The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (4 page)

The clasped lock lies outside
of her reach.

“We have a band. Three Ring
Dragon,” Miranda says, as she undoes the lock. “We could use a backup singer.”

The girl
rises and looks Miranda up and down. I can see her thinking—too chubby, too
dark, too plain—but then the princess slouches forward. “I was never that good
at singing anyway,” she says.

“We know.” Miranda smiles.

As the princess steps out, she
kicks her cage. It falls over the other side of the smokestack, and we hear it
clang onto the ground.

“Not cool!” Zaki One yells up.

“You almost hit me,” Zaki Two
adds.

“Sorry,” the princess says
airily. She leads the way down. Her legs wobble, but she stays upright.

“You’re still the princess,” I
whisper to Miranda.

“I’d rather be the revolting
peasant,” she whispers back. We make it down to the ground and none of the kids
minds that we liberated their princess from her tower.

No one notices.

Looking for a place to
practice, we enter the cold halls of the hospital and take the stairs up to the
roof. A docked helicopter sits like a forlorn spider, and we can see the city
from every direction. We see the blast-marks and smoke from our old
neighborhood. When we start practicing, we face away from it.

The princess makes us more
powerful. She adds in sound where there’d only been silence before. She gets
us, and maybe soon, if everything goes well, we’ll become the Four Ring Dragons.

We play and look down on the
kids on the hill. They move like puppets whose master keeps forgetting about
them. I can’t look too long without a numbness floating up in me.

We write a song about them. Not
a song to start with, but one to end with. We’ve never written a song for so
many people before. Maybe with the princess it will work.

At dusk we walk down the cement
stairs and out onto the overgrown field. Kids lie motionless on the grass.
Others light a pile of dried brush and throw slabs of grey meat onto the
flames.

“Think it’s safe to eat?”
Miranda asks.

“No. It probably comes from
around here,” Zaki One says.

“Going to eat it anyway,” Zaki
Two says. “No choice. We never get a choice.”

“Let’s play first,” I say.
“Let’s play hungry. It’ll give us an edge.” Something in the air feels
different tonight. The fire reminds me of summer camp, sing-a-longs, and
marshmallows.

I tune my guitar and play like
Jimi, then Page, and then Johnson. Just to show off a little. Then I start to
play like me. Like everything I know and everything that’s happened comes into
my music.

“Been standing so long,”
Miranda croons, and then repeats it.

The princess echoes, “So long,
so long,” on the backbeat. Zaki’s flute and harp come in under and over my
guitar.

“Been standing so long I forgot
how to sit. How to leave. How to fly.” It’s one of the first songs we ever
wrote together. We rock it. Even the princess doesn’t miss a note.

Like mosquitoes at dusk, kids
draw near and surround us. They stand too close. The princess swirls around and
forces them to back off. We reach the end of our first song, and I see a few
kids crying.

Pain is good.

Our next song cuts deeper. It’s
stripped down and harsh. We wrote it a couple of years ago; back when we were
playing to sold-out shows and kids remembered how to thrash. Miranda screams
and I break a guitar string trying to match her. Around us kids sway like it is
a love song.

Feel, I think as I play.
Remember. Wake up. We can still make something in this world. The anger in the
song thrums out between my fingers like artery blood from a deep wound.

We play another song, and
another. It feels like every kid left in the entire city gathers around us. I
see someone smile. I see a couple of people dance together. I focus on the
music and what we are saying with every word and chord.

Survive this. Wake up. Wake up.

We are playing better than we
ever have. I feel reality changing around us, just a little. Then it comes time
for us to sing their song—the one we wrote today. My hand cramps. I feel thirsty
and a little dizzy, but none of that matters. I let the music use me.

Their song is big, brash, and
violent. It starts hard and it keeps on going. We play it like the numb doesn’t
exist. We play it to break them apart. As I play, I imagine we could start
something here. We could grow food and keep everything bad out. We could have
parties, make clothes, and maybe one day make babies. We could become a tribe.

