Touched, page 10
This thought filled my being and the fatigue that had overwhelmed Temple suddenly lifted.
I stood up straight and grabbed Waxman’s wrists as Temple had taken hold of Lon Farthey’s.
Waxman’s new form smiled. “Mortality grabbing onto its own demise for support,” he said.
But when I squared my shoulders, his smile thinned.
When my fingers dug into his stolen flesh, he winced.
The hound ran from the house yelping, and somewhere around my diaphragm I found a deep well of strength. It was all the history of Life—not of humanity alone but of the bacteria and insects, dinosaurs and viruses, fish and fowl—all there, all my history and strength.
I looked into Death’s visage and saw an empty pit, a place where life rested but did not end. He, Waxman, was little more than the punctuation used to define the long story of Life. I was at the forefront of a living wave and he was only the space through which I progressed.
This knowledge registered in his silver orbs. Fear began to gnaw at the edges of his certainty. He bent forward, seeking to reestablish his superiority. But I was unyielding. I seemed to grow while he remained, as ever, the same. Because Death did not evolve or change, it did not reinvent itself again and again toward ever-elusive perfection. Death was complete in itself and therefore limited to the background. It, Death, was merely a prop for life, a yardstick that measured our advance.
Waxman, the personification of nothingness, saw himself for the first time in the reflective surface of the brilliance of my growing elation. As my power increased, his joints stiffened. His mind grew hazy. His thoughts became senile and repetitive. His lack of life overtook his dreams and he fell to the floor, eyes wide and unseeing, a self-aware corpse unable to manifest even a breath.
I stood there in the necessary carnage of survival. Rat Man and Reaper had had their lives torn from them. Rooster sat on the floor with his back to the wall, moaning at the lies Waxman had imposed on him. My son was bleeding badly. Celestine and Tessa stood on either side of him and were taking him outside, to the car, I supposed.
Waxman was defeated but Death could not die.
“We’re taking Brown to the emergency room,” Tessa was saying. “Are you all right?”
“Let me help you,” I said.
I took a step and fell to my knees.
“You rest,” Tessa said. “We’ll call from the hospital.”
I stayed on my knees for long minutes, panting and reveling in the feeling of a billion years of life behind me.
When I felt the hand on my shoulder I didn’t know if that would be the end of my particular branch of existence. It didn’t matter. My family was safe. My blood would carry them forward with knowledge that was bound to change the world.
“Is he dead?” Rooster asked in a hollow, haunted tone.
“No. He’s paralyzed.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I showed him how small and insignificant he was.”
Rooster pulled me up by the arm. We stood there facing each other. If we had been different men we would have embraced at that moment.
“He showed me what it was to be dead,” Rooster said. “It was a deep trench at the bottom of the ocean—dark and cold and never-ending.”
“That’s not life, Harold. He wants you to believe it, but it’s not true. His masters want it, but once the flame is lit it will never be extinguished.”
“We better clean up around here before somebody comes by,” Rooster said.
We carried the bodies through the house and out to the garage: Lon “Raver” Farthey, Sean “Reaper” Gardener, Mason “Rat Man” Drinkman, and the tall Indian man who carried the null soul of Tor “Death” Waxman. We plugged in the big white freezer, placed Waxman inside, and were just securing it with thick chains and heavy padlocks when my cell phone sounded.
“Hello?”
“How are you?” Tessa asked.
“Alive. How’s Brown?”
“He’s going to lose his left arm just below the elbow and he’ll be blind in his right eye.”
I opened my mouth but there were no words for the grief.
“He told me to tell you that he was okay,” Tessa said. “He’s going to get the arm replaced with an aluminum bat and he says that that will make him a better soldier in your army.”
“I’m so sorry, Tess. I didn’t mean to hurt our son like this.”
“It’s a war, baby,” she explained.
“I should have gone after that dog when he jumped over my head. Temple wouldn’t let me.”
“He was right. If you hadn’t stopped that thug Farthey, we’d all be dead now. All but you and I saw in Waxman’s thoughts that he would have treated you worse than we plan to do to him.”
I watched Rooster tightening the fourth chain around the Death Man’s electronic coffin.
“Yeah,” I said. “He would have lashed me to a wall in some basement and drained my blood daily to fuel his undead army.”
When I shuddered, the green moth flew in, landing on my left shoulder. She purred subliminally and the pain and fear slipped away.
“How’s Seal?” I asked.
“She’s with her brother. You shouldn’t worry, Marty. Sacrifice means survival.”
“But he’s your son.”
“And yours,” she said. “He’s done us proud, baby. He’s done us proud and he’s at peace with his wounds. He knows that his loss will give us a chance to succeed.”
“Succeed at what?”
“Whatever you decide, Mr. Martin Just. We will follow you even if you die.”
“But, but I don’t want anybody to die. I just want to live the lives we had last week. You and I getting old together and the kids going to college. They’d give us grandkids and come home for the holidays.”
“It’s not to be,” Tessa said over the radio waves of human technology. I wondered what my blood had whispered to her that I had forgotten.
Rooster and I lowered the big freezer down into the ten-foot grave. The triple-insulated cable that powered it was long enough and we were strong enough, though it was a struggle. We placed the three dead racists into thick plastic bags and, after piling a few feet of dirt on the coffin, we placed them in the grave, both friend and foe. Then we filled the tomb with most of the soil we’d excavated and put the rest behind the house.
In the days to come I would put in a new concrete floor above the burial site. But that night it was enough to lay in the soil.
Tessa and Celestine came home. I made hot chocolate for them and they went up to sleep in my daughter’s bedroom. I kissed them goodnight and felt the loss of their leaving.
“That’s a beautiful family you have,” Rooster said after they were gone.
“You think so?”
“I don’t have nobody.”
“You don’t have any family?”
“No . . . I got blood out there, but ever since that Waxman touched me I knew I was alone. You know, like a boat cut loose to drift out to sea.”
“Because you already died,” I said, knowing that it was true.
He nodded and said, “I think I’m gonna be movin’ on.”
“You’re welcome to stay, Harold.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “I can hear him down there in the ground. He’s callin’ to me. And even though I know I wouldn’t go there, it would drive me crazy to hear him whisperin’. Maybe if I get far enough away I won’t hear it no more.”
Not ten minutes later Rooster was walking down the path from my front door to Charbadon Lane. He didn’t have so much as a paper bag for luggage.
As he faded into the darkness of the night, I heard the great black dog howl for his master from the nearby hills. One day soon Brown and I would have to hunt the mongrel down and kill him. He was Waxman’s familiar as the green moth was mine.
One day we would have to kill that dog, but that night it was enough to hear his baleful cry.
Walter Mosley, Touched
