Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  “Done,” Arnold said finally. “Welcome to the Liberation, Friend.”

  We are not friends, Dinah thought. You are a killer of children and if I dared turn you in …

  She held the words in, bending to rescue the contact lens case, setting the tepid water a-ripple.

  Arnold patted Ben’s head once, deliberately, without affection. “You’re going to need friends, woman. The Kabu are losing.”

  With that he left, leaving Dinah and Ben in the ankle-deep water next to the red maple tree.

  “They are losing, aren’t they?” Dinah whispered to the mourning grove. She had never said it aloud before.

  She changed Ben slowly, hoping to slow her heartrate before she had to face Chamon again. Finally she climbed out of the grotto, step by step, making her way back to the auditorium and hoping her absence hadn’t been too obvious. Before she went inside she rubbed her eyes hard with her fists, hoping they’d think she had run off to have a cry. She needed one. God alone knew when she’d get it.

  She found Chamon and Meg side by side, with the kids gathered around them. Meg was smiling as the offworlder’s tentacles roamed her arms and those of the children; she seemed—and probably smelled—perfectly at ease.

  Good company manners, Dinah thought, and that was a fifth thing, wasn’t it? Whatever she might say at home, Meg never behaved badly in public.

  “Meg is gracious,” Dinah murmured, managing a smile as she fished out a tissue for poor angry Gwynne, as she stepped into the circle of her family.

  Audrey Carroll’s work has appeared in Fiction International, Hermeneutic Chaos, The Cynic Online Magazine, and the Red Fez Review among other publications. She is currently an MFA candidate with the Arkansas Writers Program and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University.

  “The People We Kill” is original to this anthology.

  “the people we kill”

  AUDREY CARROLL

  “One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It’s been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we’re always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  mike and Paulie died on a Tuesday and woke up on Thursday. Or: United States Privates Michael Bailey and Paul Delfino died during active duty on a Tuesday and woke up on a Thursday. The gunshots they heard in the distance were remnants from their dying moments, which they only realized when they opened their eyes, stood up, and found that they were the only ones around for miles.

  “Fuck, Paulie, did I oversleep?”

  Mike stood up and looked around them. All there was was desert—dry sand, all they’d ever see anymore. Mike and Paulie had grown up in the suburbs of central Pennsylvania and signed up for the army after high school, to make something of themselves, see something of the world, be all that they could be. Mostly they just wanted to get out of their shit coal town. Mike walked over to Paulie, who sat on the ground hunched over, examining his chest.

  “Paulie, would you stop playing with yourself so we can find someone who’s still alive? Or maybe some food? Oy, Paulie!” Mike kicked his friend’s boot to get his attention, but Paulie didn’t even flinch, probably because he was too busy sticking his finger into the bullet wound on the left side of his chest, not sure why he couldn’t feel anything more than the poke of his finger.

  Mike knelt down and slapped Paulie upside his helmet, which clunked against his head. “Hello? Paul—” Mike tilted his head at the hole in Paulie’s chest. “Hell, is that still bleeding?” Mike pulled Paulie’s arms away from his torso and ripped his shirt a little to look at Paulie’s wound. It was black with blood around the edges and on the inside, still shining. Mike went to wipe the blood from around the shot, but it was already cemented to his skin and clothes.

  “It’s healed up, Mike. I don’t know how, but it is.”

  “You’ve gotta be in shock, man. Here, tell me if this hurts.” Mike pulled at the skin outside of the wound. Paulie could feel the skin pulling, but not the pain he’d felt the first time he was shot the month before, like knives stabbing his insides. Mike had been aiming for a guy fighting for Paulie’s rifle, but hit Paulie in the back of the shoulder instead, and he couldn’t move his arm properly for a week.

  “Nothing,” Paulie said.

  “Can you feel that half of your body?”

  “I can feel just fine. It just doesn’t hurt. Here, help me up.” Paulie pulled on Mike’s shoulder, then pushed himself up. He walked to his rifle a couple of feet away and slung it around his left shoulder. “See. Just fine.”

