“Take that back,” she says. The house moans from the wind picking up outside, dirt and dust building up at the small windows.
“Everyone is dead now anyway, what does it matter how one, single person died? Tell me, which is it that hurts more, confirming he’s gone-”
She says, “Fuck you.”
“-or feeling somehow responsible?”
“God damn you,” she steps closer and raises the barrel to my nose. “God damn you, don’t say another word.”
“Do you want us to give you some privacy,” Daniel asks.
Janet says, “Screw that.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it I understand. I don’t even know the details. In fact only Janet knows that, so put it down and we’ll vote on whether he comes with us.”
Janet says, “What the shit are you doing?”
I look at him, a gun to my nose, and say, “Surviving.”
He says, “I have a respectable setup here, I never said I wanted to leave.”
“Do you?”
“I guess.”
“So what is it, what’s the vote?”
“Mine is yes,” Daniel says and all eyes turn to him. “Ignoring the bullshit I just heard, he looks like a good addition to the team.”
Janet shows smile teeth, half-eaten by cavities.
“And you,” I ask her.
Gun up, we stand in silence for years, decades, centuries for her to decide during which streets collapse into flooded subways and turn to rivers and bacteria evolve to better eat plastic. “He can come,” she says and the words stab me, my wager busted. She turns the gun his way. “But say anything about my father, you won’t have to worry about the victims. I’ll eat you myself.”
“Sounds like she already did,” Daniel mumbles. She turns the shotgun on him and he says, “Alright, alright, can we leave now? We’re behind schedule.”
She says, “He didn’t vote yet.”
Eyes turn on me and I swallow my bile, ready to lie. “The way I figure, what are the odds the last people on Earth would live this close to each other? It seems wrong to turn our backs on that.” I look at Janet. “Besides, we have history.”
Janet says, “You really think we’re the last kids at the party?”
"Yes."
“Me, too,” Adena says, the gun lowered.
Daniel says, “Feels that way.”
From the house above, in with the dying wind is the sound of a stack of videotapes toppling and spreading across the floor.
“Did you leave my door open,” Janet asks Daniel, who turns to Adena, who says nothing. “God damn it. You know they follow, right? They're like crispy Toucan Sams. They smell blood, and you assholes are filled with it. Except your brains, obviously.” He slaps the side of his head for effect. We listen again and hear feet. More than one set. The living room is alive with victims.
Daniel says, “All we have is her gun and mine, how many do you have?"
“Guns are violent machines," Janet says.
"I know, where do you keep yours?"
"Not in my house."
Daniel says, “Great. Another Democrat.”
“I do have a shit-load of things that stab, though.” He goes to the corner, behind the food shelves, where he starts to pull out blade after blade. Daniel looks at me and I shrug, Janet handing me an axe and keeping a machete for himself. Both have scars from chopping at things thicker than firewood, things with marrow.
“What is this?” Daniel goes to the corner, picks up a double-sided sword. It looks heavy, ornate, with intricate decorations and flourishes.
Janet says, “That fucker? Found it someplace. Too vicious to leave behind.”
Daniel runs his fingers over the bronze and golden grooves. At the center: a lions head, growling. The handle comes up from the top of the head, spiraled like a mane, the hand-guard out from its ears, the blade from its snarling mouth. Daniel’s eyes lick it in.
"Can I?"
Janet says, “Merry Christmas, kiddo.”
Daniel holsters the gun and we all file up the stairs loud, guns and sharps out. Janet hits the hallway first with a victim at the head. He runs up and buries the machete in hers, a great thump and her black eyes go dry, her form to the floor.
We pour out, knocking over years of hair and nails and getting ankle deep in the stuff, trudging through the dry matter. A small, dead boy is in the bathroom and Adena advances on him, shotgun held high. She fires down on him, black tar on the mirrors.
In the kitchen are two more. Adena takes a chunk out of the first with shot spray, Daniel already on the second and shoving the lion’s tongue through the soft-cooked abdomen, pulling it out and cutting the head clean off. He turns and looks at me, eyes open, takes the gun from his waist and tosses it to me no looking back. I turn to look back and in through the door is a massive victim, obese and blackened, my axe into his neck and gets stuck, pull, pull, extract it and his teeth jump at me, face to the food and I push the axe head through it.
Out on the lawn: a lunch crowd. We fall on them an art movement of bullets and screaming, blades working, bone splintering, tendons splitting, burnt bodies falling to the grass, the smell of our fury pooling in the cement cracks and anthills and untended gardens of this flash-forgotten neighborhood, until there’s only a single victim left.
Daniel waves us off, his short body heaving and sword at his side. The burn victim seeing him, Daniel runs with a howl at his tongue and the handle in both hands, the arch of the swing coming out and to and then the body cuts straight through, splitting the victim’s gut in half, and it falls. In the grass his mouth still motions, dark eyes registering no difference. Then Daniel, the handle double-fisted at the hilt, raises it up and then down and through the face, skull and skin splatter-shattered in two.
