by Saro Yen
I kick out the bits of campfire ember that have been kicked into the grass before they start something really big. For good measure I pour some bottles over any glowing red I can see. Then, looking around at the dark forest edges I make the executive decision that the two of us will sleep in the Beast tonight instead of under the stars as I’d been considering before the buck tore through our campsite.
I make sure Charley is watered and that he goes behind a tree and then usher him into the truck cab. I take Teresa out and put her on the grass (there you go babe) so that I can recline both our seats. Charley curls up into a ball on the passenger’s side and I lie there with my arms crossed. I close my eyes and try to rest but open them again onto the sight of the dead buck again.
I was never much of a hunter, though I tried to be. Years of accompanying old college friends to some tree blind or some prime patch of game preserve had made me somewhat resigned to the realities: I could not shoot worth a damn, and I found hunting peculiarly boring. When I finally did kill something I felt a disquieting remorse for what I had killed, an emotion that I kept well hidden, not that this was hard among all the slightly drunk wooping and hollering and shoulder slapping. I ponder this. I hadn’t really felt much the other day when my survival had been on the line. And here, now, the same. Have I become hardened to it, then?
I can only look upon the once living thing and think: what a waste. Can I even take it with me? I don’t even know how to field dress the damn thing. Eventually sense comes to me and I decide I can’t. Why bother?
I close my eyes and sleep.
7AM
In my dream they are tearing me apart. I can’t tell what kind of animal exactly. Maybe something like a hippo and a hyena put together. There’s the sensation of warm water. Or is it blood? And then there’s this low bellowing roar that’s almost distorted into a laugh.
I open my eyes and I see fur. Tan and great tufts of it. Sprigs and faint wisps roll in the barely moving air and settle in the wall of grass around us.
My eyes open wider. More solid walls of fur, the rooted bundles of it, and next my eyes settle on the solid ivory of teeth, no more yellow and red than the color of piano keys. Actually, so much red. There has been an explosion as if inside the buck I’d brought down the night before there had been planted a stick of dynamite. Blood, darkened here and there with oxidization, paints the grasses in a jagged radius. There is a dark stump where once there had been a two hundred pound animal, the antlers nowhere to be found, possibly dragged off trailing hunks of meat or whipped away in the savagery of the dismembering, The dark blood explodes up and like ash and soot paints the faces of a crowd of them, the lounging forms chewing on unidentifiable bits and ends: lions. A great mane-girded head turns, ringed by red on its outer edges, and from the center darkened with blood two yellow, guileless eyes stare at me. Then the blood stained teeth flash again. The bellow surprises me with its intensity and its lack of familiarity. These are no MGM lions.
“Jesus!” I say as the roar finally solidifies the pride of lions in my sleep numbed mind and I jump back in my seat and Charley jumps up in his. Immediately he begins to bark and the darkened faces all turn towards me. It would be comical if it weren’t so terrifying, all those bright eyes in the midst of dark masks composed of blood and entrails. I try to calm Charley. I pat him and try to put my hand over his snout. In my head I can see it already, the whole pride of them getting up, attracted by the tinned barking from inside this strange container. See them coming over. See the giant meaty paws take swipes at the glass. See the spider web cracks spreading across the glass. See the glass shattering. See the meaty, claw tipped paw shooting into the cabin right at me. See a final gruesome flash of a gristle smeared face, a tongue flicking out to wipe away a piece of what once had been me from a whisker.
But the forms before me, prone, seem to lose interest. Their heads lower again down to the piece of carcass they had been working. One set of gnarly teeth begin to gnaw at a hip bone that must be as big as my head. I gulp.
I must be dreaming. Am I still dreaming? The last thing I did was go to sleep right? Or hallucinating. I slap myself. No, still there. I slap myself again. This is definitely here before me. But then, is this any crazier than the tally of things that now registers in my mind, all that’s happened in the last few days?
