A Chemical Fire

by Brian Martinez

  I don't say it, but I don't think that’s a problem for her anymore.

  “What’s this,” Adena asks, ignoring it.

  “The baby was hungry,” Janet says.

  She puts down her things. “It bit you? Come on, can you get it off the bus already? That thing will eat us all.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I wrapped its mouth up.”

  “And you, you’re letting him keep that fucking thing,” she says to Daniel. He looks at her, working silently on Janet’s dressing. “Great,” she says.

  I burp forest and ocean and start the bus up, pulling out of the lot and back onto the darkening street. I drive over two blocks of street and half a Victim before Daniel finishes the bandaging and comes to the front.

  “Did you get me anything to eat,” he asks, sitting down.

  “No.” I look over my shoulder at Adena, busy reading the directions for her scale. She looks up at me and nods, then goes back to it. When she does I grab a box of cookies from my bag and hand it to him.

  “You’re an angel,” he says, ripping it open and going to it. Brown mess sliming his teeth and tongue, he says, “Want one?”

  “Not really hungry,” I say.

  The Message, Part One

  Daniel orders us to take the battery-powered lanterns and search both floors of the bookstore for victims. We do, no aisle over-looked, but find only ash. Then we get the door blocked with carts and stacks of boxes and every heavy book we can find, adding glasses and plates from the coffee counter to the top as an alarm.

  When the store is locked down we relax and everyone unpacks. Daniel takes out a propane stove from one of our last stops and begins hooking up the tank, cans of chili and tomato sauce set all around. Adena stares angry, thin hands shaking as they sort pills into an organizer.

  “Want any,” Janet asks, pulling out plastic baggies filled with a rainbow of pills. He pours out two yellow ones into my hand, knowing him some home blend of Ecstasy. I pop them and they go down easy.

  “You can pay me later,” he says, reminding me that no matter what else Janet is a dealer, and dealers want to be owed.

  I walk the floor. My flashlight passes over books on wellness and travel and science, on religion and art. I go past magazine racks on topics that don’t exist now, new releases that will never go old, coffee machines that will never run. In the center I go up stairs coiled around an elevator core to the second floor with a divided section for music and movies, the rest of it fiction, politics, self-help. Names attached to faces attached to ideas that were supposed to reach someone and change something. Messages stamped out in all formats: hardcover, paperback, audio book, abridged, unabridged, annotated, Braille, illustrated, large print, revised, out of print.

  I’m looking through a book on transcribing music when I hear Janet’s voice from downstairs, kept low, saying, “Bullshit, he scares you just like he scares me.”

  I take a few steps closer, straining to hear.

  “As leader I would never let a member of my team scare me,” Daniel whispers.

  “Make no mistake about John. I knew him before all this, and I shat on him constantly. Know why? Because I don’t know what he’d be like if he realized he was in charge.”

  “Keep your voice down. Just because he’s creepy doesn’t make him dangerous.”

  Janet says, “You don’t know about the fires.”

  Venturi Effect

  Coming out of the teacher’s restroom, I check my watch. I have to remember the time so I can eat forty minutes after the pills, but I find the school’s hallways are suddenly full of kids. Loud clanging overhead, the alarm like we’ve practiced so many times but this time no faces look bored. No joking, no small talk, no gossiping, no who-likes-who. There are no bullies and no student council members here, only children, stiff and cram-filing to the exits.

  I spot a tall girl with pulled back hair and she looks at me, her eyes stunned. I ask her if this is a drill. She moves on, wordless with the current of bodies, teachers yelling directions through the noise.

  Mrs. Jensen rushes down the hall frantic, small and wide with wildly moving arms, her neck flopping with jowls and pearls. “Where’s your class,” she asks me.

  “Back where I left them.”

  “You didn’t bring them with you?”

  “Not to the restroom, no.”

  “Find them, Mr. Cotard. Now.”

  I push toward my classroom through the path of least resistance at the middle of the hall. At the end it’s gray and blurry, smoke strangling the space, and a few kids are running from around the corner to join the crowd with pale faces. “Where is it,” I ask them and they don’t hear. When I manage down to the end my fingers go cold from the sight. The door to my classroom, my own classroom, is vomiting smoke.

  I run to it and meet flames, roaring, getting pulled back by someone and the heat is in my face, the smoke hitting my eyes, the shouting from my mouth, and it’s too much, too late, the sprinklers not enough to put it out, the entire room going violent, and the roar of the fire, it isn’t enough to cover the screams inside.

  ***

  When the police call, the word they use is negligence. They say they can trace the fire back to a faulty Bunsen burner I failed to perform proper maintenance on. Friends and neighbors call, too, asking how I’m holding up, seeing if I need anything. Gala hears it all, watching me and knowing something is different. She never says it, but she thinks it. She supports me against her better suspicions.

  A few months later I get a second call. This one says my parents house has burned down with my parents inside it. As my legs shake they say it happened in their sleep and they hopefully, probably, maybe never woke up. They also say I’m the last person seen leaving the house, and they’re right, of course, I had stopped by and woken them up to talk about Gala.

