—REV. JOSEPH COOK, SCEPTICISM AND RATIONALISM: ELECTIVE AFFINITIES AND HEREDITARY DESCENT (1881)
MONDAY, 8 JUNE 2015, ABOUT 10 A.M.
RAFTER XOX RANCH, WESTERN NEBRASKA
Glory Cardenas, who is fifteen and excitable, barrels into the little room where I like to sit over tea while I do the books for the Rafter XOX, yelling “Miz Claire!”
“Right here, Glory.” I’m already standing up and reaching for the belt that holds my hatchet and knives. “What—”
“It’s Mister Matt! Raiders outside the gate, they got him tied up—”
“Tell James to keep talking and stalling, and I’m on my way.” Good thing it’s James; he’s steady like frozen stone, for-defs the guy I’d have picked to have on duty for something like this.
When I go out into the compound, it’s dead quiet and motionless everywhere within the palisade. I look around. “A lot of people who should be working are staring at me, and that’s not gonna help. Now go on my ‘go.’ Set up to defend the palisade. All snipers to the loopholes around the front gate. Squad Four, arm up for a dash, set up to sortie behind the front gate. Medical right behind them. Squad Three, guard the medical. Troop A, mount up for pursuit behind the rest. All other forces to ready positions. Wake the day sleepers with my apologies. Hold your hand up if you know where you’re going and what you’re doing.”
They’ve been drilled. Hands snap up, no hesitation.
Glory is back at my side, whispering in my ear, “James says tell you it’s bad and come quick.”
I nod, then look back at my people. “Chaplain, join me on the bridge, prepped for EF. Everyone in place pronto, on my ‘go.’ Hands up if you understand.”
Hands are up again. Chaplain Marjorie looks sick. She was one of Mattie’s first recruits when we started Rafter XOX; she doesn’t want to give him an emergency funeral.
“Go.”
They swarm to it.
“Come with me to the bridge, Glory. I need a messenger right with me. Stay in close so you can hear anything I mutter.” I walk to the gate as quickly as I can maintain a pretense of calm, Glory trotting beside me. I hear a few clanks and thuds from dropped buckets or spears, and some of the fool chickens start clucking. The dogs are good; we don’t keep them if they can’t shut up. A guy with good ears outside the gate would learn that lots of stuff is moving around, but he’d expect that, and that’s all he’d learn.
The gate bridge is another of Mattie’s ideas: a plank bridge on steel trusses that runs above the sliding main gates, with ports in its deck so enemies can’t hide under it.
Old car hoods spaced a couple of feet apart are mounted on the waist-high front wall, so our people on the bridge are always one step from cover.
James is standing at the center gap with his crossbow cradled ready in his arm, and the two gate guards are standing to his sides. About twenty feet below us, maybe forty yards away, maybe fifteen grubby-looking assholes are decked out in scraps of the old world; I think the earmuff hat with all the CDs glued shiny side out is kind of striking. The skull on a stick is probably supposed to look scary, but in a country still littered with unburied bodies, really it’s more pathetic.
Among the assholes, a half-starved-looking elderly donkey stands patiently, facing away from us. He’s harnessed to a travois with a bicycle wheel at the point.
Mattie looks up at us from the travois. He’s tied with hands and feet under the frame, splashed with blood and dirt, and gagged tightly enough to pull his cheeks back.
I bet that hurts. At least I can see he’s breathing.
“Chaplain’s on the way,” I mutter, looking down.
Without expression, James says, “They’re staying on message.”
A raider stands on each side of Mattie, one with a machete, the other with a hatchet.
The leader, standing back by the donkey’s head, seems to recognize me. Not that it’s all that hard to identify the only six-foot, two hundred ten–pound Asian woman on this range. “We got something of yours you gonna want back.”
“Let’s skip the villain-talk. There’s no movies anymore. We don’t bargain for hostages here. James, if they move to harm Mister Matt in any way, or to take him away from the gate, shoot Mister Matt.”
