by Ryan Schow
Down by the Best Buy (bombed to all hell), this old woman with a grocery cart used to scream at everyone she walked by. She really put herself into it. Then one day she let go of her cart and went after a little boy. The mother of the boy shot the woman with a pop gun and just left her there to die. Sometimes, when I think about her, I wonder if the screamer was the lucky one.
Outside, the guy Stanton killed the night before is dead on the sidewalk. Across the street his buddy is dead, too. Slumped over in the gutter, his chest a dark bloom.
“Wrong neighborhood to pick a fight, buddy,” I mutter.
“You know Rex did that,” Stanton says, nodding to the dead guy across the street.
“Is he coming with us today?”
“Not if he’s still asleep,” I answer.
Macy won’t stop looking at the body in front of her. I finally grab her hand and say, “C’mon, honey. It’s not polite to stare.”
“I don’t think he’ll mind.”
Over these last weeks, we’ve learned to protect what’s ours. You need to do that. To think like that. So—first things first—we don’t let people get too close to us without us showing them our guns.
Some say we’re anti-social. I won’t disagree.
We’re staying inside Anza Vista just north of the Panhandle in our three story residence teetering on the edge of ruin. I don’t expect you to know about that area specifically, but right now, you can’t squat on our block without having big boy nuts. There’s not a lot of us left, and we don’t really mingle at this point, but if you don’t belong in this neighborhood, you learn real quick to get out or get dead.
The reason I’m saying this is that we’ve been forced to protect this place so someone doesn’t do to us what we did to the old lady who lived here before us. Stanton killed two people last week. He didn’t even hesitate. That’s how it’s becoming.
That’s exactly how it has to be.
The second trip to Laurel Heights was as good an idea as the first trip. That’s where we found tonight’s dinner. A near frozen pot roast. We even manage to make it back to our place alive, so there’s cause for an almost-celebration.
Near dark, when the drones have all gone back to wherever it is they’ve gone back to, we lay a small fire. The warmth is amazing. Like sunbathing in Southern California on a ninety degree day by a hotel pool filled with beautiful vacationers. Except this isn’t Southern California, there is no sun and the only thing beautiful about this place is the sunsets after a full day of bombing.
Honestly, the colors the destruction of this city makes at sunset are out of this world.
Sitting in the flames is the roast we procured from the bottom of an ice chest after about six or seven hours of rummaging through places much nicer than ours on Commonwealth Avenue. We’re not sure if it’s any good, but if it isn’t, we’ll eat what we can and toss the rest.
“Bowls?” I ask. The last light of day is quickly going away.
On the streets below, a couple of our neighbors are mingling in between the distant sounds of small- to medium-range artillery fire and the occasional blast of something big blowing up a little further out. Maybe these are pipe bombs from the locals. Maybe it’s the last of the bombing runs by the drones.
Stanton fetches us three mismatched bowls and we wait for dinner to finish heating. After a few minutes, with a pair of rusted BBQ tongs, I pull the meat from the fire, shave off the cooked outsides, divide it between us. It tastes overly salted, but then again, so does everything else.
What really scares us though, what we don’t ever talk about, is that there’s no new food. Pretty soon we’re going to have to start hunting live prey. Birds, rabbits, dogs. Who knows? When you’re hungry, you’ll eat just about anything. Maybe even each other. Look at Venezuela. They even ate the animals at the zoo.
So one minute we’re carving up more meat in silence, the next minute a bomb drops a block or two over, making the whole building jump. Fresh cracks snake up the sides of the wall. Dust falls like snow from the ceiling.
“Should I put out the fire?” I ask, hesitant yet cautious.
“It’ll smoke too much,” Stanton replies.
Sitting in filthy clothes, exhaustion nagging at my bones, I grip my bowl and Macy’s hand and I wait. My heart is kicking way too hard. Can a healthy woman in her early thirties survive a heart attack in conditions like these? Most days I’d say yes; other days I pray for a quick death.
