Daniel shouts to Adena to find the first-aid supplies as we lay Janet down between rows of corn, the ground cold and wet. Handing him the kit she says, “I think my arm is broken.”
“If it was you couldn’t hand me this without screaming.”
She says, “Maybe it’s just a sprain.”
“What about you,” I ask.
He opens the kit. “Not a dent,” his voice hollow. Then he opens a small bottle labeled ammonium carbonate, says, “Hold him,” and puts the open end to Janet’s nostril. Janet instantly shoots up gasping and I can see inside his mouth, half of his teeth cracked and jagged from impact looking like a crumbling graveyard. The interior of the mouth wholly black and red, he inhales too hard and breathes in blood, suddenly choking, coughing. He takes some time to recover and when he can breathe right Daniel has him rinse and spit with water, the water turned dark.
Janet grabs Daniel’s collar and pulls him close. “Tell me,” he wheezes, and Daniel leans in, “Will I ever suck balls again?”
Daniel laughs, “Only if John lets you.”
Janet looks my way and says, “I can do better.”
I touch my face again, remembering the damage. Pushing through corn I go to the upside-down side mirror and squat to see myself. I find a face changed, painted cherry red and cut to shreds, the nose broken up and in. The structure is collapsed the way old sheds sometimes just give up.
“It won’t be the same again,” Adena says from behind. She's holding clothes and gauze. “Accidents like these need plastic surgery.”
“Which no longer exists."
She hands me a shirt doused in water to wipe my wounds then wraps my face all around and ties them. When we get back to the other two, Janet is on his feet and biting a blood-soaked rag wrapped through his mouth, under his chin then over his head and back down around again.
“Mif noff bochkn,” he says.
“I don’t care, don’t touch it,” Daniel replies. He sees my bandages. “We need shelter before it’s dark, hopefully someplace where we can patch ourselves up and find some food.”
He looks at Adena and she meets his look over her shoulder, then turns, going back into the bus, and the rest of us follow. I find my bag then my axe with blood on it, either Janet’s or mine, I can’t be sure. Adena recovers her shotgun, Daniel his sword, kissing it, Janet his machete and suitcase.
Adena says, “You’re really taking that?”
“Ifth augh gy af.”
“Fine,” she says.
We get onto the highway and go on foot, walking the sun down the sky. Cornstalks turn to forests of red oak and sycamore turn to open fields of yellowed grass, spotted with smaller trees and the occasional burn Victim eating found ashes. The moon up, we see signs for the next town coming close and then there's Daniel saying, “Oh, shit.”
Up the road a bit are what looks like twenty or thirty LED lights, all the same height, glowing yellow. Then a pair of them shifts in unison and my eyes adjust.
“Wolves,” I say, small eyes on us.
“They don’t usually attack humans,” Daniel says.
Clouds pass overhead, moonlight breaking through and lighting up the highway. We get a clear look at them- gray wolves with black noses and thick, pointed ears, their fur in mixtures of gray, tan and white. In front of them: a half-eaten Victim, sitting on the ground and studying us, his ear getting chewed.
“Maybe they only like us cooked,” Adena offers.
Janet muffles something through his bandages, pointing to the far right, and then Daniel says, “Good, over there.” Over the guardrail and down a long hill is a parking lot for a group of structures, some kind of outlet sitting across a thousand feet of night. “That’s our target,” he says, “But no running, understand? It sets off their hunting instinct.”
“So does blood,” I say.
“They can’t smell blood, can they?” Adena's voice is stiff, her stomach tense.
“A single drop in a bucket of water.”
Daniel says, “I need you to focus. Keep a clear head and work together, or I’ll make sure the fucking things kill you myself.” He looks down the hill, making plans as the wolves sniff at the air and one of them gnashes at another for getting too close. “We have to do this as a group. We’ll scrunch up tight and move together, that way we look like one, big animal. The harder a kill we look, the better the chance we have.”
We draw in close, the heat and smell of us mixing, legs shuffling over to the guardrail and then one by one, still keeping close, we climb over the chilly metal. The wolves take notice, their bodies tensing, their necks craning, their lights tracking.
All four of us over the rail and with weapons ready, we struggle to take the sharp angle slowly. Down the hill we get around bushes and step on highway garbage and dead birds without bothering to avoid them.
“I don’t think they’re interested,” Adena says, and no one answers.
We get down far enough so we’re out of their line of sight. Our courage up a notch, we get a little faster, our bodies straight and our lower legs doing all the work. Then at the guardrail: motion. One of the wolves jumps onto it and over in one motion, eyes locked on us all the way. Our hearts sink.
“Just keep moving, we’re halfway there,” Daniel says as we get to the bottom of the hill, stepping onto blacktop. Another jumps the rail, then another, making their way down the hill slow and interested and precise.
CRACK a gunshot rings out loud in our ears and we jump. We all look at Daniel, a gun in his hand. He hands it back to me, the gun missing from my hand.
“It scares them off,” he says.
