fingers in the fabric of Poison’s shirt, and Poison’s arm went around him.
“You seem uneasy around me.”
“Do I? I just…” Ghoul started to say something, but he never finished. Ray put out the lantern and darkness closed over them. Ghoul wanted to shut his eyes, to stop thinking for a while, but it was no good. He was wide awake.
Beside him, Poison was very still. He thought at first that he was asleep, but then he felt Poison’s hand pass gently over his hair.
“I’m sorry,” Ghoul whispered. “This table isn’t very comfortable.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’re probably used to much better. I bet you had a really nice bed back home.”
“I don’t want to talk about that place.”
Ghoul felt a jolt of yearning go through him. It was not sexual longing, but it was something like it. “Please?” he heard himself say hoarsely. “I won’t ask you about anything else, I promise. Just tell me about the bed. I’ve never slept in a real bed before. Maybe a long time ago, before the troubles started. But I was just a little kid back then. I don’t remember. I want to know what it’s like.”
“All right,” Poison said softly. But he was quiet for so long that Ghoul was afraid this time he really had fallen asleep. When he finally began to speak again, his words were halting and fitful.
“It was big. Wider than this table, and a little longer too. It stood on four legs, which were carved to look like the heads of wolves. The frame was cherry wood. That’s wood with a kind of reddish hue to it. The headboard was iron. A row of iron bars, and each one was pointed at the top. There was a chain - No. No, there was not that. The sheets were always white, and they were very stiff with starch. They changed them every day.”
“Were they that shiny stuff? Ghoul said. “Like they sometimes make ladies dresses out of?”
“Silk?” Poison sounded amused. “No, just cotton. There was a blanket. It was blue and plain. I had two pillows, feather ones. They replaced them often, whenever they started getting flat.”
He paused, shifting where he lay. When he spoke again, he seemed to be choosing his words very carefully.
“When I was very young, I had a stuffed rabbit that I slept with. It disappeared one night, and I did not ask where it had gone. For some time after that, when I was alone, I would hold a pillow in my arms and sleep curled up with it.”
Poison breathed a sigh. He’d talked a lot just then, by his standards, and he must have been tired. Ghoul stroked his fingertips gently along the rise of his ribs.
“I think if I could have just one night in a bed like that, I’d never ask for anything else again.”
“I’m sorry,” Poison whispered. “I’m sorry that you have suffered.”
“Thanks. I like hearing you say that.”
“I would have thought you’d be the type of person who didn’t want anyone’s pity.”
“No, I don’t mind pity,” Ghoul said. “Pity never hurt anyone except in their pride, and I don’t have a lot of that, to be honest. Besides, I don’t think you meant it as pity.”
“No, I did not. But I was afraid of being misunderstood.”
“Well, I understood you perfectly. So there.” Ghoul shut his eyes. “Goodnight.”
“Good night,” Poison said. And after that, Ghoul really did sleep.
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “We must set our houses in order,” Prester John said. “For we shall die and not live.”
Master Post
Chapter 7
At first, they holed up in an old ranch house back in the hills. The windows were all broken and one corner of the roof had caved in. The door had long since fallen off its hinges and into the dust. But all of that mattered very little. It never rained in the wasteland.
A clean cow skull hung above the entryway, and a lot of filthy ones littered the desert for a couple of miles in all directions. They made Ghoul nervous; he’d never really had much experience with animals, dead or live ones. Once he got past that, however, the place was nice enough. They had drinking water to spare and plenty of food, so they all went to bed early and slept late into the day. Ghoul couldn’t seem to get enough sleep, as if this were his first real chance at peace. As if he had years of lost rest to make up.
Some nights, in the full-dark before the moon rose, Poison would feel his way over to where Ghoul lay curled up in his blankets. Then, Ghoul didn’t mind being awake. They’d fool around in a clumsy half-dreamlike way, never getting much beyond handjobs and dry humping and lazy drawn-out kisses. Ghoul still came about as hard as he ever had in his life.
There didn’t seem to be any sense or reason to Poison’s visits. Sometimes he would come three nights in a row; sometimes three nights would go by with nothing. Ghoul wondered if Poison was testing him somehow, or opening an invitation to him, but he never quite managed to get himself together enough to cross the empty stretch of floor to where Poison lay, unmoving in sleep or patient anticipation.
