by Brian Hodge
The destruction had been wanton and extremely violent, but also full of awful, cunning care. Chicken parts were rammed into coffeepots from the Mills, cigars jammed down the throats of dead kittens from the Pet Pantry, car seats lying on roofs, the front half of a large dog dangling from the shattered Citgo sign.
Forgetting their danger, the need to hurry, the little group halted on Main Street, staring in disbelief. Nancy West whispered again and again, “No, no, no.” Her husband had assumed the stolid pose that he took at accident sites. Chris picked up an Uncle Scrooge comic book from the street, rolled it up, and put it in his hip pocket. Joey said, “Candy, Mommy,” as he touched a Milky Way with his toe.
The destruction had been wrought with a tornado’s monstrous attentiveness. A crate of hair dryers had been jammed through the wall of the Excelsior Tower, and they jutted out of the brick surface like some mad work of conceptual art. Ellen’s papers and files blew about their feet, and she saw the body of her desk smashed into a counter full of black girdles with red accents from the Mode O’Day. The top of the desk lay on the street, its blotter still neatly in place. She walked closer and found a cabinet, its drawers thrown open and filled with something that looked like mucilage and smelled like wet human skin. She reached down, disgusted but wanting to reclaim her possessions.
Loi knocked her hand aside. “Don’t touch it! Nobody touch anything! No telling about diseases.”
They went up the middle of the street together, Bob and Brian behind Loi, Nancy and Ellen and the kids behind them. Father Palmer struggled along at the rear, his breath whistling through the twisted black stump that his nose had become.
Getting a heavy enough dose of the light, it seemed, started changes that did not stop. His left eye was fiercely veined, filmed over by a dense, milky membrane. The skin of the left side of his face was now made up of even thicker tiles, like a turtle’s back, and each was centered by a fat welt.
The priest’s breath hissed, his tongue went around and around, patrolling the fissures that were turning his mouth into a hole.
Absent a mirror, he remained innocent of his true condition. Touch told him that something was very wrong, but he couldn’t possibly have imagined just how awful it really was. Nobody could have; his disfigurement was so extreme that it was outside human experience.
A naturally cheerful man, he had even regained some of his good spirits. He’d decided that he had to keep up morale, so he sang as he walked, a catchy old Kingston Trio tune from back in the days when he had a guitar and something of a voice. “Back to back, belly to belly, well I don’t give a damn ’cause I done that already.” Again and again he bleated out the only verse that he remembered.
“For God’s sake, stop him singing the Zombie Jamboree,” Nancy West muttered as they passed the Citgo.
“Better be quiet, Father,” Bob said.
“I’m sorry. I suppose the Kingston Trio’s a little behind the times, isn’t it?”
Nancy peered up at the flashing sky and the tumbling angry clouds. “I hate you,” she shouted. “I hate you!”
“Mommy, Mommy,” Joey shrilled.
“How can you be so noisy?” Loi could walk through dry leaves in total silence. These people couldn’t be quiet on a flat street, with all their stomping and roaring.
Father Palmer went to Nancy. “The Lord is here,” he rasped, attempting to whisper. “The Lord is with us and helping us right now.”
Nancy turned bitterly away from him, her face reflecting disgust.
Loi worried that his infection might penetrate very deep. Was his soul being transformed along with his body? She watched him as he humped along leaking fluids, and thought he might bear more scrutiny than Bob did.
How quick her mind was to recapture the habits of that time long ago. She would have thought she had forgotten the sense of careful suspicion instilled in her by Wonmin Kyo, the stern, genial shadow who had been the political officer in her cadre. The men had mostly been entirely indifferent to her, hardly even aware of her existence. He had taught her to listen and report back.
Loi kept on walking, observing and assessing. Even as she scanned windows and roof lines, she evaluated the actions of each member of the group, especially those under suspicion.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” she said. “There’s no time for crying about this now.” She’d seen villages a thousand years old burned to ashes. People made a mistake being upset by ruins. The first thing was to stay alive, then find a place to start over.
