Chapter 15
Steve drove. He’d owned a moped before having it stolen a couple of summers back, and high as he was, he was slipping into the simple pleasure of driving one again. Cat rode pinion, one hand gripping his belt, the other full of razor-sharp steel. They buzzed along the alley, flashing through the intermittent illumination of pole lights and occasional motion-detecting floods, the ribbons of light and darkness reminding Steve of running through a dim forest on a sunny day. He pictured tall trees and shafts of sunlight and imagined Cat as she’d looked in her black bra, imagined what she would look like riding along through that scene, figuring she’d make a great subject for a Boris Vallejo painting. Then he swerved to avoid a pink purse lying abandoned in the street.
You’re drifting, Steve-o. You held that last hit a little too long, and now you’re drifting, and you’d better get your shit together right now, or you’re going to get your sorry ass killed.
They buzzed out of the alley into the explosion of light and sound that was Pug Street, which was clogged with cars and clotted with corpses. Alarms screamed over actual screams, knitting the smoke-tinged air with such a contagion of fear that Steve involuntarily thumbed the throttle, barely managing to keep the moped upright as he popped between a pair of parked cars. They crunched over a carpet of broken glass, and almost hit two crazies playing tug-of-war with a dead kid's body, using not their hands but their teeth. One leaned hard, teeth locked on the ankle of the corpse. The other, down on all fours like a dog, tugged with all his might at the back of the dead kid’s arm.
Steve caught all of this in a regretted glance, shot across the street, bumped over the curb, and tucked once more into the back alley, where he slowed a little and tried to get his head straight.
A block later, Cat slapped his arm and pointed. “Take a right,” she said.
A right would take them straight through town, College Drive being only two blocks downhill. And if Pug Street currently looked like Baghdad’s main drag, what would they find on the busiest street in town? A headache started a drum roll behind his eye. He slowed for the turn and felt like an ass when he realized he’d used the turn signal.
The alley sloped sharply downhill between nondescript brick buildings. Halfway to College Drive, they passed a massive yellow smiley face painted on the wall, and just a little further along, the alley opened out to reveal a parking lot and Smiley’s Package Shop. Across the lot, crazies streamed in and out of the bottle shop through the shattered glass of its storefront, cases and twelve packs loaded in their arms. Some stood just inside or outside, chugging. Others lay, dead or dead drunk, scattered along the ground like empties. Most turned to gawk as the moped passed.
A cry sounded.
All of them gave chase.
Even over the whine of the Vespa, Steve could hear the smash of bottles being dropped, and then it was all screaming: the crazies, his own, and Cat, telling him: "Go, go, go!"
They sped downhill out of the gap, through another section where brick walls closely flanked the narrow alley.
God, don’t let them come down the other end, too, Steve thought. He gave the Vespa every bit of throttle it had, and shot straight onto the last place he cared to be at this moment: the sidewalk of College Drive, the paved heart of downtown College Heights.
The devastation was inconceivable.
Literally.
Steve saw the smashed cars and broken bodies; heard the lunatics and more car alarms and sirens, coming seemingly from all directions, all at once; and smelled the smoke of the Appleton Inn, fully engulfed and burning pumpkin orange only half a block away. Yet he couldn’t square it, any of it, couldn’t make it whole or real. He lurched to a stop, and Cat banged up against him, cursing, slapping him and telling him to get moving, but all he could do for a moment was sit and stare and breathe, scared shitless but not really understanding it all.
This is the end, he thought. The end.
"Move!" Cat said.
And Steve, with the howling of the beer shop maniacs closing behind them and the screaming of crazies seemingly on all sides of them now, realized with a wonky startle that he didn’t know where to go.
"Which way?"
"Straight," Cat said.
Steve hit the throttle and shot between stopped cars, one of them angled awkwardly, its driver’s side crushed, its passenger’s side yawning wide and drooling a weak blood trail that drew Steve’s eyes backward into the car, where hung a head-sized star, smashed red into the windshield. On the other side of the street, he popped onto the curb and jagged to the right, nearly spilling the moped, straightened, and fired down the sidewalk toward the cement walkway that would take them onto campus. Vaguely aware of crazies blurring past on either side of the path, stopping, turning, staring, some of them coming after him, Steve buried the throttle. Then, as they shot up the wide cement walkway, moving up campus, a girl charged them.
