Dusty– are you going to kill me, he said.
No man. I thought you might be them.
Who?
I don’t fuckin know.
May I uh,
Yeah, help yourself man. But I’m takin the food. And I’m takin the floor model. He put down his black shotgun, straight out of Terminator 2. Reached up where the mass shooter Bushmaster AR-15 hung. Plucked it off its hook, peeled off the sign that said DUE TO HIGH DEMAND, OUT OF STOCK UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Not too much fuckin ammo for it though.
What do you think I should take.
What do you want to accomplish.
I don’t know. Shoot people.
Well get a bag and go nuts man, but your issue is gonna be ammo. This place was always understocked. Even before that fuckin AARP guy went ISIS.
He’d read the guy was government, but why argue. Either was plausible.
In the end Dusty helped him. Mostly. He got a nice nickelplated Smith and Wesson .357 revolver. A mean black rifle with a scope. A .45 with magazine as recommended. Dusty showed him how they worked. Bows, arrows made to slice wild boars’ arteries. A .22 because Dusty was jealous over the other ammo. Got to leave me some, he said. Nice enough smile but his hand back on the gun. 22 won’t do much, said Dusty, but he remembered Speed Racer killing a moose with one in a movie. Based on a true story. When his bag was almost too heavy he made to leave. Where you gonna go, said Dusty.
Don’t know.
Anyone else in that building make it?
… just me.
Well good luck out there homie, said Dusty, and they hung quiet for a second like they should add each other on Facebook.
**
Marcy was still in the car, thank God. He had to smash the Flame Broiler Teriyaki Bowl’s glass sliding door with a jack handle. The gas main had ruptured and the customers and cashiers burned alive, still smoking along with the griddle top beef and broccoli. A little blue flame still whispering on the end of the metal hose by the stove. In the pantry past the restroom where EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS were 5 gallon buckets of vegetable oil, as he’d hoped. He made one last trip for a jar of fortune cookies, the only nonrefrigerated food. The first aid kit under the manager’s desk. When he got back in the driver’s seat she was conscious.
Where are you taking me, she said.
Out of LA. He started the car.
What happened in there.
They’re dead. Can you trust me for a minute and keep your head down please, he said.
Why–
Just for a minute he said, and pulled out. OK you can sit up. Let me help you.
Up the street he stopped next to a fire hydrant; water oozing out around the bolts in the cracked concrete, already black. Around them trees on fire. Houses collapsed, smoking. The wind picked up; a burning LA X-Press hooker paper blew onto the windshield with a 2 page color spread of SUCCULENT CHRISTINA. She was fat, looked 50. He had to reach around out the window to peel her off. To the south and east, smoke columns churning dark and swarming with lightning. No cars on the road but half the phone poles were down, wires snaking onto the asphalt. How to get out. He reached across her waist and cranked the plastic dial forward to raise up her seat back.
I’m sorry to be weird but I don’t think we can let people see you, he said. Whatever men are left will want a car and a girl. He turned on the radio. For a full minute the Emergency Broadcast System tone played, indicating an emergency. No shit. He turned it off.
What happened, she said again. He said: nuclear holocaust.
I have to find my parents–
Where are they?
El Cerrito– they retired out here–
They’re probably dead. She gasped and he said, oh my God– I’m sorry. Now she was crying. He made a mental note to behave like a human being. She didn’t know. Nobody knew. He held her hand. She didn’t move. It’s a coordinated attack, he said. It’ll be all over. We’re lucky to be alive.
And where are you taking me, she said again.
We have to get to the country. Somewhere where there’s water–
Well if it’s everywhere what’s the point–
It will only be cities, he said.
How do you know?
Because I almost made it happen.
Aswang
Don’t come inside, said Maricar. She was 4′ 11”, 19, looked 14. Waray-Waray. The father a coconut farmer on Samar. There are beach there but no tourist, she explained. He’d never heard of it but decided to move there.
