NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  The flames spread as the fire drew air through broken windows, crawling up window curtains, curling around overhanging eaves.

  The coyotes and the dog packs that escaped the Inventory crews ran from their hidden dens in the old houses. Rats dropped from their nests at the top of burning palm trees, ignored by the feral cats bewildered by the smoke.

  Eckmann, Franz, Spig Wead

  When he saw the flames, Eckmann took his seat in the cockpit behind Franz and Spig Wead and signaled the tow truck shackled to the front wheel of the jet to pull it out of the hangar. Seth and Marci stayed in the first-class galley, looking over Eckmann’s shoulder.

  Franz started the right engine, then the left.

  The taxiway led past the terminals with the airplanes that no one would ever fly, beasts from a mythology beyond June Moulton’s imagination, eating from the trough and disinterested in the departure of one of their kind.

  The front cabin door stayed open, waiting for the tow driver to climb in after he centered the jet at the head of the runway. The jet could have made it to the runway on its own power, but Franz asked that the engines not be used to roll the plane until takeoff, saying, “I can’t promise to know how to make the plane move slowly.”

  The runway lights for the first hundred yards were green, followed by white, and at the end of the runway, red. It was the white lights that worried Spig Wead. “They can see those lights from Center Camp if they know what to look for.”

  Eckmann wasn’t worried. “Spig Wead, old friend, don’t be afraid of Chief tonight. His fire is in the way. They may plan on hitting us tomorrow or the tomorrow after that, but by then we’ll be somewhere else, with its own set of challenges, no doubt, but not these challenges anymore.”

  Eckmann congratulated Franz for doing so well.

  “I haven’t done anything yet, Eckmann. We’re being pulled.”

  The tow truck disengaged and the driver parked it past the edge of the right wing and carried a ladder so he could climb back into the plane. He leaned the ladder into the doorway and climbed up, shaking Eckmann’s hand.

  Pippi, Go Bruins, Royce Hall

  It made Royce Hall a happy man to see Go Bruins disobey Chief’s order and bring Pippi to the observation terrace because an advantage would yield to him when Chief found out. He’d been looking at the Burn through the strongest telescope and he stepped away from it for Pippi.

  “It’s set for downtown. You might want to change the focus.”

  Pippi adjusted the lens. “I know how this works.”

  The compulsion to send messages over the wall grabbed her and she turned the telescope toward a point deep in the Burn Zone. She felt a confused message coming to her from one particular burning house, a few of those little Thought Pictures that weren’t like dreams, but fragments of a disconnected story, a story about a little girl.

  Hopper, Silent Voice

  Hopper passed five houses, until he saw the house where the Inventory truck had stopped to load furniture and behind it, on the next block, the house with the hidden key ring. He dropped the bike on the driveway, adjusted his headlamp, climbed over the wall, kicked in the kitchen door, went straight to the cabinet beside the sink, pulled on the second drawer until it was off the rollers, spilling a tray of knives on the floor, reached into the back of the space, and grabbed the key ring hanging from the hook. There were two keys on the ring, one longer than the other. The shorter key fit the locked door to the cellar. He put the longer key into his pocket. He walked down the stairs to the basement. He turned his head to sweep his light around the room. The far wall was hidden behind shelves full of cardboard banker’s boxes. He tossed the boxes aside, uncovering a sledgehammer hidden behind them. He swung the hammer into the wall, which was drywall, not brick, and fell forward, pulled by the momentum of the force he thought he needed.

  He cleared enough of a hole to step through and grab the rope handle on a wooden crate. He pulled the crate out and then knew where to find the crowbar and how to crack the crate’s lid open.

  He knew to grab the backpack from inside the crate.

  “Get out of here now,” said his Silent Voice. “The house can kill you.”

  Hopper ran up the stairs, his ankle buzzing in light pain from his stumble on the rubble wall. The kitchen curtains were burning, the fire spreading up the wall and across the ceiling. The living room was on fire.

  He slipped his hand into his pocket to be sure that he still had the longer key. The only way out was through the flames feeding on the air coming in from a broken window.

  The tar in the street bubbled and the dry brush on the front lawn was burning now, too. His bicycle on the concrete driveway was surrounded by flame. The frame was hot.

  His Silent Voice came back to him. While he was in the cellar, he hadn’t even thought of the Silent Voice. “I can’t give you any help, not here. This has nothing to do with me. This is yours to solve if you want to live.”

  Solve? The only solution was riding as hard as he had since Palm Springs. The fire was in all directions at once, but between the flames he found gateways.

  He watched himself ask the fire for the skill to choose the right way out of the fire and this dependence on something outside of the Silent Voice, outside of the shadow of the Teacher in Palm Springs, was so curious to him that the fire lost its power compared to the marvel of all the strange ways he had been not just Hopper but someone else, someone on the way to either taking over from Hopper or making Hopper into someone new, something that had never been before.

  He was a block ahead of the fire, then two, then three, and then out of it, then to the foot of the firewall, then up the firewall with the bike and the bag, and then down to the street. He heard the distant sound of the Bottle Bangers.