“Nobody remembers who you are.
Everyone remembers what you want to be,” Miranda wails, twice as loud as any of
our instruments.

I see them changing just like I
did, like we’d been trying to make people change from the beginning. Even if it
wakes them up to an awful world, I want them here. I want them with me.

The song hits the guitar solo
and I start rocking. The princess takes a step forward and away from the band.
I think she is going to swirl around again, but instead she starts singing.

“To the roof, to the roof,” she
yells. I look at Miranda and Zaki One. They shrug. I play louder to drown her
out. Miranda starts ululating, but it’s too late.

The princess bolts toward the
hospital and, like lemmings, the kids follow in her wake.

Miranda sings louder, but there
are only a couple dozen kids left. They’re numb and stare at us dumbly.

I play the wrong chord. Miranda
forgets the lyrics, and Zaki Two isn’t playing his harp at all.

We hear yells from the roof.
Zaki One plays a fierce flute melody that should have, maybe, been able to
reach them up there. I play with him. Miranda too. We aren’t playing a song
anymore; we’re just making noise.

I see a flash of long golden
princess hair. She stands on the edge of the roof, and then throws herself
over. She flies like a bird, like a triumph, and I ache to be up there with
her. Only my guitar keeps me on the ground.

Rivers of kids follow behind.
Dark shapes drop off the roof. Down and down, and I would have thought they
would hit silently, but they don’t. They scream. Their bodies thump and crunch.

One scream is louder than the
others. It’s nearby. Zaki One screams and flails and throws his flute down.

I pull my gaze away from the
flying, falling, dying kids and see that it’s only Zaki One screaming. Zaki Two
is gone. My head whips back to the kids falling, and I think I see Zaki Two,
but I’m not sure. Miranda moans and kneels beside Zaki One. I go to them, to my
real tribe, and wonder how we are going to survive this.

Zaki One scratches his cheeks
deep enough to make scars. Miranda tears off her shirt, and I see the rough
edge of her collarbone jutting out. I hold them both. I push up my sleeves to
show them that I hurt, too. Behind us, the kids keep falling.

After they blew up our
neighborhood—after the rig and the axe, the deranged housewives, and the
suicide party, we hop a train heading south. We talk about reaching avocado and
salsa land, but our voices are brittle and fragile. It’s better not to talk at
all. The train veers east and north, and it gets a lot colder.

We watch each other and hold
each other when one of us wants to jump off. The train moves faster and faster
every hour. We see soldiers marching through wheat fields toward small towns.
We see mountain lions running alongside the train. I tell a story about never
getting off and riding until we become the wind. Or I tell a story about riding
until we get so far north, up to the ice caps, that people can’t get sick
because the air is too clean. Maybe there is a place like that left. Maybe.

In the Seams

Andrew C. Porter

There isn’t much time. If I am
going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it now. It’s late, I know, but the
dogs are spooked and that means it’s on the way. The skin on my face is
peeling. The backs of my hands are raw meat. If I hadn’t found Annie’s old tape
recorder, then I wouldn’t have been able to document the facts. I can press
record. I can pull a trigger. I’m going to tell the whole story because I know
that when they find what’s left of me, or what isn’t, they’re going to ask
questions, and I don’t want them...you, whoever you are, to think this was a
murder. This was a feeding. You’d better just put down the cause of death as
“mauled by animal.” You’ll probably have another name for it soon.

This all started out in the
fourth district a year ago when we got bogged down in the war with Iraq. Gas
prices jumped a dollar fifty and as any coal man in Kentucky would tell you,
expensive Arab oil meant it was time to clean off the dozers. Sixty dollars a
ton, that was what did it. Who in western Kentucky had ever heard of that?
Those East Kentucky mines got that, sure, but they pulled it out of mountains.
That wasn’t cheap. Here we just peeled back the top soil and there it was:
money.

