At first it was difficult to locate the source. The sound echoed and distorted on its way across the yards of brick and stone. Without thinking, Sweeney jumped down off the loading dock and began to walk toward the abandoned hearse, where the Abominations had played King of the Hill. Halfway to the hearse, he understood that the noise was a human voice, a child’s cry of grief and fear. And then Sweeney was running.
When he got to the hearse, he ran from door to door, pulling at each handle. But they were all locked. He began to circle the vehicle, pounding on the smoked glass of the windows. And the more he pounded, the louder the crying grew. The sound was making him frantic. He drummed his fists against the windows but nothing happened. He jumped up onto the hood and began to kick away at the windshield with his heels, but he could not shatter the glass.
Sweeney began to sweat and his breathing became labored. But at last, near the point of exhaustion, he moved around the rear of the hearse, got on his knees, and reached down for a brick. Bringing it up above his head, he let gravity carry the red block down against the hearse’s rear window, which cracked neatly down its center. Sweeney stood and dropped the brick, used his elbow to shatter the window, reached inside the hearse, and unlatched and swung open the gate.
Bending at the waist, he peered inside. And saw that the crying child was his son. And that his son’s body was covered in feathers. In all other respects, the boy looked normal, healthy. He was simply shrouded in a layer of down.
At the sight of his father, Danny stopped crying and yelled, “Daddy.”
Sweeney inserted his arms and extracted Danny from the hearse. Then the father fell back on his heels and cradled the child against his chest. And both of them breathed and shivered and held onto each other.
“I didn’t know where you were,” Danny said, starting to cry again. “I didn’t know where you went.”
“It’s okay, Danny,” Sweeney said, hugging his son more tightly, cupping the boy’s head and easing it down to the shoulder. “I’m right here. Everything’s okay.”
“I couldn’t find Mom,” Danny said, his need to suck air fighting his need to speak.
“We’ll find Mom. It’s okay, Danny. It’s all right.”
“I got so cold, Daddy.”
“I’ll keep you warm,” Sweeney said. “I’m here now.”
“Can we go find Mom,” Danny asked, “and then go home?”
“That’s a good idea,” Sweeney said, shifting the boy in his arms and struggling up to his feet. And when he looked around, he realized that the landscape had changed.
The ruins of the old factories now stretched as far as he could see. There were no bordering streets. No tenements or mills or city lights visible in the distance. Beneath his feet, what had been brick and rock and rubble was now something else — something like baked clay, hardpan, a gray and white expanse shot through with cracks. It was flat and it extended to the horizon. There was something intensely primordial about the landscape and it triggered sudden terror in Sweeney.
Sensing his father’s panic, Danny said, “It’ll be okay, Dad.”
Sweeney wanted to ask Where are we? but was afraid of the answer. Instead, he said, “I don’t know which way to go.”
“Can I ride on your back?” Danny asked.
Sweeney hoisted him and, once secure, Danny extended his downy arm and pointed away from the Harmony factory. And they began to walk.
They covered what must have been miles, but Sweeney’s feet and back carried his burden without complaint, though his eyes watered from the oppressiveness of the air. There was a chemical smell that got worse as they progressed, something like sulfur and cabbage. Danny either didn’t notice it or didn’t mind it.
They didn’t talk much. Once Danny asked if Mom would be mad that they were late and Sweeney said, “How do you know we’ll be late?”
“We’re already late,” Danny said.
After that they came to the first Joshua tree. It was growing up out of one of the larger cracks in the hardpan. Neither father nor son commented on it and soon they were spotting more of them and the new trees were bigger, fuller, their spearlike branches all pointing in the direction Sweeney was heading.
“Can you eat the flowers?” Danny asked and Sweeney said he didn’t know. As they passed one of the branches, Danny reached out, pulled free a white blossom. Seconds later, a few petals floated down onto Sweeney’s chest and leg.
And sometime after that they were in the thick of the trees. Their progress slowed considerably. The sky turned purple and the moon appeared low and to their right. Sweeney tried to hurry but the thicket of tree limbs made the going near impossible. There was no clear path. And the smell had grown putrid, a clogged leech field in high summer. He brought a hand up to shield his nose and mouth and from beneath the hand he said, “How can you stand it?”
“It’s not so bad from up here,” Danny said.
Sweeney felt his son’s feathers against the back of his neck and head. He wanted to put Danny down for a while, but he knew it was crucial that they continued moving. And so he tried to ignore the fatigue and tramp on. But as the hardpan began to soften, go marshy, his legs began to ache and he had to ask Danny if he could walk for a while.
The boy agreed and his father lowered him to the ground. Soon after, the trees began to thin again and when they left the last one behind them, they were fully in the swamps. Now the smell was different. Just as strong and just as unpleasant, but more alive, derived less from decay and more from something fertile and ripe.
They held hands and took smaller steps. Their feet sank into inches of heavy, fetid water. Sweeney felt it seep through shoe and sock and touch his skin. His flesh prickled and he ground his teeth. But the swamp water didn’t seem to have any effect on Danny. When it rose to the boy’s knees, Sweeney hoisted him up on shoulders once again. And that’s when the insects arrived. Fat, slow winter flies. They ignored his swatting hands, tried to land on him, their buzzing set to a ridiculous volume.
Sweeney breathed through his nose and shook his head. Within yards, the pests had swarmed into an infestation and he tried to run. But with each attempt to lift his leg and push out of the water, he planted a foot deeper into the bottom muck. Danny pressed his eyes into his father’s head and wrapped his arms more tightly around Dad’s neck. The flies began to mass on Sweeney’s face. He shook his head wildly but they refused to dislodge. And that was when he tripped over the first body.
He went down on his knees, yet somehow Danny managed to stay on his back. The putrid water sprayed up, soaked his shirt and face, which loosed some of the flies. He wiped the rest away with the back of his arm and opened his eyes to look into the face of Ernie Blake. Though Sweeney had never met the man, he was certain this was Ernie, Nora’s husband.
Blake was lying just beneath the skin of the water, floating in the murky pool. He was dressed in workman’s coveralls that had gone filthy in the swamp and sported a coating of slimy algae. Though he was fully submerged, his eyes were open and they tracked Sweeney’s movement as he tried to jump away from the body.
“It’s okay,” he heard Danny say behind him. “It’s only Mr. Blake.”
Sweeney didn’t know what to do, if he should attempt to lift the man out of the water. He felt his knees sinking into the mud and as he tried to think, Ernie Blake opened his mouth and dozens of tiny black fish swam out.
Danny began to laugh and Sweeney was horrified. He pushed himself up to standing, tried once again to run and tripped, this time over the floating body of Lawrence Belmonte, the footless hunter from Maine. Belmonte’s eyes were closed but his mouth was open and he was running his tongue over his teeth. The tiny black fish were swimming into one of the stumps at the bottom of the man’s left leg and out of the stump at the bottom of his right.