by David Liss
“I’m a little short,” Hank said. “They won’t give me the key to this thing till I’m paid in full. And I don’t have to tell you, we’re running out of time. You have contacts, Eric. All I need is a name.” Hank’s clientele was generally worth more dead than alive, whereas mine took out policies on their jewelry and recreational vehicles. “Get me in the door and I’ll take care of the rest. You’ll get your finder’s fee, of course.”
I pulled my collar away from my thickened, sweaty neck. I was suppressing a terrible rage. If anything is sacred in this soon-to-be destroyed world, it’s the trust between agent and client. That trust must be rooted in plain dealing and forthright speech. That Hank believed I might be willing to betray one of my clients so utterly was an insult of the most dire kind. But I played along.
“I like your style, Hank. Let me think on it.”
“Don’t think too long,” Hank said. The veins in his neck stick out when he grins. It’s repellant. I looked away from him toward the wire enclosure.
“What’s with the cage, Hank?”
Hank looked at me with pity, like I’d pronounced the t in escargot. “That’s the pantry. Open air pantries—it’s a modernist thing. They’re just popping up in Texas but on the West Coast people swear by them. Better visibility, reduced moisture equals less food waste. That’s going to be important in the early stages, before we get the community’s hydroponic farm up and running.”
“Huh,” I said, noting a very serious-looking lock on the pantry’s door. “Well it’s a pretty long way from the kitchen, though.”
Hank shrugged.
“And there aren’t any shelves. Seems like maybe Don Cheevers cut a few corners after all. I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable trusting my family to the design of a man who didn’t think to put shelves in a pantry.” I chuckled.
The vein in Hank’s neck throbbed. “It’s a live food pantry. No need of shelves. We’ll store the live ones in the bottom and hang the killed ones by the hooks up near the top to cure.”
“What kind of livestock is this for?”
“Whatever’s handy. Can’t be too picky in the last days. Now look at the time.”
I followed him up the stairs to the surface. As we walked toward the car in the heat of one of the last noons to grace this civilization, a wordless suspicion sparked in my brain—not the brain that sold insurance and assessed risk for a living, but an older more primitive part, the section devoted to fearing the unfamiliar, demonizing outsiders, and intuiting the will of angry gods in every eclipse or breath of wind. It didn’t take a genius to guess what type of livestock would be most numerous, most easily led when things went bad. Sheep would have the sense to run for their lives but human beings would follow Hank down the stairs into his shelter and thank him for the privilege. I’d just done it myself.
* * *
I sat on Jeff Robert and Marissa’s check for days, debating with myself into the weekend. Notions of right and wrong were already eroding It was simply a question of what one could live with. But Monday afternoon I went back to the Beal residence.
The wait at the front door was considerably longer than on the previous week. I sweated through another shirt and suit, smoothed a different striped tie, and rapped the same briefcase impatiently against my leg. I noted a small fissure in the front lawn; molten earth was coming through it in slow bubbles. The Beals really ought to get that looked at.
I was on the point of pressing the bell a third time when Jeff Robert opened the door. He was wearing red pajama pants and flip flops, and his long hair, which I had never seen unponytailed, was hanging loose. It was well past noon, but he works from home. I suppose we keep different hours.
“Cousin! What can I do for you?” he said. The tone was neither hostile nor friendly. I had assumed he would invite me in—I’d been counting on that time to make my pitch—but he had no such intention. The hug was gone, too. He stood solidly in the middle of his door, waiting for me to declare my business and go on my way.
“Did I wake you?” I asked.
“No worries. What brings you by?”
“I’ve got to return this to you,” I said, passing back the check Marissa had written me. “I can’t in good conscience accept it, not from family.”
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Jeff Robert said, holding the check between his fingertips. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“This won’t be easy for you to hear.” I opened my briefcase and began to pull out the things I’d brought him, but he didn’t take any notice. He was holding on to the doorframe as if for support.
