Fire Birds

by Shane Gregory

  “Well, we didn’t do it,” Christine said. “Is that what you’re saying? Are you accusing us?”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t an accusation, just an observation.”

  “Anyway, what’s so wrong with beheading goons or collecting yellow cars?” Grant said.

  “Nothing,” I replied. I looked at Sara, but she didn’t look up from her bowl.

  “I have some more seeds left,” I said, changing the subject. “I’ve been saving them so I can do a second planting. I was thinking about starting on that today or tomorrow. I’d be happy to show you how if you’ve never planted a garden before.”

  “What’s there to know?” Christine said. “You stick the seeds in the ground, and they grow.”

  “Yeah, bro, basic stuff.”

  “I think it’s Bruce,” Sara said.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at her.

  “Who’s Bruce?” Grant and I said in unison.

  “A guy I met in Tennessee a few weeks ago. He had a sword, and I’ve seen him cut off heads.”

  I glanced over at Grant, and his face mirrored my own confusion.

  “Like a ninja sword,” Sara added as if that explained everything.

  I looked at her again, then at Christine. Christine had returned to her meal. She knew exactly what Sara was talking about but was feigning ignorance.

  “Bruce?” Grant said again.

  “Tell them his whole name, Sara,” Christine said.

  “It’s Bruce Lee.”

  Christine snickered, but quickly stifled it.

  “Are you shitting me?” Grant said. “Babe, I...” he stopped in midsentence and his brow furrowed, then he looked at me. “Dude…Bruce Lee?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Sara rolled her eyes and exhaled loudly like a teenage girl trying to explain something to her parents.

  “Judy and I were driving down to The Gulf. We met this guy north of Memphis. He was really sweet at first. He was kind of geeky and boring. He shared some food with us. He told us he was with a group of men that were headed west, but I never saw them. He drove down with us even though he had been going the other way. It took us three or four days, because a lot of the roads were jammed with cars and we had to switch cars and backtrack. We got separated from him in Hattiesburg when we went into a Wal-Mart there. I thought he might have been killed or maybe rejoined his original group.”

  “But his name, babe,” Grant said. “Come on…I mean…for real?”

  “That’s his name,” Sara said. “I saw his driver’s license. He was all into martial arts, but I don’t know if he was really trained or just pretending. I don’t know if his parents gave him that name or if he changed it to that because he liked martial arts and comic books so–”

  “Why would he be here?” I said, getting impatient. I didn’t give a damn about his name.

  “I told him I was from Clayfield. He was clingy. He was just this geeky guy. He got me that leather suit. He wanted me to wear it for him. He said I would look like Batwoman. It was a creepy fantasy or something.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “But you wore the suit. I saw you in it. We all saw you in it. You told me that suit–”

  “He sounds like a total douchebag stalker,” Grant interrupted and reached across the table, taking Sara’s hand. “Babe, did you do it with him? I won’t be mad, I just want the truth.”

  Sara pushed his hand away, “Stop it, Grant. This is serious.”

  Suddenly, I wanted to know the answer to that question, too…probably more than Grant.

  “For all he knew, you were going to Biloxi. Why would he come here? What about the others he was with? Remember Corndog? Remember he was with some bad men, and they weren’t too far away.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But the yellow cars and the heads…I think he might be trying to let me know he’s around.”

  We were all quiet for a few seconds. The only sound was Christine slurping her soup. Then Grant spoke up, “So what? So there’s a guy in town that has a thing for Sara. Who doesn’t have a thing for her, right? I say we forget him.”

  “I would agree,” I said, “but he’s been careless. He’s been leaving the doors open on houses. Those houses are our main source of supplies until they run out. I think he burned down the hardware store, too. He can’t be doing that. What if he brings others here that are worse than him? I can’t allow it. This is where I live.”

  “As soon as the goons leave, we’ll find him and you can kick his ass,” Grant said.

  “Leave him alone,” Sara said. “He’s unstable, I think.”

  Grant stared at her blankly.

  “You did it with him, didn’t you?”

  “Stop it, Grant,” Sara said.

  Grant grinned as if it had suddenly turned into a game. “You did! You totally did it with him.” Then he looked at me. “Bro, she did it. She–“

  “Shut up,” I said. “It was before she met you, so why should you care?”

  “True,” he said, “but you should care.”

  “I said shut up.”

  Sara got up and left the table. I watched her leave the room but didn’t get up to chase her. Christine got up and wiped her mouth on a napkin.

  “I’ve got some goons to kill, boys,” she said. “Good luck sorting out Sara’s trail of broken hearts.” She walked over to the counter and grabbed a can of warm beer. “Don’t be concerned about any of my ex-boyfriends showing up. All the good ones are dead. I’m pretty sure the rest are goons. Fuckers. We’ll all be goons eventually.”

  She left the room, and I heard the back door open then slam shut.

