Everything is Broken

by John Shirley

  “You know,” Brand said thoughtfully, as they paused in a group at the bottom of the hill, “what we have here is two kinds of crazy, coming together. You have a couple of toxic personalities: a psychopath and a guy simply losing his mind. And when they come together, it’s Hell. It’s like the ingredients of gunpowder. And yeah—seemed to me that Dickie’s playing with Ferrara’s mental state.” He started for their apartment building. They followed, and after a moment he added, “Dickie’s sick too, in his way. That toxic combination . . . We have to step carefully. Or people are going to get hurt.”

  ELEVEN

  Shivering with cold even though she wore a hoody and ski jacket, Nella was trying to make herself small, lying on her side hugging her knees on a sleeping bag in the corner of the living room opposite the front door. They were in the house with the brass crucifix on the wall.

  Nella didn’t want to be there. But Dickie had chosen it as his base. He wanted some kind of independence from Ferrara. And then there was Songbird. Ferrara might not go for keeping women chained up.

  There was no generator here like there was up at that Mario’s house. In this moldy living room the only light was from two Coleman lanterns, one hanging over by the door, the other on the floor by the arched entryway to the corridor. The room was even darker tonight than normal, because Dickie and Sten had nailed big pieces of scrap wood over the broken window.

  The house smelled like dead things.

  Maybe she could slip away, find out how to get past those blocked streets, get over to the emergency camp at the high school gym.

  But she felt a despairing inertia gluing her here, on the cold floor. She was tired, and feverish. Wanting the malicious burning in her crotch to stop. She was supposed to be punished, wasn’t she, by being here? Wasn’t she already dead, really? Maybe that odor of the dead—maybe it was herself she was smelling.

  She heard her mother’s voice, reading from the Bible: They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish.

  There was a mewing sound from the corridor. It was that girl Songbird, so she called herself, sounding more like a cat than a bird.

  “Please . . . ”

  Dickie was standing in the open front door, with a big wad of lunchmeat in his hands. Talking to Sten outside. The Grummons were out there too. Nella was afraid of the Grummons. More now than she used to be.

  “Please . . . I can’t . . . I’m cold . . . ” Almost a shriek now.

  Dickie turned his head and glared at Nella. “Make yourself useful, bitch! Go and tell her to shut up, give her a blanket or something.” He took a bite out of the wad of lunchmeat and chewed, watching her.

  Nella didn’t want to go near Songbird. Going near that girl was going to force her to feel things she didn’t want to feel and think about things she didn’t want to think about.

  . . . and made all their memory to perish . . .

  “Shut up, Mama,” she whispered.

  “What’d you say?” Dickie asked, picking his teeth with a thumbnail.

  “Nothing. I just . . . ”

  But she was afraid of what Dickie would do if she refused to do what he wanted. Everything was different now than before the tsunami. Before, she had gotten along with the Sand Scouts better. Felt like she was one of them. Pretty much an equal. Dickie hadn’t forced himself on her, in those days. But it was like the wave had wiped away everything that held people back.

  She thought about the two shallow graves of those young men behind the house at the top of the hill. Out in that little woods. Sten had told her about them. Mario Ferrara was guarding the pass out of town now, with some other fellas Ferrara had assigned, but what would happen when he found out about those graves?

  She would be buried out there too, if she made Dickie mad enough. At the moment she was feeling like she wanted to live. Maybe because what was happening to Songbird scared her. Anyway, if they were going to kill her, she didn’t want to be out there in an unmarked grave, maybe tied into a big plastic bag under six inches of sod and millipedes . . .

  So she got up, wincing at all the bruises and, still hugging herself, went back into the corridor, to the bathroom, where Songbird was mewing under a Coleman lantern hung on a shower curtain rod.

  Songbird was chained up in the bathtub, a smallish gangly woman with wavy red hair, a hummingbird tattoo on the outside of her right wrist, naked from the waist down. Her only clothing was a sweatshirt so grimy Nella couldn’t make out what university it advertised. San Diego State?

