by Sam Winston
* * *
Just a thin gray column going straight up into the air. Creeping upward into a heavy atmosphere as still as the grave, and dissipating as it went.
Weller spun the wheel and took the car down into a gully and across an unfenced field toward a fenced one. The car bounding over ruts and Weller not slowing it in the least. Never lifting his foot from the gas. Hoping that that fragile little spare held out but not actually caring if it blew because he’d just keep going on the rim. Everybody hanging on.
The fence wasn’t new and it wasn’t in good or even fair condition. It was rusted through everywhere and painted over. Salvage of a sort that Weller recognized. A battered PharmAgra badge stolen from someplace else and held on by string. Whatever was behind it hadn’t been fenced in by PharmAgra but by Patel and her people, which meant they were close now. The gray column of smoke maybe a half-mile away as the crow flies but farther than that by the way they had to go. Along the fence until they found what looked like the weakest spot and straight through without so much as slowing down and along the culvert he remembered to where it vanished under the earth and then straight.
Keeping an eye on the column of smoke and navigating toward it as it began to move. The draft from a rising helicopter buffeting it and dissipating it in places and in other places making it whip snakelike. It was an earthbound tornado and it made Weller think of those pictures on the movie film he’d found in Greensboro. The little girl and her dog and the danger she was in. Watching the smoke waver and watching the helicopter rise before him.
He looked at Janey. “There’s your second chance,” he said.
“There were two,” she said.
“Get them one at a time.”
“But there’s just the one signal. This one, I guess. Where do you suppose the other one is?”
“Down, maybe,” he said. “Maybe it hit a different bridge or something. They were cutting it close. Playing around. Bunch of yahoos.”
“Maybe they stayed behind to meet the convoy.”
“Either way, there’s just the one right here to worry about now.” Pressing forward. The car bouncing along the margin of the field, toward the place where Patel’s people lived underground. Whatever it was that was burning, it wasn’t tobacco. The fire was too small, too confined.
A burst of gunfire came from up ahead, preceded by a flash of light from the helicopter. Janey stood up and pushed her head and shoulders out through the sunroof and said it’s one of the houses. The underground houses. Smoke’s coming from the roof and somebody just tried to climb out and they shot him. They shot him coming out.
Weller wanted to look over his shoulder at Penny but the car was going too fast. He could count on Liz and he had to. The helicopter swooping this way.
Janey said they hadn’t even let him come out, and Weller grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. She sat and breathed hard and wiped dirt from her eyes and said they were laughing up there. She’d made out two men in the helicopter and they were laughing at what they’d done. Up there in the sky enjoying this.
* * *
Somebody closed the sunroof as if that would help. Janey back in her seat working the scanner and Weller looking out the top of the windshield over the tops of his glasses and that synchronized beeping starting up between the scanner and the satellite phone. The beeping and the lights that meant she was in.
Janey said, “All right.” She said, “Let’s see how much they enjoy this.”
Penny pointed out her window and said, “Oh no.”
“Oh no what?” asked her mother. Reaching to pull her close but Penny holding onto the windowsill.
“The schoolhouse,” she said. One hand on the sill and one hand pointing toward the helicopter as it veered eastward and away. Its black body the body of an insect and the men within it insects too in bulletproof vests and curved helmets and glinting goggles that witnessed more than men should.
Weller kept on toward the clearing and the smoke, which was growing thicker now, asking Janey if she could take the helicopter down now before it went any farther. Wondering in his heart if the men in the helicopter had seen the little white building and thought they’d have some fun, or if they knew from Penny’s map that it was a real schoolhouse. Where there would be children. The children of these people they’d come here to harm for pay. But not saying that. Just asking if she could bring the helicopter down, which was a ridiculous question because she was trying. Paging back and forth between two screens of crawling data and blinking schematics and zeroing in on something he couldn’t make out for the movement of the car and keying in some command sequence. Looking out the window and back at the scanner and saying come back here, you. Deleting the command sequence and paging between screens again and cursing as the signal from the helicopter faded out. Hitting the scanner with her fist and saying go after him Weller we don’t have enough signal but Weller couldn’t go after him any more than he could fly.
* * *
The men in the helicopter must have had grenades.
The schoolhouse went up almost directly behind the car, back where nobody but Weller could see what had happened because he had the benefit of the mirrors. The sound was a muffled boom that blended in with everything else and shook the earth they were bouncing over and then flames leapt up and more smoke. The helicopter disappearing behind the ragged black plume of it and not coming back.
Between the seatbelt and her mother’s arms Penny wasn’t protected but felt that way. Sobbing into her mother’s breast. Not even saying what she thought. None of them saying.
