“No Victims,” I say.
“The doors were locked when the fire hit,” Daniel says.
“That doesn’t mean there can’t be security guards.”
He nods and we walk the hallway in a line, combing the place. We pass free-standing kiosks of junk toys and cheap jewelry then come to the food court and check it, finding nothing but putrid food crawling with worms and green growth. We split up to search further.
When the other two are out of sight, Adena calls me over. Behind the food counter and making sure they can’t see, she says, “Have you ever had food poisoning?” She takes a plastic bin of cutlets from a dead refrigerator and opens the top, a thick smell immediate and my stomach pulling down, saliva in the mouth. “I had it once. You’ve never lost so much weight in your life,” she says.
“That’s because you’re exploding all over yourself.”
“I know, it’s like magic.” She picks out a pink and gray cutlet, holding it away from her nose, and says, “All you need is a little Salmonella in your life.”
Or Campylobacter. Staphylococcus aureus. Bacillus cereus. Escherichia coli.
“Do you want any?” She holds it to me. I pass and walk away, getting around the corner before I hear her gagging hard.
Five minutes in I find a single vending machine off in a corner and bury the axe in it, pull out and bury again and keep going until the front gives and the other three join up and I reach in and get a handful of bags and hand them out, go back in and get more as everyone but Adena opens them and eats.
“I thought I checked over here,” Janet says, his tongue orange and black.
“You missed this.”
“Found something better,” he grins. We follow him back down the hallway, making rights and lefts around hair accessories and lingerie, chewing and swallowing and smacking until we round a corner and see it: wide and red with thick, black tires in the middle of the walkway, roped off.
“How do we get it,” Adena asks, skin pale.
“Fill out an entry form,” Janet says.
Daniel says, “The same way they got it in, the way we came.”
“Let’s wire it,” Janet giggles at me.
Hotwired and through the mall, into the delivery entrance, we move the truck then get to the parking lot and onto the road, back to what we’d left behind: red barns and vanishing farms, sand hills ready to be spread over winter roads, towers of grain oxidizing their way toward final collapse. Getting through long silences and longer landscapes, identical scenes with bails of hay dotting tall grasses, sliced through by train tracks weighed down here and there by locomotives stopped dead.
“Ahh, shit,” Janet says suddenly.
“What is it?”
“I forgot my baby.”
We’re quiet, somehow sorry for him.
***
We follow signs off the highway and to a hospital, a long, brute of a thing; brick buildings surrounded by parking lots at three sides and houses at the other. Rolling the SUV into the receiving driveway, four levels of cars to our left, we see crowds staring at us.
Daniel says, “Finally.”
“You actually want this,” Adena asks.
“Don’t you? To be honest I was disappointed the mall had nothing. Not even a janitor to pass the time.”
The vehicle comes to a stop and Daniel steps out, sword drawn, and the rest of us catch up. Three of them rush Daniel and he cuts into them, the heavy blade throwing them back, splitting their stomachs and arms. Victims converge and we start working on the crowd, axe and machete going, shotgun blasting, four against forty.
Daniel calls out victims and takes them, the whites of eyes showing and giddy laugh all the way. His face and body register the joy of each slice, the result of each kill, and we join his victories.
The crowd is half finished when he says, “Get inside.”
The three of us check each other, work still to be done.
Adena, the closest, says, “Dan, there’s still-”
He pulls her and says, “I want this,” then looks at Janet and I. “I’ll meet you in the emergency room.”
We agree and get in, finding the doors open and more Victims inside. Signs point our way and we kill our way there, corpses with stethoscopes and IV bags melted to them, reaching around corners and falling down stairs.
Into the emergency room we find piles of ash on stretchers and what used to be a girl, her chest open for surgery and her mouth looking to eat. Janet takes the head with his machete. Then we wait for Daniel, finding towels and supplies.
Adena runs to the corner and throws up, then turns to me and crosses her fingers, smiling. Five later the doors swing open and Daniel falls in, face wired with adrenaline and cuts.
“That was so good,” he says.
Janet says, “You’re a freak, man. I love it.”
Putting the sword down, Daniel says, “So what did you find?”
“A pile of fresh bandages and a cabinet over there,” Adena points, filling her pack. Daniel goes to it and picks through, stopping at a small, brown bottle and throwing it to me. The label reads morphine. I look at him, his eyes on, and I nod. He finds what he needs and brings it to a table. I pocket the rest of the bottles and some needles.
He works on Janet, sewing his gums while Janet struggles, then hits it with cleaning solution while I shoot the morphine, the blood mixing up and then back in, eyelids coming down. He tells me to take off my wrapping and I do, scabs along with them. He does what he can, sewing and cleaning, then wraps my face again.
“I’m not a plastic surgeon,” he says, “the cuts will close but-”
“I’ve already had this conversation."
He turns and looks at Janet, busy tying a doctor’s mask over his mouth, at Adena gray and trembling, her eyebrows going up pretending she’s fine. Then she turns away and spills bile out of her mouth, all over an EKG machine.
