Nuclear Town USA

by David Nell

Gavin pried Booker from around his legs. "Easy, scout." Gavin's words snuck out through a wince. He turned to the battered red bags on the stage and pulled a pocketknife from the depths of his stained cargo pants. With a flip, the young man extended the blade and set to removing a latticework of plastic zip ties. There was a practiced manner to his knife-work, something halfway between field surgery and field dressing a buck. "I have something for you," he whispered over his shoulder. Eyes wide, mouth agape and tongue extruding, Booker began to bounce. "But!" Gavin stopped his canvas surgical extraction and turned to face the pogoboy. With one motion, he collapsed the blade and pointed at Booker, palming the pocketknife in the process. "You have to share."

  The bouncing ceased and a mock-pout replaced the boy's stretch-faced grin. "Promise you'll share?" Gavin was serious, and Booker stared at Mother's floorboards in a gnashing bout of id versus super-ego. When his eyes met Gavin's again, he stood up straight, nodded honestly and extended an outstretched hand.

  "Yes," he promised simply and the scout shook his hand to seal the contract. Gavin turned back to his canvas haul and finished slicing at the zip ties. After a moment of digging, he extracted two bulging zip-top gallon bags. They were filthy and pockmarked with wear, but even through the grime Booker could make out the jumbled Technicolor mumble of LEGOs. Gavin held them out before him like two Ziplocked religious artifacts from God himself. Booker tore them from his hands with a shout of pure joy, chasing it with an endless torrent of "thankyouthankyouthankyous." Intent on keeping his promise, the young boy ran off through the gathering crowd to present his holy bounty before the rest of Mother's babies.

  At the edge of the crude stage, Gavin was an apex of selfish hellos. Deena Salto's high-eyebrowed handwringing sought out replenished stores for the pantry. Requests were made from Marc Ressman as to whether Gavin had remembered just how many requests he'd made for light bulbs. Neil Mott and Ollie Hickston begged for stories. Had he seen anyone else? Had he had any more run-ins? How bad were the nights this time? There was no waiting for answers, just a mess of questions tossed like celebratory carnations at the only boots to have seen soil beyond Mother's skin.

  President Keats stood slowly, sighed, and rubbed his hands through his hair as he took his customary spot on stage. His scrutiny drifted across the crowd until it found Carole Thomson. The young woman stood flirting with the Hockstendt twins beside her grandmother and it was a moment before he could get her attention. When he did, he beckoned her over to the stage and then leaned down to whisper briefly into her ear. The girl looked puzzled, but Keats insisted with a "Please." that wasn't a request and Carole set off running into Mother's metal halls. Keats watched until she disappeared out of sight. Then he simply stared after her for some moments.

  "Okay, folks," he announced as he returned to himself and the crowd. His voice was law. "Give Gavin some room and we'll get started." Most of Mother's residents backed up into a loose standing semi-circle. Lyle Dell remained seated with his elder charge, attentively wiping stew from the old man's mustache with a ratty handkerchief while his daughter, Catalina, took the seat next to her father and turned it to face the stage. Dr. Wood remained where Keats had left her, venting spent smoke as she stared at the President with a look that read resigned irritation. At the far end of the hall, Booker portioned out LEGOs like communion wafers to his waiting congregation of playmates.

  There was a moment of awkward anticipation. Keats stood center-stage staring at his shoes in silence while the rest of the assembled stared at Keats. Brows furrowed. Enquiring glances spread through the crowd amid a peppering of headshakes and shoulder shrugs.

  "Uh, okay," Pak Hanli broke the tension. "I guess I'll start? Where was–" but President Keats raised a hand and Pak swallowed the rest of his question with a frown.

  "We're still waiting for Cameron and Jennifer to arrive." Keats' proclamation sparked a rolling murmur through the crowd.

  "Whoa. What are you talking about, Josh?" Chas Byers stepped forward. "You...you're gonna pull the Crow's Nest down? At night?"

  "You can't do that!" The bark came from either Kim Todd or Colleen Dowden, Keats hadn't seen which, but shouts of agreement rose up around the group. The President waved them down with outstretched palms.

