American Apocalypse (3 page)

I noticed, but did not really register, the headlights of a car entering the lot. It was no big deal, even that late. What I did register about thirty minutes later was the sound of footsteps coming toward me—especially when they did not stop at the outer ring of urination. Instead, they kept coming, and I was able to hear voices.

Male voice: “C’mon, quit whining; your mom said it was okay.”

Kid voice: “I don’t have to go potty.”

Male voice: “Sure you do, kid, sure you do.”

Silence for about ten seconds, then the kid voice: “Ow! Stop it. You’re hurting my hand.”

Now they were almost on top of me. I had picked out a nice patch of small boxwoods and pine trees to make my home for the night. I recommend pine trees: They
smell clean, and the pine needles make the ground much more comfortable to sleep on. Another advantage is if you have to move around, you can do it quietly. You don’t get all that
snap
,
crackle
,
pop
that you get from walking on dead oak leaves.

Whoever was leading the kid had zeroed in on my little copse, which made sense. I had selected it because I needed enough room to roll out my sleeping bag, without being seen. If you were looking for a place to take a private dump, well it would do nicely for that also. I didn’t understand what was going on. I was getting a strange vibe from the voices, but I hadn’t learned yet to completely trust my gut. I figured that Dad, or whoever, had been told to take Junior someplace so he could move his bowels. I didn’t want them to do it in my new bedroom, but I was too embarrassed to jump up and say, “Hey, find someplace else to shit!” Yes, I know: What the heck was I embarrassed about? I mean, these people were sleeping in their cars for God’s sake! I don’t know. I do know that I rolled out of my sleeping bag, quietly picked up my trowel, and crouched next to a boxwood.

The man, with kid in hand, had detoured around me.
Strange
, I thought,
his breathing sounded so labored
. The kid was whining and sniffling. He looked maybe seven or eight, his pale face glowing in the darkness. His brown hair needed cutting, and the bangs were hanging in his face. The kid did not look happy. Actually, he looked scared to death. He had a plastic Transformer—it looked like Optimus Prime—held tightly against his chest. Seeing his expression triggered something in my brain. Something was not right here, yet I had no clue exactly what. I still didn’t fully understand that monsters weren’t
just creatures that lived in the deepest, darkest woods and attacked for food. There was another species of monsters that used the woods for far worse things.

They came to a halt about eight feet from me and I was able to get a good look at the mouth breather. He was probably six foot two, around two hundred forty pounds, of which at least forty looked to be pure Grade A fast-food lard. Most of it was hanging over the waistband of his khaki shorts. He wore a blue Polo shirt and had a Red Sox ball cap pulled down low. His face was covered with black and white stubble. I did not have to meet him to know I didn’t like him. Events began to pick up speed here. Memories of what happened next flicker in succession through my head with a strobe light rapidity and brightness: the fat man dropping to his knees . . . the kid squirming in his grip . . . the sound of clothing being undone . . .

The kid’s voice: “Stop it!”

The fat man’s reply: “Ssshhhh, hold still, damn it!”

The kid again, but louder: “Stop it!”

And then: “Don’t hurt
me
—”

The pleading rising in fright at the end.
Flash
—I am out of the bushes—
Flash
—the forged-steel trowel smooth and weightless in my hand—
Flash
—the kid’s face frozen in fear mixed with anger—
Flash
—the grotesque fat man and his busy hands; his khaki shorts undone—
Flash
—a burning hot, red anger filling me up with an intense, overwhelming need to—
Flash
—a pudgy face turned to me, reflecting surprise, the fat man, coming to his feet . . .

“I was just . . .” he tries to explain, his eyes widening.

I bury my trowel deep into his fat gut. Time slows down and then stops. I hear a wheezing sound, followed by a sucking sound as I pull out the trowel—and bury it again. This time I go a little higher: I don’t want fat; I want
vital
organs.

I drive my trowel deep into his solar plexus and twist it with a strong wrenching.

Flash!
The wheeze turns into a groan. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement: The boy pulls his pants back up. I put more muscle into shoving the trowel out of Fat Man’s back. Blood trickles, then pours out of his mouth.