James raises his crossbow and sights it; Mattie looks back, quietly, nodding his agreement. It’s how we’ve always handled these, and it was his idea in the first place.
Their leader looks contemptuously up at me. “You won’t do any—”
I let him gabble and speak to the guard next to James: one of my best shots, another stroke of luck. “Diego, can you kill me that donkey, for sure, on one bolt?”
“Hard shot, ma’am.”
“But can you?”
“Think so.”
“Do it.”
On the “t” of it, the bolt lashes out of his crossbow and plants between the donkey’s ears, just back of his poll, up to its steel fins. “Perfect shot,” I say.
The donkey falls sideways. The wheeled travois twists and cracks; the bicycle wheel bends under it. Mattie hangs down half off the travois, held by his tied hands and feet behind the frame. That really looks like it hurts.
The leader jumps back. “Fuckin’ mother fucker—”
“Now you can’t take him away,” I say. “You can kill him but if you do you’re all dead. Or if you force us, we’ll kill him ourselves, and then you’re all dead. Since Mister Matt rode out this morning with five guards, we already have five good reasons for revenge. So you’re probably already dead, but if you throw down your weapons and put your hands up—”
“You won’t kill your husband,” the leader says. “I can’t believe that you don’t feel—”
“I’m not responsible for what you can’t believe.”
* * *
TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 1998, 7:15 P.M.
WESTMINSTER, COLORADO
For one second I thought that stupid shrink-o-doctor had been right and I was having the first bad migraine of the rest of my life. More light than I had ever seen pierced through my eye sockets, and my head hurt like it was being squeezed to pieces. But when I opened my eyes, half thinking I’d see swirling colors and tumble from my chair like Mom did whenever it was convenient, instead it was just real dark. The living-room computer in front of me had gone black-dead and so had the lamp. I couldn’t even see either of them, within arm’s reach. All the curtains and blinds were closed, and it was dark outside.
In the kitchen, the little lights on all the gadgets were out, too. Dad had been making a pot of coffee like he always did when he was going to work till dawn. The splut-splut-bloosh of the coffeemaker faded into two dwindling little splorches and a brief trickle.
Dad said, “Aw, fuck, power failure.” He felt around in a drawer for the kitchen flashlight. It didn’t work either.
Mom yelled from the bedroom that her laptop was dead, “. . . and it had a full charge too, I had it plugged in all day.”
Dad ran down the hall into his office and yelled, “Aw fuck,” again ’cause his UPS was out.
Stepping carefully—you never knew what would be underfoot—I went to the hall closet where Mom kept her spiritual healing candles, grabbed the first box on top of the pile, found the matches in the kitchen drawer, lit a candle, and stuck it to the table. It couldn’t be any worse for the finish than the crusted-on Coco Puffs blobs from last month.
I’d grabbed a box of pale blue ones, scented with a mix of lavender, vanilla, and “natural floral” to bring peace and tranquility, a good idea given Dad’s yelling and kicking things in his office, and the whining and raging from Mom in the bedroom.
I lit four more candles, clustering them together on the table.
My folks were irresponsible and flaky but we went camping a lot; it seemed real unlikely that the flashlight batteries would’ve been dead. And the laptop that Mom alw
ays left plugged in? And the UPS?
Weird.
By candlelight, my digital watch was silvery-blank.
I stepped out on our porch; the chinook that had been blowing all day was still on, wet, warm, and gusty. It would turn to a blizzard, but not right away. That was at least one thing I’d learned from all that stupid X-C skiing we all had to go do every fucking weekend all stupid fucking winter, and pretend was fun, because they were trying to run the fat off their roly-poly giant of a daughter.
Behind me in the house, Dad and Mom were yelling at each other about using good expensive candles and ruining the kitchen table and who broke the electricity. Dad picked up one of the candles with Not the good potholder! and went down to look at the circuit breaker box, Mom trailing after, yelling because he wasn’t holding the candle where she could see where she was walking.
