Reeferpunk Shorts

by David Mark Brown

  “Told ‘em to turn around and take der worthless butts back to Oklihomie, was what I told Frank to tell ‘em. For dey git us all kilt.”

  Leonid nods. “The hunt overtook Bertie’s before she could be sure Frank reached the refugees.”

  I interrupt. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Leonid and Bertha both nod their heads before Leonid sums it up, “the twitchers are after the refugees, but they seem to be herding them rather than hunting them, just yet anyway.”

  I look around at my sons faces. Leonid’s use of the word, “herding” chills us all, but I know he’s right. “The helium plant.”

  Leonid nods. “That only leaves why. Why are the twitchers herding a group of refugees toward the most secure spot in the dust zone?”

  “Because they want in.” The truth hits me.

  Pyotr speaks for the first time. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Leonid judges the remaining daylight. “We’ve got time to help Bertie clean up some first.”

  “No.” The blinders fall from my eyes. I see my sons for who they are, what they have become—men, battle torn and bleeding. And I know why. I know what will hold us together, the force calling us to something beyond our own survival.

  Confusion on their faces, only Bertha knows what’s coming, but even she doesn’t understand it. They all think they know me, and maybe they do. But I remember the me from before, from before the color red.

  ~~~

  I take a deep breath. “For six years I’ve refused to say it, but I was wrong. Your mother wanted to leave Amarillo when the twitch began. It was my fault she died. In my weakness…” I take my goggles off and press my puffy eyes with the heals of my hands. “I killed Katerina.”

  Mykola tries to soften it, “she caught the twitch—“

  “I killed her!” Swallowing my grief, I continue. “I should have taken you, all of you from this hell hole years ago. But I didn’t.” I shake my head.

  “We know, Papa.” Leonid speaks, “you work for the plant. We know, all of us. In exchange for supplies, you tell them about the outside.”

  I blink with shock, looking at each of them in turn. Only Leonid returns my gaze, cold and unforgiving. Maybe I’ve already lost him. Maybe not.

  Bertha spits. “What he means is you spy on us for dem.”

  I nod. “This only confirms my decision.” I see it clear as day, as obvious as the sun.

  Bertha can’t keep quiet. “You’re still gonna’ help tose sons’ a bitches who done dis to us?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t work for them anymore. From now on I work only for you.” I roll forward until each of my sons lifts their eyes to look at me. “Men, you’re not boys anymore.” I point to Bertie’s store, blood soaked and battered. “This! This is what we are now. I should have taken you far from this place years ago. There’s no undoing that. This. This is what we are now.”

  I unsheathe my short stick and flick the blades open, still oozing with the cold, thickening blood of twitchers. “The dust zone is our home. When I cared only about myself, my life was empty. In my fear I’ve taught you to do the same.” I spin the lance over my head before stabbing it deep into the dirt. “It’s time we take our home back. We don’t need the plant. All we need is each other.”

  Pyotr is first to follow suit. With a one-sided grin, he backs a few steps from the circle and spins his ax from hand to hand.

  Mykola lifts his head. “I want to see the outside world.” His words freeze me. “But not until the twitchers are dead, all of them.” With frightening venom on his lips he steps back and slams the butt of his shotgun on the hard dirt crust.

  Leonid shakes his head, staring me down. “After six years you want to fight?” He swallows back tears. “I remember the day you shot her. Do you even remember? Or were you too drunk? I loved her so much.” He removes his goggles to blot muddy tears from his eyes. “You didn’t even know she was turning!” He raises the back of his hand, stopping just short of striking my face. Without blinking I give him permission.

  “Strike me, Leonid. God knows I deserve it.” He begins to shake. Even just the appearance of the twitch in my oldest son shatters the last of my pride. I shove my chair back and lurch forward. Draping my arms over his shoulders, I force him to either support his old man or drop him. His shock turns to strength as I feel his muscles tighten around me. I whisper into his ear, “I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry.” And I hug my eldest for the first time in six years.

  “Ach, cut all da kissy kissy, and let’s kill us some twitchers!” Bertha slaps us on the shoulders and Leonid helps me find my chair again.

  I start to object, “Bertha, you can’t—“

  “Oh can da crap, Georgy. Look what dem animals did to my store. Besides, I’m tired of living witout my Marty.” With a vicious yank she pumps her 12-gauge with one arm. “Payback, she’s a bitch, no?”

