by Michael Cart
“Just follow me.”
* * *
It was just past dusk when the two deer made their way toward Stink City again. Past the forlorn oil pumps again. Past the rusted chassis again. And into Randy’s backyard.
There he was in shorts and flip-flops despite the cool weather. Donald cleared his throat. Randy put down his paperback mystery.
“Well, look who’s here,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you two again.”
Donald moved a step closer. “You did a hundred percent of what we agreed you’d do for fifty percent of your salary. Remember—half before, half after? There was a little misunderstanding right after. We thought you might . . . When you pointed that gun . . . That’s why we bolted. But we’re here now and we want to settle up.”
Daintily, Dixie spat out a damp cud of cash. She pawed at it with her hoof.
Randy smiled and got to his feet. “This’ll really come in handy. I’m obliged to you.”
They looked at one another across a great divide that had been narrowed now to just a few feet. Donald started to say something, then didn’t. Randy began to count the money, then stopped.
They heard the sound of a car door slamming. Someone yelled, “Randy! Where the hell are you, man?”
“Those’ll be some friends of mine,” Randy said. “Probably best you all get on out of here before—”
But they were already gone, headed for the forest that seemed, anyway, to go on forever.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Alex Flinn
May 2012
“Top ten weapons?” the dude to my right says VERY LOUDLY to be heard through his ear protection and over the other shooters. “I can get it down to three.”
“Three?” Mr. Angelo pauses and even puts down his .22. “Which three?”
“Easy,” the guy says. “First, a good shotgun—twelve gauge, model eight-seventy. Second, a rifle, not too big, but not too small, either. And third, a good, reliable .22 like this one here.” He pats his gun. “That’d be enough for a survival situation.”
“Basic survival, yeah.” Mr. Angelo nods. “I agree with you there. But what about if the shit really hits the fan—the Barackalypse?”
My older sister, Kate, on my other side, nudges me and mouths, “Barackalypse?” She doesn’t even try to stifle her grin. I roll my eyes and line up my shot.
“Obamageddon?” the guy says. “That’s easy—a good semiautomatic. But that’s not gonna happen.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” Mr. Angelo says, lifting his gun again. I lift mine as well and angle my body forty-five degrees from the target, which is a picture of a zombie.
“So, Mel,” Kate yells. “Did you hear about that face-eater guy?”
“What face-eater guy?” I’m used to this. Kate has never been into shooting. She’s a vegetarian and says shooting animals is gross. But considering we’re shooting sheets of paper, I don’t see what that has to do with anything. She finds it amusing when Mr. Angelo talks about Obama’s reelection possibly resulting in the End of Days. I find it sort of scary—mostly because I know he’s serious. Like, what if he lost it and went on a shooting rampage the day after the election?
“It happened yesterday,” she continues. “The cops shot this guy on the MacArthur Causeway—he was eating another guy’s face.”
“And by ‘eating another guy’s face,’ you mean . . . ?”
“I mean it literally. Face-eating.”
“Sure.” Gross. I aim at the zombie’s forehead and squeeze the trigger. A perfect shot. Of course, is the brain the right place to hit a zombie when they have no brains? I fire five more at various vital organs for good measure, hoping maybe Kate will forget about this gross line of conversation. I check my gun bag for more ammo, but I’m out. I wait until Dad finishes shooting, then approach him, avoiding Kate’s eyes. I do not want to hear about face-eaters.
Dad shakes his head, indicating he’s out, too. When we went to Walmart last week, they had no .22 ammo. In fact, they were sold out of a lot of ammo, but they did have the shirt he’s wearing, the one that says, GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. FATHERS WITH PRETTY DAUGHTERS KILL PEOPLE. He promised only to wear it here. I begged him not to buy it, but he thinks it’s funny.
It’s so not. But in my family, everyone but me has a bizarre sense of humor that gets set off by stuff like face-eating jokes.
Case in point:
“Why did the zombie go to the dentist?” he says to Kate. Without waiting for her reply, he says, “To improve his bite.”
