by David Liss
“Oh, well,” Milo said, rolling his eyes, “if you heard it from a peddler than I guess it’s for real.” He and Cerise exchanged a look, the meaning of which pretty clearly had to do with how big of a dumbass I was. Huge, they agreed, though sometimes they went with enormous. My stupidity was just about the only thing they agreed on. They’d saved my life, but now they had zero respect for me. I’d lost my wife and children within twelve hours of the event. Without them, we’d all be dead. There were civilians who’d done better. I couldn’t really take offense: I had only limited respect for myself.
Hank had called it—not only about me, but about Bat Rodney. The entire Rodney clan was indeed sitting pretty, right on top of the smoldering remains of San Antonio. They’d taken control of what was left of the city, killing on sight, and enslaving or taking prisoner whoever they found, only after they got bored of killing. The only law was the law of the gun, and so forth.
From what I knew of Bat and his family, it sounded like they were living the dream. Every day, haggard bands of escapees wandered north past Milo’s boat carrying what little they had on their backs with a look in their eyes that indicated that the better part of their baggage was trauma.
“Which peddler? Was it Smokey Joe? Because I think he was mental before the E.O.D.,” Cerise said.
Peddlers were near the bottom of the rudimentary social hierarchy that now existed. Product supply specialists like myself were not exactly the elites, but at least we ranked ahead of peddlers. They were ragged drifters who wandered around trading matches and other sundries for alcohol. Sometimes they simply traded in information.
“He seemed lucid,” I said. I’d given Smokey Joe a warm Lone Star Light I’d found on one of my rounds through the park’s shrubbery in return for the location of the colony. He’d slammed it down like the fraternity pledge he’d once been, snorting breath through his nose, and letting streams of hot foamy beer trickle into his unruly beard. Milo was angry about the wasted beer and about my gullibility, but I’d looked into Smokey Joe’s eyes and found him sincere and I felt I ought to at least check his story out.
“You want to leave everything we’ve built here?” Milo said, gesturing toward the boat, The Jolly Barista, which we’d covered with branches and garbage to camouflage it from marauders. All six of us had been living in it at one time, and it hadn’t seemed so bad to me at first, when I was feverish and brain-swollen, but once I was up and around again, quarters got tight. I’d built my family a lean-to a little down the way.
“This is no place to raise children. My family deserves better,” I said. And I began to cry, thinking of all the things I wanted for my kids, like flush toilets and literacy. They can’t stand that, my crying. “Don’t you want to find Hank, Cerise?” I sobbed.
“Well of course I do, when the time is right,” Cerise said.
The quakes had been less frequent and the volcanism had been dialed down too, but it wasn’t what you’d call an ideal time to set out on a hike. The truck was out of the question, even if you could refuel it. The most likely thing was you’d drive it right into a lava field and burn to death, but even if you could find enough solid ground it was too conspicuous. From what the peddlers were telling me, you could expect to be stripped clean of everything you owned, up to and including your flesh, the moment the ignition fired. “Try to look like a sad sack and you might just make it,” Smokey Joe had said. The hours before my clubbing were hazy, but now a memory floated up from the depths of my splintered brain.
“You know, Hank might not be safe in the Don Cheevers,” I said.
“Of course he’s safe. He’s actually much safer than we are,” Cerise said, looking uneasily at the brush that surrounded us. We had the riders to worry about. They came around every two or three days and nobody breathed until they were gone. Today they’d come again, well-fed men on lean horses, and they hadn’t left empty handed.
“Hank’s got granite counters and concrete walls. I could be in a whirlpool tub right now. I guess someone made the wrong choice.”
“Every night. Every night we have to do this?” Milo threw the bones of his grackle into the fire.
“Before I got hit, Andrea told me not to trust Don Cheevers.”
“Who’s Andrea?”
“Blaine’s cokehead neighbor. They had a thing.”
“Blaine and Andrea had a thing?” Milo said, taking an interest in spite of himself. Gossip was in short supply in our new situation and everyone was eager to get it. We spent our days trying to survive, and the part of our souls that followed celebrity catfights and inter-office romances died a little every day.
“No, Andrea and Don Cheevers had a thing. Andrea said she wouldn’t even buy drugs from him. So she bought them from her stylist,” I explained. Since the boy in the TEAM shirt had split my head open, I sometimes found it difficult to stick to the topic in question.
“The thing is, I can’t sit here on this comfortable log, eating hot burritos, without a thought for the future. The birds are going to run out and we can’t eat rubble and ash. If there is a last colony, the Cheevers people will know of it.”
“We paid for the wine cellar upgrade on our Cheevers,” Cerise said. “The bed we bought for the dog is softer than that board in The Jolly Barista.”
Milo and I exchanged a look. Cerise still talked a lot about Cormac and we always changed the subject as quickly as possible. What with the turmoil of events on the Last Day, it seemed Hank had not had an opportunity to fill her in on the dog’s whereabouts. A different kind of person might say let bygones be bygones, what’s one child-eating dog against the collapse of all of Texas? but Cerise was not that person.
