Tex, taking her pause for breath as permission, would jump in to plead with Diodiance: “Di, don’t stray.” Those two were just each other’s age, just shy of nine. His ashy, stiff hair stood on end at the thought of losing her.
“Oh. Awright.” Diodiance never did sound convinced.
And Beatrice, more quietly, made sure to repeat what they’d all heard before. “Don’t stray.” She gazed at her Barkas with the solemnity of her age. Twelve now, or thereabouts, and they all knew the slaprash would get her soon. Watching them remember this, she’d soften her fierceness to a smile.
“Barka dears, this is world’s end. You’ve only got a few years left to your names. You gotta live ’em, not go playin’ flirt to Death’s own maggotman—no matter how he smiles and bows. Don’t go near the gravy yard. Don’t stray. And beware the Flabberghast.”
Or not.
Sighing for her lost Barkas, Beatrice pushed herself up from the squishy hard ground. Her gait felt off. She glanced down.
“Appears,” she observed aloud, “I’m missing my shoe.”
Not only that, but the white cotton lace edging her left sock had gone all rusty. Looked old. Looked like it’d been dragged oh, many a long mile. Or like something had bled all over it. Someone.
Beatrice bit her lip, and even that felt like nothing, and she covered her eyes with her hands, but there was only the same gray inside as everywhere else. The thought of limping listlessly along that thin gray groove with only one shoe and a rusty sock was the three-ton straw set atop a brittle-boned and spindly-kneed camel, and it was enough, it was outside enough!
Beatrice crumpled and began to cry.
“Please!” she sobbed, her tears all dried to dust. “Oh, please! Oh, Durga! Oh, Dad! Daddy!”
Above her, pouring from a rip in the empty sky, something like ravens circled.
Tex crept back to the Catchpenny Shop-‘n’-Save where the other members of the Barka Gang awaited.
“Beatrice is gone.”
His face, gussied up for recon, was ghoulish under the black paint. The whites of his eyes were very white, but his teeth looked yellow. Tex never did learn to brush regular, though Diodiance nightly whupped him upside his rattlebox for forgetting.
“Gone?” Diodiance asked. “Like, to the gravy yard?”
Tex shook his head. Fleas flew. “Nope. But I found a ribbon from her hair right there by the black iron gates. So I axed the Tall Ones through the bars if they’d seen her, and they smacked their lips and said, Nothing fresh has come in oh so long, and won’t I stand a little closer please, and what nice fat hands I have. I’m thinking, Di, you can’t go into the gravy yard ’less you pass the Flabberghast. And I’m thinking, Di, it’s the Flabberghast what’s got Queen B for sure.”
Diodiance shook her head. “Ate her up, poor dead Beatrice!” She wrapped her arms hard around herself and tried to think how Beatrice would sound in their situation. Cool. Assured. At least four years older than anyone present.
“No more than we should’ve ’spected,” she said at last. “Queen B told us her own dang self that the slaprash was bounded to boom her pretty soonish. And when it did, her body is bargained to the gravy yard. That’s the deal; our slaprash shows, we go and die where the Tall Ones can see us and eat us after. We do this, they stay behind the gates till the last of us is gonnered. They leave us alone.”
Tex did not look comforted. He squatted on the floor near the shoe racks. They were used shoes, lightly scuffed. You could still smell the feet of people who’d donated them to the Catchpenny way back in the olden days. A dead-people-feet smell. He turned to the third member of their gang.
“Whaddya think, Granny Two-Shoes? ’Bout Beatrice? Is she not just gone but dead?”
Granny Two-Shoes looked up from the red-and-yellow race cars she’d found in the toy aisle. She had contemplated a race between the cars and the bullet casings she’d gleaned from the gutters, but decided that, while bullets indeed moved faster than cars, even a toy car bests a spent bullet. No race, really. No glory. It would be much more interesting to stack as many of them on top of each other as could balance unwobbled, then push them down for the smash! The lap of her white nightgown sagged under the weight of her treasures.
Granny Two-Shoes didn’t have regular language. Didn’t want it. She was half past three and thought she got on pretty well with Sheepdog Sal as interpreter. Tex buckled under her eloquent gaze and redirected his question to the dog.
“Okay, Granny. Tell Sal what you think, then. Have her bark once for dead, twice for gone, three for she’ll be home in time to feed us Cheerios.”
Bending her head to Sheepdog Sal’s flopsy ear, Granny Two-Shoes imparted her opinion in a way Sal would understand.
Sheepdog Sal barked once.
Tex and Diodiance stared at each other in despair. Sighing, Granny Two-Shoes went back to her pile of race cars and casings. She was rarely wrong, but that didn’t make being right any easier.
Tex knuckled the inner corners of his welling eyes. Diodiance never could bear his crying. Made her bawl like a swoll-bellied baby herself, not the pragmatic nearly nine-year-old she was. If the two of ’em turned this into a big ol’ snotfest, it might upset Granny Two-Shoes into becoming ever more stoic. And Beatrice always said, “Let Granny be as much a child as she can bear. She’s the youngest girl in the whole wide world, and we owe her that.”
Diodiance got her squeezing heart under control. Opened her dark eyes wide. Squared her shoulders. Flung back her matted cornrows. Bared her teeth. She’d once fought off a wild Doberman with nothing but a yardstick and the Barka war cry. She could do what needed doing. Just watch.
“Tex. Granny. Sal. Way I’m seein’ it, we gotta do us some death rite. Queen B showed us how. Pick out a place she loved. Dec’rate it. Tinfoil balloons and Silly String, that picture of her dad she loved. Put what’s left of her there in a crow box. But keep of hers what’s useful,” she added mindfully, “like her slingshot.”
Tex sucked on his overbite. “To do the thing proper, we’d need her…leftovers.”
“Yup,” answered Diodiance, too quickly. “Which means…the Flabberghast.”
Tex groaned.
Diodiance sped ahead even faster. “We can win her stuff from him with games. Flabby likes games, and we Barkas are the best. No grown-up games, we’ll say. No chess or checkers or Scrabble-like stuff with words and counting. Maybe tag?”
Granny Two-Shoes cleared her throat. She contemplated the peeking tips of her pink, patent leather Mary Janes, and wondered how best to alert the others to the dangers she perceived. Sheepdog Sal was an angel of understanding, but there were nuances even she could not manage. Quickly, Granny laid out four race cars. She pointed to the first, then jabbed her finger at Tex. Likewise, she associated herself, Diodiance, and Sheepdog Sal with corresponding vehicles.
At last she showed them all a slim bullet casing, held in her pinched thumb and forefinger. With her free hand, she made a gesture in precise mimicry of the Flabberghast’s formal bow, with which he unfailingly greeted his visitors. The bullet casing, then, was the Flabberghast.
At Tex and Diodiance’s nods of comprehension, Granny Two-Shoes moved her playing pieces around the dirty tile floor in a game of tag. As the cars separated from one another and scattered in all directions, the deadly bullet casing sought each of them out separately and pounced, dragging them back to base. Checkmate.