“Try warning us next time,” Adena says. A fourth wolf takes the rail and trots to catch up to it’s kin, now tracing a wide circle around us thirty feet to our right.
“Only four of them,” Daniel says, “if we’re fast enough we can gun them down before they get close.”
“Fchk,” Janet says through cloth, and we already know. At the top of the hill one after the other after the other is coming over, the full pack dedicated to the fresher kill, the bigger payoff.
Weaving through parked cars, a Victim in one smashing to get at us with the pulp above his wrists, we get within range of the closest building: a big, featureless block with glass doors and a delivery truck parked around the side with it’s back to the wall.
“Those doors are locked for sure,” Daniel says. “We take too long working on them and we risk an attack.”
Adena: “The truck then.”
We all agree as the lead wolf steps forward panting. Still huddled, we inch our way around the building, the dogs spreading out. We get around the corner and see a corrugated metal door on the building just behind the small truck. On it’s side is a green button and a red button.
One of the animals gets close. Adena shotguns into the air and the dogs wince back, the shot ringing off the brick.
“Try the door,” Adena says to Janet.
“It needs power to open.”
We reach the truck on the passenger side and I touch it, making sure it’s real. The wolves circle around, getting close, rocking to and away, snapping teeth at the ground and at each other, ready to fight for their food. I open the passenger door and throw my axe in, slowly getting up and in and never turning my back. I get from the one seat to the other, behind the wheel hoping for keys and finding none.
Janet gets in. He moves between the seats and drops his suitcase as behind him Daniel raises his sword up, horizontally in both hands, trying to appear larger. “Get in,” he tells Adena. She takes one more shot into the air, pushing the dogs back, then jumps in with eyes wide and Daniel just behind her climbing up, the beasts moving forward the head dog pulling down to jump in, Daniel pushing Adena pushing Janet into me a mess of arms and legs, my arm crushing into the steering wheel and the horn going off.
The wolf hesitates and we all freeze with him. I realize what’s happened and hit the horn again, bashing it with my fist, and the pack, all fift
een or so, get low to the blacktop and move back and forth, ears down. Adena reaches back through the tangle of limbs and pulls the door closed, getting us safe, finally, for now.
Janet and Adena move to the back of the empty truck. Daniel settles into the passenger seat. My reflection in the driver’s side window is bandages in the shape of a face, black spaces where the eyes should be.
Daniel says, “No keys. We’ll wait it out in here.”
Janet says, “Guym tharfink.”
“If only we had some food,” Daniel says.
Adena sits on the hard floor, Janet following. We all rest, burnt out from the day, watching the wolves paw at Janet’s suitcase as he curses. They slowly lose interest after an hour or two and stalk off. The last of them glances back and checks on us, all the way down the road, making sure we haven’t tried to get out, right until they disappear around the bend.
Earth Teeth
It’s too hot for a suit. My shirt is soaked all the way through.
I weave through the incisors that protrude from the grass. As I go, the ground pitches and quivers my stance. A weeping willow offers to hold me up and I accept, leaning against it, studying the teeth and noticing how their cavities have taken the shapes of letters.
“Do you need any help?” A man in a uniform, his face scorching in the sun.
“Resting. Joining the crowd,” I sweat.
“Maybe I can point you in the right direction. You’re here for a service?”
“Hopefully,” I smile, realize I’m smiling too much and wipe it away, then think I made it disappear too fast and bring it back.
His head pulses, crooked at the neck, fingers shifting like worms. “ Can I get your name?”
“Get your own,” I tell the prick, pushing past him toward the hill. More teeth grow here, pointed this way and the other. I go around them. My palms on them for balance and their cavities in the shapes of names and dates, toward the crowd of suits and dresses hissing in the wind. I can feel the grass trying to hold onto me, keep me back, but I press on through its grip because it should mind its fucking business.
I get close and one of the black dresses sees me, pulls away from the amorphous mass, a cell division, and comes near. To my surprise the dress is wrapped around Gala. The tendrils flap across her as she drifts forward, stopping too far away; a phantom poised at the edge of vision, a weightless form of the outer border. The sun doesn’t scorch her. It can’t. It can only light her from behind, a projection on the pink screen of her skin.
“I didn’t know if you were coming,” she sounds.
The grass tried to stop me but it couldn’t.
“Look at your eyes,” she says, the white clouds of her face going gray, the horizon caving in. “What did you take?”
“My car.”
She looks at the suits and dresses. “That’s not what I mean. You’re on something?”
I turn and look at my path. “The willow and the teeth helped.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Teeth.” I tap mine. “Molars, canines. That’s my old dog.” I aim my finger at the black dog watching the suits and dresses.
“Your dog died years ago,” the wind blows.
Really?
“You shouldn‘t have come. I’m just thankful your parents aren‘t here to see you.”
“Aren’t they under there,” I say to the dirt and wood.
“John,” she starts to rain, “Just leave, I’ll call you later.”
The heads start to turn, watching the weather. The willows are disappointed, the grass nosy as ever, the dog watching us. I ask her if I can talk to them.
