Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (52 page)

Morton Orczegowski lowered his rifle to point at the ground, walked forward quietly, and stood at arm's-length from the front rank of the silenced crowd. “I
invited
Mr. and Mrs. Kaushik to come with me to my shelter. We bought and paid for everything, including the wheelbarrows, and they are ours. Just let us go with our families and the property we need, and we will leave the whole house, and everything in it, unlocked for you to take what you want from there.”

Ravikumar said, “My house is also unlocked, and we have only what is in our packs and what my friend Morton is sharing with us. Please go take what you want, but leave us alone.”

The crowd was quiet, looking at one another. Morton said, “Just let Mr. and Mrs. Kaushik walk over to me. Don't hold them that way, you're hurting them. We can't get away from you, anyway, any of us.”

A big guy in a Confederate strap-cap released Kanti's arm, and the scrawny, scruffy, probably meth-head holding her other arm did the same. She walked quietly out of the crowd to stand next to Morton; a moment later, so did Ravikumar.

“Now,” Morton said, “We will be gone in five minutes, and you can have—”

A woman with a loud voice, the kind my mom called “brassy” I guess because it cut through all the other sound like a trumpet, announced, “This is so fucking silly. I just need that box of powdered milk that I can see right there in that one wheelbarrow, for my kids.” She walked up the driveway.

Morton said, “Ma'am, I can't let—”

“It's just milk for my kids.” She kept walking. “You are not going to shoot a mother who just needs milk for her kids. That's just silly.”

Watching him from behind, I didn't see Morton's face, but there was a weird twitch in his back muscles, around the shoulder blades, like he was fighting himself for just an instant, before he raised his gun.

A loud click. Nothing more.

He tried the trigger again. Click.

“See?” she said, triumphantly, holding aloft the box of powdered milk and another whole canvas bag. “I'm taking this other stuff too so I don't have to make extra trips.”

The crowd wavered for a second. Morton pulled a pistol from his shoulder holster.

A man in sweatpants and a Homer Simpson T-shirt stepped out of the crowd with a shotgun and pointed it at Morton. Startling, loud clicks beside me: Orry pulling the trigger over and over. “It isn't firing at all,” he whispered.

Morton turned at the clicking of the gun behind him, took one step forward, and pushed the muzzle down. “Looks like guns don't work either.” He was looking right into the man's eyes. “So we'll have to—”

The lady stealing the bag of food, trying to walk out through the crowd, wailed, “No!”

People were grabbing and pulling at the bag. Someone pushed her forward onto her knees, and the powdered milk burst. Morton took one step forward, his arm outstretched—maybe to help her, or to calm the crowd—and that ratty little meth-head slammed him in the head with a shovel. Morton fell; Ravikumar jabbed the meth-head in the face with the gun butt, and bent to look at Morton.

Orry, beside me, was screaming, “Dad! Dad! Daddy!”

Ravikumar Kaushik looked up at us. For an instant, even the people tearing the bag of supplies apart froze. Mattie and I, later, both agreed we remembered the same thing: Ravikumar saw his son, looked into his eyes, and said something we couldn't hear.

Then a man whipped a garden rake over his head, down onto Ravikumar's shoulder, dragging him to the pavement, and some people closed in, kicking and stomping, shoving Kanti away, while the rest rushed up the driveway to the wheelbarrows.

I grabbed my friends' arms and stepped back hard, twisting them around to break the spell. “Orry, your coat and pack! Out the back! Before we're cut off! Downstairs! Now, now,
now
!”

The boys leaped down the stairs after me, through the kitchen. The first shoulders were already crashing against the front door.

We raced through the garage, across the backyard, and through the open gate. The man I had seen seeming to pray to his engine was standing there with a shotgun, but he let us by and kicked the gate shut behind us. Orry jammed a screwdriver through the hasp and said, “Guns don't work either, run!”

I never saw whether he did; we just fled across his yard and down the empty street, ducking behind the first big hedge and creeping over to an alley.

Wild yelling and cheering behind us, but they didn't seem to be coming our way. Mattie started to run back, but Orry and I grabbed his arms and dragged him along that alley. “I heard my mom call me!”