He turns to us, alive, panting, vehemence in his veins, blood on his blade. Janet says, “I now pronounce you man and knife.”
Leaving
After arguing with Janet for a while that yes, I can start cars, I get into the driver’s seat and ask for the keys.
“Just rub the two wires together,” he says, still not believing.
“Of course.” I find the two wires sticking out from the dash and hold them together, the car wheezing, Janet’s face smug and then washed clean when the engine turns, the air-conditioner kicking in full blast.
"It's not magic," I tell him.
“This bag of shit won’t help us,” Daniel says. “Is there any place around here we can find something bigger?”
Janet says, “There’s an elementary school two blocks from here.”
I cut the engine. “I’m surprised they let you live that close.”
“Are you kidding? Those were my best customers.”
Adena says, "You sold to kids?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Kids don't have money."
We head for it weapons and all, sky looking like a clearing out storm. Not two blocks but four later we come to the circular driveway of the elementary, two levels of brick with columned awnings over each doorway, windows tinted black. To the left is a playground of monkey bars and swings and seesaws and a rusted metal grasshopper with crooked ladders for legs. Everything is quiet; the foam and pebbles in the ground retired from protecting children.
Janet says, “The parking lot is on the other side but let’s cut through.”
“Why?"
“Maybe there’s something we can use inside.”
“There’s nothing we need here,” Daniel says.
I gotta take a shit, okay? This powdered food is like an avalanche.”
Finding the doors locked, Daniel punches the sword through, making a weak point in the safety glass to kick in. We do until the hole is enough and we go in. Janet runs off past the gymnasium to find the bathroom, the squeak of his shoes bouncing off polished floors and announcement boards and trophy cases, water fountains and hand-made posters advertising fund-raising cupcake bake-offs.
We split up and I roam dead hallways, aq
ua-colored and spotted. All the way down are numbered doorways leading to classrooms, inside them rows of contoured desks so small it seems like a joke. I go into the nurse’s office and go through the supplies- nothing but bandages and acetaminophen and eye drops. I’m sitting in the nurse’s chair going through the drawers when Daniel enters and sits in the chair on the other side.
“I had to get away from the sound of him in that bathroom,” he shudders.
“There’s a lot about Janet that’ll do that to you.”
He leans forward in the small chair. “Nothing against him, but how could she? With him and not me? I don’t understand it.”
I unwrap a pop from my pocket and mouth it. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, he traded her for drugs.”
“Think so?”
“I’m pretty sure Janet has never gotten a woman in his life without bartering. He's not the kind who buys into romance. And she told me herself she’s bought uppers.”
“I can’t see her doing that,” he chews on it.
“Amphetamines stop the appetite.” He meets my look. “Besides, you’re a good-looking man, how else can you explain it?”
“I can’t,” he says sitting back in the chair.
“Me, either, and she’s obviously keeping some secrets with that father thing.”
He says, “You never mentioned you were married.”
I push out of the squeak-rolling chair. “I found first aid supplies in that cabinet if we need them.”
He looks at the cabinet then back at me, eyeing the pop twirling on my lip. “I’m not sure who I can trust,” he says, “but I appreciate the Intel.”
“You deserve to know it,” I lie.
Back with the others, Janet says, “That was the smallest toilet I’ve ever flooded.” We exit out the opposite side and find a small parking lot pressed against the backs of houses and shaded by tree branches, holding no cars, no buses.
Adena says, “Quite a selection there. I guess it escaped your attention that buses stay at the bus company, not the school.”
He points to a small, white building under the trees with a large garage door on the left of it and a small, windowed one on the right. “They keep an idiot bus in there,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“I sold snow to the janitor in there all the time. Jumpy bastard with long hair.”
We go to it and Daniel tries the doors, both locked, so Janet walks along the side of the garage to the back and out of sight. He comes back with a fake rock that opens up to a key. “He only remembered his name because it was printed on his fucking overalls.” He tosses the rock, then unlocks the door and goes in. A moment later the large door slides up in it’s track to show a short, yellow bus parked inside.
“Is that enough for what we need,” Adena asks.
Daniel says, “It’s hard enough siphoning gas, we’ll waste less this way.”
Janet grabs keys from a nail on the wall and we all get in, me in the driver’s seat, and I get it going and pull out and drive back to Janet’s house. We form a loose chain that stretches down to the basement and fill the back seats of the bus with food and water, stopping only once to shoot a Victim coming down the street.
When we’re finished Janet says, “I’m gonna say goodbye to Gary,” disappearing for twenty minutes and coming back to the bus in different clothes and sweaty hair. “Where’s the field trip to,” he asks, sitting toward the back, behind Adena.
From the seat next to mine Daniel says, “Somewhere with less bodies walking around. We need to make a permanent base.”
