by Terry DeHart
I start to tell her, but she starts talking about her dream.
“It was raining outside, at your grandmother’s house.”
“It rains in Portland?”
“Yes it does, Mr. Wiseacre. But there are different kinds of rain. You know how Eskimos have lots of words for snow? Well, for any person with eyes and a brain, there are different kinds of rain in Portland. This rain I’m talking about was a sharp rain, the kind that makes a person stubborn, holing up and looking for something good and wholesome, finding comfort in any way possible. It was somewhere between drizzle and shower, with drops so cold they felt like needles. It was the kind of sharp rain that makes you appreciate things, and it was warm in the kitchen. The windows were all steamed up because your grandmother had just baked a sheet of Toll House cookies. She was listening to KPDQ on the radio, and there was a sermon on, a sad one that made me want to hug her, and we were safe from the sharp rain.”
Mom mists up and then she gets pissed off at herself, because she was trying to make me feel better and failed.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I know what you mean.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a squeeze. She pats my arm and smiles and laughs as if it’s silly for her to cry. I don’t tell her that we all need to get harder about things. I was weak before, but I have a purpose now. I need to focus on my mission and let go of all the other stuff, even if it comes down to losing part or all of my family, here on earth. The thought of it makes me cry, but I need to be able to take whatever’s coming, so I can become God’s sure and swift right hand, God’s wrath unleashed on the monsters of the world, starting with the little fuckers who are probably raping my sister.
We need air, so I break free of our nest and go to find some. I’m weaker than I can ever remember being. I get the dry heaves again, and it seems to take away all my reserves of energy. I crawl to the front of the bus. I pull myself into a standing position. I push up on the door. I push it open enough to grab my coat and I pull and pry until the coat falls into the bus. It’s frozen solid and heavy. It lands on my left foot. I hear it hit me, but it takes a while for the pain to register. When it does, it’s the last straw. I don’t have the energy to curse, so I fall down and pass out.
A small avalanche of powder snow wakes me up. It keeps streaming in until I’m about to stuff my coat back into the hole, but then the little avalanche stops. Daylight and sweet, fresh air are pouring in. I take three or four deep breaths and it’s beautiful air, but then the cold cuts into me again. We’re soaking wet, and the cold will kill us very fast. It’s a shitty deal: suffocate or freeze or live long enough to die from gunshot wounds or from the radiation.
I try to shake out my coat, but it’s so frozen that it’s like a lump of metal. I bang it against the stainless-steel handrail that the special kids used to board their bus, and the ice cracks in enough places that the coat is almost flexible again. I take off my gloves and I manage to cram my arms into my coat sleeves. It’s like wearing a rusted suit of armor. Somehow I get it zipped up before my hands stop working. I put my gloves back on and wait to see if I’ll be able to move my fingers. The air coming into the bus is so cold that it refreezes the outside layer of everything, our clothes and the vinyl nest and the face of the dead girl. I can almost see the crystals growing. The cold hits the humid air inside the bus and it makes a fog, like when you open a super-cold freezer on a hot summer day.
But the cold doesn’t stop at the first layer of things. Mom and I are wet clear through, and our layers of clothes freeze up, and we’re dying. I go kind of crazy, because I know that if I don’t do something fast, I won’t get another chance. I get Mom up, and she’s full of adrenaline, too, and we walk back and forth and we yell and clap our hands and bounce off the walls of that damned bus, but it’s not helping. It’s not enough, so I tell Mom to keep moving, and she starts to sing a crappy Christian song from the seventies, something about God telling Noah to build him an arky-arky, and I’m laughing like a maniac and trying to push away the pile of snow at the door so I can light a fire there.
I get the snow pushed back into the bus and I’m grabbing scraps of vinyl and stacking them under the open door, wondering how the hell I’ll be able to light them, knowing all the time that the smoke will probably kill us. I can’t feel my hands, but I bang away on the wheel of my Bic lighter until I get it lit. I hold the flame under a scrap of vinyl and it lights and burns slowly at first, and then it builds into a hissing, smoking chemical fire. It puts out good heat, but it won’t last long, so we get right up to the flames. Most of the smoke is pulled up through the door, so we’re okay for a while.