They were in the best hotel in Angeles. You could tell because there were so many Arabs. In the elevators they’d quietly appraise your girls and smile. One named Waleed he’d seen three times, earned enough trust to hear that your George W. Bush was a criminal. He worked for the Jews.
He thought she’d be impressed with the room but she only liked the toilet. Below off Walking Street pimps squatted on scooters by massage girls doing each other’s eye shadow. They were 15, looked 12. Too young to have a license to fuck clipped on their tube tops, a photo of the fat regional health minister in a polo shirt smiling. Instead they grabbed your sleeves on the street saying massage massage. Stuck out a card with a cell phone number you called to get them in your room for 500 pesos. From there who knows. Maybe you got macheted.
Maricar had never been with a white man. If you went too hard she’d cry. Her cunt felt like it was wrestling him in baby oil. He pushed it in slow, pretended it was not to hurt her. It was just that he didn’t want to cum too fast. When it got to be too much he tried to make himself come inside. So when he died he could think he might have a kid somewhere. He couldn’t.
His hair was going white and he had hips like an old German shepherd but the young girls still made his cum hit the headboard. Then ten hot ropes on her belly, her neck. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes and squirmed like a baby. For a minute he just looked at her. She put her hand over her face. I shy, she said.
The shower took ten minutes to get hot and the door had a big gap at the bottom where the water got all over the room. These places had been built in a week on top of jungle, by island people who didn’t understand time or straight lines. The girls had sex at 14. Ruined, they went to Angeles. Sold themselves to Koreans in loud bars. Wired the money to a hundred brothers and cousins who sat around playing cards, smoking shabu. They had drunk boyfriends who beat them up. A Catholic country.
Maricar showered too. She was fast. Most girls took forever. Maybe to be away from him before their time was up. Like when he’d take too long counting prune juice in the drug store basement, to get away from old Russians and their coupon disputes. Computer won’t let you? So your computer is almighty God? She came out in a fluffy white towel and they laid on the bed, wet together. Most girls kept their distance, said I shy. But Maricar put her face on his chest and her palm on his belly still warm from the water. For a second he felt something. Back home girls looked at him like a worm on the street.
You’re beautiful, he said.
You too, she said.
You want American boyfriend?
Maybe, she said.
Do you like me, he said.
Diri, she said, and laughed.
**
Out on Fields Avenue scooters with pigs in wire cages on the back blasted by. Hideous men with Boris Yeltsin gin blossom faces stalked from bar to bar looking at the ground. In the bars monkey faced girls danced listlessly to Katy Perry and other children’s performers. If you pointed at them they’d sit with you. Sip apple flavored beer. You struggled to make them understand questions until they got bored. Back at the hotel, $40 to fuck for a minute and a half. Then just look at them. In the states these girls would have you arrested for swiping right.
Here they told you about lives on hot islands no one had heard of. Coconut orchards stretching to the white beach. Palm huts blown away by typhoons. The other men were 60. Collected pensions. Drank cheap beer in the heat until nighttime when they’d roll around in giant soft hotel beds with h
igh school age girls out of the “escape” section of Bridge Over the River Kwai. They were the unhappiest people he’d ever seen. It was monsoon season. Between rains he’d see their eyes in puddles like his own death.
**
You use condom, she said. No, he said. I don’t like. Please, she said.
Do you have something?
I no have a sick. But they give us talk at the bar. Health minister. It is important to use a condom every time you have sex. She sounded startlingly like a health minister. He made a mental note never to patronize The Drill Shack again.
Listen, I don’t have anything he said. I won’t come inside. Thinking how am I 8,000 miles away having this same argument. She had a tattoo that said Malibog.
Please, she said.
No.
She looked like she was about to cry. What’s the fuckin big deal, he said. We won’t fuck.
Mama san get mad.
Why?
She give you back money.
Wait– is that an option?
I go back, she give back money, very mad.
I won’t make you go back.
I don’t want to walk home, she said. I am a scared. At night is Aswang.
What?
I don’t know how you say in English. Some girl disappear.