Then something comes to me from out of my past. Something from high school. I’m reminded again that I’m in Texas. So much open land. Wildlife parks and animal sanctuaries abound. Hell, we had one of those wild safari’s right across the empty field from Stephen F. Austin High. Every lunch time we watched the necks of giraffes crane over the distant tree line. We imitated their cud chewing except on stale, once frozen chicken nuggets and canned corn.
It doesn’t take much to imagine that hungry lions will cross measly fencing to get to food. They’d find a way, I posit. And almost as if in confirmation of this, I see the scars on the beasties’ hides. On all of their hides, as if they followed one by one like soldiers in black and white movies through the gap in the chain link fence or barb wire. That image makes me laugh. The cowardly lion in his green combat helmet. The laugh draws the chagrin of Charley who whines at the highest pitch I’ve ever heard and the whine draws the ire of the lions. Somehow, despite all the barking, THIS seems to make them all forget about the feast before them and turn towards the Beast.
“Oh shit boy. Now you’ve done it.”
More whining.
“Only making things worse bud.”
The big male lumbers over and pounces on the hood. Instinctively my eyes are drawn to the splayed digits of its massive paws, long knife points protruding from the tip of each. I push back in my seat again as if the metal and glass between us were simply air. Charley, the more nimble and unconstrained of the two of us leaps into the back seat and cowers in the shade.
I laugh. Fuck me and fuck this situation I laugh. “You coward!” I scream to the back seat. I honk the horn but the big cat, now lounging on my hood, a tarp of muscle and fur thrown over my entire windshield, remains still and unperturbed. I can’t stop cackling like a maniac as I crank the engine. This finally startles the furry mass monopolizing my windshield. The lion is quick on its paws and hops off. Then it’s doubled back and comes forward to investigate my side.
I honk the horn again to no avail. Not even a wince. Again it goes back on its haunches, rearing up and coming back down again on my side of the truck. I hear a sick crunch of metal as the supports holding up the side view mirror give in. The lion roars in what seems to be bewilderment and then takes a moment to lick his paw.
Charley whines another “Let’s get out of here, man!” The lion rears up again just as I throw the car into reverse. The Beast thumps over something and comes back down. The jolt makes a large sound and I see the other lions and lionesses get up and begin to chase after the Beast in its slow moving roll and glance in the rear view to notice the tree trunk in time to curse before I slam into it. I hear a disturbing crack and see the line branching across the back window.
Then I see it, a scene at first seemingly more grisly than the dismembered buck. A human hand stuck up out of the dirt. Legs and a crushed torso. A head of black hair. A familiar dress and metal ribs protruding from a skin of foam.
“Teresa!” I scream on realizing what that bump under the Beast’s tires had been. Did I kill her or did the lions do the deed?
It should be fucking funny, hilarious, but I’m not laughing anymore; I sober and throw the car into drive. The lion ‘pride’ is gathered in a circle around my car. It’s them or us I say to myself. I lay on the horn and I don’t let off while nudging the car forward. Now pulled away from the tree I check the back window: the crack is still just a singular crack thankfully. It looks like it will hold. I brush lion mass out of the way. This angers the males and they swipe and paw ineffectually at the metal body of the car.
“HaHAH!” I say as soon we’ve edged beyond the unappreciative and unwelcome audience an
d leave the lions behind. “Hot damn!”
“A bit of excitement, huh boy?”
Adrenaline is coursing through me now but I know that I will look on this incident in a few moments with a grim analysis, some sign of the end times having come and gone leaving me only with the lions and lambs. Sunday school thinking that I revert to whenever I require comfort. I look to the side to see if the lions are following and then remember: shit, I lost a side view mirror.
Then I start to laugh to myself. Does it really matter?
We drive towards the smoke in the distance.
3PM. I’ve only gone ten miles and the entire horizon is a gray shawl of smoke. The wind pulls it apart in tufts of dirty cotton from the charcoal scribble of what were once grass and trees. The wind is high and the grass blowing. I see loping herds of deer running past us. It seems like the smart direction. What the Hell am I thinking again?
