Apocalypse blues x-1

by Walter Greatshell

  "I don't feel alive. I feel like one of those things we left behind, like I'm walking around dead and just don't know it." He sat against the sink and began to cry, saying, "God, I'm so lonely."

  I reached out and stroked his hair. "Hey, hey," I said. "It's okay. We all feel that way, which means none of us is alone."

  "I know… I just keep thinking about my dad. Not Albemarle-I mean my real father. He went away when I was about two, so I never really knew him. My mother and sister told me he was dead, so as I got older I built him up into this tragic hero, this mythological father figure. Needless to say, I preferred this phantom dad to a real stepfather. Finally, my mother admitted to me that not only was my dad still alive, but he was in prison for trying to kill her. I refused to listen to anything she said, but after our last big implosion, she took me down South to visit him."

  "Oh my God."

  "Yeah. She sent me into the visiting room alone, so it was a little scary. And-big shock-he was just this guy. Nothing special, just an old burnout with greasy hair and bad teeth. And he knew how he looked to me, too, because the only thing he said was, 'What the fuck you expect, coming here? This ain't no Hallmark card. Go home and tell that bitch she can shove her divorce up her ass.'"

  "That's terrible!"

  "Yeah-he's a douchebag. Or was. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing does." Hector wept for a little while, holding the edge of my fur cape. "It's so soft," he sniffed.

  "Yours, too," I said, stroking his shoulder. All at once, something inside me gave way: I put my arms around him and crushed his body against mine, smothering us both in fur. For a second he recoiled, then clutched me to him, convulsing with emotion. It felt good to cry.

  After a moment we relaxed, heaving chest to chest, and he looked at me searchingly. "God, you're beautiful," he said.

  "No I'm not. If anything I'm weird-looking."

  He chuckled softly. "No you're not. Here, I'll show you." He took something from his pocket: a stub of grease pencil.

  "What are you doing?" I said, leaning away.

  "Don't worry," he said. "I won't bite."

  "What's that for?"

  "Just a little touch-up. It'll come right off." He made a curlicue in the air. "I wouldn't do anything to embarrass you, Lulu. Ever."

  "Okay… just watch the cheek." I submitted, while he made some marks on my face. It felt strange to have his face right in mine as he drew, so that I could study the tortoiseshell brown of his eyes, his every tiny mole. The pressure of the pencil and his baked-bread smell caused a ticklish heat to spread through my body. Without thinking about it, I leaned that extra few inches and kissed him.

  He broke off before I did, leaning back with a grin to inspect his handiwork. Then he got up off the sink and stood me in front of the mirror. In the smeared reflection I could see a striking cat-girl, oval face framed in a fur hood, with black-tipped nose and whiskers. It was not a tragic face. It was a face that belonged to a whimsical world free of the shitty buckets and cold that defined this one. I nodded, eyes welling with tears again.

  "I like it," I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  "This is bullshit," said Mr. Monte the next day. It had been twenty hours since we'd been dropped off. "We don't have a clue when they're comin' back, and they've stranded us out here with nothin'. Meanwhile, we've left them a boatload of supplies fit for a king. It ain't right."

  Everyone was awake, though it was as dark as ever. We had shared out whatever candy and snacks people had brought, and once more the Brits had made tea, but as soon as this meager breakfast was over, we were all restless. We weren't accustomed to having free time. There was nothing to do except listen to the men argue downstairs.

  Albemarle was trying to remain positive: "Hey, we have heat, we have lights. We have water. If you think about it, it hasn't really been that long-"

  "Those friggin' utilities are electric-powered," said Monte. "They're only givin' us back a little bit of what they're gettin' in spades from the boat's reactor. It's our own juice! They ain't doin' us no favors."

  "And where's the CO? Where's Coombs?" demanded DeLuca. "What the hell are they thinking, cutting us off like this? Now we're just fuckin' civilians again, is that it? After we been covering their asses all this time? I'm sorry, but we've earned the right to at least know what's going on. At least. I'll tell you what: I'm about ready to go and ask. They don't want to come to us? Fuck 'em, we'll go to them."

