Everything is Broken

by John Shirley

  “Where is he? Goddammit, Brand, get up here!”

  An answering bullet whistled past them—Russ crouched behind a bush, seeing, again, those mud-caked bodies in the wreckage of houses. Remembering dead animals he’d seen near the railroad tracks as a boy, carcasses with skin all rubbery and black after a week or so lying on the ground. He and Brand and Dale could end up like that, out here, lying in the brush. Shot dead and turning rubbery and black . . .

  Then Brand came gasping up the trail. “I didn’t hit ’em but they took cover . . . ” He led the way now, Russ behind him.

  Russ heard Dale fire another shot to keep their pursuers back and then caught the sound of Dale’s heavy boots as he came lumbering up the trail behind, and in minutes they were over the crest, passing through a little woods, going past the town storage shed, to the first row of houses.

  Shame rose up in Russ, then. The feeling of shame as definite and strong as the sickness of a hangover.

  PART TWO:

  The Walls Came Down

  . . . And the walls came down.

  They just stood there laughing.

  They’re not laughing anymore.

  —The Call

  “The Walls Came Down”

  FIFTEEN

  Nella waited till they were all asleep, about an hour past dawn. She’d been awake most of the night, curled like a sickly fetus in her sleeping bag; clutching herself, trying to ignore the pain in her crotch and the pictures in her head. Now she wormed out of her sleeping bag in the corner of Ferrara’s carpeted front room.

  She’d been glad of the warmth here, anyway. Glad to be away from the house with the brass Jesus and the dead people in the pit out front. Songbird lying there like a bird run over by a car. But she wanted to get away from here—to see, anyhow, if God would let her go.

  She’d thought the men would never go to sleep. They’d come back late, Dickie and Sten and Ferrara and his brother Mario. The other two had gone to relieve the Grummons at the bonfire.

  The men had spent two hours in the kitchen, drinking and arguing. Ferrara sounding almost hysterical. The Grummons coming back just as things started to calm down and getting in the argument, starting it up again. Ferrara telling Dickie shooting that man hadn’t been necessary, and Dickie saying get real, more than that’ll be necessary, hella more, and Ferrara saying we have to get those people to sign, get them to turn over the goods, to start the company, and now those four are witnesses, and they’ll testify and I’m part of it, and Dickie said shut up and have a drink, these people needed a scare put in them, that’s what’ll get them to do what you want . . .

  Around and around and around. Then not long before dawn the Grummons had gone off to the other house and Dickie’d gone to sleep on the couch and Sten in the easy chair and the other two in the bedrooms and Nella had lain there still, waiting and waiting to make sure, just to make absolutely sure they were breathing that regular slow loud way that meant they were deep asleep . . .

  Now she got up, slipped out to the kitchen, carrying the sleeping bag wadded under her arm. She went out the kitchen door, so she wouldn’t call any attention to herself, opening and closing the door real quiet. Then she hurried off, tip-toeing in the sneakers that were a bit too big for her, down the street in the cold gray light.

  The damp wind nuzzled her hair, stung her nose. From up here on the hill she could take in the sea, all stretched out, wrinkly, still mucky in places, with some debris still floating in it, including a corner piece of a house looking like a pyramid of wood popping up out of the water. But much of the debris had been drawn out to sea, cleared away—especially soft things, like bodies. The ocean looked steel-colored now, with white tops cresting, farther out. And it talked to her. Whispers of warning.

  The sea just hushed and murmured and sent long, low, steady rows of waves toward the wrecked town. It seemed like it was going to do that forever and had never done anything else. But it could suddenly rise up and smack down on you whenever it wanted. They’d all learned that.

  She hurried down the hill, throwing the unzipped sleeping bag around her shoulders as a kind of ungainly shawl against the cold. It smelled of mustiness and bodies.

  Need to get off this street, she decided. If they looked out the front window of Mario’s place they could see her down here.

  She cut across the street and down to the left, south along a side street that was just above the high-water mark of the tsunami.

