A Chemical Fire

by Brian Martinez

  The Americas. Dead. Europe and the United Kingdom. Dead. Australia and Africa and Iceland and Greenland and all of Asia, cities and villages and jungles and suburban towns wiped of human life because of me. I’ve killed every person on Earth minus three, and now I’m finishing them off, too.

  The head swells, brain against skull, ready to rupture, hurting so much my eyes water because it’s true, it’s all true. I can feel it and I know it.

  I pull up, lurch and stagger to the red car and get in behind the wheel, watching the shake and shudder inside the doors, the three of them struggling in the middle. If they survive the swarm the last thing they deserve for it is me. They're not looking my way. They're focused on survival, as they should be, and the only chance they have is to be wherever I'm not.

  I get the engine going, pull out and drive dizzy until the stadium leaves the mirror, deep into what I’ve created.

  Act Four

  Church

  Nerve Signal

  With less in my way I’ve never pushed so hard, no cars to move out of the way or slow down and get around, only the occasional Victim. I have no one asking me to stop to eat or piss or start a side mission. There’s only me, watching it all die and go to dirt and cactus.

  The sky is a patch of purples through these eyes, punched through by black clouds wearing gray armor. Under every rock is the pure outline of spiders and scorpions, the talons on every vulture above visible to me alone, running their hunger circles and asking my help.

  When the heroin is metabolized I pass a camper that burns red for me and I get into it. I split apart the trapped family with the axe and find their drugs, my eyes bringing me to it. I chew a few bitter pills and pocket the rest. My clothes ripped and dirty I go through theirs to find a hooded shirt, put it on and get out and drive more stopping whenever my eyes tell me there’s a reason to.

  The first signs for the Hoover Dam are washed in the water-green of the struggling moon. I listen to them, keep moving through the succulents and desert roses until the horizon bubbles up with something I haven’t seen in a long time: electric light; Las Vegas blazing neon and halogen in the distance. I slow to stare, then drive the headlights through the desert, bugs crawling in all directions.

  ***

  All this time, all these brutal miles and finally the dam is under me. The victory is bitter-sweet; there’s no real reason to be here now except finality, completing a goal held through violent odds.

  I look onto Lake Mead, see where it feeds the machinery, then go to the edge and look down to the drop below. The great curve down to the gushing water, the stony river bending out of sight. For a while I think about going to that water, falling through the wind, my clothes flapping, my eyes closed and ready to join her. I decide against it, a waste of all the supplies I recovered from broken cars.

  The entrance leads down to the lobby. It's lit up, filled with pamphlets and black-and-white photographs of the excavation. A television at one end loops a video over and over; on the screen is the flattened history of men breaking their spines.

  Around me water from the lake is flowing at high speeds through the dam’s waterway, funneling into the turbine. The turbine is rotating the connecting shaft which turns the generator, inside it magnets spinning around copper coils. This creates a flow of electrons, which makes electricity. Mechanical energy transforming into electrical energy. This electricity goes through transmission lines to the surrounding homes and cities. Done with its purpose, the water, the entire flow of the Colorado River, gushes downstream and off to more power plants cashing in on gravity.

  Four million cubic yards of concrete move under my feet and I decide to sit down. I fall into a chair and my thoughts attempt a shift to the guilt and the horror but I don’t let them.

  A blink later, morning is kicking through the gauze.

  Burial

  The water can’t do that, that can’t come out of there. That kind of spider doesn’t live here. Too many of them, spiders don’t travel together, they’re solitary, they don’t work like this. Ants and centipedes are here too, and earwigs, crickets and roaches out of the ground, up the concrete slabs of the dam, flies and bees from the skies, they’re in my head. I tell them that, scream that, something in those last pills, my throat shredding and they don’t care. They inch and creep and scatter and push and move and crunch and flitter and bunch and buzz and get into everything but they don’t care that they can’t, that they shouldn’t.

  I crawl on knees into the broom closet and they get in with me. I push the door closed and they compress jointed bodies and get under, up onto the shelves with sets of four and six and eight legs and into the yellow water bucket and onto paper towels and spray-bottles of blue and clear cleaners, finding me folded into the corner and going away, going inside and away from cerci and thoraxes, knowing this is my punishment and I will never escape it.

  That I deserve it is my only relief from the itch of their legs. I take a breath of wings, let go and let them. I don’t struggle when they get under my bandages. I don’t fight when they get into my clothes and sit up next to me, tasting my skin. When they wriggle into my shoes and under my socks I calm myself by knowing I’ve earned this, and somehow that makes it easier. Like relaxing in the cold to stop from shivering.

  I stop holding my head up, the way Janet once told me I did. It’s easier on the neck.

  Time passes, cold-blooded and exo-skeletoned. With no one around to see it I can stop lying about who I am: the largest mass-murderer of all time, buried in insects. The most vile person who’s lived, and hopefully the last.

  Diagram

  Eight feet tall, four feet wide and with four beveled panels, the door is held to the frame by three hinges. All around it, a layer of spongy foam insulation.

  “Gala,” I say.