  DeLuca's idea resonated with the frustrated men and soon snowballed into a plan: If four more hours went by with no word, a miniexpedition would be sent out to find Thule's headquarters. It wasn't expected to be far away-just a matter of following the packed-down road taken by the buses. At the very least we could walk back to the sub.

  I say "we" because I was going along. When I heard what was being discussed, I piped up, "Excuse me, but I'd like to volunteer to go." Before they could dismiss me out of hand, I said, "It'll be harder for them to turn you away if you have suffering children with you. Believe me, I know-my mother used me as a weapon all the time. People get self-conscious about their behavior when kids are around. They're afraid of looking cruel."

  "Lulu"-Albemarle sighed-"you don't know what you're talking about. This is a military base on highest alert. They're not gonna give a shit. Go back upstairs."

  I didn't budge. "Well, what chance do you think you guys have, then?" I asked.

  "Probably nil, but at least they'll have to take notice of us. Even getting arrested would be better than nothing."

  "But that's just it," I said. "They can't arrest kids. They're not prepared for kids. We're your ace in the hole. Send in a children's crusade, and all the bureaucracy falls apart."

  "What horseshit," scoffed Albemarle.

  "Oh really? Well, it got me in the gates of your factory, Albemarle. It got me past you. Why am I here among you now, when everyone knows women are a plague on mankind?" Suddenly I clasped my hands together and gave them my most yearning, guileless eyes. "Please, sir," I begged weepily. "My daddy is in there. Please let me go see my daddy."

  The men looked at me like I was a monster. But they knew I was right.

  Cold or not, it was good to be out doing something. There were nine of us: DeLuca, Albemarle, myself, and all the boys I knew best-Hector, Julian, Jake, Shawn, Cole, and Lemuel. This time they wanted to go with me. We followed the road across broad snowfields, with dark blue hills on one side and an endless sloping plain on the other. Somewhere down there it became the frozen sea, but it was impossible to tell where.

  As we walked, the two men traded furtive glugs from a pint bottle-part of the swag from the cruise ship-and when we noticed, they told us it was "cold medicine."

  At one point Lemuel said, "Hey, is that the boat?"

  He was right. Far away across the flats we could see specks of light. I felt a strange twinge of loss to see it, and the feeling surprised me-when had I become attached to that submarine? Or maybe it was only the sense of forward motion I was attached to. We all felt something, because the boys stopped heckling each other and became very somber. Shawn recited a strange little poem:

  One bright day in the middle of the night, Two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. When the deaf policeman heard this noise, He came out and shot the two dead boys.

  We came up on more empty barracks, dust-bowl homesteads rising from the plains, then gradually other shuttered structures, one labeled BX and another labeled USO. Except for all the oil tanks, radio towers, and radomes, it could have been a deserted frontier town. Wind whistled through the wires.

  "What the hell's going on here?" DeLuca said. "Is this the goddamned base or isn't it?"

  Albemarle replied, "They're around here somewhere. Look!" He pointed out a thin curl of smoke rising from one of the buildings set back from the main street. There were two snowmobiles with little trailers parked by the entrance. "Now we're getting somewhere."


  "Those LCACs we saw didn't come from there, Ed. We're missing something."

  "One thing at a time."

  We wallowed through the snow to the glass doors and went inside. There was a kind of air lock to preserve warmth, and on the other side of that a pile of broken furniture heaped to the ceiling. It was warm in there, and the woodsmoke was so thick it was almost overpowering. Yellow firelight flickered through hundreds of tiny windows that covered the inner walls-they were mailboxes. There was muted conversation coming from behind them.

  "It's the APO," whispered Albemarle. "The base post office."

  "No shit," said DeLuca.

  A sooty canvas flap covered the opening to the sorting area. Very cautiously, Albemarle lifted it, and we all peeked inside. "Jesus," he whispered.

  In the middle of the floor there was a makeshift stove fashioned from heating ducts, and a group of Inuit men camped around it. In the firelight, they looked like hunter-gatherers from some prehistoric age. They were toasting Pop-Tarts. When they saw us I felt a thrill of fear, not knowing what they might do.

  It was not much. Most of them glanced our way and went back to their own business. Only one got to his feet and came over, looking us up and down with a jaded air. It wasn't that we weren't strange-it was that he had seen it all.

  "Do you speak English?" asked Albemarle. "Any of you?"

