A Chemical Fire (14 page)
Authors: Brian Martinez
Daniel gets in close, breath hot with chili. “I thought we agreed it's very important to share Intel with me. Especially something like this, this is heavy, heavy need-to-know shit.”
Chewing my cheek I tell him I wasn’t even sure I’d seen it.
Adena says, “Now we have to worry about them coming back? Can I just say this isn’t how I pictured the end of the world.”
With his teeth caked with food, Janet says, “You wanted aliens, too, right?”
“No,” she says. “just not this.”
Daniel steps away from me, trying not to lose control. “Is there anything else you want to share with us before it lands in our laps?”
I prop the axe against a bookshelf, looking at them waiting for an answer, all not knowing if they should follow my lead and put their weapons down or use them to slice my throat. After a moment I say, “Hoover.”
Adena says, “The vacuum?”
“The dam.” And Daniel turns fast. “As forts go, it has a fresh water supply and only two ways in. More importantly-”
“It was built to last,” Daniel finishes.
"So?"
“Hoover Dam is a miracle of human engineering. It supposedly has more masonry in it than the fucking Great Pyramid of Egypt, and the machinery," his face opens up.
"It’s probably still working as we speak.”
“Why should we give a shit about a working dam,” Janet asks.
I walk up to him and brush Victim mess from his shoulder. “Because it’s a power plant,” I say, “and power plants make electricity.”
Receiving Icarus
Adena says, “The first thing I’m using is a hairdryer.”
I get a mouthful of gasoline and pull out the tube, gagging on the oily stuff and spitting it out. It’s more odor than taste, filling my sinuses with so much of the smell it hurts, pungent in my head and eyes.
“Porn for me,” Daniel says, “definitely porn.”
Janet says, “Porn is good. I’ll do some cooking, too.”
“You cook?”
“I do, but I make such a Meth,” and they laugh.
I thrust the tube into the buses waiting tank. All around the three of them have weapons out, protecting me from passersby. Two kids come at Adena at the same time, getting too close. She almost gets hit but shotguns them in time, the second falling with a handful of her coat.
“I miss full service,” she sighs, breath tight in bony chest.
“If you were better with that thing it wouldn’t be a problem,” Daniel says. “You have to either learn how to use it right or pick a gun with better distance.”
“Says the guy carrying a sword.”
"The difference between you and me," he winks, “is I’m not afraid of getting close to people."
The tank overfills and I pull the tube out, screw the cap back on and shut the door. Everyone files in and goes to their seat and we pull away. Janet says, “Hey driver, turn the fire down. I still have one ball left.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The heat, it’s like a volcanoes dick in here.”
“Heat's not on” I say, turning back onto the highway. He says nothing and I get back to blacktop and concrete, the bus moving us through a tour of old Colonial houses built on hills of dead grass, separated from the generations of people that painted and swept them. We find the road as before, slow from having to weave around crashed cars and stumbling people, sometimes getting out and moving a thing that can’t be driven around. It doubles our travel time, easily. Hours get eaten by the road this way, seeing water park after water park, eating pills, passing faded red and blue roller coasters twisting the landscape; like rusted worms drying in the sun.
Something smash-cracks down through my side mirror, sheering it right off the bus.
“What was that,” Daniel asks, waking up.
“Whatever it was it hates mirrors.”
“Did you hit a-”
THWUMP another hits the hood and my hands jump, the bus going with them. I regain myself, get control and slow all the way down, the bus stopping in the middle of the highway with grass stretched around us. There's a lump of something in the crevice where windshield meets hood, a greasy form tangled in with the wiper.
“Is it raining,” Janet asks, and everyone turns to stare at him.
“It looks like some kind of blackbird,” Daniel says.
Adena says, “Two of them in a row?”
Something lands off in the grass. Then something else. Then a third, this time impacting the highway. This one we can see clearly- it’s a bird carcass.
“So it is raining,” Janet says calmly. All around they fall harder and harder, in the bushes and onto concrete, thump, thump, clanging loud off the roof and cracking glass at the sides. They start to get in through the open windows so we rush to slide them up and get blood and feathers on our faces.
Eyes wide across the farmland, everywhere we can see, we see birds falling. We sit and watch. When we can’t watch anymore we look at each other, faces dotted red.
Adena says, “It’s not just people that are dying, is it. It’s the planet.”
“I hope not,” Daniel says, “I’m looking forward to owning a quarter of it.”
Janet says, “This show I watched said the planet’s died a dozen times already but it always comes back.” He lights a cigarette.
“Everything gets demolished when that happens, idiot. All life ends. The planet may grow back plants and animals but we’ll be gone. What’s the point.”
White birds and red birds, gray and blue, small and large come from the sky already dead. Thump. Thump-thump.
At least we can say we stood for nothing. Meant nothing. Accomplished nothing.
When the bodies stop falling I get back into the wheel seat. The bus starts up and we roll slowly, too fast and we lose traction, and we drive this way for a while, crunching all the way.
***
After a length of barns and silos patched up from the fingerprints of tornadoes, we come across a great lake and decide to stop. We pull into a parking lot with light poles and garbage pails leading to a beach leading to the water, and we come off the bus all leg cramps and yawns, stretching and going down to the water, all the way stepping around dead birds. Rock jetties reach out in front of us, tangled with plastic bags and fishing line.
“Look at that,” Adena points. Out on the water, hundreds of birds are floating across the surface; Cardinals and Purple Martins, Kingbirds and Allies, their feather oils seeping into the water in luminescent waves.
Out on the jetty, Janet lights a cigarette and laughs. “Hey, there’s a dead guy in these rocks,” poking something.