So had I, but I hissed, “It wasn't her, it's a trick!” I knew Kanti wasn't calling
for
him, she was calling
to
him; it wasn't
help me
, it was
good-bye
.

We ran along that alley in the dark until we were all stumbling. Orry said, “This way!” and we followed him back onto a wider street, heading west to judge by the dark shape of the mountains against the stars.

In the street, little clusters of people wandered aimlessly. There were some fires starting to burn in every direction. Behind us, there was a sudden high flame; Orry looked back and said, “I'm guessing that's Dad's spare fuel tank.”

At the edge of the big park-with-a-pond west of our subdivision, Orry stopped and held up a hand. Between gasps he said, “Always imagined it would look like this when Dad talked about it. Sounds so different though. Never imagined no motorcycle or chain saw motors, no sirens, no car horns, no guns.”

I looked up from where I'd been bent over, coughing hard; I was in shitty shape in those days and the air was already thick with smoke. “I never imagined it at all.” We all gasped for air for a minute or so; at least with the wind from the west, it was only a little smoky so far.

Orry said, “Okay, no way we can go much farther in the dark. One of us would turn an ankle or somebody'd ambush us or we'd fall into something we never saw. We have to hide till we have light to move by.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. I realized Mattie wasn't talking, which was a first, and not a good one.

“Trails Park, for tonight. Up to the shelter tomorrow. I'll explain more once we're safe for the night. Meanwhile I have a bolt cutter and crowbar in my pack, and the pump building for West Lake is close.”

It took less than a minute to break in; inside, Orry produced a candle from his pack and lit it. There was a little workbench with tools, a big, now silent, pump and motor, and a little room on the concrete floor. “No windows,” Orry whispered, “so we can have a light.”

He dragged on the door to make sure it was shut all the way. “I didn't pack much food,” he said, apologetically.

“I did.” I started pulling things out of my pack. We all gulped a bottle of water, wolfed things from the bags, and then swallowed more water. Mattie still wasn't talking.

Orry investigated the small refrigerator under the table. “Ha, lucky day. Some naughty maintenance guy was keeping beer here.”

“Not really time for a party,” I said.

Orry shook his head. “It'll help us sleep. We need to do that.”

Mattie spoke. “My mom and dad say . . . they say . . . I promised them I'd never drink till . . . till . . .” He began to cry.

“You don't have to,” I told him, “but it might help.”

Orry and I had three beers each; Mattie reluctantly had one. I'd been thinking about how cold that floor would be, sleeping in my coat, but Mattie said, “My sleeping bag is a big double and . . . and I want to have somebody hold me. My mom used to hold me when I couldn't get to sleep.”

He looked pretty pathetic. I said, “Okay, but don't even think about trying to get a feel.”

He was warm, almost like the big dog I'd always wanted. Even though he was still sobbing and whispering “thank you for holding me,” between the beer, the warmth, and too much exercise I fell asleep right away.

I had no idea that this sharing a bed thing was going to be the rule for the next seventeen years.

*   *   *

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
18, 1998, 5:50
A.M.
T
RAILS
P
ARK
, W
ESTMINSTER
, C
OLORADO

Who was this person hanging on to me? Why wasn't I in my bed? Why was it so hard and cold under me?

I remembered, poked my head out into the pitch-black chill, and tried to crawl out without disturbing Mattie, feeling to find my boots and coat. Mattie wriggled out beside me.

Three feet away, Orry was crying, very softly, choking it down and plainly trying to pretend to be asleep.

I wondered about both boys, and if they'd be okay. I knew I wasn't like other people—my folks had spent almost as big a pile of money trying to find out what was defective with their big fat ungrateful daughter as they'd spent buying me out of the Busan orphanage in the first place. I guess it was worth it for Mom to have something to say when the other moms were bitching about their kids, and Dad maybe 'cause I was somebody to talk to that wasn't as crazy as Mom, and only got in his way a little bit when he happened to think of it.

