by Bobby Adair
Murphy glanced over at the charred tower I’d torched in the heat of the battle. “Their chemist was up there. Professor at Baylor before the collapse.” Murphy pointed at the crispy critter on the ground. “Probably him right there. Normals, especially the educated ones, are worth their weight in gold.”
“Wait. Pluta’s mad at me? His shitty intel and his knob-job plan were getting so many of us killed that we were going to lose this stupid battle, and because I took the initiative to pull his nuts out of the fire, he’s going to put me in time out so I can’t see my dying wife?” My temper was getting away from me again. I hefted my flamethrower over my shoulders. “How about I just walk down there and barbecue Pluta and all seven of his dwarf dicks.”
“Don’t be stupid?”
“Stupid? Are you kidding me? I wear a yellow gas mask in an army of white-skinned halfwits and attack good, healthy, normal people who are just trying to make a living in a fucked-up world, and if I fail to do this, a gorilla with a garage door opener electro-shocks my fucking brain. I think I passed stupid a long fucking time ago.”
“Damn, Zed. You’re a touchy bitch lately. What’s wrong with you? I mean really?”
“Murphy, I don’t mean to blow my own horn, but I think I saved your life last night. That was my intention, anyway. When those jerkoffs in the tower started shooting over there where you were, I torched them, because they don’t mean shit to me and neither does this mission. Especially not this mission. I know we’re supposed to capture the normals to make Bill’s Happy Harpo Homestead all work out, but I don’t give a shit. I really don’t. I only care about you and Steph, Grace and Jazz. And I guess the rest of the folks from Bal. But to be honest, I don’t give that much of a crap about them either. I mean. Christ. I don’t know what I mean.” I dropped onto my ass in the dirt. I was exhausted, inside and out.
“Zed, you’re losing it, man. You know that, right?”
I didn’t know what to say. Nothing in me could understand Murphy’s acceptance of this situation. I wanted to argue. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to bury my face in my hands and not move. I wanted to do any of a hundred things to push back, because that was my way. My stubborn, contrarian, anti-everything way of dealing with the world. And with my friends, apparently.
“You’re worried about Steph. It hurts. I get that.”
He was right, but I was more than worried. I felt like I was walking on the edge of a black hole. I was so afraid I was going to lose her, but at the same time, I kept telling myself we’d get out of Nuevo Tejas and live happily ever after somewhere far, far away. Only Steph’s ever-after was going to end a long time before mine did. No matter what happened in the hospital. One day, I was going to lose her, and I didn’t know how I was going to exist in any kind of world that didn’t include her. My voice cracked when I said, “I don’t know what to do for Steph.”
Murphy knelt in front of me. “Bro, I’ll do whatever I can to get you out to see her. I’ll snuff that putz, Pluta, if I have to. But I’ll find a way.”
I nodded, because if I’d tried to thank him with words, or apologize for acting like an ill-tempered little dickwad, or hug him for being the best friend I’d ever had, there would be a gushing river of snot and girlie tears I might never rein back in.
68
What seems like it should go pretty quick too often takes all day. And then some. Midday brought so much sunshine it was actually hot sitting out in the field, keeping watch with my flamethrower. The noon hour didn’t bring any lunch with it, though. Poor planning by Pluta, or so Peck told me when he shirked his share of duties to come sit in the grass with me. It was par for the course. Pluta found his talents in climbing the ladder in mysterious Bill’s moron military. As for any tactical or logistical gifts? Pluta was an idiot.
So, deprived of our breakfast while we were mopping up resistance around the factory, Pluta hadn’t planned for lunch either. The Whites all ate, though. They’d turn surly when hungry, surly and hard to control. Good thing we always had plenty of corpses around when we went to work. Most often their comrades, but Whites didn’t mind. Meat was meat.
Dinnertime came and went. The sun went down. The cold settled back in for the night, and they finally finished ransacking the factory, loading the dead into refrigerator trucks and lining up a convoy of some thirty vehicles for the long drive back to New Tejas. One of the stooges passed Pluta’s orders to Murphy, and we loaded into our cattle hauler. Laughably few of us.
