by David Liss
“Well, okay. But answer me this—who did you buy drugs from?”
“My stylist,” Andrea said.
“But who did he buy it from? From a terrible person. And who did that person buy it from? From some sick psychopathic narco son of a bitch. This is murder powder,” I said, pointing to the coffee table where Blaine was divvying out more lines. “None for me, thanks,” I added. “Andrea, innocent people died so that you could paint your nostrils white. You’re snorting up human misery. You’re a person without scruples, a woman who will overlook the most horrific violence and criminality in the interest of fulfilling her own petty pleasures. And yet you’re telling me, you wouldn’t buy from Don Cheevers on principle?”
“That’s right,” Andrea said. “Believe me he is bad news. We had a thing—it was years ago. But there are two words for that man: con artist.” Andrea began to tick off his flaws on her long nails. “He doesn’t build to code. He’s a liar. And the money—”
“Follow the money. Always follow the money,” Blaine said. The two of them burst into hysterical laughter. I didn’t get it. They were connecting on some plane I couldn’t reach due to my comparatively modest intake, and I felt left out.
Lisa sat up on the couch and took in the scene. “What the F, Eric,” she said. “This is your plan?” I didn’t like the way she was looming over the coffee table.
“Calmate, Lees,” I said.
“This is your plan for us?”
“Lisa don’t!” But she was already doing it. She flipped over the coffee table. Powder filled the air and Andrea screamed.
“Nobody move!” Blaine yelled as the powder descended over his living room set; and then, “Get the broom!”
“Jeanette! Isabel! Let’s go!” The girls appeared instantly, having correctly deduced from her tone that their mother was at max rage and meant business. Jeanette was wearing some sort of leather overalls and a denim and rhinestone cap; Isabel had on a golden cape and a dog collar and purple boots that reached her thighs.
“Babe,” I said. That was the drugs talking. I hadn’t called her babe in years. “Go? Go where?”
“Anywhere,” Lisa said. “I’d rather be out there than in here with these people.”
* * *
I followed them out to the empty street pleading with Lisa to get back in the building but she walked barefoot down the sidewalk, the belt of her bathrobe trailing behind her, holding each of our girls by the hand, not even turning her head. I was following behind them, a yelling fat man with a crossbow, when I realized that the streets were not entirely empty. The sound of a big wheeled vehicle could be heard one to two streets over, though I couldn’t see it through the office buildings. It made me nervous. “Lisa, it’s not safe out here,” I pleaded.
I estimated that the death squads were just gearing up, sort of dipping their toes in. They were doing a little window smashing, some shooting out of traffic lights, waiting to see if there would be any response. It was becoming clear there wouldn’t be. A sheriff’s department car was parked street side. Someone had fed the meter, but the car’s door was open, its blinker signaling left. The scanner let off blank bursts of static and a classic Haggard played through the speakers think I’ll just stay here and drink.
“Lisa, where are you going?” I said. Lisa stepped over the shards of a window. Paper blew out through the hole in the glass. A funny thing—peripheral vision remains acute even when a person is too blind to find their own glasses on the bedside table without fumbling. Such a person will still be able to detect movement. For instance, the house cat that stalks over the blankets will register as a threatening blur. It’s because death has a way of sidling up to us; always has. I saw the man step from the corner and raise his bat, but I was a forty-year-old, recreational drug using fat man, and my instincts were dull. I just stood there and let him bring the bat down on my skull.
* * *
I woke up tasting asphalt. My tongue had lolled out of my mouth and I carefully retracted it back behind my dry, bloody lips. Inches from my eyes I saw the ridged soles of a hiking boot.
“Lisa?” I said.
I lifted my head and called for her again, knowing she was gone. I stood up, swaying. At my feet was a teen in an inspirational shirt: Together Everyone Achieves More. Go Mules! Somehow, I had taken my assailant down with me, and this salvaged a bit of my respect, but only a bit, because he was very young, and if his shirt was credible, only a junior varsity member of the swim team.
