A Chemical Fire (5 page)

In the medicine cabinet is Xanax and Soma. Under the sink, cough syrup and sterilizing pads.

Past the kitchen are the basement stairs and his wife’s ashes, the light flick-flickering before holding steady. The air is pregnant with mildew and yeast, wood rot and the old odors of food and paper. Down the stairs, one by one, creaking and sighing, the thin space made tighter with gun racks and hanging coats and corkboards with calendars and post-it notes, reminders to go to doctors and community meetings, car insurance statements and paycheck stubs, down the steps layered with thick, grey paint speckled with trapped dirt and dust, eyes-wide in the dark to the bottom, and then to the right a small pantry.

This is what I was looking for. Canned goods and a washer/dryer.

The backpack zips open and I move prescription bottles and baggies to get my change of clothes out. They go in the washer, then I undress and throw those in, too. I twist and pull the knob, put detergent into the swirling, rising water then shut the top with a metal bang, leaving the machine to do it’s work.

I step out and go right, bare feet cold on the linoleum. I can’t see anything in the basement, just a sense of space and a vague shine to the ground that stretches out from the threshold. The shine is what’s wrong. It’s pattern uneven and spotty.

The washer hums an undulating rhythm as my bare skin picks up the faintest draft. Something sticks to the bottom of my naked foot. My leg comes up and the foot turns to show whatever’s there, which turns out to be a small piece of shredded magazine, glossy and sticking to the moisture on my skin. I take it between my fingers and look close, turning it over.

The Deluge

Down the streets and avenues, across the parking lots of the dead, my throat tastes like prescriptions. I’m sweating armpits of expectorants and suppressants when the power goes out, for good. All is dark now, and always will be.

The buildings here wear hair of twisting brick and flame so I get onto the highway and walk it for miles. I stop to search a great car crash, a tourist van piercing a gasoline truck marked with its own fire. They hold the usual ash; dead and fermented, stomachs and ears burned to product. In the back of a pickup I find a child laying face down, melted to the seat. When I nudge it, it moves. I put ammunition in it and run until the wheezing tells me I’m far.

The wind kicks up a legendary bitter stink and my stomach coils, my medicines wanting out. It brings me down to knees already sore from searching, my back arched. The breath of the world gets into my mouth and lungs and I vomit until my hands are surrounded at all sides and my eyes are hot and watery.

The horizon looks like a sandstorm rousing, in front two figures walking slowly in dark shudders. More of them- the wretched survivors.

In the pack I have a scarf. I take it out and wrap it around my face for protection. The safety comes off the gun, the storm rolling forward like a wave, I turn and squint. It blows into me softer than expected, the gray stuff sticking where it can. It’s not sand but flesh, burnt doctors and neighbors and actors, patent clerks and managers and ninth graders turned into a skin storm. People buying shoes, treating acne, caring about thin hair, now turned to black dust for blasting brick and paint. It’s tremendous in it’s reach, the wind carrying its children.

With one hand holding the scarf in place, pack to my back, I walk forward gun barrel out to meet the survivors. When I reach them I scream with the bullets.

I see more coming through the storm and decide I’m done walking, find a forest green car and push the ash off the seat. I rub my eyes and turn the key, the mechanical parts moaning of dusty buildup, and I accelerate and hit the wipers on and drive over the bridge, across the knife of water that floats with papers and soot. I can’t see far through the muck of the air, and that’s fine. I'd rather not see what's become of things.

I drive around three more of the burn victims, brittle clothes hanging from their arms and their tongues dried up. Twice I consider stopping and letting them in to hitchhike and rip.

It’s a while before I see her, wearing a hood and a shotgun, walking out of the winds the way the living do.

***

There are slivers of gray in her hair but she's not old. She comes to the driver’s side with wheeled luggage at her feet, telling me to roll down the window. Aiming with her shotgun she pulls the ski mask down to expose her lean mouth, her crow’s feet asking, “Who are you?”

I pull fingers from the steering wheel, saying, “Honestly, just get the fuck in.” She takes a step back. I add, “If you can’t trust the one living guy left, you’re better off swallowing the shotgun.”

Her eyes are wide for her skull, a layer of people-dust across her. After a few seconds of looking from me to the two coming our way she says, “Pop the trunk," and I do and she throws her bag in the back, then gets in and removes her hood. We look at each other, sizing each other up. “Name’s Adena, what’s yours?"

“Just John.”

“It’s not a contest.” Her teeth pull back, amused, looking around the car. “I’ve tried a dozen of these bastards and none of them started.”

Wind screams into the car, ash trickling out of the air vent and I slide it shut before any more can get in. “This was the first one I tried,” I say, planning pills.

I put the car into gear and push us forward and around the two, reaching for us with broken arms. “They’re not what you think, you know. Not like the movies.” She holds her arm up to show the grooves of a bite twisted across her forearm. “There’s no once-bitten-twice-die here. It does nothing but hurt.”

“And kill.”

She shrugs. “Lost half a pound, though.”

Arterial

The storm gets bad and then it gets worse, the wipers working heavier all the time as we roll slow to squint through the people and into the night. When I can’t stand to wait any more I stop the car and piss into the piles building up against the concrete walls of the highway. I feel the heaviness inside pulling me down, asking me to sleep in the storm. I push it back with a handful of anything and get back in.