Kate groans, and I say, “That’s really not funny. A guy was eating another guy’s face.”
He shrugs. “Maybe if they had global health care, they’d take care of the mentally ill, and that kind of thing wouldn’t happen.”
At the moment Dad starts his pro-Obamacare rant, I expect the shooting around us to suddenly stop and everyone around us to stare. It’s something my dad usually doesn’t mention at the range: He’s a Democrat. A liberal. He voted for Obama.
Bang!
But it doesn’t stop, and I hold up my hand to get him to quit it, because I don’t want to get into an argument with all these guys with guns.
I go to the bench and pack up my stuff, then wait until the range is cold and collect my zombie target. It looks thoroughly undead-dead. I smile.
Kate follows me out. “So do you think it was a sign of the zombie apocalypse?”
I know she’s back on the face-eater topic. “Meth-head, more likely.”
“Who’s a meth-head?” Mr. Angelo has followed us out. With my eyes, I plead with Kate not to tell him. It’s better not to engage him on current events.
But Kate says, “The face-eater guy.”
Mr. Angelo shakes his head, knowing exactly what she’s talking about. “Lot of sickos out there. That’s why it’s important to be prepared, not get caught with your hands in your pockets when the liberals let everything go south.”
I look away. “Be Prepared” is Mr. Angelo’s motto, but that doesn’t make him a Boy Scout.
Things I like about shooting:
• Being better at it than my dad (and, needless to say, Kate). Well, sometimes. When I was little, and he used to take me shooting, we had these cool splatter targets that turned different fluorescent colors with every bullet that hit, and I’d save them until my mom got tired of stepping on them and threw them away.
• Bonding with my dad. He went shooting with his dad when he was a kid, and even though we don’t have a whole lot in common, this is something we like to do.
• Power. You can have this little tiny gun, even a pink-and-purple sparkly one like I had when I was a kid, and it can actually kill someone. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to kill someone. I mean, yeah, if they were coming at me in the middle of the night, and I had my gun with me, I would, but that’s unlikely because our guns are in a gun safe in my dad’s closet. My dad’s lectured me over and over again about respecting guns and how to handle them. So I’d never actually aim one at someone, but I could. And, even though that’s scary, it’s sort of awesome. I’m five feet tall (same height as Annie Oakley, the great sharpshooter), cute, and look powerless. But I’m not.
Things I don’t like about shooting:
• Two words: Mr. Angelo. Mr. Angelo is my PE teacher from elementary school, and he’s one of those guys that make gun owners look crazy. If he was a character on television, I’d think he was too stereotypical, but here he is, in my real life, actually existing.
Right now, he’s wearing enough camo to guest on Duck Dynasty—pants, jacket, hat, sneakers, even his T-shirt says PREPPER in matching green camo. A prepper (sadly, I know this) is a kind of survivalist who’s getting ready for the End of Days. When I had Mr. Angelo for PE, he always wore a polo and Bermuda shorts. I guess he still does—to school—but we get to see the real him at the range.
“Lunch?” Mr. Angelo asks Dad. “The usual place?”
“I have a lot of homework,” I say at the same ti
me Dad says, “Great idea.”
Dad looks at me. “It’s just lunch. You gotta eat sometime.”
“There’s nothing for Kate to eat there.”
“I don’t mind just having French fries,” Kate says.
“Of course you don’t,” I say, because I know she’s just doing it to bug me.
“And they have the best corn,” she adds.
We head to our car. We didn’t come with Mr. Angelo. He just seems to show up at the gun range every time we’re here lately. Maybe he’s following us or maybe he just goes every day.
Mr. Angelo was my favorite teacher in elementary school. I was scared of the ball when we played softball, and everyone made fun of me, but he was really encouraging and kept giving me extra turns, catching pop-ups until I got it.
I miss that guy.
