Everything is Broken

by John Shirley

  Russ shook his head. He felt a rock-steady sureness about it. He had to go along. He’d thought about it most of the time he’d sat there with Pendra. “It’s not a macho thing. I just have to do it, that’s all there is. You can let me get your back, for once.”

  Dad’s mouth had been opened to object but that last remark stopped him short. He chewed his lower lip, and Russ noticed that he hadn’t shaved in a couple days; that there were deeply etched circles under his eyes.

  Finally his father shrugged and said, “You want to go, fine. But, son—you haven’t got any training with guns . . . ”

  “Neither have you.”

  “That’s not exactly true. There were times. I did some target shooting. I went hunting a couple of times.”

  “You?”

  “Just to experience it. Didn’t like it. But I got so I could hit something.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “What I’m saying is, we’re not going to give you a gun. You don’t have time to learn to use it. In the middle of the night, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ll take along a knife, Dad, whatever. I’ve got a buck knife in my coat right here. And I’ll be an extra pair of eyes. And I’m younger than you guys—I might be able to go on ahead of you when we get past them. Get help sooner. I can sure as hell use a cell phone.”

  His Dad took a long breath, and let it out with a soft, extended whistle. “Leave a note for Pendra. And—let’s go.”

  His weariness was gone, and he didn’t feel the cold. A crowd of blue-white stars watched them clamber through the chaparral of the hillside, following Brand, who had a few supplies in a backpack, along a sketchy game trail. Brand, Dale, Russ, with Russ’s father at the rear. Dale had provided the firearms: Dale and Brand carried rifles, Brand had a Browning .32, Dale a 30.06, while Drew, Russ’s father, carried a big black 12-gauge Remington pump shotgun.

  Russ had the buck knife in his pocket. Nothing else. But he could feel it against his right leg, when he took a step in the steeper parts of the hill, and its presence stimulated something in him he hadn’t felt since he was about twelve, on a “raid” against Those Kids on the next block over.

  They’d all been suburban kids, at the low end of the economic spectrum but not so poor they didn’t get bicycles for Christmas. Kids on the next block had thrown a rock at Jerry Pruval and told him to stay away from their street, and Jerry had told his friends, including his best friend Russ, and four of them had gone out in the early evening on their bikes, rocks in their pockets . . .

  Somehow, he’d known that none of them wanted anybody to really get hurt. And nobody was. A couple of bruised shoulders, when it played out. A shout from an angry father.

  But the simple intensity of looking for adversaries in the darkness on a spring night had burned the memory into his mind. The memory of taking a run at them, of retreating and regrouping, of talking excited strategy, of eluding the cops. The sweat on his palms gripping the handlebars; the scents of blossoms and dinners cooking as he’d ridden through the soft night air. The delight in conspiracy with his cronies; connecting with them in a single purpose. Something primeval, a kind of atavistic high . . .

  He was feeling it tonight, for the first time since he was twelve. Feeling primevally alive. And something else: feeling justified and furtive at once. His own group was definitely, most definitely the good guys; Ferrara and his crew were most definitely the bad guys. But did it matter? Russ was of one mind with the three men with whom he threaded the narrow path between boulders, outcroppings of sandstone, star-limned manzanita, the aromatic coastal sage. They had a single purpose—to penetrate the lines of an enemy and bring help to women and children waiting for them, behind. He was connected, in this moment to some dim genetic memory of other men, on similar missions, that seemed to resonate across millennia.

  Russ felt his lungs fill with air and seemed to feel its oxygen igniting in his veins, as he climbed, tireless, pumped, through the night.

  There was a partial moon, and starlight, and enough space between the shrubs of the chaparral to make out the way, but now and then Brand paused, clicked a pen light on, partly blocking its slight glow with his hand to look at the stringy trail, before going on.

  They were skirting the hilltop now, just below a great knob of stone, Russ’s left foot slipping on the scree of the slope. Sometimes he had to feel his way a bit with a foot before following Dale.

  They didn’t speak. They’d agreed to be as quiet as possible, and in the two miles they’d trekked so far, north and east, they were still not sure how far they were from the men at the pass. Maybe a quarter mile northeast of them, Russ guessed . . .