  The man said something using the word "English," but he clearly didn't speak it. His consonant-rich native language, every other syllable ending in uk or ak or ik, was impenetrable. He was trying to incorporate foreign words for our benefit, but none of them were English. Several times he repeated, "Hvor kommer du fra?"

  "Is that Danish?" Albemarle asked.

  "I wouldn't know," replied DeLuca. "Now if it was Italian…"

  Annunciating clearly, Albemarle asked the man, "Where is the air base? Air base-Thule?" He flew his hand through the air like a little plane, with sound effects.

  "Smoke-um peace pipe," Jake said in my ear. Lemuel slugged him.

  One of the men at the fire said something that sounded like kapluna, and all the Inuit laughed. The one who was speaking to us led us outside and pointed in the direction we'd been heading.

  "Valhalla," he said. "Air base."

  "The base is that way?" said Albemarle. "How far?" He waggled his fingers like tiny legs. "Close enough to walk?"

  The man made a chopping motion with his arm and repeated, "Valhalla." It seemed to suggest that we were coming to the end.

  "That's good enough for me," said Mr. DeLuca. "Let's go. I gotta get my blood circulating."

  We thanked the man as best we could and went on our way. Shawn complained, "Shoulda taken those snowmobiles."

  "Oh that'd be good," I replied. "Let's see if we can get ourselves killed by the natives."

  "What do you mean 'we,' paleface?" said Lemuel.

  It wasn't far. Looming up before us at the far edge of town was a wall of plowed snow at least twenty feet high. Its crest mimicked the horizon in the dark, or we would have noticed it much sooner. There was no telling where it ended on either side-it snaked across the land like the Great Wall of China-but straight ahead of us we could see a fenced gap where the road passed through.

  "That's one big-ass pile of snow," remarked Cole.

  We ventured up to the base of the thing, abashed by our relative puniness. There were no sentries at the gate, no signs, but also no way through. We could see cleared ground on the other side, but nothing beyond that because of an inner mound blocking the view. We could hear something, though: faint sounds of machinery… churning diesels and the high, silvery whine of turbines. It sounded like an airport, and a moment later looked like one as the sound reached a high pitch and we practically had to duck for a chunky gray cargo plane that climbed screaming into the sky right over us, fat wheels dangling like curled talons.

  "That's it," said DeLuca, eagerly rubbing his hands. "That's definitely it. Now we just need to let them know we're here."

  Albemarle pulled out the megaphone he had used at the ship. Instead of using it himself, however, he handed it to me, saying, "Let 'er rip, Little Orphan Annie."

  "Oh," I said. The scarf covering my face was a frozen caul, and I had to peel it off. "Okay… uh: GREETINGS, THULE AIR BASE. UM, I'M LOUISE PANGLOSS-FROM THE BIG SUBMARINE?-AND I'M HERE BECAUSE WE'VE BEEN LEFT ALONE SO LONG WE GOT SCARED YOU MIGHT HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT US. WE'RE COLD AND HUNGRY AND ARE WONDERING WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE CREW AND COMMANDER COOMBS… AND ALSO MY FATHER, FRED COWPER. HE WAS VERY SICK WHEN I SAW HIM LAST. WE HAVE WALKED A LONG WAY AND ARE VERY, VERY TIRED. PLEASE LET US IN. PLEASE HELP."

  Albemarle looked at me approvingly. "Well, if that don't do it, nothing will."

  We waited a long time, but there was no sign of activity. They directed me to try again, and keep trying every few minutes, but halfway through my second plea, the megaphone died.

  "Batteries maybe," Albemarle said after examining the thing. "Or maybe the cold. We can try to warm it up a little and see."

  DeLuca erupted. "Fuck that. I'd like to get noticed before my toes turn black and fall off, if it's okay with you. They obviously can't hear that thing. What I propose to do is scale the wall and have a look-see, maybe signal them by flashlight. Shoulda done that in the first place." Without waiting for approval, he climbed the roadside embankment and plunged into deep snow, making for the barrier.

  Albemarle watched him for a minute, then shrugged, and said to us, "What are you waitin' for? You heard the man." We all followed behind.

