Darwinia

But the gods were silent on the subject.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Elias Vale’s last client was a Caribbean woman dying of cancer.

Her name was Felicity, and she had come through the autumn rain on her stick-legs to Vale’s shabby suite in the Coaltown district of New Dresden. She wore a flower-print shift that hung on her hollow body like a collapsed tent. The tumors — as his god perceived them — had already invaded her lungs and bowel.

He closed the shutters on a view of wet streets, dark faces, industrial stacks, sour air. Felicity, seventy years old, sighed at the dimming of the light. She had been shocked, at first, by the broken contours of Vale’s face. That was all right, Vale thought. Fear and awe were comfortable neighbors.

Felicity asked, in a faint voice still ripe with Spanish Town inflections, “Will I die?”

She didn’t need a psychic for that diagnosis. Any honest layman would know at once she was dying. The wonder was that she had been able to climb the flight of stairs to Vale’s consulting room. But of course she hadn’t come to hear the truth.

He sat across from her at a small wooden table, its short leg propped on a book of astrological charts. Felicity’s yellow eyes glistened in the watery light. Vale offered his hand. His hand was soft, plump. Hers was gaunt, parchment skin framing a pale palm. “Your hand is warm,” he said.

“Yours is cold.”

“Warm hands are a good sign. That’s life, Felicity. Feel it. That’s all the days you lived, all ru

She said sternly, “How many more?”

Vale’s god had no interest in this woman. She was important only for the fifteen-dollar consultation fee. She existed to top off his purse before he hopped a train to Armageddon.

Ready or not.

But he felt sorry for her.

“Do you feel that river, Felicity? That river of blood? River of iron and air ru

She closed her eyes, wincing slightly at the pressure of his hand on her wrist. “Yes,” she whispered.

“That’s a strong old river, Felicity. That’s a river as wide as the Rhine.”

“Where does it go to — in the end?”

“The sea,” Vale said, gently. “Every river runs into the sea.”

“But… not yet?”

“No, not yet. That river hasn’t run dry.”

“I feel very poorly. Some mornings I hardly can drag myself from bed.”

“You’re not a young woman, Felicity; Think of the children you raised. Michael, building bridges in the mountains, and Constance, with her own young ones almost grown.”

“And Carlotta,” Felicity murmured, her sad eyes closed.

“And little Carlotta, round and beautiful as the day she died. She’s waiting for you, Felicity, but she’s patient. She knows the time is not yet.”

“How long?”

“All the time in the world,” Vale said. Which wasn’t much.

“How long?”

The urgency in her voice was chastening. There was still a strong woman in this sack of bone and rotten tissue.

“Two years,” he said. “Maybe three. Long enough to see Constance’s little ones out on their own. Long enough to do the things you have to do.”

She sighed, a long exhalation of relief and gratitude. Her breath smelled like the butcher shop on Hoover Lane, the one with goat carcasses strung in the window like Christmas decorations. “Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

She would be dead by the end of the month.

He folded the money into his pocket and helped her down the stairs.

New Dresden’s rail yard was a vast, sooty wasteland illuminated by harsh industrial lights on steel poles. The city’s towers rose up behind the longhouses like tombstones, steamy with rain.

Vale wore dark clothing. He carried a cloth bag with a few possessions in it. His money was on a belt cinched around his waist. He carried a pistol in the folds of his trousers.

He crawled under a torn section of chain-link fence, drenching his knees on the muddy ground. The soil of compressed dirt and cinders and coal fragments harbored pools of rainwater on which oil floated in rainbow slicks. He had been shivering for most of an hour, waiting while an inland train was shunted onto the nearest track. Now the diesel engine began to speed up, its headlight beaming through the rain-streaked darkness.

Go, Vale thought. Run.

He felt his god’s sense of urgency coursing through him, and it wasn’t about catching this particular train. Human history was spiraling down to the zero point, perhaps even faster than the gods had anticipated. Vale had work to do. He had come to this desolate place for a reason.

He tossed his bag through the open door of a flatcar and hurled himself after it. He landed rolling, bending back the fingers of his left hand. “Shit,” he whispered. He sat up against the wooden slats of the far wall. The car was dark and stank of ancient cargo: moldy hay, snakes and cattle bound for slaughter. Rail-yard lights strobed past the open door.

He was not alone. There was another man huddled in the far corner of the car, visible in flashes. Vale’s hand went instinctively to his pistol. But he saw in a flicker of hard light that the man was old, shabby, hollow-eyed, and probably drunk on aftershave or antiseptic. A nuisance, perhaps, but not a threat.

“Hey, stranger,” the old man said.

“Leave me alone,” Vale said crisply.

He felt the burden of his days. He had passed many anonymous years since Washington, had led a marginal life in the marginal districts of too many towns. New Orleans, Miami, Jeffersonville, New Pittsburgh, New Dresden. He had learned a few things useful to the gods and he had never lacked for food or accommodation, though he was sometimes poor. He had been, he suspected, held in reserve, waiting for the final summons, the last trumpet, the ascension of the gods over mankind.

And always there had been the fear: What if that battle never came? What if he was condemned to an endless round of cheap rooms, the confessions of impotent men and dying women and grieving husbands, the shallow consolations of discount liquor and Turkish heroin?

Soon, his god whispered. Or perhaps it was his own secret voice. Lately, the distinction escaped him.

Soon. Soon.

The train rattled deep into the countryside, past dripping mosque trees and sage-pine forests, across steel bridges slick with autumn mist, toward the wild East, toward Armageddon.

He woke in a wash of sunlight with the hobo looming over him. He scooted away from the evil-smelling old man and reached for his pistol.

The hobo backed off, holding up his grimy hands in an appeasing gesture. “No harm done! No harm done!”

The train clacked through daylight forest. Beyond the open door, a ridge declined toward a mossy river.

“Just keep the fuck away from me,” Vale said.

“You hurt your hand, my friend,” the hobo said.

“That’s my problem.”

“Looks bad.”

“It’ll heal.” He had twisted it coming into the train last night. It didn’t hurt. But it did look a little odd.

Four of the five nails were missing. The flesh beneath was pale and strange.