31
A WAVE NUDGES the Beretta toward the depths, but Strickland is quicker. He crawls for it, seizes it, joins both hands to hold it tight. Now to rid himself of the twin rats nipping at him. He rolls onto his back, kicks the old man in the face. He shoves Delilah Brewster several feet down the jetty. Strickland is bitten all over, spurting blood from his foot, blinded by the downpour. Still he props himself on an elbow, opens his mouth to the rain. It is his rain now. He brings himself to a sitting position, gasping water into his lungs, and cranes his neck.
Deus Brânquia fountains with color. It stares at Strickland through blades of rain, past Elisa, who is cradled in its arms. Slowly, it lowers her to the walkway, where waves lick against her. The Gill-god stands. Strickland blinks, attempts to comprehend. It’s been shot twice in the chest. And yet it stands? And yet it walks? Deus Brânquia continues down the jetty, its body a torch in the night, an infinite thing that Strickland, stupid man, believed he could make finite.
Strickland tries anyway. He fumbles the gun upward, fires. Into Deus Brânquia’s chest. Into its neck. Into its gut. Deus Brânquia wipes a hand across the bullet holes. The wounds dribble away along with the rain. Strickland shakes his head hard enough to spatter water. Is it the freshly filled river that gives it such strength? Is it the gathered beasts supplying their master with life force? He’ll never know. He isn’t meant to know. He’s crying. The same big, ragged sobs he told Timmy he wasn’t ever allowed to cry. He lowers his face to the jetty, ashamed to meet the Gill-god’s everlasting eyes.
Deus Brânquia kneels before him. With a single claw, it hooks the trigger guard of the gun, gently removing it from Strickland’s grip and lowering it to the dock. A spate of black water explodes across the jetty, steals the gun, swallows it down. With the same claw, Deus Brânquia tilts Strickland’s face upward by the tender underside of his chin. Strickland sniffles, tries to keep his eyes closed, but he can’t. Their faces are inches apart. Tears stream down his cheeks, across the bridge of Deus Brânquia’s claw, down the brilliant scales. Strickland opens his mouth and he is glad, here at the end, to hear that his own voice has returned.
“You are a god,” Strickland whispers. “I’m sorry.”
Deus Brânquia cocks its head to the side, as if considering the plea. Then, with a single, casual motion, it moves its claw from Strickland’s chin, touches it to Strickland’s neck, and draws the claw across his throat.
Strickland feels opened. It isn’t a bad feeling. He has been closed to too much, he thinks, and for too long. There is a lightness to his head. He looks down. Blood is jetting from his slit throat, spilling down his chest. It empties him of everything. The monkeys. General Hoyt. Lainie. The children. His sins. What remains is Richard Strickland, the way he began, the way he was born, a vessel containing nothing but potential. He is falling backward. No, it is Deus Brânquia, guiding him down, tucking him into water as soft and warm as blankets. He is happy. His eye sockets fill with rain. Water is all he can see. It is the end. But he laughs as he dies. Because it is also the beginning.
32
GILES SEES CIVILIZATION reassert itself from nature’s wilds. Vehicles with histrionic lights and infant bawls. Men in uniforms and rain gear, sprinting for the docks, hands steadying the jounce of equipment belts. They skid to a halt before the beasts massed at the foot of the jetty, not as many as before, but enough to impress. Civilians have also begun to gather, people who wouldn’t brave a storm like this except to seek out the incredible colors they saw radiating from the docks, some madman, maybe, launching fireworks in the downpour.
He coughs water from his lungs. He ought to be dead. He recalls striking the river bottom and paddling furiously to resurface, only to be clenched by a riptide and tugged toward the bay. A hand had grasped his wrist, though, pulling him back to the jetty. Their palms should have slipped from each other’s, but this hand had a good texture for gripping, calloused by scouring pads and perpetual pushes of brooms and mops, a hand rather like Elisa’s.
It had been the black woman Giles had glimpsed at the Occam loading dock, their clandestine colluder. How she was here he couldn’t begin to guess, but then again, nothing about the woman added up: round, middle-aged, given to appearing at momentous junctures, driven by some unlimited cache of courage. The second he had a hold on the jetty, she’d unsheathed the paintbrush from his pocket and attacked the man with the gun. Now that man is dead, his throat pumping so much blood even the whipping waves can’t disperse all of it.
Giles struggles to an elbow. The woman pulls his shivering body close to hers. Their heaving breaths equalize as they squint through the spray to watch the creature stand, flick the man’s blood from his claw, and walk on webbed feet to Elisa’s collapsed body, his glorious lights dimming with every step.
“Is she…?” Giles croaks.
“I don’t know,” the woman says.
“Put your hands up!” men shout. The creature takes no heed. He lifts Elisa from the jetty. The shouts change to “Put the woman down!” but these have no better effect. The creature stands in place for a moment, black against the river foam and sterling rain, a tall, strong shape at the edge of America. Giles is too exhausted, too heavied by grief to cry out, but he mouths the word good-bye, both to the creature whose healing touch gave him the strength to resist drowning tonight, and to his best friend, who gave him the strength to resist drowning for the past twenty years.
Without a sound, without a splash, the creature, holding Elisa, dives into water.
Men come at last, their shoes splashing up the jetty. The ones with firearms go all the way to the end, pinning their hats to their heads in the gusty winds while trying to follow the flashlight beams being shone at the waves. The ones with medical kits drop down first beside the dead man, and second beside Giles and the woman. A medic runs his hands over Giles’s head and neck, along his torso.
“Are you hurt?”
“Of course he’s hurt,” snaps the woman holding Giles. “We’re all hurt.”
Giles surprises himself by chuckling. He will miss Elisa. Oh, how he’ll miss her, every night as if it’s morning, every morning as if it’s afternoon, every time his stomach rumbles because he has forgotten to eat. He loved her. No, that isn’t right. He loves her. Somehow he knows that she isn’t gone, nor will she ever be. And this woman? His savior? He might already love her, too.
“You must be Giles,” she says as the medic examines her.
“And you,” he says, “must be Zelda.”
The absurdity of formal introduction under such apocalyptic settings makes both of them smile. Giles thinks of Elaine Strickland, who disappeared before he could tell her everything she had meant to him. He will not make that mistake again. He reaches out, takes Zelda’s hand. Salt water slides between their palms and seals them together. She leans her head against his shoulder as the rain drums against them, melting them, or so it feels, into one being.
“Do you think…” Zelda begins.