  Brand stopped—and turned toward them, waving a hand so they’d see it in the dimness. He pointed—and they saw the flicker of the bonfire at the pass through the hills, seen now from the farther side. It seemed no bigger than a campfire from here.

  The down-slope was steep, on the most direct route toward Deer Creek. Too steep. Dale and Brand whispered briefly together, then Brand led the way again, along the trail a ways closer to the bonfire, but trending slowly downward across the eastern face of the hill.

  They’d cut in away from the pass pretty soon, Russ figured. But getting closer to it at all was dangerous. The excitement rose in him. Something in him wanted a confrontation, an exchange of gunfire. Thrown rocks.

  Something else said, Quiet, slip past, stay on mission.

  Slowly they worked their winding way, half sliding, angling down the hill, till the next hill south bulked up and blocked their view of the fire—and the view of anyone who might have seen them from there. They slipped down the slope in silence, accompanied only by the sounds of their heavy breathing, the clicking of rocks rolling from their tread, the occasional call of a night bird.

  At the bottom of the hill they followed the bed of a faintly trickling creek around a lower knoll to the east. They came out in a wash of moonlight, with the hill between them and the pass, and they all felt a little safer.

  “Should be okay to rest here,” Dale said. Russ could hear a raggedness in his voice, from breathing hard. He was the oldest, and heaviest of them. “Highway’s about a hundred yards on. We’re under cover from the west here. Rest a few minutes, then hit the highway and hoof it for Deer Creek. That sound good?”

  They sat on two shelves of sandstone, about thirty feet over the trail east. Russ and his father on a higher one, the shotgun slanted across his lap, Dale and Brand on a lower projection, passing a bottle of water. They were half hidden from Russ by a Monterey pine, growing all alone from a bank of clay in the hillside. Russ was thirsty but too cold, now, to drink water, sitting on the cold hard rock with his hands jammed in his coat pockets.

  “Can you see the safety here on this gun?” his dad said to him, softly. Suddenly. “See where I’m pointing?”

  “Um—yeah. I see it.”

  “Safety’s on now. Push it that way—it’s off. There’s a shell in the chamber. Pretty risky to have a round in there with the ground slanted like this, in the dark. But now I put the safety on, so it should be okay.”

  “What if you have to fire it, like, real suddenly?”

  “Don’t expect to have to. But if I do—I know where the safety is. I’ll flick it off with my thumb. I just . . . I don’t know. I never used guns much. We never talked about them. I thought I ought to . . . ”

  “That sort of like the birds and the bees? One of those Dad talks?”

  “I don’t think I ever gave you the birds and bees either.”

  “Didn’t need the sex talk.”

  “Nowadays I guess not. You kids do a search on the Internet.” He paused, exhaled; Russ could just faintly see Dad’s out-breath appearing, vanishing in the moonlight. “I wanted to say . . . Russ, I feel like I should’ve stayed with you back home. I mean—I don’t know if I could have stuck with your mom. But I could have stayed close to you. In Akron. Just put up with Ohio. I was sure at the time I had to do whatever I could
to pay the child support. Even if it meant moving to find a job. But . . . ” His dad cleared his throat. His face was hidden; his voice was rich with emotion. “Hell, I should have been a janitor, anything, to stay closer to you.”

  Russ smiled in the darkness; it was safe to smile there.

  “Dad—that’s . . . ” He wasn’t sure how to say it. Then it came to him. He knew what he wanted to say to his father. “Dad . . . ”

  Then his father jerked back, against the rock, as the hills echoed with a cracking sound, and the shotgun went clattering down the hill from his flapping hands . . .

  “Russ . . . ?” His voice hoarse.

  His father slipped off the shelf of rock, and rolled, limp, down the stony hillside into the declivity at the base of the hill.

  Russ heard himself shout, and was aware that something struck near him, like a steel pick against the rock, and only when he was stumbling down the hill, over the fallen shotgun, making his way to his awkwardly sprawled father—only then did he realize that someone had shot at him.

