A Chemical Fire (8 page)

He says, “I guess not,” looking to the side, smelling of doubt.

“You have to check them manually, one by one. It’s tedious but it’s the only way you don’t end up with a flashlight that doesn’t turn on when by all accounts it should. How about it, right now? You and me?”

He looks at his watch, saying quietly, “Not enough time,” meaning his 1:30 Jerk Room thinking I don’t have his schedule down. My forehead feels like it could come off, my eyes pouring with good intentions.

“Know what,” he stands, brushing rice from his camouflage pants, “It’s your idea, your project. Pull it off and there could be a promotion in it for you.”

“You’re not coming?” My acting face, absent of one kind of eagerness, forging the other.

“ I’ll monitor from here,” he lies. “Just work top to bottom, clockwise, and quickly.”

“Sounds good.” I leave with honest body, take the stairs up and get to work pulling apart packs and going to flashlights without a look at the bottles, diligent, endlessly helpful, fingering out double A’s and trying them in the control light, examining light streams and nodding. A team player, right up until 1:41. Then I get to the real work.

I hold up my hand, in it three batteries bubbled with corrosion, looking the way anything would look after two minutes at four hundred fifty degrees in the oven of an abandoned hotel kitchen, then dropped in water to cool.

II.

Circulation feeds raw nerves as leg pads attach. Bowels rebind under Kevlar. Helmet visor slides down to add haze to the haze, knives to the sides and clean rifles loaded, ammo stashed. We stand at the metal door to Earth and he pulls out a map to a death-run, the iron grid city laid out with X’s and O’s and arrows between them, more O’s than X’s.

“This X is you,” he pokes.

Slapping a clip he says we’re running a blitz. “Watch the sides for runners and hit that quarterback.” We clap hands and break. He unlatches the door, victims spilling to plan, standing between us and the end zone and us with guns up and armor on.

“Wait a minute,” I stop him. “I’ve never played this, who's the quarterback?”

He lifts his head, movement slow as he checks the air, takes in the scene. Down fifty yards and past one and then two cars is a group of four of them with us in their sight.

“That one,” he says a grenade coming out, pin pulled and dropping down, winding back and throwing to the air, up, over, tumbling at the victim feet, sleep-sound as ears silent hot and then bangTHOOM he’s shouting GO but I can’t hear, hands to the rifle and I scramble, burn victims turn to the sound as our guns come to face THACK gummy scabs spraying away, boots clopping and armor rubbing, checking left and right and running, a corpse reach too close, hiss-throating and then gunfire taking his shoulders to ground.

A hand reaches out from under the car, grabbing him with filth and shriek. “Time out,” he shouts, body-nails ripping at his gear, a charred face pulling out, teeth reaching. He shoves his rifle under the chassis and fires a long burst. Dead blood and muzzle flashing, then nothing.

“I called time out, goddamn it." He stands and I follow. In the end zone two of them are in pieces and pulling themselves up. “That’s all they've got? Why doesn’t their coach pull more players from the bench?” I look at him and he’s throb-smiling. I ask him if he has more grenades. “You don’t want me to use those yet.” He pulls out two more diagrams and a red marker, making lines to murder in.

“I don’t understand.”

“The end-mission is two more blocks away.” He spins out from behind the car and says, "That was only the first quarter.”

We come down on the two victims with our rifles laughing, their chests and eyes coming apart under bullets. Next comes I don't know how long of run-and-gun point conversions, a hard drive on the dusty streets, running backs with caved faces, slot receivers taking ammo to chest cavities, and us with the heady rush of victories, screaming, laughing, a game to end all games.

It's all in quick clips like living the highlight reel. There are interceptions and tackles and fouls. There's a girl, a dead girl, and me loving my bullets ripping her. High fives and reloads. There's pulling my vest off so I can breathe it in. Touchdown dances into arms reaching around me, shoving them away and firing dead. The crowd getting every penny, a roar like tsunami as they come and worship, worship and come, and Daniel saying far too early, “That’s it, that’s game,” and me pushing him off and screaming overtime, overtime, and him repeating, “That’s game,” and me looking around to see there’s no one but us and our chests coming up and falling down, lungs scratching, and us leaving the field as heroes, first past the posts of the dark horses, us, clear-winner champions, until we breach and enter to a different sort of locker room made of bright plastic and boxes.

“What's this,” I complain.

“Toy store. Closest place likely to have batteries, I’ve checked just about everywhere else.”

We step down and the floor goes wrong, dolls and action figures pushing heavy out of the way. Looking down I’m in a foot of water. Daniel says, “Spread out.”

I go left, him right, sloshing through the murk of unicorn dolls and super-heroes, board games a-bobbing, bright plastic guns under the father-stare of our big, gray, cruel ones. The smell of wet cardboard and carpet comes up as flashlights snap on down the aisles, one and one, splash and splatter. We comb this dense rectangle, this rotten winner’s circle, and it gushes under our boots.

I lower my rifle and say, “Shit.”

“Contact?”

I motion down and he sees the display, face to the down, packages of batteries sunk in the swamp. He drops his aim, sighs and falls ass-down into an orange plastic bench shrunken to kid-size. He says, “Do you think the manufacturers predicted this?”

I sit in a tiny chair that's trying to float up from under me like the pills, drug apex kicking in hard, smiling faces on toy boxes widening, tops of aisles swaying, bobbing over like jack-in-the-boxes to the water, stomach churn burning my eyes, cold and warm, throat-sand tasting like acid, spinning and grinning, a crowd concerned, ninjas and soldiers all.