  “Bro, Sara did the dirty with Bruce Lee.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Sara spent the rest of the day outside picking berries and wild greens. The only interaction I had with her was to show her where to find the plants. She didn’t want to talk. She seemed angry or embarrassed. I stayed in the garden, but I was distracted by my thoughts, so I didn’t get a lot of work done. The constant gunfire didn’t help either. I had decided that I would put a stop to the shooting after that day. I wanted some quiet, and I knew both women would be winding down their cycles soon. Hopefully, the zombies would lose interest in a few days and leave.

  CHAPTER 17

  The next morning, after breakfast, I was sitting alone at the kitchen table looking over my to-do list for the day. I hadn’t slept well the night before. It bothered me that in the space of a couple of months, Sara had already been with two other men. I wondered if there were others that I would find out about later. If it had been Jen, it might have come as less of a surprise, but this was Sara. I didn’t expect her to be like that. I kept trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. She had thought I was dead. She had been upset, and she was young; I shouldn’t judge her too harshly.

  Christine and Sara came in the back door carrying buckets and heading toward the stairs.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Just flushing the toilet upstairs,” Sara said.

  “Is that water?”

  “Yeah,” Christine said. “We have to have water to flush. So?”

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked. “You didn’t get it from the cistern, did you?”

  Sara set her bucket on the floor. “Yeah, why?”

  “Well, I’d prefer you leave the cistern water for drinking and washing. I always use the pond water for flushing.”

  “But the pond is way out in the field,” Christine said. “We’d have to climb the fence and everything.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I made the composting toilet. I even moved it out to the barn so you could have privacy.”

  “You can’t seriously expect us to use that thing,” Christine said.

  Then Grant came in carrying another bucket. Some water sloshed out when he stopped next to Sara.

  “What’s going on?” he said. “Do you need me to carry your bucket for you?”

>   “No,” Christine said. “He doesn’t want us to use the cistern water for the toilets.”

  Grant turned and looked at me. “But they need to be flushed.”

  “Use the pond water for the house toilets or use the composting toilet in the barn,” I said flatly. “We’re going to need the clean water for other things.”

  “This water isn’t really that clean,” Christine said. “The pond is too far, and I’m not shitting in a bucket.”

  I had endured Christine’s surliness for days because I knew she was hurting over Julio, but I was ready for it to end. I stood abruptly, my chair scraping the floor. I had their attention.

  “We’re not voting here,” I said in an even tone. “You are guests. I’ve let you eat my food, use my ammunition, and drink my booze. You don’t pick up after yourselves, there’s trash everywhere, and you’re making noise all day. Going out to the pond for water isn’t asking too much.”

  “Guests?” Sara said. “Really? You almost sound like my dad. Are you going to give us the as-long-as-you’re-under-my-roof speech?”

  “I think he just did,” Christine said. “I wonder who he was calling ‘trash.’ You know, this is why I don’t like living with old people.”

  I chuckled. “I’m hardly old.”

  “You kinda are, bro.”

  I looked at Sara for support, but the anger in her eyes was obvious. She had no right to be angry with me. She was the one in the wrong.

  “I suppose I would look old to a bunch of immature kids barely out of high school.” Then I looked Sara in the eyes. “I’ll stop sounding like your dad as soon as you start acting like a grownup.”

  The moment the words came out, I knew they were a mistake, but I couldn’t apologize or I would have looked weak. Sara was stunned.

  Christine looked over at Sara. “What an asshole, right?” Then she turned to me. “Fuck you. I’m tired of living like this. I’m going up to flush the toilet.”

  “I use the RV toilet all the time,” Grant said. “You two can use it if you want.”

  “The waste tank on the RV will fill up,” I said. “It’s no different than using the toilet in the barn. I’m trying to keep us alive. What if we run out of water?”

  “Yeah,” Sara said, coolly. “We get it. We might be kids, but we aren’t idiots.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Please don’t act this way. We only have so much clean water. I don’t want–”

  “Shh,” Grant said. “Listen. I think the plane is back.”

  We all got quiet and looked up at the ceiling. I heard it. Christine put her bucket on the floor and pushed past Grant to go out the back door. Grant followed her, Sara after Grant, and I went out last.

  It came in right over the treetops like it had the day before, except it came from the north this time. When it got over the back pasture, something small, white and square-ish tumbled from it to the ground.

  “Did you see that?” Grant said. “He dropped something.”

  The aircraft flew over us and the house with a roar and then continued south.

  “Somebody go pick it up,” Sara said.

  Christine laughed, “I don’t think so. It’s probably a bomb or a body part in a box.”

  “He’s not like that,” Sara said.

  “So you think it is this Bruce guy?” I asked.

  Sara shrugged, “Who else could it be?”

  “He’s coming back.”

  It roared over again, over the pasture, over the woods, and was gone. We waited to see if it would return, but it did not. I started walking toward the fence.

  “What are you doing?” Grant said.

  “I’m going to see what he dropped.”

  “Don’t you want to wait for it to do something?”

  I stopped and gave him a quizzical look, “Like what?”

  “I dunno...like detonate or something?”

  “Don’t you have a toilet to flush?” I asked. Then I turned my back on the three of them, grinned, and started walking again.