After the price went up, every
old coal baron got into his equipment barn and started calling back the miners
he’d laid off in ‘79. Course, most of them were dead or enjoying black lung
settlements so they sent their kids. That’s how I came into this. I was on a
road crew running a backhoe when Snodgrass called.

“Phe’ps,” he said, shortening
Phelps like every Butler County septuagenarian does, “your daddy worked for me.
Now I got a golden opportunity for you. What’s Scott paying you to run that
hoe?”

“Pretty good, Mr. Snodgrass.” I
didn’t want to ruin any offer with the truth.

“Would you come work for me for
twenty-two an hour?”

“Can I get overtime?”

He laughed at me. “Boy, you’re
gonna be begging me for a Sunday morning off. We’ll get going at Aberdeen
Grocery at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”

We talked
for awhile about the old days, my father, his purchase of the Lindsey land back
when everyone thought coal was dead. I was almost off the phone when he asked
if I knew a good dozer operator. Two more seconds and I would have been off the
phone. Two more seconds and I might not be sitting on my porch with a loaded
shotgun and a tape recorder. I’m not saying that all this wouldn’t have still
come down eventually had I not recommended Zan. It was in the seam after all,
and somebody would have run across it before too long, but maybe, just maybe,
if I had gotten off that phone, I wouldn’t be the one waiting to die.

Zan had come back from Iraq six
months before. He’d joined the army after high school, encouraged by his
recruiter and the possibilities opened up by his unusually high ASVAB scores.
His daddy was a dozer operator and so was his older brother. The army would get
him out of that terrible inevitability. That was what the recruiter had said.
Two months after signing up, Zan was in Felujah, running a dozer in the grand
task of pushing down neighborhoods deemed “lost to the insurgency.” It turned
out he was genetically predisposed to being a top notch dozer operator.

I found Zan that very night,
lying in his underwear on his blue couch in the den of his pink trailer,
smoking pot.

“Come in!” he hollered when I
knocked, not bothering to find out who it was.

“Zan, it’s me, Andy,” I called
out as a precaution.

“I know, I could hear Annie’s
car from a mile away. What’s new? You want to hit this?” He extended the
three-foot red plastic bong toward me.

“No, I’m fine. I got you a
job.” He pulled a long, gurgling lung-full of smoke as I talked, then held it
in, his upper body poised awkwardly upright by the tension of maintaining his
expanded chest cavity. Curling fingers of blue-white smoke trailed out of his
nostrils and the corners of his mouth, drifting in the stale dead air of the
living room and into the cone of light emanating from the television. It was
the History Channel showing a documentary called
The Battle for Felujah
.

“They drug test?” I told him
they didn’t, and he agreed to meet up with us at four-thirty in the morning.

He was on time. Everyone was;
the money Snodgrass had promised was too good. I left the house at four; the
stars were bright and cold, as I warmed up the truck and my breath fogged
heavily in the pre-dawn November air. Aberdeen grocery was a ten minute drive
from the house, but I planned on getting a sausage biscuit down while I was
there and buying a bologna sandwich for lunch. Aberdeen grocery would slice off
the bologna as thick as three slices at other places, and they steadfastly used
real mayonnaise. I came into the grocery and immediately found the crew.
Surrounded by the haze of a dozen cigarettes, twelve men sat around the picnic
table that occupied the middle of the fishing tackle room. I sat down beside a
bleary eyed Zan and ordered a coffee while we waited for Snodgrass to arrive.
It was a good crew. I knew three of them well. The rest I knew fairly well. I
had played ball with Curtis Ward; he would be a mechanic. Owen Kelley and B.J.
Smith would be on equipment. Eric Ingram and his brother, Jay, would be running
the trucks. We were all about the same age. Only Johnny Lindsey had experience
from the days before the ‘79 bust and, as Johnny was a mute, he wouldn’t be
telling any stories. He would be another mechanic.