Not on Fire, but Burning

by Greg Hrbek

  Also by Greg Hrbek

  The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly

  Destroy All Monsters

  NOT ON FIRE, BUT BURNING

  Copyright © 2015 by Greg Hrbek

  First Melville House printing: September 2015

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London M4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  ISBN 978-1-61219-454-7 (ebook)

  Design by Adly Elewa

  v3.1

  Contents

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  She saw the impact. But Noah must have seen the object coming. From the next room, where he had been playing Monopoly by himself, he said:

  “Skyler, look.”

  “What.”

  “Skyler, look.”

  He was five years old and Skyler Wakefield had been his babysitter since she’d started college, a year ago now. In a few weeks, classes again. She was ready to declare her major. She was going to be a fiction writer, like her father. This is what she had been thinking in the moments before it happened. Like my father. Then she looked. The house, set on one of the city’s hills, had views of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands on the far side of the bay. What Skyler saw through the window confused her: A plane. But not a plane. It was too bright. Like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere, a star falling in broad daylight, but now decelerating strangely, like a machine, as if to land in the water of the bay. Then not landing. Slowing and lifting—all of this happening very quickly—as it approached the bridge, seeming to shrug its wings like some impossible dragon, though there were no wings, and yet something, metal or fire or a bolt of electromagnetism, was severing the suspension cables; and as each red cable lashed whiplike into the air, the roadway fell by stages to the pure morning blue of the water.

  More than a crash. Not an accident. Get away from the window. Knowing what was coming now. Skyler put her back to the wall—shut her eyes, hard—and tried to shout to Noah. But her voice was gone from the terror of knowing. Even with eyes closed, she could see the flash of light.

  If he’s looking, he’ll be blind.

  A moment later, a shock of wind hit the house and the sound of every window breaking, of flying glass, of glass shards being rifled into walls and furniture, chiming against objects held together by metallic bonds, was like the music of the world please no glass plane dream help now Mom Dad Dorian …

  When Skyler woke up, smoke was flooding the room. The door—the one leading to the hallway and the adjoining room where Noah was—she could not see. She tried to feel her way to it, but objects blocked her way, and she crawled in circles. She stopped. She pressed her cheek to the floor, trying to hear, afraid that the membranes in her ears must be slashed, because the only sound now was a pure and constant tone, like the hum of a tuning fork. She reached in her pocket for the phone vibrating against her thigh. On the glowing screen, she saw the numbers and the name. Noah’s mother. She pushed ACCEPT and held the device to her ear, and was able to hear the voice, just barely:

  “Skyler.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  Of course, the mother wanted to know if Noah was there. “Are you still with him?” “I’m with him and he’s all right,” Skyler said, not knowing if this was true. The mother gave her very clear directions. Take Noah out of the house and go three blocks south and one block west to a school with a fallout shelter. Being told what to do made Skyler angry. Take him out. Take him out how. Then the voice was lost. The call had dropped. The network collapsing under the weight of attempted connections.

  In the hallway, there was less smoke. Here, she could breathe, though breathing only thickened a sooty residue in the flue of her throat. She made it to the room he was in. The window hung in the dark like a painting of orange fog. She did not want to go in. If she went in, she might not come out. She took off her shirt, pulled it inside out, and wrapped it around her mouth and nose. She found him under the window. After saying his name close to his face and not hearing a response, Skyler took him by the wrists and pulled him toward the door. He was not heavy: because he was small. He looked younger than five years old; it made him crazy how people were always low when guessing his age. I should be running, she thought, then remembered a way outdoors through a south-facing room at the end of the hall. She would take him, but first she would find the door and open it.

  She felt the door, the knob. Decided there was no fire on the other side. Turned the knob and pushed. To the left, steps up to the street; to the right, a dark cloud lit from below and within. She got Noah onto her back. His arms dangled over her shoulders, and his lips, when his head moved, seemed to be kissing her neck. Skyler took him straight up to the street, worried if she put him down she wouldn’t pick him up again. There was no one else nearby. One person, a block away, running south. At the crest of a street, beyond the enclave of opulent homes, Skyler looked down to the burning neighborhoods along the bay. What she saw down there recalled a medieval painting of hell she had studied in Art History. Innumerable scenes of crazy torture, some brightly lit by fire, others in shadow, all of them under a sky impastoed with sun and ash. The street leading down was so sharply pitched that steps had been built into the sidewalk on one side. People were climbing towards her, climbing the steps on their hands and knees. Skyler felt a surge inside. Up here, the metal posts of street signs might be twisted into the shape of palsied limbs and the trees along the streets defoliated, but the buildings were still standing; and so was she, and she had the boy. She shrugged the boy higher onto her back. Three blocks south and one block west. Not far. She told herself that the worst was over and she had lived through it and she could keep living if she did everything correctly. The boy weighed nothing now. With every step: easier to carry. Skyler imagined she was carrying her brother, who would turn three in a few weeks. She felt like she was carrying Dorian.

