The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  He herded them into the big open office, where papers were strewn across the floor and across a half-dozen desks.

  “Dad!” the boy cried. Milo Mardesich was gagged and duct-taped to a cheap desk chair, and in the redhead’s usual style, much of his hair had been crudely shaved off. His skin was burned red, so he’d probably been out in the toxic cloud for a while. His eyes registered astonishment, and he mumbled something through the tape.

  “Dad?” the redhead said. “My-my.”

  The boy strode across the room and began prying the tape off his father’s arms.

  “Get away from him,” the redhead demanded.

  “Go ahead, shoot me. Maybe you’ll miss and blow out one of the windows.”

  “Not if I get very, very close.” He came up and pressed the pistol into the meat of the boy’s shoulder. “Okay, now, little son, since you’re intent on freeing your old man, if it is your old man, let’s do it quick as a cat.” He grabbed the tape across Milo’s mouth and yanked. Milo screamed when the duct tape came away and brought a lot of his mustache with it.

  “That’ll leave the lip sorer’n God. Have a seat,” he announced, waving them to sit down. He hiked up his pants and perched on the corner of a desk facing them. Like a social-studies teacher, Jack Liffey thought. A dork, Maeve would say. He wanted badly to see Maeve again, to see her grow up and become something. He was really quite frightened, but doing his best to hide it.

  The redhead’s eyes were going crazy now, as if the stony facade had cracked away. Jack Liffey decided he was on something stronger than marijuana. Maybe he’d Shermed up his joint with PCP. Every now and again he would duck his head a little as if a large gliding bird was passing overhead, just missing him.

  “Now I got your attention, I got to tell you the story of the grasshopper and the bees. I ever tell you this one? Naw, of course not. This grasshopper, he loves honey, and every year he buys a jar of it from the bees to eat over the winter, and the bees, they got their reasons, they sell him a bit of their honey every year, make some extra money, you know, and everybody’s happy. It’s all working out okay and the world’s in its accustomed orbit.

  “But little by little the bees take to jacking up the price and keeping most of the honey for their own kind. Still, since grasshopper’s been a steady customer and all, they keep selling to him, maybe the price is a little higher and he gets a little less, but still he gets his honey.

  “Now, one winter the price is double, and grasshopper, he finds out one of the queen bees is behind the cutbacks and price hikes. She’s a real cunt, likes to see the honey lovers suffer, you know?”

  “There’s only one queen bee,” Jack Liffey said.

  The redhead ignored him. “Still, he’s going to get his honey and no point rockin’ the boat, they figure he’s thinking, right? The workers show up at his door as usual to bring him his winter hit of honey. So what does the grasshopper do? Grasshopper fucking breaks the jar of honey over their heads, these bees standing there at his door with great big eyes, and all the bees come buzzing down to sting him to fucking death, and as he’s shuffling off his mortal coil, about nine thousand stingers in his ass, one of these bee types asks him, ‘What the fuck you do that for?’ You know what he says?”

  “These insects all speak English?” Jack Liffey said.

  The redhead glared, but went on. “He says he just got in a bad mood. You know something? I don’t believe it. I believe it’s, like, he’s the kind of grasshopper that don’t take no shit. He don’t take people fucking with what he wants.”

  “I hate honey,” Jack Liffey said. He wondered if riling the man would serve any practical purpose, but it was better than doing nothing.

  “Okay, wise guy. You get to lead the parade. Help Pops there to his feet. You three are getting a big break. You get to make a run for it.”

  “Out there?” the boy objected.

  “There it is. Just hold your breath the first five miles or so and you’ll be fine. I suggest north up Buena Vista.”

  “Why don’t we all just make friends and wait for the fire department?” Jack Liffey said. “I gave you a break once.”

  “I worked at Tommy’s Pizza once, too. Tommy didn’t teach no one to stick around where there’s a bunch of evidence of murder one. Maybe that’s why Tommy’s didn’t pay so fucking good.”

  Jack Liffey decided not to point out the logical inconsistencies the redhead kept sprinkling through his little exemplary tales.