  "I've already sent Carole to get them. We'll be fine, but I need to speak with everyone. All at once." The crowd shifted uneasily and disquieted. Some people took to the nearest folding chairs they could find. Dinner plates were moved to the center of tables. Flatware was organized for the dish crew. Gavin sat cross-legged on the edge of the stage, absent-mindedly picking at his newest scabs. Small conversations smoldered across the group, but nothing louder than guarded pockets of minor insubordination. Debbie Levine drifted away from the rest of the greenhouse crew to watch over her daughter, Jackie, as she built a replica of their sleeping quarters out of LEGOs. When Jackie smiled up at her mom, it was with an untroubled and unaware virtue that nearly made Debbie cry. She swallowed hard, gave in to a flurry of blinks, and then tight-lipped a grin as she rubbed her daughter's back in loving Zen-like figure eights. At a nearby table, Sara Wray bowed her head in prayer. Pradeep Narang checked his salvaged watch at the sound of running feet in the adjacent hallway. At 1922, Carole jogged back into the lodge hall.

  "They're coming," she panted and motioned over her shoulder before rejoining her grandmother. It was two more minutes before Jennifer and Cameron emerged from the shadows of Mother's halls. Cameron Fulton was tall and slight. His body was all limbs and nose, long piano fingers and a face dominated by eagle beak nostrils. Jennifer Murin was a good foot and a half shorter than Cameron, but she carried herself with a bull terrier's gait. She wore her camo cargo pants with equal parts military conviction and punk bluster, something reinforced by the scarification on her arms and the eight-gauge plugs in her earlobes. Both carried his and hers sniper rifles slung over their shoulders. They strode into the hall as if everyone else had been unfashionably early. In his right hand, Cameron suckled a pipe and trailed blue smoke behind him like a wounded jet.

  "Okay, they're here." Chas Byers stood with his arms folded. "What's this all about?"

  "Jen. Cam. Can I have your weapons, please." The guard pair shared a glance, but handed the rifles over to Keats without a word. The President walked the twin rifles towards the back of the stage, propped them casually against the far wall, and then returned to address the rest of the Forty-Seven. "In these bags...No, wait. Let me back up." Keats crossed his arms and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Two weeks ago, I asked Gavin to go Outside and make his way to Sacramento."

  A long "holy shit" filled with extra vowels slipped from Gio Cielo's mouth until Paula smacked him on the arm. Gavin couldn't contain a small grin of pride.

  "Was it still there?" Pradeep asked and Gavin's grin faded.

  "No." The President said bluntly. "Not really." There was silence. "It's the same as across the Bay. Some buildings stand, most don't. The fires took almost everything."

  "What about the, uh–"

  "Devils," Sara Wray spat. Patrick Hockstedt rolled his eyes.

  Gavin simply nodded and held up his bandaged arm as proof. Chas Byers sat down. There was a mournful stillness.

  "Gavin was scouting for the usual," Keats cleared his throat and regained control of the conversation. "Scrap, bulbs, fabric, whatever. And he has some of those things. Deena, we'll go over the list later." Gavin picked up the open canvas bags as an indication for the pantry mistress and set it apart from the others. Here the President sighed. "But he also had another task." Keats locked eyes with Dr. Wood, then looked down at Mother's salvaged floorboards before continuing. "I also asked Gavin to find the state Registrar of Voters office."

  Confusion washed across the faces of the audience. "And I asked him to bring back any of the voting information he could find from the last election. Whatever was left. Whatever he could salvage, if anything."

  Donald Serra shook his head in pure bewilderment. "I'm sorry, what? What the He
ll does this have to do with anything?"

  "Blame, Don." Dr. Wood exhaled loudly. "Josh wants to know who he can blame for the end of the world."

  A confused hum of "whats" and "what are you talking abouts" bubbled across the audience. Dr. Wood only motioned with her cigarette towards Keats who stood grim-eyed and stoic. His nostrils flared and his frown congealed into a hard knot.

  "This is how this is going to work," Keats said quietly. He continued staring at the floor. "We're going to all sit here – together – and I'm going to go through these bags. If you voted for...this," he gestured to Mother with a sneer, "then you're out. Simple as that."

  "What do you mean by 'out,' Josh?" Pradeep investigated.

