Read Online Snakeskin Road by James Braziel - Free Book Online Page B

he was hauled away.
    “I’m tired of cleaning up your messes,” the officer from the new shift called after them, but the departing unit kept their heads down, their shoulders down, and walked.
    “Leave him for the Red Crosses. Let them take care of it,” one of the new guards said.
    “I don’t want to look at this dead POC my whole shift, do you?”
    “No, sir,” the guardsman answered quickly and whistled for help, and “On three” they leaned down, the hard shells of their hats almost touching, then separating as they lifted the body up. The harvest machines sputtered nearby and fizzled, a sound they made all night.
    When the man collapsed, Jennifer had wanted to turn away, wanted not to watch, but she did and didn’t help him because what if that made her noticeable. For so long she had stayed unnoticed. A few times, hands had grabbed her, but she pulled loose, kept walking.
    In the morning, and then, again, the middle of the daywhen the sun broke up the ozone, and at evening when it cooled just a little, enough that you could feel yourself breathe again, the old Cold War sirens launched into their slow whir as if the city were under attack, as if
attack
were an experience about to happen and they should prepare. The church bells and fewer and fewer explosions sounded, as if that part of the city had exhausted itself. The siren was a marker of when the others woke up, when they ate, how much the sun was willing to give. Afterward there were no stars. None to follow.
    She had been given rations of food and water, canned beef that tasted of ash, and vegetables that tasted the same. Three people had been killed over rations. And the guardsmen went on missions into the square with the Crosses to bring the dead to the harvesting machines, the sick to the hospitals, and from the hospitals to the machines with their steel mouths open like bullfrog planters—that’s what they looked like. Jennifer had planters like that once. She’d taken them from a house in Alma and kept them and loaded the stone mouths with dirt and zinnia seeds, tulip bulbs that sprouted then withered until in disgust she threw the planters away in a backyard in Montgomery. The following night, they were already covered under sand drifts, and she forgot where she had thrown them.
    The guards wouldn’t venture out into the square at night, and once a guardsman said over a loudspeaker,
“No firearms,”
repeated it over and over. But that group inside the fountain with the black shirts, they were still there. And yesterday in the afternoon she had seen a collector after the last Red Cross detail had receded into the crowd. He moved his hand over the new dead as if he might heal them. Something round, half-round in the belly of his palm occasionally glowed a faint red and that’s when he stopped and took out his short knife. She watched him peel a phone from under someone’s ear, making sure to remove the long wiretaprootsundamaged, cut fingers and shake the rings into a bag, clamp down on teeth with pliers and take them, and volt-chips, optic-steel—whatever had been implanted in scars and hips and skin, all of this into his bag, wet at the bottom as if it had been slung through mud. She knew then that she couldn’t fall asleep.
    By now she had been in the park for three days. She moved back under the oak where a few leaves still twisted, refusing to splinter in the barrage of heavy gusts, though most of the leaves had been carried away. Under the tree, there were people fixing themselves into the branch-shade. On one side, a family, and on the other, several couples huddled together. The woman selling herself was gone. Beyond them more people in stacked tight bands, and no longer clearings between the haze and the buildings, opening, closing, swirling open.
    The dead birds had all been scattered by the children. They played with the bodies, burying them and digging them up. One boy arced them high above the crowd like grenades, footballs,