Instead they watched cartoons. She was 21. From Palawan. He looked at her while she slept and decided to move there. She sent money to her father who’d lost his hotel job. There are beach but no tourist now, she said. Abu Sayyaf had stormed a resort with speedboats. Beheaded a Canadian. The State Department issued a warning. The Aswang was a vampire. In the daytime you couldn’t tell unless you looked into its eyes. Your reflection was a different person. At night it grew wings to hunt.
**
At 3AM someone grabbed his T shirt sleeve. He was walking past an alley; overhead a sign with Garfield promising whores. Massage massage. She looked like his ex’s junior high school portrait. The one that got away. How old are you, he said.
Nineteen.
I can’t.
If you don’t like you get massage from my sister.
Behind her the sister leaned on a dumpster, made up in raccoon eyes. She was his ex’s fifth grade portrait. Her hips hadn’t come in. She pouted, licked her lips.
Nineteen huh? You have family?
Yes, she said, one baby. You want to see? She pulled out her phone. The boy was half white. Had his eyes.
Who takes care of him?
My father, but he is alcoholic.
And your mother?
She has mentally ill. You want massage, 500.
I can’t honey, he said. I gotta go.
Wait, she said. You have both, 800. He paused. Down the street monsoon clouds miles high. Something black flapped across the moon.
Festival of Savings
He dreamed he was walking. Looked down and his hands were holding papers. Folders of mistakes he’d made. It was the day of his annual review. In one or more areas he had not been Very Satisfactory. He woke up thinking he was late. Then remembered. There had been a nuclear holocaust.
Thank God, he thought.
Then felt bad. Millions dead. Millions more burned. Irradiated. Trapped even now, lungs half crushed choking on smoke. Pinned in flaming rubble. Can’t even scream, and if they did– who would come.
Still. It felt like a snow day.
They were in the car. The front seats of the 1979 Mercedes 300SD reclined fully. If you removed the headrests they lined up with the back seats. Formed beds. The Germans thought of everything. Marcy asleep on the passenger side. Really she ought to have taken the seat with the steering wheel, at five foot five. But she’d had a rough day. Sex roles persist.
They hadn’t made it far. Trees in the roads. Phone poles but no live wires. He dropped a stop sign across two downed cables to see if it would spark. No light, no cracking sound. Just shrieking black winds, car alarms slowly drowning into dead battery moans. It rained. This is good, he told her. Less fallout. He had no idea if it was true. When the sun seemed to go down behind staticky black clouds the headlights picked out shapes like huge dark demons running. Outside the car you couldn’t see your hands in front of you. They pulled over in a lean-to formed by a collapsed billboard. It said your partner might be lying about HIV.
The sun was rising now. He reached back, pulled an Activia from the tote bag in the back seat. Strawberry banana. Realized he’d forgotten utensils. Peeled back the top and raised the 8 oz. cup to drink it. But the product was made to hold its shape pleasingly in a spoon. The yogurt flopped out around his mouth in a gelid hunk. Ran chilly down his neck. Billions of probiotic organisms died in open air. Marcy moved. She turned toward him. Black dust smears around her nostrils, mouth and eyes. Where are we, she said.
We’re still in Sherman Oaks.
Why am I in a car with you.
We’re the only two who lived. There was a bomb.
That’s right– you wanted this–
I didn’t. I didn’t do it.
But you wanted to.
I don’t know anything Marcy. I don’t even know if it was the same people. I shouldn’t have said anything–
You killed everybody!
I fucking TOLD YOU I didn’t go through with it. If you don’t believe me, you can get out of the car and you can FUCKING DIE too.
When he yelled she got scared. That too felt good for a second.
Why, she said…
I–
Why do you have pink stuff on your face.
It’s Activia.
… are you trying to shit?
No, it’s… it was the only food in the office.
You didn’t take the broccoli?
I didn’t.
We need to get food, she said. We need to find people.