His eyes roll up . . . one chubby hand feebly paws at the trowel. I feel alive, so intense, like I’ve never felt anything before. The anger is gone now, replaced by a light. I feel whole in a way that getting high never could give me, watching his life fade away . . .

Flash . . . He is down. The blood is black; it is everywhere, still warm and sticky on my hands. I look over at the kid: He is staring at the body. He looks up at me; I have no clue what he saw, but he kicks the Fat Man in the side of his head. Fat Man’s head goes side to side as if he is saying, “Oh, no.”

For some reason this sets me off. I start laughing and can’t stop. The kid looks at me; he smiles and kicks Fat Man in the head again. We are both laughing. The kid kicks him over and over in the head, growling something under his breath. If he had been wearing anything other than cheap Chinese sneakers, the Fat Man’s head would be caved in by now.

Strobe light.

I am whispering to the kid, “Hey. Hey! Little man.”

He stops kicking. No one is laughing. I have no idea how much time has gone by. I tell him, “It’s okay, stop.” I lean over and wipe what I can off on the fat man’s shorts; being such a fat ass means there’s plenty of cloth to work with. I roll him over to use the back of his shorts also.

I have a lot of blood on my hands; I see the shape of a wallet and help myself to it. The kid is watching me. I tell him, “He was an asshole.” He replies quietly, “I know.”

“You okay?” He nods his head gravely.

Damn—I feel tired. The Transformer has fallen in the grass. “Optimus Prime?”

He nods.

“Cool. Can you find your way back?”

“I don’t want to go back.”

This throws me for a bit of a loop. What am I supposed do? It irritates me; I try to keep it out of my voice because I know what it’s like to be a kid the world is dumping on—just not like this.

“Look, little man, I got to roll out of here.” I indicate Fat Man with my chin. “Somebody is going to come looking for him, and they aren’t going to be happy when they find him.” I look at him, “You know what I mean, right?”

He nods his head solemnly, pauses, then says, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I look away and then look back at him. “I know and you know, but will they?”

He ponders this, running who knows what through his head. He nods, and then startles me by throwing his skinny little arms around me and giving me a hug. He backs away, adjusts Optimus Prime in his arm, turns, and begins walking back to the car lot. He walks about ten
feet and begins to run. I figure I have less than five minutes to be gone.

Actually, it turned out that I could have gone back to bed. The kid went back to his mom, and she wasted no time in getting the hell out of there—no surprise there. The money Fat Man had paid her was probably burning a hole in her pocket; plus, even a stone junkie could figure out that the questioning that would arise from this might not be to her advantage.

I went back to where my sleeping bag was and bundled up everything as fast as I could. I strapped my stuff to the bike and started riding hard in the opposite direction of where the Car People were parked. I came out on the other side of the office building that the parking lot had been built for and really started putting my legs into it. Only one problem: I had no idea where to go. Also, it was not the brightest idea to be out there on the road zipping along like a man possessed in the dark—not with a fair amount of blood still on me. I cut off on to a jogger path and slowed down. I needed to find a stream to wash off and a place secure enough to think.

I headed for the big drainage pipes. They went under the road near a half-completed office building, and they were big, too—big enough that I could stand up in them without bumping my head. I expected a helicopter to be hovering over the area soon, and I hoped being in the pipe would make me invisible, even to infrared. Then I realized that I had left my trowel behind! My stomach knotted up even more, as if that was possible. I had to stop the bike and throw up; I leaned over the handlebars and gave it all up—not that there was a lot. Then it was
dry heaves until I made it to the pipes. There was enough water flowing through them for my purposes. I stepped back into the woods where it was flat and changed, rolling the clothes I had worn into a ball and bagging them.

After that I sat on the slope at the entrance to the pipes and waited: waited for the sirens and the sound and light of the county police chopper circling; waited until dawn and nothing came—an occasional siren in the distance, but nothing headed in my direction and nothing in the air—nothing. I rolled down a foot path and turned into the woods. I found a downed tree big enough to serve as a wall on one side of my sleeping bag when I lay down; I was asleep within minutes.

Three days later I came out of the woods. I had to; I was starving. I rode out tentatively, feeling as if I had a big neon sign blinking MURDERER over my head. A federal Humvee rolled past me, Homeland Security stenciled in white along the side. The soldier in the turret did not even look at me as they rolled on by. A few cars passed me. The drivers casually glanced at me and continued on.

