by David Liss
This was patently ridiculous, in Trip’s case, but though I had dropped a shocking amount of weight, I was still looking pretty robust by the standards of the day. Many of the onlookers hadn’t known me before, and I could see they were suspicious. I was hearty and strong. I sported a very becoming BMI, and I had been caught with a stolen can—what more did they need to know? The crowd looked like it wanted to hang Trip Edmonds by his electrical cord belt and beat me to death with the pole of my own lean-to.
Trip assessed the crowd’s mood and made a tough call. “I’m afraid that you were badly misled by this man, Jeff Robert. We can’t hold you responsible, sir. It was your first day on the job. The blame lies here,” Trip said, pointing at me. “And I think it lies with no one else. Let’s not make this into a witch hunt,” Trip said, now addressing himself directly to Jeff Robert.
Jeff Robert nodded; he was willing to play ball. He pointed at me, too, and raised his voice for the crowd. “This man was my insurance agent. This man was my family. Peace of mind is what he promised me.” Jeff Robert slowly peeled off his bloody shirt and displayed his injuries. “But this is what he gave me instead.”
The crowd was now whipped up into a frenzy of anti-Eric sentiment. “Kill him!” a woman screamed. Her name was Kim and she had been a cashier at the lawn and garden big box near our home. We’d once been on friendly terms, once. A few others expressed their preference for my immediate demise; a sort of chant was being taken up. HR pointed their guns at the crowd to quell it.
“People. We have policies in place for this kind of thing. Let’s not be led by emotions,” Trip said.
“I’ll resign if that’s what you want,” I said to Trip.
“I think that’s for the best. And I’ll need you to sign this non-compete clause,” Trip said, scrawling some legalese in the dirt with a stick.
“But that’s a death sentence,” I said. The dirt letters spelled out my promise that I wouldn’t scavenge for items either useable or edible anywhere within the territory formerly known as Texas for the next five years.
“Your other option is literally a death sentence,” Trip said. The big guns from HR nodded their agreement.
I took the stick from Trip and made my mark in the dirt.
* * *
“Well now what?” Lisa said, when the onlookers drifted away.
“First I’m going to kill Jeff Robert, and then I’m going to find the Don Cheevers with Milo and Cerise.”
If Marissa’s ghost had a problem with that, well then too bad. I’d do my best to make sure that Louis wasn’t around to witness his father take a boulder in the brains, but she wasn’t entirely up to speed on what a brutal place the world had become. Her qualms were impossibly quaint and fussy things now, like grapefruit spoons or finger bowls.
“You are not going to kill Jeff Robert,” Lisa said. “I was a bridesmaid in his wedding.”
I tried to reason with Lisa—after all, Jeff Robert’s teary vows and sentimental first dance hadn’t precluded him from doing a little killing—but she was adamant. So I scrapped the boulder plans and said my goodbyes.
“Just make sure she eats,” I said to Elias.
“Eats what?” I was leaving them in a terrible position. Elias was too old for product reclamation; he thought he might hang out his shingle as violence coach, but so much violence among the chronically malnourished was a spontaneous affair, and demand for planned revenge or score-settling was uncertain. He and Lisa and the girls would have to scrounge grackles outside the safety of the park or earn their food fetching water for better-off families.
* * *
It just about killed Milo to leave his boat and in fact he would not agree to do it until we had heaped another layer of greenery and debris over it. Cerise promised that the two of them would be back before nightfall, and Milo made her hold up her hand and swear it. He made each of them strap on a life jacket, too. “Some people don’t know when to quit,” Cerise said, as Milo held out the orange life vest for her to take.
“I have two conditions, and this is one of them,” Milo said. Cerise began to strap the thing on.
“What’s the other condition?” I said, but they both looked at me like butt out. I was obviously going to be the third wheel on this trip.
* * *
“I just hate leaving a thing half done,” I said, as Milo, Cerise, and I stepped out onto the open road.
“What are you talking about?” Cerise said.
“Jeff Robert,” I said.