Besides, Poison always came back to him. In time, Ghoul would always feel the weight of his cool darkness bending over him; his voice, with its dry urgency, whispering, “Shh, it’s me. It’s only me.” long after Ghoul had figured out that much. There would be the blazing cipher of his kiss, branding itself once more on Ghoul’s neck.
There were times, Ghoul knew, that they weren’t quiet. Ray must have heard them, but he never said a word, nor even gave Ghoul one of those shrewd barracks looks that would have indicated he knew everything. Ghoul was grateful for that, though sometimes he thought it must have been pretty hard on Ray, with his wife dead and all. Alone for all those long months…
Ghoul never followed that thought to its logical conclusion. Ray was too paternal, too lamely fatherly, for Ghoul to think about him that way. It was like that time back when he was still in the PUF, when that stacked blonde Belorussian arms dealer had shown up trying to unload two tons of C4. The Manskinner had gotten all squirrelly and conducted a lot of private conferences in his room with Irina. It was enough to make your balls crawl up inside your abdomen and die.
At the ranch house, they didn’t have much to fill their days. Poison started to refer to the time they spent there as Operation Thoreau. He seemed to regard it as a kind of limbo, a kind of stasis into which they had all willingly entered.
Ray tried his hand at hunting, and he proved to be a pretty good shot. He brought down a massive milk-white three-headed snake, a mangy coyote with a row of boney spines protruding from its back, and finally something that would have been a fish were it not for the fact that it had a lizard’s legs and crawled on the sand.
No one felt much like trying the meat from any of them, and that was the end of their experiment in self-sufficiency.
Slowly, mistrustfully, almost unwillingly, they began to talk to pass the time. They talked about the present sometimes, the past often. Never the future. Ray told them that he had been hired at an investment firm in Battery City right out of college, that he’d married at the respectable age of 31, that they’d had a son and daughter and that it had been his idea to move out of the city. His idea, but for the kids’ sake. Then, he told them how things had been when he was alone; the traps he had laid in the desperate hope that someone would come along to trip them, the supplies he had set aside like a distress beacon to the outside world.
All for profit, Ray had said. He’d had a lot of time to think it over, and he knew now why they had cut the suburb off. The gas rationing and the food shortages had hit Battery City hard, and to keep the outlying areas of the Zones supplied cost more than it paid in. Best, then, to excise the cancer draining the life from the city. It was in the best interests of the shareholders.
And it was wrong, Ray went on. But maybe it was wrong of us, too. To set ourselves apart from people, to act like we did not need their labor more than they needed ours. I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it into words exactly. I don’t know…
It was then that Poison had gotten up and stormed out. Neither of them had made a move to follow him.
As he listened to him talk, Ghoul knew that Ray was holding some things back. He never said what had happened after the quarantine of the suburb; he never let on what had become of everyone else. In his calm and articulate account, there was no sign of the man who had taken a lighter and a can of gasoline and reduced that part of his life to ashes.
Ghoul didn’t mind, though. He was holding back quite a bit himself.
Only Poison didn’t say much. He sat with them, and he listened and he chain smoked. It seemed that sometimes Ghoul could detect a kind of sadness in his expression, a kind of obscure yearning, as if Poison had no stories to tell except those that must be self-censored and silenced.
Still, they had their nights together, and Ghoul was afraid when he thought of how long and how well those might sustain him.
As the days stretched into weeks, Ghoul noticed that Poison’s mind began to wander. That he stared at the horizon and sometimes walked out to the Trans Am just to rest his hands upon its baking hood.
One afternoon, Ghoul came out of the house and found Poison standing like that, his fists clenched against the car, his eyes fixed on some point in the far distance. And he remembered what Poison had told him once - back when he was still Gerard - that he would take them away. As far away as he could.
Ghoul knew that they weren’t there yet.
He came up behind Poison and put an arm around his waist and pressed his lips to his shoulder.
“Want to head out tomorrow?” he said.
“Yes,” Poison replied distantly. “Tomorrow is good.”
“I’ll let Ray know.”
“Thank you.”
In the morning, they awoke early and packed the car and headed for the highway.
***
For several days they travelled the desert without seeing anyone, though they came across frequent signs of habitation. In every abandoned gas station, diner, or roadhouse where they stopped to spend the night there were fresh cigarette butts, empty cans with the pasty residue of food inside them still damp. Once, they even found a set of tire tracks, new and crisp-looking in the dust.
