Everything is Broken

by John Shirley

  He folded the letter up, put it back in the envelope, stuck it in his coat. If he got through tomorrow, he’d take it to her, himself.

  He’s still a little short of being a man . . .

  Russ sighed, and shook his head. That was what he got for reading his father’s private letter to his mother.

  But it was true.

  He went to lie down on the bed. There was an extra comforter at the end of the bed and he pulled it up and over his shoulders.

  He found himself imagining what it was like for Pendra now. Dickie, the Grummons, Sten—they could be doing anything to her. Doing it right now. This moment.

  It took him another hour and a half to fall asleep.

  Russ and Dale and Brand, packs on their backs, weapons strapped to their shoulders, threaded the path through the boulders to the beach.

  The sea rumbled; the wind soughed. But the breeze was from the south, the sun was out, and it was warmer than usual for this time of year.

  Close to the highway, the beach was like the place at the end of time where flotsam from some swatch of history had washed up. The great wave had deposited cars and trucks of half-a-dozen makes, furniture swathed in seaweed that had dried into green cellophane, several desks from several eras, shelves of disintegrating books, an entire shack turned on its side that might’ve been from almost any era, a 1960s refrigerator, splintery sections of wooden fences, boxes of all kinds, mattresses, traffic lights, a dead medium-sized yellow dog, the carcasses of seals chewed at by gulls and crabs, a wide selection of rotting fish—and this was after a great deal of debris had washed back out to sea.

  Closer to the breakers, the beach was clearer, the fug of decay swept almost clear by the wind. Seabirds wheeled overhead. A pelican balanced on a tilted chunk of house that stood pyramid-like about a hundred yards offshore. Russ wondered if there were bodies in it. Not much left of them by now.

  “Maybe we should get a burial detail out here, after all,” Brand said, nodding toward a scrabbling, fighting cluster of seagulls a hundred feet down. They could just see the birds tearing at the shreds of flesh remaining on a skeletal human leg that stuck out from under an unidentifiable slab of wooden wreckage.

  “Well,” Dale said, “if those remains are still there after the next tide, we’ll try and get ’em out, but good luck identifying ’em. Unless you want to pull ’em out now.”

  Brand shook his head. “Let’s do what we came to do.”

  An old, splintery armoire lay face down, half buried in the sand. They took off their backpacks, they had a little food in them but mostly ammo. Dale laid the ammo out on the wood of the armoire, well clear of the sand. Everyone unstrapped their weapons, set them carefully next to the ammo.

  The weapons and ammo had been stored at Dale’s, locked up in the basement. There was the Winchester 92, the 12-gauge, the 30.06 rifle, and Dale took a .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun out of his backpack and held it up. “This pistol’s already loaded, so be careful of it. Now—let’s load the others. Keep the safeties on for now and whether or not safety’s on or they’re loaded you keep them pointed at the ocean, away from one another. You don’t turn them toward anyone you’re not willing to kill.”

  Dale picked up the short rifle. “Now, Russ, I’m giving you this Winchester, and when I say giving it, I mean I’m going to sign it over to you, and you’ll have to get it registered if you . . . when you leave town. When we were picking out guns at my place, that night, your dad looked at this one, but I was a little reluctant to let it out of the house. I think he liked the old fashioned look. So I want you to have it.” He looked out to sea, cleared his throat. “I sure liked your father, Russ, so . . . ”

  “Thanks.” Russ was moved in a way that felt distinctive to the gift. “Thanks a lot, Dale.”

  “Now we practiced loading it, this one takes a .44 . . . let’s put the magazine in . . . Now what do you remember from last night about that lever?”

  “That . . . lots of people take the gun from their shoulder to work the lever, but you said not to, keep it there, get used to it that way, keeps it readier to fire . . . ”

  “Right. First thing you need to work on, of course—like we talked about last night—is a good gun mount. Got to have it just right on your shoulder, and in your hands. Here, nestled like that. Right. Let’s try it. Lever a round in. Good. Now you line up the back sights and the front on your target, and aim a little low because—especially with a light rifle like this—it’ll rise when you squeeze the trigger. Aim it at that plastic jug floating out there, see it? Don’t try to fire it yet. Just practice lowering the front sight onto the target, lining up the sights . . . Okay, let’s take the safety off.”