  "I mean just what I said, Pradeep," Keats snapped at Mother's engineer. "Out. Gone. As in: you gather up your things and go Outside. If you don't want to go on your own, then Ricardo or Neil will help you leave."

  "Hey, man, don't bring me into this."

  "Oh, you don't want to do your job, Neil? That's fine. You can join them Outside."

  The big man shot to his feet. "Jesus Christ, Josh! Fuck! Okay, fine!"

  From her chair beside the threatened enforcer, Mrs. Dennings placed a steadying hand on his tattooed arm. "Joshua, maybe you should take a few deep breaths and think about what you're saying."

  "You think I haven't thought this through, Janet?" A murderous edge overtook The President. "I've thought about this for years. I am so sick of this shit. I'm sick of the depression. Sick of the mourning. Mine. Yours. Everyone's. I'm sick to death of waking up every goddamn day inside of this capsized rusting tub in the middle of a mud hole! And every dinner – every dinner – every time I pass someone in the halls I wonder 'who was it?' Whose bullshit politics was it that put me here? Whose small-minded, short-sighted shit was it that murdered everyone in the fucking world?!"

  The President smashed one of the canvas bags with his foot and stormed off to the back of the makeshift stage. There was silence inside of Mother. Couples clung to each other. Heads were bowed. Tears fell from cheeks to mark jeans amid stifled sniffles, but there was silence. Mouthed prayers mingled with cigarette and pipe smoke in the steel rafters. At the back of the stage, Keats stood with his back to his nation, his fingers laced atop his head. At the far end of the hall, LEGO building continued mutely.

  There was a creak of Miss Oon's chair as she stood to her feet. "Josh, maybe I should take the kids back to the–"

  "No." Keats spun to point at Lily's chair. "No one leaves. Everyone watches." He punctuated each sentence with a firm finger-point and Lily Oon sunk back into her chair with her eyes closed tightly. Keats strode back to the front of the stage, his footsteps striking with gavel finality until he stood beside Gavin.

  "Alright, let's do this. Open the first one."

  The young scout glanced at Dr. Wood only to find her staring at the rifles on the far wall. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head, the pocketknife came out again and the surgical zip-tie removal resumed.

  It wasn't long before the second bag laid splayed open onstage. Gavin removed stacks of smoke-damaged papers and arranged them in tidy piles beside the bag as if sorting organs from an autopsy. Bundles emerged of brown rippled paper clotted together in the remains of melted plastic bags and ash smears. Everything was garbage, the warped and wrinkled husks of a thousand scribbled Scantron bubbles. Keats sighed.

  "Is this how you found it all?"

  "Mostly," Gavin replied as he continued his unpacking. "The other two bags were untouched. This one was open originally and I crammed as much as I could find into it before I zipped it back up." More garbage emerged onto the stage. "I didn't really know what you'd want to see so I tried to get everything."

  Keats bent down and picked up a random pile of refuse. Beneath the grime and the wear, inked votes freckled the pages with useless data. Nothing was labeled. Each page presented him with shifting constellations of felt-tipped marker spots, the indecipherable pictograms of ballot measure results and selections for county supervisor. Years ago, before the world had burned to the ground and the night belonged to slaughter, a computer had scanned the dots, run them through its Rosetta Stone of computational programming, and spit out a logical translation of outcomes. Somewhere far Outside, that computer was now a melted heap of silicon slag. All that remained were the dots with no way to connect them. The President threw the sheets back into the bag with a curse.

  "Well, that's all trash." He ran his hands through his hair again. "Let's try the next bag." As Gavin laid bare the contents of the third bag, it was immediately apparent they were in considerably better shape. Plastic bags were intact and held neatly organized collections of paper results. Plastic anti-static sleeves had dutifully protected computer vote cartridges beyond the end of the world. Day-glow orange vests, a clipboard and pen, and two functional flashlights had slumbered safely in their canvas cocoon for years. Gavin set the treasures aside in the provisions bag meant for Deena Salto.

  Keats squatted on the edge of the growing pile of government minutia. There was a three-ring binder full of instructions for pollworkers. The President thumbed past the clip art cover page of a faceless suit cheering on the celebratory masses of a victory rally. Above his head were two giant words that proclaimed it to simply be called "The Guide." Littered among the myriad of grayscale photos and checklists were nuggets of useless wisdom:

  "During the day, you will leave the Audio Unit unattached until a voter requests to vote an Audio ballot.