Ray had grown taciturn and sullen. Poison maintained his elegant silences. Caught between the two encroaching walls of quiet, Ghoul felt himself stifled and choked. By the third evening, he was glad to get out of the car for the night, even if it meant leaving the comfort of the AC behind.
Poison had settled on a doublewide trailer set back from the highway. It had once been a restaurant, but little remained except for the stainless steel shelves in the kitchen and a huge scarred billiards table, too sturdy to break down for firewood, that dominated the dining room.
Night came on quickly. Ray lit a kerosene lantern and they crowded superstitiously into the halo of light it cast. Ghoul sifted listlessly through the cans of food he had brought in, not bothering to try to read the labels. He wished he could think of something to say to break the silence, but nothing came to mind. He snatched up one of the cans at random, tore the lid off and vindictively began to shovel miniature ravioli and congealed tomato sauce into his mouth. It tasted good, but it had no substance. It seemed to disappear as soon as it was inside him.
Something moved outside the trailer, scratching along the tin wall.
Ghoul’s eyes came up, and he knew he was not the only one who had heard it. Ray had the Glock out of its holster, and he held it at twitching readiness. Poison was already on his feet, making a cutting motion with one hand for them to keep still.
He moved across the floor so stealthily that he seemed not to be taking steps at all. It was as if he floated above the ground. The scratching came agin just as he reached the door, and Poison’s pistol was at the ready when he flung open the screen.
There was a beat of silence, and then Poison let the gun drop back to his side. “I could have killed you,” he said.
“I’m glad that you did not,” came a voice that Ghoul recognized. “I don’t make it a habit to go armed.”
Poison came back inside. A small shadow trailed meekly behind him, its hat in its hands.
“It’s that preacher,” Poison said.
“Prophet,” Prester John corrected, but wryly, as if it were part of a joke he and Poison shared.
“I remember,” Ghoul said. “Come on in. Have something to eat. I owe you. This is Ray, so you know.”
Prester John came into the light. He sat down carefully, straight-backed, and placed his hat on his knees.
“What are you doing here?” Poison asked.
“The light in your window looked welcoming to this weary clay. I pray that I have not intruded.”
“No,” Ghoul said, and Poison gave him a sudden curious look. He set his jaw against it. “We’ve got some drinking water and a place for you to sleep. That’s about it, though.”
“Also, if I recall, it is long past time for those stitches of yours to come out.”
Ghoul rubbed the ridge of scar tissue at his temple. “To tell you the truth, I completely forgot.”
“I shall remove them,” Prester John said. “As it was I who put them there.”
“Does that mean you were looking for us?” Poison asked.
“Far from it. It was but Providence that brought me to you this night, as it does in time guide me to all the far-flung goats of His flock.”
“You’re nothing but a small-time con artist,” Poison said haughtily. “You act humble. Ingratiate yourself to everyone. All for what? A free meal?”
“Poison…” Ray said.
“No, let him speak,” Prester John said with a faint smile. “I should aspire to be nothing greater in his eyes. Though you don’t seem to like me much, Brother. I hope that I can one day give you cause to reevaluate your opinion.”
He stood up, a swift decisive motion, and picked up the lantern. “I think the light will be better over here. Come.”
Lowering his eyes, Ghoul followed him to a spot near the kitchen, where a low-hanging partition did make the light fall differently over their faces. While Prester John took out a little penknife and fastidiously cleaned and sterilized it, Ghoul found himself painfully aware of Poison’s voice, a hot indistinct whisper coming from somewhere back in the darkness.
“Anyway,” Ghoul managed, just to have something to say. “Anyway, it’s good to see a familiar face.”
“Yes.”
“I guess you know all the people who live out here pretty well, don’t you? How many of us are there?”
“Fewer than there once were. It is slow work replacing those who have gone ahead to wait. But that isn’t what you really want to know, is it?”
“I just-Ow!” Ghoul flinched. Prester John had moved in quick while he was busy looking towards Poison and had severed the three small sutures on his temple.
“Please, go on,” Prester John said as he began to remove the threads.
“It’s just that we haven’t met anyone since we left The Killjoy. No one but you. And I think Poison is starting to get impatient.”
“Impatient for what?”
“I don’t know,” Ghoul said. “For something to happen, I guess. He probably gets bored easily, knowing him.”