  The door looks like dark wood but it’s actually made of fiberglass-composite; a core of insulation wearing a polymer, then embossed with artificial wood grain.

  “Please don’t do this,” she says, her voice worn out. “The funeral was the last of it, the absolute last. They were your parents, John. You should be ashamed.”

  From the street, a fiberglass door gives the appearance of looking normal. Close up, really in close, the story starts to change.

  “Let’s talk about it, face to face. I know if we just look at each other everything will work out. You'll see, things will change.”

  “You don’t even look the same.”

  The lockset is brushed brass with a round handle and matching back plates. Inside is a deadbolt using a cylinder lock, in which the key turns the cylinder turns the cam.

  “I look different?”

  “Please don't make me do this."

  Turn the plug one way, the cam pulls into the bolt, the door opens. Turn it the other way the cam releases the bolt, the spring snaps into place, and the door doesn’t.

  All this is what makes up the distance between the two of us. What keeps us apart. Nothing else.

  “It can change, this time I want it to. I need your help, though. Otherwise I can’t even start.”

  “We’ve tried that so many times.”

  I look around at the neighborhood. Houses with security lights on their porches, televisions shimmering blue through the curtains of bedroom windows. “Just one turn of the wrist,” I say, “Just open it, that’s all I want.”

  I installed this door, using levels to measure the subsill, beads of caulk on the edges, and a combination of shims, jambs, and screws to hold it in place.

  “Is it, is that all you want,” she asks, and I can tell she’s crying.

  I sanded the frame, pushed the door in, applied the insulation. I made it, and it’s keeping me out.

  She tells me to look in the mailbox. I open it and find a brown paper bag inside. “All of your precious pills,” she bubbles through mucous, and I hear the bolt click open, my heart jumping. “You can leave with them, or come in without them,” she says through the door, then footsteps, fading up
the stairs.

  “I didn’t set the fires, you know.” I wait for an answer. “Gala?”

  I take out the bag and it’s so full, so heavy in my hand. She found both of my bottles, the one from the cabinet and the one from the bathroom. Even the sandwich bag from behind the bed.

  The door, unlocked. The bag, so full. My face hot, my eyes pouring, we walk away.

  I Am Becoming

  After four or three or five days, when eating the dead ones isn’t enough anymore, I draw out of them. They pour off like water and I trudge to the door to strain it open, resistance from the bulk. I walk through the dam and up into the sun, all the way pushing through their bodies.

  Across water bugs and down the street, past the red truck buried and useless and away from Vegas, I walk into the landscape. There I find the insects end. Only the dam is covered in them, and I’ve just spent six or two days in them, swallowing them with the pills.

  Funny, I tell the dirt, but it makes no difference now.

  The sun is ruthless. Rocks jump with warmth and the glow of scorpions hiding, edging out and checking me before scurrying back to save their energy. I follow only the telling burn of my new vision. Over the hill it pulses me, my feet trying not to trip each other, my final goal blurred but something to hold onto. I have nothing inside of me and anything is better than falling down in the desolate tract and staying there to become leather.

  The top of the hill brings a small shack below, bleached and beaten, and I fumble to it. The plank of wood lifts off and the door opens, using the last of me to fall in and eyes to adjust.

  To nothing. Just a tool shed, rakes and plows stuck to the walls, and I don’t know why my eyes led me here. A sour stink leads to a rat that came in here to die a long time ago. I get into it and bite and eat every dried bit, feeling better with every bone I scrape until I can stand without falling. I’ll need to trap something, kill something- a snake, a fox, a meercat.

  Something howls far off and makes my stomach growl, so a farmer’s blade comes off its pegs; the long, wooden handle with a curved blade that sits heavy and good in my hands. Then back out to the heat I follow the way back, much easier now with the rat in me and something to hold me up.

  When I get back to the dam, Daniel, Janet and Adena are waiting for me.

  ***

  “We understand why you ran,” she says, every shift under her skin, every striation and organ resting just under the paper. “You had to come here alone.”

  Where did the bugs go?

  Daniel has Kevlar armor strapped to his torso when he says, “We figured out the same thing you did. It’s you bringing them back. After what happened back there it’s clear. We’re not angry, though, we know you had no control.”

  “Yet,” Janet adds. A cloud moves past the sun, hiding the dam.

  “But you don’t have to run from us.” Daniel’s face, etched with cut against cut from battle, most from the lion sword in his hand.

  “No, not us.”

  Adena says, “Now that we understand, none of us are scared anymore.”

  “Now we can share the weight of it.”

  “The four of us are in this together,” Janet says through the dirty fabric of his mask. The wind coming up over the brink gains strength, our hair and clothes shaking. But this is mine, they can’t share it.

  “This doesn’t belong to you,” Daniel says. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you. We’ve played our parts as much as you have.”

  No.

  Adena says, “Listen to us. Getting here has showed us so much, we knew we had to get you back, to help you see, too.”

  How did they get here?

  “We have something to show you,” Janet says, mask wide. Behind him sounds begin to fall, clapping heavy and hollow on the road, like gunshots signaling something with size coming around the corner, and it does. Then another and another, then one more, tones smoldering in the daylight.