  My mother said, “There’s no doubt love can kill you, and fast. But a life without it? Oh, baby, that’s like a stomach wound. Such a slow, sad way to go.”

  My father said, “For me marriage is all or nothing. You pick your poison and you drink every last drop. Anything less, that’s not living.”

  The police tell me the fire started just after I left, and now the word negligence is dropped from the vocabulary. I stop getting calls from neigbors, then from friends, then family. Only lawyers and police and reporters call, and those I don’t even hear.

  The Message, Part Two

  When I come back down Daniel and Janet are spooning hot food into their mouths from paper bowls, Adena standing far away from them on her scale. Daniel offers me a bowl. As Janet’s pills finally take effect I pop a handful of Adena’s and say, “No.”

  He finishes his, throwing it aside and folding up the portable stove. “We have to talk about where we’re going,” he says.

  Adena steps off the scale, bothered by what it says. “Aren’t we going west,” she asks.

  “We need a specific target, a place to fortify ourselves. Houses and hotels only last so long, as we see. Something that won’t burn down would be optimal.”

  Janet says, “Why don’t we steal a yacht or something and cruise the ocean? We can come to land when shit runs out and just take what we need. Like Vikings.”

  Daniel says, “Not a bad idea, but there’s fuel to think about. Also the bad weather we’ve been having could get complicated on the water. That’s if we can even get a boat working, I'm assuming we don't know.” He looks at me and my head shakes.

  Adena says, “How about a fort? Aren’t there still some of those left?”

  “Absolutely, we could find a hundred just looking through some of the books here. Even Alcatraz was a fort before it was a prison, which is something we shouldn’t rule out.”

  “I’m not going to prison,” Janet says.

  "It's just a building. The guards are dead."

  "Not going to prison," he repeats.

  "Again," I add.

  “Okay, no prisons. Forts are good so long as they’re accessible but
still defendable. Some pussified tourist trap with handicap ramps and a gift shop is useless.”

  Everyone goes quiet when a thump sounds out from the second floor, all movement stopped, ears and eyes scanning the dark store.

  Another thump hits and then above us: a Victim woman with a peeled off face is toppling over the railing and falling down, moaning, us shouting, and she lands in between Janet’s legs facing away. She looks around at us, dark eyes sizing up food and then turning around to see Janet, Janet pulling back, Daniel and Adena going to their feet for weapons. I’m up and on her with my axe before they have the chance, euphoria washed and chopping, splitting, rending, putting it to sleep, feeling so good, the adrenaline, the serotonin.

  The job done, Janet looks up at me with a mouth full of brown and black gore. “Payment for the pills,” I say and he spits the goop out onto the floor.

  “How did you miss her in your sweep,” Daniel screams.

  “We didn’t,” Adena says. “We checked everything. She had to get in some other way.”

  “It’s the ash,” I say, wiping the axe blade off between the pages of a children’s book. Everyone looks at me.

  “What do you mean the ash,” Daniel says.

  “The piles, sometimes they come back through the ashes. I saw it happen once in a gas station. That's probably what the second floor of the hotel was about.”

  Daniel gets in close, breath hot with chili. “I thought we agreed it's very important to share Intel with me. Especially something like this, this is heavy, heavy need-to-know shit.”

  Chewing my cheek I tell him I wasn’t even sure I’d seen it.

  Adena says, “Now we have to worry about them coming back? Can I just say this isn’t how I pictured the end of the world.”

  With his teeth caked with food, Janet says, “You wanted aliens, too, right?”

  “No,” she says. “just not this.”

  Daniel steps away from me, trying not to lose control. “Is there anything else you want to share with us before it lands in our laps?”

  I prop the axe against a bookshelf, looking at them waiting for an answer, all not knowing if they should follow my lead and put their weapons down or use them to slice my throat. After a moment I say, “Hoover.”

  Adena says, “The vacuum?”

  “The dam.” And Daniel turns fast. “As forts go, it has a fresh water supply and only two ways in. More importantly-”

  “It was built to last,” Daniel finishes.

  "So?"

  “Hoover Dam is a miracle of human engineering. It supposedly has more masonry in it than the fucking Great Pyramid of Egypt, and the machinery," his face opens up.

  "It’s probably still working as we speak.”

  “Why should we give a shit about a working dam,” Janet asks.

  I walk up to him and brush Victim mess from his shoulder. “Because it’s a power plant,” I say, “and power plants make electricity.”

  Receiving Icarus

  Adena says, “The first thing I’m using is a hairdryer.”

  I get a mouthful of gasoline and pull out the tube, gagging on the oily stuff and spitting it out. It’s more odor than taste, filling my sinuses with so much of the smell it hurts, pungent in my head and eyes.

  “Porn for me,” Daniel says, “definitely porn.”

  Janet says, “Porn is good. I’ll do some cooking, too.”

