Glitter + Ashes

by Dave Ring

  “Time for Utopia two point oh,” Nestor continues, pacing at the center of a ring of angry machines. “I’ll just start over. I should have known this design was too convoluted. Children! Damn it all, where am I going to get fresh children?”

  “It’s over!” Drexa shouts. “The Gulch is ours!”

  Nestor barks a laugh. The robots keep coming. Some jaunt in fresh from bathtub-tipping duty in the city while others come crawling up from hidden compartments under the streets. Buzz swallows hard: he never dreamed there were so many. In moments they have the Utopians surrounded on all sides: a human donut, ringed by armored machines braced in identical fighting stances.

  Buzz looks over his shoulder, and the others all look back. Drexa nods. Hammer winks. Killer—Killer finds Buzz’s hand and kisses the palm.

  “You can’t punch your way out of this one,” Nestor shouts incredulously. “What chance do any of you stand without your armor?”

  But they get down to trying—and when they do, all the armor they need is each other. Buzz watches Killer’s back while Killer guards Drexa’s left flank long enough for her to pry a bot off Hammer so he can help the crowd push a whole phalanx of bots off the balcony ledge. In the chaos, the shouting, the sprays of blood and glints of chrome fists, there’s no way to tell who’s winning.

  All Buzz knows is that everyone helps everyone. That’s the whole game.

  It is either midnight or noon on the Nevada highway, which means Noma is driving by sight or by love. They grapple with the wheel, attempting to straddle the beating yellow line at the road’s center, instead ricocheting in a series of hazardous diagonals between the broken edges of the road. They’re super fucked up on Tox, as am I, as are the other two (or possibly five) people in the car, the number of occupants varying from one moment to the next as our bags extend appendages and wave plaintively before resuming their existence as inanimate objects. It’s either noon or midnight, and we’re going to be late for our next performance.

  “Ten miles left,” I say. This is not the distance to the next outpost, which is so far away that we can’t even pick up its radio station, but the range left on the car’s battery. We’ll eventually roll to a stop in the desert and die, so high on the toxins swirling between the settlements that we’ll barely experience a suitable dose of existential dread.

  We’re running out of time and space, but more importantly, we’ve run out of things to talk about. The tires have been singing on the warm pavement for a hundred silent miles.

  “Let’s play the game,” Noma says.

  I nod, and I wonder how we would make the sound of a nod in one of the radio plays we perform in the outposts. An agreeable rustle, a stack of papers with “yes” printed on every page.

  A mile shivers and vanishes under us. “Foot crushed under a tire,” Noma says at last. We used to pass the time this way while driving between gigs, back when silence shimmered like heat between us, and didn’t pool in the low, quiet spots, as sinister as Tox.

  “Hmm,” I give it some thought. “Celery breaking, plus something a little wet. Maybe squeeze a grape.”

  “Celery is great for the long bones,” they agree. “But the metatarsals are shorter and relatively thicker. You’re right about the need for something a little squishy in there. Watermelon,” they say. The car shudders as we diagonal off the edge of the highway and slither in the dust before Noma brings us back to the pavement.

  “Watermelon,” they say, possibly for the second time. “You get a crack as the skin breaks, but also the flesh parting, a softer sound, and a little more prolonged. It’s wet inside, like a body, and if you listen really carefully you can hear the way it pulls apart at the seeds with faint pops, the way people do.”

  “Have you ever heard a person pulled apart?” I laugh, but Noma doesn’t laugh.

  “I’m a person,” they say.

  “Fifteen miles,” I say after a while. “We should ditch the hitchhikers.” The two passengers slump amidst our foley gear in the back seat. They fell into a stupor shortly after we left the last outpost, knocked out by Tox exposure. Most people are like this: doomed to huddle in squat settlements around radio towers, as if sheltering out a storm under a tree, stuck on islands of toxin-free land.