  “Huh,” Mike said, standing up and walking over to Paulie. “How the hell does that happen?”

  Paulie shrugged, staring over to a point in the distance, where he saw something above ground level. They didn’t know it at the time, but it was the town that their army had bombarded with machine guns and small bombs while they were still alive and continued to assault after they were dead. Paulie nodded toward it. “Should we get over there? See if there’s anyone left?”

  “I guess so. Beats dying from the heat, right?”

  And so the privates started toward the town they’d been ordered to destroy, because it held weapons used against them and possibly a couple of terrorists. Or, at least, this is what they were told. What Mike and Paulie would never know is that the town only had enough guns to protect themselves from all the fighting, from the town crumbling around them, and that a terrorist had never set foot within a hundred yards of the place. Hardly anyone that destroyed the town would know this.

  “Do you have ammo in that thing?” Mike asked. “Cause I’ve got my pistol, but that’ll only do us so much good.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got half still left in here,” Paulie replied, squinting toward the town. “Ya know, those people are gonna be pissed at us if there’s anyone left.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just watch your ass, huh?”

  Paulie turned to Mike and did his best not to laugh. “Sure. Just make sure you don’t get another piece of shrapnel in your head, huh?” Mike, whose helmet was long gone, taken by a boy from the town trying to protect himself, felt up the side of his face, to the top of his head. In the middle of the hair on the right side of his head a piece of sharp metal was sticking out. He tried to jiggle it. It wouldn’t budge other than to rub against his skull and what Mike estimated to be his brain, but it didn’t hurt, either.

  The two men continued in silence. It had been a long time since they just walked together in silence. They used to do it all the time as kids, walk up to the river to see if they could catch fish or frogs or turtles, or see what they could hit with sticks and stones. The last time they walked to the river, Mike had just turned thirteen and Paulie was still twelve. Towards the end of their walks to the river, Mike had started taking big sticks with him and using them like hiking sticks, like he was guiding Paulie along.

  Paulie reached out into the river, his hands cupped under the water as he watched the fat guppies swim by about a foot from him, attracted to the surface by the leaves dropping down. Mike stood by a tree, leaning his weight on the walking stick as he stood up straight with his chest puffed out. He squinted over at the mountains. His eyes hurt from the sun, but he couldn’t let Paulie see him turn away. Then he spoke:

  “Hey, Paulie, don’t worry about the kittens, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Paulie replied, not bothering to look up at Mike. A guppy swam over his hands, but he didn’t move. He was waiting for a turtle, a baby turtle, if he could manage it. His mom would never let him have something cute and cuddly like a cat or dog, but he could bring back all the fish and reptiles in the world and she couldn’t care less, so long as they were in his room. Mike and Paulie had recently found a litter of kittens on their walks, behind an old oak by the Jenkins’ place under a shrub. They meowed harder each time the boys had come around, an
d they hadn’t seen the mama cat for at least a week. Paulie had wanted to take them in—there were only four of them—but Mike had convinced him not to. Paulie’s mom’s famous claim was that her son had allergies, but he was never allergic to anything in his life, except maybe pollen. Paulie’s glasses slid down his nose, but he ignored it. A small turtle, whose shell still looked soft, was heading his way.

  “Look, man, you know your mom wouldn’ta let you keep ’em. And Christ knows that we have enough Goddamned cats already at my place. Enough Goddamn kids, too.” Mike’s father had remarried five years before this, and he and Mike’s stepmom already had two kids in addition to Mike’s seven and ten year old baby sisters. When Mike’s dad had told him he was going to remarry, he and Paulie walked to the river, as fast as they ever did. Mike had smashed the root beer bottle his dad had given him when they had their “talk” against a tree, and pitched a dozen stones into the river that day, none of which skipped. Paulie had never known Mike to spend more than fifteen minutes at a time in his house after the first new kid, except when he was sleeping, and even then he spent a lot of nights at Paulie’s house.

  “We still coulda given them to the girls at school or something,” Paulie mumbled.

