A Chemical Fire

by Brian Martinez

  Down the street: Famine sits silent on her shadow horse. Her scales are held to the air. She raises her bones and the wind swells and bursts past her into trapped prey, first blowing away the ash in its mouth, then its very teeth down its throat. Left broken and unable to feed, the Victim is overtaken by her swarm of flies.

  Casinos burn. Signs topple. Tires melt. Grass shrivels. Trees fall. Windows shatter. Bridges collapse. When the city has fallen we leave it, destruction our footprints.

  For days we cut East across the land, the direction we came but a different path, finding new places to touch, a sick stampede of hooves and bloody victory. We clear the shaking and splitting Earth of those who have lost their rights to it, those who are extinct and don’t know it, those who need to be swept away the dust they are. With us is our wrath of arachnids and insects, mammals and infection and killing, wind and darkness.

  All pretenders fall before us, their souls collected by the rolling white fire always at our backs. We are fear in the black eyes of the fearless and our only mercy is to be quick about it.

  We are rarely merciful.

  Instrumental

  The earthquake ends with us in a small town at the center of the country. A scattering of our Victims along the streets. I raise my scythe and with it the ashes inside the homes and stores, new heads rising through windows for us to gather. Their fear is amusing.

  Pestilence laughs maggots. He wears a coat of locust as he goes to them, an excited shriek on his black lips, falls on them and spreads sickness. Victims coughing up dust as they writhe in the streets.

  War drips blood. His cuts are reopened and he rides into the thickest group and splashes them. They set on each other at once. They become a twisting and gnashing mob, ripping cooked limbs from rotted sockets. He comes off his horse and walks across their feuding shoulders, and when he wants to touch his boots to the ground it's a simple matter of burying his sword in a skull. The dead weight is his elevator.

  Famine brings flies. The cloud pulses around her and swells to lift her emaciated and outstretched arms. She goes to where they feed and warns them off their wickedness, absolving them with thunder and wind and a rending of mouth.

  I spread. My beasts filter through the streets, looking to fill their gullets. I burn what I hate. I collect. I burn more. I know nothing else.

  ***

  I ride along a row of low buildings. My dying horse trotting down the sidewalk, I look into each. In one store, deep in the back, my eyes see the movement of one that would avoid me so I dismount, leaving my horse to grunt and shuffle. The glass door goes white and melts from the middle out, the handle falling to the ground, pink edges burning and receding around me as I walk through to the dark.

  The Victim convulses away all melted hair and sun dress to the back door, trying an escape. The daylight coming in there goes quickly to shadow blocked by the climbing bodies of cockroaches and earwigs and all other sorts, thousands pushing in toward her until the glass gives and shatters, the living pile rushing in and knocking her down and covering her entirely.

  I walk to her and they part from her face, showing it to me. In her wide and darting eyes I see only the store around us, nothing more, nothing to denote a being of higher function, a thing which should be allowed to flourish. Under my watch the horde jumps and funnels into her mouth, all of them down her neck and swelling her inside and she stretches wide and wide until her gray stomach expands too much to hold and bursts with insect.

  Her kicking goes slow, then still.

  The work done, I turn and walk away. On the walls are strange relics; wooden guitars, saxophones of light bronze, violins, harmonicas, trombones and trumpets, instruments of string and brass left to fall apart without lips and breath and fingers. Posters of heroes, advertisements for lessons.

  My hand picks a book of sheet music out from a display, glossy and tall. It has piano pieces by a composer long gone and claimed, white pages of long, black bars, half and full notes laying across them.

  Every sound you hear is a note.

  I turn back to the Victim, the surface crawling but her body tranquil. The face before all this was a pretty one.

  This was a woman once.

  My skull twists, hot detonation.

  If she were here, the things she would think about me.

  My legs fold underneath.

  She would be ashamed of me.

  Wasted muscle knots, back hunched, eyes squinting so hard they bleed at the edges. A voice not mine that smolders. An acid melting the innards. A crackling sting of light.

  Gala, what have I become?

  ***

  I get back to my horse and rejoin the others. All satisfied, we leave into the fields leading further East to more towns. With tall, tan wheat rushing past I look at the three of them up ahead, all pushing their beasts hard, their lust-focus on the upcoming hunt, the next collection.

  I pull the reins, my horse shifting and slowing down to nothing. “Stop,” I call to them. They all rear their horses at a sudden, turning back with surprise on their fronts at hearing the first word between us for days.

  “What did you say,” Daniel asks.

  “Stop.”

  He looks back at Adena and Janet, all of their faces twisted and lost. Adena says, “The next town isn’t far now, we should keep moving.”

  “We’re not going to the next town,” I say.

  “I don’t understand,” Janet drools, “is there some place more deserving we should go?”

  “It’s us. We have to end this.”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Daniel says, sitting tall and scarred in his saddle. “We’re putting an end to this game, it’s what we’re here for.”