  The woman looked half delirious, kneeling in the dry tub facing the spigot, her wrists swollen and red in the grip of the silvery-looking hardware store chains, like something you’d use to chain a pit bull. Small padlocks kept the looped chains tight on her wrists, the other end of the chain locked to the spigot. Her shoulders were heaving; she was mewing again, shaking her head from side to side. The streak of mauve in her matted red hair was almost gone; mud clung to the roots.

  “You need to wash your hair,” Nella said lamely. Something to say. “But of course there’s no water . . . I guess . . . ”

  The smell struck her then—the smell from the toilet, though the woman smelled bad too. She smelled like old semen and blood and sweat. There were streaks of blood on her thighs. The Grummons had been at her.

  But the smell from the toilet was pure raw sewage. No one had bothered to flush it, though next to the toilet bowl was a two-gallon paint bucket, one of those big white plastic ones, filled with seawater.

  Nella went to the brimming toilet, took the ceramic top off the tank, leaned it against the wall and, grunting, lifted the heavy white bucket, poured the briny water in. When she’d got the tank pretty full, leaving a little in the bucket, she pressed the flush handle, and fortunately the toilet didn’t quite overflow on the floor. After a swirling hesitation it began to drain, and she slowly poured in the rest of the water to encourage it. Then she put the bucket on the floor and opened the window a little bit.

  “There, at least it smells better for you in here,” she said.

  “Please, I’m so cold, take the chains off, let me up . . . ”

  “They want me to make you be quiet,” Nella explained. “You better be quiet or they’ll come in here and hurt you again.”

  She turned and started for the door—and the woman spoke to her, in a different tone, her voice trembling but with some thinking behind it. “Wait—let’s talk. Your name is . . . it’s Nella, isn’t it? Nella?”

  “Yes.” Nella didn’t want to look at her. She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, rubbing her shoulders, wanting to go back and burrow into her sleeping bag and hope that the men left her alone. Her privates hurt so bad already. She thought she had some kind of infection down there, from the time Dickie had forced himself on her.

  Or maybe the feeling was punishment from God. For being with these people. Sending flame into her groin. Or maybe the infection itself was the punishment. That was how God took His revenge, wasn’t it? Disease, bad luck, things like that? And a giant wave . . .

  “Well, Nella,” Songbird said, “we’re two people stuck in—” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat, got control of it again. “—stuck in a bad place and that’s when . . . when . . . we should be . . . working for positive energy . . . together . . . I’m a life coach, you know . . . Maybe I’m here . . . maybe I’m here for a reason.”

  She sounded like she had to make herself say that. Here for a reason.

  “For a reason?” Nella asked, turning to look at the plaintive, pale creature in the light from the Coleman. Wondering if the woman thought she was being punished by God too.

  “Because . . . this might sound funny . . . you might need my help. If you can unlock me . . . I can help you. And I’ll tell the police not to . . . tell them you tried to help . . . ” Her lips quivered as she tried to stay in command of herself, tried to draw from some spring of persuas
ion inside her.

  But persuasion didn’t work here. Nella knew that for sure. When they’d first caught Songbird, skulking around in one of the houses, nearby, eating out of cans, the woman had tried using persuasion on Dickie. Nella had been there. Heard Songbird tell Dickie, “You threaten violence but I feel in my heart that you don’t mean it. You’re calling out for help.”

  “Help!” Dickie had said—and knocked her cold.

  Sten had smirked at that and said, “Ha! Help!”

  “Yeah—now fucking help me carry her!”

  Sten had sung that Beatles song “Help” as they carried Songbird over here, Nella trailing along.

  “I don’t think anything can help us till we have our full punishment,” Nella said, now. “Our punishment from God. Then—maybe. Or . . . we just go to Hell.”

  “Um—God doesn’t want to . . . to punish us . . . Nella. Please.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m so cold here. Could you get me a blanket and maybe you could hide the keys in it . . . for these locks . . . if you could put them in the . . . ”

  “What the fuck is that bitch saying?” Dickie said, appearing like an apparition in the doorway, so that Nella almost fell when she stepped back to get out of his way.