  After a couple more blocks, she saw the school on the far side of a public park she’d visited before with Noah. From a half block away, she could make out the sign with the symbol of three inverted triangles nailed above an entrance to the building; but not until she got to the doors could Skyler read the message, handwritten in magic marker on a sheet of looseleaf paper and fixed to the inside of a window. The shelter was filled to capacity. Steadying him, she tried the door handle, though she knew it wouldn’t move. The strength went out of her. Going down to one knee, she laid Noah on the concrete, supporting his head as she had her brother’s when he was an infant.

  “Locked,” a voice said.

  She looked up.

  “I tried every door.”

  The man was standing right over them. A kind of rain had begun to fall, black and oily. The man held the boy under the arms, and Skyler took his feet and they moved him under a portico out of the rain.

  “Your phone,” the man said. “Is it working?”

  “
No.”

  “Honey,” the man said. “About your boy.”

  “He’s not mine.”

  “Whoever’s he is. You’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Honey.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “Look at him.”

  She looked at him. He was a boy, a few years older than her brother, though not much heavier. She wasn’t sure what else the man wanted her to see.

  Skyler had been sixteen when her parents had Dorian. Her mother on the cusp of forty. Skyler knew they weren’t planning more family. It had been six years since the last child (her other brother); and a whole decade separated her from Clifford. The truth was, every single one of them had been an accident. Her father had told her, one time, that accidents could change your life for the best. Which is exactly how Skyler felt about Dorian. Back when she was sixteen, when it seemed she would soon lose her family forever, slip out of their reach and beyond their power as through a hole in the fabric of space—there he was: covered in blood and fluid and trying to express something with his tiny lungs while her mother came out of the violent trance of childbirth and her father smoothed her mother’s hair and Skyler guided the curved tangs of the scissors to the umbilical cord and cut the mooring.

  On the note fixed to the door of the school, the location of another shelter had been written. The man told Skyler he would help her carry the boy there, though he didn’t think it was a good idea for anyone. He knelt there, waiting. The rain was more like tar than oil. Then the man suggested that maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly and the thing for her to do was leave the boy here and go with him to the next shelter.

  “Leave him where?”

  “Here.”

  Skyler didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and wished the man would disappear. When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

  City wireless was still working. She did a search for hospitals. The nearest one, by chance a children’s hospital, was close enough. But the rain. A wet toxic shit, not falling hard, but after a few minutes they would be covered. The air, too, Skyler thought—and they could not but breathe the air. Still, the rain seemed more dangerous. They needed clothes. She left Noah by the school and ran along the sidewalk to a row of houses whose bright colors Skyler could still make out through the cover of ash. She scrambled up a set of stairs. The door was locked, but the panes of glass were gone, as was the glass in every other window. She reached through and turned the knob on the inside. On the floor of the foyer: a scattering of mail. Accruing, Skyler guessed, for a week. They weren’t here. They were somewhere else. Clothing hung from hooks on the wall. She pulled on a windbreaker and zipped it to the neck, and took a hooded sweatshirt for him.

  What else?

  For the second time, she felt a qualm of nausea. Didn’t want to eat, but she should take food for later, and there might be filtered water. She got halfway down the hall and retched. It must be in me. She found water in the refrigerator. Rinsed her mouth, and drank. Then she pulled out her phone and sent her parents an e-mail. Subject: I M OK.

  She hadn’t been there more than five minutes. When Skyler got back to the school and found Noah gone, a spike of panic went into her heart, a feeling from a dream she’d had weeks earlier in which she was her brother’s mother, realizing she’d lost her child after dark in an amusement park with attractions made of ice. Someone in the school had taken Noah. Or maybe not. Was he never really here? For a moment, Skyler saw through all the tricks her mind had been playing. Then she looked across the street—and there he was, wandering over the smoking waste of the park.

  “Hey,” she said, catching up with him. He didn’t respond. When Skyler touched his shoulder, still no reaction. She had to get in front of him and stop him with two hands.

  He blinked up at her.

  She said: “And where do you think you’re going?”

  He nodded.

  The rain was in his hair and dripping down his face and into open wounds she somehow hadn’t seen until now.

  “This isn’t a natural reef,” he said.

  “What?”