  All muscle and snout in ferocious form; horses, their hooves thundering the dam’s pavement so hard it shakes under foot. They come up just behind the three of them, halting and blowing snorts of hot air from their nostrils.

  Janet pulls himself onto a horse the color of cocaine, settling in and retrieving his crossbow from it’s saddle.

  Where did they find these?

  “We didn’t,” Daniel says and goes to another horse, it’s coat like blood in the sun. He mounts it, and with his sword at his side he looks down at me, scarred and fire-eyed.

  Adena strokes the oil-spill mane of the third, watching me. “Everything between us is settled. Now that I really see you, I understand. I know you belong with us.” Then she turns, inserts her boot into the horses strap and climbs onto its massive back.

  “Do you see now,” Janet asks.

  Adena unties something from the saddle. She holds the instrument at her side. It’s made of metal, a counterbalance of some kind, and then I see it: a black set of scales.

  Dark clouds flash as they all turn to the final horse, the color of Chlorzoxazone tablets; a stale, deadish puss. My face goes cold, the structure caved in and dried under the bandages, pocked with damage, and I run fingers across it.

  No.

  Behind me a pack of wolves appear, teeth naked to the waking anger of a storm. They stalk up the road with their yellow eyes on me, the horses not shifting from their stance.

  “We had them wrong,” Daniel says over my shoulder. “They never would have attacked us, no more than our own weapons would. They were excited to see us.”

  Janet says, “There’s no more hiding, it’s time to become what we’ve been becoming.” He takes his mask off and lets the wind pull it away and over the edge. His mouth is a murder, crawling with infection and maggots.

  I step back, lungs locked. Hemispheres spin like a globe, almost throwing me from the dam into the livid water jumping against the rocks all the way down the river.

  “Let go. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Forget our names, this is who we are,” Adena says. The skin around her eyes peeled back tight. I look down at my hand squeezing the handle, the sharp blade at the end of the scythe, and I bring it close. There’s a reflection in the metal there, more familiar now than the one before it.

  Daniel says, “I know you feel it like we do. Drawing near.”

  Pulling like the tide.

  “We’ve already started the work but we need to finish it. This is what we have to do, in every bone of us this is what we have to do.”

  To close the synapse.

  “To feed the unbearable wound.”

  To belong.

  I walk to the pale horse, the wind and all earthly sound pushed to a mute and my every move slowed to a deep-sea sink, a cold and silent plunge through immeasurable pressure. The horse jolts under my touch and I steady him, my open hand holding the sickly coat, the strings and fibers underneath, and his eye turns in the skull to me. I look into it; the stretching pupils, the white jelly of the sclera, the black of the iris. I know every part of it. Every reason for every change, every reaction. I understand it as I understand my own. Slowly, under my hand, he calms.

  A branding on the saddle reads ‘dis manibus'. Some Latin from an old life, but I don’t know it. I find a strap next to it and my scythe fits, sliding in and coming to a stop.

  “You’ll never be on your own,” Janet scratches through the worms and decay. “Whatever else happens you won’t suffer it alone. There’s no more fear unless we cause it. No more hurt unless we want it.”

  A great wailing rises in the distance, the strains of it carrying through the desert wind as I take the saddle. And as I bring myself up my horse it rises farther, terrified shrieks and moans from the gathered remainders of the world all crying out at once.

  “This is what is needed.”

  “The way of all things.”

  “What was always meant.”

  What they deserve.

  My hood comes up, black and just as the skies open re
leasing a rumble-boom explosion of thunder and lightning, a wrath on the land, and the cries reach their peak and all is weeping and shouting.

  I feel my eyes go over. My true eyes.

  “It’s time to spread among them,” Pestilence says.

  “The battle is waiting,” War says.

  “Our influence is needed,” Famine says.

  We ride down on the city of filth and sin a terrible sight, the beasts of Earth at our sides and the fires of Hell following behind us. We are the answer to an ancient promise. Our actions are prophecy.

  I have become Death, and my Victims have avoided judgment for long enough.

  The Vengeful

  The streets of New Sodom become our killing grounds. Its tall neon lights watch us bring decision to the damned with all that we have, riding through on weapons and vengeance, a wreaking of violence for the astray.

  At the bases of covetous fountains, War cuts himself, spraying them with his thick blood to turn them one against the other, Victim eating Victim eating Victim. His cries echo off the abandoned pillars of man’s greed, drenched sword coming down on another head.

  As he thunders past, I pull corpses back from the limbo of dust to be ripped apart by the teeth and claws of dogs. The Victim hunger no longer enough to run them at us, now they turn away, trying to escape on weak and pathetic legs.

  On the main boulevard a frenzy of motion sets off among them as one vomits black onto another, then that one onto a third. In no time it spreads to all of them nearby, all unable to move, violently bringing up their dead organs and flesh and emptying themselves of everything. Pestilence looks down on them and shrieks with laughter. When a new Victim limps to he runs an arrow through his rotten mouth, pulling it back out smeared in plague and virus and spilling maggots, then fires it into their wretched gut to watch them sicken.