  She walked down the street, seeing no one, thinking maybe they’d all gone over to the school gym camp. Word about the lootings and fires and the gang had gotten out and they were probably all huddled over there. Although most of the houses on her left were intact, the ones on the right had been in the upper reach of the tsunami—some of them were smashed down, and others were partly undermined, half-standing, leaning crazily, as if bowing in servility to the sea. The street went on for a ways . . .

  And then she saw the house, on the right, with the big rusty anchor.

  She knew it instantly, though she’d never seen it before. Ronnie had described it. Ronnie Burke with his translucent-framed glasses and his weak chin with that little soul patch and his kind words to her. “You’d make someone a great little sweetie,” he’d said once, when they were smoking a doob together. She knew what he really meant by that. He meant him. He’d been too shy to say. And she didn’t feel like she was a good enough person to offer herself to him. That day, she’d come from doing some things with the Sand Scouts that scared her to think about . . .

  Ronnie’s sister lived in this house. He stayed mostly in Buried Cove but he came up here to spend weekends with his sister sometimes. She’s got a place up on Overlook, he’d said, one of those big flat-topped places with a roof deck for sunning, and this hella big giant ol’ rusty anchor out front, in the garden. Thing is huge . . .

  That anchor, standing in a growth of ice plant, must be six feet high, must weigh like five hundred pounds. There were lounge chairs on the roof deck. This was Overlook . . .

  It had to be the house. Could Ronnie be sheltering in there?

  She immediately crossed over, went to the front door. Knocked. An empty sound. No response. She tried the knob, found the door was unlocked. She opened it and stepped cautiously in. Instantly knowing from the smell that there was death in the house.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in here alive too. He could be injured, stuck somewhere with his sister’s body, not able to do much for himself . . .

  She went a few steps more, hearing the house creak under her steps, wondering if her weight could make the damaged floor collapse. She stopped, several steps in, and gagged at the smell.

  Then she held her breath, made herself walk down the hallway—until she came to the edge of the living room and looked down through what had been the floor, into the basement.

  The living room was completely gone, along with the whole back wall. A section of roof from another house had been carried by the big wave to fall like a giant axe blade into the back of the house, and the floor of the living room—overlooking the slope—had caved into the lower part of the house, busting through the ground floor at the lower level too, exposing a basement.

  The basement, a story and a half below, was choked with dirty water and irregular pieces of debris. The remains of the caved-in floor of the living room, at Nella’s feet, angled down sharply to the basement like a big slide down into it, and wedged between two chunks of fallen wood-and-plaster wall, down there, was a man, lying on his back. His right arm seemed to be missing, and his left was just a bone with shreds of flesh. His chest was rent open and half hollowed out. She could see, from where she stood, that there were skewed glasses on his head—with the translucent frame. And that distinctive chin was there, that weed of a beard. Not much more of his face remained, the eyes and nose and lips were mostly gone. The wave had brought a clutch of crabs with it—some of them survived, and they were scrambling in the ocean water left in the rubbled pit of the baseme
nt; they were eating his face.

  They were eating Ronnie’s face.

  And as she watched, a crab crawled out of the hollow of his belly, like it had come out of its cave to greet the day, and it was walking sideways up onto Ronnie’s yellowing hip bones, and then tilting itself up a little to peer at her, lifting its pincers in greeting . . .

  Come on down. Join your lover, Nella. We can take you where he’s gone.

  Nella backed away, gagging, spitting up a bit as she went. Nothing much came up, she’d eaten so little.

  She turned and staggered out onto the street and wandered for a while, sobbing, though no tears would come out of her eyes. They were so dry. So dry they ached.

  A block slipped by. Another. She realized that in her daze she’d been going the wrong way. She should find her way to the high school. Get away. Go with her original plan. It was hard to care right now. But she turned—to find Dickie staring at her, standing on the damp, cold street corner in his stocking feet, a pistol held loosely in his hand.

