At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  “… wrong?”

  Jake used his finger to trigger the transmit button. “I’m sick, Carolyn,” he gasped. “I’m fucked. Buzzer’s buzzing. I’m dead.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The tone of Carolyn’s reply surprised him. She sounded argumentative; not the least bit grieving. He felt her tugging on the sleeve of his suit, then saw a bundle of duct tape in her fist.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. Then he saw. The atropine. “Wait!” he yelled. “Maybe it’s just the heat!”

  Carolyn had never been a nurse; never wanted to be, as far as he knew, and it was a damn good thing. She jammed the needle into his leg like she was squashing a bug. He wondered if she lodged it in his thighbone. The pain changed from sharp to burning as she mashed the plunger, and then the head rush came. He fell backward for an instant; then it passed.

  The shot of pain cleared his head. The buzzer was slowing now. Time was short. He had to get out of the suit. Now. Right now.

  Body bag with a window.

  The zipper was a little thing, nestled somewhere behind his head and sealed under a velcro flap; designed specifically not to be readily opened. That way, you couldn’t accidentally snag it on something and ruin your day. Jake fumbled for a minute looking for it.

  “Use your knife,” Carolyn’s voice instructed, seemingly from inside his head. He looked up in time to see her give herself an injection, noting just how gentle she was with her own thigh.

  The knife. Yes, of course, the knife. How was she staying so calm? It was a stretch snaking his hand down to his pocket, but the instant his latex-clad fingers found their mark, he was rewarded with the feel of locking-blade Buck. Opening a knife was a two-handed operation, though, requiring him to pull his other arm out of its sleeve as well.

  Working strictly by feel, he wrestled the blade out of its slot, just as the buzzing of his facepiece stopped. He’d never drawn a tank down this far before, but popular theory stated that once the vibrator stopped, only thirty seconds of air remained.

  Shit!

  Gripping the blade in his fist, he thrust it through the suit just below his chin. The five plies fought him every inch of the way, but he worked like a madman, ripping the suit to the crotch, then changing his grip to take the cut down to his knee.

  And his air tank died. In midbreath, the air just went away, as surely as if someone had pinched off his nose and mouth. His lungs screamed and his gut muscles tugged for air, but it just wasn’t there. In those seconds, he forgot all about his suit as panic seized him. He dropped the knife down his pant leg into his boot and clawed with both hands at his facepiece. His struggles had drawn the pressure in the mask down so far that it made a quiet burping sound as he pulled it away.

  “Thank God,” he said aloud, bending at the waist and resting his hands on his knees. He could breathe again.

  “Get out of your suit,” Carolyn commanded. “You’re dirty, Jake.”

  The suit. God, it was filthy, contaminated with whatever had burned up in there. Jake stopped breathing again-this time by choice-and shrugged and stepped his way free of the moon suit. He stumbled away from it in his stocking feet, quickly scrambling a good ten yards before stopping to look back.

  He propped himself against a tree and he breathed. The hot August air felt cool by comparison, and the simple act of drawing breath in and out of his lungs seemed blissfully unregulated. And he was alive.

  “How do you feel?” Carolyn asked. She was still in her suit, still talking to him over the radio, and in the background Jake could hear through his earpiece that her buzzer was sounding, too.

  “You’re using me as a guinea pig!” he shouted, palming his transmit button. He laughed. “You shithead! You were waiting to see if the air was going to kill me!”

  Like a bird emerging from some bizarre silver egg, Carolyn cut her way out. Clearly, she’d practiced this before, if only in her mind, and her motions seemed smoother than his; graceful, even, as if her knife were somehow sharper and the effort somehow easier. After emerging from the moon suit, she stepped free of the boots, then walked downrange a good distance before methodically removing the tank from her back, then the mask from her face. Last things off were her gloves, which she meticulously turned inside out as she snapped them off, thus preventing cross-contamination.

  When she was done, she looked through the trees to Jake, who stared back at her for a long moment, before they started to move toward each other.