**
The Safeway shared a parking lot with a Pet Smart and a Chinese massage spa where he’d once tried to get a handjob on his lunch break. The woman was 50, pink terrycloth track suit with silver letters across the ass spelling JUICY. Police come, she explained. Massage only. He looked it up after. Three sheriff’s deputies had been masturbated. Their masseurs deported. District Attorney Takes Down Human Trafficking Ring. She ran for senate. The election would have been next week.
They were parked on a hill. He’d insisted they look first. He had binoculars in the trunk, next to his paperback of Birds of Los Angeles. On the back cover a Western scrub jay and Bullock’s oriole perched together by the Hollywood sign. Below, the Safeway was smoke black, glass blown in but largely intact. And in the parking lot, among the ash-streaked cars: people. Living people. Maybe 20, 30. A big white sheet with a red cross crudely painted on hung in front of the corral of pumpkins. Some stood guard. Others waited in line at a jagged hole that had been the Safeway door. A group went in, three at a time.
You were right, he said. I didn’t think it would be like this. He held out the binoculars so she could see. I’m still not gonna stay here, he said. I’ll drop you off. He couldn’t keep a hitch out of his voice. Like he was fourteen. For a long moment she looked.
Something’s wrong, she said.
What.
Why is it only men.
It’s not.
Look. She handed back the binoculars.
She was right. Women and children in line but only men at the door. Men by the ersatz first aid tent. Men keeping the line orderly. Maybe we’re back to gender roles, he said. Maybe the women are safer inside.
It’s not like that, she said.
Well we need food, he said. There’s medicine. I’ll take a gun. I’ll go down around the back and look. If it’s OK I’ll come out front and wave. I’m going to leave you the keys. If I don’t come back, take the car.
He waited for her to say no, I’m coming with you. There weren’t even crickets.
**
No one was guarding the back of the Safeway. He was able to hoist himself up on the concrete loading dock. Duck through a half open rolling steel door. Colla
psed pallets of Lucky Charms scattering blue moons, purple horseshoes in the darkness. .45 tucked in back of his pants, as seen on TV. Past half charred towers of Angel Soft Family Paks double doors led into the retail space. A man was yelling inside. Echoing in the quiet without electrical hum. He held his breath and put his eye to the door crack.
He saw a giant naked man in a hockey mask. Back hair coated with sweat, rank even over the smell of the meat. In front of him on a waist high display of pumpkin pie filling cans a young girl bent over, naked and sobbing. The floor tiles slick and red. Ten men in a circle stood guard with machetes, axes, Bushmaster AR-15’s, cackling. Heads and limbs of men, boys and old women hacked up and kicked into piles at the feet of shelves still half stocked with bags of Fun Size Snickers bars. Kneeling by the guards were the young girls who’d lived. Some weeping, others with dead empty eyes. A dark eyed man stroked a girl’s cheek with a spiny king crab leg.
The fat man pumped at the girl furiously. It had been his voice through the doors. He bellowed LIVIN’ THE DREAM, BABY! Looked around for approval. In the mask his blue eye caught the door crack. Stopped.
He ran backwards. Slipped on scattered Lucky Charms. Hit his arm hard on the polished concrete but pulled the pistol out as he staggered back up. The doors thundered open and the naked fat man stood laughing, his cock quivering and blood red. The gun wouldn’t go off. Just like in his dreams. The safety was on. The others’ eyes on him now. Some raising rifles. He scrambled back under the cargo door, hit the asphalt hard with his knees and palms, sprinted what felt like miles to the back of the Pet Smart with the wind howling. The fire exit hung open and he ducked in and slammed the door shut and waited.
Waited.
Nothing.
They hadn’t chased him. Why would they. What could he do.
**
The animals were dead except one yellow-crowned green parrot, which he let out of its cage. He thought it might hesitate. Like in poems. But it flew out like a bullet through a ceiling hole. In the Amazon they ranged by the hundreds. Covered miles and miles seeking fruit. He’d seen them on vacation. In LA escaped captives had lived long enough to form wild flocks. Maybe it had a shot.
Finally, Some Good News Page 3