Nobody heard her. Nancy was having hysterics because Father Palmer had embraced her, in a misguided effort at comfort. They were preoccupied with trying to calm her down, and to make the old priest understand why he couldn’t. His face grinned hideously, and Loi noticed a net of veins growing across his teeth, which now looked yellow and soft, like big pieces of chewing gum. Only shooting it to pieces had killed the living head of the poor Rysdale boy. She wondered when they would have to begin on the priest.
“Listen to me,” she said. Nancy was still sobbing, and now. Ellen was having trouble, too, crouching before the remains of her office desk, running her hands over it.
Loi raised her pistol and fired into the air.
The report froze them. “All right,” she said into the stunned silence. “No need for me to be quiet, you’re all so noisy.” She tucked the pistol back into her belt. “Now we go.”
They followed her up Main, toward the darkened bulk of Fisk’s Garage. “Get food,” she said as they passed the devastated ruin of the Indian Market grocery. “But be careful. Nothing with any strange substances on it.” The glue-like material was everywhere in and around the store, dripping from tumbled counters, off ruined crates of melons, thickest around burst cans.
A slick of melted frozen food covered the floor, making it treacherous to walk without slipping in melted spinach soufflé and breaded veal cutlet dinners. The fresh-vegetable bins had been upended, as if something had looked behind them for people. The meat locker was wide open, its door pushed up through the ceiling into the second floor, where Caroline Chipman had her art gallery. Like the rest of the food, the meat was ripped up and damaged, but not eaten.
Fisk’s Garage was devastated. It was getting dark and they had no flashlights, so they had to pick their way carefully among the glass shards and twisted ruins of yard tractors and all-terrain vehicles to get in.
Gas tanks had been pulled off, axles bent, tires torn to bits. The cylinders and spark plugs from engines that had been ripped open littered the floor around the remains of the vehicles.
“Let’s look in the back,” Loi said in a brisk voice. “Come on, there’s no time to lose.”
“No!” Bob was in front of her, barring the door.
She took out her pistol. I will do it if I have to, she thought, although it made her sick at heart.
They faced one another. “Loi, I have this very strong feeling that we shouldn’t go in there.”
“If we don’t find transportation, we’re going to get caught, Bob.”
“There’s something in there!”
Chris ran to his father. He looked from Loi’s face to the barrel of her gun, holding his dad around the waist. She felt tears come to the corners of her eyes. “Resolution is the soldier’s credo,” they had taught her.
“You have to let her through,” Ellen said.
“We’ll all be killed if we open that door.” Bob was sweating. In the gloomy half light, Loi could see that his eyes were glassy with fear.
“I am going to step forward and open the door,” Loi said.
Bob gathered up his wife and sons.
Loi threw the door open.
Father Palmer cried out, “Glory to God!”
There stood four beautiful Suzuki ATVs in picture-perfect condition, smelling faintly of gas and new paint, gleaming.
For a moment they were brightly illuminated by a distant flash of lightning, then long thunder rolled back and forth between the mountains.
&nb
sp; Behind her she heard sobbing. She turned to see Bob sinking to the floor, his shoulders heaving. He looked up at her. “You oughta shoot me,” he said miserably. “My God, I’m possessed.”
“From now on, no matter what you think is right, you trust me.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to be loyal to all of us. You’re my people. But I have these… feelings that make me want to do different.”
“Never trust yourself. Never!” She sighed. Maybe he would be all right and maybe he wouldn’t. She hoped for the best. For the moment, she saw another problem. “Where are the keys to these things?”
“We can hot-wire ’em in a second,” Chris announced, marching up to the closest one. In moments he had them running.
“Where did you learn that?” Nancy asked him.
“I forget.”
As Ellen tried the seat on one of the vehicles, Brian and Bob raised the door to the street. Although they were designed for only one rider, each must somehow take two.