I stop near a cluster of cars about half a mile before hitting the smoke. It already looks like Hell reconsidered, meaning all the times I had ever had need to imagine a Hell I determine now the image in my head then to be cliché, inadequate and my mind works backwards to retroactively correct my stilted imagination. Shit. I should turn back. I feel the wind picking up. It also feels like a really schizo, crazy wind, like any second it could turn and bring the fire back into all the unburned dry grass around me. In fact, looking at all the kindling around, I decide that this is the most likely outcome.
I’ve driven through smoke before, but nothing like this. About sixteen years ago, after I just got my learner’s permit, my pops was driving with me when we encountered another wildfire. It was already being driven back by firefighters and planes dropping powder dyed red but the cops had still blocked the highway because they didn’t want wrecks with the poor visibility. They’d stopped us outside of the plume of smoke, but then the wind shifted. We got into our car from where we were milling around on the side of the street watching operations. I remember my pops saying hold on and he took some old towels from the back and stuffed them all around the doors and vents. Didn’t matter though, smoke still came in. Although, looking at this fire now, I’m not so sure completely wrapping the car in Glad wrap will keep the smoke from coming through. I look for an overturned Wal-Mart truck nevertheless. No luck there.
I only have the quilt in the back and a sheet of canvas wrapped around my preserves and I have the crazy stupid thought: breathing is nice but I’d rather keep my preserves, thank you very much. I step outside, Charley following at my heels. Poor pup, warm winter. It must be seventy five maybe even hotter what with the fire right down the road and he’s panting something fierce. I check the nearby wrecks for anything that could be useful. The passenger cars got nada, but further on ahead I do see a flipped over trailer truck. It’s actually a big box, HEB. I go back to the Beast and get the big ole fire axe and return to the truck. I try to clear enough room to give a good whack, but Charley keeps getting in the way. I have to lure him back to the truck with some jerky and lock him in there. Then I get back to the business of busting open the truck. Feels like Christmas, I think, as the tip of the axe comes down and smacks the lock off. One hit. My technique is improving. I slide the door open, which, because the truck is on its side, means sliding it left. Bingo. There are boxes galore in the back and boxes mean padding, and I’m right. I cut through all the thick plastic shrink wrap with my knife. When I open the boxes, I find blenders galore and along with that packing galore. The blenders are already in boxes and in between the boxes are sheets and sheets of blown foam insulation. I tip the large boxes over and claw all the blender boxes inside out onto the highway and grab the sheets of plastic and blown foam padding. I do this with a couple of boxes so I’ll have enough to do all the windows and doors.
I sit there and stare for a while at the cornucopia of blenders. It seems a shame but there’s nothing for it. Any more than one blender would be simply useless to me. And even one is useless to me right now anyway. Still, something nags at me. Despite the danger on the horizon I dig deeper into the truck. What’s on my mind is the possibility of smoke getting into the cabin, of running out of air, Before long I’ve broken into the boxes where the light stuff is, tunneling around all the heavy crap like refrigerators and washers. On the asphalt behind the truck there’s a mountain of useless crap.
Or maybe not. There’s a bag of giant, heavy duty balloons. I look around the rest of the crap for a pump. Appliances. No. Packaged toys. Bleh. Mounds of clothes. Paperback books. Bicycles. Close, but no. Shit yes! I find a foot operated pump and quickly get it out of its wrapper. For the next few minutes as the wind blows the fire closer I pump furiously. When I’m done I tie balloons off and then string them together with some strong twine. I decide ten is a good number and run back to the truck where Charley is barking his head off. I tie the balloons to the ties that extend over the truck bed cover. Just in case. Hopefully I won’t need it.
I get back in the truck and Charley covers my faces with a second skin of dog saliva. I say “Well boy, into Hell we ride.” I put the Beast into gear and gun it towards the scrim of smoke.
As he has become used to doing by now, Charley looks at me and does that open mouthed turn of the head and a little whine, pinched up at the end: Are you insane?