  Dale and Brand were scrambling down beside him, but Russ was already kneeling by Dad, hands pressed against the pumping wound wet with blood from the bullet hole in his father’s chest. He couldn’t see his dad’s face in the deep, cold shadow.

  But he knew he was dead. There was no movement, no heartbeat under his hands. Just the diminishing flow of blood, caressing Russ’s fingers.

  FOURTEEN

  “What the hell have you done?” Ferrara asked, the words coming with difficulty through his hard breathing as he stumbled up to Dickie in the darkness.

  They’d taken up a position below the pass, Ferrara and Mario and Cholo and Steve and Dickie and Sten.

  They had lain there shivering on the chilly slanted top of a twenty-foot-high block of stone close to the shoulder of the highway, right where the path between the hills would take the men Lars had said were trying to slip out of town. The stone angled up like a roof, toward the hills, offering natural cover and a good vantage on the trail.

  Ferrara had been wondering how he’d gotten here at all. Thinking maybe he had gone too far, but knowing he couldn’t go backward. He was committed. And maybe it would work. Maybe he could save the town. Save himself. Stop the destructive forces that wanted to pull apart everything he’d built.

  He was thinking that, and then they saw the men coming around on the trail not far above the hill’s base—four silhouettes. Three of them had guns. You could see that much.

  It was them, all right. The party looking to slip out of town and get help that Lars had told them about. Four of them, resting on some rocks by a Monterey Pine, before heading on toward the highway. Ferrara figured they’d wait them out, catch them from above, get them covered, order them to drop their weapons. March them right back up the highway to the pass. Have to cut the wire to get through but they could re-string it.

  “We’ll take them back up the hill,” Ferrara had said.

  No sooner had he said that then bang, crack, the smell of smoke, and one of those men was falling down the hill.

  Ferrara, ears ringing with the gunshot, looked at Dickie—who was chortling at Sten.

  “I caught that high-handing son of a bitch right in the chest,” Dickie said.

  “Fuck it,” Sten said. “Let’s finish ’em all off. It’s them or us right about now.”

  “Yeah. I’m fucking sick of lying on this rock freezing my nuts off. Come on.”

  “Waitaminnut!” Ferrara hissed—but they’d slipped off the rock, were already heading through the stand of firs next to the road.

  Mario was whispering to him. Something about what are we going to do, what are we going to do, should we really be in this, what was going to happen, this guy Dickie, what do we know about him, for God’s sake, Lon . . .

  It was all spinning out of control. But Ferrara had been so sure. It had seemed so clear . . .

  He was in it now. “Come on, Mario,” he said. “We got to follow through. Try and make this work. Any way we can.”

  Because that’s all that was left to him.

  “I can’t find a pulse, Russ,” Brand said, hoarsely.

  “My dad . . . ” Russ said.

  They were crouching in a fissure, about three feet deep, with a rough block of lichen-coated granite between them and the gunmen. Water trickled somewhere nearby. A cold breeze brought, just thinly, the smell of gunpowder from the shots.

  Russ took his father’s right hand, squeezed it. Felt blood slip between his skin and his father’s. No response.

  He pressed the wrist, tried to feel a pulse. Nothing . . .

  “We can’t be sure,” Brand said, voice cracking. “I’m no doctor, I haven’t got a stethoscope. But . . . ”

  “We could pump his chest, we could . . . ” Russ’s own voice sounded strange in his ears. Low, choked, unfamiliar.

  “That’s where the wound is. Right where . . . ”

  “They’re coming,” Dale said. “Two of ’em . . . I think there’s more back there . . . I can see a rifle . . . ”

  “Where?” Brand lifted his head to look.

  “In the trees. They’re . . . ”

  A whining ping, a smell of something burning, a stinging pain at Russ’s scalp—had he been hit?

  Heart hammering, Russ ducked lower, wiped his hands on his pants and felt his head, just a slight groove in the scalp, a little oozing. Probably a chip of stone scored off by the ricochet.

  “They’re shooting at us,” Dale said, unnecessarily.

  Another round smacked into the hillside just above them, spraying bits of rock.