  Noma and I aren’t like most people. Our tolerance to Tox is ridiculously high. We can venture into the shimmering wilderness of the road and breathe the dust of the smashed world, suffering only mild to moderate to severe hallucinatory effects. Our shared bond has kept us together through the long miles, the endless string of performances at one station after another, under the warm, settling clouds of everything that was.

  I prefer my passengers to remain unconscious. Hitchhikers who stay awake have a habit of shrieking, begging us to stop, and pleading to be let out. Most people have an even lower tolerance for Noma’s driving than they do for Tox.

  If we leave the riders behind, we might eke out a few extra miles before the battery dies. They would perish in the desert, but only if they’re actual people, and I might be imagining them. What are the implications of killing a fictional person? Noma and I routinely kill off characters in our radio plays, accompanying the dramatic moments with the most grotesque sound effects we can muster using available foods and farm implements. We never mourn those deaths.

  On the other hand, these might not be the kind of ghosts found in Tox-saturated places. They could exist in the reality found near the outposts, which is to say, real, in which case we would be murdering them. Alternately, Tox may be altering the rules of time and space, which it can do. It’s hard to know.

  Another problem with dumping them is that I’m having difficulty distinguishing between our guests and our luggage, which is again reaching for me and moaning inarticulately, like a bear attempting human speech. If we throw out the hitchhikers, in our condition, we might inadvertently leave half our gear on the side of the road. Also, I’m not sure how to describe the process of slowing the car to Noma, who is barely negotiating the act of driving, and who has begun to resemble a large construction of playing cards in the front seat, a careful assemblage that might explode into its component parts at the slightest provocation.

  “I know the way it feels when I’m pulled apart,” Noma says. “I know the sound of the sound of the feeling of being pulled apart.”

  I blink. It must be daytime. I can see everything with complete clarity, if everything is the stutter of the yellow line in a patch of reality directly in front of us. The headlights caress the bare desert like the flickering warmth of love, so blinding that you keep thinking you see it after it’s gone, indistinguishable from its own after-image.

  “New game,” I say. “What noises can you make with playing cards?”

  “We’re not going to make it,” Noma says, and I don’t know if they’re talking about the car, or us.

  “I need some air,” I say, rolling down the window and resting my head on the cool sill, knowing it will only fill my lungs with a blast of more airborne nightmares. I want to warp time and space, to come unglued from the limitations of car batteries, the boundaries of the landscape beyond the edge of the headlights, where even love can’t reach.

  “Do you know what’s horrible about cracking open a watermelon?” Noma asks. “It sounds just like you imagine a foot being crushed would sound like, but it also sounds delicious. It’s enough to make you hate watermelon.”

  “I love watermelon,” I say. Bringing my head back into the car feels like reeling in a fish.

  “That’s because you’re the one breaking it,” they reply.

  “Thirty miles,” I say after a while. “New game. What’s the most awful sound you love?”

  “Hey,” says one of the hitchhikers, or possibly a piece of luggage.

  “Oh, hey,” I answer, nervously moving to block his view of the windshield and the wandering road. “Awake already?”

  “I was never asleep,” he says. “I’m Time. This is Space.” Space nods from the darkness of the back seat.
She seems very far away, but I suppose Space would do that.

  “I might be imagining you,” I tell him.

  “You are,” he says. “So is everyone.”

  “I was thinking about leaving you on the side of the road.”

  He nods. “You can’t keep us here forever. Eventually, we’ll come between you.”

  Space leans in, as distant and pale as a drive-in movie screen. “Nothing lasts,” she says. “Not this road. Not this world. Not this love.”

  I roll my eyes. Real or not, they’re going to find themselves on the side of the road if they keep talking like that.

  “Do you know,” Noma says, “that there are different kinds of silence?”

  I shake my head, as does Space, and Time.

  “You can’t just be perfectly quiet on the radio,” Noma says. “The audience will think the station has gone dark, and they’ll turn off their receivers. So you make this noise, so everyone knows that what they’re hearing is silence.”

  “What noise?” I ask.