  “We’re alive,” Carolyn said. Her tone carried none of the happiness that the words should bear.

  Jake wanted to say something clever-something to lighten the moment-but a sudden rush of emotion staggered him. Shadowy, surreal memories of fires and explosions and friends’ bodies swirled in his head, and he found himself suddenly overcome. He still had Carolyn. That much made sense, even if nothing else did. And as she said, they were still alive. As they hugged each other in the silence of the woods, he had a nagging fear that the ordeal wasn’t over yet.

  They walked for nearly four hours before stumbling upon the cabin along the river. It was a one-room affair, done in Early Hobo, with an old Army cot in one corner, a chemical toilet in the other, and a propane camp stove in the middle. The door hung from one hinge, and it appeared that no one had visited for weeks.

  “Charming place,” Carolyn mumbled.

  Jake smiled. “Yeah, a real fixer-upper. I don’t suppose you see a phone anywhere, do you?”

  She put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. I think it’s over there in the butler’s pantry.” She strolled toward a broken window.

  He sighed. “We need to get to the cops.”

  “Well, as soon as… Hey! They’ve got a boat!”

  Jake hurried to peer through the window, over Carolyn’s shoulder. “Where?”

  Carolyn led the way back out the front door and down toward a makeshift dock. About halfway, next to a disorganized stack of firewood, lay a well-abused aluminum canoe, turned upside down in the leaves. “Think it’ll float?” she asked.

  “You can’t just go steal a guy’s canoe! Christ, they probably hang you for that out here.”

  She made a face. “You have a better idea? I’m done walking barefoot through the woods, thank you very much, and I’m not inclined to stay here in this shack.”

  Jake looked around, as if someone was watching. “Jeeze, Carolyn, I’ve never stolen anything before.”

  “Oh, yeah, like I’m John Dillinger, right? It’s not like we have a lot of alternatives here.”

  He took a deep breath and held it, scanning the horizon for inspiration. Finally, he shrugged. “Oh, what the hell. In for a dime, in for a dollar, right?”

  He rolled the canoe onto its keel and dragged it down toward the dock, while Carolyn carried the paddle that had been stashed underneath. “Not overexerting, are you, dear?” Jake grunted, struggling not to smash his toes under the boat.

  She smiled.

  Once he got the boat past the firewood, it actually slid pretty easily across the sloping grass and into the water. Standing submerged up to his hips, Jake helped Carolyn down into the canoe before climbing in himself, taking the rear position.

  They paddled for an hour, past endless stretches of forest. “Think we’ve gone five miles yet?” Jake asked, his first words in a long while.

  “I think we’ve gone a thousand miles,” Carolyn said, groaning. She lay on her back on the bottom of the canoe, her arm slung over her eyes to block the sun. Jake’s question was really a test to see if she was awake. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, since the contingency plan calls for evacuation within a five-mile radius, I just wanted to make sure we’re safe.”

  She lifted her arm a fraction of an inch to sneak a peek. “You’re so full of shit, Jake Donovan. You never read the contingency plan.”

  He shrugged with a smile. “No, but you read it to me.”

  “Next time I’ll show you the pictures,” she said, once again r
etreating under her arm.

  The river narrowed considerably in the next twenty minutes, and as the banks grew closer together, so did the distance separating the homes that lined the riverbank. “I think we’re reentering civilization,” Jake announced, prompting Carolyn to sit up.

  The houses on either side had lost their hunting-cabin feel, and while the yards continued to double as junk heaps-dumping grounds for old stoves, refrigerators, and the like-people obviously lived here. Set precariously close to the water’s edge, the houses looked dank and pitiful among the towering trees which cast them in perpetual darkness, sheltered from the invading rays of the blistering summer sun.

  As Carolyn took it all in, she tried to imagine what it would be like to fight a perpetual battle against mildew. She shuddered at the thought of what these un-air-conditioned shanties must smell like.