“Just one damn minute, you people!”
They all turned. Standing in the shadows of the glassed-in office was the figure of Henry Fisk. He strode to the middle of the room. His scruffy jacket and John Deere cap made him look inoffensive, but he was carrying a weapon that Loi recognized instantly: an AK-47. She became very still.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hi, Henry,” Brian said mildly. “Just lookin’ over some of your machines.”
“The hell! You’re stealin’ ’em.”
So deep she felt more than heard it, Loi became aware of the sound of an engine coming in from the outside, loud enough to rise above the steady idling of the ATVs. It was heavy equipment. “We have to leave.”
“You sure are right about that, China girl.” Fisk turned to Brian. “Get your ass out of my sight. And take Shanghai Lil here with you.”
“Take it easy, Henry,” Bob said. “You calm down or I’ll have to put you under arrest.”
“You? You escaped from the psycho ward down at Ludlum Community. They’re looking for you from here to Buffalo!”
“They might have been. Not anymore. You know what’s happening around here, Henry, as well as we do.”
“No, that was a dream, that there. I thought it was real, I sure did. But it was a dream. I mean, Allie’s lying on the back porch with a bicycle pump sticking out of the side of her head. That’s not real, that’s a nightmare! And Junie and Charlie, they—they—oh, shit, Brian, tell me it’s a damn nightmare!”
“It’s real, Henry. Look at the priest.”
Fisk glanced at Father Palmer, then lowered his head. Loi knew how a man feels at such a moment of realization. She laid her hand on the butt of her pistol. He might well put down his weapon. Or he might shoot everybody in sight.
Outside, the engine note was now distinct. It was more than one machine, many more. “We can’t get away,” Fisk moaned. His head remained down, but his assault rifle was still pointing straight at them.
“We must try to, Henry!” He didn’t respond. Loi took a step toward him.
“Don’t you move, slant-eyes!”
Bob realized that Fisk was capable of killing her without a second thought. She was nothing to him, just a Chink. But not Bob West. Fisk would hesitate to shoot a man he’d known all of his life, a respected member of the community. Bob stepped in front of Loi. “You put that thing down, Henry. And stop calling her names.”
“Bob, I’m warning you.”
“Give me the gun, Henry.”
“Fuck you!”
“Henry—” Bob took another step.
The AK-47 clicked nastily. Bob could see a vein pulsing in Fisk’s neck. He was about to shoot. Another second and they were all going to be dead. He spoke quickly. “You remember that yard tractor I bought from you last summer, the Toro? It’s running damn good, Henry.” He took another step closer.
The building shook a little. Dust filtered down from the ceiling. That meant only one thing: action in the ground underneath. “Henry, we have to hurry!”
“That was nothing! It was nothing!”
“Was Allie nothing? Is Father Palmer nothing? It’s all real, Henry. Give me the gun.”
Fisk hesitated. Bob approached him. “Hand it over, Henry.”
Behind them in the dark somebody made a protracted spitting sound. “My teeth,” Father Palmer hissed, pronouncing it “teess.” He’d tried to chew some beef jerky he’d picked up along the way. His attempts to drag the mess out of his mouth made a noise like a child playing in wet clay. Henry Fisk watched this, appalled. “What happened to him?”
“Got hit up close by that light.”
“Purple light? I seen that. Made me feel funny. Made Junie and Charlie… made ’em worse than him.” The priest let out a slopping noise, snorted. “I’ll get you a towel, Father.” Putting down the rifle, he went over to a sink the mechanics used, and brought the priest a roll of paper towels.
Bob picked up the weapon. Loi came close to him. She held out her hands.
“I can do this, Loi.”
“I want to trust you, but I’m not sure I can.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
She shook her head.
“Then you’d better leave it with me. Somebody could get hurt.”
“An AK is easy to use.” She grasped the weapon.