  “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “It woke me up. I can’t trust you out there. I don’t know why I keep you around. Except you stuck with me. You did your part with Buff. Seemed like you earned something. But now . . . ”

  She waited for him to shoot her. But then he surprised her by making a groaning sound she’d never heard before and saying, “Go back up to our house.” She started up that way. Not knowing what else to do. And he came padding along behind her. The only thing he said on the way back was, “I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

  “Maybe so,” Brand said. “Maybe we lost our nerve. But in those . . . those circumstances . . . ” He shrugged. Brand’s rifle was leaning on the wall next to where he sat at the sofa.

  Pendra and Brand and Russ were sitting around her grandma’s living room, all of them bundled up with extra blankets. They’d been listening to a radio about FEMA struggling to help Santa Cruz and big parts of San Francisco. Didn’t sound like anyone was thinking about them at all. So they’d switched it off to save the battery and they sat in the slanting afternoon light coming in through the picture window and Pendra kept looking at Russ . . .

  Russ couldn’t decide if the look was pity because he’d lost his father, or pity because he’d discovered he was a coward, someone inconsequential. One of the limping antelope to be culled from the herd.

  She’s not like that, he decided. She wants to tell me again how bad she feels about my dad. But she doesn’t know how to start.

  He felt bruised inside. Like someone had cut open the skin of his stomach, and punched his insides, again and again, and then sewed it back up. And what kept going through his mind was his dad’s remains, lying in the chaparral.

  “My dad’s body is still out there,” Russ said. Staring at the rug.

  He could feel her looking at him.

  “We’ll get it eventually,” Brand said. “But they’ve probably got people still watching that area. I’m not even sure how many of the sons of bitches there are.”

  Russ looked at Pendra—but now she had tilted her head to look Brand up and down. “I keep thinking I’ve seen your face somewhere. Brand. And . . . your name is so distinctive. The only ‘Brand’ I know of was Brand Grande . . . ”

  Brand smiled sadly. “That would be me.”

  Pendra blinked, leaned forward, and looked closer at Brand.

  Startled, Russ said, “What?”

  “It’s a pen name. When I write kid’s books.”

  Russ stared. “You are not Brand Grande.”

  “I am, actually. Brand Robinson’s my real name, but yeah. I write books. Illustrate them. For kids.”

  “You’re that Brand.”

  “Well, yeah.” Brand seemed relieved to be talking about something else besides Russ’s father, besides the corpse wedged between boulders.

  “My mom loved your books, we used to read them together!”

  “That’s where I know your face—!” Pendra burst out. “From the book jacket!”

  “Yeah. I was sort of like Lemony Snicket but before him and nowhere near as successful. My stuff was a bit more fantasy oriented.”

  Pendra laughed. “I read Bleeper In Blueland to myself when I was lonely. It was kinda goth for a kid’s book.”

  Russ looked at Pendra. Glad himself to be able to think about something besides death. “Can you believe that? We both read him! And here he is!”

  “Are you going to do a new book?” Pendra asked.

  “I was . . . yeah. I am. I . . . sure.”

  Russ had the feeling Brand was trying not to disappoint them, so he was talking as if the book was for sure. But he seemed less than enthusiastic.

  “Did you write some of it already?”

  “I did. I’m illustrating it now. Or I was before all this happened. But my house is still standing. My work should be okay. I’ll show you later, if you want.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter much.

  “That’d be cool,” Russ said, aware that his voice was dull. Trying to pull away from the bruised feeling. And falling back into it.

  “Hey, Brand—that character, Bleeper,” Pendra said. “I always wondered about that name. I mean sometimes you’d call him ‘The Little Bleeper’ . . . ”

  Brand grinned. “You sure you want to hear this? Might be disillusioning.”

  “Like anything could disillusion me now.”

  “You’ve got a point. Well—I had the story but not the character names. So I said to my wife ‘What should I call the little fucker—or should I call him Little Fucker?’ ”

  Pendra chuckled. Russ managed a smile.

  Brand went on, “My wife was kidding me—she said, no, you’d have to call him ‘Little Bleeper.’ So I said what the hell, why not. Marilee never thought my editor would go for it but he did.”

