After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (27 page)

Jeremy heard what Dad was saying, but his eyes were on Dad’s hand. “Dad, what about
your wedding ring? Oh, Christ! What about your pacemaker?”

Dad froze. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

“Oh, God!” Jeremy said. “What about your crowns?”

Dad shut his mouth with a snap. Then he said, “Let me see your mouth.”

Jeremy opened wide, and Dad sighed. “Right. Your mom always insisted on composite
fillings for you kids. No mercury silver amalgams.” He looked down at Jeremy’s pants.
“Shit. Take off your pants.”

“My pants?”

“You’ve got a brass zipper, a brass snap, and copper rivets reinforcing the corners
of the pockets.”

“What about
your
zipper?” Jeremy said.

Dad shrugged. “You’re right about my pacemaker. I’m not going
near
the car. You’ll have to do it. We need the water and the clothing, if they haven’t
already turned the containers into Swiss cheese.” He looked down. “Looks like your
shoes are all leather and plastic—punched lace holes, no grommets. So get out of your
pants, and we’ll try this.”

Dad took the GameGuy while Jeremy took his pants off. He felt funny about it—standing
outdoors in his underwear—but had his shoes back on in just a few minutes.

Then Dad gave Jeremy the key. “Stick it in the lock, turn it, and flip the lid up.
Don’t try to get the key back out.”

Jeremy nodded solemnly.

They moved around until they were lined up behind the trunk, about twenty feet back.
Dad had Jeremy show him the GameGuy’s on switch. “Yeah—thought so, but wanted to be
sure.”

He swung his arm back and flicked the switch.

There was moment of stillness on the car as every bug stopped moving; then iridescent
blue wings exploded into view and bugs buzzed into the air, headed for them. Dad flung
the GameGuy through the heart of the swarm, and most of the bugs shifted to follow,
but a few still headed toward them.

“Damn it,” Dad said, and bolted. Jeremy dropped to the ground and shoved his fist,
the one with the trunk key in it, into the loose sand. With his other hand he scraped
sand over it, mounding it high.

One bug flew by, ignoring him, but another hovered for a moment, shifting back and
forth in the air over him. Then it dropped to settle on Jeremy’s discarded jeans and
began eating the brass zipper.

Jeremy loosened his grip on the key, then dug his other hand into the sand and lifted
a mound up, the key inside. He didn’t know how much sand it would take to shield the
metal from the bugs, but hopefully, with the car, the GameGuy, and the cell phone,
the bugs would have higher-priority targets. He walked slowly forward, dribbling sand
as he went. Bugs were returning to the car now, but the trunk lid was largely unoccupied.

Jeremy brought his mound of sand right up to the lock before he let the last grains
pour out of his hands. For one frantic second, he nearly let the key slide out of
his hand with the sand, but he caught it, aligned it, and jammed it into the lock.

The bugs on the trunk lid were twitching, but they kept eating even as the lock clicked
and the trunk rose on sprung hinges.

There were a few bugs in the trunk, but it wasn’t too bad. Jeremy grabbed the baskets
of clothes and flung them behind him, far from the car, then snatched the two water
jugs and backed up.

The motion of the trunk lid had stirred the bugs up, and more were in the air. One
bumped into his head and snagged on his hair. Jeremy could feel it moving, and pictured
it eating into his skull. He shook his head violently, and the bug flipped off, buzzing
into flight before it hit the ground; but now it was closer to the car than to him,
and it flew to the vehicle.

Jeremy quickly gathered the spilled clothes back into the baskets. He dragged the
water into the shade of a mesquite bush, well away from any metal. Then he took the
clothes back to where Mom and Laurie were still sitting. “Where’s Dad?” Jeremy asked.
Dad should have circled back to them by now.

Mom looked around. “I don’t know. I thought he was with you.”

Jeremy guessed she hadn’t overheard their conversation about the crowns and Dad’s
pacemaker. He didn’t want to worry her. “He’s probably looking for shelter.”

“Where are your pants?”

“Too much metal,” Jeremy explained. “Metal zipper and snaps and rivets.”

He dug out a pair of basketball shorts, baggy and long but with an elastic waist,
and pulled them on over his shoes. He pointed at the clothes baskets. “You should
probably change out of anything with metal on it—unless you can remove the metal itself.”

