The Rains (Untitled #1)(72)

Leaning back, I took in the curved sign over the entrance: CREEK’S CAUSE CEMETERY.

Cutting through would save me a good twenty minutes, so I walked beneath the arch. The fog made the air so wet I felt like I was breathing the white wisps themselves. Staying alert, minding each step, I moved past gravestones and plots and a few mausoleums from richer families like the Blantons.

I was so focused on peering through the fog that I didn’t notice where my legs were carrying me until I had arrived.

My parents’ graves.

Two humble little plots, side by side, with white markers. It had been all we could afford.

It’d been a while since I’d visited. I’d carried anger at them since their car crash, anger that they hadn’t been more responsible, that they hadn’t thought more about their kids at home before drinking that extra glass of wine. Over the years that anger had loosened from a hard knot in my gut. But I realized now that it had never left entirely. It had just spread out through my body, less obvious, sure, but just as heavy a burden to carry.

I thought about all the ways the world had come undone and everything I had to face now. The loss of my parents, awful as it was, had prepared me for this. I pictured the view over the revolver, Chet’s face wobbling in and out of the sights, my finger on the trigger, refusing to pull it. I’d made a mistake, and Zeus had died. I was human and imperfect and doing the best I could minute to minute.

My parents had been, too.

I owed it to them to forgive them. But even more, I owed it to myself.

I crouched before their graves and patted the green, green grass blanketing them. Closing my eyes, I sent them all the warmth from my body, from myself.

When I opened my eyes, the fog had started to thin. Even as I watched, it lifted, billowing up into the treetops and away into the crisp night air.

Something moved to my right. And to my left.

And then all around the vast cemetery.

Mappers.

Still dressed like ranch hands, probably from Billy Joe Durant’s two-thousand-head cattle operation to the north. At least thirty of them.

Somehow in the fog, I’d missed them. And they’d missed me.

They walked their patterns in every direction I looked. Their heads tilted downward, they swept through the cemetery like an army of ants, covering every square inch.





ENTRY 32

Standing before my parents’ graves, I unfocused my gaze, trying to take in as many of the Hosts as possible. The entire cemetery seemed alive, crawling with them. Their movements were coordinated, the Mappers keeping a short distance apart as they strategically covered ground. I thought about using the revolver, but by the time I’d spent the six shots, the remaining Hosts would’ve swamped me.

A ranch hand in a ragged denim jacket was closing in fast. He turned crisply on his heel, cutting across the back of a mausoleum. His next pivot would take him directly into me. And anywhere I stepped would be right into the path of another Host. A second Mapper trudged along behind me; others walked spirals to either side of my parents’ graves. Beyond the nearest Hosts were layers more, deep in every direction, stretching as far as the darkness and thinning mist allowed me to see.

I dropped to the moist earth before my parents’ plots. The grass smelled fresh like summer, like baseball. A few wisps of fog floated through the air.

I had let go of everyone and everything in the world. I was as alone as I’d ever been, as alone as I’d ever be.

A squish of mud signaled the ranch hand’s next turn. He emerged from the side of the mausoleum, heading for me, his head scanning the ground just ahead of the tips of his boots.

I grabbed the baling hooks so hard that my knuckles ached.

Wet grass slurped at his boots as he moved forward. His eyeless eyes were inches from noticing me. I watched the cant of his head.

And it struck me how I could save myself.

Sliding off my pack, I rolled neatly backward over my shoulders, landing on all fours atop my parents’ graves. Somehow the Stetson stayed on my head. The Mapper walked right past me, close enough that the cuff of his pant leg shushed across my cheek.

Easing to my feet, I pulled the pack on again and slid behind him. I kept right on his back, the tattered denim undulating between his shoulder blades inches from my face. I held his pace precisely, put my boots in his footsteps. When he turned, I turned. I could gaze straight through his head from behind, which helped me gauge where we were going. We crossed paths with another Mapper who drifted within spitting distance but did not look up.

Ever so slowly, our turns widened. I stayed on the Host’s back, wiping sweat from my brow. Other Mappers marched by on either side, scanning the ground at their feet, the awful boreholes directed just to the sides of my legs. The slightest misstep would alert the Host in front of me or put me into the path of another.

It felt like playing Frogger on the old-time arcade game at the One Cup Cafe, trying to zigzag between cars without getting squashed.

Walk, turn, walk.

A swinging arm whistled by to my right, a massive Mapper stomping past, sending off a waft of body odor.

Walk, turn, walk.

Painstakingly, we spiraled our way out of the inner sanctum of the cemetery.

Walk, turn, walk.

A half hour passed at this excruciating pace. Another. The Host in front of me halted, and I nearly stumbled into him, my splayed fingers brushing the back of his jacket. He did not turn. Instead he tilted his head up to the sky. A bluish white glow framed the boreholes and the edge of his head as he uploaded his data to the heavens and whatever resided up there. A clicking sound emerged, maybe from his throat, maybe from somewhere else. Staring through the rear boreholes as if they were binoculars, I watched the mapped terrain scroll across his front eye membranes.