  “She’s just—we were talking about God,” Nella said.

  “Oh bullfuckingshit, I heard her talking about getting keys.” He turned suddenly to Nella. The light behind her was blocked so that his face was in darkness. “You were talking to her—about getting her out of here?”

  “No—! Dickie, we—”

  The declaration was snapped off when Dickie backhanded Nella across the mouth, so hard and fast she tasted blood almost immediately as she went staggering back, losing her balance, falling to hit her head on the toilet seat. She sprawled there, stunned, feeling weak and distant from everything, all furry and unreal, as she watched Dickie reach into his pocket, take out keys, unlock the chain.

  “Oh thank you, now we can talk,” Songbird babbled, “we can help each other, we don’t have to have this negative energy—”

  “You wanted to get out of there, then come on, bitch. Hey, boys—!” This last a shout to the hall, and the Grummons came to the door, as Dickie pulled the woman out of the tub by her hair, the chains dangling from her wrists, her skinny naked ass all bruised.

  “Dickie, she didn’t . . . ” Nella heard herself say. But it couldn’t be heard over Songbird’s shrieking. Nella—getting to her feet, feeling sick to her stomach, swaying in the bathroom.

  Wondering when Dickie and the men would be punished. Was that ever going to happen? Why were only the women being punished?

  Dickie’s time would come, she decided. God would pick a time, it would come like an alarm clock ringing . . . shrieking and screaming and ringing . . .

  “You want her again or not?” Dickie asked the Grummons.

  The Grummons looked at each other, and looked at Songbird. “Naw,” Liddy said. “Had her. She’s a mess.”

  Songbird wouldn’t stop shrieking, so after awhile they dragged her out to the broken-down part of the house. Nella got up and wandered out that way, thinking maybe she could say something to save the stupid little woman.

  But Nella finally just leaned on a wall and watched as they shot Songbird in the back of the head and pitched her off the edge of the chopped-off stairway, down into the pit of mud, slime, and broken concrete and rotting kelp, the falling body disturbing an enormous cloud of sleeping flies, that rose up in a dark swarm to buzz furiously at the sky; to mingle blackly with the stars.

  Russ and Pendra stood together in a corner of the gymnasium, leaning against the wall near the door; the gym was now unevenly lit with portable lights powered by the rumbling generator Dale had finally rigged out behind the school.

  Several dozen people were gathered in the gym, talking in groups, eating. Someone was smoking a cigarette and someone else was asking them to take it outside. After all they’d been through, it seemed silly to Russ to worry about secondhand smoke.

  Russ felt he had to be here, as Dad tried to organize a meeting around the wrestling mats spread out near the door. But in fact he didn’t want to be here at all. He wanted to go back to the apartment building. No electricity there—the lanterns were getting dim—but it was cozier, and he could lie on a bed and try to forget about things. He was tired, his eyes still burned from the oily smoke at the bonfire, and he kept seeing that gun in Dickie’s hand pointed at his father’s head.

  “I can’t believe that guy was threatening to shoot your dad,” Pendra said softly, brushing her hair from her eyes. She shook her head wonderingly. “Dickie and Ferrara are both sick. I just never have gotten people like that. Or like—people who decide to kill themselves but that’s not good enough, they have to kill their families too. I don’t get that. Kill yourself, whatever, that’s your business, but shoot your kids? What’s that all about?”

  “I read somewhere they don’t know the difference between themselves and their families—like they’re all overlapped in their minds.”

  “Well, that’s sick.”

  “Sure as fuck is. But I’m getting used to sick.” He thought about the woman with the mud stuffed in her torn-open gut; he thought about Dad having to kill that dog. He thought about the child who’d died alone in the farther corner of this very gym. Turn your back a second and the kid dies. Don’t think about that stuff.

