Like any light in darkness, you attract, she thinks. The Exes are not aware of Violet’s presence. If she warns him, she will give away her own position.
“Hey, kid!” she calls to him anyway. She is no longer that pretty bit of nothing in a sunshine dress. She’s tougher. She has sinned, and she is sorry. “Kid. Behind you.”
Digby’s bravado turns to fear, and he looks back and forth between her and the monstrous Exes. And then he runs. Toward them. As if they are the lesser of two evils, and perhaps they are.
“Oh, poo,” Violet says, but she does not hesitate.
He is running directly into monsters, so Violet leaps after him, snatches him up. She drags him back toward the cemetery, hampered by his struggling. She slams the wrought-iron gate shut behind them, but more Exes are coming in the front gate and streaming out of the church’s back door. Violet and Digby, flanked, are brought to bay with their backs against a crypt. She lets go of Digby. He sidles a few inches away, but there is no place to go. They stand side by side, pressing themselves into the cool stone. Digby has his slingshot out and cocked, ready to go down fighting.
“She’ll come,” Violet tells him.
“Nobody comes,” Digby says, the little pessimist. “Nobody ever comes.”
The Exes sidle closer with their eye bulges shining blind-white, reaching with their ragged-jagged fingers. They sniff at Digby with their high-set, slitted nostrils. They huff the taste of Violet from the air and smile. Their teeth, dripping hungry spittle, are square and blunt and huge.
“She’ll come,” Violet repeats, and Digby takes his eyes off the Exes long enough to shoot her a cynical look.
Then a close-up of his face, his eyes gone wide, surprised. Closer still, and now the whites are visible all around the irises. Violet’s change is seen first this way, in the reflective lens of his innocent gaze.
“Hello, kid,” Violence says, and then she does what Violence does.
I’m proud of the fight scene. It’s some of my best work, the kinetic bodies color-soaked against dark, static backgrounds. Violence is rampant, and Digby backs her, pinging rocks at Exes with his sling. Seeing this, she grins a red-black grin. As she chases off the few surviving Exes, her booted feet smash apart the two dusty skeletons who are lying in each other’s arms in a hollow between two smaller crypts.
She turns again to Digby, and he’s standing with his own feet planted wide, slingshot aimed at her face.
“Oh, kid, what heart,” Violence tells him.
She lets him back away. She lets him run. It is Violet who follows him, watching over him at a distance until she earns his trust enough to get close. It’s not easy. She is blond and blue-eyed, and in this brave new world with its limited resources, the few survivors who are still human have banded into small tribes. Digby’s whole group fell victim to genocide while he was fishing. He came back to find himself thoroughly orphaned, but he could not find his sister’s body in the carnage left behind. He’s looking for her, and Violence-in-Violet goes along; tough as he is, he’s too small to survive alone. Digby will come to love the double woman he calls Vi. He knows that she is beauty and the beast all in one package, just like most of us.
Dark Horse went crazy for that opener. They loved my antiheroine seeking redemption in a blighted version of America. It was chock-full of monsters and lost children, race wars and superbeings, and I had plans for some individual humans with mutations, too. Supervillains that could challenge Vi and Digby for years to come. They traded the prequel for a series, and I signed on for a longer, more extensive contract.
If it did well, then down the line some other team would run it. They might write Vi’s origin story, and I might be part of that or not. For now it was enough to begin, letting her go on to what was next in the shadowland version of Birchville.
I had to set it there; Birchville was the place where I had come to clearly see the monsters plaguing my homeland’s real landscape. They all had their avatars in Vi and Digby’s world. The artist in me wanted to explore the Second South in large terms, but I wasn’t above putting in a Mack Monster at some point. I’d rename her, of course, but she’d for sure have those iron-gray witch scraggles and a lip-lifted donkey’s mouth. I might put in Tackrey—though our dealings with her had mercifully closed after Birchie made her grand and almost honest confession.
That day, when we got home from Regina Tackrey’s office, we saw that the Franklins were already standing on our porch. Wattie’s son Sam opened the door for them. Sam and his wife and their middle daughter had all arrived two days earlier. Wattie had finally come clean with both her sons.
Sam stepped out and waited with the Franklins on the porch when they saw my car pull up. Esme was holding a casserole dish that I knew contained her famous corn pudding. I couldn’t imagine how she’d had time to make it. When we reached the top of the stairs, she thrust it into my arms so that she could hug Wattie, and her dish bit me with cold.
She’d pulled it from her freezer, premade as testimony to the human condition. Trouble and hunger always came, and most of Birchville kept an emergency casserole at the ready. Esme had grabbed hers and run to us, not waiting to thaw or bake it. Even cold, this was funeral food, rich in butter and comfort, and Esme and Grady were wearing black. They had come to mourn.
While Esme and Wattie were still clasped, a blue Honda pulled up and parked on our curb. Grayle Peck, another Redemption deacon, got out, and I saw that Wattie’s cousin, ’Genia Price, was in the passenger seat. He’d checked ’Genia out of her nursing home and brought her over so Wattie would have more family here; Stephen couldn’t fly down until next week.
Birchie opened the front door, letting Esme and Grady inside to preheat the oven. Sam led the way, but the three of us waited on the porch. As ’Genia began her slow creep up the walk on Grayle’s arm, another car was pulling up, and then another. Two more turned onto the square. All the cars were packed full of folks I recognized from Wattie’s church. They wore dark clothes and carried food. Redemption was coming, and in force.
Birchie and Wattie formed an impromptu receiving line at the top of the long staircase, greeting Wattie’s gathering church. I stepped back out of the way and watched them.
Arm in arm, Birchie and Wattie were a living hinge. They were the place where the South met itself, and I thought that it was good, even though their very sisterhood had called forth a mourning party. It was ugly, but it was where we were. This was where history had brought us, and inside me the baby I would not name Digby spun like a small promise of better things. He belonged to me and to both of them. He was the future that Birchie and Wattie had risked everything to preserve.
I walked to the far end of the porch, out of earshot. I sat down on the swing, got out my phone, and called Polly Fincher.