  “What if we're wrong?”

  Janet rides up, bringing his horse against the side of mine. “This isn’t a choice. You understood that the same as us."

  I look over the top of the field, to the far mountains cutting the horizon. Above them the sun burns with a black spot on its right edge.

  He says, “Everything we’ve ever been was larva for now. Would you go back to being the faceless man, the pushover science teacher? The junkie your wife divorced and pushed away, did you like him better?”

  The splotch on the sun spreads across it like hair, overtaking part then half then all of it, stamping out the light and pitching all the Earth into murk.

  “You always backed down. You were so weak, thinking you were better than me and everyone around you. Do you know how many times I had to hold your hand?”

  “What does that mean,” I ask.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Every time my phone stopped ringing I knew you’d lost your stomach. I had to call you to put you back on the path. And every time there you were, hobbling back for more. You'll never know just how sad you looked.”

  His putrid air closer he says, “Without me, you’d never be what you are.”

  The sun is a ball of dead hair hanging in the sky, leaving the moon and stars directly above us to come out. “We’ve been perfected with purpose, and you want to lose that?"

  “No, I don’t.” His teeth part into a smile and he turns back to the others, ready to move past this temporary pause, this brief hurdle. They look at each other in relief.

  The scythe they don’t see. It cuts through the air as if in perpetual slow-motion, arching, moving, floating into Janet’s face and slicing through the mouth. The blade goes clean through the skull, goes through maggots and bacteria and bone, taking the top of his head off in one, long swoop, and the cap tumbles, falls to the grasses with the eyes open. Then his body follows, spilling worms all the way.

  Daniel and Adena are frozen.

  “It was a separation,” I tell them, "not a divorce."

  The field is still.

  “With my wife.” I look at Janet’s body down in the wheat, unmoving. Around us, quiet. Then locusts hit the ground, millions of them all at once and falling to the Earth. Impact after impact, a dead swarm. The white horse c
ries out and breaks into a run, cutting through the meadow and away from us.

  “Do you know what you’ve done,” Daniel asks, his face going red.

  I nod.

  “There are supposed to be four of us, how can we finish with three?”

  “Actually, there’s two of you.”

  “I’ll make sure of that,” he says, pulling his sword from the sheath.

  “Wait,” Adena says, but she's ignored, Daniel already snapping the reins. His horse trotting then running at me, snorting. I pull the scythe out and he’s closer and closer, his face distorted. Almost to me he cries out and swings his sword, fury in his movements, and our blades impact.

  He’s knocked from his horse, slipping through the air and then hard into the dirt, the air pushed out of his lungs and a sound at his lips. I turn the horse to face him as he gets up, recovering his sword.

  “Come down and face me,” he froths, and I don’t move. “Face me or I’ll chop your horse down like a fucking tree.”

  A stirring at his feet gets his attention. His eyebrows come together then raise as he shouts out, ants crawling up his legs, centipedes spiraling around, every ground dwelling spider reaching out from the dirt and seeping up, grasshoppers flapping to him from the field until he’s layered. “You think this will stop me,” he shouts, pulling them from his face before they close back in.

  I come off to the ground. As Daniel struggles behind me I whisper in my pale horses ear, telling it to go, freeing it to heal or die in peace. It runs off and I watch it go.

  Daniel takes a wad of bugs from his mouth. “You idiot, you’re throwing all this power away. Everything is ours,” he shouts, scraping legs from his eyes. “And for what, your dead whore wife?” He smiles insanely at the precision of his strike as the insects close back in.

  I ignite them.

  He bellows, swallowed in fire, sword dropping arms going in fits, wheat around him singeing and catching. Then a rapid wind hits him, all the grasses shaking in a blur, snuffing the fire. I turn to see her, sitting on her horse like a marionette, no muscle on her body and nothing in her eyes or on her mouth.

  Daniel shouts, running, and tackles me. The scythe comes out of my hand, bringing me to the ground, the smell of cooked meat in my nose as we shred into each other. Hit after hit into my face, my stomach, every part alive with bruise and swell. Him striking me with everything he can give and Adena watching us from a cold distance.

  A rib cracks.

  A kidney pops.

  An eyeball flashes.

  He stands over me wheezing and laughing. Over his cooked shoulders the moon washes red, a sea of blood filling the whole of it’s surface and pitching everything in its light. “I’ve been waiting so long for this,” he says, his face peeled. “Now it’s just me and her. The king and the queen, finally ready to rule. As my first act as king, I get to enjoy beating the life out of you.”

  “I can take it all,” I rasp, getting to my knee. “More than you have.”

  “Why, because you have love in your heart? So precious.”

  I stand quickly, bringing his sword up with both hands, setting the blade on fire and piercing it through the Kevlar and into his heart.