A plump monster with bobbed blond hair, she pumped toward them in a pink tiny-T and a frilly white skirt, swirling a little white purse over her head as if she were spinning a lariat. She screamed as she charged, and Steve laughed involuntarily, thinking, She sounds just like a cowboy. As she neared, he slashed quickly to the left, avoiding her easily, but he heard Cat grunt, heard the whoosh of the knife, and felt a vibration pass through Cat. His laughter snapped off.
Twenty feet from Cowgirl, he slid to a halt.
No more yippee-kay-ay.
"The fuck are you doing?" Cat asked. "Go, Steve!"
Down the path, Cowgirl struggled to her knees, pressing a hand to her neck but failing to staunch the jets of bright red blood spraying from between her fingers. Her green dripping mouth worked soundlessly.
"What the hell did you do?" Steve said.
"Saved our asses. Now go."
"Saved us? We were past her. We—"
"Go!" She jabbed him in the ribs, and he jerked with surprise, thinking for a second that she’d stabbed him, but it was only the handle of the knife, kinetic punctuation to her command.
Further downhill, just coming onto the path, the bottle shop crazies howled, still in pursuit, along with others who had joined them. They jogged inexorably uphill, faces going ghostly pale as they passed through globes of light beneath intermittent pole lamps. When his mind leapt to that old ‘70’s gang movie, The Warriors, the way the white-faced Yankee gang, the Furies, looked, jogging under the street lights, he knew he was still baked. He knew then he needed to shut up, clip the thinking, and trust Cat.
He got them going again and whirred up the path, still trying to square what had just happened. A part of him knew she was right—this wasn’t the time for half-stepping—but a part of him wondered why she’d done it. Half an hour earlier, Cowgirl had been just another college kid. Now—or at least as soon as the mob reached her—she was dead. Forever.
"Don’t freak out on me," Cat said. "Straight up the hill, left at the library."
They buzzed past occasional crazies and park benches, elms towering overhead, grand old stone buildings flanking the path more regularly as they neared the top of the hill, where the path T-ed at the foot of the epic triple-tiered marble steps leading Acropolis-style up to the columned face of the campus’s grandest building: the university library. Dozens of bodies littered the green of the upper quad. What the hell had happened here? Steve wasn’t slowing down to find out. He weaved between them, reached the library, and made the left.
Chapter 16
Over the year since his discharge from active duty, Demetrius Devereaux had come to view his fellow students with contempt bordering on disgust. On campus, they were a flood of weakness. They shuffled three-abreast along paved pathways so that Demetrius, coming the other way, had to step off the path and make way. They streamed in and out of buildings, yelling into designer cell phones, and eddied everywhere in animated herds, laughing, bitching, shouting, always so loud, loud, loud. They scuffed around in sandals and clogs and baggy, raggedy-ass clothes that had probably cost thei
r parents a fortune, slouching against lumpy, low slung backpacks stuffed any which way with Lord knew what. During classes, he’d watched them pull all sorts of shit out of their bags: MP3 players, laptops, drinks, snack sacks, even pillows. Whatever, whenever. Most of them were weak and cocky, a combination that made no sense at all in his life experience. They were credit card kiddies, the modern silver spoon set, riding Mommy and Daddy’s stocks through four, maybe five years of partying, free rent, and even a tutor, if they decided they wanted one. In their minds, they were entitled to everything. Their rights weren’t only inalienable; they were the law of the land. Hell, their appetites were the law of the land. They were the alpha wolves of a consumer society.
Demetrius had a tough time adjusting. He was a loner here. Then, earlier this same day—November 11th, Veterans Day—while trying to decide whether to return in the spring or just forfeit his GI Bill money, forget the degree, and bail out of Toyland, Demetrius ran into one of his teaching assistants in a quiet bar downtown.