  You will connect the Audio Unit before the voter inserts the Voter Card. Remember to disconnect the Audio Unit when the voter has completed voting."

  Hours of someone's life had been devoted to perfecting these instructions. Committees had tweaked the wording until they had found the perfect balance between clarity of message and simplicity of language, a manual for the lowest common citizen denominator to read and master without question. Bosses had spellchecked and approved its use for pollworkers, supervisors, equipment, voters and a world that were now all dead. Keats tossed it off the stage with a snort. Kim Todd flinched.

  When he had finished laying bare the third bag, Gavin sat staring at Keats, one hand scarring scabs. Keats sifted through the pristine garbage. There was a roll of "I Voted!" stickers that he knew would be plastered at child-height throughout Mother's hallways within a week. There were trilingual signs ordering now-skeletal residents to "VOTE HERE". The President stared at the ghost of a generically Asian language he assumed to be Korean, but it could have been Vietnamese or Indonesian for all he knew. Whatever it was, none of Mother's children spoke it so it was effectively a dead language.

  "French is a dead language," Keats mumbled to himself.

  "Sorry, what?"

  The President looked at Gavin for a moment without seeing him. He was preoccupied with scribbling countries off of a mental map of the world.

  "France," he said at last.

  Gavin blinked. "What about it?"

  Keats shook his head to break up the fog of memories. He ran his hands through his hair.

  His fingertips lingered lightly on his brow.

  "Joshua..." The sound drifted from Mrs. Dennings' mouth like a quilt. Keats immediately tensed. Rage flared his nostrils and returned clarity to his eyes.

  "Are you done yet?" He didn't let Gavin answer. "Where's the last bag?" The scout set to filleting the fourth bag without argument.

  In the growing pile of civic debris, The President of Nothing found twin deceased cellphones. He handed them to Gavin. The children could play with them and pretend there were other ears to call.

  In a plastic bag, President Keats discovered an American flag. Heads craned forward in the audience to get a better view. Laura Cornell began to cry. At the sound, Keats glanced up at his survivor nation. All eyes were fixed on the cheap Chinese-made banner crinkled within his hands. It was as if he had uncovered a holy relic, as if Gavin had brought back the consecrated skull of Saint Elvis Aaron the First of Mem
phis. It was seven bars of Corvette Torch Red emblazoned across Marilyn's dress. It was NASA and American Idol against the blue glow of a dead cable channel.

  He wadded it up and handed it to Gavin.

  "Burn this."

  "You son of a bitch..." Ollie Hickston shot to his feet.

  "Dad, please. Just sit down." The younger Hickston cradled his head in his hands.

  Dr. Wood sighed around her cigarette. "Josh, we could use the fabric at lea–"

  "I said burn it."

  Eyes shut, lips pursed and eyebrows raised, she exhaled the smoky remains of the rest of her objections. The older Hickston punched his chair over and stormed aimlessly off to pace Mother's makeshift lodge hall. Keats ignored him.

  By his feet, Gavin had just placed on the stage a long mottled brown book. On its front cover were typed the words "452200 – Fire Station 11 Side A, 14903 Catalina Street, San Leandro CA." President Keats snatched the book from the ground hungrily and tore into its pages. Inside was a sprawling list, sheet after sheet of names and addresses, party affiliations, signatures and notes. It was a list of the ghosts responsible for the end of the world, and Joshua Keats beamed from ear to ear.

  "This!" he shouted as he pounded the list and stood to his feet. "This is exactly what I'm looking for! So..." He began pouring over the pages.

  Bines, Marshall – corpse

  Bines, Tammy – corpse

  Boland, Kim – corpse

  Bolstridge, Meredith – corpse

  This was going nowhere. There were hundreds of dead names in this book from only a single precinct. It was a log of victims and traitors, a time capsule dedicated to petty party-driven suicide and the closest thing any of them would ever have to a marked memorial. Keats' breathing intensified as he read.

  "Was anyone from San Leandro originally?" he asked loudly into the book.

  For a beat, there was only thinking and lip biting. Then Marc Ressman spoke up.

  "Um, I think...uh. I think Nuñez was from San Leandro."