“Whatever you need—whatever needs to happen to get this policy through, say the word.”
“It’s nothing like that. As far as the agency is concerned, everything is in order. But I feel I’ve deceived you. I simply can’t live with myself.”
“I need this policy.”
“You think you do, but I assure you what you actually need are supplies. Drinking water or some way to get it. Foodstuffs. Weapons. Battery powered everything.”
“I want what you sold me.”
“You have the option of course to seek another broker, but I urge you not to do it. Under the circumstances, these policies will be worthless in short order. Spend your money on something useful—while money still has some value.”
“I don’t think you understand my situation. I’m in a time crunch here,” he said.
“Jeff Robert, I don’t think you understand your situation. We’re all in a time crunch, man. I brought you some reading materials.” I attempted to give him two books by my personal hero, Cody M. Johnson, but he wouldn’t take them.
“I don’t want to join your fucking church, Eric.” His mistake wasn’t uncommon. The Rev. Tiffany Buckle held services in a geodesic dome just down the road. Her congregation of several hundred went door to door, and they used the E.O.D. heavily in their outreach.
“I don’t go to church myself,” I said.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve-forty-two.”
“Oh God. I have to make a phone call.” He slammed his front door in my face. I left the Cody Johnsons on the mat and pocketed the check. I’d neglected to mention the fissure in his yard in the short time Jeff Robert gave me, so I jotted down a note about it:
YOU MIGHT WANT TO GET THAT LOOKED AT
with an arrow pointing to the spot. With my conscience reasonably clear, I stuck the note to the front door and went to turn in his policy, which would indeed give my monthly total a positive bump.
* * *
“Four stitches. Four stitches in her face,” Lisa said. Our daughter Jeanette was sitting on the kitchen counter as Lisa dabbed her cheek with alcohol.
“You’re sure it was Cormac? Sweetheart, look at me. Are you sure it was Cormac?”
“Yes,” Jeanette sobbed. He’d dug out under the fence again and gone roaming around the neighborhood, not for the first time. But today he’d found Jeanette playing on our front porch and he’d knocked her right over and bitten her cheek. There would certainly be a scar.
“He could have killed her,” Lisa said. Jeanette began to cry harder. Cormac, in spite of his owners, had always seemed a friendly enough dog, though he was also a nuisance who had a habit of wandering under my carport and spraying my tires with urine. But today something had set him off. The stitches in Jeanette’s small cheek made up my mind.
“I’ll go talk to them,” I said, but I had no such intention. I could imagine exactly how that would go down, me pleading with Hank and Cerise to do the right thing, the two of them sneering, not even letting me in the door. I was tired of begging people to hear me out.
The decent thing would have been to adopt a live-and-let live strategy, to forget about Hank and his Don Cheevers, to call in a report on the dog and let the city handle it from there. Maybe fate had something deservedly unpleasant in store for Hank Schoenfeld, and if I kept my head down and played fair, we’d each get what was coming to us. Cheaters never prosper, as
they say, despite all the evidence.
I suppose I am not a decent man, not where Hank is concerned. I hated him in a way that felt larger than myself. I hated what he stood for. I’d told Lisa that once and she’d blinked at me and said, “Well, but what does he stand for?” and then she’d turned on the blender before I could come up with an answer.
In my younger days, I would have avoided him, winced whenever our paths crossed, and gotten bitterly drunk whenever I heard of any good luck or success coming his way. But now civilization was slipping away and so were my inhibitions. His dog had sunk its teeth in my child’s face. Hank had to pay.
I drove around the neighborhood a few times and when I came home I told Lisa it was all taken care of. To my surprise, she kissed my cheek. I risked draping an arm over her as we settled down to sleep that night, and for the first time all week, she didn’t immediately insist I remove it.
