A Chemical Fire (7 page)

I run to the base of the hotel and when I come close I see a thick door has been pieced together out of scrap and grafted to the frame. I go to it and push and it swings in, enough to squeeze through, heavy, and I pull and close it, find a deadbolt and slap it closed, checking twice to be sure.

The hotel lobby is made of oak and lacquer and over-sized vases bearing the large-leaves of artificial plants, the elegance blemished by a set of stairs taken apart and smashed up, the top half hanging useless and amputated. Somewhere that echoes, a voice says, “Take the gun.”

On the front desk is a handgun. I grab it, looking for the voice.

“Over here,” the elevator says, its door forced open and no car blocking the way into the dark. I peek in and look down, down to the basement level where a pile of victims sits like a snake pit, some of them moving with broken arms and legs, the rest of them not. “I’ll take care of those,” the back of my head shakes and I look up, seeing ten floors up to the top and the wide man there with a very long gun.

I turn to find the kitchen and he fires down, down through the dark spine of the building running eleven floors straight to the bottom, through the heads of victims lying broken underground, snuffing them out.

I find the kitchen filled with quiet, brushed-metal stoves and other dead machines, some that once steam-cleaned coffee and spit from glass and ceramic, others that bubbled wide pots of soup and sauce. Past pristine tables waiting for vegetables to chop, fish to dissect and red meat to hammer, I find a small door in the wall fitted with an unlocked combination lock. I pull the door open, the space inside no more than a television.

I think about it a second. Then get in. Immediately it kicks and whirs- the first electricity I’ve heard in a while, bringing me slowly up through the black. Only a few times light flicks at me through the spaces, otherwise I can't see. All the way I regret my decision knowing this may be the way I end.

I hit the top and hear a second combination lock being worked and pushed aside. Then the door pulls open and the man is looking in with blinding light behind his buzzed blonde hair.

I look at the lock in his hand. “You know these things are dumb animals?”

“So are rats,” he says, “but eventually even they get everywhere.”

Everyone Needs a System

“This is a Handgun Room,” he says with fat teeth. “Pistols, revolvers, so on.” Our footsteps fall quiet on dark red carpet. “Next is a Canned Goods Room, got your vegetables, peas and beans, your sauces, your soups. Then you have a Dry Foods Room. Rice, pasta, flour. Next a Semi-Automatic Room, oldies like M1 Garands all the way up to the Rugers and Soviet jobs. Then, you have a Panic Room.”

I turn to him, his thick forehead aimed up at me.

“It has a bug-out-bag filled with choice supplies from each room. Also a reinforced door with a deadbolt lock and an alternate exit. Every hallway of every floor has a Panic Room. Long story quick, the shit goes down, you go to a Panic Room.”

The hotel is hollow. It buzzes with power from the generators around us, only the necessary lights switched on to conserve power. Down the wide hotel hallway it’s one, big, beige washout broken by a rainbow. “That’s color coding above the doors,” he says. “I painted those squares for reference. Cold colors are food supplies- purple for canned, green for dry, blue for liquid. Hot colors are not food supplies. You’ll notice I don’t do a lot of fucking around. I don’t take chances and I don’t keep all my eggs in one basket.”

“Isn’t this hotel one, big basket?”

“I have others. The point is I don’t wait around to die. With all this spare time we have, all there is to do is prepare and move. I’m here to stay alive and if you’re not, go shit yourself.”

We continue down and turn left; more rooms and more color squares. Every room has a purpose, an idea. Some rooms have maps drawn on their walls, others are stockpiles of tools or water jugs or storage bags, the beds pushed aside or used, windows kept clear or set with a gun and appropriate ammo.

I double-take a room that for a second looks alive. It’s covered in bodies; head-to-toe, floor-to-ceiling porn cut-outs. Toes and mouth, tits and asshole. Not an inch missed.

I look around the Jerk Room and wonder how many of these porn-stars are walking the streets right now as hungry scabs, implants melted to their rib cages, dried saline running down their black bellies.

He says, “My name’s Daniel,” and looks around. “I favor ass-to-mouth myself.”

“John. Which color is for medical supplies?”

Dichlor (Cl)

For two days I help the cause, sorting and filing. Daniel tells me to stay behind and locks the door of my assigned room saying, “When you have the training I’ll take you with me,” leaving in black gear and duffel bags. My legs twitch and I count the walls and cameras between the sweat on my neck and the medical supply rooms, the alphabetized bottles inside filled to the top. His level of organization is hard to bypass, but it can be done.

On his way out I ask his helmet, “Have you thought to check the expirations on all your meds?”

“Of course.” He comes back a hundred minutes later with things from his list; rope and yeast in the bag he hands to me. The one he hides has lubricants and videotapes that I let him pretend I don’t see- a sex shop snatch-and-grab. I bring what he wants to the appropriate rooms, always working in his needling eye line, secretly making head maps.

The missions are routine, each time the click of a lock and my eyes sinking into dark wells as I recall footsteps through the carpet. Turn right out the door then eleven steps, left at the extinguisher and down fifteen more, pivot left at 305 and look up at the red square.

Then one day he says, “Let’s hit the pool.”

I follow him to the ground level and down the rope hanging through the chopped-up stairs and through doors I haven’t been. On the other side we come into damp air and a massive rectangle of a room; an in-ground pool cut fifteen feet wide, fifty feet long and nine feet deep into it’s middle, flicking with ripple-lights and smelling of cleansers.