Milo gave me a look like drop it. I’d wanted him to do it for me, and in exchange, I’d promised to kill Hank at the first opportunity, but Milo had balked. “That’s not necessary. I think the stress is getting to you, Eric,” he’d said. I’d accused him of going soft, of inhabiting a pre-doomsday mentality that had no place in our current circumstances. Hank would have told him the same thing. Kill or be killed: if he’d said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. Milo was letting his guilt over the affair cloud his judgment. When Hank came for him, and he would, it would be cold comfort that Milo had spent many tender moments with his wife. On that day, Milo would exchange even his best moments with Cerise for a second chance to put a pastry wheel in that guy’s chest. I’d explained all this to Milo.
“Just let me shoot him on sight, because when you show up with his wife, it’s going to be clear you’re cheating on him,” I whispered.
“I’m not cheating on Hank. I’m Sancho-ing him,” Milo said. “And no, thank you.”
“Either way,” I said, “you will live to regret your sentimentality.” Of that, I was certain.
As we left the community and started out on the open road, I looked back and saw Trip Edmonds hunkered down amid the mesquite brush, desperately trying to lick some drops from the bottom of the stolen can.
* * *
To the best of Cerise’s recollection, the site of the Don Cheevers was a little more than three miles from where The Jolly Barista was moored. We’d go there, and then with help from Hank and whoever else was in residence, we’d press on to the last colony. The plan was ridiculous on its face, but nobody wanted to hear the facts of the matter, which were that Hank wouldn’t have helped me during the golden age of civilization, let alone now, and that he was unlikely to welcome Milo with open arms, given that Cerise had been welcoming Milo with open arms behind Hank’s back. I’d advocated for skipping Hank and just going right to the location Smokey Joe had described, but I’d been outvoted.
“First of all it doesn’t exist. But if it does exist, it’s probably some kind of a trap. We need intel before we just waltz into the unknown,” Milo had said.
So we were headed to the Cheevers now, using what remained of the Tower of the Americas as our point of reference. The base of the tower still stood, though its top was missing. It looked like a dandelion somebody had blown the head off.
We’d gone maybe a mile in the right direction—or as Milo kept saying to Cerise, what you think is the right direction—when we hit our first setback. We walked through the remnants of a gated community where all the streets were named some kind of bluff, Bluff View, North Bluff, Hunter’s Bluff, when a man on a bony horse came riding slowly out of the cul de sac on Bluff View Circle. His beard reached halfway down his filthy t-shirt which said Programmers Do It In Code. He was well-fed and strong, yet he had the look of hunger, too. The horse walked with its head drooped. I didn’t even wait for the vote. I hit him in the forearm with an arrow, and he fell out of the saddle and into the street. The horse stood there, moving it dry lips over its big long teeth.
“Wow, Eric. A little hasty, don’t you think?”
“I don’t remember voting on that,” Cerise said as we watched the stranger’s death throes.
I was on the wrong side of the law, cast out from the community, and suddenly I was comfortable just calling them as I saw them. For the first time in my life I didn’t have a supervisor to answer to. I was my own boss, and it was exhilarating.
“I jus
t don’t trust someone that well-fed on a horse that skinny. He’s obviously not on the grackle diet,” I said. He’d been riding in the direction of the park, but I didn’t say that out loud. I removed my arrow from his arm and tried not to think about it. I had to hope that Lisa could take care of herself and the girls, and Elias had already lived a full life, so there was no point in fretting. We stepped over the rider and let the horse wander off down the empty streets of the subdivision.
We walked through the deserted suburbs and strip malls, and when we reached the handicapped spaces of The Barbecue Station we came to a lava field that stretched out in all directions. The land near the edge of the lava had a springy, uncertain feel, as if it might cleave off from the rest of the crust and drift. There were bits of asphalt and topsoil floating across the molten surface which told me I was right to worry.
I had another reason to worry, but it was kind of embarrassing to bring up, so I said nothing. We walked a long way and when we were nearly at the far end of the lake, a small fissure at lake’s edge blew up a wisp of groundsmoke and the three of us walked right through it. I gritted my teeth and kept my eyes on my feet. We’d barely finished coughing when it started.