The good thing about The Pit barbecue, where we go to eat, is that it’s out in the middle of the Everglades, so no one I know goes there. If that wasn’t true, I’d definitely have gotten a case of raging diarrhea instead of agreeing to go with Dad in his embarrassing T-shirt, and Mr. Angelo in his embarrassing . . . well, everything. The food here is good, the closest to Southern barbecue you can find in Miami, and it’s not so far out that I can’t get an internet connection on my phone (there is none at the gun range), the better to tune out the conversation.
“So you’re having trouble finding ammo?” Angelo’s saying to Dad. “I can help you out there.”
“You know someplace that still has it?” Dad’s interested.
“Someplace real close to home. I make it myself, in my garage.”
Of course you do.
“You make your own ammo?” Kate kicks me under the table. “Isn’t that fascinating, Mel?”
Don’t involve me in this.
“Hmm,” I say, because it’s the least I can say.
“How’d you get into that?” Kate asks a bit too perkily.
“Necessity.” Angelo raps his knuckles against the table. “Have to be prepared for when Obama’s goons come in their black helicopters to take our guns away.”
Goons. The thought of our elegant president having anything approaching goons almost makes me laugh. Almost. But I’ve heard it enough times to know not to engage him.
And so does Kate. And yet she does. Engage him, I mean.
“Do you really think that’s going to happen?” She rolls her corn in butter. “It hasn’t happened yet, and Obama’s been in office over three years.”
Angelo starts to answer, but Kate keeps going. “There are people out there who say the whole paranoia about Obama taking guns away is just propaganda from the gun industry to make more sales.”
By people, she means Dad. Dad says that all the time. He also says gun sales have actually almost doubled under Obama, with more permits issued than in the previous Republican administration.
Angelo laughs and starts to wind up for what I’m sure is going to be a big speech when it happens:
Brendan Hoyt and the entire Palmetto High Environmental Club walk in.
Oh, jeez.
I know why they’re here. There was a nature walk in the Everglades this morning and, of course, it ended right now.
There’s some kind of unwritten rule that, if you love the environment, you have to hate guns. I have no idea why—some kind of Democrat handbook I didn’t receive. I’m the only idiot out there who loves both. So I turn my face to the wall and pretend not to be there as Angelo makes a speech that begins with an explanation that Obama’s awaiting reelection before he shows his true colors and ends with him waving his arms around and shouting, “In the words of that great American Charlton Heston, they’ll take away my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!”
And then, he sits and takes an audible chomp on his pulled-pork sandwich.
I sneak a look away from the wall.
And see the entire Environmental Club staring at us.
“Melanie?” that’s Brendan. He’s in the environmental club and the Young Democrats and he’s my secret crush. He has blond hair and these long eyelashes that perfectly frame his gray eyes. In fact, if I’d known he was going on the nature walk thing, I’d definitely have gone myself.
“Heyyyyy.” I picture how we must look, Mr. Angelo with fresh-killed meat dripping from his lips.
Don’t be stupid. Everyone eats pulled pork at The Pit.
And Dad in his crazy-embarrassing T-shirt.
Sure enough, Brendan turns his gray eyes on Dad, and so does everyone else, looking from Dad to Mr. Angelo, Mr. Angelo to Dad, as if they’re watching tennis on TV.
I wrack my brain for a logical explanation as to who these people are and why I’m with them, one that doesn’t involve me actually being related to them.
“I thought you were going on the nature walk,” Brendan says. “You said you were when we talked yesterday.”
And it dawns on me. Brendan wasn’t going to go, but he went because I said I was. And I was going to go, but I skipped because he wasn’t going.
Star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet. Or something.
“That is so fascinating,” Kate’s saying to Mr. Angelo.
Shut up, Kate. Shut up, Kate.
“Are you doing the thing where you put away extra food and supplies in case of the apocalypse?” she asks.
“Barackalypse,” Mr. Angelo corrects her, and I see Brendan’s eyebrows rise.
“And yes,” Mr. Angelo continues, “we’ve stored up some extra food. Of course, we do that for hurricane season, anyway. But Terri’s canning, too.”