I shed my gear and stretched out in my usual spot at the front of the trailer. I intended to sleep. Peck joined me, as did Murphy, once he got the taints and yellows settled in. Unfortunately, sleep didn’t come, despite my fatigue and hunger, so I asked Peck, “How does New Tejas survive casualty rates like these?”
“Taints and low yellows,” said Peck, “we round ‘em up like cattle. We go out every month or two. Round ‘em up, load ‘em in the trailers, and leave ‘em at the conditioning camps. That’s where they train ‘em. We’ll likely get a new shipment of taints any day now.”
I’d figured I’d spent a month watching that training process through my jail cell window. A more important question came to mind. “Joe, how did you survive this long?”
“Van Halen,” answered Peck.
Murphy laughed. “As in Eddie Van Halen?”
“Rick Van Halen,” Peck told him. “No relation to the guitar player. He was Senior Man before Pluta. We lost our share of taints under Van Halen, but that’s okay. That’s what they’re for. You see, when we go on a raid like we did at that place this morning, Van Halen always had us send in the wranglers with their taints first. That way, they catch all the bullets. Most times, bullets are in short supply, or guns jam up because they’ve reloaded the cartridges too many times, all the guns are old and just plain worn out.”
“We had that problem out in Bal,” Murphy told him.
“Pre-collapse ammo,” said Peck, “is getting hard to come by these days. Point is, us high yellows are smart enough to hang back, if the Senior Man is smart enough to let us. So, we live, and the taints don’t tend to last long. But with Pluta…” Peck leaned over and lowered his voice. “Word around the water cooler is Pluta whacked Van Halen and his stooges. Had Mort torch ‘em. No witnesses around, so can’t say for sure, but… In case you didn’t know yet, killin’ a high yellow will get you chopped around here. Bill values us too much. You know, in his special way.”
I was still stuck on the ID of the assassin. “Our Mort? Big dumbass Mort did it?”
“The same,” answered Peck. “That’s why Pluta made him the barracks Bull. They had a deal.”
I looked down the length of the trailer. “Speaking of Mort.”
“Didn’t make it,” Murphy told me.
“What a shame.” I laughed. For real, for the first time in—I couldn’t remember when.
69
The boom interrupted my dream.
The skidding tires woke me up.
Before I could piece any of that into a coherent thought, our cattle trailer careened into a ditch, tumbling us around like dice in a cup. One of the impact Molotovs exploded down near the door, dousing a handful of my halfwit comrades in liquid fire.
“Shit!” shouted Peck.
Murphy jumped to his feet, yelling to get control of the jabbering yellows and yowling taints before the fire spread through the stinking straw spread on the floor.
I was already gathering my gear and strapping on my flamethrower, because fourteen years of the world’s new rules had taught me all I needed to know about the feel of coming danger.
Down the road behind us, more tires skidded. Up the road, a second explosion detonated. Gunfire popped.
“C’mon, Peck! It’s an ambush.” Just an educated guess.
I rushed into the diesel barbecue stink as Murphy marshalled the yellows to extinguish the fire. Bullets, what sounded like a few strays, pinged against our trailer.
“We can’t get out of the trailer,” called Peck.
“Not without word from a stooge.”
We were at the back door by then, and I glanced at Murphy. “We gotta go, bro.”
He pointed right. “You take Peck down that way, I’ll run these yahoos down the other side of the road.” We’d faced ambushes before, me and Murphy. More times than I could count. Going on the offensive, quickly and unexpectedly, was the best way to turn the tables.
Peck reached through the metal gate to undo the latch from the outside. I jumped down to the grass and ran to the fence line with Peck right on my heels. Murphy followed us out, yelling at the taints still inside to hurry.
I looked up and down the road to assess the situation. Up at the front of our convoy, flames roared out of one of our semis that was stopped at a T intersection. Behind us, a messy line of semis and pickups idled on the road or spun their tires on the muddy shoulders. We were on a two-lane country highway in the apparent middle of nowhere. The fence line, separating the wide ditch from the fallow fields behind, grew thick with trees, thorny blackberry canes, and dense shrubs. Muzzle flashes in the bushes ahead told me all I needed to know about the tactical situation.