Adena says, "You have people in your hair."

In Earth’s timeline, this period will be identified by a layer of sediment that tests positive for DNA.

Minutes down we pass dead survivors blinding their way through the highway. Even they seem frustrated, mouths gnashing at the air. Adena says, “We should really stop, this is like flying by Braille.” I turn the car onto the next ramp and find the end of it clogged with a brown station wagon. There’s a large burn victim inside, smashing at the window in steady rhythm.

“Help me push it,” I say. We exit, masks up and guns out. We’re on either side of the car, ready to strain, when she gasps behind her ski mask.

“I knew this guy,” she says with her hidden mouth. “He went to my gym, body-built like a freak. Now all that muscle looks like burnt steak.”

I get close and look. Still the same steady thrash against the safety glass, not taking offense to anything just hungry, black skin and dead blood marks on the window. She says, “I can barely tell it’s him, I just recognize the car. I saw him dealing weed in the parking lot a few times, and some other stuff.”

“What did you buy,” I ask.

She studies my eyes. “Amphetamines, one time.”

“Back up.” My left hand goes to the driver’s side, rubbing my wrist on the glass to clear a spot in the film. He notices. His mouth follows the movement. I slow the circle, his teeth keeping pace with his oily marbles. I go slower, make smaller circles, bring the gun up to the window, his breath bringing no fog, his head lazy, the circle closed then slowed to a stop.

The door open, I push through coagulant and find a paper bag that smells illegal, then find doses in his pockets. I shove the mess aside and feel around under the seats and in ashtrays and compartments, Adena’s reflection watching from the rearview.

I throw it into neutral and tell her to push, putting weight into it. She joins at the back, both of us rolling the car forward out of the ramp and into the intersection. We find a gas station but the pumps won’t give, then notice a flatbed with filled red jugs and take them.

“The storm’s about to get bad,” Adena says.

“It’s already bad.” I feel it like undertow; something going in the air, something ozone. “We haven’t seen it all. Get the car in the garage,” I say and she gets into the driver’s seat as I load the containers.

I hear the engine trying and then, “The fucker won’t start.” She gets out and I get in, rushing, the key turning in the ignition. It starts for me and she curses. I pull the car into the garage and we slide the door down as outside the night begins to yell.

A Gentlemanly Abortion

The gas station garage has walls made of parts. Radiators, spark plugs, custom rims. Real dust, the old dust, is a blanket worn by metal and plastic. We camp out at the foot of the kicked-in snack machines and listen to the wind, me eating pretzels, her water, looking at the pipes and wires, the air holding an oil that reminds me of repairs and road trips. Behind us the counter is covered by catalogs and buying guides and draped with our coats.

Laid out on cardboard with a battery-powered lantern that deepens eye sockets, she breathes deep and asks me what I did before this.

“That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I was a diet coach,” she says, rolling to her side. “I sat across from fat people and their fat kids and I screamed inside.” She pulls her rolling luggage to her and unzips it, taking out a full-size digital scale, the kind that reads body fat percentage.

Holding it, she says, “I took money from clients who couldn’t make this thing work for them, even when I told them how. I coached them for hours and gave them notebooks with charts in them, and they’d still shove themselves into my office and lie to me and tell me how hard it was,” her voice sounding like throat-static. “It’s so hard, they’d say. I don’t have the time, I’ve got kids, while they were ships made of fatty tissue, sinking toward diabetes and heart attacks and parentless children.”

She tosses the scale onto the cardboard between us. “I may not have any more clients, but I’m still what I was. You should be guarding the back door.”

“Good idea.” I go through the door to the back where the car lifts are, where ours is parked holding my backpack. I find Gene’s stuff and pick through to find something for sleep. I take three and find a side-room where tires are stored and sit down across from an ash pile to wait for them to start.

Outside is a weather-slaughter. And the wind, still the wind, carrying the dead and shards of glass and occasionally aluminum siding to skip along rooftops and scar them, it bangs at everything loose enough to move, the sounds almost peaceful, and I know if I let it in here it would tear me apart and eat me like dogs do in their dreams.

***

Some time has passed and I’m waking up slumped over with legs out, my arms hanging down and an icicle of spit from my face. I hear myself moan but also a sound like someone stirring pasta, maybe potato salad. That and a sand dune that’s shifting.

“Thass crazy,” my voice says.

I fight my neck and swirl my head around and up, seeing the floor and something on it, but it’s dizzy and I look blurry so it can’t make me out and it’s drooling me.

“Whut are you tall king habout,” my voice asks, concerned. It shakes my head and sobers me a step, my eyes the same direction for a second. I see the movement of the asphalt. The focus ring turns, brain to the front and I can start to make understanding of it, but my arms are the pasta.

I focus further and then finally understand: it’s someone’s head on the ground.

My voice: “Whoo arr you?”

They don’t answer, only look around. I focus. Why did someone leave a head here? Focus. Arm out of the ground. Focus. Two arms. Focus. The ash, where the ash was.

Focus. A burn victim, coming back from the ash, dust turning to mud and muscle, shoulders and a head rising from the hard ground and arms pulling up and out of its birth and into the room. I shake my arms violently until they respond and reach, new as the ones on the mechanic delivering from the floor, looking for something to bash his new black eyes in, eyes watching and taking on hunger.