  “I haven’t even had a funeral for my grandma. When they burned those bodies in that empty lot—that was . . . I mean, just burning them all together like that . . . ”

  He nodded. “I know what you mean. Seems like, I don’t know, like they’re saying they weren’t individuals. But . . . Lucia and Dad, everyone—they were worried about cholera. They did say some words over them . . . ”

  “That’s not a funeral for any one person. That was for, like, everybody, at once. Not the same. My Gram was . . . She was a real person. I mean maybe everyone is but . . . ” There were tears in her eyes, and she looked away.

  “I know what you mean.” It occurred to Russ that here was a chance to do something for Pendra. “We could have a funeral for her. At least you and I could. Like maybe in her apartment, with all her stuff around. Celebrate her life. We could have candles. Have her cats there.”

  She looked at him, her lips parted, seeming startled. “That’s a really good idea.”

  “Those cats are still around, aren’t they? You been feeding them?”

  “Course I have. She had a big bag of dry cat food. They still have that. I don’t know what to feed them when that runs out. I’ve been scrounging pet food from different houses for all the pets over on Shell Street. It’s all dogs barkin’ all the time when you go on that street. Lonely little dogs. Most of them probably lost their owners. And the kitties too . . . There’s even a turtle . . . ”

  “When you want to do the funeral?”

  “Can we do it tonight after the meeting here?”

  “Why not?”

  And he got his reward, for starts, when she reached over and almost furtively squeezed his hand.

  Just gratitude, he thought. Nothing to get excited about. But her touch lingered . . . even after she took her hand away.

  Dad came over, then, with Dale and Brand and Jill—squinting without her glasses, picking her steps carefully through the gym mats and people sleeping. Sometimes letting Brand help balance her. Lars wandered over too, in that same marijuana-leaf T-shirt, stroking his beard, scratching in his dreadlocks, his eyes red.

  “Spuris wasn’t interested in meeting with us,” Russ’s dad said, in a low voice. “He’s not into doing anything except feeling sorry for himself.”

  “We could get some of the other men, maybe Lucia,” Brand said.

  Dale shook his head. “Tell you the truth, if we do what Drew’s got in mind, the fewer that know it the better. Lord, my back hurts. I need to sit my ass down.”

  They sat in a circle on a wrestling mat, Russ feeling good about being accepted in thi
s circle of men making a plan, Pendra lying on a mat, face down, just behind him, her chin on her arms, watching and listening. Jill sitting with her long legs drawn up, close to Brand. Russ noticing a sort of bonding between them. Hard to define. But it was there. Dale and Lars and Dad. Dale glancing uncertainly at Lars. Like he was wishing he wasn’t here.

  “Was me,” Lars said, “shit I’d make a deal, we don’t need the bad vibes. Just tell ’em what they want. Probably won’t mean much later on.”

  “He’s got some plan to make people sign something,” Russ’s dad said. “Sign property and such over to him. Would it stand up in court? Maybe not. But it’s our word against his. And he can argue there was an emergency and he was trying to prevent looting when he stopped us from leaving.”

  “He’s setting up an out-and-out theft,” Jill said. “He can forcibly collect things from people—not just signatures and checks. Valuables! He’s obviously told the authorities at Deer Creek we don’t need their help any further. So when do we get any help? If we put up with this, we’re at their mercy. And with people like Dickie Rockwell and those others—who knows what could happen? I mean—Christ, I don’t know if he’d have shot Drew tonight, if Ferrara hadn’t stopped them—but it sure looked that way to me.”

  Dad made a growling sound in his throat. “I think he probably would’ve done it.” He glanced at Russ, as if afraid of worrying him. “Well, who knows. Maybe it was a bluff. But I sure as hell could have done without it.” He hesitated, musing. Then added, “I saw him and those other punks over on the north side of town, when we were checking houses, me and Dale, looking for trapped people. Saw them on a street that only had a couple houses, down the hill, slammed. Dickie said they’d already checked, no one alive there. ‘Just us fuckin’ roosters’ he said.” Dad glanced at Dale. “You remember . . . ”

  Dale nodded. “They wouldn’t let us search the houses on that street. Said they were keeping an eye on things. They had guns on them even then. I had that pistol sticking out of my coat pocket—if I hadn’t had that, I don’t know if they’d have let us go.”