He says, “In this group you don’t have to worry much about looks.”
Mouth Parts
Back in the SUV and down the road a while, Daniel takes out the sealed foods from the hospital and passes them out to everyone but Adena. I eat a little of the dry stuff while driving, then hand the rest to Daniel, him and Janet already done with theirs.
“You’re something, man, you always manage to find food,” Janet says, his mask down around his neck and food tumbling inside.
“Nothing good,” I say. The car catches a Victim’s right side and sends it shattered to the blacktop, Daniel cheering.
Regaining himself he says, “Don’t sell yourself short. I’ll take a teammate who finds food over one who throws it away.”
“I’m not apologizing for that again,” her face clammy.
“I didn’t realize you had.”
“In my own way- I stopped pointing out how vile you are.”
“Thank you for that,” Daniel says, “but I still want to know, honestly, why you got rid of our food. You don’t like to eat, I get it, but you could have left ours alone. You have the willpower, I’ll give you that.”
Adena looks out at the cornstalks as they pass by the thousands, the morphine in me warm and slow. “I have my reasons.”
“We deserve to know.”
“Because you don’t realize how fat and lazy you are. You sit in that seat on your big ass with your gut hanging over your belt and your neck hanging down, breathing like you just ran up eight flights of stairs, and you chomp and chomp away. I worked with people like you for years. You don’t want to better yourselves. You’ll say you do, but you can’t do it. You’re too weak. So you need your food forcibly taken away from you for your own good. That’s the truth and I’m done apologizing for myself.” She looks at Daniel, turned around in his seat. “Just like you want to win fights all the time and claim every place we come across, because that’s what you do and it feels right when you do it.”
Through his mask Janet says, “You know what makes me feel good? Pull over.” I stop the car and we all get out becau
se no one gets out alone, Daniel’s rules, then watch the road while Janet walks into the field, dry corn rustling all the way to find a place to squat.
The sun is bright in my pupils and I wipe the sweat from my palms. Daniel turns to me and says, “I don’t need to bother asking what makes you feel good.” The breath so light in my lungs. He says, “Can you drive?” Skin itchy on my arm, scratch it but the itch keeps moving. "Hello?"
“I don’t remember what we’re talking about,” I say as the blackness folds in all around the edges, an old movie iris blotting out the sun too bright anyway and still not enough to warm my toes, not doing its job, and it shakes me saying to wake up with Adena’s voice but I push it off.
Everything is black, quiet. Then through it Janet calling: “Is that you guys?”
Daniel’s voice saying, “Is what?”
“Are you trying to watch me shit?”
“Why would we want to?”
“I don’t know but one of you is into it.”
“We’re still by the car,” Adena’s voice.
Then the sound: a moan, a scuffle. Janet getting attacked out in the corn, shouting and falling over. Daniel and Adena run into the field. I still can’t see and I follow their sounds, my arms out I step down off the road into the dirt, a few fast ones and I’m hitting stalks hitting my face and pushing them away, more shouting up ahead. Voices getting closer and forcing my eyes to see, dark pulling back enough to see tall corn and movements.
I keep moving, tripping, fumbling over, finding my footing.
Catching up to them, sun coming through my eyes a little more and I’m there but I can barely see, no weapons, they’re pulling a big Victim off Janet, his back against the dirt and his pants down, saying, “Get it off” through the mask. The Victim is reaching out, trying to grab Janet’s face and it gets a handful of his mask, clawing it off, Janet’s mouth coming out disease and all and the victim stops, enough pause for Daniel to pull it away from Janet and shove it off tumbling into the cornstalks.
Daniel helps Janet up, the pants coming up, too. He says, “Did I see that right? Is your mouth so nasty it scared that thing?”
Janet laughs, buckling his pants. “I’m just too dirty for these boys,” and he trails off, looking into the sun.
“What’s wrong,” Adena says, looking up, then Daniel, too. Eyes still coming back to me I see only a cloud against the sun.
Daniel says, “Come on, that Victim’s still moving.” We start making our way back through the corn and I hear a faraway static sound, buzzing up and up. Behind us the Victim is following, stumbling our way, us with no tools. “Quickly,” Daniel says, still watching the sun. I look and see the cloud is bigger, double the size, and the noise is louder.
I slow down, watching it.
“What the hell is that,” Adena asks, brittle legs flapping.
“That’s no moon,” Janet says, mask back up.
It must be ten thousand feet thick, blotting the sun. The cloud, more a column, it’s not getting bigger; it’s getting closer. I stop running and the group gets ahead of me and the Victim is still behind.
I say, “Locusts,” and all goes dark.
The swarm slams into us, an explosion of brown thoraxes and abdomens. Fore and hind legs claw at us as we cover our faces and run, around us the crop laid into by grabbing pincers and chewing mandibles. Hiding our eyes we can barely see, antennae in our views and no sun on us. The air so thick it slows us down, corn stalks breaking from the weight of them, the sound screaming into us.