  It wasn’t as easy to find as I thought it would be. I walked around in circles in the high grass several times before I finally saw it. It was a white box a little larger than a brick. There was no writing on the outside, just a UPS shipping label and a big bar code. I picked it up. The address on the label was to a Rebecca Tanner of Clayfield from Amazon.com.

  “What did you order, Rebecca?” I said and shook the box.

  I looked over to the others. They were probably waiting to see if I would be blown up. They were still standing in the backyard next to the well house watching me.

  The well.

  I should have had a generator on the property so we could have pumped the cistern full of clean well water during this time. We could have also had working toilets. Then we would not have had that argument earlier. Maybe we could have watched some movies, too. That would have improved everyone’s mood. I was feeling bad about what I had said to Sara, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I suppose I was old. When I thought back to when I had been in my early 20s, a guy my age would have seemed old. A guy my age would have had kids, possibly kids not much younger than they.

  “Dammit,” I said.

  I pulled out my pocketknife and used it to cut the tape on the box. There was a part of me that fully expected to find a severed finger or penis inside on a bed of cotton. Instead, I found a hotel room Gideon bible and a 2-way radio wrapped in months-old newspapers with a note.

  The note said:

  “Stop shooting. You can’t kill them all. The noise will keep the sick people around. Be quiet, and I will draw them away with another noise. Might take some time. Just be quiet and go inside. You can talk to me on channel 1 if I’m in range. I will let you know when. Don’t waste the battery. Listen to your radio in your car or house. 94.1 FM. –Dan”

  “Who the hell is Dan?” I said to myself.

  I looked back at the others and they continued to stare at me. I grinned again. Then I screamed like I was dying and danced around. The three of them screamed with me, and Sara ran toward the fence. I fell to the ground, laughing. Sara ran upon me and stopped when she found me unharmed.

  “Jerk!” she yelled.

  “Come down here,” I said.

  She scowled down at me then took a step forward and stopped.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Stop being mad at me.”

  She shook her head and looked at the sky. I could tell she was fighting a smile.

  “Come on,” I said. “I have a message from our special red airplane.”

  “What does it say? Is it Bruce?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I’m going to need a kiss for that information.”

  She dropped to her knees, bent over me, and kissed me deeply. I felt like I went someplace else. I felt like forever happened.

  “Nice,” I whispered when she pulled away.

  “What does the message say?”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “It does not.”

  “No,” I said with eyes closed still trying to return to myself. “I love you. I’m sorry for what I said. You are not a child. You are more woman than any woman I’ve ever known.”

  She leaned in close to me and said, “And you are more of a man than I’ve ever known. All the rest are just boys. Now tell me what it says.”

  I took another deep breath and sat up. Somehow the world seemed brighter. I looked over at her.

  “What does the message say?” she said again.

  I offered her the box, and she took it. She took out the bible and the handheld radio. Then she read the note.

  “94.1 FM? That’s 94 Smooth. Who’s Dan?”

  CHAPTER 18

  The four of us went to the RV. Grant, Christine and I got as comfortable as we could on the tiny pullout furniture in the living area. Sara cranked the vehicle, turned on the air conditioning, and tuned the radio.

  “Don’t you remember? The announcer would say, ‘Grooving with ninety-four smoooooth,’” she said,
deepening her voice.

  “I listened to the oldies station,” I said. “850 AM.”

  “AM?” Grant said making a face. “Dude.”

  “The station gave the museum free ad spots, so I promised them I’d leave it on at work,” I said with a shrug. “I liked it.”

  Then a voice came through the radio and silenced us. It was not the voice of a professional announcer. It was nasally with a heavy western Kentucky accent, and the cadence was annoying.

  “…five o’clock in the afternoon. This is a recordin’. I am one of a group of survivors livin’ in Clayfield, Kentucky. We make live broadcasts on this station most days at five o’clock in the afternoon. This is a recordin’. I am one of a group of survivors–”

  Sara turned the radio off and looked back at us.

  “What time is it now?” Christine asked.

  “Just after eight,” I said.

  “The 94 Smooth station isn’t far from the Grace County Airport,” Sara said.

  “Let’s turn on the walkie-talkie and talk to him,” Christine said.

  “No,” I said, putting my hand on the radio that was clipped to my belt. “We’ll listen to the broadcast this afternoon first. Maybe he’ll tell us the right time. I wouldn’t want to drain the batteries for nothing.”

  “He must think we’re morons to send that note to us,” Grant said. “Everything he said in there was stuff people had to learn the first week.”

  “He’s the moron for not realizing how obvious he was being,” Christine said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m glad there are more survivors, and I’m glad they have a pilot, but it’s not like we need to be rescued. They probably need us more than we need them. I’ve been hoping to secure a block or two in Clayfield. Maybe now that all of you are here and if this group will help, we can do that.”

  “So it’s ‘we’ now?” Christine said. “Are you afraid you’re going to lose Sara to the red baron or something?”

  “More like redneck baron,” Grant said with a snort.