  Shannon, Bottle Bangers, Drifters,

  Siouxsie Banshee, Frank Sinatra

  Siouxsie Banshee pushed her way through the crowd on the Ritz-Carlton roof to watch the bus with the dancer wrapped in strands of light come slowly down Figueroa. The exploding Burn Zone was hidden from anyone who wasn’t forty stories above the street. She grabbed Frank Sinatra’s hand. “This is art, Frank. Do you understand?”

  He pointed to the fire and the smoke cloud rising over it and coming toward them. “I don’t know about art. I just want to know what’s going to happen when the ash starts to fall on Figueroa.”

  As the bus approached Wilshire Boulevard, Shannon smelled the fire. She stood tall and stopped dancing to locate the flames so she could run from them.

  Chief called Erin. “Why did she stop?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Erin crawled out onto the stage.

  “Shannon, you have to dance.”

  “There’s a fire.”

  “Yes, there’s a big fire.”

  “We should run.”

  “We’ll be fine. It’s not close and there’s a wall to keep it from spreading.”

  “I don’t like fire.”

  “Nobody does. Just stay where you are,” said Erin as she dropped back into the bus and asked Brin for a glass bottle and a knife or spoon. “Empty and clean.”

  AutoZone said, “There’s some bottles in the bedroom in the back.” Toffe took a steel knife out of the drawer.

  Jobe found three full bottles of Tito’s vodka.

  “I just need one,” said Erin. “And give me a table knife.” She stood up on the table and poked her head through the hole again.

  Shannon watched the skyline for flames. Erin gave her the bottle and the knife to bang it with.

  “Drink the bottle. Drink all of it.” Shannon swallowed a mouthful.

  Erin told Helary to turn off the loudspeakers.

  With the push of a button, the music stopped and the change in sound was like a change in creation. The silence scared the Bottle Bangers. Instead of making more noise, they made less.


  Erin told AutoZone to keep rolling. “Slowly, AutoZone, slowly, slower, slower, that’s it, thaaaat’s it. Slow.”

  She climbed out of the portal and dropped to her knees before Shannon. Erin was a fan and she knew that Shannon’s obligation to the world started with making each fan happy. As Shannon wrote in her autobiography, Erin’s all-time favorite book, “All good things start with one person loving another person and I love my fans, one fan at a time.”

  “You are Shannon Squier. Shannon Squier is not scared of smoke.”

  “Chisel Girl is afraid of smoke.”

  “Chisel Girl is here no more, only you, Shannon Squier, only you. Just get up and bang the bottle, that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to sing. You don’t have to dance.”

  “Fire,” said Shannon. “Run. You can smell it. Run. Can’t you smell it?”

  “Yes, so can everyone else. And you’re going to make them forget it, because you’re going to have fun now, Shannon Squier. Now you’re going to show them who you really are and, when you do, if you’ve forgotten who you are, they’ll tell you. That’s how this works, how it’s going to work. But you have to do this quickly, because the Drifters smell the fire, too.”

  Yes, the Drifters could, too, and the First and Second Wavers among them, immune to panic about fire, weren’t immune to panic about a Drifter stampede. The Drifters broke car windows, threw bottles at Shannon on the bus, looked for Shamblerinas to strip. The Shamblers made their humming sound as they massed together.

  Siouxsie Banshee watched the two women through her binoculars. “What are they doing?” she asked Redwings.

  “Sister, I don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t. But as I wrote in my old journal, six years ago, ‘Even the best of us hit the same pothole twice.’”

  Chief climbed down from the referee’s chair. “Sinatra, we’re going down to the street. Everyone else stay here.”

  Sinatra knew that Chief wasn’t used to Figueroa at night, and never without a swarm of protectors around him. “We stay here, Chief.”

  Which is what Chief wanted him to say.

  In the street around the bus, a wave of order passed with the sound; the Bangers around them felt it before Sinatra and Chief could see Shannon clearly, tapping the neck of her Tito’s bottle, one, two, three/four, one, two, three/four, with a slight increase in speed between the third and fourth beat and a tiny hesitation before the repeat.

  The Bangers and Drifters closest to her followed her beat exactly, and those next to them followed the precise pattern.

  Shannon shifted her weight while raising the bottle overhead and keeping the beat, and some banged their bottles with such ferocious approval that they shattered from exuberance instead of dread.

  A delirious Banger beat his own head with metal chopsticks. Every time his face turned in Erin’s direction she wanted him to stop and just look at her.

  She said, “Daddy.”

  Helary asked her, “Why’d you say ‘Daddy’?”

  “That’s my father. I know that face. It’s on the pictures of my father. He has my father’s face. That’s my father.”

  “He has a beard. I know the pictures of your father, and he doesn’t have a beard.”

  “His eyes, Helary. Stop the bus!”

  AutoZone knew that if he stopped, the crowd would make it impossible to move forward again. “No, I have to keep moving.”

  “But, my father. Daddy.”

  She watched him turn into the crowd, which closed around him with another surge toward the bus.

  She pulled herself through the hole in the stage and Shannon, even in her trance, separated from her performance and tapped her foot on the side of Erin’s head to force her back into the bus.

  “But I saw my father, Shannon. I saw him.”