I slapped his cheek to wake him and found it cold. His bat was lying in the street and his hands were convulsed around my crossbow. I deduced that he’d accidentally shot himself in the chest at point blank range. I pried my crossbow from his cold, dead fingers and removed the arrow from his chest. It made a sick, sucking sound upon exit. Then I picked up the bat, wiping my own blood—and brains, for all I knew—onto my shorts and hobbled down the street. I wasn’t entirely sure I was alive anymore.
The longer I walked, the less certain I became that I wasn’t back there in the street with my head split open. A woman in a yellow hat was raising herself out of an open manhole. “They’re down here, darling. General! Everybody is down here.”
She kept speaking to me out of the smoke that blew up around her, but I kept my eyes away from hers. Dead or not, I knew better than to linger. The manhole began to spit a geyser of molten ooze. I climbed the fire escape of the nearest building. My feet were unsteady on the narrow steps. The street below me filled with fire, the sky blew down ash, and I was dizzy. I dragged myself onto the tar and gravel roof and collapsed.
II
“Do you know the expression ‘let bygones be bygones’?” Trip Edmonds said. He was wearing a toga made of orange tarp, belted with an electrical cord, and as he spoke, he cinched the belt tighter around his ever shrinking waist. He was so hungry he chewed little twigs and handfuls of leaves from the live oak trees when he thought nobody was looking. The lean muscle mass people were really having a bad time of it.
“Of course,” I said. “But that guy—”
“That’s what I’m living by in these latter days. Bygones be bygones, or B.B.B. That’s the reason I took you on, gave you your own sector. Now if you can’t pay that forward, well…”
Trip looked up at the shattered Captain Burger sign that marked the community’s northern boundary and shook his head. Behind him, Human Resources was doing some military type drills, marching and spinning their guns in sync. “We’re building something from the ground up here, in every possible sense—and I think it’s important that we’re all reading from the same playbook. I want to incubate a forward-looking culture. We don’t have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking, not in these times. Were mistakes made? No doubt about it. But I guess the thing I keep coming back to, Eric, is that we’ve all done things we’re not proud of.”
I looked over to where Jeff Robert, that ponytailed bastard, stood wearing rainboots and a pair of paint-splattered overalls, waiting to learn his fate. “Yes,” I conceded. “But we did those things after. He did his thing before.”
I’d pushed it too far. Trip was grinning like his face would split in half. “I seem to recall that there was some question of your involvement in the thing before. You say you didn’t have a hand in it; well, Jeff Robert also says he had no hand in his wife’s disappearance. I choose to believe you both, though I can’t know with anything like scientific certainty that you and he are not guilty of murder and fraud and what have you. All I do know is that you are two healthy, able bodied males between the ages of 18 and 50, the prime demographic for this industry. So can you work together, or are we going to have a problem?” I could see the man’s cheek bones jutting out beneath his thin, sagging skin as he grinned at me.
“B.B.B,” I said. Trip clapped me on the shoulder with one of his bony hands and I went to welcome Jeff Robert to the team.
“Look, asshole,” I said, handing him a canvas sack. “You fill your quotas and stay out of my way.” Jeff R
obert took the sack and followed the others.
My team of product reclamation specialists was working a strip mall north of the loop today—a hot, dangerous walk over many treeless miles without any cover to speak of. He had no weapon, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be lending him one from my small arsenal. With any luck, a rider would get him or he’d step onto a lava geyser and I wouldn’t have to work with the likes of him again. Otherwise, Marissa’s ghost was definitely going to be on my case about it.
We preferred not to call ourselves garbage pickers, but that’s what we were. We sorted through the rubble for useful refuse from the old civilization. It was a dirty job, but I was good at it, number two in my territory, just beneath Trip Edmonds, who was—well, the man was just a garbage picking machine. I’d always assumed his dominance over me in the insurance field was due to pure dumb luck, and so it was galling to come second to Trip in yet another field, under the auspices of a new civilization. But I had to confess it was a thing of beauty, the way he worked. The man had an eye like a crow. He could spot a useable tennis racket or scrap of aluminum amid a pile of rubble and ash from yards away. If Trip was working an area, I knew just to move my people along down the road, because he’d have it stripped clean of anything of value before I even got my pickings sack open.