The street was its same old identical-beige-boxes Denver burb, but way darker: no electric lights, no moon, way past sunset, and about half the sky was socked in with low dense clouds. Pale red-yellow light flickered in a handful of windows—I guess they’d found the candles too. Black rectangles of doors opened up and down the street.
Normally at night in the Front Range, the city below lights up any clouds in the sky brighter than the moon, and the reflected light is plenty to see by. Tonight, the irregular, lumpy black clouds overhead reflected nothing.
My friend Mattie could probably have figured out how far away that meant the lights must be out—he was already taking trig in ninth grade—but the short answer had to be a buttload of a long way away.
The thought of Mattie completed the brain-circuit: Shit, it’s started.
Mr. Burke next door came out carrying a lighted candle, unlocked his BMW, and popped the hood.
I went over there. “Nothing with electricity is working. Battery or plug.”
“Looks that way,” he agreed. He scraped a big screwdriver across the battery terminals. “Not even a spark, and I drove two hundred miles yesterday. There should be a full charge. I wonder if this is going on everywhere.”
“I think at least everywhere on the Northern Front Range,” I said. “Look how dark the clouds are.”
He looked up and realized that I meant they weren’t reflecting any ground light. “Hey, if I get in, and you give it a good push, we can try to roll-start the car and see if the alternator can still make current.”
“Worth a try.”
We checked everything over several times, since the driveway slope was gentle and this was going to be our one try.
“Okay, push, Claire!” he said, through the open window. I leaned into his front bumper, getting the car rolling down the driveway in neutral.
Whump-bump-bump. It stopped.
Burke got out. “I didn’t hear anything that sounded like a cylinder firing, did you?”
“No.”
“So no city current, no battery, and the alternator doesn’t work,” Burke said. “Well, shitburgers.”
“Hey, I know a disaster prepper who’s got a shelter—I’m going over to his place. You want to come along?”
He sighed. “Karen’s flight from Miami is supposed to be coming in at ten thirty. I better stay here. Good luck, Claire.”
“Thanks.”
I hurried into the house, trying to get away before Burke realized that Mrs. Burke’s flight would have been in the air when everything stopped working.
Mom and Dad were screaming at each other down in the basement, their usual flapping around uselessly, like they did about who forgot to pay the cable bill or register the car, or whose fault it was that I had shitty grades and had gone up another pants size. Mom was ranting that Dad was being patronizing, interrupted by his yipping about her being childish.
Food, shoes, pack, go.
I poured the remaining half box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch into a big mixing bowl, added the last milk from the fridge, and started gulping.
I was almost done when Mom came running up the stairs, crying, with Dad following and desperately apologizing. Then they saw me.
“Claire,” Mom said, in that bitchy tone of exasperation she put on to impress her friends with how tough she had it, “we are going out for Mexican just as soon as this crap with the electricity gets straightened out, and that cereal is supposed to be half a cup a day because it is loaded with carbs—”
I kept shoveling it in, and said, with my mouth full because she hated that, “It’s started.”
“What has started?” Dad demanded. “You got something to work?”
“Duh.” I gulped a big bite because no one could say the next name intelligibly through a mouth of cereal. “Morton Orczegowski was right. Something’s happened, something big. No light on the clouds, the whole Front Range is down, and the batteries and Mr. Burke’s alternator and digital watches and nothing works. So I’m going over to Mattie’s and then him and me and his family will go over to Orry’s and then to the shelter. You should come along and see if he’ll still take you.”
I picked up the bowl and chugged the rest, letting a little of it run down my face.
“Claire, that is so vulgar—” Mom began.
Dad said, “I am not going to go beg a crazy survivalist libertarian gun nut to save me from what’s probably just a big solar flare.”
I opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and used a handful of it to wash my face.
“Claire, that’s Evian, it’s expensive—”
“There won’t be any water in the sink,” I said. “The pumps are electric.”
Dad angrily yanked at the faucet to show me I was wrong; it guttered and burped as the very last of the city water ran backward down the pipe.