“Could it be that they are all avoiding you,” Prester John said with a shrug.
“Do they do that a lot? Avoid people?”
Prester John laughed, a sudden and unexpected sound. “If they avoid me, I don’t know about it. But I’ll put in a kind word for you amongst the good people.”
“Thanks,” Ghoul sighed. The stitches were out, but all at once he found that he did not want to go back right away. Prester John was watching him with a gentle interrogative expression, as if he understood all without being told.
“Listen,” Ghoul said. “Do you really believe in all that stuff you talk about? Prophecy. I mean, that’s like psychic powers right?”
“It’s not quite like that. The knowledge comes from within, not without. I have not, to my knowing, seen the face of our Lord yet to come. But, yes. I do believe.” He gave Ghoul a knowing look. “Not everyone does.”
Ghoul hesitated. “I don’t want to start shit with you. You seem like a good person, and I don’t want to make you upset, or whatever.”
“It is difficult to upset me with words alone,” Prester John said. “One of my functions is the Confession, after all.”
“So you’re, like, Catholic?”
“I am whatever is required of me.” He folded his hands on the counter, interlacing his long fingers. He had the broken nails and bulging knuckles of a laborer. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Nothing, really,” Ghoul said. “I guess I was just thinking about you. About what it must be like to be you. I’ve never believed in anything. Even when I was a kid, I knew there wasn’t a god. Nothing like that could possibly exist. I still know it, even now.”
“Sometimes I think,” Prester John replied, “that God, such as He is, must exist only in relation to the individual. Absent from the hearts of they who proclaim him most ardently, but ever beside his most adamant deniers.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. But it doesn’t really make it any more real.”
Ghoul knew even as he said the words that they had come off more cruel than he had intended them. Prester John only laughed. “No, it doesn’t. But people will believe all the same.”
“I guess so. But those are just people. What I really want to know is what you believe.”
“I must admit, I’ve never seen this side of you before, Brother.”
“You don’t know me that well.”
“I don’t,” Prester John admitted. His eyes shifted to Ghoul’s face, then away again, looking out over the darkness that crowded the corners as if it stretched on for miles. “Do you remember the Great Fires?”
“Yeah,” Ghoul said. And then, less steadily. “Mostly, I do.”
“It was a time of great suffering. A plague. And all the comfortable people, all the complacent people, who had never before had a need to contemplate suffering, nor know what pities should attend it, in that moment needed a spar to which they could cling. And God was there, but He was not the only god. A rift formed, between the True Believers in Capitalism, who cleaved themselves to Better Living and its wild promises, and the True Believers in Religion, who hid themselves under the shelter of the desert’s wings. And so here I am.”
“You’re one of them,” Ghoul said. His eyes narrowed. “And you don’t really believe it. You don’t believe any of it. But you’d rather be here than there. You really are a scam artist, then. Just like Poison said.”
Prester John’s eyebrows drew together. A shadow gathered in his eyes. “No. It’s not that…”
“It doesn’t matter one way or another to me. I think you’re on our side.”
A hand, skeletal and cold came down on Ghoul’s wrist, pinning it to the counter. Ghoul felt his breath welling in the back of his throat, and he managed to turn the cry that threatened to burst out into a sharp exhalation.
“We must set our houses in order,” Prester John said. His head was bent, and the voice that came from behind the curtain of pale hair seemed not like his own. “For we shall die and not live.”
Ghoul tried to free his wrist, but Prester John’s grip was iron. “In time,” he said, in a voice so soft that Ghoul should have had to strain to hear any of it. Should have, but did not. “In time, we’ll get out of this mess we’ve made for ourselves.”
He let go abruptly, and stood up. Without a word, he turned and went back, leaving Ghoul to fumble with the lantern and trail after him.
When he got close enough, he realized that Poison was scrutinizing them very closely. “What were you talking about?” he said.
“Nothing,” Ghoul said. “Dumb stuff.”
“Come here. Let me see the scar.”
Ghoul leaned over to oblige, but before Poison could get a good look at him, his eyes snapped to Prester John. “You’re leaving?”
Prester John put his hat on. “Do you object to that?”
“You haven’t even eaten,” Ray said. “You’re too young to go around skipping meals like that.”
“I said I knew you to be a scam artist,” Poison said sharply. “Now that you see where you stand with me, I don’t have a problem with your presence here. Sit down.”