  “How can people live like this?” she asked, mostly to herself. Her mind conjured up images of filthy children playing in squalor as they awaited their next malnutritious meal.

  Jake slipped his Budweiser T-shirt back over his head and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said charitably.

  She smirked lovingly at his never-ending optimism. “Nobility of the poor, right?”

  “Well, there’s certainly no shame in it.” Jake sounded a little defensive. “For all we know, these people work three jobs to afford what little they’ve got.”

  “Whatever,” she scoffed.

  He recognized her tone as the one that dismissed his outlook on such things as naive and ill informed. It was a quirk in his wife’s personality that he’d never been able to understand. She’d set a standard for herself that no mere mortal could possibly attain, and even as they wallowed together in that stage of their lives where an evening out for pizza and beer had to be carefully budgeted, she showed a disturbing, almost cruel intolerance for people who were “poor.” Every time Jake tried to point out that their income hovered perilously close to the poverty line, she’d insist that he was missing the point. It was their potential that made the difference, she’d say. As college graduates, with degrees in a worthwhile, technical field, they had limitless potential. The fact that Jake’s father had spent a career in the coal mines, working night shift until the day he died, and that his mom had cleaned houses to make ends meet didn’t seem to impress Carolyn in the slightest. She was funny that way. Jake figured it all had something to do with her childhood; something that twisted her outlook on the world. In all other ways a charitable, giving wife, Carolyn could be brutal where money was the issue.

  Jake let it pass. “Where do you think we are?”

  Carolyn craned her neck, as if she’d be able to recognize this stretch of river by sight. “No idea,” she said at length. “Downstream from where we were before.” She smiled, lighting up the whole boat. All the snottiness and intolerance in the world couldn’t cheapen the pure beauty of that smile, Jake thought.

  A few minutes passed before the horizon changed again, revealing a line of dilapidated shops, which, like the surrounding residences, were built right up against the edge of the river. The tallest of the structures also looked to be the oldest, built of stone at its lowest level, with two additional stories stacked on top, sporting faded wood siding and a once-red, hand-painted sign, “Bobby’s Bait and Tackle.”

  “Hey, look,” Jake said, pointing. “Let’s go see if Bobby’s has a phone we can use.” He steered the canoe toward shore, running it aground against the gravel parking lot, where it joined the waterline. He got out first, holding the boat steady as Carolyn joined him. Together, they pulled the canoe safely ashore and chicken-walked through the gravel, unconsciously flapping their elbows as they guided their bare feet across the sharp-edged rocks. Thirty yards later the gravel gave way to smooth concrete, and they paused to let the pain subside.

  “Welcome to Buford,” Carolyn said.

  Jake cocked his head. “How do you know that?”

  She giggled and pointed across the street. “Buford Hardware.” Then, pointing two blocks down the street, “Buford Motel.”

  “Your powers of deduction are truly awesome,” he teased. “How do you know that some guy named Buford doesn’t own a hardware store and a motel?”

  She shot him her know-it-all smirk. “People named Buford don’t own businesses.”

  The town was bigger than Jake had expected. Stretching on for several blocks in three directions, it sported an interesting mix of old business district construction, with its tall false fronts and wrought-iron fencing, interspersed with the pastel and glass architecture of the sixties. The mining town where Jake grew up had been a lot smaller than this, and it bragged ten thousand residents. Using that as a benchmark, he pegged Buford-if indeed that’s what it was called-to be good for about twenty. All the more remarkable, given the fact that not a soul was in sight.

  “Where is everybody?” Carolyn asked, speaking Jake’s thoughts.

  “Kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Bobby’s Bait and Tackle, like every other building in sight, was locked tight, with the lights off. “Didn’t I see a Twilight Zone that started like this?”

  Carolyn shivered inadvertently, and then she got it. “They must have been evacuated!” she proclaimed. “The fire down at the plant must have run them off.”

  Jake scowled. “Jeeze, you think so? This far away?”

  “Well, we really don’t know how far away we are. Five miles is a long way.”

