by Sergio Gomez
They didn’t say anything else for a moment until another one of Charlie’s concerns popped back into his head halfway down the corridor. “Los Noches got John, right?”
“Yeah, they did mijo.”
“That makes me sad.”
“It makes me sad, too.” Alejandro said.
“You think him and his wife are in heaven together right now, Pa?”
“I’m not sure, but if they are, I bet they’re both rooting for us.”
“You think his wife forgives him for leaving her behind?”
“I do, I think she’d understand that he did what he had to, to survive.”
“Would you have left mommy behind?”
Alejandro put a hand on his son’s back and guided him down the corridor. He wanted to say that he wouldn’t, but that was easy to say when you’re not in the situation. “I won’t be leaving you behind, let’s just leave it at that.”
They went down the steps in silence. And this time, the creaking of the steps didn’t scare Charlie. They didn’t scare him one bit.
16
They were packed up and ready to go early in the morning. Both of them were feeling refreshed from the little bit of sleep they got the night before, and despite the scares and dangers, they were both excited to get on the road.
The junk they had taken out of the back of the pickup truck to make room for their own belongings sat on the grass by the truck like unsold yard sale items. A large flock of birds flew by up in the clear sky, casting their fast moving shadows on the dry grass below.
Charlie sat in the passenger seat of the truck looking at his dad through the rearview mirror. Alejandro was in the bed of the truck going through the bags. He pulled out a bottle half full of Vodka, one of the many parting gifts from their friend John, and tucked it into the back of his jeans
“Alright Charlie, I’ll be back.” Alejandro said, jumping off from the bed of the truck with two paper cups in his hands.
Charlie gave him a thumbs-up.
He headed for a door on the side of the church, a door that had caught his eye because it looked ancient and couldn’t imagine it opening without parts of it disintegrating. He was about to find out if that was true.
Alejandro grabbed the knob and opened it, half expecting to see piles of bones belonging to humans, animals, or monsters, or any combination of those, really.
But when the door was wide open the reality was a lot less exciting. It was a janitor’s closet that looked to have been abandoned even long before The Chaos. There was an old dusty mop in the corner, a single roll of toilet paper (still wrapped) sitting on a big metal shelf, and a spray bottle in pieces in the middle of the floor.
Green moss grew on the stone walls, starting from the corners and going at least four feet across. It made Alejandro think of the broken down cars in the little town they had just come from, the way that Nature had been creeping up to claim them, these walls too would be claimed by Nature. The stone would be buried underneath a thick layer of moss in the coming months like if someone had covered them in wallpaper.
This was as good a spot as he was going to find. Alejandro put the paper cups on the shelf and then turned back and went over to where John’s body laid next to the truck. He shooed the flies that were feeding off the hot blood. The mob buzzed all around him angrily as if standing their ground and then most of them took off to have lunch elsewhere. Only a few stubborn ones stuck around.
Alejandro halted up John’s body by the armpits. He grunted as the dead weight came down on his arms, loud enough that Charlie heard.
“You need help?” Charlie asked, his head sticking out of the truck’s window.
“No, I’m fine.” Alejandro said, and dragged the dead body a couple of feet.
Charlie saw he was able to do it himself and his head disappeared back inside the truck.
Huffing and puffing the whole time and at a snail’s pace, he finally got John into the janitor’s room. With one more grunt he dragged him all the way through it until they were by the metal shelf. Here he leaned John against the wall so that his body was sitting up.
“Well…John, I’m sorry you couldn’t come with us.” Alejandro said, feeling a little odd that he was talking to a corpse.
“You asked me to have a drink when we first met, and I turned it down. Well, now I’m accepting. A little too late, but what the hell.”
He grabbed the paper cups off the shelf and filled both with Vodka. He put one by John’s side and the other he downed in one swig.
“The other one’s for you, my dear friend.”
He turned on his heels and walked out of the room. As he closed the door, a hopeful part of him anticipated John calling out to him that he wasn’t actually dead. “Don’t close that door and leave me in the dark, amigo. This heart’s still tickin’!”
But of course, that was just crazy thoughts. So he closed the door. Turning to face the sunny day, he could still feel the burn of the alcohol in his throat. In his stomach, too.
He walked across the lawn back to the truck, and everything burned.
PART II: RADIO FINDINGS
1
They spent the morning winding through desolate roads between heavily wooded areas and expanses of green fields. These were the kinds of roads that were almost always empty even before the population had been reduced by The Chaos.
The Chaos was what the papers had been calling all of the madness. When there was still enough semblance of civilization for there to be papers delivered to people’s doorsteps and news channels to broadcast on people’s TV sets. If the times were to be described by the face of a clock, the current hour would be 12 o’clock. In comparison, when the term “The Chaos” was being used in media outlets, it was 8 o’clock.
At 9 o’clock the cities had officially been declared warzones by the government. Military units, including armored cars and tanks, began strolling in to Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle.