They both held it. “Loi, I know something’s been done to me. But I can control it. We started this thing as a team, you and I. Let it stay that way.”
The floor cracked from one end of the room to the other. More dust sifted down. A growing vibration told of movements beneath the earth.
Loi wasted no time. “We go now.”
They got on the bikes, and after a short struggle with the seating arrangements, moved off into the dark. Fisk jogged along behind them nattering about his loss.
2
The street was a gray strip between the shadows of buildings. Loi was sure she’d heard machinery, but it was nowhere in sight. Then her quick eyes detected movement. “There are vehicles out there,” she said in a voice just loud enough to be heard over their own engines. They were coming straight up Main from the direction of the Towayda Road. To escape them, it would be necessary to either go back toward Mound and Queen’s Road where they’d come from, or ride out into the woods.
At first the others saw nothing. Finally Bob made out the slowly moving shadows. They were so wide and low that he didn’t at first understand what they were. But when he saw them clearly, the shape became familiar. “Those are Humvees.”
They were absolutely dark. Loi watched carefully. “I count six. Everybody be quiet. Get ready to move out fast.”
Bob was astonished at her. “But that’s the U.S. Army!”
Suddenly Loi was behind him with her hand over his mouth. “So it seems. But we must be careful. Do you agree?” She pressed the flat side of her gun against his back.
Only when Bob nodded was he released.
Ellen was the first to see the lights that had appeared at the other end of the street. “Oh Jesus, here comes a car.”
They all looked. “I think that’s Judge terBroeck,” Brian said. “That’s his car.” It was coming up from Mound Road. Loi saw that they were now trapped between the car and the slowly advancing Humvees. Their only escape route was to go through the alley, across the yards of the houses behind it, and up onto the ridges.
There was a flicker of purple light from the front of the lead Humvee.
Nancy started to walk out into the street. Loi put her hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be a fool.”
“Look, those are Humvees, a la the Gulf War. This is the American Army and we’re saved.” She looked to her husband for support.
“Listen to Loi,” he said.
“Get back. You do it.”
“But those are our people!”
“We cannot know that.”
She came back.
“You’ve never been in a war,” Loi said. “We
have no room for mistakes.” She paused. “Do you see the foot soldiers?”
Nancy looked. “No. There aren’t any… are there?”
“There are nine soldiers coming down the street hugging the walls. They’re in full chemical protective dress. They’re wearing some kind of night vision equipment on their faces. They are heavily armed.”
“I don’t even see them!”
“Whisper! Always!”
“Go easy on her, Loi.”
“No, Bob, not if she’s taking these risks.” She looked out across the dark. “They are in front of the drugstore now. Walking parallel to the Humvees.”
“I see them,” Nancy muttered.
To Ellen they looked like robots, with huge mechanical eyes and glistening black metal where their faces ought to be. Something about their movements was wrong. They came slowly along, looking into doors and windows. The Humvees moved along ahead of them.
In a matter of minutes, the soldiers were going to be peering down this alley with their light-amplification goggles.
Loi gathered the group around her. She barely breathed her words. “Get on the ATVs. When the Humvees are past, we go out quick. We’ll have to hope we surprise the soldiers when we pass them. We’ll go as far as Mound, then turn south into the woods. Can everybody get his engine started?”
Quickly, Chris taught his father and Brian which wires to touch together. Ellen had no trouble, and Nancy had already seen him do it. Henry Fisk bristled but said nothing.
As they came closer together, the lights of the judge’s car illuminated the first of the Humvees. It was a dead, dark black, the blackest color Loi had ever seen.
The first Humvee passed the alley, then the second.
With a squeal of brakes, the third stopped, neatly blocking the entrance.
They were trapped. They shrank back into the dark between two buildings. There remained for them only a narrow view of Main, illuminated by the lights of the judge’s car.
He came into the lights. He was emaciated, far more so than he had been even two days ago. His dark blue double-breasted suit hung on his frame like a slack sail.