Job came upon a place pounded into dust and rubble by godlings. There were no cars, now. Job had passed that place days ago. Had turned around, one day, and seen them glaring at him like a wall. The beams of light dancing in their windows and on their surfaces.
He was shocked at how easy walking was, without a glut of abandoned vehicles in your way to slide past, clamber over. It was easy, even as he dragged the corpse behind him. Its great lumpen limbs catching, tearing on the pavement. Or, tendrils? Or arms? Wisps of fabric? Its heaving mass, holding Job back, until he pulled and pulled and pulled and it finally popped up, dislodged, began obeying him.
Even the grey debris-sand sloughed away, steadily. It lay in occasional patches, of course. Or collected under a rock, or in the corners of two walls with ragged tops and scattered bricks, sticking from the ground like broken bones. It was all scraggly weeds jutting from bare dirt, tarmac with potholes. Footsteps with strange symbols in them.
Forests popped up in crouching, slinking patches, around old ponds or rivers or burst pipes. Harsh trees with peeling bark and silvery leaves. Or patches of tilting, jutting signposts. Some small, bending aside as you placed your foot down, or even being crushed beneath. Some had grown massive. So it was through fields of hard metal poles Job walked through, like a long open prison, and the sunlight lit up their red faces and coiled around their sides. Vines swirled around them, shrubbery formed their footwork.
And the mounds of rubble. Where the streets had once been were clearly marked out, in blocks of fallen cement, or a jutting plank of splintered wood, or the smattering of shining glass on the dirt. Marked out in the earth, so the ground itself became a museum. The city had left scars. On some mornings, Job would awake, pack tinkling. He’d hear the rumble, the drift, feel the rushing wind of cars on his face, wheels tearing against the ground. All things present, all senses, even the stink of petroleum, until you looked at the road and saw nothing there but leaves spinning in a breeze.
And some days, down some streets, around some corners, they’d be full of humans. Humans, humans, everywhere, more than back home at the BAR, more than at Poetsfetch. Job stopped, and watched, silent, the first time he had seen it. Whether a trick or not, it was surreal. And loud, unbelievably so. The little floating snippets of lives irrelevant to Job’s, that would never be relevant, would be kept secret from him, from everyone else forever.
They wore clean clothes, the sort that’d be seen in only the best parts of Mars, or Europa. Though the air danced with puffs of dust, and the occasional rainfall dug up sloughing pits of mud, they were untouched. Business suits sometimes, even, but just as many short sleeved shirts, jeans, ripped only fashionably and not by claws or trees or broken infrastructure.
They did not pay attention at all to Job. They had their own lives, their own secrets. And when he reached out to graze them with a finger, he passed through them, felt nothing but a coolness. And, when a beam of sunlight fell directly on them, or when a lamppost shone down, their features slivered off, their clothes and features and shapes all melded together and it was nothing but muttering streets of shadows carrying on ineffable business.
Job had begun to take up commissions, now. These inner suburbs were populated, in a sense. Smatterings of humanity. A family in an empty apartment block in a desert of rubble, here, a pair of families in a small village of shacks there.
The commissions blended together. They tended to rely on Job’s unique expertise of ‘having a gun’ and ‘not respecting entirely his own safety’. They were good, sometimes, when he would walk into a lair, in the long cool shadows under a bridge and witness, there, some great mammal, some oversized lizard, reclining on a pile of coins or human bones. And he’d shoot it, bring back some proof, be off with a nice few hundred dollars, or a few sacks of salt, or a small box scrounged up goods made from gold and brass.
They would, just as frequently, be bad. He’d be standing there, at exact midnight, stinking of incense and waving his crucifix in one hand, clasping his chalk on the other, chanting words he only vaguely understood.
He could not recall how many he had taken, how long it had been since he had taken his most recent one. He could not recall, either, where the corpse specifically had come from.
He did not see himself as forgetful so much as the details blended together. So that one instance in his mind regarding the corpse may have come from weeks ago, and this piece might have, rather, been two days ago, or that, say, that element of his battle with it was from a distant, ancient commission, back when he worked for the Men Who Lived Behind the Cracks in the Pavement.
It was a couple, he knew, that had put him up to it. They were young, he thought. Or old. Perhaps middle aged. They were a man and a woman, or a man and a man, but certainly not two women. He thought. But they may have been. They wanted him to slay the creature, and they wanted him to bring the whole dead body. Easy enough.