They reached the clearing and Weller stopped the car. He told the rest of them to wait. Wait and don’t look at what he had to do, there was no need to look, and he got out and sprinted to the underground house where the smoke was coming up. The humped-up roof of it gaping open in the middle and the tobacco plants on top smoking and the steel beams underneath exposed and scorched. Another grenade. On the far side of the humped-up roof he found the door and it was half open and there was a man or the body of a man crumpled just inside it. His clothes burned and his hair burned and his back full of bullets. Bullets hammered into the dirt all around him like things planted. Like things planted that would never grow.
Weller dropped to his knees when he recognized the body. The tall young man who taught the children at the schoolhouse. If he were here, they must be here too. This late in the afternoon they’d be done. He turned back toward the car and waved his hand knowing that despite his having told them not to look they’d be looking anyhow, and when he saw that they were looking he gave them a thumbs-up. Signaling that all was well. Thinking they could draw from it what they might. The three of them started moving in the car and he shook his head and showed them the same hand palm out, warning them off. All might be well but they’d better stay put.
He pulled the man free and laid him down among the tobacco plants and went down the ramp himself. Two or three families down there cowering. Hidden beneath the dining table and beneath the benches along the walls and beneath the beds. Light shone down from the hole in the roof but it didn’t illuminate anything for illumination wasn’t the order of the day. The air was clogged with cinders and dirt and smoke that choked off the light and swirled in it. Settling the way death settles. Children crying and the low murmur of parents comforting them and comforting themselves for it was all they had. Each other.
Weller called out to them. He didn’t identify himself because what difference would it make. A couple of faces poking out from the shadows and a couple of gleams of recognition. He said the helicopters were gone but they weren’t gone forever and when they came back they’d bring worse. These were just spotters, and they’d be back with a whole army. Black Rose soldiers here to wipe out their crops for money and kill any one of them that got in their way. Maybe just for fun. Like this right here. This grenade they’d tossed just because they could. Waving his arm in the thick dustlight and stirring it up and coughing. Saying grab anything you ca
n’t live without and let’s go.
He took the linens from a bed by the ramp and went back up to the door and out into the sun. Drew a sheet over the schoolteacher. Told him he was sorry he hadn’t gotten here sooner.
* * *
Regardless of what her mother said, Penny burst from the car the instant she caught sight of the children. Leaving the door open behind her and flying across the tobacco field to meet three of them who’d come up the ramp from the bombed house and then flying to meet two more just emerging from the next house over. A brother and sister coming up into the sun and blinking, as astonished to see her as they were astonished to be alive at all. Figures from a dream spying a figure from a dream. Not one of them looked at the quilt or what was under it. Her father was at some remove, sending other men off to other doorways and ducking down himself into the last one. Getting halfway down and then coming up again and signaling to Liz and Janey in the car. Come.
Patel looked up from her desk as if she had last seen him just a moment ago. As if she’d known he would appear at the very moment of their greatest extremity, and as if she didn’t entirely need him to find a way through it. “I can’t say how they found us,” she said, “but we can hold out. We have to hold out.” Not even looking at the stores and samples and equipment spread beneath the light of a gas lamp that someone had piped from the main in Weller’s absence. Inspired by what he’d done and extending it. The way people will, given a chance.
“It’s worse than you think,” he said. He had a pillowcase and a folded-over patchwork quilt from the bed in the other house and he started filling them. Samples in glassine envelopes. Damp bagged vegetable matter that smelled like death and life at the same time. Telling her as he worked the same thing he’d told the others, how the helicopters would come back and they’d bring an army with them and they’d destroy everything. Janey and Liz bursting down the stairs and Weller saying this is Dr. Patel. Strip the beds. Pack up what she tells you and don’t take no for an answer.
Patel stood up. “Where would you have us go?”
“Anywhere. North.” Opening the freezer and glad to see that it was still working even though it wouldn’t stay working for long. “Someplace other than here, is all.” Thinking if you could do this once you could do it again. Start over. Build everything up from nothing.
“Not north,” Patel said, going to Liz and beginning the process of take this, don’t take that, take this. “The climate is better to the south, if anything.”
“South, then. Fine. South it is.”
“Where?”
“You said there were others. Other people doing this.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“The runners will still be out there. They’ll know.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong. There’s a whole army coming and we want to get out of their way.”
“But if you’re wrong?”
“If I’m wrong we’ll come back. No harm done.”
“We.” A statement and a question. Patel was the one who said it, but she was speaking for everyone.
Weller was leaning over into the freezer, chipping away at ice. “I thought the chances of saving this stuff would be better if all of us pitched in. We’ll all go south if we’re going south and we’ll all see a little bit of the world we haven’t seen. Janey knows some people down there, don’t you, Janey? In Spartanburg. They’ve got tomatoes down there like you wouldn’t believe.”
But Janey didn’t hear. Janey was gone.
* * *
She’d heard the sound of rotors, and she’d be damned if that helicopter would get away from her again. Coming up the ramp into the sun with the air smelling of smoke and a high hammering everywhere. The unnerving and unplaceable sound of a helicopter you can’t see yet. She ran to the car. If she couldn’t see the helicopter she probably couldn’t raise it on the scanner but you never knew.