  ~~~

  We draw out plans to hit hard and fast, to extract as many refugees as possible and let the helium plant take care of itself. Bertha and Leonid agree that once the conflict starts with the plant that the twitchers most likely won’t pursue. So we stake everything on it, and end the session with the same old words given new meaning. “We don’t do anything, unless we do it together.”

  Wind whipping past us, we approach the outskirts of Amarillo at a 30mph clip. The sun dips low in the western sky. It’s almost six o’clock in the afternoon. The day’s still at its hottest, the twitchers at their slowest. But all that will change soon.

  Pyotr and Mykola ride in the cab of the truck with Bertha manning the machine gun, like only a fifty year old German woman named Bertha can. Leonid insists on joining me in Leviathan. I’m grateful. I’ll need his marksmanship before this is through. “Bertha knows exactly where the armored Jeffery is and which railway to take.”

  “Roger.”

  “The trick will be to take the heat off them and make it to the refugees without getting dead.”

  “No problem, Papa. You just drive. I’ll keep the twitchers off our ass.”

  I reach back and squeeze his shoulder, and feel the roots of a love built on something other than fear for the first time since losing Rosalyn. “I know you will.” We rumble over the ruins of a stick frame house blown into the road. Crushing a path for the truck, we barrel onto Buchanan street—going the wrong way on a one way. Funny how some things stick with you. “Now.”

  Leonid waves Pyotr off, and the truck obediently slows and turns right into a quiet neighborhood, one known to be mostly twitcher free. Each of my boys has the territorial map of twitcher residences in Amarillo memorized. Fortunately, the twitchers who resided in Amarillo long enough before they turned tend to haunt places of familiarity, providing some predictability to navigating the city. Unfortunately, the events of today have flushed much of what we trusted about twitcher behavior.

  “Twitchers! Five o’clock. Four o’clock. Eight o’clock. Lots of ‘em.” Leonid levers a bullet into the chamber of his Winchester ’73.

  “Damn. I was hoping most of them would be out of town.”

  “Maybe they’re covering all the possible retreats.”

  “Maybe so.” I shift my grip on the clutch. “Hold on. It looks like there’s new debris in the road.” I throttle down to jump the curb. That’s when I spot several eyes through a department store window only feet away.

  “Got ‘em!” Leonid strikes first, shattering the glass with a .44-40 slug. As soon as he does a swarm of twitchers emerge from the jagged mouth missing the treads by mere feet. At full throttle we bounce around the debris and back into the road, splintering a hitching post along the way. The slower twitchers fall away quickly, but not the faster ones. Round after round Leonid works the Winchester’s lever and burns the afternoon air with powder and lead—every bullet finding its mark.

  The rifle’s thunder echos amidst the tall, brick buildings of downtown, drawing even more of a crowd. A block ahead a half dozen twitchers lope straight for us. I grip the
double-barrel 12-gauge under the armrest, count to three and pull both triggers at once. A blast of exploding blood foam and sinew envelopes us. A tumbling head deflects off my left shoulder, bruising me, but nothing more. Wiping the mist from my goggles, I nearly miss our turn on 3rd Avenue, and then instantly wish I had.

  Wrecked autos block our path, new since last week. Railroad tracks hem us in on the right, and besides, we need to keep heading north. “Hold on!”

  “I need to reload.”

  “Just hold on. I’m going to get someify to get vodka.” We buck the curb onto the sidewalk and I steer directly for the loading bay doors of Hal’s Garage.