  “Up-up, dudes.”

  The redhead marched them back down the hall to the cafeteria, where a horrible yellow light flooded in the sliding-glass doors from the hostile world outside. He marched them right up to the doors. They could see Nick Giarre tied to his black leather office chair, still staring off into the burning yellow fog.

  “Feets, don’t fail you-all now. I count five and anyone not out the door gets shot in the dick. One.”

  “Let’s go folks,” Jack Liffey said. He wrenched the door open, and as the redhead fought at pushing the other two out, he made a beeline for Giarre and rammed his hand down in the man’s pants’ pocket. There was nothing but change and a Chap Stick on the left, but the right had what he wanted, a little plastic box with a single key attached. The siren was still hooting over and over, and the roar in the distance seemed to have picked up a notch.

  “Hasta la vista, dudes.” The door slid shut behind them.

  “Cover your face with your shirt and follow me,” Jack Liffey yelled.

  He took a breath and his lungs filled with fire. He had to fight the drowning panic as he climbed the wall. Once he was over, he pulled a flap of his shirt up over his nose and mouth. He guessed Milo would have a worse time because he’d already had a big dose, and he glanced back as he was rounding the corner of the building to see Jimmy helping his father over the block wall.

  “Around front!” he called.

  There was one button on the plastic box and the parking lights of the big black Beemer flashed at him as he pressed it. With all the other noise in the air, he couldn’t hear whatever unlocking signal it gave. The door came right open and he jumped in and jammed the key in the ignition and cranked. The big engine roared to life along with the insistent clang-clang of the seat belt warning. It was an automatic transmission, he noticed. What a wimp. He rammed it into reverse, and backed until he saw the boy half carrying his father around the corner, then he got out and opened the back door, feeling dizzy and sick. Jimmy pushed his father into the backseat and fell to his knees, vomiting.

  “Get in now.”

  He got back in the driver’s seat and reached across to tug the boy in. He pulled the car forward until he could see the front window of the executive building. The redhead was standing there, wearing the aqualung with the mouthpiece dangling like a necklace. Jack Liffey hesitated a moment, then picked up the steering-wheel lock that lay beside the seat, got out, and hurled it with all his strength at the big front window. Things went into slow motion for a few moments and he watched the steel bar with its red neoprene covering tumble end over end through space and strike the lower corner of the picture window, which vanished all at once in a shower of glassy gems. The last sight he had of the redhead, the man had really big eyes and he was fumbling for the mouthpiece of the aqualung. You put me in a bad mood, too, Jack Liffey thought.

  He coughed for a while, uncontrollably dry-heaving, and then tumbled in, slammed the door, and made sure all the vent levers were off before he floored the pedal. The big beast slammed them all back into the seats.

  “Jesus Kabeezus,” the boy said.

  Two turns and he would be on Victory Boulevard, which ran west for twenty straight miles across the Valley floor. He knew he was sitting behind a five-liter V-12 engine. It had forty-eight valves and far more torque and horsepower than anything he’d ever driven in his life and he’d always wanted to open up something like that and feel it crank.

  He came around the first turn and skidded to avoid a woman lying in t
he street. He couldn’t see very well in the fog and he just hoped no one had abandoned a cement truck in the middle of the road. There was the last turn, Victory. He straightened the wheel of the big beast out into the middle of the road, right over the center line, a part of his mind calculating that if sixty miles per hour was a mile a minute, a hundred and twenty would be two miles a minute.

  Try and catch me, highway patrol.

  “Yoweeee!” The boy grimaced and straight-armed the dashboard as the automatic roared up through the gears and the horrible yellow world flashed past their windows.

  “Open it up!” Jack Liffey bellowed. In fact, despite the nausea and the burning sensation all the way down his throat to his lungs, he was pretty excited and pretty proud of himself.

  Epilogue

  THE RATTLE OF MORTALITY

  “DADDY ALWAYS CHEATS,” MAEVE BLURTED OUT. SHE WAS getting pretty competitive, and he wondered where it was coming from. He’d always thought of himself as a good loser in games like this, and he knew he was, though it was mainly only true when he was among people he liked and trusted.