But it doesn’t last long. The fire dies out and there isn’t anything else to burn. I tell Mom that I’ll try to get some diesel from the tanks and we can burn it in our canteen cups. The wild edge of desperation is wearing off, and I’m getting very tired. I start to pull myself up through the door, but I hear voices outside.
“Over here,” one of them says, and then I’m backing away from the door and reaching for my rifle, but then I remember that I don’t have one, and my hands are gone, baby, gone, and there’s no way I’ll be able to shoot off anything except my mouth. Mom’s face looks like she was just betrayed by someone she loved and trusted, but then she smiles at me. I know she’s accepting whatever’s coming, the next installment of His mysterious plan, and I smile back at her, and we’re okay then, the two of us freezing but at peace, because we have each other and a mustard seed of faith between us.
Bill Junior
We’re close enough to throw dynamite into the house, but I don’t want to kill the girl. That big bastard Wickersham isn’t anyone to fool around with. My pops told me to steer clear of this place, back when my pops was still talking to me. We knew right at the beginning that Wickersham would put up a good fight, and we kind of saved him as a problem we’d take care of later, when we got super-bored or super-hungry.
I’ve lost four men today, and three more are wounded, but we’re in the middle of a battle, and I’ll leave the wounded to take care of themselves. Only pussies spend a lot of time taking care of their wounded while the fight is still on. It’s timing and momentum that wins fights, and it doesn’t make sense to waste time on men who might die anyway, if you ask me. My stomach isn’t so bad now, and maybe we’re getting better, but this could be our last battle, and I intend to win it.
There. I get close enough to see Wickersham peeking at us every now and then. It’s either him or that prick Sharpe. They have machine guns and good cover behind those damn sandbags, but I have a plan. I dig under my coat to find the sports whistle I’m wearing on a cord around my neck. I wish I had a bugle, but there’s nowhere to get one. A bugle would really make our enemies piss themselves, but all I have is the whistle, and I give it a short blast to send them forward.
Luscious and Stumpie move under their white sheets until they’re right up next to the walls. Luscious takes the front of the house and Stumpie takes the back. They each put two wrapped sticks of dynamite right up against the walls and then they back away. I can’t actually see them do it, but that’s what I told them to do. They know how to follow my orders, so I don’t let myself worry about it.
They don’t take any fire, going in. I give them what I think is enough time to get back, then I give a longer blast on the whistle. Seconds pass, and it feels like a whole minute goes by before they set off their charges. The explosions don’t happen at the same time, like I’d hoped, but that was only me being a perfectionist. There’s almost a whole second between the blasts, but they blast open the walls, front and back, and the sandbags are blown away. We can see clear through the house, from the breakfast nook to the back patio. I hit the whistle again, and Darko and Biggus light highway flares and throw them into the house, and we have us a nice, bright shooting gallery.
The trouble is, there isn’t anyone to shoot. We run into the house, ready to kill the old farts and take the girl, but nobody’s home. We
clear the first floor. I send men upstairs and down into the cellar, but we don’t find them. It’s a plain mystery, but I’m not the kind to sit and scratch my head. I send Luscious and Stumpie and the two wounded men that can still walk outside. I throw them highway flares.
“Check all around. There’s no need to spare anyone. You see them, you shoot them. The girl, too.”
“Damn waste,” says Luscious, “but okay, we’ll do her.”
And off they go, the light of their flares making them look like rescue workers searching a crash site. In the dark with their flares, they look big and professional and important, and I’m proud that they’re my men, following my orders.
Inside the house, we rip apart the cellar. We look for a tunnel, but we don’t find one. We cut open the furniture and empty the cabinets and bash holes in the sheetrock of the walls and ceiling, but there aren’t any hidden compartments or passages. Somehow, the fuckers just plain disappeared.