“Are we swimming?”

“Shooting." Off to the side there's a table set up with handguns, ammo and sights. All the way at the other end are targets stapled to mats, the kind used on the floors of gyms.

“I know how to fire a gun.”

“Not correctly,” he replies, walking to the table. “Your dad took you to the range when you turned eighteen, showed you how to hit bulls-eyes, right?” The dribble of water, pristine and choking with pH-levelers. “Good start but it won’t save you.”

I stand at the pool’s edge, looking through the water to the bottom. “Can I jump in or not?”

“It’s not for swimming. I maintain the clean water because as you’ve noticed plumbing doesn’t work anymore. That's our drinking water.”

I look from him to the pool.

“You’ll contaminate it. Chlorine kills most things but who knows what we’re coming in contact with out there,” motioning to the dead world.

“Blood. Teeth. Heart attacks, the stuff that make it real and fast. The point here isn’t to fire a gun as accurately as possible, the point is how quickly you can fire it accurately.”

I come to the table and pick up the handgun, black and heavy and fitted with a metal-and-glass scope. I aim it at the center of Daniel's chest. “What if I use these skills to kill you?”

“You’re welcome to try. If you hold the gun that tightly though you won’t hit shit." My hand gives slack. “Your grip has to be just right; too tight and you influence your shot, too loose and you lose stability. Now face the target.”

I shift and move the barrel, hair slapped to my forehead like wet worms, watching the shake in my hands where drugs want to fill the cracks.

“Uncomfortable,” he asks.

“What?”

“Your stance. You need to support the gun with your bones and muscle but if you’re not comfortable you’re not accurate. Try every position once until something feels good. When you find it, squeeze one off.”

I stare at the target at the end of the water. When I’ve waited what I think is long enough I fire and flinch. The gym mat spits out foam half a foot from the target.

“Don’t check your shot,” he barks, “not until the victim falls dead out of picture.”

“It’s a piece of paper.”

“Shut up. Six shots, fast.” I fire, fire, fire, the loud pops bouncing off clean tile. I give the target a look: one hit, bottom left corner of the paper.

“John,” he calls and I look. Shaking his head he says, “If you don’t think of this as fucking, you’ll never do it right.”

So I missed. I screwed up. So what? I couldn't hit the target silhouette, down there at the end, laughing without a hole in it. The pool filter churning on and on, bubbling out air that smells white, Daniel thinking I can’t do this. In a way the target is to blame. I shift and feel the guilt on me for missing.

Daniel starts talking about scopes, warning me of half-moon images that block the sight picture. He says, “Picture the bullets are your fingertips. All you want to do is push them into someone's skull and squeeze.”

I can't even listen to him. All I can think about is this fucking target, waiting down there for me to fuck up again, waiting to laugh at me as sterile air fills me, makes me slower, clears my eyes, my lungs going deep and deeper and deeper. I think of every woman I’ve been on top of and I picture they’re all this target, waiting to get it without a breath in them. Like my lungs: deflated.

“Good shot,” Daniel is saying when I realize he’s still talking. I look at him, struck dumb. “Your second shot,” he says, “Much better.”

“I haven’t fired a second one."

“No?” He points at the target. Suddenly it has a round hole in it an inch from center. “You're a fast learner. Good thing, or I'd kick you out. Tomorrow we’ll add a target over there, at the other side of the pool, and you’ll alternate. Two shots here, one there. One here, three there, like that. Then you’ll start with the gun laying on the table and you'll grab it and shoot, quick draw-style. Then we’ll add more tables. More targets. Closer targets, until you can shoot in any situation.”

"Thanks for helping me," I lie.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a game plan for you. Keep that up,” he nods to my hit, “and you’ll be going on missions by the end of the week.”

More than anything I need to be in his good graces. He could be my bodyguard and my dealer, all rolled up in one, pot-bellied package.

Pig Skin I & II

I.

Forking food over monitors I cramp up, chilled over. Ten across five down, gray light boxes lay out the hotel: beds and night stands seen unused through open doors, piles of ash swept into corners, front desk unmanned, kitchen unused, pool unoccupied and hallways unrun with kids; no parents to follow behind and say “Wait” when card keys hide in this pocket or that, no wait staff to wheel up with cheeseburgers and seltzer water with fuck you breaths and sudden smiles when doors open. The weight that thinned these carpets to a shine is now blowing as ash-wind up streets or flopping whole and broken down them.

He says, “Why are you so sweaty?”

“Allergies. What’s the checklist?”

“Door checks are complete." Portioned ham cubes and rice in his mouth, television in his eyes. “I scheduled generator maintenance for tomorrow. It’s a few days early but I don’t like the smell of it lately." I watch his big teeth working and I try to break their code. “I found a hair in the pool filter last night,” he says. “Looks pubic. Know anything about that?”

“I could fill a book with what I know about pubic hair.”

He looks at me, thread-veins rooted in his eyeballs. “I’m telling you because either that hair belongs to someone dead, or it belongs to someone dead.”

My head, my heart working. “Those dates are useless. Batteries have chemicals which break down differently depending on their environment. Temperature, humidity, the manufacturers don’t know where they’ll end up. You think they predicted this?”