“They’re in a better place.”
“Where?”
“Away from you.” She breaks and thunders, turning to rejoin them. They take her in, arms folding over, a cohesive matter.
“Wait.” I try to shake the chemicals off my eyes. “It’s the- it’s Janet. He only had things for sleep. I couldn’t do this without…”
Standing over the hole in the ground, I can see the people are one, solid shape again, a grouping of cells with cloth membrane. Over here, away from them, one electron is broken free and bouncing through the body, oxidizing cells and causing damage.
More uniforms come out from the teeth and trees. The dog turns and walks away, then I do, out into my solvent cage.
Intake, Compression, Power, Exhaust
I wake up with a snake constricting my face, its belly filled with bugs that scratch and squirm to be free. Jumping up in my seat, clawing at the attacker I find only its shed skin, wrapped flat and hard against my skin.
“Don’t take them off,” Daniel says. I check the mirror and see my bandages, soaked through and dried to my face; paper-mache’ for the maimed. In the back of the truck the rags are out of Janet’s mouth, laying on the floor in a bloody heap with small pieces of tooth stuck in the fabric. He moves his jaw around to check it, his dark mouth undulating sickly.
Adena, her cheekbones and eye sockets coming through, says, “Can you do that outside? Your breath is nauseating.”
“You like to vomit on your own terms.” His words are painted with a lisp, almost a hiss from the smash up and infection.
Daniel says, “She’s right. You need more than a first aid kit, you need a hospital.”
"Great idea, why don’t you call me an ambulance, big chief?”
Daniel’s face goes hot. “I want you to get something straight, you dirty shit, all of you- I treat your wounds so you stay useful to the group. If you don’t want my help I don’t care, I’m not your father.”
“That’s good," Janet says, whisper-scratching. "If you were, I’d kick your fucking lips in."
We get out of the truck and check the glass doors up front. Locked. We walk around the complex to find an easier point to break in, going around separate department stores and banks and food courts, sections connected by hallways. All doors are too thick to work on, reinforced and safe.
“Let’s crash the truck into them,” Janet says.
“No keys,” I say.
“Another car, then.”
Daniel says, “None of those cars are big enough. I don’t know who built the doors like this but they did a good job.”
Adena says, “Every so often someone drives their car through the mall. Why are we trying to get in again?”
“Food,” he says. "Pretend you're human."
She points to Janet and says, “He knows how to hotwire a car, right?”
“They don’t start for me.”
She looks at all three of us, waiting.
“But he can show me how,” I say.
Behind the wheel, Janet at my back and the other two standing outside, he tells me I just need to strip some wires and cross the right ones. There’s one set for ignition power, one for the starter, so on. If there are two red ones they go together. If not, look for complimentary colors.
To the plastic cover under the steering wheel he says, “Off.” I grab it and wrench it back and forth, snapping the old clips and pulling the whole thing away.
He points to a panel with six wires clipped to the back of the key tumbler and says, “Even easier,” then goes to the back of the truck and sorts through junk, throwing it around. He finds a tool kit and pulls it open, digging out loudly and returning with a screwdriver. “Your key,” he says. I push it into the ignition and turn, the engine turning and the truck rumbling to. I look at him and he says, “Try turning the wheel.”
I try and it doesn’t move. “Fuck. Wheel lock. It needs the key.” He grabs the wheel and forces it hard to the right, telling me to do the same on the left and we pull back and forth, trying to crack the lock until our arms are sore. The wheel not giving, he says out the window, “We can drive but we can’t turn. If you can move the mall right in front of us, we’re kings,” and the two of them turn away. We sit in our seats, truck growling around us and stomachs the same. Empty, tired, blood-lost. Then I look in the rearview.
I put u
s into gear and pull forward, Daniel and Adena watching us unsure, Janet asking what I'm doing, and I give the truck a hundred feet of distance then hit the brakes. He looks in his rearview, sees the corrugated metal door behind us, snaps his seatbelt in and says, “Fly, you crazy bastard.”
I hit the gas, slowly at first, then building speed. Hands off the useless wheel and the truck getting momentum, the speedometer reads twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five miles per hour, the mall in the mirror coming up on us. At forty my eyes shut and teeth clamp. We impact, bodies jolting and flopping, a crash all around us and then we’re passing into the building, destruction clearing the way. My foot goes for the brake, missing then finding it and pushing down, pulling us finally to a stop as things fall all around.
Daniel steps in through the peeled back metal, followed by Adena, into the delivery area with its loading vehicles and boxes, its steep step up for trucks to unload, its doorways small and large leading out. “Good work,” he says, checking boxes.
We walk through a door and then two more until we’re in the outlet mall, long hallways of glass store fronts extending down and snaking off. Shoes and videogames, wigs, imported furniture and home goods, jeans and ice cream and pretzels. A skylight above, triangled up to morning with sun coming through to light bushes installed in the center islands, drying them up.
A Chemical Fire Page 13