“Where’s my purse? I’ve got scissors in them.”

“We buried them, Mom. Metal, remember?”

He went back and got one of the water jugs, dropping it on the sand by Laurie. “Here.
I’ll go check on Dad.”

Dad had gone north, away from the road, away from the car. Jeremy picked up the other
water jug and followed.

There was a large stretch of gravel and sand interspersed with mixed cactus and mesquite,
and some dry-as-tinder grass. Jeremy kept his eyes open for rattlesnakes and scorpions.
He wasn’t as worried about Gila monsters, since they rarely bit unless you picked
them up.

The brush stopped at water, and Jeremy blinked, surprised. It was a water trap on
the edge of a golf course. On the other side of the water was a green fairway starting
to turn brown, and condos lined the far side of that.

They weren’t as far out in the desert as he’d thought.

There were bugs buzzing across the water, and something moved just below the surface,
then Dad’s head came up and he took a deep gasp of air. The bugs shifted toward him,
but Dad was already underwater again. Jeremy saw a flash of a kicking leg as he swam
toward a different spot.

Jeremy knew Dad couldn’t do that forever. He wished he had the GameGuy again, so he
could heave it across the pond, distracting the bugs. He had to do
something
.

A groundskeeper’s shed, roofed and sided with corrugated fiberglass panels, was strewn
across the grounds at one end of the pond. There were bugs crawling through the contents,
but Jeremy saw, off to one side, some scraps of hose. He ran over, slowing drastically
as he got closer. The bugs were eating metal shovels, brass fittings, and the screws
out of the two-by-four framing.

But they’d cut through a bunch of hose, too, while eating through the metal reel the
hose had been coiled around. Jeremy inched closer until he could reach in and snag
a foot-long section. It was still connected to the main hose, but only by a small
strip, left when the bugs had crawled through it. Jeremy put his foot on the longer
section and heaved. The connecting material broke with a snap, and he fell back into
the brown grass, clutching the short end.

Bugs—disturbed by the vibrations, Jeremy guessed—rose into the air, and he froze on
the ground as they swirled over him, then finally returned to the scattered shed and
settled back onto the tools.

Jeremy edged away from the shed and ran back to the pond, plunging in and swiftly
heading for Dad through waist-deep water.

This time, Dad’s face was out of the water, just barely, just enough for him to breathe.
His eyes were wide and flicking back and forth, looking for bugs, but they hadn’t
spotted him yet.

“Get back, Jerry! Those bugs could get you as they’re trying to get me!”

Jeremy held up the tubing. “A snorkel.”

Dad couldn’t hear him. The water was in his ears. So Jeremy put one end of the tubing
in his mouth and tilted up the opposite end, then held his other hand flat, indicating
the surface of the water below the upper end of the hose.

“Ah!” Dad reached for the hose, and Jeremy put it in his hand. Dad’s head came up
out of the water, and the bugs, four or five, homed in on him. Dad dove back under,
and Jeremy did too.

When Jeremy came up again, the bugs were spread out, quartering the pond. He could
not see his dad, only the hose sticking out of the water in the middle of the pond.

The water wasn’t that cold, but when Jeremy climbed out of the pond, his wet skin
and clothes acted like an evaporative cooler, chilling him. It felt good at first,
and then uncomfortable. He wanted to get those bugs away from Dad. Dad couldn’t stay
in that pond forever.

Laurie and Mom had changed clothes when he returned. Mom looked up sharply when he
came back into sight. “Where’s your father?”

Jeremy gestured. “He’s okay. But he needs to stay where he is. The bugs really like
his pacemaker and his crowns.”

The car was now completely covered in bugs, and its outline had changed substantially.
It was lower on the ground. Between cactus thorns and bugs burrowing through the tires,
going after the steel fibers, the tires no longer held air.

“We should get farther away from
that
,” Jeremy said.

Mom started stuffing their metal-free clothes into one of the clothes baskets, ignoring
the discards.

Jeremy looked at Mom’s purse, still lying besides the ring of rocks that marked the
buried coins, keys, and scissors. He picked it up. It was a leather purse lined with
cloth. The straps were a continuous sweep of the body’s cloth-lined leather and it
had a nylon zipper. The only metal part, the zipper pull, had come off the previous
year.

He started filling it with sand.

“What are you doing?” Laurie said.