They were both outsiders. Needless to say, Demetrius hadn’t fit in very well. Sitting in the bar, he said, "I never expected it to be so hard, being a student. I don’t mind the work, that’s not bad, just…these kids."
Sam said, "To them, we are old men."
Demetrius nodded. "Outsiders."
They raised their glasses, savoring their status with grim pride. Outsiders. Demetrius was black; Sam was Thai. Demetrius had a soldier’s posture, a marching gait, and a slight southern accent tempered and tightened by the clipped, concise style of communication he’d developed in the military; Sam dressed like shit, wearing big, plastic-frame glasses not unlike the birth-control specs the army supplied its recruits, and cheap button-up shirts tucked into tight khakis with an elastic waistband that always rode a few inches too high, and though he had a solid English vocabulary, his speech remained heavily inflected. Demetrius was thirty-nine years old, a retired master sergeant working on the tail end of a degree in engineering; Sam was a few years younger, a graduate assistant who knew a lot more about calc, he proclaimed during his third drink that Friday afternoon, his face going rosy, than the professor of the course did.
Demetrius believed him. The prof always seemed vaguely confused and disorganized. Sam was sharp. He might have been a certified fashion assassin with those glasses and his pants hiked up like that, but he always seemed to have his shit together. It was Sam who did the grading, Sam who served office hours, and, on more than one occasion, when the professor for one reason or another hadn’t shown up, Sam who’d taught the class. These classes were the best of the semester thanks to Sam’s obvious mastery and machine-like presentation, even if half the kids, upon noting the professor’s absence, had ditched class, and the other half had banged around and chatted and giggled, most of them either amused or pissed off by Sam’s accent.
Demetrius remembered a girl behind him taking five minutes to bitch to her friends way too loudly about how she couldn’t understand this guy and how it just wasn’t right, the university hiring all these foreigners, before making way too much noise stuffing her shit back in her ruck and walking out in a huff. Sam taught through the disruption, pausing only once to smile at the girl. Demetrius wondered if he was the only one who really saw that smile, really interpreted it. The others—those who weren’t too busy to see Sam smiling at all—probably saw anxiety in that smile, worry, maybe embarrassment. But Demetrius thought it more likely the TA was envisioning how the obnoxious girl’s head would look mounted on the hood of his Chevy. One way or the other, Demetrius was glad they’d bumped into each other that Friday afternoon. For as different as he and Sam were, they were also alike, a pair of alienated outsiders surrounded by tens of thousands of assholes.
They drank, sticking to the Saturday afternoon special, something called a shipwreck, which was basically a Long Island ice tea with a few extra shots thrown in. Twenty-five ounces of no fucking around alcohol. Ahoy, let’s get wrecked on shipwrecks.
They hit them hard, and by the time he’d finished his second and felt the buzz roaring up in him, Demetrius had known, regardless of wiser plans—all week, he’d assumed he’d be in the library now, studying while most of the town was up at the game—he was going to get shit-faced. Sam, too. It was one of those moments. They’d both been isolated too long, outcasts in paradise.
Demetrius said, "These kids are spoiled. Cocky, too. Ever notice that? They’re weak, but they’re cocky, too."
Sam nodded, grinning darkly over his fourth shipwreck. He’d stopped ranting about the professor’s ineptitude, slouched for a time in a brooding silence borne of embarrassment, anger, or a blend of both.
Demetrius finished his drink and pushed the glass across the bar. "They’d never make it in the real world. Working, or in the army. Shit, drill sergeant would smoke them like Chesterfields. They’d be dead in the water. Same way in Thailand, I’m guessing."
"Thailand," Sam said, his smile going strange. "In Thailand, they not be dead in water. Just dead."
They both laughed then, too hard. It was a barbed joke, one that revealed just how much anger—hatred?—had built up inside of Sam…and Demetrius as well. All these goddamned spoiled brats. God, he was sick of them. It was cool finally hanging out with somebody who felt the same way. So they laughed too hard, and it was weird, and they both knew it yet kept on laughing, and Demetrius called for another round of shipwrecks.