  “You cook?”

  “I do, but I make such a Meth,” and they laugh.

  I thrust the tube into the buses waiting tank. All around the three of them have weapons out, protecting me from passersby. Two kids come at Adena at the same time, getting too close. She almost gets hit but shotguns them in time, the second falling with a handful of her coat.

  “I miss full service,” she sighs, breath tight in bony chest.

  “If you were better with that thing it wouldn’t be a problem,” Daniel says. “You have to either learn how to use it right or pick a gun with better distance.”

  “Says the guy carrying a sword.”

  "The difference between you and me," he winks, “is I’m not afraid of getting close to people."

  The tank overfills and I pull the tube out, screw the cap back on and shut the door. Everyone files in and goes to their seat and we pull away. Janet says, “Hey driver, turn the fire down. I still have one ball left.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The heat, it’s like a volcanoes dick in here.”

  “Heat's not on” I say, turning back onto the highway. He says nothing and I get back to blacktop and concrete, the bus moving us through a tour of old Colonial houses built on hills of dead grass, separated from the generations of people that painted and swept them. We find the road as before, slow from having to weave around crashed cars and stumbling people, sometimes getting out and moving a thing that can’t be driven around. It doubles our travel time, easily. Hours get eaten by the road this way, seeing water park after water park, eating pills, passing faded red and blue roller coasters twisting the landscape; like rusted worms drying in the sun.

  Something smash-cracks down through my side mirror, sheering it right off the bus.

  “What was that,” Daniel asks, waking up.

  “Whatever it was it hates mirrors.”

  “Did you hit a-”

  THWUMP another hits the hood and my hands jump, the bus going with them. I regain myself, get control and slow all the way down, the bus stopping in the middle of the highway with grass stretched around us. There's a lump of something in the crevice where windshield meets hood, a greasy form tangled in with the wiper.

  “Is it raining,” Janet asks, and everyone turns to stare at him.

  “It looks like some kind of blackbird,” Daniel says.

  Adena says, “Two of them in a row?”

  Something lands off in the grass. Then something else. Then a third, this time impacting the highway. This one we can see clearly- it’s a bird carcass.

  “So it is raining,” Janet says calmly. All around they fall harder and harder, in the bushes and onto concrete, thump, thump, clanging loud off the roof and cracking glass at the sides. They start to get in through the open windows so we rush to slide them up and get blood and feathers on our faces.

  Eyes wide across the farmland, everywhere we can see, we see birds falling. We sit and watch. When we can’t watch anymore we look at each other, faces dotted red.

  Adena says, “It’s not just people that are dying, is it. It’s the planet.”

  “I hope not,” Daniel says, “I’m looking forward to owning a quarter of it.”

  Janet says, “This show I watched said the planet’s died a dozen times already but it always comes back.” He lights a cigarette.

  “Everything gets demolished when that happens, idiot. All life ends. The planet may grow back plants and animals but we’ll be gone. What’s the point.”

  White birds and red birds, gray and blue, small and large come from the sky already dead. Thump. Thump-thump.

  At least we can say we stood for nothing. Meant nothing. Accomplished nothing.

  When the bodies stop falling I get back into the wheel seat. The bus starts up and we roll slowly, too fast and we lose traction, and we drive this way for a while, crunching all the way.

  ***

  After a length of barns and silos patched up from the fingerprints of tornadoes, we come across a great lake and decide to stop. We pull into a parking lot with light poles and garbage pails leading to a beach leading to the water, and we come off the bus all leg cramps and yawns, stretching and going down to the water, all the way stepping around dead birds. Rock jetties reach out in front of us, tangled with plastic bags and fishing line.

  “Look at that,” Adena points. Out on the water, hundreds of birds are floating across the surface; Cardinals and Purple Martins, Kingbirds and Allies, their feather oils seeping into the water in luminescent waves.

  Out on the jetty, Janet lights a cigarette and laughs. “He
y, there’s a dead guy in these rocks,” poking something.

  Adena says, “We have those all over the place.”

  “Yeah but this one happened before that. He’s, you know, normal dead.”

  Daniel claps his hands and says, “Alright. So if we’re a team we have to be trained like a team. We need to increase our reaction times and learn to work together. And I’ve seen everyone here almost eat it at one point or another, so this isn’t negotiable.”

  Janet shouts, “Oh man, his skin just slides right off! You should really see this!”

  Adena says, “I’m already a good shot.”

  “It’s not about firing a gun as accurately as possible,” I say, “It’s how quickly you can fire accurately.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Daniel says. Adena looks at me as if to say, Kiss-Ass.

  When we’re ready Daniel takes us through our lessons, with Janet borrowing a gun. Preparing us for spontaneous attacks, he throws garbage at us and has us draw weapons. For multiple targets he sets up the pails in a crowd situation, having us move through and fire on each one in orders he calls out. We work on one-handed firing, weak-handed firing, firing from a prone position, close-quarters, indoor, moving then shooting, moving while shooting.