  “Papa, what are you—“

  Leviathan’s treads crash into the bottom of the doors first, buckling the dry boards and popping them from their support irons in a shower of splintered wood. Then suddenly the floor beneath us gives, and there is nothing but dust and darkness and the sensation of flying.

  ~~~

  The impact cracks one of my teeth and shoots a rooster tail of sparks out from underneath Leviathan’s treads as they grab at the abandoned rails beneath us. Steering the beast through the prohibition tunnels in the dark reminds me of iceskating at night back in Virginia. Traction is horrible, and in a matter of seconds the twitchers follow and gain on us.

  “Papa, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “For the first time in a long time, I’m certain.” I absolutely know what I’m doing, just not whether it will work. Somehow Leonid manages to reload and begins picking off the front runners. “Save some bullets. We’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  “My supply of hooch.” Lord willing it’s still there. Only a handful of my friends knew about it during the years after prohibition and before the twitch, all of them most likely dead. “We’re going to light it, all of it. I’ll make the mess, but I’ll need you to clean it up.”

  “No problem.”

  We slide around a bend, the right tread chewing into the rock of the tunnel side, bouncing us and spitting gravel. Finally I make out the stash by the glint of sparks bouncing off the glass bottles stacked in wooden crates from floor to ceiling. “Get ready!”

  No sooner than the words leave my lips we crash into the wall of vodka and beer, the impact more painful than I had hoped. With nothing to shield the blow, a crate catches me across the forehead. Another smashes into my chest, weighing down Leviathan’s controls. “Now!” I grunt through clenched teeth.

  The Winchester barks and a violent woof rushes past us before sucking all the air back toward the fire. I feel the hair on my face shrivel from the sudden heat as hideous howling fills the tunnel.

  “Hot damn! I can’t see much, but I think that got ‘em.”

  I blink rapidly, trying to bring moisture back to the surface of my eyes and focus again on the glint of the rails before us. Only then do I realize I still have a case of vodka in my lap. “Think these might come in handy?”

  Leonid shifts to see the bottles. “For once, yes. I do.”

  “Under your seat, there should be some matches and an old shop rag. Get ‘em out now, incase we need ‘em.” I finish the thought under my breath, “I have a feeling we might.”

  “Where does this tunnel come out?”

  Nothing gets past my Leonid. “That’s the problem. It doesn’t really.”

  Fear creeps into my eldest’s voice. “What do you mean it doesn’t come out? It has to—“

  “The exit’s just like the entrance, son. But it’s a lot easier to get down than to get up. I haven’t been down here since I lost my legs.” For several seconds I hear nothing but the grating of the treads on the steel rails as we draw nearer to the end of the line. “I’m not gonna’ be able to get back out.”

  “Sure you can—“

  “Not with Leviathan, not with my chair. Just me, a broken old man.”

  “You’re not broken! You’re my Papa.”

  I hear the terror in his voice, and it breaks me, but I know I can’t be soft. “And when we get to the top you’re going to carry me? Through throngs of seething twitchers? We’ll both die, and you know it.”

  “But we don’t do anything unless we do it together!” He’s screaming now.

  “Not dying, son. That’s the one thing I won’t allow. You do that on your own, fifty years from now.”

  “You bastard! You make me care for you just to give up and die?”

  “Leonid—“

  “For five years I’ve wanted nothing more. I longed for the day you would kill yourself and put us all out of your misery, because for five years you were nothing but a broken, old man.”

  “Leonid—“

  “And today I get my Papa back, just to—“ he crumples in a heap.

  Leviathan slows to a stop. “We’re here. End of the line.”

  ~~~

  After several seconds of rare silence, he lifts his head. “No. If not for me, what about Mik and Pete?” Five pinholes of light hover several feet above our heads—a manhole cover leading to a dead end in the industrial district, near the helium plant. I picture myself crawling down the street on my elbows.

  “Son—“

  “Let’s just get to the street. We’re in the middle of town still. Industrial district, right? We’ll get to the street and play it by ear.”

  “What did you just say?” I can’t believe my ears.

  Leonid slaps his hands on the side of Leviathan. “Let’s get to the street. The others will be waiting—“

  “No, after that.”

  He hesitates, squinting at me through the darkness. “We’ll play it by ear?”