I’ve come up with my story: Angelo is a relative (a distant one) from out of town, and we had to take him out. Everyone has crazy relatives. They’ll understand.
But, suddenly, Ashley Garcia steps out of the group and says, “Mr. Angelo? You were my PE teacher in elementary school.”
And, at that same moment, Dad stands, stretches out his hand to Brendan, and says, “Hello. I’m Melanie’s father. We’ve been out shooting today.”
I die. Just die.
Except I don’t die. Dying would be easy. I just sit there, living the whole thing in slow motion, like a scene in a movie, that old one my dad likes, where the woman’s trying to pull a baby carriage down a huge staircase, and you know the mob hit men are about to show up.
Just like that.
Dad’s standing there, hand out, wearing his FATHERS WITH PRETTY DAUGHTERS KILL PEOPLE shirt.
Mr. Angelo’s standing there, talking about laying up supplies for the biblical End of Days, and obviously, he’s not from out of town.
Ashley’s standing there, really, really close to Brendan.
Everyone I know now thinks I’m a weirdo.
In science, we learned about something called a “fight-or-flight response.” When an animal (or a human) is confronted with danger, he reacts with an instinct either to fight or to flee. There are those who say “Stand Your Ground” laws, which protect gun owners who shoot intruders on their property, make people more likely to fight.
But I do what any normal fifteen-year-old girl would do.
I flee.
I grab Dad’s keys off the table, say I feel sick, and run to the car.
I keep up the sick act for the rest of the weekend and Monday, too. My mother tends to believe us about being sick when we say we’re sick on Saturday. After all, why would we miss our day off? But, of course, Kate tells her I’m being a brat and skipping.
So, Monday night, Mom demands to see actual symptoms.
I want to just tell her the truth, that I lied to get out of going to school because her husband completely humiliated me in front of everyone I know. That, in fact, I need to transfer schools. But to do that would make her question me (harder) every time I’m sick for the rest of my life. I’d never be able to stay home for cramps or get picked up from school for a headache.
Finally I decide it’s not worth it. I should suck it up and go to school.
I was soooo wrong.
I t
alk Mom into driving me (still a little sick) so I can skip the bus and, also, get there at the very last second to avoid conversation.
But still, when I sit by Ashley first period, she giggles and says, “Hey, Melanie, you packing heat?”
It’s like that in every class, with someone making funny remarks or pretending they’re shooting an Uzi. I try to text Mom to pick me up, but she says no.
When I see Brendan, I avoid eye contact. He says, “I heard you were sick.”
He’s being nice, but I still can’t look at him. He thinks I’m a weirdo, that my family are weirdos. Maybe we are.
That night at dinner, I tell my dad, “I’m not going shooting anymore if Mr. Angelo’s going to be there.”
Dad shrugs. “I don’t invite him. I can’t make him not go. The gun range is a public place.”
“Then I guess I’m not going. Why does he have to be such a nutcase?”
My father purses his lips. “It takes all kinds. I hope you’ll change your mind. I like having something we can do together.”
I used to.
“So they think that guy was on bath salts,” Kate says.
“What guy?” my mother asks, and I give her a look. How can she not know what guy? It’s literally all Kate talks about lately, other than school.
“The stupid face-eater guy,” I say.
“His name was Rudy Eugene,” Kate corrects. “He was on bath salts.”
“Bath salts?” my mom asks. “Like Calgon?”
Kate rolls her eyes. “It’s a kind of synthetic drug.”
“How do you know this?” Mom puts down her fork. “How do you know about synthetic drugs?”
“They say he may just have gotten some bad marijuana,” Dad says. “Don’t do drugs. They turn you into a zombie.”
I cringe. He’s such a goof.
“I still think he was an actual zombie,” Kate says.
“Well, it’s good they shot him before he spread the zombie virus,” Dad jokes.
“Can I be excused?” I say. “I’ve lost my appetite.”
That night, Mr. Angelo comes over with a box of homemade ammo and some mangoes his wife canned. Dad wants me to come out and say hi, be polite. I pretend to be asleep.