  They let go of the steering wheel. The old tires kiss the wasted earth, and I hear the sound of the feeling of right now, not a dead channel but a quiet microphone, waiting for the performance to begin.

  “How would you make that sound?” Noma asks.

  I play the game. “I’d rub the outside of a peach while humming and slicing my hand open on a saw blade.”

  “Close,” they smile. “Cry over an old photo while a dog whines and someone shuffles a deck of cards.”

  The road drones its reassuring song of endless wear and tear, a hard lullaby, a sound like staying together.

  “I don’t hear anything,” says a voice from the backseat.

  “The luggage is talking again,” I tell Noma.

  Noma shrugs. “You know how hitchhikers are. Always telling us to stop.”

  The night opens for us, radiant with stored sunlight and the songs of distant outposts, and we do not stop.

  Bee polished a secret shining in her heart: she was grateful the world had ended.

  Bee watched the brittle children tossing rocks, and the feeling burrowed down like a creature escaping daylight. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a packet of Skittles she’d been saving. She knelt down and poured several into each of the kids’ faint, greedy hands.

  “When do we make the next run to the Second Quad?” Mar placed her arm absently—but not carelessly—around Bee’s waist. The other hand reached for an orange candy—her favorite—and Bee’s heart buzzed. It never got old. “Jeremy thought we’d go tomorrow, but it doesn’t look like the Fog is going to let up.”

  Bee squeezed her wrist and shrugged. “I’m not sure we have a choice, Fog or no Fog.” She felt a twinge of guilt looking at Mar. Would she have noticed the beauty in front of her before the world ended? The gentle curve of her back, the way her lip pulled into a smile more on the left side.

  A pang hit her, sharp and angry. She was an imposter. Her old life might not have fit, but that’s where she was told she belonged. A whisper asked her if the world hadn’t ended, would she have ever considered Mar’s companionship?

  “You’re right. We should prep anyway and bring an extra set of masks. You still haven’t painted ours.” Mar looked at Bee. “Matching gas masks! A fun couples costume!” Mar’s lips pulled into a smile, more on the left side, and she cupped Bee’s face. Her fingers were small, perfect heaters on Bee’s frigid cheek. “What’s wrong? You’re very far away today.”

  The whisper was a lie. A narrative ghostwritten for her by society. The fierce love in her heart told her so. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. This was real.

  “Nothing. Everything is fine.” When Mar’s face scrunched up, Bee took her by the hands and squeezed them. “Really. I’m just a little worried our trip tomorrow won’t get us the supplies we need, and with the quadrants becoming harder to cross through, we’ll get stuck.”

  It was easy to displace her personal woes with tangible ones.

  “If we get stuck, at least we’ll be together.” Mar kissed her on the cheek, and Bee could feel a new blush rise up even though they’d been together for months. “I’m going to pack. Should I bring your entire set of Lu novels just in case we get stuck?”

  Bee’s blush persisted and, though it was a joke, she nodded anyway. “Stop acting like you know me.” What would the world be without stories to escape to and someone to read them with? Mar grinned and turned away to their tent, her messy bun bouncing behind her, the sick wind tugging at long, loose strands.

  Bee banished her insecurity. Nothing was more exhilarating or frightening than loving Mar, except for maybe a gunfight. It was time to get clear, be strong, and kick many asses. She needed all of her focus for the journey tomorrow.

  What was the difference for Bee now that the world was dust? She could breathe. She could stretch. She could see the road in front of her, however harrowing. Her old life might have ended, but something raw and new had sprung up in its place.

  And Bee was with Mar, right where she belonged.

  Ten

  The back of Venom’s leather jacket was embellished with a beaded coral snake. Its eyes flashed ruby bright in the lantern light. Technically, those legless motherfuckers had black eyes, but artistic license took precedence in beadwork.

  Nine

  The poor snake was gonna lose its luster someday. Not much could fit in the cracks of threaded seed beads, but desert dust got into everything. In fact, Bite figured that—after seventeen runs—he and Venom probably had particles of the Mojave in their DNA.