Daniel’s mouth says, “You know what we need?”

A time machine. An airplane. A flame-thrower.

“We need a woman. Here we are, the last two people on Earth and not a cunt between us. How fucked is that? Humans are done, you know that? Fucked. Extinct.” He looks around at the walls not closing in on him, not vibrating. “Fucking Christ. Kids and their colorful bullshit. Wasting their time right ‘til they died. You don't know how awful these little shits could be. Unless you do, I don't know."

My cheeks are flames burning my skull up I say No.

“Good. Don’t have kids, whatever you do. You put all this work into them, taking them to practice, always punishing them, and after all that investment your payoff is they go homo and get a film degree to make movies about flowers and dick grabbing. Trust me, don’t get married.”

I tell my finger: I won’t.

“Well not now you won't, all the women are dead.” The toy store currents wash around us, electronics in the waves. “Women and batteries,” he says and blur wipes out his mouth, soaking out and hiding him in bursts of censor. “That’s all we need.”

Forcing lids, licking lips, I roll to the direction of the mute-down voice and just because it feels so good I say, “If you can get us there, I can show you where there’s both.”

Forgot Something Down at The Store

I’m puking ham behind a bus bench. A gunshot sounds, then: “This is a real woman we’re talking about?”

He’s too distracted to realize I’m throwing up his drugs. “Skin and everything,” I wipe, sobering, regretting.

“I can’t believe you were holding out on me. Do you know how much we need this?” He meets my eye. “To repopulate, don’t look at me like that. Do you even get what this means? Humankind is saved. We can restart the race, you and I as its father.”

We get back to running. “Not with her,” I say.

“Waiting for the stork to come? If he does he’ll be burnt and bleeding just like everyone else.” A victim, gun butt to fore with a snap of neck-spine. “Don’t worry, we’ll take turns with her. Better for the gene pool anyway.” Tongues exploding from mouths.

“Obviously,” he fires. Slowly a grin fills his face. “You’re trying to turn me off of her, aren’t you? You want her to yourself. You sick mother. Ask for my help getting to her and then hoard the goods.”

“If that were true I never would have left her.” In front of us: the thick, square building thumping with body.

“She's here? Last time I checked this place it was full of lethals.”

“Well there’s only one in there now,” I say. We clear the entrance left and right, left and right and press ourselves into the bricks. I cover him and he takes apart the barricade and I think of before, Adena seeing me like that, exposed, deranged, and I think of Daniel’s med supplies in me and him not knowing.

I tell him, “Watch the front, I’ll go in first.”

He raises his handgun to my sternum. “That’s a good plan. I get eaten and you get the girl, right? We could also do it like this: you, out of my way.”

“You don’t know her. She almost killed me.”

“You probably deserved it.”

I take out a victim fast and turn back. “I don’t even know what I did to make her angry, but you’ve never seen something like it. She’s…” Insert dramatic pause. “Unstable. Delusional. If we walk in big and scary she’ll dream up some reason to pop our brains out. I need some time to work on her.”

He thinks, shakes. “More reason to back you up.”

I push him back. “You’re not listening to me. It won’t work if we do it your way. You’ll never sleep with another woman again.” He stops struggling. “Give me a few minutes, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

He looks at the door, me, away. I push aside the door and head in. Behind me he says, “Tell her something good about me. Something women like. Tell her I want babies with her.”

What I do is nod. What I don’t say is how that wouldn’t work, not on any woman and especially not on her.

The air is crawling, old, rancid. Somewhere deep inside the store a battery-powered CD player is putting out Mozart, and under it my armored boots are laying down the beat, thop..thop…thop, and my rhythm section heart keeping double-time, thu-bump thu-bump thu-bump, and my eyes down each row.

Four aisles and nothing, five and just smell, down six aisles and the music gets louder, reverberation swirling, seven aisles nothing, eight aisles and THOOMsplash liquid detergent explodes at my ear bringing me to knee and I scream, ”Wait.”

“For what? For you to finish the job,” the napkins shout through the concerto.

“For my apology.”

“You don’t say sorry for trying to murder someone. It's not oops-sorry stuff.” chide the softener sheets. “You try to kill someone, you go to jail.”

I peek through the products, hands up. “In a world without prisons, you’ll have to settle for an apology.”

With a crinkle the bleach pads say, “Christ look at you- you’re dressed to kill me. You came prepared for this.”

“This is to protect me from teeth. It's getting worse out there.” Daniel’s footsteps come slamming closer and closer, ignoring his wait. “Stay back,” I yell and the sound stops an aisle behind.

“Is that someone else? Did you find a survivor,” she asks, her black hair with lines of gray a periscope, and I definitely can't get rid of her now.

“I’m surviving fine, I don’t need your help. In fact the only time I needed help was to save me from you,” she shouts from her bird’s nest. “Now turn around and get the fuck out of here, this place is mine.”

The strings and flutes coming from the speaker, Baroque dripping from the shelves, I feel a little sorry for her. I slow my breath.

“It’s decaying under you. I don’t care how much air freshener you have, it’s getting unlivable in here.” I stand up, shoulders slacking. Daniel comes to my right with his weapon down. “It’s getting worse out there, Adena. There's more of them now. They won’t stay out forever, some day there’ll be so many they’ll push right in. You can only stay up there so long.”