We push through and manage out of the corn and up into the street, Janet already smashing into the SUV with the force of his body. He gets the door open and we all run and tumble in, closing behind, shaking the passengers off and crushing what got in.
“I almost ate one,” Adena says. “It got in my mouth, I almost ate it.”
“Heaven forbid,” Daniel says.
The windows, the entire car, covered in locusts. I look at one of them, deep brown like a dead leaf, long and sectioned body.
“I didn’t know we had locusts here."
“Not in over a hundred years,” I say. “We have grasshoppers but farming killed American locusts.”
“The farmers are all dead now,” Adena says.
“This is too fast.”
Janet fingers the glass.
“And this is nothing. Swarms have been seen thousands of miles long, larger than California.”
A body bashes into the car loudly- it's the Victim. He paws at the doors and wipes locusts from the window; an accident that clears the view of him, covered inch to inch in wings and bodies.
Adena says, “Are they stinging him?”
“They can’t,” I say, getting close to see a female. She chooses a spot on his shoulder and pushes down, forcing a hole with the valves at the tip of her abdomen. She contracts her muscles, opening and closing the valves and drilling in. The Victim sees me and opens his mouth hungry, the locusts crawling in.
“They’re laying eggs.”
“Nice,” Janet says.
Adena asks if that's normal. The locust’s entire, stretched abdomen buried into the skin now.
“Only if he was made of dirt.”
Other females on him are pulling out of the black meat, leaving mucous and eggs behind. I say, “This is called ovipositing,” and the car fills with the stink of Adena’s stomach.
Serpentes
I don’t remember how we got here. I don’t remember the locusts moving on, if they did, or the car starting or any of the drive from then until now. The last thing I remember was the sun blocked by arthropods. Now the night is out, the ground more barren out the window.
“Nine hours,” Adena says. She’s in the passenger seat, sucked into the seat and barely there. “You’ve been driving nine hours.”
“Why didn’t you stop me,” I ask, throat crackling.
“Daniel tried.” She points to him, asleep in the rearview with his lip swollen and cut. “You really don’t remember? He had us stopping every five minutes to deal with any Victims we came across, even if we didn’t need to. At one point he was trying to talk to you and you didn’t answer. Nor did you respond well to having your hand pulled off the wheel.” She looks at Daniel. “I’ve never seen him so angry.”
Mountains are in the distance, tall outcomes of violent tectonic shifts with snow on their caps and evergreens. Then, to our left and right, rock formations rise from the ground to swallow us in.
She says, “Jesus, John, I don’t know where you go when you’re like that but I hope I’m never there.” The headlights fall across the scales of snakes coiled under stones, tasting the air and raising their heads as we pass. They've come out to see for themselves the last of us. Her leg is trembling. “Sometimes you seem like a pretty normal guy, funny even. And then you get that look, and you’re the scariest thing I’ve seen, and I just want to get as far from you as possible.”
Janet snores into his mask, wet sounds and the whistling of broken teeth.
“I can accept if that’s who you are as long as I can trust you. If I know you won’t try to kill any of us again I can pretty much handle the rest. I mean, I can’t even believe I have to ask you that, but we’re all pretty freaked out.”
Rock walls part and we come out from the claustrophobic grip, back into the open air. The Earth opens around us into deep-carved canyons and jutting plateaus, and she says, “Do you promise?”
The highway, line after line, hypnotic.
“Is that a no? Are you even listening anymore?” She shifts and exhales. “Its times like this I miss my Camry. Just me, the radio and the road."
Outside a rattlesnake shakes its tail, the hollow beads of the rattler rubbing dry. A warning to a possum come dangerously close.
“What color was it,” I ask.
“The snake?”
“The car.”
I know rattlesnakes. Their hollow fangs show drops of venom at the tips, different depending on the species. Neurotoxi
ns which cause muscle paralysis, hemotoxins that decompose tissue and blood, nephrotoxins that poison the kidneys, cardiotoxins which destroy the heart.
She says, “Black.”
“Were you ever in an accident?
“No. Well, one.”
I slow us down, bringing the SUV into a stop on the dark, mountain road, steep declines to our right ending in trees hundreds of feet below.
She says, “You need to pee or something?”
If necrosing flesh from a snakebite enters the bloodstream, it causes a rapid destruction of muscle tissue. This is called Rhabdomyolysis, which can also be brought on by trauma. Car accidents, electrocution, drug overdoses, those are also considered trauma.
“Why didn’t you turn around after the accident?”
“Excuse me?”
Trauma is stubborn- a person sustains one kind of injury and treats it, only to have more damage show up somewhere else. Like after-shocks from earthquakes, in seemingly unrelated places.
“When you hit someone with your car, you should turn back to make sure they’re okay.”
The rattlesnake does all this with two, tiny fangs. It can strike without pulling its head back, at a speed which the human eye can’t follow. They’re constrictors, and have been known to suffocate a person by crawling into their mouth.
A Chemical Fire Page 14