I was already heading out of the kitchen to go change my shoes. Dad grabbed my arm. “You are not going off into some fallout shelter with some gun nut libertardian—”
I shoved him in the chest; no time for this bullshit, I’d been taller than he was since I was twelve, and he was scrawny anyway. To make sure they stayed out of my way, I dropped the bomb: “I bet Richard would have gone, and he’d have taken Mom along so he’d have something to fuck.”
See, a couple of years before, Mom and Dad tried this thing called being poly, and Mom had a big romantic thing with a big muscular construction dude named Richard. Meanwhile Dad couldn’t get a date. They ended up spending twice as long in counseling as they did being poly, just to get back to being their same old whiny miserable selves.
It worked like always. Mom ran into the bedroom wailing and slammed the door; Dad followed her, pathetically mewling, “Abby, she just said that to—”
I dashed to my room, ditched my little strappy silver sandals, and pulled on heavy socks and the butt-ugly hiking boots they’d given me for Christmas. From their bedroom, her sobbing and his apologizing blended into familiar meaninglessness.
My big thick knee-length down coat had pockets all over it; it had been my favorite coat for shoplifting last year. (I gave that up; if you’re good there’s no excitement and if you’re not there’s too much.) I put the coat on, dumped everything out of my school backpack onto the floor, and loaded the pack and coat pockets with everything from the cabinet where Mom kept all her bags and boxes of cookies and candy, plus all the bottled water I could fit in.
I could hear Mom subsiding into talking mean shit about how disappointed she was in Dad, punctuated with wracking angry sobs, and Dad pleading in between.
I tied the top of my pack loosely over a bag of tortilla chips and fit a jar of Cheez Whiz into my last pocket. Time to go.
Dad ran out of the bedroom and down the stairs, realized he couldn’t see, came back, and got a candle, shielding it with his hand, before going down.
I sighed. One more time, I’d try.
Down in the basement, by the light of the candle, Dad was taking the front panel off the washing machin
e. “Your mother was just thinking she’d feel better if she could get caught up on laundry, and we didn’t always have to take it out, so—”
“Dad, the washing machine hasn’t worked since before Christmas. You will never need to fix it now. There is no electricity. Not from main power, not from a battery, not from nothing. Cars don’t run either. Nothing’s working.”
“Your mom just gets so frustrated, Claire—”
“I’m going now,” I said.
“Over to Mattie’s house, you said? Tell Ravikumar I could sure use help on this washing machine.”
“’Kay, Dad. Gotta run.”
Back upstairs, Mom was on their bed, eyes closed, blanket wrapped against her face. “I just want . . . I just want . . . I just want . . .” Classic Mom. Her breakdowns seemed real enough but her timing was always suspect.
“Mom, I hope you feel better soon.”
“Be careful, baby.” All of a sudden, she lunged out of the covers and hugged me.
I pushed her arms apart. I didn’t like either of them touching me. It always felt like they wanted something.
* * *
Mattie was either my best friend or the closest thing I had ever had to a friend. His real name was Mahtab Kaushik and he was one of those scrawny all-feet-and-head kids, with a beaky nose and huge horn-rim glasses, dark enough to be mistaken for black or Mexican; his folks had a little Indian lilt in their accents but Mattie was Colorado born and raised, and sounded like it.
He constantly fact-spouted. That was what the counselors and special ed people at the alternate school called pouring out all the random trivia that a guy who reads too much and remembers all of it accumulates. He also couldn’t seem to shut the fuck up even when he wanted to.
Much of his fact-spouting was about games and computers and sci-fi TV shows, but he also spouted a lot about school stuff, which helped me get by with less reading.
We fit together real good at crazy-weird school. His fact-spouting was fine with me; I liked to hear Mattie talk, and so did he. Mattie drew bullies like shit draws flies, so he was safer standing next to that scary giant psycho Korean bitch. And teachers always put us together in groups and committees; they categorized us both as All Other Non-White. Probably they thought Busan and Jaipur were both in All Other Non-White Land.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 42