They never told Job why they wanted the whole body, unless they had, and he forgot it. There were many reasons you might want a monster corpse. A religious ritual, perhaps. Maybe they wanted a very exotic lunch.
They lived in a street where their building was the only one standing, and barely so. Its neighbour was a high mound with only a single wall, and their building hunkered next to it like a lover. Wooden beams, Job recalled, were installed here, there, around, to keep it up. And apotropaic symbols had been drawn, spirals that connected to themselves, and crosses, to keep spirits away from the supports. It was once a block of apartments. Theirs was all that was left. A big bland rectangle, a front garden spilling onto the tarmac, smelling like pollen and wet dirt. Sign posts breaking out of the houses directly opposing it.
So Job went. So he dragged. It got caught on things, at times. Sometimes Job would be so annoyed, he’d spin around and blast whatever it was apart with the tunnelgun.
And it drew the attention of animals. Crows, magpies, watched him from afar, approached carefully when he looked away. Rats snuck up on it. He waved them all off.
‘Luis,’ would call a crow.
‘Luis,’ would whisper a butterfly, suddenly, into his ear.
‘Luis,’ would beg the pack leader of a group of wild dogs, stalking him from the ruins.
To all of them he would reply: ‘Nah,’ and remind them of his name.
So it stumbled into warfare. They came, sometimes, in organised parties, waves lead by committees. Shape into formations, ones to draw Job away, ones to drag along the corpse. Joined by unaffiliated mercenaries, expert fliers or runners, flicking in and out of Job’s view and aim. And the scavengers, picking scrappy bits while Job was distracted. They were clever, uncannily so. Job respected that. He blew them all away with the tunnelgun, and with his yells.
At midnight, when the bells were meant to strike, and didn’t, and the dancing moonlight pranced on the edges of the ruins, stranger things came. Furry, hunkering, mammalian shapes stalking behind trees, buildings, in their shadows. Human shapes with arms too long, bodies too lanky, the twisting of pale light revealing smooth wet skin where a face would be, would crouch on rooftops.
Most obnoxiously, Job would feel a tug from the corpse, swear it had caught, once more, on some shrub, or pavement, and would see it writhing, flapping, seemingly on its own. And he’d see, then, a chunk rip from its side, and vanish. He would aim his tunnelgun and fire wildly, leaving cylindrical holes littering the roads, walls, until a sudden spurt of silvery blood would burst from the air itself, and it would all stop.
He always avoided uninhabited, untouched buildings, especially so now that he was with the corpse. It seemed to increase their activity. He heard things scraping, dragging, inside them. Strange lights behind the curtains, in unfamiliar colours.
Job came through another seemingly-inhabited street. The chattering and murmuring was almost unbearable. Clean and unaware humans wandered over pavements, stepped through the rubble and unlocked, pulled open, and entered doors that weren’t there, vanishing. Job did not meet their eyes. They seemed harmless. Rats and crows and magpies never seemed to strike, when Job was with them. And the other spirits avoided him, too. It comforted him, to be eaten up into those crowds, to become a shade among shades, another set of drifting shoulders and elbows to bump into, another nobody with his nobody life to wander to.
But it was bad luck, meeting the eyes of spirits, of dead people, of unwholesome non or ex humans. Job wasn’t in the mood for bad luck.
It was all scar tissue, was what Job thought, passing through them. These streets blended together, became one, to Job. It was all the same shapes, the same mounds, the same trees or signposts, reorganised over different places, or shifted around, colours swapped. The rubble, the ruin did not help matters–the very atoms seemed to be crushed, mulched, blended together in one. Except for the scar tissue. All streets were different, with that scar tissue. He always saw the shades of different people, different types of people, doing different things, holding different things. He knew when a place had been rich and empty, or when a place had been poor and stuffed. He knew a great mound, with rearing brickwork and dotted with glimmering glass shards, was a grocery store, by the uniforms of the teenagers exiting and entering it, by the bags the others carried.
Scar tissue was all that had remained, it seemed, now that everything else was wiped aside and torn apart.
It made Job think, then, of his own home. If his own shade would appear, then, a vague shape at midday, details on his coat, of his joints, clear in the shadows. If it wandered the dusty halls of that ship and adjusted his collection, or laid, drifting with ennui, in the bed, or walked outside to a crack in the pavement and discussed business with the little men living beneath it. If a traveller, like him, passing through, would recognise some distinction, some unique mark in that place, from him. If he would be fooled, if just for a moment, too, that it was a real person he was seeing.