  It was hard going. The snow was tartlike, its icy crust just barely too weak to support a person's full weight, so that every step ended in a plunge and a battle to break free. I kept losing my boots. In the time it took us to slog over, Mr. DeLuca was halfway to the top, working his way up a heap of rubble at the base of the wall. The bottom was steep, imprinted with a bulldozer's curved blade, but it had collapsed in places, and wind-blown snow had formed deep drifts that rose high up the sides. He was using one of these as an awkward ramp.

  "Could stand to have… some snowshoes," he grunted.

  "You're okay," said Albemarle from below. "You're almost there." He was heftier and less agile than DeLuca, and was treading the snow as if stomping grapes, trying to beat down a path. Suddenly he struck something underfoot and absently aimed his flashlight there. He stopped moving.

  "What?" said Hector.

  Albemarle slowly bent down and prized a large crooked object from the snow, holding it before the light.

  It was a human arm gripping a.45 automatic pistol.

  Rock-solid and perfectly preserved in its stiff glove and fur-lined sleeve, it looked like a limb from a mannequin. As we approached in sickly wonderment, Albemarle handed off the disturbing relic to his stepson and hunkered back down in the glowing scrape, his underlit face ghoulish as a grave robber's. Hector took the arm as a matter of pure reflex, then didn't know what to do with it.

  The snow was full of bodies… or rather parts of bodies, tangled and bound together in the ice like freezer leftovers. Crablike hands and hairy heads and torsos and boot soles and pink-boned stumps all glistened underfoot. Everywhere we stepped, there was more. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at how calm we all were, considering how much we'd been through already.

  "Gus!" Albemarle called, holding a tiny silver leaf pin up to the light. "Get down here!"

  DeLuca had reached the top and was oblivious to what was happening with us-something on the far side of the berm had his complete attention. "Sweet Jesus," he said in awe.

  "Gus! Gus, you gotta see this!"

  Shaking his head, Deluca said, "No, Ed, you gotta see this."

  "There's a bunch of dead airmen down here."

  "What?"

  "A bunch of dead men under the snow!" He took the arm back from Hector and waved it in the air. "Look!"

  DeLuca switched on his flashlight and shined it down. At that second there was a loud ZAP! and the flashlight tumbled down th
e slope, its bulb gone red. Other, larger objects were also tumbling, but DeLuca himself was nowhere to be seen. I blinked, not sure what had just happened.

  Albemarle flicked his beam up the wall, then immediately turned it off, and shouted, "Everyone back! Back the way we came, fast! Run!" We all saw what he had seen, what was left of Mr. DeLuca, and we did not hesitate.

  Running in that deep snow was exactly the same as trying to run in a dream. You lunge forward as hard as you can, but your feet have no purchase and a maddening, dull force holds you back. It seems as if you are actually going slower than you would by walking. Our short sprint back to the road was such a Sisyphean ordeal, and just as we were reaching its hard-frozen shoulder, we realized it was no use anyway. The fence flew open and a blue school bus rolled out, wheezing to a stop before our frozen noses. They had us.

  "Everyone get behind me," Albemarle said, out of breath.

  The door opened on a jolly Inuit waving us in. He was wearing a top hat. There was no one else on board.

  "What the fuck, man?" wailed Shawn. "Why'd you assholes have to kill him? You didn't have to kill him!" The driver's big bronze face was cheerily befuddled, uncomprehending. He seemed to have no idea what was going on.

  Albemarle raggedly told us to get on the bus, and what else was there to do? We trooped in like a work gang fresh from the gulag, collapsing into the front rows. I think we were more resigned than horrified. Personally I was grateful for the ride, even if we were just going to be returned to our doomed ghetto. And as the bus began to move, it did take us back the way we had come… for a moment. Then the driver found a wide enough spot in the road to turn around. Shortly, we returned to the gate and passed through with impunity, not that we cared.

  In a low, cracked voice, Jake sang, "Eighty-eight bottles of beer on the wall…" Then trailed off.

  Out the windows we could see what Gus DeLuca had seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was an airplane city, a City of the Planes, so crowded it was more rookery than airport, with hundreds of jumbo and lesser jets making up a dense belt-a great thorny briar of silver fins and fuselages-surrounding a many-lobed dome complex of such incredible size that at first glance I thought it was a glacier.