At 10 o’clock the city streets were full of gunfights; soldiers shooting soldiers, civilians shooting civilians, soldiers shooting civilians, and civilians shooting soldiers. There was looting and riots that escalated to the point of cars being lit on fire and establishments being turned upside-down and inside-out.
When the clock struck 11, Los Noches surfaced from whatever dark holes they came from. Word about them began to spread, at first dismissed with the same air that people would dismiss a UFO or Bigfoot sighting, but then the creatures reproduced at a rapid pace, and more and more people began to see them in the nights. They began to own the nights, to take them over with their sheer strength and numbers. And it became undeniable to everyone that a new species of animal—if they could be classified as that, there weren’t any scientists still working in labs when they showed up to run DNA tests on what they were exactly—was amongst them.
The nights became too dangerous for humans, only a few intrepid souls would dare wander around in the dark, and these souls would quickly be added to the growing death count when Los Noches spotted them. They’d get ripped to shreds and their remains taken back to where Los Noches resided.
No one really knew what had caused The Chaos. Depending on whom you’d ask you’d get a different answer. Asking a man drinking in the center of Philadelphia and he’d tell you it was the people wanting to take some of the power from the police force. Asking a man in San Francisco he’d say something about it being a republican scheme to try to eradicate all of the ghettos and gay neighborhoods by turning the cities into warzones underneath a guise. Pressed to tell what the guise was, he wouldn’t be able to come up with an answer, but he’d reiterate that The Chaos was the republicans’ fault, that much he was sure of. Asking a man in New York City would elicit a response about how it was the people being fed up with the deliberate racism in the country and that The Chaos had stemmed from an ethnic uprising.
No one had been right, but no one had been wrong, either. The Chaos was real, and in the hour betw
een 11 o’clock and 12 o’clock, everything had been destroyed.
2
Alejandro sat in the truck, lost in thoughts of The Chaos while Charlie was somewhere in the woods by the road going “number two”. Back then he had trust in the government and the people that the country would get out of this unscathed and the US would continue to thrive. The trust had been misplaced.
He looked down at the gun sitting in his lap. He felt like a man who had just participated in a magic trick because he wasn’t sure how or when the gun had gotten from his holster to his lap, but at some point when he had been thinking about The Chaos he had pulled it out.
Looking down at the shiny gray metal object, a new sensation overcame him, a sensation similar to an attraction. Either way, this newfound feeling guided him to open his mouth, and stick the barrel into it.
The gun sat in his mouth for a few seconds, then he took it out and stared down at the barrel. The safety was on, but just the same the sensation of having the gun in his mouth had sped up his heartbeat. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
He had thought about killing himself if Charlie had been killed by Los Noches back at the church—the first time he had ever thought about suicide—and sitting here now thinking about the hell they lived in, the same thoughts returned and stamped themselves into his brain. He’d kill himself if Charlie died, there was no question about it.
But for now, he wanted to just see how it’d feel the seconds before he did it. He stuck the gun in his mouth again.
It didn’t feel good, not good at all. The cold steel in his mouth was like a chunk of ice if a chunk of ice could end it all at the twitch of the muscles in his finger. He took the gun out, and looked down the barrel. It was round and dark, darker than he had ever realized the barrel of gun was; it was like staring into the abyss. Then he stuck it into his mouth again, but it didn’t feel any better this third time.
He put the gun back down on his lap and stared at it again. Charlie emerged out of the woods from his business and opened the truck door.
“Wait, wait, stay out there.”
Another thing that had been weighing on him popped in his mind. It was the opposite of what he would do if Charlie died. What would Charlie do if he was the one to go? He’d taught him how to cook, how to bandage wounds using things other than bandages, how to start a fire, etc. basically a crash course on basic survival skills he had been taught in the Mexican army when he was a teen. But the one thing he hadn’t taught Charlie was how to shoot.
Charlie watched with confusion as his dad unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the truck.
“Dad?” Charlie said standing from the other side of the truck.
“I have to show you something.”
Alejandro went through the junk in the back of the truck and found what he was looking for underneath a pile of shredded Styrofoam and broken bits of wood. With the three cans in his hands he started for the woods the same way Charlie had come from.
Charlie stood in place, still confused as to what was happening.
“Vamos!” Alejandro called.
Charlie jogged to catch up with him. He saw the cans in his hands. “Dad…are you going to show me how to use the gun?”
“You have to learn how to use it.”
Charlie remembered what Alejandro had said the night he asked him about the gun. It was a snow day so he had no school and Charlie was in his parents’ room on the floor reading a Spider-Man comic book. Alejandro was getting dressed to go to work. While his dad was rifling through the clothes hangers looking for the shirt he would wear that day, Charlie caught a glimpse of something silver-colored over top the pages of his comic book. He put the book down and when his dad moved another hanger he got a better look at what was shining in the back of the closet.
“Is that where you keep your money?”
“Huh?” Alejandro had almost forgotten his son was in the room with him. He turned to see what Charlie was looking at. “Oh, that? Nope. We keep our money in the bank, you know, where we go on Fridays and Teresa gives you those green lollipops you like.”