  “I know,” Marlena agreed with a grin. “Jackie’s a big cheat.”

  He frowned. “That wasn’t cheating. Actually I prefer a game with more possibility of cheating, like poker.” All he’d done was add I-T-Y to the word mortal, but the four-point Y had come out on a triple-letter square and given him a total of thirty-two points. Marlena was only passable at Scrabble and kept trying to sneak in Spanish words, but she was happy to play with them and regularly come out a hundred or more points behind because she and Maeve enjoyed joking with each other and Maeve really loved the game.

  Maeve played Scrabble recklessly, laying words out into open areas to offer possibilities for her opponents, while he played with a merciless defensive caution that tended to crab everything into one tight corner as he waited for a big killing, and still Maeve managed to beat him once in a while.

  “Mor-tal-i-ty,” he repeated to himself, as if the word might lose some of its mystery to a careful enunciation. It had certainly been dogging him recently, though he supposed it wasn’t that strange to be a bit obsessive about death after almost 2,300 people had died in the catastrophe that had become known as the Burbank Gas Cloud, or in the manner of disasters the world over, just Burbank. On the international-league standings of disasters, however, Burbank wasn’t even in the first division, as the newspapers kept pointing out in ghoulish little tables. Bhopal had killed over 6,000. Even a simple ferry sinking in the Philippines in 1987 had killed 3,000. Every twenty years or so a typhoon rolled into Bangladesh and killed 100,000. Earthquakes in China, Japan, and South America did the same every decade or so. And a 1931 flood in China had killed almost four million people. But it was a pretty big event in a country like the U.S. that had insulated itself so successfully even from its wars.

  Burbank seemed to have changed him and made him warier, he could feel it. Afterward, he’d been in the hospital getting his lungs Hoovered out for almost two weeks, and he hadn’t liked it one bit that gas victims had died in beds on either side of him. These days he found himself reading the obits in the L.A. Times, which he’d never done before, and relating each item directly to himself: Oh, this one’s only forty-two, younger than me. This one was sixty. Eleven years to go.

  In fact the Times’s instant paperback on the disaster, Deadly Summer Smog, was tented open on his coffee table. It was propped onto the page that mentioned him and his hell-bent drive out of the yellow cloud, an escape that had killed a lumbering mule just west of the 405 as he sideswiped the poor beast at 127 mph. A piquant traffic footnote to the catastrophe. But not nearly as celebrated as Schatzi Groening, who had died of the spreading gas cloud while chained to a foldout sofa in Van Nuys, or the redhead, Tim O’Connor, who had died trying desperately to hot-wire an old AMC Concord with plastic taped over the right side windows. Both shared billing in a chapter entitled “Blood Will Tell,” which was devoted to the shady enforcers of GreenWorld Chemical, though the Times got most of the details badly wrong.

  Marlena’s radar picked up his eyes on the book. “You was almost famous, Jack.”

  “Were,” Maeve corrected automatically, and then she ducked her head in a signal of chagrin at her impertinence.

  “I’m locally famous,” he owned, indicating his two Scrabble opponents. “That’s plenty for me.” Outside, the interminable basketball bounced on and on as the kids from the Astaire sat on the retaining wall, chatting and dribbling, a kind of mindless fidget of conversation for so many of them. In fact, it was a basketball player who’d almost made him famous for real. A minor pro star who’d played in Chicago in the eighties and then become a small-time Hollywood producer had called him up and pestered him to death about his story. Jack Liffey had finally agreed to talk to a man the ex-point guard called “his screenwriter” about his experiences. The screenwriter, a boozy old hack with bad body odor and a plastic hand, had been sharp enough to fasten like a hawk on the possibility that Jack Liffey might have touched off the whole disaster by digging into GreenWorld’s dirty work, but nothing had ever come of their talk. Thousands and thousands of dollars had been in it for him—the only reason he’d put up with the screenwriter’s horrible body odor—but the money was always somewhere far down the road.