  Russ thought he ought to get dad’s shotgun, get his knife out, at least, but he could only crouch there, shivering, trying to take it all in.

  What would he do with a knife against men armed with rifles? He was surprised that he didn’t seem to feel angry, didn’t seem to feel anything, just a kind of stunned paralysis.

  A sizzling sound, a crack, the thud of a gun. Smell of gunsmoke heavier now.

  “They’re about forty yards off,” Dale whispered.

  Russ realized he was still clasping his father’s limp hand. It was already losing warmth. Going cold.

  “Now there’s four of them shooting at us,” Brand said.

  Dale lifted up, fired almost randomly over the rocks, the flash startling, the bang making Russ’s ears ring.

  “They’re in the shadows there,” Dale said. “I don’t know as I can hit any—” He ducked down as two more bullets chopped the air over them. “—body.”

  “Okay,” Brand said, a tremor in his voice. “We didn’t come prepared for a gunfight in the darkness. I thought maybe we’d fire at them if we saw them coming but this . . . no. We’re gonna run along the crevice here, keep our heads down, and around that boulder. Then book on through the brush back up toward the town.”

  “One of us maybe cut east for Deer Creek?” Dale suggested.

  They were silent then—as another gunshot, sounding louder, cracked into the hill behind them. Russ realized they were waiting for him to volunteer, because he was the youngest and slimmest and probably the fastest. He stood the best chance of getting through to Deer Creek.

  But he couldn’t speak. He felt unreal and strangely feeble. His father was dead, and he seemed to see all those other dead people after the tsunami, looking like mummies from some ancient bog. His father was becoming one of them.

  He was going to become one too. Just another wet dead thing lying on the ground. They’d catch him out there, in the country, and shoot him and maybe leave him to die. Men like that, who knew what they’d do. Beat him to death? If they felt like it.

  He couldn’t speak. He felt like his mouth wouldn’t even work, if he tried to talk. What was the expression? Numb from the neck up.

  “Okay . . . ” Dale hesitated.

  They waited for another gunshot. But instead they heard boots, the labored breathing of men, muttered curses. They were coming.

  “We’re all going bac
k,” Brand said. “They’re just too close. Come on.”

  Russ saw Brand’s hunched-over shape move down the crevice, north, and he thought: My father’s body.

  But he let go of it. He left it behind. He followed Brand and Dale and they crept quickly up the declivity, stumbling sometimes, but still holding on to their rifles.

  Now and then Russ slipped, skidded, barking his knees on stone. Feeling a pinching sensation in his back where he expected a bullet to hit him.

  A thud, something zipping past, a zinging ricochet. Another . . . An angry shout.

  Russ thought he caught the word, bitches.

  Then they’d rounded the big boulder, were climbing a thin path, brush scratching at their faces, stinging.

  My father’s dead . . .

  There were men arguing, behind them, and after awhile, when they’d nearly reached the top of the chain of hills overlooking Freedom, just when Russ was thinking that maybe now he should do it, maybe now that they’d dropped back he could cut across the countryside and head for Deer Creek—another gunshot came and the whine of a ricochet.

  Russ and his friends threw themselves flat on the trail, the trail’s small broken stones hard on Russ’s knees, and palms and elbows.

  “They’re still back there, goddammit,” Dale said. “There’s cover up ahead—we got to run for it.”

  Brand turned, and knelt behind a squat sandstone boulder. The starlight glimmered on his rifle barrel as he propped it across the stone. “Keep going. I’m just going to slow these pricks down a little . . . ”

  Russ wanted to say something to him but he wasn’t sure what it was. So he kept moving between the bushes, up the trail.

  Dale led the way. They jumped up, dodged behind little thickets of manzanita, kept their heads low, that familiar pinching in his back, a branch from a manzanita falling to the right as a bullet cut it in two, and then they were atop the hill, going down the other side, sweat clammy on Russ’s temples.

  Brand’s rifle barked and Dale stopped, turned to look past Russ. “What the fuck is he doing?”

  “He’s . . . ” Russ’s own voice sounded like a stranger, whispering hoarsely. “Trying to keep them from following . . . ”