* * *
I ate lunch early at my desk: three sandwiches and a bag of potato chips from the vending machine and as much milk as I could stand. When I was finished, I loaded my poisoned arrows in my briefcase and drove over to the Schoenfeld residence. The place was dark and locked tight as a drum, as I expected. I peered through the windows of the garage and found it empty. I walked the perimeter, sweating through my dress shirt, with the bow slung over my shoulder, looking for a weak point. It has to be done, I told myself and set my jaw. I tried to think of General Santa Anna; he’d busted a few heads in his time, and though history judged him harshly, he died at peace with his choices. That’s all I wanted for myself.
I considered waiting in the yard for the dog to emerge, but it was a hundred degrees in the shade, and with my new bulky physique I was already suffering. The back entrance was fitted with a doggy door for the convenience of Cormac—the love of their dog was the one weak point in the Schoenfeld’s paranoid, locked-and-loaded, kill-or-be-killed approach to life and home security.
It was almost too easy. I pushed my case of arrows through the swinging door, then my crossbow. The top half of me fit through the dog door easily, but around the middle, things began to get tight. I snaked my arm up to the doorknob and turned the lock, then I backed myself out of the door. My excess flesh scraped against the frame, and when I stood up, I was bleeding through my shirt. Then I let myself in through the unlocked door.
The noise of my entrance hadn’t attracted any attention and I began to suspect that one the Schoenfelds might have taken Cormac to work. But as I walked through Hank’s house looking for some sign of the dog, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a romantic interlude in progress. I froze where I stood.
“Oh, yuck,” I whispered.
I’d set my mind on accomplishing a difficult and unsavory task, but even so, this was more than I’d bargained for. I covered my mouth with my hand so as to muffle the noise of my own gagging. Then I heard the sound of paws padding down the hallway. I ducked into the guest bathroom and hid behind the shower curtain, my bow armed and ready. Cormac sat down in the hall just outside the bathroom door and began licking his hind legs. I was going to kill that stupid dog, but I didn’t want to take a bullet in the process. Hank and Cerise keep their firearms loaded. I could wait.
From behind the shower curtain I prepped my shot. Just when I was sure all the unpleasantness was over, it would start up again. How could these two jerks keep the passion alive when Lisa and I could barely get through dinner without an argument?
“Babe, I’m so late,” Cerise said. I heard the bed springs creak as she exited. Then I heard some incidental conversation of only low interest to myself, and then a goodbye kiss of unnecessary duration and smackiness.
My God, I thought. Was this what other people’s marriages were like? I just about sat down in the bathtub and cried, but I put aside thinking about the problem of love for the moment, and refocused on the task at hand.
A few moments later, the front door slammed. Cormac padded into the bathroom and began to lap water from the toilet. I put my finger on the trigger and carefully edged Hank’s green shower curtain to the side, exposing the tip of the poisoned arrow. But I misjudged my shot. The arrow flew over the dog’s head and grazed Milo, who was coming through the door wearing only a pair of athletic socks and a rose-colored sweatband.
He screamed, but he didn’t know how lucky he was. There was a small abrasion on his right thigh, but it had barely broken the skin.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Man, I am so sorry.” I kept an eye on him as I reloaded, hoping he wouldn’t start spitting bubbles in his beard, but he seemed to be maintaining. I followed Cormac down the hall to the kitchen and shot him in the back leg. The poison is extremely fast acting. He fell over and began to twitch and foam at the mouth.
* * *
“I guess we both know what I’m doing here, but what are you doing here?” Milo said. He had grabbed Hank’s camouflage robe from the hook on the bathroom door and the two of us stood over Cormac. The dog’s eyes were already getting glassy.
“Also self-evident,” I said. “I came to kill Hank’s dog. It bit my kid’s face.”
“Well your timing is very awkward,” Milo said. He poured us each a glass of orange juice. “Next time, give me a heads up.”
The pulp of the juice stuck in my teeth. “Next time? I can’t kill his dog more than once. And how was I to know you were cheating on Hank?”