  He remembered suddenly to record his score—distraction was another trait that had slipped up on him since Burbank—and he rotated the board toward Maeve. She’d been thinking for some time.

  “How’s that family doing?” Marlena asked.

  “They’re all just super-duper. The boy fell off the Holy Boy Road and decided to take himself to college at Northridge this fall. The dad taught himself Java and is making a killing designing Internet Web sites. And the mother is working for the Red Cross or something like that, caring for victims of the gas. It’s another family saved from the brink of doom by the timely intervention of Jack Liffey, always standing at moral attention over the world. Wire Palladin, Culver City.”

  He noticed that Marlena watched him closely whenever Faye’s name came up, but he was not going to make any concessions to irrational jealousies. There had never been anything between him and Faye.

  He knew that there were broader effects of the gas cloud, too, harder to articulate, difficult even to notice in the urban muddle of the world city. In a peculiar way, the disaster seemed to have burned off some of the excess religion that had lain heavily over the basin. That’s the way it felt to him, anyway. The Broom Closet in North Hollywood and an ashram in Burbank had shut down for good in the wake of people who had died taking shelter within. It was like one of those borderline camel-straw-broken-back changes—just enough of a change, the ecumenical babble retreating from some critical mass of competing versions of holiness, until the city became livable again for the secular.

  Maeve was making all kinds of faces at her letters, canting her head this way and that, as if the little wood tiles were purposely defying her.

  “And we’re all onto the next phase of our lives,” he concluded.

  “I seen too many phases already,” Marlena said. “I like this one.”

  “Ha!” Maeve cried. “Diet-ician. I’ll make cheat words just like you.”

  “Perfectly legal.”

  He watched Maeve slap down her letters and scribble her score with triumph, and then discreetly he watched the masses shift under Marlena’s blue print silk blouse as she slipped a hand in at the neck to readjust her bra straps in the heat. His mind was on her big, ultrasensitive nut-brown breasts, where it seemed to be spending a lot of its spare time lately. The idea of the ardent and affectionate lovemaking that awaited him was like a bright lantern in a dim valley.

  Thut-thut, the basketball went on and on outside, an atomic clock kept out in the condominium’s courtyard by the Bureau of Standards. A yardstick for setting all the other instruments that measured the gnawing away of their minutes. In fact, a strange form of mortality had crept up on him that very morning wh
en he’d gone to the supermarket and found people staring left and right in puzzlement. He’d ignored whatever it was, left it sizzling at the corner of his consciousness, until he went to the cornflakes and found, where the familiar yellow boxes should have been, a phalanx of Liquid Plummers. His hand had frozen in midair. The vengeful modernizers had got to the supermarket and reshelved everything following some obscure new logic. In that moment he’d had the vivid insight that knowing where things were and where they belonged was one of the very few methods of fending off death, and like all of the others, it could be taken away far too easily. He’d broken out in a cold sweat.

  “Twenty-six points,” Maeve announced. She looked up and glanced from one to the other of them. “You know, since Mom went and married Butt-head, why don’t you two get hitched?”

  His eyes went to Marlena and he could see her distancing herself quickly in self-protection—the animal inside backing away from the deep brown eyeholes. Maybe it was an artifact of that insistent timekeeper that bounced away out in the courtyard, over and over, or the obits in the paper, the unsettled arrangement of the supermarket, all the rattles of mortality reminding him that there wasn’t all that much time left to him, that there wouldn’t be too many more brass rings drifting past, and none of them would ever be absolutely perfect.

  “Sure,” he said, smiling as he watched the big earthy kindly Latina stare fretfully back at him. “Why not?”

  “Albert’s characters are as real and quirky as your next-door neighbor.”—Raleigh News & Observer

  SUSAN WITTIG ALBERT

  __THYME OF DEATH 0-425-14098-9/$5.99

  China Bayles left her law practice to open an herb shop in Pecan Springs, Texas. But tensions run high in small towns, too—and the results can be murder.

  __WITCHES’ BANE 0-425-14406-2/$5.99

  When a series of Halloween pranks turns deadly, China must investigate to unmask a killer.