“Hurry up,” Stanton tells Macy. “Eat in case we have to go.”
“What about Gunner?”
He stands up, takes the bowl of meat upstairs to Gunner, then returns and says, “I invited him down, but he just shook his head and thanked me.”
“He still hasn’t come to grips with the fact that his parents are probably dead,” Macy says. “And you and Rex scare him.”
“That’s because he’s got sissy blood running through his veins,” Stanton says.
“Hey,” I say, “that’s not fair.”
By then, Stanton’s already working on another cut of meat. I finish with mine and Macy finishes with hers. We eat until we’re full, then put the meat in the fridge for tomorrow.
“Do you think when they get tired of this nickel-and-dime stuff,” I ask, “the bombs will get bigger, maybe even turn nuclear?”
“I still want to know why they don’t attack us at night,” Macy says.
We’ve all been wondering it, and we have no idea. It’s not like the drones need time off. They’re not exhausted. They don’t need to sleep.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Rex says they don’t have enough bombs to run 24/7. Maybe they’re rearming themselves.”
“What if they start?” Macy asks. “What if they make enough bullets and bombs to go all night long?”
“Then it’s going to be pretty hard to get any sleep around here,” Stanton replies, and that’s that.
We don’t continue this line of discussion because it will only take us down darker, more depressing roads. That’s the last thing we need.
The sun is gone from the sky completely, the temperature dropping with it. Not too far from here, clouds of smoke billow into the already dismal sky. Night settles over San Francisco. Silence follows. Even small arms fire comes to a stop.
Hours later we’re not so on edge.
Just before bed, while Stanton is still awake, the tears come. I try to stop them, but it’s too easy to let them go. It’s Macy that brought me to tears. This sniffling, it’s all because I can’t stop thinking that my daughter is just fifteen, that she doesn’t deserve any of this. She’s yet to be kissed, to find a suitable mate, to fall in love. She’s got such a strong spirit…she deserves these things! I close my eyes, turn away, contemplate safer circumstances.
“Are you okay, Mom?” she asks.
“No,” I say, “but yes, too.”
Tonight I needed Stanton to not be his usual brooding self. I needed his body against mine, to remind me I am not alone, that he still cares, that we have a chance not only at falling in love again if this thing ever ends, but living our life to its end as a family.
To his credit, he slides his hands around my waist, curls into my back and says, “It’ll be okay, Sin. I don’t know how, but it will.”
Chapter Seventeen
Outside, you can’t even see the sky anymore the clouds are that low and it’s that polluted. The air outside is just wet dust and compressed smoke. Also, I’m pretty sure we’re breathing asbestos. This beats the alternative though. People are getting slayed out there. They’re being systematically murdered just for being human and alive.
“Do you think we’ll have to leave today?” Macy asks Stanton.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m starting to think it’s not good to put down roots for this long.”
For some reason—and this started out as a concern, which became a synopsis, which has since been confirmed (based on entirely too much evidence)—we are being exterminated as a species. We’re not sure there
are any other viable possibilities left to consider.
“If you squint real hard,” Macy tells me, her eyes on a triangle of blown-out window, “it looks like snow falling.”
“That’s great, sweetie,” I say, my mind elsewhere.
“See what I mean?” Macy asks, dragging me out of my thoughts once more. She’s pointing at the raining ash and calling it snow.
Is she losing her mind, or is this a silly game?
I bite my tongue, allow her this fantasy (delusion). She reaches out of the broken window, palm up, catching a few more flakes. She pulls them in, frowning when she sees they aren’t wet or dense like snow. She rubs the flakes into her palm. They flatten into a dry, powdery smear.
“Come away from the window,” I tell her. “Drones have been rocketing through here all morning.”
Macy stays put, shoves her open hand outside again.