  But he didn’t say anything more. He just stared at her, though not directly. Eyes open like the eyes of a sleepwalker. Skyler passed a hand before them. The pupils didn’t react. The flash, she realized. And Skyler remembered, long before Dorian. Her father had been in Japan, and she and her mother and Cliff had met him there, and they had traveled all through the country (she was six, seven) and arrived finally at the Peace Park in Hiroshima. She hadn’t really comprehended. But she had never forgotten, of all the memorials, the one dedicated to the children, and how her mother had lifted her up so she could take hold of the rope and ring the bell.

  The hospital. The nearer they came, the more people they encountered streaming in the same direction. Some were bleeding and soaked with blood; others seemed completely untouched, and Skyler wondered what they were doing, not sheltering in. Since opening his eyes, the boy had not wanted to be carried. He insisted on doing his own walking, though his vision was gone; as was some of his hearing; and, Skyler guessed, a good part of his memory. He wasn’t saying a word about parents or home, nor asking a single question about what had happened. Now she swept him up and tried to run the rest of the way, an activity that made her stomach sicker. The entrance in view at last was for the emergency room. When she saw the crowd outside, Skyler stopped and set him down and heard herself sob. All confusion: no help here. Then she caught sight of someone wearing a protective parka with a respirator mask. Heard instructions knifing out of the chaos. She picked up the boy. Around the corner, at a different entrance: pulsing lights of a police cruiser; fewer refugees; more responders in hazard suits and masks, turning the childless away and directing anyone with a boy or girl toward the doors.

  Inside, there was nothing as organized as a triage station or a line. Women and men in blue scrubs were moving through the crowd, examining patients and then directing them, as if they were a form of traffic. The room—the smell of burnt skin, the sight of so many hurting children—made Skyler want to vomit. She thought she could feel it in her system now, the poison: a slow burn along the fuses of arteries and veins. A woman in scrubs took one look at Noah and checked the yellow box on a color-coded tag.

  “Tie this to his arm,” she said. “Over there. Yellow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means yellow.”

  Skyler felt stupid for asking the question, and selfish. She tried to thank the woman, the nurse or doctor or medical student; but her voice got lost in the whirling flock of voices, and the woman was already checking the next tag—red—and securing it to the wrist of a girl whose body hung on her father’s arms like a deserted cocoon. Skyler took Noah’s hand. Affixed the tag and went with the other yellows. Wounded and lost forever, but not in danger of dying. That, she thought, is what it must mean.

  “Is he your brother?”

  “What?”

  It was a man speaking to her. They’d been pushed close to one another on the way through doors that were painted like barn doors and gave onto a ward whose walls were bright murals of farmland.

  “No,” Skyler finally answered. “No, he isn’t.”

  She sat on a chair with the boy in her lap, waiting, mind and pulse finally slowing. People around her talking about where they had been and what they’d been doing when it happened. Skyler had been writing. Working on a short story while Noah played Monopoly. She tried now to recall. Couldn’t. What was the story? Something about … She had been writing it for weeks, but couldn’t remember anything now about the plot or the characters. When it happened, she had been writing a story. Noah had said look; and as she ducked away from the window, the computer, still on the table with the file open and a sentence unfinished on the screen, must have been hurled melting through the air. And her story must have gone with it.

  They had been waiting for one of two doctors in blue scrubs, neither much olde
r than Skyler. Finally, the young man came. Detached the lower tab from the triage tag and took the boy’s wrist. Took his pulse and wrote on the next tab and only then gave her a kind of smile. He put a hand on Noah’s chest and said into his ear:

  “Breathe now.”

  The boy kept breathing.

  “What’s your name,” the doctor said.

  “Skyler.”

  “Him?”

  “Noah. He’s my— I mean, I babysit him.”

  “Mother?”

  “She’s out of town,” Skyler said.

  “Father?”

  “They’re divorced.”

  The doctor withdrew his hand from the boy’s chest and wrote again on the tag. Then asked Noah firmly: his name, where he lived, where he was now. The boy’s answers made no sense. Again, the doctor looked at Skyler, and asked: “Do you know what happened out there?”

  “No …”

  He nodded. “Where were you when it hit—indoors or outdoors?”

  “In.”

  “Where? What neighborhood?”

  “Presidio Heights.”

  “So you sheltered in for a while.”

  “No.”

  He didn’t seem to understand. “Well, what’ve you been doing the last two hours?”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “Look,” he said. “Tell me your name again.”

  “Skyler.”

  “Skyler. You’ve been under the plume for two hours—”

  “It wasn’t that long.”

  “It’s been two hours,” he said. The words sounded so final, Skyler thought he would move on to the next wounded kid and not look back at them. But he stayed long enough to change the status on Noah’s triage tag from yellow to red—and to look at her once again. Never had she seen eyes so transparent. The one pale comparison Skyler’s mind would make was to a boyfriend from the previous semester. The way he’d looked at her when she dared tell him one night: I think I love you. As if there was nothing he could say and nothing to be done for her.