  Brand looked up toward the houses on the northernmost hill overlooking the beach. “I kind of wonder if we’ll tip our hand, shooting down here. For one thing, we might attract ’em to come and fuck with us. For another—we put them on guard.”

  “Got no choice,” Dale said, as he fussed over the guns. “Those dumb pricks have seen us with guns—they didn’t seem worried then. They’ll just figure we’re practicing defensively, same way we’re carrying the guns. But just the same, when I’m working with one of you, the other one watch for those sons of bitches. At least there’s plenty of cover down here. I doubt they’d rush us across the beach. Let’s find a target,”

  “Maybe we should shoot those damn gulls eating that person,” Russ suggested.

  “They’re just being gulls. But let’s fire near them, to practice, chase ’em off. Then we can dump some sand on the remains. Now, when you fire—do it between breaths.”

  The first time he fired the Winchester, at a snag of lumber near the feeding gulls, making them rise squawking into the air, the rifle’s recoil wasn’t too bad. But as he continued firing, it soon bruised his shoulder. There was not even a faint chance he was going to complain about that to these two men.

  “You got to work with that recoil,” Dale said. “Let it pop up a little, lever a round in, bring it back down. Now the best way to shoot is to be as relaxed as possible while still controlling the gun. Hard to do at first because you’re going to tense up in anticipation of the gun going off, and the bang and all. But fire it enough and you can do it. We got a lot of ammo here. I got more at the house. Now, when you’ve got a moving target, like that jug, you want to pick the front of the target, whichever way it’s going, aim toward that. You got to move the gun with the target. Now that jug’s moving quite a bit in the wave, that’ll be good. Stay with it. Track it smoothly. Squeeze that trigger, don’t pull it . . . See, that’s too high . . . Focus on the target, not on the end of the gun.

  “You’ve got to line up but trust yourself to aim. Let your hands follow your eyes. It takes a lot of tries. If it feels like your shoulder is swelling up and coming out of joint you’ve only fired half enough rounds. You need to fire a lot of rounds to get a feel for it . . . Now while he’s reloading we’ll start you on that thirty-ought-six . . . Brand and you’re both going to get a feel for the shotgun and the revolver . . . ”

  Hours passed. As the day wore on, Dale could see Russ wincing when the gun cracked into his shoulder, so he declared a rest. “Best let the swelling go down some.”

  They sat on the edge of the armoire, their backs to the wind, eating cold chili out of cans with plastic spoons, drinking bottled water, watching the hilly streets coming down to the debris-strewn highway. Half expecting Dickie’s bunch. Seeing no one.

  “I almost hate to turn my back on the sea,” Brand said. “I don’t trust it any more than I trust Dickie. It’s not fair. It was kind to me all my life till a few days ago. But that’s how I feel. Gonna take awhile to get over it.”

  Russ nodded. “I know what you mean.” He gazed down the beach, thinking it surreal. Seeing someone’s old trunk on a sewing dummy next to a rotting mattress. “Like every attic in the world emptied out here.” After a moment he said, “You know—this time tomorrow—they could be dumping our bodies right her
e on this beach. We could all three be dead. Right here.” He felt a pang of embarrassment, thinking he shouldn’t have said that. It didn’t sound manly.

  “I was thinking along the same lines,” Brand said, chuckling. “But . . . ” He closed his eyes. His voice was solemn. “We have to do this. Or not. There’s no in-between. Not with things the way they are. Not with Dickie Rockwell. It’s all or nothing.”

  Dale glanced at Russ, then away. Something on his mind. Finally he said, “You going to be up for this, Russ? I mean—we got to face two big things. The good chance we might get killed. Shot dead, if we’re lucky. That’s one. And two—if we don’t get killed, we got to kill other people. We got to end their lives. It’s easy to say you’ll do that. But unless you’re some kind of . . . psychopath, or something—it’s not that easy to do when you’re right there in the moment. To just . . . shoot a man dead. In boot camp they train you up in the idea. Doesn’t help that much. But it’s something. We haven’t got time for that.”