“I wouldn’t want to be beholden,” said Prester John in the same wry tone as earlier, the one that suggested he and Poison were simply playing parts in a crude satire. He removed his hat and sat down.
***
Later, as Ghoul was making up a bed for himself on the billiards table, it occurred to him that Poison had been acting strangely. You never could tell with Poison, that was true, but Ghoul was sure that something had changed him while he was off with Prester John getting his stitches out.
Some fierce protectiveness had been aroused in him, or, if not protectiveness, than jealousy. Either seemed absurd. Prester John was wispy, bone-thin, so slight and pale that he was almost translucent. That Poison might have considered him a threat or a rival could have made Ghoul laugh. But he didn’t laugh, he shuddered to his very bones.
“Poison?” he said suddenly, not turning to look at the place where he moved softly in the darkness.
“Yes?” Poison’s voice came back.
“There’s plenty of room over here. Why don’t you share with me?”
The offer was out, and Ghoul felt bold and defiant for having made it, though neither Ray nor Prester John seemed to notice or care in the slightest.
“Of course,” Poison said. It didn’t seem to matter much to him either where he slept, but he came. Folding his jacket into a pillow, he laid down on the patchy green felt of the billiard table. Ghoul climbed up beside him, and he found himself falling immediately, with no forethought at all, into the crook of Poison’s arm.
His head was on Poison’s shoulder, and one arm was flung across his chest. He clenched his fingers in the fabric of Poison’s shirt, and Poison’s arm went around him.
“You seem uneasy around me.”
“Do I? I just…” Ghoul started to say something, but he never finished. Ray put out the lantern and darkness closed over them. Ghoul wanted to shut his eyes, to stop thinking for a while, but it was no good. He was wide awake.
Beside him, Poison was very still. He thought at first that he was asleep, but then he felt Poison’s hand pass gently over his hair.
“I’m sorry,” Ghoul whispered. “This table isn’t very comfortable.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’re probably used to much better. I bet you had a really nice bed back home.”
“I don’t want to talk about that place.”
Ghoul felt a jolt of yearning go through him. It was not sexual longing, but it was something like it. “Please?” he heard himself say hoarsely. “I won’t ask you about anything else, I promise. Just tell me about the bed. I’ve never slept in a real bed before. Maybe a long time ago, before the troubles started. But I was just a little kid back then. I don’t remember. I want to know what it’s like.”
“All right,” Poison said softly. But he was quiet for so long that Ghoul was afraid this time he really had fallen asleep. When he finally began to speak again, his words were halting and fitful.
“It was big. Wider than this table, and a little longer too. It stood on four legs, which were carved to look like the heads of wolves. The frame was cherry wood. That’s wood with a kind of reddish hue to it. The headboard was iron. A row of iron bars, and each one was pointed at the top. There was a chain - No. No, there was not that. The sheets were always white, and they were very stiff with starch. They changed them every day.”
“Were they that shiny stuff? Ghoul said. “Like they sometimes make ladies dresses out of?”
“Silk?” Poison sounded amused. “No, just cotton. There was a blanket. It was blue and plain. I had two pillows, feather ones. They replaced them often, whenever they started getting flat.”
He paused, shifting where he lay. When he spoke again, he seemed to be choosing his words very carefully.
“When I was very young, I had a stuffed rabbit that I slept with. It disappeared one night, and I did not ask where it had gone. For some time after that, when I was alone, I would hold a pillow in my arms and sleep curled up with it.”
Poison breathed a sigh. He’d talked a lot just then, by his standards, and he must have been tired. Ghoul stroked his fingertips gently along the rise of his ribs.
“I think if I could have just one night in a bed like that, I’d never ask for anything else again.”
“I’m sorry,” Poison whispered. “I’m sorry that you have suffered.”
“Thanks. I like hearing you say that.”
“I would have thought you’d be the type of person who didn’t want anyone’s pity.”
“No, I don’t mind pity,” Ghoul said. “Pity never hurt anyone except in their pride, and I don’t have a lot of that, to be honest. Besides, I don’t think you meant it as pity.”
“No, I did not. But I was afraid of being misunderstood.”
“Well, I understood you perfectly. So there.” Ghoul shut his eyes. “Goodnight.”
“Good night,” Poison said. And after that, Ghoul really did sleep.