Adena says, “We have those all over the place.”
“Yeah but this one happened before that. He’s, you know, normal dead.”
Daniel claps his hands and says, “Alright. So if we’re a team we have to be trained like a team. We need to increase our reaction times and learn to work together. And I’ve seen everyone here almost eat it at one point or another, so this isn’t negotiable.”
Janet shouts, “Oh man, his skin just slides right off! You should really see this!”
Adena says, “I’m already a good shot.”
“It’s not about firing a gun as accurately as possible,” I say, “It’s how quickly you can fire accurately.”
“Yes, exactly,” Daniel says. Adena looks at me as if to say, Kiss-Ass.
When we’re ready Daniel takes us through our lessons, with Janet borrowing a gun. Preparing us for spontaneous attacks, he throws garbage at us and has us draw weapons. For multiple targets he sets up the pails in a crowd situation, having us move through and fire on each one in orders he calls out. We work on one-handed firing, weak-handed firing, firing from a prone position, close-quarters, indoor, moving then shooting, moving while shooting.
For teamwork we repeat everything, this time together.
He says, “In every second of combat you have three questions that need answering: where is my gun pointed, where are my teammates, and where are my teammate’s guns pointed.”
We’re running down the beach full-speed as he shouts, “You’re dumb if you think the body doesn’t experience physiological responses to stress. Vision blur, shaking, and most importantly, loss of manual dexterity.” Adena ready to collapse, he says, “Your blood is rushing to your core right now, away from your pretty little trigger finger.”
He shouts, “Now fire on your target, kill it, right now,” and we all miss.
We do it again, and we all miss.
We do it again, and no one misses.
Atrophy Wife
By the end of the day we’ve worked through small town after small town, every one with the same layout, main street and all, and Janet is snoring at the back, the night driving made difficult with no light posts, no buildings to reflect; we have only the headlights and the stars, glowing strong through the absence of pollutions.
“We need to stop soon.” My eyes are dry and my face swollen. I overdid it with the last handful of pills, and getting my food down to one meal hasn’t helped. According to Adena’s scale, though, I’m already making progress.
“Turn off at the next rest stop, there should be plenty of diesel in the parking lot,” Daniel says.
Adena says, “Is the bus over-heating?”
“No, why?”
“There’s a smell. And it’s not good.”
“I don’t smell anything,” Daniel says, sniffing around the dashboard. Then he moves away and says, “Wait, there it is,” following it to the back.
She says, “It’s probably that goddamn suitcase baby.”
He goes to where it is, shaking his head. Then he gets closer to Janet, asleep and mouth hinged open, and he gags. “It’s his breath,” he says, back of his hand to his mouth, walking back to the front. “It must be an infection. I almost threw up in his mouth, which would be an improvement.”
I take the turn-off and come into the parking lot for a highway rest stop. Station wagons and mini-vans sit close to the building, trucks further away in special spaces painted their size. I weave through islands of grass and shrubbery and park close, the long building directly in front of us.
Shaking Janet, I’m hit with the smell like rotting fruit and meat, much worse than I was expecting. He doesn’t move so I shake him harder, still nothing and I go harder until I look murderous and finally his eyes open, vein-snaked and edge-crusted.
“What’s going on,” he says, voice dry.
“Get your machete, we’re sleeping over."
We rush the building. An old man Victim coming from under a gas sign jerk-runs at us and Daniel takes him down with three shots. We get in with flashlights, past a tourist information desk set with brochures and into the wide lobby faced in by six or seven stores: fast food, coffee, gifts, so on.
This room alone has four Victims, one with no legs crawling at us, and we work on them. When they’re finished Daniel says, “Everyone take a store and clear it out. If you find any ashes,” he looks at me, “collect them in something and get them out of here.”
We split up. I take the bathroom at the far end, down a small hallway, my bladder filled with overdose. I piss long and dark in the urinal, toxins in the stream, then realize I haven’t checked the room out. Down low to the tile I see, in the second to last stall, burnt feet in melted shoes and legs swaying slightly.
At the stall, body pulled back with axe up, I try to kick the door open but it’s locked. Just a scratching grunt from inside.
The bathroom door opens and it’s Adena saying, “Is it clear?”
“Let me borrow that,” I say, trading her for the shotgun. I crouch in front of the stall quietly, slowly moving the shotgun until it’s in under the door and angled up, the Victim inside not reacting, not noticing.
I adjust a little, sweating, resting the butt of the shotgun on the floor to take the recoil, then pull the trigger. In an instant deafening the ceiling above goes massive red-black; a rose shape of dead blood, skull and hair stuck in the stuff. There’s a delay, then the sound of a body collapse onto the toilet, door still closed.
Shotgun back in her hands, Adena says, “We only found one pile of ashes. Have you noticed we’re not seeing them as much?”
“Hopefully it’s wind and not birthdays,” I say as we leave.
Back in the lobby lanterns are set up and fallen bodies are pushed to the walls. Daniel is tying up a bag of ashes and says, “Clear?”
Janet comes out of the café’s backroom, buckling his pants. Across the front of them are new-looking black stains. "Yup," he says.
“Same,” I say going to the gift shop to find cold medicine and cough syrup. Daniel opens the door and lobs the plastic bag deep into the parking lot, then it takes all of us to push the information desk so it blocks us in.
We make camp in one of the dining rooms that has cushioned benches, each of us laying in a different one and eating protein bars. Even Adena, her backpack full of diet pills and a scale off her back, eats some canned peanuts she found in the gift shop.
To Adena, Daniel says, “I’m going to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to get your period all over me.”