I knew Carol would know what was going on. Running a shelter meant she was plugged into my world, and the real world. Plus, if I was wanted, well, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t snitch me out—at least I hoped so. I got lucky; she was sitting in a folding chair, catching some sun, and smoking a cigarette. One of the guys who helped out with security at the shelter was standing about ten feet away from her, watching the world go by.

The people at the shelter tried to give her space and a few minutes alone when she was having a cigarette; it was the only break she allowed herself. Tito was out there just in case some idiot thought she had another one for him—or wanted to discuss why he had gotten thrown out. She
would have given you the cigarette she was smoking if you asked; it was just that her staff didn’t want her bothered. I had not counted on Tito. We were not tight, Tito and I, but I figured Carol would keep him heeled if word was out about me, at least until I was down the road, if it did come to that.

The conversation with Carol left me amazed: Nobody seemed to give a damn. The guy I had killed was an unemployed real-estate agent and a Cub Scout leader who was forced to resign, even though the charges against him had been dropped. Until a few days ago he was just another Car Person who called a parking lot home. No one, when interviewed, had anything good to say about him. The kid never did come up in the conversation. Carol did say that whoever had removed the guy from the population had done a lot of people a favor. Hearing that from her made me feel a lot better inside, especially when she added that they should have dragged him behind his car for a couple miles before killing him.

I think she knew, but she wasn’t going to ask me straight out. What was really interesting was that when the body was found, so was my trowel. The crowd that had gathered around the body had noticed it before the cops showed up. When the cops bagged the trowel, some wit in the crowd had yelled out, “The gardener did it!” I liked that; I liked thinking of myself as “The Gardener.” What does a gardener do? He weeds the plants and flowers of invasive species. I think child molesters qualify as invasive.

I have to admit to an unhealthy liking of the Batman movies when I was growing up. After my conversation with Carol I actually spent time thinking about possible costumes, or as I preferred to call them “uniforms.”
Uniforms
sounded much more dignified, even when it was only me that I was holding the conversation with. But I could not get past the image of me on the Batbike: cape fluttering in my slipstream, as I pedaled furiously somewhere “on a mission.” That was a little too insane, even for me. So I gave up on the uniform idea, although from then on I mentally referred to my wheels as the Batbike. Too bad it was green. But if I squinted, and it was the right time of day, it did look black.

I wanted to do something with my life other than just scrounge a living from the crumbs of a society that never had much use for me anyway. I had grown up a throwaway. I had never mattered enough to anyone to protect. Hell, it was a big deal for Mom to remember to feed me. I knew firsthand what it felt like to be prey, in my case, prey for Mom’s latest boyfriend to beat on after he got drunk. I would stay quiet and out of sight until he’d eventually turn on her. Mom had a talent for picking out a certain kind of asshole and then slowly driving him insane until he snapped. Sometimes they would come find me to beat on. Other times I would try to distract him from beating on her and take the blows instead. I had been helpless in a world where everyone was bigger, stronger, and knew more than me. I may have gotten older and bigger, but not much else had changed. Except now I had a secret, a powerful secret that made everything feel so much better. But at the same time it felt wrong, too. I went back and forth in my head arguing the different sides. In one corner I had “Why care?” with “Fuck them all” pacing in the opposite corner and “Never again” off in a third.

I didn’t really like
Why care?
He was a whiner who just wanted to find someplace safe to hide away and eventually
die in.
Fuck them all
was angry—very,
very
angry—a burning red violence that alternated between intense flaring heat and smoldering. He wanted to hurt people, any and all people; I knew once he started it wouldn’t stop until he was killed.
Never again
was the hardest to see and promised nothing immediately. The only promise he offered was that I could get myself to a place where I no longer had to be a victim. The price was I had to do my best to protect those around me with what I learned. It turned out to be a simple choice: good wolf or bad wolf. Carol made the decision for me: When the memory of her face floated up into the three-way conversation,
Fuck them all
lashed out, and I couldn’t live with that. I really did love her. I squeezed him out, a growing intense pressure that was trying to take me over from the inside, and I boxed him up and never opened that box again.