I send men onto the roof and we check the chimney, but it’s like someone reached down and pulled them up into the sky. The old buzzards are gone. They left their machine guns behind, but there’s no more ammo for them. They shot us up pretty bad, but the thing they shouldn’t have done was to take my girl with them. That was going too far and, too bad for them, they’ve gone and got me mad, and there’s not so much as a fly turd of mercy in my heart.
Jerry
There’s no doubt that Wickersham is an actual paranoid survivalist, because he takes us to a passageway that’s hidden behind his dishwasher. He kneels in front of the machine and I think he’s gone crazy, but then he unlatches some kind of mechanism and rolls the entire sealed box of the old Maytag out onto the kitchen floor. He points to a tunnel. Our mouths open and Melanie giggles. I haven’t heard that sound in a long time, and it makes me happy. It makes me greedy, too, because I want to hear my wife’s laughter, too, and Scotty’s nervous bray, and it’s all my fault that they aren’t with me, but I let up on myself and push Melanie toward the tunnel.
Melanie disappears into the dishwasher feet-first. She whispers something that sounds like, “Sleep, spiders, sleep.” I’m next. Maybe the dishwasher leaks, because it smells very bad in the hole. It’s like being born again via the wrong orifice, but we descend beneath the snow and volcanic rock. I feel safe for the first time in a long while.
Wickersham lets himself into the tunnel above us. He stands on a ledge and rolls the dishwasher back into place. He comes down with a chemical light, and its weird glow casts our shadows like green smoke on the tunnel walls.
When we near the tunnel exit, Wickersham drops the chemical light and we crawl the last ten yards in near-darkness. A ladder is buried at an incline. We climb it, Melanie first, and we come up into the snow-muffled night. Wickersham comes up and I look at the tunnel exit.
We’ve come up from the earth through a hinged stump. It’s exactly like the escape tunnel exit from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes. I can’t help but laugh, and my laughing comes up into the world quietly. I start coughing again, but no more blood comes up.
The craftsmanship of the escape tunnel is amazing. It’s a hell of a design, and there’s some humor mixed with the paranoia of it, so I slap Wickersham on the back and thank God for the crazy, TV-rerun-addicted survivalist loners of this world.
We wipe the tunnel dirt from our hands and knees and crouch near the exit. Wickersham turns and asks me if I’ve ever watched Hogan’s Heroes on TV. I’m about to answer when the boys run out of the blasted house and start shooting at anything and everything.
Wickersham isn’t lucky or blessed. He takes a round in the chest, and he isn’t shy about taking his leave from the world. We leave him mouth-open in the snow and run away. The boys aren’t on our trail, but we’re leaving tracks and it’s only a matter of time. We need to get some distance between us before first light. My knees are clicking and my quadriceps won’t last long at this pace and my head weighs a hundred pounds and my head is bleeding again. We finally get to a place where the snow can better support our weight. We make better time, and my legs hold off their impending mutiny, but we’re still leaving tracks. The clouds are low and thick and roiling above us. I pray for just enough snow to cover our tracks, but the sky holds on to its moisture.
We slow to a fast march. I’m about to puke, but then my mind wanders again from the pain and I’m okay. Melanie pulls up beside me, breathing cleanly and moving with good form. Maybe we’ll survive after all.
Sometimes we’re walking almost directly back toward the junkyard. It’s dark, and we need to make best possible speed, so we walk a snow-buried country road. The road is lined with ditches. An occasional lonely-looking mailbox rises out of the gloom as we pass by. Power lines droop unpowered between their creosote-soaked poles, and it’s very quiet. There aren’t any animals, no dogs or birds or squirrels. I start to worry about radiation again, the cumulative effects, and the worry keeps me warm for a few miles, but that’s about all it’s good for.
We walk single file. Every half hour or so, I trade places with Melanie at point, breaking trail through the snow, but it doesn’t take long before I’m used up. Melanie powers ahead of me, and I have no choice but to follow.
* * *
We walk into the foothills of Mount Shasta. I think we’re headed in the direction of Mount Shasta City. The road twists through the hills, and we walk its snowy switchbacks. We take a small single-lane track off the road, and it seems to dead-end at a growth of blackberries, but it doesn’t. There’s a walk-around through the brambles. The trail snakes through underbrush that seems like it’s from somewhere else, blackberry and vine maple and fern. We follow and it leads us to a cabin.