“Excuse me!”
I recognized the voice, of course. My head snapped up before I could stop it. A man was bobbing in the middle of the fire lake, speaking on an old style telephone with a cord. Once you’ve made eye contact, it’s all over. You just have to play along until the breeze picks up or it will not go well for you. Earlier in the week, I was extracting a vacuum cleaner tube from under a brick pile when a 17th century Spanish missionary had popped up from the ground and sunk his teeth into my ankle, all because I made some abrupt Spanglish excuses and tried to exit his rambling Castilian conversation before he was ready to end it.
“Are you the one who makes the pants?” the man in the lake yelled into his phone.
“No sir,” I said, quietly. I didn’t have the nerve to ignore him.
“Well find out who made these up and let them know they’re a little too tight in the crotch. They cut me. It’s just like riding a wire fence. I want you to give me just as much room as you can down there.” A piece of earth floated toward him and he swatted it out of the way.
“Okay,” I said.
“I want them the color of a lady’s face powder. And make the pockets bigger by an inch. When I sit down my knife and my money fall out.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Where should I have them sent?”
“White House.”
“Are you talking to someone Eric?” Cerise said. I pointed to the large jowly man in the lake, who was bigger than in life, so big he was out of scale. The hand that held the telephone could have encircled my head.
“You’re talking to the lava?” She was hot and irritated. She’d snapped at Milo for humming a minute ago and I didn’t have the nerve to tell her the truth.
“Just thinking out loud,” I said as LBJ sank below the surface of the lake.
* * *
It had taken, Milo pointed out, more than double the time Cerise had anticipated, and we were still not at the site of the Don Cheevers. Nor had we seen a single other (live) person since the well-fed coder, a fact I found increasingly unnerving. The body of an EPA agent hung from an overpass, covered with grackles, and the scent of death leaked out from piles of roadside rubble, making us wretch. I kept my crossbow slung over my shoulder, but Milo wouldn’t let me load an arrow onto it. I was getting pretty sick of being treated like a prisoner.
Many of the houses had collapsed in on themselves during the quakes and the streets were lined with the carcasses of rotting birds. Some do-gooder had put up a sign that read DANGER TURN BACK but we ignored it. The danger was everywhere and there was no back to turn to, but it was hard to keep our minds on it. We were getting thirsty. Our throats burned with the smoky air, and the water Cerise clearly remembered putting in her pack was not there.
“If you’re going to accuse me of something, then just accuse me,” Milo said.
“I didn’t say a word,” Cerise said. She was carrying two loaded shotguns and Milo had some sort of antique pistol on his hip. The mood was tense as we trudged through one abandoned neighborhood after the next, until we passed the shell of a Panera and Cerise stopped and said, “It should be right here.” But there was nothing in sight.
“Unless this is the wrong Panera,” I said.
“Exactly. Would it have killed you to use a local bakery as your landmark?” Milo said.
“I like Panera,” Cerise said. “The prices are reasonable and the quality is consistent.”
I winced on Milo’s behalf. She knew just how to hurt him. “What are you going to do when you get there, Cerise?”
“Take a bath,” Cerise said.
“You know what I mean. What will you say to him?” Milo had stopped walking. He removed his enormous, soot-streaked glasses and began to clean them with the hem of his shirt. I wondered what I would say to Hank, but I knew if I mentioned that the meeting would be awkward for me, too, the two of them would accuse me of always having to make everything about myself.
“Milo, you are a pain in the ass. You are almost as big a pain in the ass as Eric.”
“Hey!” I said.
“I feel betrayed,” Milo said.
“You feel betrayed. Listen to yourself, Milo. You feel betrayed. Hank was your friend.”
“He still is my friend. That’s why you have to say something.”
“It’s not the right time,” Cerise said. She gestured to the empty, rubble strewn streets, the piles of dead birds, the ashy sky. Milo shook his head.
“You always say that. I don’t think it’s honest. I’m beginning to think that you’re not serious about me.”
Cerise lowered her shotguns and pressed the muzzles into Milo’s chest. “You are twenty-five years old. Of course I’m not serious about you!” The mission was devolving fast.