  Shannon kicked her harder and Erin let go of the stage and fell back into the bus.

  Erin remembered that she was here to do a job. The feeling about her father dribbled away quickly. It wasn’t as though she remembered his qualities and his love. She remembered the face in the pictures and maybe it wasn’t her father. Her father didn’t have a beard.

  A Transport Service worker with a bottle of Grey Goose in his hand was close to the stage and offered her another drink. Shannon reached for the bottle and seemed to balance herself with her left foot pressed against the free air beyond the limit of the stage. She took another mouthful and raised the bottle to the sky like it was the head of a wolf she’d just killed with her chisel, like it was bleeding.

  She tapped the bottle with the spoon and then cupped her ear with a hand. The Bottle Bangers understood her. No woman in the center of their circles had ever banged the bottle in return.

  Shannon banged the bottle and danced and the crowd banged their bottles and danced, returning the old love and restoring something that Erin, so close to Shannon, felt first, as her concentration on the singer turned inward. Erin saw nothing but her mother and father lighting candles at the dining room table and then saw what others around the bus were seeing, as Shannon’s energy bounced from the stage into their frayed brains. She danced and gave one man an image of a girl in white in a yellow garden on a red blanket with a birthday cake and another man saw a dozen roses and a dog in the snow and a Driftette saw the Virgin of Guadalupe with her shining robe covered in the crude stars with their emanations of indulgence.

  Erin saw this in Drifter eyes. Each of them danced and remembered something, their concentration on Shannon also turning inward.

  If this is happening to me, thought Erin, it is happening to them. It was small at first and not even known to them as a memory but it was there.

  They were recovering torn pages of a shredded album that had been carried away by a hurricane four years ago. Erin slowed down to think about what Shannon was like when she was young and famous out of nowhere, nothing left to prepare because everything after that first ascension was going to be shocking and beautiful.

  The clumsiest Shamblers, doomed for the desert bus ride, felt the return of lost images, meager and majestic at once.

  And then above the sound of the rattling bottles, above the thick notes of the Burn, they heard the loudest sound in four years.

  Eckmann, Marci, Seth Kaplan, MD

  Eckmann told Marci to push the ladder away and close the door.

  As Seth watched Marci reach to do what she’d been told, a small idea unpacked itself between two breaths, as he thought about who he might have been before NK3, the kind of man he might have been, Seth Kaplan, MD, expert in pediatric oncology, a man who often had to tell the parents of his patients that their children would die soon and in pain. He thought about not just who he had been specifically but who else he had been like, his similarity to other doctors and the lives other doctors lived that had been like his. Of all the grievances he held against Eckmann for stealing him at gunpoint from the hospital inside the Fence, the largest part of his hatred for the man took the shape of the wife he once had and the children they once shared and the life they’d known in Los Angeles and the places they’d visited when they had time to spend the good money he earned. Now—on the plane, about to take off—this family mattered to him, not that he remembered them in any way. Of course it was too late for that, but doctors worked hard for their good lives, and he’d seen family pictures in most of the doctors’ offices he explored in the UCLA medical buildings. Here on the plane he wasn’t with anyone he had ever traveled with before, and it was that, more than his fear of the plane crashing, that inspired him to hold Marci’s hand before she could knock the ladder to the runway, too far to jump without hurting themselves.

  Marci and Seth looked at each other, and then touched the backs of their hands together, feeling each other’s warmth. Just that.

  “I’m going,” said Seth. “I don’t want to be with these people. Come with me.”

  “Do I lo
ve you?” Marci whispered. “Is that what this is?”

  Eckmann again told Marci to close the door.

  She went ahead of Seth, stepping down the ladder and dropping the last three rungs. She held it steady while Seth followed and then pulled the ladder down as Eckmann yelled to them: “What are you doing?”

  Marci took Seth’s hand and they ran past the wing.

  Saying nothing else, not calling after them this time, Eckmann sealed and locked the door. They saw Eckmann in the cockpit talk to Franz and Spig Wead.

  The jet rolled away on thunder.

  “Shouldn’t you be going faster?” asked Eckmann.

  Franz throttled back and stopped the plane.

  “Am I the pilot?” asked Franz.

  “You’re the pilot, yes. You’re the pilot.”

  “Do you think you can fly the plane?”

  “No. I can service the plane, but I can’t fly the plane.”

  “Then why are you asking me questions that you can’t answer?”

  “I’m being cautious.”

  “Because of you I almost died.”

  “I know that.”

  “And the doctor has run away. He doesn’t think I can fly the plane, does he?”

  “I didn’t talk to him. I don’t know why he left the plane.”

  “He left because he thinks we’re going to die. Maybe yes, maybe no. You want to go to Phoenix?”

  “First, yes.”

  “All the airports are in the computer. We’re going to fly over the ocean, turn around, and when we do, Spig here will tell the plane which airport you want to go to, and the plane will take us there at the speed and altitude I select. The plane can land automatically once we tell it where to go.”

  The jet was heavy with fuel and the holds were full and Eckmann thought, It won’t fly, it won’t fly, it won’t fly. Because his memory of flight had been erased.