It’s a true log cabin, a big two-story job. The small first-floor windows are covered by rough-cut shutters. The exterior is smeared with mud and furry with patches of moss and lichen. The place is surrounded by blackberry vines that look as if they’re trying to swallow the place whole, and just might manage it. The logs of the structure look old and maybe past their prime, but I pound on a few of them, and they’re solid and perfectly seasoned and they seem to be well-sealed against the elements.
As a born-and-bred product of the suburbs, I can’t help but wonder what the place would look like all cleaned up, with a clear coat of varnish and a covered porch and a tasteful chandelier in the dining room and maybe some low-wattage lights out front. But then I realize why the place won’t ever appear on the cover of an architectural magazine. It looks like a crap-smeared old wreck because that’s the way it’s supposed to look. I knock on the door, but there’s no answer. I wait and listen to the sound of wind in trees, but we’re tired and cold, so I kick the door. I’m running on nothing but adrenaline. The impact of the kick reverberates in my head and ribs and in my irradiated guts, but I kick until wood splinters and the door swings open.
“Welcome to mi hacienda, et cetera,” I say.
“Thanks for having me over,” Melanie says.
“De nada, and so on and so forth. Mi casa es su casa, but let’s speak English, shall we?”
We go inside and I find a wooden chair and I jam it against the door to keep it closed. There’s a staircase to the left of the front door. I light a kitchen match and circle the ground floor, checking to see that we’re alone, and that the curtains are pulled. I stumble into a low table, and there’s a sand candle on it, and I light it.
Melanie gives me a smile. It’s a “what the hell are you gonna do?” kind of smile. She looks down. Her pants are filthy, and I’m a mess, too. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I can smell it on us, the smell of wet soot from burned cities and burned people.
Melanie goes upstairs and returns with an armload of blankets. She strips off her sopping, contaminated clothes and wraps herself in blankets decorated with scenes of elk and bear and salmon and eagles. I manage to throw the clothes outside. I strip out of my own nasty clothes and throw them into what’s left of God’s nature, and wrap myself in a blanket advertising Reming
ton Arms.
I stand at a window high in the logs and peer through thick curtains. It would make a fine firing position, but all I have is the little belly gun. Melanie finds a lantern and I light it. The great room is clean and appears to have been furnished from a Cabela’s catalog. The hardwood floors are polished and everything is squared away. There’s an old-fashioned hutch to display the china, and the kitchen is spotless. A selection of books are fanned out on the handcrafted coffee table: a 9/11 conspiracy book, a pictorial history of failed United Nations military actions, The Anarchist Cookbook, and a do-it-yourself book about distilling alcohol.
There aren’t any subwalls or finish carpentry extras inside the cabin. The walls are unpolished rough-cut logs. They’re more than two feet in diameter—thick enough to stop the 5.56 rounds that the boys are so fond of. There’s a fireplace made of stone. A good compound bow hangs above the fireplace with a quiver of hunting arrows.
I put out the lantern. It’s dark outside, and the dirty snow doesn’t have much of a night glow to it. I peer through blackout curtains and look for whatever’s coming next. I weigh my options. I could use the bow, ambush the boys and pick some of them off. Maybe I could take one of their rifles and lead them away from the cabin.
I’m sick and battered and naked beneath my blankets, but I’m getting myself worked up to do it when a big gust of wind hits the cabin. It blows the sooty flocking from the trees, and the world goes gray. It makes the shutters bang against their latches, and it blows under the door and flutters the pages of the coffee-table books. I pray for more, and a storm blows in with high wind and more snow than I’ve ever seen. It’s a certifiable blizzard. It’s clean snow, too, and I’m not ashamed to give a prayer of thanks, right out loud. I use the conversational voice I used back when I stood a chance of making my family feel safe and loved and special. I talk to God as if He’s my beer buddy, and it makes me feel fine to do it. I pray without thinking and I don’t remember the words after I’ve said them.