“I think Eric is right. We should go with him, Milo. If there’s a last colony, we need to know that. But first we should check on Hank—he might need us.” Cerise was rubbing her lower back. Milo’s mattress is not ergonomic. She mentions that daily.
“Sure. Great idea. Let’s do it,” Milo said, but he stared into the fire like he didn’t mean a word of it.
* * *
“Your roof just blew off, hippie,” my father-in-law said. He was sitting on a stump, watching as the thin corrugated metal roof that was pride of our home tumbled away, leaving us with nothing but matted grass and a large stick that functioned as the beam, and piles of untraded merchandise.
“Don’t get up, let me,” I said, rolling my eyes. Then I chased after our roof on my injured knee as Elias sat on his ass and watched, his main occupation these days.
When the roof was reattached, Lisa and I sat together plucking the birds for dinner. A delicate peace existed between us now. I was no longer spending money we didn’t have, because money wasn’t even a thing. I couldn’t lie to her about where I was going, because there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. And I had lost touch with Parker Saenz. I hoped she was out there somewhere, safe, but ideally not anywhere in the immediate vicinity. Lisa was beginning to trust me again. She smiled at me as she snapped the head off a grackle and I brushed her hand with mine.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Same old, same old,” I said. She was looking at my knee. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Honestly.” Later, when it was dark, I would give her the energy drink I’d stolen her, and if she could keep it down, that would give me more pleasure than bashing Jeff Robert’s skull in, which was also on my to-do list.
Isabel was crying again. “Grandpa says if we don’t listen, the rednecks will eat us. I don’t want to be eaten!”
“Dad!” Lisa said. She was putting the dinner birds onto the roasting sticks now, while I worked on starting the fire. Elias was supposed to be helping with the children.
“Hey, it’s the truth. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s better that they know. Two big old rednecks today. They took that little bastard what’s his name—the one with the crew cut who lives down by the creek?”
“Cooper,” Jeanette said.
“Real disrespectful kid. He threw a r
ock at me day before yesterday. Anyway, we won’t be seeing his smart ass around here anymore. He looks just like that right about now,” Elias said, pointing to the plucked and splayed bird Jeanette was roasting on her own little stick.
“Elias, come on. We’re trying to have a nice family dinner.”
“Grandpa’s only joking,” Lisa said. But he wasn’t. Milo had filled me in already.
“Do you know I arrested Bat Rodney? That was in the winter of 1979.”
“We know,” I said. If I had to sit through the story one more time, I was going to take Elias by the throat—but I stopped myself. It was one thing to think along those lines back in the old days, when you knew you’d never really do it, and a totally different thing to think that way now, when there was absolutely nothing to stop you. But Elias was doing it; he was telling the story again.
“Bar fight. Man, if I’d busted his head when I had the chance. Make it look like it was from the fight, you know? Easiest thing in the world. I could have saved us all a lot of damn trouble. I blame myself, tell you the truth.”
“It’s not your fault, Dad,” Lisa said.
“Have mine, too. I ate at Milo’s,” I said, passing Lisa my bird. There was hardly any meat on them, and I could easily have eaten five or six more, but I pretended not to be hungry. Even Jeanette and Isabel could handle two each, but Lisa was eating almost nothing. She held the gray slightly charred bird flesh but she didn’t take a bite. Even the smell made her sick.
“You don’t want it, pass it over,” Elias said, and he ripped into it, smacking and crunching right through the smaller bones. The older generation was having trouble adjusting to subsistence living. They clung to the old ways, complained constantly about the lack of air conditioning and running water, ate everything in sight, and generally failed to pull their weight. Many seniors had been driven out of their families to save resources, and so it brought us great status, having an elder in the household, especially one as ostentatiously idle as Elias. The old man’s presence around our fire impressed the others, the way flashing a Rolex or owning a vacation home would have only a few months before. But sometimes as I watched him wrap his lips around a third or even a fourth grackle at the dinner rock, it was all I could do not to knock him off his comfortable stump and drive him from our lean-to into the dark.
“I tell you what,” Elias said, picking the bones cleans. “One of those honky-tonk pieces of shit catches you, you bash your head against a rock first chance you get. You remember what your Grandpa told you, girls. There’s dying and then there’s dying. You don’t want to do it the second way.”
* * *
I passed Lisa the protein shake in the dark and the sound it made when she opened it almost brought me to tears. I cried a lot, yes, but there was no shame in it these days. The pop of an aluminum can, a garbage truck beeping in reverse, the whine of a television—I missed these noises as much as I hated the sound of horse hooves, the shrieks of dying birds, and the rumble of buildings falling in on themselves.
“Do you like it?” I whispered. She said she did, but I couldn’t see her face. When she kissed me goodnight I tasted its chalky artificial cocoa flavor, the slight tang of aluminum. It was so sweet and delicious, and knowing that Jeff Robert had also tasted that, a whole can of it, made up my mind.
* * *
Elias was supposed to be doing the first watch, but as usual, he wasn’t taking it seriously. His snoring woke me only ten minutes into his shift. “The bastards hunt in the daytime. There’s no point,” he said when I shook him awake, but I explained that wasn’t the reason I’d interfered with his rest.