Job was certainly distinctive, at first glance. It would be a memorable, if confusing, somewhat, sight.
It was a dull, tired, nostalgia that these thoughts gave Job. Pulled at his insides, gave him that strange, nonsense longing that hung off him like tatters, that he could do nothing about, and so he carried it all day, and dragged the corpse. But a comfort, too.
He wondered, even now, if he was leaving a shade. It would one day become a part of all these other figures, a ruffled, coated, grunting shade, dragging a corpse through the streets, gazing fondly around itself. And he would be tearing a great long scar in the earth using the corpse as a knife.
What was the corpse? Job asked himself, one night. Even that night faded into vagueness. It might have been yesterday, or weeks ago, But Job remembered it well. He had tried, that night, flipping through the bustled, confused memories of the last few days. He had looked for details in them, the little touches here and there to distinguish one day from another. On that day he was limping, because a joint of his was torn open by a claw. And on that day, his coat flapped and waved, because he ripped it on a piece of rubble.
Was it a loathsome, roaring beast, encountered in the shade of destroyed buildings, held together with roots and vines? The mottled light dancing on its scales as it reared at him, pounced and tore at his chest until, finally, he had blasted it dead with the tunnelgun?
Had he come upon it sleeping and restful, gentle, almost pathetic? The dust twisting from its nostrils as it breathed, tiny flies dancing from its fur and glimmering in the falling moonlight through the stop signs? And, as he riddled its quiet body with holes, had he felt a deep, blotting guilt seep into him, like back in the old days, with the Men Who Lived Behind Cracks in the Pavement?
Did it writhe, in an inky pond, stinking of wet dirt and stone, singing the names and quiet secrets of the people it had eaten? Or soared at him from atop a great mound, flinging feathers?
He looked to the corpse for clues, and it gave him none. It was a mass, was all. With limbs, or appendages of some kind, for the dragging. That was all Job could see of it. It was not his business, anyway. It was the right corpse, that was sure. He had found it in the right place. He only needed to take it to the couple, to be paid, and to continue.
And he dragged it. It was distracting work. Landscapes slid by. He did not sleep much, or, at least, very consistently. There wasn’t a single part of him that needed sleep, but, rather, those phantom senses, tingling in the ghost of his brain, where he would suddenly slip from steely numbness into drifting, quivering sleep, have enough time to stumble to the side of the road, under the shade of some bush, awake later with a mouth full of sticky spit that wasn’t there.
So even individual days blurred together. Time slid across, melded together with blurry edges.
Job met a strange man with teeth like shattered glass on a bridge, once. It was a thick, squat thing, jabbing straight over a creek like a frozen corpse. The creek was overgrown, green water filled with thick folds of moss and prying weeds. It stunk of rotten plant matter and thrummed with the sounds of buzzing and clicking bugs that batted against your face and slipped around in clouds in the sunlight. Rusty signposts lined the edges of the creek, wreaths of weeds around their bases.
The man had asked Job about the corpse. About the tunnelgun. He had asked Job about violence. Job wasn’t ever able to piece together what he was thinking, what he was feeling. The man struck Job more like a great brick wall, than a man. A hovering steely obstacle, bereft of feeling, sentience. A blocky grin, teeth like broken gravestones, squinting eyes.
‘See ya, Luis,’ the man had said, stepping aside.
‘Don’t call me that,’ Job replied. ‘My name’s Job.’
His face was unchanging. It was like looking into blank white snow, or like looking at scattered stones and debris, seeing, with pareidolia, the resemblance of a human face. Yet knowing that, should you see it from a slightly different perspective, maybe crouch a bit, or shift to the side, it would reveal itself scattered objects, purposeless.
The man paused, at that. Pondered it a bit, almost cartoonishly, tilting his head here and there. ‘Job. Luis. Green. Erythro-iridophore. You haven’t earned any of them, really. I’ll call you what I want.’
And, before he left, he said:
‘You can do better than this. I promise you.’
Job knew it had taken place, but could not pin down where. It was a moment lost among lost moments. He could not even recall where the bridge had been. Or where he had ever seen, or encountered, that creek. Nothing else he could recall seemed to line up with it. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. Was he even dragging the corpse, then? Or was it before even that?
