A Chemical Fire (13 page)

“Are you actually deluded into thinking it’s worth something,” Adena asks him. “First, that’s disgusting. Second there’s no such things as money anymore, so there’s no market to sell it on.”

We step out into cooler mountain air, find the pharmacy’s sliding doors stuck partly open and push them the rest of the way. The inside is damp and marred with water leaks, rodents that dart and dash between aisles.

She says, “Pharmacy counter?”

I nod and we go to the back, axe and gun, unlatching the waist-high door and going in to pick through shelves lined with white and brown bottles and boxes and a few birds nests. Finding the controlled substance safe locked I go to the backroom and find the management office with all the labeled keys, find the right one and go back to the safe and get what I need. Adena holds a shopping bag open for me and I fill it as she watches.

“Is all this necessary,” she asks.

“What do you need?” I grab the bag from her and tie it off.

Her mouth twists and she turns, hopping the counter. I follow her down the aisles, animal sounds in the ceiling and she stops at the diet section. Browsing the body scales she holds one out and says, “If you don’t have access to a water displacement tank or calipers, this is the most accurate thing going.” She puts it aside, pulls out an empty bag of her own and goes to the diet pills, picking out a few and bagging them. “Most of these are garbage but the caffeine helps,” she says. “What I really need is…” she trails off, walking around the corner. When I catch up to her she’s standing at a section with vitamins and herbs, saying, “Yes, perfect,” and throwing bottles into her bag.

“This one is Gymnema, it curbs sugar cravings,” she says, opening the seal and pouring two capsules into my hand. “If you’re especially tempted, open it up and eat the powder. It’ll turn you off sweet stuff by changing the way your tongue experiences them.”

She opens another bottle and says, “Chromium. You’ll break down the sugars you do eat quicker. This or cinnamon.”

Then it’s conjugated linoleic acid to block the refilling of fat cells. Then Hoodia, a plant chewed by African tribesmen to stop hunger during hunts. She says, “It doesn’t do much, but why not.”

We get back to the bus holding bags and a digital scale to find Janet laughing as his fingers get wrapped in gauze. Daniel says, “Did you pick yourself up some tampons? We don’t need our friends out there tracking us.”

“And you, you’re letting him keep that fucking thing,” she says to Daniel. He looks at her, working silently on Janet’s dressing. “Great,” she says.

I burp forest and ocean and start the bus up, pulling out of the lot and back onto the darkening street. I drive over two blocks of street and half a Victim before Daniel finishes the bandaging and comes to the front.

“Did you get me anything to eat,” he asks, sitting down.

“No.” I look over my shoulder at Adena, busy reading the directions for her scale. She looks up at me and nods, then goes back to it. When she does I grab a box of cookies from my bag and hand it to him.

“You’re an angel,” he says, ripping it open and going to it. Brown mess sliming his teeth and tongue, he says, “Want one?”

“Not really hungry,” I say.

The Message, Part One

Daniel orders us to take the battery-powered lanterns and search both floors of the bookstore for victims. We do, no aisle over-looked, but find only ash. Then we get the door blocked with carts and stacks of boxes and every heavy book we can find, adding glasses and plates from the coffee counter to the top as an alarm.

When the store is locked down we relax and everyone unpacks. Daniel takes out a propane stove from one of our last stops and begins hooking up the tank, cans of chili and tomato sauce set all around. Adena stares angry, thin hands shaking as they sort pills into an organizer.

“Want any,” Janet asks, pulling out plastic baggies filled with a rainbow of pills. He pours out two yellow ones into my hand, knowing him some home blend of Ecstasy. I pop them and they go down easy.

“You can pay me later,” he says, reminding me that no matter what else Janet is a dealer, and dealers want to be owed.

I walk the floor. My flashlight passes over books on wellness and travel and science, on religion and art. I go past magazine racks on topics that don’t exist now, new releases that will never go old, coffee machines that will never run. In the center I go up stairs coiled around an elevator core to the second floor with a divided section for music and movies, the rest of it fiction, politics, self-help. Names attached to faces attached to ideas that were supposed to reach someone and change something. Messages stamped out in all formats: hardcover, paperback, audio book, abridged, unabridged, annotated, Braille, illustrated, large print, revised, out of print.

I’m looking through a book on transcribing music when I hear Janet’s voice from downstairs, kept low, saying, “Bullshit, he scares you just like he scares me.”

I take a few steps closer, straining to hear.

“As leader I would never let a member of my team scare me,” Daniel whispers.

“Make no mistake about John. I knew him before all this, and I shat on him constantly. Know why? Because I don’t know what he’d be like if he realized he was in charge.”