Looking at her, at her unwashed hair, I feel like the worst mother ever. She pulls in more ash, rubs it in her palm, then wipes the mess on her shirt. Her button nose and bowtie lips remind me that not too long ago she was a normal, well adjusted child.
“You’re bathing today, Macy. No more excuses.”
“Maybe,” she says, preoccupied.
“You’ve never been a dirty child, do you want to start now?”
“I said I would,” she snaps.
Even though she’s well into her teens, and being a bit of a shit right now, all I see is my little girl. She’s still so fragile my heart aches at the sight of her, of what she’s having to endure. Of whom she must become to survive this impossible existence.
You can’t protect her from this, I remind myself. You can’t protect her from the entire world.
I’ll shelter her and feed her as best as I can, and try to keep her from getting killed, but that’s about all I can do. Standing in the kitchen, I can’t even look at her anymore. Elbows on the counter, I lower my head into my hands, battling tears of exhaustion of frustration, battling tears of dread.
I know what’s coming. How this ends.
I wipe away the start of damp morning eyes and stiffen my resolve against a wildly beating heart. But I can’t seem to soften the lump in my throat, or the constant buzz of paranoia in my head.
“What are you thinking?” Macy asks.
“Nothing,” I answer too quickly. Trying not to go crazy. Then: “Everything.”
What I’m thinking, what needles at my brain, is that if we survive long enough, chances are good that one day we’ll no longer resemble the people we were meant to be. It’s already happening. We’re turning back the years of evolution.
We’re…regressing.
Suddenly I feel so sick to my stomach I can’t help but think that suiciding us all in the dead of night might be the wise alternative. It was happening all over the place.
The suicides.
This couple below us, they were halfway ready for the holocaust, rogue governments, mass coronal ejections from solar flares and EMP blasts that squelched civilized society, but they weren’t ready to be apart. Would they have been ready for this? For a loss of morality? The loss of not just each other, but themselves?
Stanton used to be level headed, a moral beacon, fearless with his money and his job title, undefeated with his silver tongue. I used to be even keel in the worst of situations. The ER prepped me for a lot, but it didn’t prepare me for this. For the killing. For Stanton’s bumpy fall from grace.
We all do it now. We can’t help it. We’re all taking our own little measurements of society. Notching out all those hashes on the wall, like some story we’ll later tell our grandkids. Here is where the bomb went off, here is where we lost our house, here is where the city fell, where we lost our way, where we started killing and stealing and—
Ugh…my world is nothing but dark clouds. This morning I’m struggling to find hope. Will any of this ever get any better? Can we ever bounce back from this as a civilization?
I don’t think so.
That’s why suicide is my safety measure.
Knowing I have the power to spare us the indignity of such a bleak future, if things get that bad and there truly is no hope for humanity, I remind myself it’s just three bullets and game over. This thought gives me a small degree of peace, although not as much as before. I don’t want to die. And I don’t want to have to kill my family.
But I will.
If it comes to that.
Ash drifts in through the broken window, settles on the floor. Outside the sounds of carpet bombing start back up.
“Shut the drapes, Macy,” I tell her, my voice taking a stern edge. “And get away from the window.”
Half the street-facing windows broke from a concussion burst a few days ago. We boarded most of them up, but we need a way to see outside, so we’ve left two open. We have only the drapes to shelter us from the elements, from the soot in the air. Most days it’s enough. We lean plywood up against them at night, and it helps some, but the insulation here is poor.
God, those drapes. They’re ugly floral patterned curtains.
I remind myself they serve their general purpose. At least, for now. Rex and Stanton have been talking about moving lately, to a bigger house, one that can accommodate all of us. I think that’s why they’re trying to get me and Macy good with the guns. Just in case…
For a second, I almost forget my fear.
Then there’s a knock at the door—a sharp, authoritative knock that has us all paralyzed where we stand. Stanton rushes into the room, finds us, his flashing eyes telling us a thousand stories about how bad this situation could be.
“Hide!” he hisses.