  Russ’s mouth felt dry. “Yeah. I’ve been sort of putting that off to the side. Not thinking about it—just trying to do what I have to.”

  “But it’s there,” Brand said. “I worry about it too—I’ve never killed anyone. I’m not sure I can do it. Except—we can’t let them keep Jill and Pendra. We can’t let them get away with shooting your dad down. Penning us in like sheep. I feel like—they’re just going to slip away if we don’t confront them. And they’ll take the women with them—or kill them. I just—” He squeezed his eyes shut. Shook his head, then chuckled ruefully. “Not sure I can kill anyone.”

  “No point in going up there if you aren’t willing to kill ’em,” Dale said. “All you can do is think of it, like . . . it has to be done and it’s going to save lives, really. And—you have to get mad enough to do it. You have to get in that state of mind. You have to get mad enough to send that bullet right through another man. Do anything to get past him. That man’s in the way of what you really, truly got to do. He’s hurting your people. Got to keep it that simple in your mind. And as for dying . . . ” He exhaled noisily. Cleared his throat, grimaced at some memory. “We all die. I watched a bunch of people die. In war and at home. My folks—I was with them when they died. Comes to all of us.”

  “ ‘All beings are invisible before birth and after death are once more invisible,’ ” Brand said softly.

  Dale looked at him with raised eyebrows. “That a quote?”

  “The Bhagavad Gita,” Brand said, scooping a handful of sand, letting it spill back down through his fingers. “Somebody wrote that down around 500 BC.”

  Dale turned to Russ again. “Tell you what, man, I hate to talk a young man into risking himself. That’s been done way too much. So you decide. If you’re going with us—you have to take that attitude the Indians had: It’s a good day to die. You want to do this thing, be ready to face that, Today I might die. If you’re not ready to die—you’re more likely to. If you’re right in the fight, I mean.” He paused to think about it. “How we got through it, when I was in a firefight, was like this: You don’t take stupid risks—but you got to go for it, and say, Maybe today I die. So be it.” He paused, and nodded. “Just: So be it.”

  Russ nodded. It was like there’d been a space in him, waiting for that: Maybe today I die. So be it. And that space was filled now. He felt a new orientation around it.

  Dale rubbed his forehead. “But if you take stupid risks—you’re not going to get the job done. You need the willingness to die if you have to, but if you throw it away—it’s all a goddamn waste.”

  Brand said, “The hard part for me is killing another man. That expression, ‘taking a life.’ People use it so casually. It’s a burdensome thing to even think about, for me anyway. But I feel like—we don’t have a choice. Not this time.”

  It made simple, visceral sense to Russ. He took it in, and made it part of him. But there was something he had to say anyhow.

  Russ put the chili can down in the sand, and shifted to face Dale. Wondering how to say what he had to say. His shoulder ached as he turned. He took a deep breath.

  “Dale—here’s the thing . . . They’re expecting us to bring a load of stuff up there. Like, this evening or tomorrow. Right? It’s possible we could bring it. And maybe if they see the stuff . . . ”

  Brand and Dale exchanged surprised glances.

  “You’re saying maybe they’ll give us the women after all?” Dale looked at him with raised eyebrows. “You’re saying—just play their game? Just . . . give them the stuff? Well, I never thought you’d want to go that way . . . ”

  The gulls shrieked mournfully, sounding disappointed in him.

  TWENTY

  Nella knew for certain-sure that the demons were whispering, when Dickie brought crystal meth out, that morning in Mario’s house. Dickie woke up after just four hours—the men had gone to sleep at dawn, drunk, getting plastered when the Grummons came back from their watch on the pass. Relieved when Lucas and Chuckles and Remo went grumbling back out to take their place. They were all drunk except Sten, who seemed nervous, wary. He stayed mostly sober. Watching at the windows for Mario.

  She’d gotten blankets and pillows for the two women in the garage, but she doubted they’d slept much. She felt them judging her every time they saw her.

  God will judge me, she’d told them. She’d heard her Mama’s voice: For we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done . . .