  Mike pitched the stick into the river. He listened to the splash it made, then watched it sink a little until it was almost submerged in the water. “Yeah. Well, for one thing, we dunno if the cat is gonna come back for ’em or not. Just cause we don’t see her doesn’t mean she’s not around. And second of all …” Mike jumped down to the bank. His legs stiffened as he went down, but he ignored the aching that surged through them as he landed in the hardened land. Mike wiped his hands on his pants, leaving streaks of dirt on the denim. “And second of all, you gotta stop with this whole soft spot shit, okay? It’s all cute and whatever for girls to be like that, but when you eventually end up with a girl she’s gonna expect you to kill a spider, not sing it a lullaby and help it get outside.”

  Paulie snapped his hands together so that his thumb was touching his thumb, and they almost looked like distorted praying hands under the water. He could feel the baby turtle moving around in there, like he was kicking to get out. Mike punched him in the shoulder. “Hey! Paulie! Are you listening to a fucking word I’m saying?” Paulie clasped his hands tighter, which made the turtle fight harder, but he managed to hold on to it.

  “Yeah, yeah. Soft spot bad. Got it.” Paulie stood up, his hands shaking a little but still clasped tight. He tilted his head back quickly to get his glasses to slide back up his nose, but then they sat crooked. “Can we get going so I can put this thing in a fishbowl?”

  Mike shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “So what’s this one’s name?” he asked, staring at his shoes as they walked away from the river.

  Paulie shrugged. “Haven’t named it yet.”

  As they closed in on the Jenkins’ place, Mike peeked over at the oak. Three of the four kittens were still there. Two of them, a gray and white one and a black one, nudged the other with their noses, batting it with their paws, meowing loudly. The kitten refused to move, even when they flopped it onto its side. Fuck, Mike thought. He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes, shaking his head. Then he looked over at Paulie, who was walking with his arms straight out so that his cupped hands were about a yard away from his chest. He was basically tip-toeing with his turtle. Mike decided not to say anything as they continued toward Paulie’s house.

  When they arrived at the town, the only things still above ground level were the buildings, and even those weren’t much. They were the shambles of buildings, a piece of wall with a window opening or door still intact here, a roof resting against the side of a house there. Most of it was just the rubble from houses and stores scattered on the ground. Mike was the first one to see a dead body. It was a man, maybe about their age, who was laying facedown in the dirt.

  “Paulie, over here,” Mike said, jutting his head toward the dead man. The men walked over to him. Mike rolled him over, searching his pockets for weapons. Paulie, who would usually be bothered by this, didn’t blink. He just checked around them for ammo, instead of looking at the man, thinking about if his wife and kids were okay, if his parents were still alive, if he had planned to play with his dog the next day, which would be normal for him. After Tuesday, nothing would ever be normal for him again.

  “Nothing,” Mike said, pushing the guy away. It was as he was pushing the man away that he finally caught a whiff of his flesh, which only rotted quicker in the direct sunlight for the past two days. “Aww, fuck,” Mike said, stuffing his nose into the crook of his elbow. His clothes smelled like sweat and dirt and vomit, but it was at least better than the rotting man’s flesh. When Paulie and Mike were brought back, they didn’t have rotting flesh. Their bodily wounds were healed and any sign that they had already been deteriorating had vanished by the time they woke up, not that they understood how they woke up or the logistics of their revival.

  Mike stood up and continued down the road. Paulie stayed behind. His hand cupped over his eyes, he looked up at the sky. There wasn’t a single cloud, only the sun making his eyelids heavy. He wanted to sleep, to lie down and wake up and be with his troop again, able to eat and hang out and know what he was doing that day. It would be a long time before Paulie would give up hope on finding people who were still alive. He scratched at the left side of his chest, a little of the crusted blood chipping under his fingernails.

  Paulie blinked the brightness out of his eyes and headed over to Mike, who was squatting over by a house that stood more intact than a lot of the others. The whole front was still there, and if you stood in front of it and ignored the lack of roof, you could almost pretend it was a whole house. Mike brushed aside handfuls of rubble, searching for weapons. He found the pieces of what looked like an M-249.