“Jeff Robert that married my cousin Evelyn’s girl?” Elias said. “You wake me up at—what time is it, like 9:30 in the night—” We all went to bed early these days, sans electricity. “You wake me up at 9:30 to kill him? Can’t it wait?”
I explained that it could not. Marissa’s ghost was standing, cross armed and impatient, at the door of our lean-to, but I didn’t mention that to Elias. We walked quietly through the dark, following Marissa past our sleeping fellow residents.
“I’m too old for this,” Elias said. “All of this. I tell you, I wish it had happened sooner. This had gone down in the 80s no way I’d be sleeping on the ground, begging for my supper. I would have been running things. Guys like me, we were made for this stuff. But I just never got this kind of opportunity,” Elias said. He was actually wistful.
* * *
Jeff Robert was bad off. He had one of the worst sleeping spots in the entire community, being alone, being a newcomer. He had no soft grass and not a scrap of shelter; he was snoring heavily on a stretch of bare, rocky ground, and fire ants traveled over the exposed flesh of his arms.
“Okay, let’s get this done and go back to bed.” Elias bent over Jeff Robert, studying him. “There’s the spot you want,” he said pointing to his temple. “Quick and clean. No time for screaming. Count of three. One… two…” I raised the rock. “Three,” Elias said.
I was bringing the rock down on Jeff Robert’s temple when Marissa’s scream ripped my eardrums to shreds; it was a sound only I could hear. The rock was already arcing toward him. I swiveled and brought it down hard on his shoulder. Jeff Robert woke with a scream that was audible to everyone, and Elias and I ran for it.
* * *
“You lost your nerve, hippie. Now we’ve got problems.”
“I didn’t lose my nerve,” I said. “He had his kid with him.” That’s what Marissa had seen at the last minute. The boy, Louis, was sleeping beside him.
“So what if he had his kid? Not our problem,” Elias said. “You know what makes me laugh? Back when people like you were running things, this was all you could think about, the way the world was going to be after. Now it’s here and you’re terrible at it. Just terrible.”
“I’m a team leader,” I said.
“Congratulations. You’re the number one garbage picker,” Elias said. I was number two, actually, but I didn’t point that out.
* * *
“You know what’s funny? I’m not even mad,” Trip said. He held the empty aluminum can in his hand and stared at it like it was a mysterious object from a lost world, which it was. “I guess what I am, is disappointed.”
I’d planned to take the can with me to work that day and drop it in some convenient out-of-the-way spot when nobody was around to see. But HR had come at first light, and they’d searched our lean-to before I’d had a chance to dispose of the evidence. They were acting on an “anonymous tip.” Now they stood outside our door, with their guns pointed more or less in my direction, while Trip Edmonds fired me for the second time.
Jeff Robert was among the group of onlookers who’d gathered to witness my downfall and I was pleased to see that his shoulder looked even worse than my knee. Murder, attempted or completed, was viewed as a private matter, so long as it happened after hours and was carried out with personal property. But misappropriation of resources was the unforgiveable sin, and with that slim aluminum can, Jeff Robert had sealed my fate.
Still, I tried. I fell to my knees and begged for my job. I explained our situation. I appealed to their compassion, but even Elias was unmoved.
“What? What the hell is the matter with you?” Elias said. “There’s no room in this place for a baby. Crying all the damn time, keeping everybody up. And what about diapers? You want to use some leaves for that? Stupid idea.I should have busted your head when I had the chance,” Elias said.
In fact, the baby was a terrible idea, and I’d thought so from the moment Lisa looped me in on the situation. But obviously this was nobody’s idea. I’ve tried to imagine breaking that to this future son or daughter, if both it and I live long enough for it to have questions about why Lisa and I brought it into this world. I will have to put an arm around the kid’s shoulders and say, “Son or daughter, you were an oversight at a time of great upheaval that, unfortunately, coincided with a rare moment of marital détente.” That’s a lot to l
ay on a kid, especially one who has never experienced the simple joys of tap water and refrigeration.
Jeanette and Isabel will grow up dirty, ignorant, and underfed, and comfortable in a society in which cannibalism has replaced low carb diets, but at least they will retain some hazy early memories of a world that more or less worked. Whereas this kid is completely screwed. Of all my many mistakes as a husband and father, I considered the third child to be the most egregious.
“Yeah, that’s just not going to cut it,” Trip Edmonds said. I didn’t much care for the look he was giving Lisa. She hadn’t said a word from the moment HR ripped off our metal roof and began to tear up our home.
“What about him,” I said, pointing at Jeff Robert, who was loitering at the edge of the crowd. “He’s as guilty as I am. More so. He took a can for himself and didn’t report it. I saw him drink it.”
HR waved Jeff Robert over. The crowd parted for him and he begged for his life. I’d led him astray. I’d told him the rules didn’t apply to supervisors or their kin. The crowd grumbled At night people sat around their campfires and claimed management kept all the best things for themselves.
“I assure you, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Trip said, holding up his hands and calling for order. “The rules are the rules.”
“Eric said it was kind of a wink-wink, nod-nod policy and I should pay no attention to it. He said you and he kicked back with your secret supply of foodstuffs on the regular,” Jeff Robert said.