“Cerise is cheating on Hank. I’m cuckolding Hank. Big difference. Anyway, I thought you knew. She’s so indiscreet,” Milo said, rolling his eyes.
* * *
We agreed the best solution for all parties was that Cormac simply disappear, so we loaded him into my trunk and drove him over to the storage facility. Milo and Cerise were in love, he explained, the love of big pop ballads and great works of literature. Each Wednesday they put on jogging gear and ran from their cars, which they parked in front of the YMCA down the street, to meet at Cerise’s place. He’d never felt this way before and neither had she. That I doubted. Cerise had been around the block a few times.
“She shares my beliefs. She’s the only woman for me,” Milo said.
“She’s in the rising sea level camp, too?” If Hank knew this, he’d be almost as furious as if he knew about the other thing. But I wondered if Milo’s feelings were genuine, or if he was simply resigning himself in advance to the drastically reduced dating pool of the future, which according to him would consist entirely of people who’d been aboard boats when the Gulf made its move.
* * *
Someone had scrawled
Do Not Open Till The End of Time
on the door of the Alamo Preppers communal storage unit. The idea had been that the Alamo Preppers would pool certain essential resources and keep them all in one place, in order to get the colony up and running with max efficiency during what were likely to be conditions of chaos. As Milo keyed in our code, I scanned the rows of low storage buildings. A couple of birds flew overhead in drunken loops, casting their shadows on all the blinding-white concrete. Groundsmoke blew up from some fissure I couldn’t locate. It occurred to me that this would be an extremely difficult site to access once law and order rolled up the mat; there wasn’t a scrap of cover.
I helped Milo push up the metal door. It took my eyes a minute to adjust and when they did, I saw the place was empty—except for my stuff. Even Milo’s things were gone. So much for the seeds, the ammonia, and the mylar we’d all chipped in for.
Milo read my thoughts. “Yeah, everybody pulled out by the end of month two. I’m keeping all my gear in the boat. Sorry buddy.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I feel like such an ass. I bet everyone has been laughing behind my back about this.”
“No, no, no. Nothing like that,” Milo said in a way that only confirmed my suspicions. He grunted with the effort of lifting the back half of the rapidly stiffening dog from my trunk.
“Careful,” I said, wrapping my arms around the dog’s front half. “His organs will begin to burst and you don’t
want dog bile on your skin.” We took little shuffling half steps into the darkness of the storage unit, like two guys moving a sofa.
“Are you mad?”
“I’m humiliated,” I said.
“Honest to God, I think you should be proud. It speaks well of your character that you really believed in the commune idea.” Milo helped me heave the dog I’d executed onto the bare concrete floor. “Look at you. You’re the total package. You’re loyal. You’re a great dad. Your crossbow skills are not perfect, but certainly they’re decent. I mean, I’d be open to being in a flotilla with you, if you ever come to Jesus on the sea levels.”
“No thanks,” I said. “What now?”
“Do you want to say a few words?” I looked down at the bloated corpse of the dog that had taken a chunk from my baby girl’s face.
“No.”
“Then we’re done. In this heat, he’ll just cook down to ash.”
Milo helped me load up my field toilet and MREs and then we rolled down the door on Cormac and locked it. In the road between two rows of units, a group of teens was bent over a fissure in the cement, huffing groundsmoke. Milo was young enough to simply shake his head and chuckle as he climbed in the car, but I was determined to intervene.
“What are you kids thinking?” I said. I walked over to confront them but my lungs began to burn almost at once. It’s been documented that sensitivity to groundsmoke varies significantly from person to person, and I stood hacking in the smoke, trying to talk some sense into them, but hardly able to get a word out. They made quite a number of insulting personal remarks, most focused on my weight. I was getting nowhere with these jackasses and my eyes were stinging from the smoke, so I washed my hands of the situation.
When I turned back to the car, I saw that Marissa Beal was sitting on its hood. I gasped and then laughed, embarrassed by my overreaction. “Sorry cousin,” I said. “What brings you here?”