There were people out. Adults and children both, with sacks and backpacks and bed linens tied up into bundles. Some of them sitting patiently on their belongings and some of them pacing along the tobacco rows or ducking down into their underground houses for something they’d missed and some of them just standing still, watching the sky. Watching Janey watch the sky. She hollered at them to go down. Go down below where it was safe. She’d stay with the car. She had something she had to do. She watched them go and she thought how they’d never get away from here if those helicopters were still circling. Thinking they could gather up what they needed while she rode shotgun. She started the engine and the scanner fired up and she opened the sunroof again to look at the sky. It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t see enough. She unspooled the cables from the scanner and got out of the car and stood alongside it. Seeing everything now. Seeing that she was all alone up here, and glad of it.
The hammering kept up and it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular because it was coming from everywhere. Janey looking from the scanner to the sky and back again. The hammering growing louder and more oppressive and one or two faces appearing in doorways as people came to look. Other doorways closing up. People withdrawing and lowering the doors after them. Weller sticking his head out, though, and Penny squeezing up in front of him.
Janey looked over toward them and he said, “You be careful.”
She said, “I will.”
Penny piped up. “You be careful.” Like father like daughter.
Janey said, “Don’t worry.” But the words didn’t make it back to Penny because they were drowned out. Drowned out not by one of those little bumblebee helicopters she’d been expecting, but by the real thing. That one last Black Rose Chinook. It came in low over the trees and the fences, as slow and stately in its forward movement as a battleship or an undersized planet or death itself. Ungainly and unappeasable.
Weller saw the flamethrowers on the belly of it and he knew. An array of black tubes spitting fire. Warmed up in hell and staying hot now for the real event to come.
Napalm.
He hollered at Janey to get clear, but she didn’t hear him. She was working the scanner and dust was flying everywhere and clods of dirt and metal and loose fencing mingled with it because the pressure of the Chinook’s passage was enough to uproot a swath of tobacco twenty yards wide. Just tearing a slice in the earth without even touching it. She had been able to see the pilot in the other helicopter, the little helicopter that was nothing compared to this, but she couldn’t see whoever was controlling this one. He was faceless, a machine inside a machine. She shielded her eyes against the dust and looked into the car to see the lights on the satellite phone blinking in time with the display on the scanner. Meaning she was in. The Chinook almost overhead but at least she had enough signal. It was close enough and she wasn’t going to lose it this time. Not this one and not this time. She didn’t hear Weller shouting at her. Shouting at her to get clear, not to risk it. Not to risk bringing that thing down right here with the load it was carrying.
He knew he couldn’t reach her. He knew because he couldn’t hear his own voice. He couldn’t hear anything as he watched her work the keys on the scanner and as he doubled himself over Penny’s small body in the hole and said close your eyes, honey. Wrapping himself around her entirely. Offering himself up to withstand the worst that the world might have in store for this his only child.
The helicopter went down in slow motion, the same way it had come. A ponderous black blot moving through the air and battering it. The sound of it growing unsteady and beginning to wobble and smoke coming from someplace it shouldn’t have been coming from. The two great rotors going out of synch and the whole machine staggering as if it had struck some invisible obstacle. The ground itself seeming almost to draw up to it. As if the big black Chinook and the earth itself possessed equal gravity, but only one of them could endure.
Only Janey saw it go. The arc of its passing overshot her by a hundred yards or more, and when the helicopter finally struck ground the drums
of jellied gasoline in its belly burst and caught fire. The scorched earth that Black Rose had had in mind from the beginning but not quite. Janey dropping the scanner and covering her face with her arms and then falling to her knees. Doubling over and feeling the heat of the burning Chinook on the back of her neck. Breathing slow and deep to collect herself and then deciding she was ready to go on. Standing up.
Down in the hole, Weller began to unfold himself as well. The ruin of the helicopter a good distance off to the north. The world silent, and the way ahead clear.
He loosened his hold on Penny. “Open your eyes,” he said.
*
The Author
Sam Winston is on the web:
Web site: http://www.whatcameafter.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@whatcameafter
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorSamWinston
Now, a special bonus for readers of What Came After: The opening of Sachin Waikar’s In the Jungle of Black and Yellow — a vengeance thriller reviewers have called “terrific,” “Tarantino-like,” “wonderfully dark,” and “beautifully crafted.”
In the Jungle of Black and Yellow is available here for your Kindle.
0. Now
In a dark and nameless city, Sengupta drives a cab.
1. Now
Tonight the taxi’s hood gleams black, waxed by starlight. When Sengupta reaches to turn off the FOR HIRE light, he sees the figure. It’s slouched at the curb’s edge, small against spires and storefronts. A woman or girl, her hand half-raised, as if she’s unsure what she needs or where she’s going.