Sam talked about his life. He’d grown up in Bangkok. Then, with American involvement in the Vietnam War, Sam’s father, a Thai ambassador, deployed to Cambodia, taking Sam and his brother with him. Six months later, Sam’s father was murdered in the village square by the local warlord.
"He was Communist. Warlord first, Communist second. They called him ‘The Monster’. That was all. That was enough."
"Shit. He killed your dad?"
Sam took a drink, nodded. His face was red now. "They made me watch. I fight not to see, but they hold my head, and they pull my eyes open." He was waving his arms a little now, and he pried his eyelids open, acting it out. "My father tied up. The Monster, he use a big knife." He took another drink. "Then I was joined."
"Conscripted? Pressed into service?"
Sam nodded gravely.
Demetrius whistled, more loudly than he’d meant to. The bartender glanced at them, looking annoyed. A couple of old weirdoes hanging around the bar when they should be up at the game, tailgating. Sam, who had undergone a distinct change in personality, stared back. Something in the bartender withered, and he turned away, suddenly interested in restocking glasses at the other end of the bar.
Turning back to Demetrius, Sam said, "My cousins and I were mine dogs."
Demetrius leaned back, shaking his head. Land mines littered much of the world’s open ground. Back in the armored cav, they used detectors with a special nose for ordinance. Other armies, lacking equipment and basic human empathy, used people, often kids they harvested while wiping villages, to "detect" mines for them. They sent these "mine dogs" sprinting across any suspicious stretch. There wasn’t much to say about that.
"That’s rough," Demetrius said, and tapped another cigarette from his pack. So much for quitting. He’d smoked more cigarettes in this little session than he’d smoked in the previous week. Fuck it.
He offered the pack to Sam.
"I quit," Sam said, waving it away.
"Guy runs across mine fields, then quits smoking?"
They both laughed, too loud again, but the bartender didn’t even glance their way. Sam took a cigarette. Demetrius pushed his lighter across the table. Sam lit up, passed the Zippo back to Demetrius, nodded, smiled, and exhaled. "Good."
He continued his story. His brother was older, faster. "We cross many paddies. Go, dog! Run, dog! We run so fast. Soldiers yell, ‘Go back and forth! Cover more ground!’ They fire bullets into paddy beside us. Water spray up into air." He made a fountain motion with his hands.
"Then I start counting. I count steps. Every step.
I focus on count, not on danger. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred." He laughed. "Then I start counting all the time. I count steps I walk, or breaths I take, or the trees or the clouds or stars. I count seconds between things. I count squeaks of wheel when ox cart pass. I never stop counting.
"Then, one night, I start really use math. I count paddies and number of steps to cross them and number of mines that could be there. Over and over, I count these things, estimating chances. I was a little boy, and I was inventing statistics." He grinned and took another drink. "I realized I would not step on mine. It was statistically improbable. Then my brother stepped on a mine, and it killed him so much, he was all over the place." Sam waved his hand back and forth, shaking his head, showing what it was like.
The same mine that killed his brother peppered him with shrapnel. He pulled at the collar and showed Demetrius one of the scars. The soldiers left him to die. Farmers saved him. Years later, he made it back to Thailand, where children kick boxed on street corners and stabbed each other with compass needles in school yard fights. He fluttered through several lighthearted half-stories, laughing and explaining that if you wanted to start a fight in Bangkok, you looked at somebody and raised your eyebrows up and down, but these stories didn’t have much steam, and then he stopped talking for a while.
They drank. The game on TV seemed loud. A big group of alumni came into the bar, the men chanting while the women did shots.
"Math did not fail me," Sam said later. "It failed my brother, but it did not fail me. It did not lie to me."
Demetrius nodded but said nothing. He was drunk as hell and didn’t know what to say, and a little while later, they left the bar and walked out into a cool, windy afternoon aflutter with falling leaves. They both lived uphill from town and walked the first part together. Sam weaved and staggered, visibly shit faced. When they reached his turn, he leaned against a stop sign and puked into a storm sewer grate. Clinging to the sign, he hung his head over the grate and spat. Waited. Spat.
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