Was it before, even, the Ocean of Cars, as he walked through side streets on some errand? Supplies, groceries, things for his home in that ship? The man with teeth like shattered glass, asking him questions about his gods who lived in those cracks in pavements, about his commissions, about the tunnelgun and if it comforted him?
Well. That was none of Job’s business. His business, currently, was physical in nature. The prevention of starvation, and of dehydration. The continuation of actuation in his joints, not to mention the oiling thereof, the cleaning out of dust and sand. Everything within his skin was his, and all things outside could twist and spin and twirl as much as it desired. So long as the Job inside was safe, he could keep trundling ahead.
Now he came across another forest. It swarmed, suddenly, around Job, so all the long fields with hills of rubble and gusts of sand and dirt were eaten away, consumed in the greenish fog and mottled beams of sunlight. And the drifting poles of steel, bright red signs saying nonsense symbols, language that Job did not understand, and the vines twisting around them, connecting to a tree with white smooth skin sticking from a carpet of fallen dry leaves. So even the tarmac gave way to the fallen leaves and stems and branches and the little marching lines of black ants, and a chirping of cicadas around the corners. The flitting of birds, practically invisible, but a wing, a leg, or a song.
But still, the drifting of cars. Crashing of wheels on tarmac. The wind gushing by, dancing in the leaves. The rustling, all around him.
It was close. This was one of the thickest forests. The couple scavenged, here. Grew plants, picked fruits. Adams and Eves. They left offerings hanging in the branches, so the flitting figures that lived in them would leave them unharmed. Even as he stepped, Job saw one–a makeshift amulet–hanging from a branch, at head level. Yes, if Job recalled anything, he recalled this forest. Though, it was larger than he had left it. The carpet of leaves had been thinner, then. He couldn’t even see the earth beneath it anymore. It piled in slippery mounds, rustled and danced as Job stepped through. The signposts were harder, loomed down and glared at him.
Job shoved through, spent much time fiddling the corpse through, too. Shooing bugs and ants away from its body, before they could–mess its fur up? Crawl through the breaks in its carapace?
So be it. He dragged. Pushed. The forest sung, around him. Sometimes the leaves brushed aside, and revealed a door, encrusted by verdancy. Or a skull would wink at him, wrapped in roots. Or a pane of glass, shimmering, uncannily clean, would be standing in an empty clearing. The air smelled of pollen, flowers, wet dirt.
Not much happened in there, though he knew he was being watched. Mutters on the wind, occasionally. A tiny voice convincing him, please, Luis, leave us the corpse. Just this one.
‘My name’s not Luis,’ he replied, under his breath. And marched on.
And steadily, the forest slunk away. It was not long before Job was once more on tarmac, if tarmac adorned in leaves and twigs.
And it was not long before Job reached the house. The wind hummed, sang. The leaves of the faraway forest, the few trees sticking from the pavement, from the mound piles, rustled, added their part to the music. Music, music rustling under the sky. Dust kicking up from the mounds, from the grey empty plains stretching into the distance.
There slumped the sole apartment. It was dusty. The windows were dark, and the curtains ripped. The planks, rotted. The door hung languidly open. Job deposited the corpse by the front door, and stepped in.
‘Christ,’ he muttered to himself. Even his quiet speech sent vibrations, dislocated dust, sent the musty walls quivering. The stink of old rot, of long shadows. ‘Am I late?’
Job stepped into the living room, where the walls peeled over and the air flickered with floating particles. And on the rotting sofa, skeletons. Shadows in their sockets. Crumbling into dust.
‘Late,’ concluded Job, rushing suddenly from the living room. The air weighed down on him. Pressed on his senses. He stood, for a moment, the mould and must and the weighty liquid melancholy of the place crushing him.
As he moved, he saw a drawer next to the door. The way the door’s windows were placed, morning light would slide, diagonal, across its top, alight its dark wood crevices, patches and spots. The light that entered was foggy and dusty. It was where they had left the first half of his payment when he had first met them, and there the second half laid. Four one hundred dollar notes, in a mound of dust. He took them and left.
When he exited, looked aside to the corpse, he saw that it, too, was dusty, lonely bones. No shape to them, and no pattern. Femurs on rib bones on finger bones on tail bones. An unassuming nonsense pile.
So it went. Job was bones, too, he knew.
Meat Girls Dot Org 