IT WAS GOOD OF HER to offer me the couch, but when she was gone, I took my quilt and carried it out into the foyer. I had myself a little pray, kneeling beside the two dead women bundled there. I don’t mind telling you, I had some pretty warm comments for the Man Upstairs. I said whatever was wrong in the world, there were a lot of good people in it, like Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted, and if He thought slaying them in a hail of nails served some kind of just purpose, I had a revelation or two for Him! I said I was sure the world was full of awful sin, but riddling a pack of little kids headed to summer camp was going to eliminate absolutely none of it. I told Him I was disappointed in His performance over the last twenty-four hours, and if He wanted to make it up to me, He’d better hurry up and get to smiting whoever had set loose the nail-storm on us. I said Dr. Rusted had spent his whole adult life spreading the Good News, telling folks about how to find forgiveness and live the life Christ wanted for them, and the least God could do was let him still be alive and tend to him in his time of mourning. I informed Our Father that I thought He was a damn bad sport for taking away the doctor’s loved ones. That was a fine way to show appreciation for all his service! One good thing about being a butch queer is you already figure you’re going to hell, so there’s no reason not to give God a piece of your mind when you feel like it.
After I was worn out cussing the Lord, my fatigue got the best of me, and I stretched out between Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted. I drew the quilt over me and threw an arm over Yolanda’s waist. It’s funny how tired I was, even though I hadn’t done anything except stare at a computer all day. Grief is hard work. It’ll run you down like you spent the day digging ditches. Or digging graves, I guess.
Anyway, I had a good sleepy talk with Yolanda, curled beside her on the floor. I told her I would owe her the rest of my life for sharing her family with me. I said I was sorry like heck we weren’t going to have more silly times together. I said it always made me feel good to hear her laugh, so loud and free, and I hoped someday I’d learn to laugh that way. Then I shut up and held her as best I could. I couldn’t quite spoon against her—even with her wrapped in a quilt, those hundreds of spines in her back made it impossible to cuddle. But I could drape an arm over her and put my thighs against the backs of her legs, and in that way I fell asleep at last.
Only an hour or two passed before I opened my eyes. Something had changed, but I didn’t know what. I peered blearily around and discovered Templeton standing just above my head, Dracula cape tossed over his shoulders and his thumb in his mouth. He hadn’t been outside in days, and his face was corpse pale in the dark. The lord of the vampires, visiting with his colony of the dead. At first I thought Templeton was what had stirred me, but it was something else, and a moment later he told me what.
“They’re singing,” he said.
“Who?” I asked, but then I shut up and listened, and I heard them myself.
A dozen sweet voices carried in the warm August night, all of them harmonizing to that Phil Collins song “Take Me Home.” They’d been at it for a while. It was the sound of them, not Templeton standing over me, that had brought me awake.
I peeked out the thick square window in the center of the door. It looked like the whole Church of the Seventh Dimensional Christ were out in the night, dressed up in their shiny silver cowls and robes, carrying paper lanterns with candles in them. They had collected their dead, the three women who’d been out making lunch, and rolled them up in shrouds of metallic Bubble Wrap, so the bodies looked like monstrous burritos swaddled in tinfoil. The congregation had assembled in a pair of concentric rings, with the corpses in the center. The inner ring walked clockwise; the other ring marched in the opposite direction. It was almost lovely if you didn’t think about how crazy all of them were.
I picked Templeton up, brought him down the hall to his bedroom, and tucked him back in. His window was open a crack, and the song of the comet cultists came through clear and rich and full. For a pack of deluded and pathetic wastrels, they sure could carry a tune.
I stretched out beside Templeton for a bit to see if I could settle him down. He asked me if I thought Yolanda’s soul had gone up to the clouds. I said it had gone somewhere, because it wasn’t in her body anymore. Templeton said his mother had told him his daddy was in the clouds looking down at him. Templeton said when he turned into a bat, he was always sure to go looking for his father in the sky. I asked him if he went flying often, and he said every night, but he hadn’t spotted his father yet. I kissed his eyebrow on what Yolanda called his shiver spot, and he gratified me with a weak, happy shudder. I said no flying anywhere tonight, time for bed, and he nodded solemnly and said no more flying ever. He said the sky was full of nails now and it wasn’t safe for an honest bat out there. Then he asked me if I thought it would rain like that again, and I said I didn’t think so, because who imagined it would keep happening? If I’d known that night what we were all going to have to live through, I’m not sure I could’ve lived through it.
I told Templeton no more thinking and got up to shut his window and said good night to him. I could only keep my smile on my face until I got out into the hallway. I stepped around the bodies of my own loved ones and let myself out into the humid, perfumed summer night.