  “Is your wife . . . ?” Pendra glanced at Russ, looking like she wished she hadn’t raised the subject. “Was she in town when it hit?”

  “No, she . . . Marilee passed on, some years ago.”

  There it was, back again. Death was in the room. No one bothered to say, Sorry for your loss. Seemed redundant in some way. Had been for days.

  Pendra just nodded and sagged back in her chair. As if the presence of death, Russ thought, was a weight dragging her down.

  “I’m so tired now,” she said. “I haven’t done much today. I ate something. I even took a vitamin. But I’m tired.”

  “Any fever?” Brand asked. “Maybe you should talk to Dr. Spuris.”

  “No, I . . . ever since my Gram died I just feel like . . . tired.”

  Brand nodded. “I felt tired and out of sorts for a long time after my wife died. Grief shows up in different ways.”

  Russ just nodded.

  Brand went on, choosing his words carefully, “We have a right to be angry at life. But we lose something if we blow it all off completely.”

  Russ snorted. “Sure. We lose our illusions.”

  “I know how you feel. It’s funny to be arguing the other side, considering that just the other day I basically told someone her belief was bullshit . . . but it’s a matter of balance. When we were pulling people out . . . hearing a little boy crying with a wall collapsed on him, digging him out—you realize, hell yeah, it does matter. Hard to say why in the big picture—but it does. There’s something there.”

  Pendra nodded to herself. Russ knew Brand was right. He’d felt it too. But right now he couldn’t feel much but the aching void that was the sudden absence of his father in the world.

  Someone knocked. Brand got up, picked up the rifle, went to the door. “Who is it?” he called, holding the rifle ready.

  Pendra looked at Russ. Whispering, “Whoa. Is it really necessary to carry the gun to the door like that?”

  Russ sigh. “My father is dead, Pendra. Someone shot him. What do you think? Yeah. Right now, we need guns.”

  “It’s me!” Dale called, through the door. “Ferrara’s asking us to come to the pass. Some ki
nd of ultimatum.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Remember,” Dale whispered to Russ as they walked up the highway toward the bonfire. “You don’t accuse anybody of killing him—this ain’t the place. The time will come. That’ll come later. This is just to see where things stand. We don’t want to provoke any more killing, we don’t have to . . . ”

  Russ nodded. He didn’t know who’d fired the shot anyway. The time will come.

  The bonfire had mostly burned out. Smoke writhed up from its coals. But the razor wire was still there. And the gunmen.

  Eight men stood in front of the antipersonnel wire, when Russ arrived with Brand, Dale, and Pendra. Dale and Brand carrying rifles.

  Most of them were the men who’d been here before. There were the Grummons and Dickie and Lon Ferrara and Sten. A big swag-bellied man squatted by the coals, squinting against the smoke; he was red-faced, head shaved bald. He wore a Levi’s-and-leather biker’s jacket with Chuckles sewn across a front pocket—so that’d be Chuckles. An automatic pistol was held loosely in his hand.

  There was a man with long, wavy black hair and a full beard. He was carrying a pistol-grip shotgun; he wore leather pants, a grimy trench coat streaked red and black, and dark glasses. A face like Jesus except for the dark glasses. Chuckles asked him for a cigarette, as they came up, calling him Remo.

  Lucas would be the rangy, lank-haired man in the army jacket and fatigue pants, carrying a carbine. His lean face stubbly, his sunken eyes flicking back and forth, tongue darting over thin lips. Seemed stoned on something.

  Lon Ferrara, stepping up to Brand, carried a shotgun. Sten and Dickie carried rifles.

  Russ was aware that Brand and Ferrara were talking, but he wasn’t listening. All he could think about was which one had shot his father. There were some guys missing from this bunch, weren’t there? That Cholo guy for one. Maybe watching whatever place they holed up. One of the missing ones could have done it. Maybe the guy who’d done it had run away, left the area. Not wanting to be here when the law returned. Or maybe . . .