“Need to carry some metal over to where Dad is.”

“What? Won’t that bring the bugs down on us?”

“Not if it’s buried in sand. Shielded.” He dug his hands into the sand in the middle
of the rock circle, worming his fingers down.

He found the scissors by stabbing himself firmly in the ball of his thumb. He jerked
his hand back up and stuck it in his mouth, tasting sand and blood.

Jeremy brought the items up one by one, centered in a double handful of sand, and
dropped them into the purse. Only once did a bug come to investigate, and he frantically
shoveled more sand into the purse until it flew back to the mound of bugs that used
to be their car.

The last thing was his mom’s key ring, with the radio remote for the car and some
decorative metal stars hanging on chains. As he pulled it up out of the sand, several
bugs took to the air and flew toward him. He dug down into the growing hole, grabbed
the last few coins, and threw them at the approaching bugs. As the pennies and nickels
flew by, the bugs turned around to follow them.

He had to get Laurie to help him carry the purse, it was that full of sand. She took
one strap, Jeremy took the other, and they staggered back through the mesquite and
chollo to the water trap.

Dad was still underwater, out in the middle of the pond, breathing through the hose.
The bugs, now more than a dozen, were patrolling the water’s surface.

“Where’s your father?” Mom asked.

Jeremy pointed and told her about the snorkel.

She put her hand to her mouth. “We’ve got to get him out of there!”

“And put him where?”

“Someplace where he won’t
drown
.”

“What about the bugs, Mom? If he gets out of the water, those bugs are going after
his crowns and his pacemaker.”

Mom blinked and looked around desperately, as if hoping for a policeman or an EMT
or a fireman to help her. Then she covered her mouth, as though holding back screams
to keep them from echoing across the pond.

Jeremy curled in on himself, arms crossed. He remembered the body from the road, the
one the vultures had been stripping, and he wondered if this is how the man had died.
Had the bugs drilled through his head, going for his crowns? Did he have a pacemaker
or an artificial knee or hip? For a terrible instant, Jeremy visualized his father
lying faceup in the sun, the bugs crawling over him.

Laurie said, “Bury him.”

Mom dropped her hands, shocked. “How is that better than drowning?”

Laurie shook her head. “I don’t mean like a grave. Shield him with earth, like this.”
She jerked her chin at the purse.

Jeremy licked his lips. He took a deep, shuddering breath. That could work, maybe.
“We’ll have to dig a hole.”

It took an hour to build the bunker. They ran into caliche—fused clay and gravel—at
a foot and a half. Without metal tools, they couldn’t really go any deeper, but they
could raise the ground around it.

They ended up with a trench that was as long as Dad was tall, with walls that stuck
up three feet above the caliche floor. Jeremy dragged some of the fiberglass panels
over from the remains of the groundskeeper’s shed, and set them aside. When they were
ready, he retrieved a quarter from the center of the sand-filled purse and flung it
across the pond. The hovering bugs followed it.

Dad was able to stick his head up out of the water long enough for Jeremy to explain
the plan.

He said, “I’ll try anything to get out of this damn water.”

Mom and Laurie waited in the pond near Dad while Jeremy dug his hand into the purse
and found Mom’s keys. When it seemed clear enough—there were only a few bugs now quartering
the surface of the water—he ran for the fairway, around the pond to the side that
was opposite the shed, Mom’s ring of metal keys and bangles dangling from his hand.

A few bugs followed him, but when Jeremy reached the middle of the golf course, he
pushed and held the unlock button on the car remote. Bugs rose all around him: from
the remains of the shed, from the pond, and from the condos on the other side of the
fairway. Thousands of bugs.

He hadn’t thought of that. They were
everywhere
.

He flung the keys as far toward the condos as he could, and dashed up the brown grass,
zigzagging, hearing the bugs tear past him, stinging and burning as they bounced off
his face; and then he seemed to be clear of them.

Jeremy circled back around to the pond, where Mom and Laurie had helped Dad out of
the pond and into the trench, then laid the fiberglass panels across the raised dirt
walls. They were scooping dirt on top of him as fast as they could. Jeremy tried to
help, but blood kept running down into his eyes. When the first layer of soil covered
the fiberglass, Mom made him go sit in the shade and hold a T-shirt to his face until
the bleeding stopped.