I pat his lopsided head and push the truck through the thick smoke, hoping that my pre-emptive measures, the cloth and plastic over all the vents and sandwiched in the doors will keep the cab from filling up. My optimism proves unfounded and soon we’re all coughing our lungs out. My eyes tear up and it becomes even harder to see, but I continue on because stopping will most certainly mean death for us both. I’ve got the car in the grass but hug the very edge of the shoulder and the asphalt grinding against the very edge of the tire is the only re-assurance I have that we’re not veering into deeper smoke and fire. The smoke inside the cab grows so thick I’m starting to have trouble seeing my own hands on the wheel.
My wits returned to me I understand the gravity of the situation and I drop my lead foot on the pedal. The headlamps and big spotlights angled down from the roof hardly shine a few feet in front of the pickup but there’s no lingering in this Hell. I have to almost rely on innate instinct, or so I like to think, and I swerve here and there, not even knowing if I’m dodging anything at all or if next moment I’ll smack into a big wreck and send myself flying through the windshield.
I’m going at a good clip for a while and then it comes into my head that I’ve been going straight without having to juke for far too long, and at the last second I jerk the wheel right and barely miss a big overturned car carrier. I shiver as the shape looms past us like some hulk floating in deep space or drifting at the bottom of the ocean. Charley barks in surprise and climbs up high on his front limbs.
I can’t see anything and I’m quickly getting light headed. I judge there’s as much smoke in the cab as there is outside and I’m holding my breath for long moments at a time and things are starting to seem distant, surreal, and I know it’s oxygen deprivation, but I can’t help it: I’ll still hold my breath because I don’t want the smoke to cause permanent oxygen deprivation. And I can feel eventually my connection to the world slipping past and I begin to take in and cough on shallow gulps of smoke. My hands begin to jerk and then loosen on the wheel and everything seems just about to slip out of my control when all of a sudden the light floods into the cab, blades of sun sluicing through the thick, dark curls of smoke. My hand scrambles for the window controls and my fingers find them, all of them and all four windows of the cab are coming down and the speed of the truck, the clean air rushing past is whipping all of the smoke out and clean air is coming in. God. God yes.
?????? I’m lying on the hood of the truck and the metal, hot from sun, is about to burn my skin. It feels good. I feel possibly…more than I’ve ever felt at this moment. It’s cliché but more alive than I’ve ever felt. More better. That’s what this whole post apocalypse thing has felt like. Funny, right? Funny. I am
directly in the middle of two large brushfires separates by many miles and the wind is whipping to and fro, alternately leaning the shelf of smoke this way and that, threatening one moment to topple it over us and the other moment to topple it away. We are at the mercy of pissed off God. We are in the middle of a tornadic column of fire. And here I am resting on the hood, the hot slab of the hood of the Beast under me, nearly scalding, and it feels good. Why? The head of Charley barely peeks over the edge of the hood. Sometimes he’ll put his front paws up and lick at my hand. Time to go, he’s saying. The wet of his tongue cools in the whipping wind. The heat from the hood. I’m alive. I’m feeling this. The last of the smoky lethargy leaves my lungs. I sit up. “We’re ALIVE Charley.”
“Ruff.”
Time to get going.
4:15 PM
I see a little path that takes me to the side opposite where the main fires look to be. I veer on to it.
I can’t stay on the road with the smoke like this. I try to drive at a tack almost perpendicular to the highway, hoping that this will take me far enough away from the smoke so that I can continue on in a northward direction.
I look overhead and see a mass of birds wheel out from under the smoke in the distance. I see the sun lowering across the sky in the slight west. So that must be North then. In my headlong rush I can’t be fucking bothered to check the compass on my phone, my GPS. Gotta hurry. I turn towards what’s supposed to be North even though it edges the great shawl of smoke again over half the sky. I’m aiming for that clear slice ahead. That must be North enough. Dallas. Amy. We’re coming for you.
North is North most like but soon I know something is wrong. The great dark shawl is spreading, drawing over the remainder of the sky. It looks apocalyptic, God drawing the curtain down on all he’d ever made.
