A Chemical Fire (9 page)

Boxes push aside and her big, dark eyes look down. “He's fat," she motions to Daniel, "and he's making you fat, too."

“Watch your m-”

“Then help me,” I cut him off. “You’re the pro, right? Help me lose the weight.” Daniel eyeing me, jealous, thinking I was his project.

She looks to him. “You know he’s insane, right? He tried to kill me. All that mess you see, he did that.”

He sees the dried blood, the rips, the stains, the char. Sinister run-off from a previous disaster, a tanker run aground transporting black, puking wrath. He looks at me and my eyes say She did this. His say, We understand.

“Whatever the problem is, I can protect you,” he says up at her.

And all I can think is, don’t say pills don’t say pills don’t say pills.

Vibrissa: Eyes of a Compound

“Welcome to my castle,” Daniel smiles, standing over rifle victims.

Adena says, “You have rice in your teeth.” She steps past him with her rolling luggage and looks at the hotel, the metal door, the mounted guns, the boarded up windows. “Well you found someone as crazy as you,” she says to me.

Daniel undoes the metal door and we go in, closing it behind us. I check the joining rooms and he looks down the elevator shaft, all clear, and says, “You’re safe now, my lady.”

Adena laughs. “Who exactly are you trying to impress?"

He takes off his armor. “I know you’ve been through a lot. I’m just trying to make you comfortable in my house.”

“Take-your-pants-off comfortable? Everyone is dead, so drop the shit. Armageddon or not you’re still a guy, and I’m not stupid.” She walks around the room, past the chopped up stairs, past the fake plants, she leaves her luggage and finds the reservation book and leafs through the pages of missed appointments.

“For drinking water. Come on, I’ll show you.” He opens the door to the pool room, stepping aside and leading her in; faking what he thinks a gentleman is. As we enter a great sound rushes to us like living static chewing at our ears, packing the room with nervous energy. I come up behind the two of them halfway between the door and the pool and the water looks black and gray. Something is wrong.

I hear Daniel curse, his body tense. The sound gets louder as we get closer, the water living, Adena around to the side.

“This is your pool? What have you been doing in here?”

Standing arm to arm, Daniel and I look into it. Where there had been water before, now there’s a frenzy; a cloud; a nightmare. “Those are…those are flies,” I hear myself saying under the thundering buzz.

Thousands. Millions. Filling the pool top to bottom, swapping for water. A spinning crowd so thick it’s almost liquid, flying and humming as one. Daniel looks at me, shocked. “I swear I didn’t go swimming,” I tell him.

The door behind me flies open, slamming to the wall and jumping my nerves. Through the door the unthinkable comes running: a victim, cracked and stumbling fast, leaving a snail’s trail of soft-black skin and rushing at me gurgling.

“It's going down, it’s happening,” Daniel yells, charging toward the table of arms and ammo. The victim closes our distance and I step back from him, my foot finding nothing but air, loud air, my body reacting and my arms shooting out. Center lost, hope lost, I fall back and down, through the pool and its flies, molasses with wings. I close my eyes, try not to breathe, feel my fall through the terrible weight of insect mass passing over my skin and under my back, against the neck hair, dropping down.

Impact fires through skull and spine, softened only by the scrunch of abdomens popping underneath. My head explodes. Neurons carrying the message and lungs shutting off. The agitated static-sound deafens me. I push my eyes open and face a whirlwind. The flies, attacking my eyelashes, and I panic, struggle to find my breath and with it a mouthful of them to spit out onto the pool’s bottom. Somewhere above, alarmed voices.

Then through the living water: a hand. The victim, down here with me, burnt and hungry, reaching out blind to part the greasy bugs and find me. On my ass and hands I scramble back and away from him.

“John?” A woman’s voice from heaven. “John, answer me.”

“Gala,” I answer, hand away from my mouth and flies rushing in. I’m overwhelmed, taken under. Burn-swollen fingers grasping at the pool floor grab my feet, pulling up my legs as I drool out flies.

“I’m dropping you a handgun, the safety’s off.” Daniel's shout through the cloud. The victim’s black eyes stare as he pulls himself stinking up my clothes to bring his mouth closer. This isn’t personal, his face says, this is starving as a fiend.

Clack-sliiide behind me and a handgun hugs the curve of the pool all the way down, to my left, glides to a stop two feet away. I hear my voice whimper as I reach for it, fingers on the cold grip when my thigh bursts with pain, teeth under the surface, a shriek at my lips. I look down and see his face, greedy, sunken into my leg.

The woman above the cloud says, “Did he kill you?”

“Not yet,” and more flies get in.

The gun in my hand is brought to his head, his teeth shoveling at me, and a pull of the trigger BANGSPLAT black brains into black flies, the victim’s head exploding off me and bringing the meat of my leg in his mouth with him. The cloud around us reacts away then falls back into place like a wave.

I’m screaming a bit, sure, but I’m also thinking how much worse this would be without the painkillers in my veins.

A rope for holding up target practice mats drops down by the edge and I crawl to it, blood pulsing from my leg. I push away from the burn victim, his faceless body still, hold on, get pulled up through the wings and legs with my leg pouring. I clear the cloud and arms come over the edge and we pull me out. I shake flies out of my hair and clothes, each one flying back into the pool and rejoining the swirl. Not one veers from the group. Not one chooses to be apart.