“San Francisco PD!” the voice on the other side of the door barks. “Open up!”
Oh God, no! The pee-dee.
Macy and I hurry to the hall closet; I grab the Sig Sauer on the way, pull back the slide to make sure it’s loaded. It is. Inside, we move behind the old lady’s coats, our backs against the wall.
“Not a word,” I tell Macy.
It’s just me and my daughter in the dark, sweating, our hearts clamoring, our breath high in our chests and coming fast. Too fast. I pull my daughter’s young body toward me, too forceful, way too fearful.
“He can’t let them in,” Macy is saying, panicked.
I’m thinking the same thing. But Rex said Stanton is in charge and we all agreed. Agreement meant compliance so no one would make the wrong move and get everyone killed.
The rifle stock hits the door again. “Open up or we’ll kick it down and come in anyway.”
Why these thugs still try to pass themselves off as cops seems preposterous. Apparently they’re doing it because people are still complying. So as long as things keep going their way, success will shape their actions and they’ll continue doing the same thing until someone stops them.
Can we stop them? Is that what Stanton’s planning?
Out in the living room, at the end of a short hall, we hear the front door open and booted feet tromping in. The mix of authoritative voices puts my nerves on edge. The one thing I can’t stop wondering is why the hell Stanton is obliging them. Is he thinking he can do what they want and they’ll just leave us alone and move on? With everything we have, the truth is, we don’t stand a chance against them. If they broke that door down and saw everything we have, they’d look for more and find us, too.
There was no way around letting them in and Stanton knew this.
Unconsciously I squeeze Macy even tighter against me, feeling her skin and bony frame, listening to her every quiet breath. Is she breathing too loud? If she yelps at some point, if she can’t stand the anxiety anymore, there’s a pretty good chance she’ll get us killed.
She’s just a child!
Pressing my face into her hair, suppressing a hard sob, I inhale the scents of her and wonder if this will be our last time together.
Tears flood my eyes. At this point, I’ve stopped trying to contain them. I’m cracking, just like Stanton’s cracking,
just like Macy’s maybe cracking inside, but in a different way altogether.
The ruckus going on in the living room is the only thing keeping me from going to pieces. If someone opens this door…oh God, I don’t even want to think about that!
Taking a deep breath, I find my resolve and realize that at some point I’m going to have to start killing, too. I can’t just leave all this on Stanton anymore. It’s time to pull my weight.
“Mom?” Macy whispers.
“Shhhh.”
Rex and Stanton claim to be committed to the task of getting us out of the city, but it’s proven to be more difficult than any of us had imagined. Listening to what’s happening in the living room, I’m starting to realize it was all a big pipe dream.
Speaking of Rex, I wish he were here now. He’s the merciless one. The determined one. The one with the combat experience and a penchant for bloodshed.
“Can’t breathe,” Macy finally whispers.
I don’t realize how tight I’ve been holding her until she fights for that extra deep breath. My grip on her loosens, but I keep her close. If we’re going to die here, it’s not going to happen without one hell of a fight.
Another round of bombing rattles the world from a few blocks away, the walls rumbling, the floor beneath our feet shifting. I press a palm against the wall to steady us. Macy shifts her footing for balance, quickly but quietly. Some powdered drywall from above drops into our hair and lands on our shoulders.
We pay it little mind. I’m more concerned about the floor collapsing.
Heavy voices inside our home bark orders. It’s amazing how authoritative they sound, how…police-like. They’re mimicking even the simplest of details. Working quickly toward the goal of forced compliance. I hear Stanton’s manic, aggravated voice talking back to them and I wince.
I can’t help thinking, this isn’t the time to lose it, baby.
I can’t help thinking, keep it together.
“What business do you have with us while blocks away we’re getting shelled?” he asks. “We’re nobodies. This whole city is filled with nobodies.” Stanton is pretending that not knowing they’re former gang bangers will save him. That it will save us all.