* * *
We walked over miles of lava flows cooled and hardening into rock, a dead zone where anything of value had been permanently lost. I thought of giving karma a little nudge in the right direction, waiting till Jeff Robert and I were alone and then shooting him in the throat with one of my arrows or helping him on his way to a broken leg. Even a good sprain would be enough. We were too far from camp to deal with the injured out here. Anyone who couldn’t walk back at the end of the shift would be left to die. We had just walked past the dehydrating corpse of Carl, who’d twisted his ankle last week. I sprinkled ash on his eyelids as a sign of respect, according to the new custom, and we walked through the doors of a Kohl’s which, as I feared, was extremely picked over. Trip had given my team the shit assignment and I blamed Jeff Robert for this, too. My team blamed me for questioning Trip in the first place.
Now they stood in the lower level of the store, grumbling. We were looking at everything you do not want in a job. The building was still standing, but it had been so blasted by heat that the guys immediately began speculating on how long that would remain the case. Guesses ranged from a week to thirty minutes before the whole thing came down. The clothing had melted to its hangers and everything reeked of groundsmoke and was coated in ash. The footprints of other crews—many others—were visible all over the filthy floors.
“Let’s get this done,” I said, and led them into the dark. When our eyes adjusted we began to work, breathing through our shirts, if we had them, or rags we tied across our faces, if we had those. Jeff Robert had neither and I was pleased to see him sputter and cough as he moved through Housewears.
* * *
My pack was light—a spoon, some dirty kitchen twine, and the blade from a shattered blender—when I found the door to a tiny office just off the women’s intimates section. The occupant was still at her desk, what was left of her, and my increasingly callous heart ached for this unknown woman. What a way to go.
I scooped some ash from the pile that had collected on the surface of her desktop and sprinkled it over her. Then I began to investigate the mini fridge behind her desk. A rotted clamshell of salad and protein shakes. Two of them. A sensible, filling replacement for a balanced meal. The dead woman had struggled with her weight; that’s probably how she would have phrased it. She had no idea. None of us did.
A bonus of our altered circumstances, one of the very few bonuses, was that I no longer wrestled with questions of professional integrity. I put the shakes in the waistband of my pants and not in the bag without a second thought. I was bringing them to Lisa.
“Cousin,” Jeff Robert said. The ponytailed piece of human garbage was standing in the doorway with a gotcha expression. This morning he’d stood at attention with the others as I paced the line of my crew, a little ritual before every mission, and laid out the ground rules. Any appropriation of products reclaimed on company time will result in immediate termination. We left it deliberately vague as to whether we meant termination from employment or from the living: that was at the discretion of the manager, but I knew what kind of mood Trip was in.
“Do we have a problem, cousin?” I said to Jeff Robert.
“No problem,” Jeff Robert said. “It’s just that I’m real hungry.”
I passed the asshole one of my protein shakes and he cracked it open right then and there. Brazen. It was hard to watch the chocolate flavored calories pass his unworthy lips.
“I should round up the team,” I said. The store’s detritus was sparse and of only small value. It probably wasn’t worth the damage we were doing to our lungs. We would press on to the next retail establishment.
As I moved through the door Jeff Robert’s leg darted out and hit me mid-calf. I tumbled to the floor. We both heard the sick popping sound my knee made.
“My bad,” Jeff Robert said, dropping his empty can into the ash.
* * *
“You okay, boss?” Enrique said, watching me limp across the cracked-up asphalt. He was my best product specialist, and he was gunning for me. The load of reclaimed products he was carrying back to camp today was, quite obviously, heavier than my own.