  “Paulie, are you gonna help me out here, or are you just gonna watch?” Paulie stared at Mike’s head, at the metal shard shining out of it. It was almost enough to blind him. “Paulie!” Mike turned around. “How about you check somewhere else and see if you can find something useful, huh?”

  Paulie nodded. He continued up the road, his helmet clunking against his head. It reminded him of the sound of his heartbeat in his ears after he was shot, how the shooting eventually faded but that heartbeat in his ears kept pounding. As Paulie entered the front room of what used to be a building, he wondered if Mike remembered this much of his death, if he remembered what Paulie had done in the middle of all that. Paulie found a pistol on the floor. It had been badly damaged, all dinged up and covered in dirt, but when Paulie checked it still had some ammo left. The house smelled like burning, as though something like plastic or rubber had caught fire. It reminded Paulie of the smell of Mike’s car.

  Mike’s father didn’t want to fix up the ’70 Barracuda anymore, and he needed to buy a minivan for all the kids, so as soon as Mike was able to drive he inherited it. The Barracuda was the car that Mike and Paulie drove around in as kids, up until they left for the war. On one of these nights, with Mike behind the wheel, Green Day blasting on the radio, and Paulie staring out the window, Mike proposed what he and Paulie should do with the rest of their lives.

  “Come on,” Mike said, squeezing the wheel tight. His knee itched, but he didn’t budge to scratch it. Paulie watched the side of the road, squinting, his glasses catching some of the glare from the headlights. The corn stalks out there were browned and dried out, each new set zooming by, replaced by another set and another, and nothing changed between them. Occasionally Paulie caught sight of roadkill—possums usually, but sometimes cats or raccoons or even deer, too. He didn’t tell Mike this anymore—he thought he might rip on him for it like he did when they were kids—but he felt bad for all those innocent things splattered in the shoulder. The bugs plunked like rain drops on the windshield. “You don’t hafta actually kill anyone. Even if you just wanna be one of those medical people. Yeah, there you go. You can save people instead of killing them, huh?”r />
  Mike turned to look at Paulie, who didn’t look like he was paying him much attention. He got distracted really easy ever since they were kids, so Mike just waited for him to get out of his head and talk back. The road sped by, and Mike’s eyes sometimes played tricks on him in the dark so that it looked like there were waves or bumps in the road after a while, ones that weren’t really there. The youngest of his dad’s kids had a ballet recital that night, but he said it was okay if Mike didn’t go. Mike tended not to go to those sorts of things. That night he’d gone to the movies with a girl from his American History class, who wasn’t the first or last girl to see his back seat that week, then he’d picked up Paulie.

  “I’m failing science, Mike,” Paulie finally replied once the dead corn had made him dizzy. “I think I’d need science to be a doctor. That seems like it’d be a requirement or something.”

  “Well, you could just man up and kill some guys. It’s not all that different from Grand Theft Auto, except that, you know, there’ll be actual blood splatter.” He turned the wheel as the road curved suddenly, but the Barracuda made the transition seem smooth.

  “Come on, Mike. I nearly puke if I watch ’em shoot the cat in Boondock Saints. You want me to shoot people? I don’t even play Grand Theft Auto.”

  “You’ll get used to it, Paulie. We just gotta bulk you up some. Lots of carbs and lifting weights with the football players’ll do you some good.” Paulie stared out the window again, watching stalk of dead corn after stalk of dead corn zoom by, his eyes not even having time to process one before another had replaced it. Mike drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his palms still curled tight around it. “What else are we gonna do? Get jobs down at the factory like everyone else? It’s not like we’re gonna get into college. And the factory’s only got so many jobs.” In fact, by the time they graduated high school, the factory cut half its workers, including Mike’s dad. Paulie stared out the window, trying to ignore what Mike was saying. The future was something he didn’t much like thinking of. “You’ll get used to it. I mean, they have to, right?”