  Sten had a hard time keeping the Grummons and Steve away from the women. “We need the hostages intact,” he said.

  Dickie supported him. But Nella figured Dickie was just keeping Pendra for himself. “Soften her up, keeping her out there, that way she’ll be ready to play nice,” he said once.

  Nella couldn’t sleep much. She was lying there listening to the gulls yelling. She tried to work out the messages in their squawk. Closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep when Dickie’d come out of the back bedroom around ten; she’d heard him drag the ladder around the side of the house, climb up onto the roof; heard him stomping around up there talking to himself. She figured he was looking out to sea, up there.

  Then he came down and went stalking through the house, yelling, “Okay, that’s it, we’re getting ready to fucking rock, no more ball-scratching! Get your fucking lazy pink-pussy asses up!”

  And he pulled out the baggy of yellow-white crystal meth and waved it under the Grummons’s noses, and in front of Mike Sten, who rolled his eyes. Cholo had a look like he wanted to tell Dickie to forget it but then he stared at the meth and said, “What the fuck. Maybe I won’t feel this hangover anymore.” And Steve, waking up, ran to the bathroom, vomited loudly, came back, clapped his hands together once and said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “We got a shitload of stuff happening today,” Dickie said, leading them into the kitchen. “Either they bring us the goods or we go get ’em.”

  “Look at how yellow this shit is, only half processed,” Liddy Grummon said.

  “Shut up,” Dickie said, chopping it up with a buck knife, “it’ll work just fine.”

  “Lot of shooting down on the beach yesterday,” Sten said, as they gathered around the kitchen table where Dickie laid out the crystal meth. Nella stayed in the next room, huddled in her sleeping bag, but she watched and listened through the door to the kitchen.

  “So what, some assholes target shooting,” Dickie said. “Not going to do those snaky little bitches any good.”

  “Which snaky little bitches, the ones in the garage or the ones over at that high school gym?” Randle Grummon asked, laughing and then wincing because his hangover made it hurt to laugh, right then.

  “Not none of them,” Dickie said, rolling up a ten-dollar bill. “ ’Cause I got the word from out past the edge of the world.”

  “That what you were doing on the roof?” Sten asked. “Woke up and heard you stomping around.”

 
; Dickie gave him a hard look. “You got some kind of issue with that?”

  Sten shook his head, and yawned. Always smart enough not to let any friction with Dickie escalate. “No. Served us well.”

  “I got word that today we take action,” Dickie said, and snorted up a long line of the shitty yellow crystal meth, right off the dirty table top. “Fuck but that burns! What shit!” He laughed shrilly and snorted up some more. “Here. We’re gonna wake up on this shit and be ready. Because when it comes from the edge of the world, it picks me up—that’s what that wave was, that was me calling it from the edge of the world, that was me kicking this town’s ass, that’s what that fucking tidal wave was, strong as a bar of steel, fucking skull-ring-certain, bro, we’re getting lifted up and carried on to the next place but we’re going in the best cars in this fucking hole of a town—”

  Going on like that, speed rapping for a while. The others shaking off their hangovers with speed. Complaining of the burn but whoofing up more and more of the shit. The Shit, in fact, was what meth was called, in a lot of places; people liked to snort up The Shit and wasn’t that kind of funny? Nella thought.

  But when they offered her some she just mumbled, “No. Not feeling too good. Have to rest.” She’d figured on getting some, before—but now she didn’t want any. She thought it might kill her, the way she felt now, all sick and dragged out, and she didn’t want to die that way. She was counting on a bullet in the head. Or maybe she’d drown herself, if she got up the nerve.

  “Better get your ass up and wash or something,” Dickie told her. “You look like shit. It’s kind of makin’ me queasy.”

  She got up, wincing at the pain, then paused at the door—thinking maybe she should have some meth after all. And at the same time not wanting it. Wavering.

  “What we oughta fuckin’ do,” Steve was saying, real fast, a quiet guy gone all bold on speed, “is we should go check out the houses like two blocks north of here, you know some of those houses, shit man, some of those fancy-ass fucking houses look like they’ve been hardly touched—”