“Let’s go.” I darted into the proto-hedgerow, swiping down with my free hand to find the rusty barbed wire I knew had to be stretched through the twigs and leaves. For the price of a ragged cut on my forearm and a few scratches, I found it. Using the trunk of a bent tree as a step to climb over, the wire caught my boot and I tumbled into the tall grass on the other side.
Panting, and looking at blood flowing from a cut in his own hand, Peck asked, “What next?”
“Watch my back.” I jumped to my feet awkwardly, as I had forty pounds of gear and combustible fluids strapped on. I clicked my striker until the pilot flame jetted blue. “Let’s ruin somebody’s day.” I charged down the backside of the fence line and loosed a gush of fire into the hedgerow. Shrieks followed me as my inferno grew. My fuel tank pounded bruises all up and down my back. The handles on my gun heated to scald my hands. I ignored all of it until I skidded to my knees at the end of the row, panting to catch my breath.
Looking back, I saw three hundred yards of fire licking at the dark sky. Burning people ran out from cover, falling in the grass.
Still, gunshots popped back down the road.
Peck dropped to a knee beside me with Molotov in hand. “It’s not over yet. You okay to go?”
I nodded because I didn’t have the breath to answer.
He dragged me to my feet, telling me, “Slower now.”
Peck led me past the last trees I’d torched, through the ditch and up onto the road, where the first two trucks of our convoy blazed.
In the flickering light, two more trucks down, I spotted a figure with a flaming Molotov in hand, busy at the gas tank of one of the idling semis. The truck’s door was open. A body lay in the road, and I didn’t need to see any more to know what was happening. “That’s the normals trailer,” I told Peck, as I raced forward, shouting, “Don’t!”
The guy with the Molotov reacted by stepping back from the gas tank, staring at me, confusion on his face. He was a normal, too. That’s the moment I realized the ambush had been laid by normals. In the same rush of realizations and instincts, I raised my weapon and blasted, telling myself—no, insisting—that I’d had to do it to protect the captured normals trapped in the trailer.
Through my rationalizations, he screamed. I released the trigger. As my fire disappeared from the air all I saw was that man, running in mad circles, swatting at flames, though he was wholly engulfed. And then he dropped to his knees, deathly silent, and fell face first into the ditch.
“Listen,” Peck told me. “The shooting stopped. It’s over.”
It wasn’t over. Not for me. The second-guesses and doubts were just starting to turn into guilt, because I’d killed more normals. At the same time, I believed I’d saved the lives of the normals we’d captured. And the taints too stupid to escape from their vulnerable cattle haulers and save themselves.
I didn’t know whether I was in the right or the wrong. Had I just done evil or good?
“What are you stupid shitheads doing out here?”
I turned to see Pluta with three of his stooges marching toward me.
“We have this under control,” Pluta shouted. “Get back to your transport.”
I raised my flamethrower, pointing at Pluta.
“Don’t,” whispered Peck.
I was too far into the realm of moral ambiguity to believe that torching Pluta would make a difference. I pulled my trigger. A spurt of flame burped onto the pavement just in front of me.
“You inbred taint,” Pluta cursed, his angry entourage in tow. “Don’t you have the good goddamned sense to swap your tank when it runs dry? What good is a torch man who can’t tell when his rig is empty. Peck, get this imbecile back to his transport or you can spend the next three months on KP with him. Get out of my sight.”
70
Squinting in the harsh morning light, I stood in a ragged line along with the rest of Stalag 17’s yellows in front of the officers’ hut. The taints and their wranglers were in their respective barracks, sequestered and fed as soon as we returned. For us mid and high yellows, the fifty or sixty of us still alive after a week of brutal losses, we watched Pluta, five of his stooges—two had died the night before—and Pluta’s boss man standing in the shade of the wide porch. The boss man had a lot of happy nothing to say about the great job we’d done securing the bullet factory and its nineteen experienced workers.