  I laugh. The first laugh I can remember for months. “Leonid Founder. Did you just suggest we act without a plan set in advance?”

  “I, I…” he stutters.

  “If you can be spontaneous, my eldest, then I suppose I can live without my shell.”

  “What—" alignWhat—

  “But you have to swear one thing to me.”

  “Papa?”

  “Swear it.” I growl the command, making it unequivocal.

  “O.k. I swear.”

  “The moment I decide I’m a liability, you leave me.”

  “Papa.”

  “Do it, or I’ll blow my brains out before I see you come to harm.”

  “O.k.”

  “Now come on. We’re still taking the vodka.” We unload several bottles of Vodka into my duffle and I send Leonid up the metal rungs ahead of me. He heaves the heavy lid aside slowly allowing the ruddy light to sift into the darkness. Peering upward I wonder briefly where the blue sky has gone and if I’ll ever see it again.

  “Clear.” Leonid lifts himself onto the surface before lowering a hand to take the duffle. I hand it up to him and heave myself into a seated position, my dead legs still dangling in the hole.

  “These buildings are usually empty.” I adjust the shoulder straps for both my .44-40 and my shotgun and crane my neck for a look around. “We need to get there, the east wing of the plant.” As we watch the eastern sky above an abandoned rail yard, the wind suddenly shifts, rustling our clothing.

  “Crackle.” Leonid stands, looking further to the east.

  “I taste it.” I check the hair on my arms and count to twenty five. Finally a light blue flicker dances over the buildings, fading quickly. “The twitchers are using it to herd the refugees.”

  “They’re close. About a mile.”

  “Son, we won’t make it in time to divert them to the pickup zone, not with me like this.”

  “Papa, I’m not leaving—“

  “Wait.” I search the area for something I know should be there. “Handcar. Help me up.” He tugs me over his shoulders, and I clasp my arms around him like a kid getting a piggy back ride—like I had done with him six years earlier. “If we can parallel the main track before the Jeffery passes then we can alter the plan, switch the rails so they push north instead of east.”

  “Right into the middle—“

&
nbsp; “Of hell’s birthplace. Yes. It’ll be messy.”

  “But we’ll do it together.”

  I hear something behind us. “Stop.” I crane my neck, more to hear than to see. “Did you hear—“

  “Moaning. They’re coming.” Leonid lopes toward the train yard and the nearest handcart, his muscles surging beneath me. I’d never noticed how strong he’d become. Suddenly an explosion ripples the air east of us followed by scattered gunfire. “It’s started.”

  Between Leonid’s heavy breathing and the gunfire, I hear nothing and see just as little until he unloads me on the hanuice on thdcart. “Son, we’ve gotta’ go.” Dozens of twitchers stream between the buildings behind us, heading for the larger fight. But gradually heads turn our direction, and then more than just heads.

  Leonid begins pumping up and down on the cart handle, but we’re moving deathly slow while a dozen twitchers lope in our direction. I slump open the duffle and use my knife to punch down the cork on a bottle of vodka. Stuffing a strip of rag into the top I strike a match and light it. The alcohol wicks up the rag until the flame begins to smoke. The lead twitchers clump, clawing at each other less than twenty yards behind us and closing fast. “Fire in the hole!”

  ~~~

  The glass bottle shatters one step in front of the three twitchers and blankets them in fire. Sprawling and wailing, the three manage to spread the flames to three others by the time I pack the second bottle and light it up. Leonid has us moving at a fast run now, hopefully fast enough.

  I crack the second bottle on the wall of a maintenance shed just as another clump of twitchers round the edge of it. The burning liquid fans out in a delicate spray, like a phoenix tail, licking the fetid skin of twitchers. Their tortured screams draw more attention. I toss three more and prep the last two bottles, but a quick count identifies three dozen targets, and growing.

  “The Jeffery!”

  I spin around to see the armored vehicle clacking toward us on a parallel track still three hundred yards away. “The switch. We’ve gotta’ get there first.”

  “Less than a hundred yards. We’ll make it. There’s a smash bar.”