“Oh.” He looked at the safe intently, wanting to figure out what his dad kept in there without having to be told. “So mommy has a giant jewel in there?”
He had seen that in a plot of one of his Saturday morning cartoons—Bugs Bunny or something.
Alejandro chuckled. “Nope.”
Charlie gave up. “So what’s in there?”
“It’s where daddy keeps his gun to protect the house in case any bad guys come in.”
“Oh,” millions of new questions came rushing in to his nine-year old mind. “You ever use it on anyone?”
“Nope, and I don’t plan to ever use it on anyone. It’s there just in case.”
Alejandro was dressed now and sat on the bed. He picked Charlie up and sat him on his lap.
“Just in case of what?” Charlie asked.
“In case I need it.”
“When do you shoot it?”
“I shoot it when I go to the range with Martin, but that’s the only place I shoot it. Having a gun is a big responsibility, and when you have one you have to be careful of when to use it.” Alejandro took Charlie off his lap and put him on the ground. “Don’t forget that, okay mijo?”
And he hadn’t forgotten that lesson. Trailing behind his dad through the woods now, the echoes of that lesson played in his mind.
“Los Noches are more dangerous than I thought. If we find another gun somewhere I want you to keep it.” Alejandro said, walking a pace Charlie was power-walking to keep up with. “And if you’re going to have your own gun, you’re going to need to know how to shoot it, you understand?”
Up until last night they had been able to avoid Los Noches. Most of their observations of them had been from afar and they had seen the results of their ruthlessness after the fact.
It was a different thing to be in immediate danger of them, Alejandro had realized this when he had locked eyes with the one in the church.
Outrunning them was out of the question. Trying to fend them off with a weapon that didn’t shoot would be suicide. Guns would be the only equalizer between them and Los Noches.
They stopped walking when they came to a rotted tree that had fallen on its side. Alejandro lined the three cans up on top of the tree. Then he took the gun out and told Charlie to follow him. They walked about a hundred feet away from where the cans were setup then they turned to face them.
Alejandro stuck the gun out toward Charlie, who in turn looked at it like it was a snake rattling its tail. “Go ahead, take it.”
Charlie took it with inexplicable reluctance. “I…don’t know if I can shoot it.”
“Sure you can,” Alejandro said licking his cracked lips, “I’ll walk you through it.”
But that didn’t make the look of worry disappear from Charlie’s face.
“First, take the safety off.” He said, pointing to the switch on top of the gun.
When it was off, Charlie looked back at Alejandro for the next step, even though the next steps were self-explanatory. Aim and fire.
“Take a stance where you feel confident you’ll be able to take the recoil, and then aim.”
Charlie stood the way he had seen the heroes in the movies do—and his dad. He aimed at the first tomato can. “Dad, don’t you think this is enough already. I think I get the idea.”
“No, I want you to feel the gun in your hands. Shoot the cans.”
Charlie took in a deep breath. “Dad, I really don’t want to.”
“Do it!”
He could feel his legs start to shake, and he tried to calm himself down. The trigger was just like his toy gun, only this one wasn’t made of orange plastic and it wouldn’t shoot soft darts when he pulled on it. This one was the real thing, a trigger that has the power to end life when it’s pulled.
He aimed at the first can on the right, and shot the gun. The bullet shot out with a pop that echoed through the trees and disturbed the bir
ds, they flew away and slapped against the leaves. The recoil was heavier than he had anticipated and his hands flew up toward his face. His wrist smashed into his nose.
Charlie screamed in pain as his nose gushed with blood and tears blurred his vision.
Alejandro reacted quickly and took the gun from his son’s hands. “Wipe your nose and take the gun again.”
“Dad, I think I broke my nose—“
“It’s not broken, even if it is, that shouldn’t stop you. Those monsters won’t stop if you broke your nose, would they? Now wipe your nose and take the gun.” He pointed the butt toward him. “Go, take it.”
Charlie wiped the tears from his eyes and the blood from his nose, and then took the gun back.
“Imagine if you would have done that while Los Noches were after you. You’d have blinded yourself, now you know what to expect. Take another shot and be mindful of the recoil.”
His vision was just beginning to become clear again when he aimed the gun. The first shot had missed the can by a long shot. He had really just shot it to shoot, but this time he intended to hit it so this could be over.
He took aim again and shot. The recoil made his hands fritz like he was holding an electrical eel, and he missed again. Not as far off as the first shot, but still not close enough to end the lesson.
“Again,” Alejandro ordered.
Charlie took another shot that missed, but this one was closer. He was beginning to get used to holding the gun and wasn’t as nervous anymore. He shot again. Missed.
Again. Another miss.
Again. This one clipped the top of the can.
“Almost.” Alejandro said flatly, not at all like when Charlie almost hit a homerun at baseball practice.
Charlie felt a surge of excitement go through him like nothing he had ever felt before, and he knew that his dad was right. A gun did give you the kind of power you had to be responsible with.
He took aim again, his vision more focused in on the can than before now that he felt confident with the gun in his hands.