“Look!” I whispered. Ahead of us was the geodesic dome of Living Waters church. The front door was open and inside, somebody was playing the organ.
* * *
Milo put his finger over his lips and the three of us stepped through the doors of the church silently. We pointed our weapons at the organist, but she turned around, very nonchalant, before Milo, who had insisted upon being the one to speak for the three of us, could come up with anything to say. A certain type of person might seem all the more threatening for pointing a gun silently, without making any demands, but Milo couldn’t quite pull it off. He was wearing jodphurs and a life vest.
The organist, a small unarmed woman in her 60s, looked at the three of us and was obviously thinking amateur hour. “What can I get you?” she said. She was clean and she wore an animal print blouse with ruffles and a pair of yoga pants and compared to the three of us, she was dazzling. My clothes were filthy and blood crusted, and despite all the birds I’d eaten, my pants were beginning to sag. Cerise and Milo were somewhat better off—Cerise in a sundress and ropers, Milo in the jodphurs and plaid, but their hygiene was not what it once was. Cerise had said that Milo looked like a pirate called Debris Beard.
“We’re thirsty,” I blurted out.
The woman laughed a chesty smoker’s cackle. “Is that all? Go get yourselves a seat.”
* * *
The woman served us beer in cans, which we drank too fast, due to the dehydration. She brought out more as soon as we finished. She did the same again when we drank down the second cans, and as we sipped our third, Milo began to recount an episode of Moonshine Ranch scene by scene. Cerise rolled her eyes. This was a liability of hanging out with Milo when alcohol was involved. But our host seemed to enjoy it.
It still made me nervous to be in buildings; they were just rubble that hadn’t happened yet. But I looked around and tried to make sense of the place. Living Waters was kind of low on decorations. There was a bright blue carpet throughout and a Jacuzzi bubbling at the front, which looked so inviting that I’d agreed to
be baptized as soon as we finished this round. But it was anybody’s guess what sort of gods were worshiped here, because they were nowhere represented along the carpeted walls.
We finished the beers and our host, who we now knew was the Rev. Tif Buckle, dunked us one by one in the warm bubbling water. Then we sat dripping in the front pew and Milo started in on episode 39, My Friend, My Enemy. We made some excuse to be on our way, which was harder to do than it used to be. There were no jobs or appointments, no handy reason why we couldn’t sit here under the dome talking about television programs of the late 1960s indefinitely.
“You can’t leave yet,” the Rev. Buckle said. She requested just one more, the episode where the youngest of the brothers, Chick Cooper, tried his luck with the mentally unstable daughter of an area rancher and nearly brought the law down on everyone’s heads.
“Oh, A Woman Scorned? That one is a classic. Excellent choice,” Milo said.
“Hold on just a minute. Let me get the rest of the gang,” our host said and she disappeared through a door in the back.
“Let’s run for it,” I said. The three of us sprinted for the exit.
“What’s your hurry, boys?” our host yelled, and we froze. Two enormous men in braids had joined her. They wore bandoliers across their chest, Pancho Villa style, and once they had probably driven trucks with frightening bumper stickers.
“No hurry,” Milo said. “We just didn’t want to overstay our welcome.”
“Impossible,” the largest and scariest of the men said. “You’ve found your church home. All are welcome in the house of the Lord.” But in spite of these friendly words, they looked at me like the Lord might have his limits.
* * *
The terrifying giants were the Rev. Buckle’s twin sons, Rolph and Craig, both Elders in the church. They’d all been prepping for years, studying the Maya texts and gearing up for the 2012 event, but when that didn’t happen they’d kept the faith. Every Sunday they’d passed the plate and each and every cent collected was put toward laying in supplies for these times. The community was extremely well outfitted, a hundred and fifty strong, all living in a shelter below the church. The way they saw it, we’d agreed to join them. By accepting their beer and the baptisms, we’d declared our intention to stay with them in these last days, until whatever deity or deities they subscribed to showed up and finished us all off. It seemed late in the day to ask for the details of their belief system, so we just played along.