  “And this is a big town,” he finished for her. “What a nightmare getting all these people moving.” He placed his hands on his hips and looked up and down the street. “Do you see a pay phone?”

  With none in sight, they started moving toward the Buford Motel. Surely, they’d have one there. They walked quickly, gripped by an odd paranoia. The total absence of people, at a time when the streets rightfully should have been packed, felt strangely post-apocalyptic. Jake half expected to see Mad Max appear with his band of refugees.

  Could it be that the contamination had actually extended this far? Five miles was the default evacuation distance for hazmat disasters, and as such carried a safety factor of at least five, meaning that the evacuation zone encompassed five times the distance that was truly in danger. Was it possible, in this case, that wind directions or thermal inversions, or any number of other physical or meteorological anomalies, had actually put them in harm’s way?

  They discussed these things as they wandered across the street, but Jake was the one who put it in the proper perspective: “Too late to start worrying about it now. If this is a danger zone, then we’ve been exposed all day.”

  Clearly, he and Carolyn had dodged the bullet for the most acute hazards of whatever they might have been exposed to. Now they’d just have to wait another twenty or thirty years to see what chronic effects might lie ahead. Cancer maybe. Or blindness. God, there were countless possibilities. Signs and symptoms could take decades to show themselves. In any case, that particular horse was out of the barn.

  And that’s what made this such a scary business. Some of the most hazardous chemicals on earth were colorless, odorless, and tasteless, with toxic effects that took years to manifest themselves. How could a person know if the tumor that materialized after his sixty-fifth birthday was just another tumor, like the last three that the oncologist had treated, or if it was the result of some ancient chemical exposure?

  The parking lot of the Buford Motel was deserted, just like everything else in town. A single story in height, the complex looked like every other motel constructed in the 1960s. A couple dozen rooms stretched out at parking lot level, anchored on the near end by a small, glass-walled office. Being this close to a bed and an air conditioner made Jake realize just how exhausted he was. Suddenly, each step took just a little more effort than his legs were willing to give.

  “Not bad, all things considered,” he commented. Someone here had quite a green thumb. A sea of phlox and pansies surrounded the small swimming pool, itself an obvious afterthought, plante
d as it was smack in the middle of the parking lot. Geraniums grew in uniform clusters in colorful window boxes outside of every room.

  “You suppose they rent for whole nights, or just for a few hours at a time?” Carolyn quipped.

  Jake shook his head. “You’re such a snot.” He was careful to keep a smile in his voice.

  She chuckled. “Well, I can afford to be snotty when I’m so fashionably dressed.” He hadn’t thought about it until that very minute, but they looked like hell. Sweaty, sunburned, barefoot, and filthy, they truly were quite a sight.

  “I need a nap,” he said, reaching for the tinted glass door to the office. The door pulled open easily.

  Like the building itself, the furniture was old yet clean. Sort of Early American, with some Colonial and Danish Modern thrown in for flavor.

  “How nice,” Carolyn mumbled sarcastically.

  “Shh,” Jake snapped. “Hello?” he called to the room. “Anybody here?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. “I feel like a burglar.”

  “Well, hi there!” The two of them jumped a foot as the clerk materialized from behind the counter. Pushing seventy, with a genuine smile brightening his stubbly face, the guy looked way too old to be greeting visitors at the counter. “Sorry, folks. Didn’t mean to startle you. Name’s Terrell. Can I help you?” Terrell’s smile remained unchanged, but his eyes darkened as he took in his visitors’ appearance. “Y’all okay? You look sorta… Well, everythin’ okay?”

  Carolyn opened her mouth to answer, but Jake touched her back lightly. “We’re fine, thanks,” he said. “But we’ve had a bit of an accident. Mind if we use your phone to call the police?”

  Suddenly, Terrell’s smile disappeared, replaced with a deep, concerned scowl. He hurried out from behind his counter. “Goodness, folks,” he said, motioning them toward some chairs. “You hurt?”