“Keep your voice down. Just because he’s creepy doesn’t make him dangerous.”

Janet says, “You don’t know about the fires.”

Venturi Effect

Coming out of the teacher’s restroom, I check my watch. I have to remember the time so I can eat forty minutes after the pills, but I find the school’s hallways are suddenly full of kids. Loud clanging overhead, the alarm like we’ve practiced so many times but this time no faces look bored. No joking, no small talk, no gossiping, no who-likes-who. There are no bullies and no student council members here, only children, stiff and cram-filing to the exits.

I spot a tall girl with pulled back hair and she looks at me, her eyes stunned. I ask her if this is a drill. She moves on, wordless with the current of bodies, teachers yelling directions through the noise.

Mrs. Jensen rushes down the hall frantic, small and wide with wildly moving arms, her neck flopping with jowls and pearls. “Where’s your class,” she asks me.

I push toward my classroom through the path of least resistance at the middle of the hall. At the end it’s gray and blurry, smoke strangling the space, and a few kids are running from around the corner to join the crowd with pale faces. “Where is it,” I ask them and they don’t hear. When I manage down to the end my fingers go cold from the sight. The door to my classroom, my own classroom, is vomiting smoke.

I run to it and meet flames, roaring, getting pulled back by someone and the heat is in my face, the smoke hitting my eyes, the shouting from my mouth, and it’s too much, too late, the sprinklers not enough to put it out, the entire room going violent, and the roar of the fire, it isn’t enough to cover the screams inside.

***

When the police call, the word they use is negligence. They say they can trace the fire back to a faulty Bunsen burner I failed to perform proper maintenance on. Friends and neighbors call, too, asking how I’m holding up, seeing if I need anything. Gala hears it all, watching me and knowing something is different. She never says it, but she thinks it. She supports me against her better suspicions.

A few months later I get a second call. This one says my parents house has burned down with my parents inside it. As my legs shake they say it happened in their sleep and they hopefully, probably, maybe never woke up. They also say I’m the last person seen leaving the house, and they’re right, of course, I had stopped by and woken them up to talk about Gala.

My mother said, “There’s no doubt love can kill you, and fast. But a life without it? Oh, baby, that’s like a stomach wound. Such a slow, sad way to go.”

My father said, “For me marriage is all or nothing. You pick your poison and you drink every last drop. Anything less, that’s not living.”

The police tell me the fire started just after I left, and now the word negligence is dropped from the vocabulary. I stop getting calls from neigbors, then from friends, then family. Only lawyers and police and reporters call, and those I don’t even hear.

The Message, Part Two

When I come back down Daniel and Janet are spooning hot food into their mouths from paper bowls, Adena standing far away from them on her scale. Daniel offers me a bowl. As Janet’s pills finally take effect I pop a handful of Adena’s and say, “No.”

He finishes his, throwing it aside and folding up the portable stove. “We have to talk about where we’re going,” he says.

Adena steps off the scale, bothered by what it says. “Aren’t we going west,” she asks.

“We need a specific target, a place to fortify ourselves. Houses and hotels only last so long, as we see. Something that won’t burn down would be optimal.”

Janet says, “Why don’t we steal a yacht or something and cruise the ocean? We can come to land when shit runs out and just take what we need. Like Vikings.”

Daniel says, “Not a bad idea, but there’s fuel to think about. Also the bad weather we’ve been having could get complicated on the water. That’s if we can even get a boat working, I'm assuming we don't know.” He looks at me and my head shakes.

Adena says, “How about a fort? Aren’t there still some of those left?”

“Absolutely, we could find a hundred just looking through some of the books here. Even Alcatraz was a fort before it was a prison, which is something we shouldn’t rule out.”

“Okay, no prisons. Forts are good so long as they’re accessible but still defendable. Some pussified tourist trap with handicap ramps and a gift shop is useless.”

Everyone goes quiet when a thump sounds out from the second floor, all movement stopped, ears and eyes scanning the dark store.

Another thump hits and then above us: a Victim woman with a peeled off face is toppling over the railing and falling down, moaning, us shouting, and she lands in between Janet’s legs facing away. She looks around at us, dark eyes sizing up food and then turning around to see Janet, Janet pulling back, Daniel and Adena going to their feet for weapons. I’m up and on her with my axe before they have the chance, euphoria washed and chopping, splitting, rending, putting it to sleep, feeling so good, the adrenaline, the serotonin.

The job done, Janet looks up at me with a mouth full of brown and black gore. “Payment for the pills,” I say and he spits the goop out onto the floor.

“The piles, sometimes they come back through the ashes. I saw it happen once in a gas station. That's probably what the second floor of the hotel was about.”