  Eight

  Bite wore a beaded jacket, too. Silver and white wolf head. Golden eyes. The piece had taken weeks to finish. Weeks and a thousand drops of blood. Thimbles weren’t his jam.

  Seven

  Other riders in the village adorned their uniforms with grindstone-pointed metal spikes, neon hazard symbols and grinning skulls. Their fashion was a warning: don’t touch me; I bite. Anthropogenic aposematism.

  Six

  During his first few jobs with Venom, when inexperience heightened the danger of the road, Bite dressed to intimidate, too. But it felt like a betrayal.

  Five

  On their tenth job, a one-way escort mission guiding a motorcade of college kids to Los Angeles, Bite tore all the pointy bits and scary patches off his leather jacket. Even though he felt like a snail without its shell, the job was a success. Nobody gave them trouble.

  Four

  Twenty-five successful jobs later, he and Venom wore whatever the hell they wanted. With their reputation—almost fifty runs with no deaths—they didn’t have to be flashy.

  Three

  Bite never intended to make a career of this; he wanted experience on the road and figured escorting travelers through the desert a few times would suffice. But, well, love, you know? It changed plans, scrambled priorities, complicated matters. As if his life wasn’t complicated enough.

  Two.

  Should he say something before they left? Give Venom a clue that this job might be their last together for a long time?

  One

  No. That question had to wait. Just one second until the sky went black, and every millisecond mattered. They had less than four hours to reach Willowbee. Technically, their sportbikes could do the job with time to spare, but the roads were crap, only sporadically maintained in bursts of rushed labor under the shadow of the heaven shield. Plus, anything could happen out there. Robbery, blockades, road rage.

  Plus, “might” was the key word. He shouldn’t rush life-changing decisions, as if everything under the sky was one massive, frenetic street race—

  Go.

  “Ready?” Venom shouted. His voice rose above the purr of two running motors. He and Bite idled side-by-side at the bottom of an exit ramp that shot directly from the violet village to the world above ground. The metal roll-up door at the end of the ramp rose in anticipation of their run, baring the pitch blackness outside. It was ten-thirteen PM, but the
heaven shield blocked the almost-full moon and stars.

  “Let’s go,” Bite said.

  They accelerated, fighting the incline, the roar of their engines ricocheting off the rough-hewn stone walls and chasing them through the tunnel.

  This was Bite’s favorite part of every ride: the ascent into the night.

  They shot from the tunnel onto the access road to I-40 and merged onto the interstate. Several western-bound cars and bikes, other heaven shield riders, were already racing the clock. Venom and Bite hit the throttle, breaking away from the slower travelers, accelerating to eighty, ninety, one hundred, one hundred and ten miles per hour. Ahead, the road was empty and smooth, but that could change more suddenly than a lightning bolt. With his right hand, Bite signed to retain speed.

  “Ten more,” Venom signed back. A question, not a demand. The logistics of runs—speed, scheduling, trajectory of the shield—were Bite’s domain.

  “Five,” Bite compromised.

  Their headlights cut a tunnel through the night, with vague shapes of barbed cholla and other desert plants flashing in Bite’s peripheral vision. He activated a motion detector on his bike; if something approached the road, the detector’s alarm would ensure they had a few extra seconds to react. Highway robberies were uncommon on I-40, since it was always busy when the shield passed, but desperate people both took risks and avoided risks for the same reason: survival. How many desert-dwelling scavengers would exploit or cause a wreck on the interstate? And how many travelers would drive past an accident because of the looming countdown until the clear sky?

  It’s not that he blamed them. Once, the land was a home for wolves. Family packs that roamed from coast to coast. Then, death came for them in the form of hunters. Their extinction had been inevitable, Bite figured, but love sped up the process.

  Love and leg traps.

  A snare or steel box could catch a wolf by the leg and restrain her for days as she starved and suffered. All the while, members of the wolf’s pack would gather around her, unable to help but unwilling to leave, and fall prey to the trapper. Whole families were thus annihilated. Whole species.