“In other words, leave the suburbs,” Adena says.
I turn the key and we roll off, diesel engine rumble-chugging us away from another crime scene. To the wheel I say, No one really does.
Act Three
Murderous Gardens
Consumer
After a day of highway driving through green grass towns and rivers, of farms and carriages, of chocolate powder meals and cramp-sleeping on pleather seats, we’re ready for a turn-off. The sun failing above we take an exit and check out the town, finding half of it burned to cinders. Rows of collapsed houses separated by squares of black grass. Commercial buildings hollowed out. The parts that stand are more spread out than we’re used to. So are the Victims.
“I need a pharmacy,” I say, my feet surrounded by pop sticks licked clean.
“I need some real food,” Daniel says.
“Your neck fat tells another story,” Adena says, “but I second the pharmacy. What about you,” she calls to Janet, gets silence back. “Janet, what do you need?” We wait, hear nothing, she goes to check.
“Shit, you brought that on the bus?” Stepping back.
“What’s the matter,” Daniel stands, the bus rocking him to a topple and he catches himself against the seat.
“That suitcase,” she says. “I don’t know what’s in there but get it out. I'm serious, get it out.”
“Are you insane? Do you know how much this baby is worth,” Janet asks.
“What the hell is it?”
I turn and say, “He just told you.”
Adena is silent a second, then quietly: “There’s a baby in there?”
Janet says, “Damn right, and if you thought it was worth something before, can you imagine now?”
"Worth something?"
Daniel says, “Is it alive?”
“Don’t open it,” I tell him.
“Wait a minute,” he holds me off. “Is that thing alive?”
Janet says, “It is now.”
“It’s a Victim,” Adena says. “You brought a fucking Victim baby on the bus.”
“Well, I admit the market’s changed since I invested,” Janet says.
“Market?”
“I’m pulling into this pharmacy,” I say, already turning in.
“Are you actually deluded into thinking it’s worth something,” Adena asks him. “First, that’s disgusting. Second there’s no such things as money anymore, so there’s no market to sell it on.”
He looks down at the case.
“Definitely not,” Daniel says.
Janet says, “Then fuck it, wanna see it?”
Daniel says, “Yeah, open up.” I kill the engine and get out. “We’ll stay and watch the bus,” he offers.
Adena says, “Wait for me, I’m not hanging around with the Blood Scouts.”
Daniel says, “Make sure you secure the building first.”
We step out into cooler mountain air, find the pharmacy’s sliding doors stuck partly open and push them the rest of the way. The inside is damp and marred with water leaks, rodents that dart and dash between aisles.
She says, “Pharmacy counter?”
I nod and we go to the back, axe and gun, unlatching the waist-high door and going in to pick through shelves lined with white and brown bottles and boxes and a few birds nests. Finding the controlled substance safe locked I go to the backroom and find the management office with all the labeled keys, find the right one and go back to the safe and get what I need. Adena holds a shopping bag open for me and I fill it as she watches.
“Is all this necessary,” she asks.
“What do you need?” I grab the bag from her and tie it off.
Her mouth twists and she turns, hopping the counter. I follow her down the aisles, animal sounds in the ceiling and she stops at the diet section. Browsing the body scales she holds one out and says, “If you don’t have access to a water displacement tank or calipers, this is the most accurate thing going.” She puts it aside, pulls out an empty bag of her own and goes to the diet pills, picking out a few and bagging them. “Most of these are garbage but the caffeine helps,” she says. “What I really need is…” she trails off, walking around the corner. When I catch up to her she’s standing at a section with vitamins and herbs, saying, “Yes, perfect,” and throwing bottles into her bag.
“This one is Gymnema, it curbs sugar cravings,” she says, opening the seal and pouring two capsules
into my hand. “If you’re especially tempted, open it up and eat the powder. It’ll turn you off sweet stuff by changing the way your tongue experiences them.”
She opens another bottle and says, “Chromium. You’ll break down the sugars you do eat quicker. This or cinnamon.”
Then it’s conjugated linoleic acid to block the refilling of fat cells. Then Hoodia, a plant chewed by African tribesmen to stop hunger during hunts. She says, “It doesn’t do much, but why not.”
Apple cider vinegar. Senna. Cayenne. Seaweed. Collagen. Pyruvate. Garcinia Cambogia. Carnitine.
She says, “This is ginger. You won’t lose any weight on it but it’ll help with the nausea.”
I’m chugging down Percocet and something called Hydroxytryptophan when she says, “Wait, mix some fiber in that water.”
“Egzercise woob bee eezier,” I gurgle through grainy water and softgels.
“Only if you want to get bulky and gross.” She grabs a backpack from the school aisle.
We get back to the bus holding bags and a digital scale to find Janet laughing as his fingers get wrapped in gauze. Daniel says, “Did you pick yourself up some tampons? We don’t need our friends out there tracking us.”
A Chemical Fire Page 10