In the dribble of blah blah blah, as I was zoning out and thinking about how I was going to get out of Stalag 17 so I could rescue Steph, the number nineteen locked my thoughts in place. Nineteen wasn’t right. We’d captured twenty-three normals. I didn’t think we’d lost any in the ambush. Then again, anything could have happened. After all, what did I know? I was just a yellow-headed taint nobody, boarded in barracks of bozos in the middle of Billdo’s Bullshit Utopia.
“Dude.” Murphy pushed my shoulder, sending me stumbling to catch my balance.
“What the hell?” Some yellows from the barracks laughed at me until my glare shushed them.
Murphy grinned. “You fell asleep standing up.”
I didn’t think so, but honestly, I didn’t know. I was dead tired. The speech was already over, and somehow, I’d missed the big finale.
“Boss man’s giving us steak and eggs.” Murphy pointed at a fifty-foot-long wood-fired BBQ pit mounted on a semi tractor-trailer with faded custom wrap that said “BIG TASTE GRILL.” The last time I’d seen anything like it was at a barbecue competition way back before the collapse. As rusty as the whole contraption was, it looked to have been from that era. It still functioned, though. Guys were lined up in front of the open grills, cooking.
Murphy and Peck headed to where a line was queuing up. I followed as the smell of real food wafted over me.
No surprise, at least in retrospect, Pluta, flanked by a few of his stooges, stepped in front of us. He pointed one of his long, prissy fingers at me. “Not the retard.”
“What’s the matter?” I taunted. “Is ‘intellectually anomalous’ too hard to say?”
Pluta’s face reddened. “You little shit stain.”
“Senior Man.” Murphy stepped between us. “We just got back. Zed saved us in that ambush. At least let him have breakfast first.”
“Get Peck to tongue your hole, Smalls. Your love bunny is going to KP, and he’s doing it right now.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Murphy pleaded. “That’s nothing. Let him eat first.”
“You’re not a bull,” spat Pluta. “You don’t deserve to run a barracks. You shouldn’t be in charge of anything bigger than your little peppermint penis. You’re a weak, useless hillbilly who’s only alive because Bill—for some misbegotten reason—decided you had potential. Well, here’s the news of the day, Smalls, you don’t. One day, Bill is going to see his mistake, and he’s going to tell boss man, and boss man is going to let me bend you over th
e butt punch table at skank hut. Maybe when your mouth is full of taint dick for a month you’ll learn how to keep it closed when you’re supposed to.”
“Boss man’s happy now.” Murphy pointed to where the boss man was joking with his entourage of lackeys. “Look at him. See for yourself. We wrangled a herd of normals for him. We hauled all that munitions equipment back for the greater glory of New Tejas, and now he’s buying us breakfast.”
“Nobody buys anything in New Tejas,” Pluta sneered. His hard little eyes fell back on me. “This one goes. Now.”
Peck stepped up. “Senior Man, if I may. Give the retard a half-hour here with us. Afterward, I’ll go to KP with him. That way you get two-for-one for the rest of the day.”
“Why the hell would I do that?” Pluta laughed. “Giving him more work than he can handle is the whole point.”
“Guys,” I lied, “I’m not hungry.” I stepped up to Pluta, like maybe I was going to headbutt him, elbow him in the jaw.
Pluta inched back, as he raised his clicker-zapper.
I told him, “Tell me where this KP thing is supposed to happen and I’ll go.”
71
Holding a dull meat cleaver, I stood in front of a restaurant prep table with rusty legs and a stainless steel top. It was safe to say that stainless steel described the material, not the condition, which matched so much of everything in the world fourteen years after the fall. On the beat-down table lay a cold corpse, one I’d shlepped over from a stack by the wall. Yeah, a stack of cold corpses.
Flies buzzed everywhere—on the cold cadaver, on the greasy floor, and on my face.
“Jib day,” a foul man soiled in kitchen grime told me.
“What?” I asked. “Like every Tuesday or something?”
The guy—Stinky Pete, they called him—pointed at the corpses stacked against the wall. “The day they deliver the jibs.”