The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [62]
They walk along the roof’s circumference. The rectangular teeth of the wall are taller than she is, but the spaces between are only waist-high. In the blacked-out city far below a few fires set in trash cans now light up small patches of street. Farther down the mountain a block of row houses is on fire. The valleys twenty miles off have regained power and form a gauzy sickle of light around the base of the slope.
As they make their way from the western side to the southern, the Shackley River comes into view, wending its way down through the foothills, its sluggish current of lava illuminating the dilapidated, postindustrial shores in a dim orange glow. On its western face the Black Tower is a hundred stories tall, but the building is set into the mountain so that as one circles around, it shrinks as the urban terrain rushes up to meet it. Looking down from its northeastern quadrant, just before the volcano’s peak, the ground is a mere ten stories below.
A few steps farther and the volcano’s mouth appears, and the distance plummets again. Chas leans over the wall, gazing down into the blackness, and Ursula, slightly calmer now in the partial light, can’t resist the urge to do the same. Half a mile down, through the dark, choking clouds of sulfur and ash, she can make out two small pools of magma, one elongated and snakelike, the other smaller and round, like burning letters in the abyss:
So
In the ruddy illumination the crater wall is visible, smooth and black. At eye level around the rim jut the jagged peaks of buildings, windowless and filmed with soot. Nuzzled between two of these, the asymptotic crest of the Sidney Gottlieb building and the spiraling peak of the Carlucci, stands the statue of God. She’s never seen it this way before—from behind, that is, an angle that makes it seem even more twisted and comical, its gaunt, charred back bristling with knobby vertebrae and stooped from the weight of its lopsided, twin-lobed, elephantitic head.
“Man, this stinks,” Chas observes.
He’s right. The crater fumes are terrible. She knows some poisonous gases occur naturally, but the fact that the volcano doubles as the city dump probably doesn’t help matters. Even at this hour of night the conveyor belt at the northern end chugs away, sending a steady stream of trash plummeting silently over the lip and down into the abyss.
My God, she thinks. We’re in hell.
She coughs. The stench of the fumes makes her feel faint. She doesn’t think she has the strength to move. But when Chas calls out to her, suddenly somewhere else on the roof, she feels her legs moving her toward him.
“Better over here,” he shouts. “Some crosswind.”
She finds him taking shelter behind a mushroom-shaped aluminum vent, the only one she can see on the rooftop. It’s a breezy night, and the ash smell isn’t nearly so strong here. She waits for him to speak, to indicate what happens next, but he doesn’t say anything, just waits her out, whether patiently or indifferently she can’t be sure.
“I don’t understand, Chas,” she says, striving for calm. “What’s in it for you, using Ivy for this campaign? And what’s in it for Cabaj? What if she goes crazy again? He knows the story. Why on earth does he want to risk that?”
“What’s the risk?” he says, looking off at the whipping ash. “Crazy is good. Crazier the better.”
“I don’t get it. Why is crazy good, Chas?”
Chas shrugs. “Schizos are in.”
His squarish profile reveals nothing. She can’t make sense of it.
“Schizos are in?” She laughs nervously. “How do you figure that? Name one schizo who’s in.”
He considers this. “It’s more of a hunch kind of thing,” he admits.
“ ‘A hunch kind of thing’?”
He turns to face her. “Ivy’s the perfect spokesperson for diet water,” he says. “That thing she did with the warpaint, Ursula—people still remember that. They’ll look at her and they’ll think of all the pressures of the world, and how all those pressures can drive even a pretty young girl nuts. But they’ll also see that she’s happy now. They’ll see that all her dreams have come true.