As Daniel wraps his hands tight around the leg to stop the blood, Adena says, “Where did that thing come from? We locked that door of yours, I know we did.”

They help me to my feet, my face sour. “It’s not possible,” Daniel says. “There's no way. Absolutely none. The door is locked and I’ve checked every room of this place."

Necrosis ex Necropolis

Daniel puts us in the shower room with an emergency stash of medical supplies. He tears my pant leg to expose the bite and uses the material to tie a tourniquet above it. Then he tells me to elevate it and leaves with gun to check doors, clear landing zones, be everything he is. Before he leaves he gives me the look that says Here’s Your Chance.

The door closes behind him and I say, “He wants to screw you.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Adena says. “And why should I take warnings from you? I haven’t forgotten you tried to strangle me. Just because you're hurt doesn't mean I trust you again.”

"You never trusted me." I play with a nozzle on the wall- nothing comes out of the showerhead except for a squeak and I say, “Do we talk about it?”

“There’s really nothing to discuss,” she laughs. “I shouldn’t have come here and I knew it. I said it. Now in what, less than an hour’s time, I’ve already helped save you from dying in a pool of flies? Seriously, what’s wrong with you?” She gets closer. “There's something about you. The temper, the guilt, something says stay the hell away.”

I study the drain at the center of the room, scrape it’s rust, see the shimmer of roaches through the holes.

“I'll bet you can't tell me one reason I shouldn’t leave."

When the generator is gone and the cold comes in, these cockroaches will be dead. They can survive nuclear winter, maybe, but not actual winter. For all the talk of their durability, they’re still tropical insects with tropical needs. Their year-round presence in this part of the world has only been made possible by artificial heating.

“Fucking answer me,” she yells in this square of room, a room that will leave impressions longer than most others. The metal will go first, of course, all those screws and nails ionizing, causing the plumbing fixtures to come off. Then the grout will break down, allowing the tile to fall down, followed by the rest of it collapsing in a loud, unheard heap. The shape will be gone, but because of its properties all that tile could be found a few thousand years from now, looking like fossils, imprinted with water damage and the screams of a woman wanting to know why.

“John,” she says. I look at her and I can see her skull so cleanly, so unobstructed. “I realize I never should’ve made you go to that house.”

Antennae probe up through the scum of the drain and I say, “What house?”

“Your wife’s.”

I tell her I don’t have either of those things. Her head cocks as the door opens, bringing Daniel saying, “Hotel’s clear. Not a soul.”

Adena says, “That’s not what you should have been looking for.” Daniel grabs a knapsack from the supply shelf and drops it to the floor, antennae retracting from drain.

“With a chunk missing like that we won’t be able to sew you up, but what we can do is disinfect it and remove any debris. At least that way it won’t get infected.”

“That sounds painful,” I say, unwrapping my leg to let the blood flow.

“It’s necessary. Human mouth flora has a lot more pathogens than your traditional animal bite, and that’s when we’re still alive.” He unzips the bag, fishes in and throws me a bottle. “Only take a couple, they’re strong.”

Adena says, “I don’t think you should-“

“Thanks,” I stop her, popping a childlike two knowing if he were to count the bottle it would already be short seven, this and every other interesting bottle in the building.

“Okay, so, this will be terrible,” Daniel says. He holds one brown bottle and one white one, me ripping more material from the hole in my pant leg and gripping the bloody fabric between teeth. He pours the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and an instant bubbling mass foams up pink, my muscles tensing as the cold hits the inflammation. The peroxide streams from my leg and runs to the drain, reacting with scum and roaches.

“So no one wants to talk about the flies?” I look at the two of them. Neither of them says anything. “I’m fine with that.” Then I say, “Go,” and he pours, and I add my impressions to the fossil tile.

The Screaming Hallway

The best part about being injured is people trust you. It must be that bond they feel with someone they’re taking care of, that helpless feeling thrown off by the damaged that tells people, I must protect this.

Daniel gives the tour to Adena as I lay in my room. He says, “This is a Handgun Room, pistols, revolvers, so on. Canned Goods Room, got your vegetables, peas and beans, your sauces, your soups.”

I get to my feet, ignoring the hurt and the bloody bandage. At the door, listening to them as they go into the stairwell, I hear Adena ask, “What’s behind the locked one?”

Whenever they’re gone I limp-run to get more supplies, always back in my room when they come to change my gauze or give me something for the pain that I’ll chase with more after they leave. For days I do this until it’s too noticeable, then I file down pointless pills to look like good ones, using paper clips and razors to score them or mark them with their appropriate lettering, refilling what I take. The slightest bit of water applied to the cut marks, I find, gives them back that dull sheen you don’t get with handwork. Within a week my leg is getting better, the trust in me coming down, near-enough supplies falling. This means I’ll need to do something, soon.

On the eighth day I’m resting when shouts come from below. Standing out in the hallway, ears tuned deep, I hear the two of them yelling about something when a smell comes to me, something ancient and dangerous. Then I see it roping up out of the stairs: smoke.

The best I can I run down the stairs, the smell and smolder stronger, thicker, crashing into my lungs and eyes. I go from the third floor I’ve been living on to the second to the first, just above the ground level, standing at the mouth of the taken apart stairs with the rope uvula. The smoke is black. Eyes burning, I wave it away and see the shape of the two of them, staggering through slow and confused, the air so dark I can’t even see their faces, only feet clearly and barely bodies.