“Nothing serious,” I said, through my teeth. The knee was swelling with every step, and I struggled to keep up with my team. We passed Carl again on the way back and—no surprise after all the groundsmoke I’d breathed in at that Kohl’s—his ghost was stretched out on the lava flow, obnoxiously lounging. We can rest when we’re dead was something I liked to say to motivate my team. Carl’s ghost gave me the finger as I hobbled by.
* * *
Trip sorted through my team’s haul. “Garbage, garbage, garbage—oh, this is nice,” he said, admiring a lint roller.
We’d made quota, barely, but there would be no bonus today. Our community was situated in what had once been a city park, and Trip was something like its mayor and CEO rolled into one. The settlement abutted a major footpath, and we bartered useful items to ragged bands heading north, or sometimes, to ragged bands heading south, at an almost unconscionable mark up. Even so, nobody was getting rich.
“Any issues?” Trip said, as I hobbled up to him to receive my pay.
“Not a one,” I said. I felt Jeff Robert’s eyes on my back where the protein shake was hidden. Trip handed me six fresh grackle and a hot pink shoelace. Birdfall had been light today and we were on reduced rations. I didn’t have the nerve to argue.
* * *
“There’s no last colony. That’s bull,” Milo said. The three of us were sitting on a branch, spit roasting grackles over a small fire, Milo, Cerise, and me. For reasons that needed no explanation, Cerise was on Milo’s boat, which was still parked in the lot of his complex, when the event began. They’d been hauling the boat down Dolorosa Street, searching for that incoming toxic sea, when they’d spotted me dragging myself up a fire escape with a serious head wound. They’d dragged me onboard the boat and then we’d picked up Lisa and the girls just a half mile away.
The last colony was a subject I often found myself raising whether at campfire or during team meetings with the product specialists who reported to me. It had come to my attention that I harped on it. When we convened for our Monday launch meetings at the dry fountain in the north end of the park, I tended to get off topic. I’d be giving a rundown of items that were predicted to be hot in the next period—rope, maybe, or drinking vessels—and before I could stop myself I’d be spouting off about the last colony. Looks would be exchanged like, here we go again. They’d keep their mouths shut till the end of the meeting, but sometimes as we moved through the dead zones, sifting through the ruins I’d hear them laughing about it among themselves.
I had every reason to harp on the last co
lony, more than the rest of them, even, who would be well served to wake up, take an honest inventory of our circumstances, and conclude, as I had done, that we were in a race against starvation we could not win. But there were things about myself I didn’t feel like sharing. Now that my knee was swollen to twice its normal size, the colony’s location felt especially pertinent.
Milo flipped his second grackle belly-side-down over the fire. He had just explained at some length, citing multiple sources in popular entertainment—a subject on which he had an encyclopedic knowledge—that the last colony was a cliché. “Of course you want to believe that there’s one place where things are still up and running. We all do. But it’s simply—” Milo paused to pick a feather out of his teeth, “not the case.”
Milo ran food services, which meant he often had something extra to share, like the grackle I was now devouring. We’d torn through the supplies on his boat within two weeks; he only ever intended them to supplement the haul from his fishing nets. His boat was by far the most luxurious living quarters in the entire park community, and it conferred a certain status, as did his relationship with Cerise.
Cerise headed up code compliance, enforcing standards about the size and type of hovels that could be erected and the number of firearms per family. People feared her and stayed out of her way. But even though Milo was among the younger adults, it was now customary to seek his opinion before making a major decision.
“We heard it from a peddler,” I said, burning my lip on the hot grackle. It tasted not unlike the meat in a Chipotle burrito, and when I’d first made that realization, another illusion of the old world was stripped away. As long as the birds held out we wouldn’t starve, but they fell from the sky in such large numbers that we were sure that wouldn’t be too long. Already there were off days, like this one, when most of us would go to bed hungry. Milo was trying to dry cure the birds, rubbing their bodies in salt and hanging them from a clothes line, but it was impossible to keep the flies off them and they sprouted maggots within 48 hours. He was frustrated by this and by the failure of the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes he stood on the roof of his boat, wearing his captain’s hat, with a look on his face like he was just mad at the whole world.