I tried to imagine seeing my father killed, like Orry and Mattie had seen last night.

No idea, no clue, no feeling. Dad was okay and I kind of liked him, so maybe I'd be pissed off.

I figured I'd better stay real quiet on the whole subject. I needed Orry and Mattie to live through whatever this was, and who could tell what they'd do if they found out how weird I was, or how weird they looked to me?

Orry was crying harder now, still inside his sleeping bag. Mattie touched my arm, took my hand, guided me to my feet, and led me to the door. We carefully opened it, finding the beginning of gray daylight, and a huge moon halfway down the clearing western sky.

The chinook was on its way out, but the bad weather still wasn't here. Mattie dragged the door shut behind us. He was holding Orry's crowbar. “I think we can probably get into the bathrooms,” he whispered, “and it might be our only chance today for a comfortable place to go.”

We pried the women's side door open on the little building; it seemed like a good idea to take turns keeping watch while the other one went in peace. It was freeze-ass cold to drop my pants in there, but at least there was toilet paper. By the time I'd finished, Orry was walking down the slope toward us, and if his face was kind of red and smeary, he seemed to at least be done crying for the moment.

We let him have his turn; he emerged with a wry smile. “Good thing there's only three of us. That's all the toilets there were and we'll have to bring up buckets of water from the lake to flush,” he said.

“Why would we bother?”

“For the next guy. That way he doesn't get sick from our crap and spread disease, which will find its way to us.” He held up an REI folding bucket. “There's a cook pot in my pack too, so we can boil water once we make a fire, and I've got water purifying tabs.”

“If we boil it do we need the tabs?” Mattie asked.

“Oh, yeah. Pretty much all surface water in Colorado has cryptosporidium. You want to shit your guts out for two weeks?”

“There's a soft drink machine in the rec building,” I pointed out.

“There's no electricity—” Orry began.

“There's no cops and we have a crowbar,” I said.

“I'm still going to grab water to flush the toilets,” Orry said, and headed down to the lake. Meanwhile, we broke in and found the machine was mostly full. We started stacking bottled water and Mountain Dew.

“Can't believe I didn't think of that,” Orry said, joining us. “That private property libertarian thing, I guess.” He seemed on the brink of tearing up, probably thinking of his father again.

Afraid he would set Mattie off, I asked, “So where's the shelter?”

“Up by Lyons. Dad equipped it with pretty much everything we're likely to need.”

“How far?” Mattie asked.

“Thirty-two miles. We might even get most of the way there by dark. Going west from here, there's a whole chain of public parks, school campuses, and software company campuses. Dad said to go this way ‘in case of civil disorder,' which we sure got. So . . . you guys have any better plan?”

We didn't, so we all sat down and ate more chips, cookies, and candy for breakfast. My pack was getting emptier, so we reshuffled to even out the load of water and soda.

“I'd like to get a look at the city before we go,” Mattie said. “Just to see what's happening down there. I mean, what if the power came back on overnight?”

“The Coke machine would've been working,” I pointed out.

“And I'd rather not go up the slope and maybe show on a skyline,” Orry said.

I looked at Mattie's face and shrugged. “Maybe if we're quick?” I was guessing Mattie was hoping to see cars moving and traffic lights working and then go back and find his parents still alive. I'll never get those parent and kid things but I knew Mattie needed that last look to be sure.

From where we lay prone on the ridgeline, we had big, long views to the south and east.

Eastward, the sun was just above the horizon, a huge ball of red, dark as a fresh wound, slashed by black lines of retreating clouds. I-25 was a horizon-to-horizon smear of abandoned cars. In the nearby housing developments, some fires burned, and some swaths of burned buildings were still smoldering. The big refinery in Commerce City was pouring out black smoke, as were the tall buildings downtown and in the Tech Center. And it was
quiet
, quiet like when you're backpacking.

“Let's go,” Mattie said. “Let's get away before more people are out.”

*   *   *

M
ONDAY
, 8 J
UNE
2015,
ABOUT
10:20
A.M.
R
AFTER
XOX R
ANCH
, W
ESTERN
N
EBRASKA