  “Because I’m stronger than you.” His face goes to shock. He tries to suck air like a fish, his face unbelieving. I come close to his ear and whisper, “For your son,” and push him to the ground.

  I look around the field, red from moonlight. Victims stepping out of the grass drawn here by the blood. His horse runs through them and away, almost invisible in its own color.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I turn to Adena. She’s off her horse, holding the harness. Victims are gathered behind her, behind me, a dense circle all around.

  I walk to her. When I’m next to her I say, “You’re doing fine on your own.”

  Her face twists, tears from her eyes. I walk into the crowd and brush past their dead, scraping arms and they part for me, let me pass. As I walk away I hear Adena telling the black horse to leave. It does, galloping off as meteors begin to fall and strike around it, metallic rock colliding with the ground in shockwaves, destroying mountains in the distance.

  The crowd constricts on Adena, falling in to feed on nothing but skin and organs, and she lets them. When it’s done and I’m far I take my hood off and all the Victims burst into dust.

  Act Five

  A Prison

  Wormwood

  All is silent, for about a half hour.

  Then the sky streaks with hail and fire mixed with blood, everything burnt, drenched or smashed through as I walk into another town. In a car I find new clothes and take off my old ones, throwing them away with the bandages. I catch a mirror, seeing the damage to my face clearly for the first time. I ignore it, try the car but it doesn’t start, then I run to another and try that too, finding the same thing.

  I try my fire and nothing happens.

  I call to the beasts and they ignore me.

  It’s a long walk with no car and no ride, the chills setting in. I’m alone again, this time not even Victims to share the streets with. There’s only me and the hemorrhaging of Earth, the true finale of its tragic play.

  The days are for walking, the nights for reading and trying to sleep. I find food in the usual places. Days mean nothing. Only East matters.

  The violent sky leaves buildings burned to the foundation, cars folded in half, streets stained pink, punch holes and burns on everything. When the mess from above finally ends, every tree and blade of grass catches fire and burns to cinders. Then the waters turn to roiling blood.

  ***

  The house looks like an antique that’s been dropped; memorabilia from a cancelled show. Standing in charred grass with nothing more in me, legs and feet vibrating, I go up the walk. I take out all the pills I’ve been dying to eat and leave them in the mailbox, then go through the door and into my house.

  Past the living room covered in broken things my arms shivering, past the dining room stained with piss and nests my skin sweaty I manage up the stairs and down the hall, into my bedroom with my bed and the ashes of Gala still laid out in perfect silhouette.

  “I don’t think it’s much longer now,” I say after a bit. “We never had a chance to talk. I just wanted to see you one more time before everything died.”

  My eyes sting, knees shake too hard to hold and finally give, crashing me to the floor.

  “I came here,”

  An ocean inside, a tidal wave pushing at the walls.

  “to tell you,”

  Outside the deafening blast of a fallen star wiping out blocks and blocks of suburbs, atomic in its reach.

  “you were right.”

  Houses obliterate to splinters, streets lift away black and crumbling to powder.

  “Even now, I feel you here with me.”

  Trees and telephone poles turn to nothing as the wall of my face gives, the sea escaping.

  “Everything wrong I’ve ever done was away from you.”

  The dark takes me in as creatures thrash against the windows, locusts with bodies like horses and faces like men, risen from the depths of the pit.

  She was the world that I killed.

  Lucid

  I have this dream. In it the chemicals seep out of me like a towel drying in the sun. They come out of my pores and my eyes, my fingertips and my ears and my mouth and even my hair. The electrons bond and form a new compound. A new substance, synthesized from the withdrawing elements, that trickles down into my house and begins changing things. It fixes and heals what it touches, every drop rebuilding every damage.

  Chairs reassemble. Rugs sew back by their fibers. Fallen glass melts and pours back into frames. Tables uncollapse, the books and magazines on them binding. Walls push back and shift into place, the cracks repairing and paint sealing as if nothing had ever happened.

  It’s warm in this dream, and everything is so clear.

  “John.” My faded wife, the voice to my vision. In the dream I open my eye
s to the blinding and it’s her, my Gala, wearing the sun and saying my name. “What happened,” she radiates.

  Playing along, I tell the image of her that she died.

  “Oh,” she says, as if it's nothing at all. “And what did you do?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  She says, “You got lost.”

  In the dream I smile and say, “I was always bad with directions.” The light dimming enough to see her. “This is more than I expected. I didn’t think I deserved a dream like this.”

  “That may be true, but this isn’t a dream.”

  “No?” I look around the room, looking like it ever did; no mold, no decay, no crawling.

  She shakes her head. “Outside I can’t speak for.” She motions to the window and I stand, the neighborhood still ripped apart through the glass; houses leveled around the edge of a pit cut deep into the Earth. The same, lifeless sun and blood-filled moon float above it in the same, dead sky.