by McBain, Tim
The square of glowing glass before them seemed to get bigger and bigger on the horizon as they advanced. It burned incandescent against the night, not quite a white light, somewhere toward the shade of egg nog. The traffic pouring into the lot let up, and in the ensuing silence Mitch heard a motor growling in the distance like an idling lawnmower, perhaps the generator out back, he thought.
His heart rate picked up as they got close, the fist shaped muscle in his chest squeezing tighter and tighter, rattling the walls of his chest with each beat. He felt kind of dumb about it, about getting jacked up over arriving at the store, but he couldn’t help it. He was awake now. Alive.
Stepping through the doorway, the light was everywhere, white and bright and glaring. Mitch couldn’t help but smile at how overwhelming it was, his eyes squinted down to stinging slits. He pressed his forearm against the gun in his belt to make sure it was still there.
“Dang,” Matt said. “Too bright.”
They toddled forward, half blind, legs staggering out choppy steps as they struggled to keep pace with the crowd around them, all of the people making their way into the open.
Baghead
Rural Oklahoma
9 years, 126 days after
A black dream. No lightning this time. He moved in shadow, walking into nothing, the dark surrounding him, swallowing him up like he wasn’t all the way real. He didn’t mind that idea of himself, his physical being, reduced in some way, still here but not all the way.
He chose his steps carefully, his feet picking their way over obstacles, somehow able to navigate the roughage even without seeing it. It occurred to him that his movements seemed assured, seemed to have purpose that he wasn’t quite aware of. That didn’t make sense. Did it?
He stopped walking. Some feeling here struck him as familiar yet new. Like he’d been in a thousand different versions of this place, wherever it was.
Could it be a dream?
He reached for his face, unsure if he’d find the old or the new. He braced himself for either result – the rough feel of the canvas bag or the smooth flesh of his old face restored. His fingers closed in and closed in and found nothing where the bag should be, where the jaw should be, where the cheek should be. Nothing at all. Empty space.
His hand flailed around, looking for anything solid, finally descending toward his torso, feeling along the collar bone to the place where the skin went vertical, climbing the warm flesh along the jugular and finding it sheared off in a stumped neck. His fingers sank into the hole, a jagged bone surrounded by flaps of throat flesh all opened up and wet.
He woke in the Delta 88, recognizing the sound of the engine first and then the uneven throb of the tires rolling over rough patches of road. He adjusted his bag so he could see, the car weaving back and forth over both lanes to avoid the worst of the potholes.
“You awake?” Delfino said.
“Yeah. I am now.”
“Good. We’re almost there. About five minutes out, in fact.”
Bags nodded, the canvas pulling taut against his forehead and releasing.
He looked out the window, noting that the land had flattened out again, and that there were more weeds here, though still nothing like the grass and clusters of trees he’d been hoping to see. Patches of dirt still showed through everywhere. This land was balding instead of bald.
Life was rougher in the places where food still grew, though. The green places. Out in the desert, things were quieter. You had to have money to make that drier climate life work, or you had to be craftier than most. Finding the spot by the river helped a lot in that regard.
“Here we go,” Delfino said.
Figures formed on the horizon, distorted by the blur of the heat rising off of the road. Seven of them. The silhouettes looked like men holding assault rifles, but something about it looked off, something that Bags couldn’t place. They stood around a metal gate of some kind with a bunch of stop signs attached to it in haphazard fashion, all uneven and some tilted at odd angles. It struck him how clearly he could read their body language and discern their movements, even from a great distance and through the haze rising up from the road. They milled around, shifting their weight from foot to foot, adjusting their grip on their guns or moving them from shoulder to shoulder, leaning forward to spit on the ground.
“Remember, our primary objective here is to not get our heads hacked off. I’ll talk. You’ll do the opposite of talk. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Delfino let off of the accelerator as they got close, the Delta 88 drifting to slower and slower speeds. The haze seemed to clear, all of the details sharpening into focus little by little. They seemed a scrawny bunch, all gaunt faces and stretched-out limbs with deltoids being the only visible muscles among them. Was that what looked so weird from a distance? The rifles rose before Bags could ponder it much, one after another, aimed at their car. A precaution, Baghead hoped.
One of the men in front lowered his weapon and raised a hand, palm out. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign for them to stop or if he was communicating with his people via hand signal. And then he got a better look at the man’s face. Or the boy’s face, he should say. He couldn’t have been over 15, a pale stick of a boy with sandy hair and a single black line painted under his eyes. He looked around at the others, all of them sporting the black paint from cheek bone to cheek bone.
And all of them children.
Teddy
Moundsville, West Virginia
69 days after
With the traps baited, he walked back to his room to kill some time. This was the hardest part. The waiting.
The ground crunched and scraped with every step. Broken glass littered the sidewalk along with shards of brick and another building material he couldn’t place. Most of the front windows of the shops downtown were busted out. It looked like the city was a pinata and someone had taken a stick to it to get all of the candy out. Not much to look at, but this area was a good place for his traps. It had served him well.
As he walked, he remembered getting called into Lewis’s office, not three weeks after that first cat got squished by the blade. His boss sat him down in one of those chairs where the upholstery feels like rough carpeting. He knew something was wrong based on Lewis’s demeanor. His puff of dark hair looked more frazzled than usual. Extra creases formed around his mouth. His eyes seemed more wet than usual but more fierce, too.
“Teddy, I need to ask you somethin’,” he said. “And I need you to be straight with me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rico told me you’ve been loading cats and dogs into the back of the truck,” he said. “Is that true?”
Lewis always sounded like a deep-voiced preacher to Teddy, like some smooth talking character on TV that knew how to make his words sound all nice. His voice had that quality now, but a hushed version, an angry version.
“Yes, sir,” Teddy said.
His hands trembled. A warmth crawled up onto his face, and he tucked his chin down to his chest. It felt like being in school when the teacher made him read out loud. His words came out slow and choppy and the kids all laughed, little chortles all around. They laughed like he couldn’t hear, like he wasn’t a real person.
“Dammit, Teddy. You can’t be doin’ that,” Lewis said. “You can’t be doin’ stuff like ‘at.”
Teddy didn’t say anything. He knew he did something bad, something worse than he knew at the time.
“Why the Christ would you wanna go and do somethin’ like ‘at, anyway?” he said. “They lock people up for animal cruelty, you know that?”
Teddy remained silent. Lewis leaned back in his seat and went on.
“Look, Rico is trying to put the screws to me over this,” he said. “Says he’s going to the cops unless I give him a raise. Says it’d be terrible publicity for us, some whack-job smashing puppies in our trucks, and he has a point there, I expect. A fair point.”
He drummed his fingers on his belly.
“It stops now,”
he said. “I know you. You’re not a bad guy. I figure you don’t know any better. Other people don’t know that, though. Keep fuckin’ around, and you’ll go to prison. You got that, bub? You can’t do it ever again.”
“But won’t he tell on me?”
“Nah,” he said. “Shoot, Rico just wants a raise. If he had evidence, he’d have shown it to me to get what he wanted.”
Teddy shook the memory off as he turned right into the driveway, closing in on the garage door. He pulled the key to the doorknob, the wire cable unspooling from his belt. With the door unlocked, he released the key, and the wire snapped it back to his waistband. It reminded him of the cord of his mom’s vacuum cleaner. He’d lost too many keys, though. He had to keep them attached, right next to the holster that held his hatchet.
From the garage he went through another doorway into the house and then down a flight of steps. He rented a room from an elderly couple, a basement bedroom with two cinder block walls facing two with roughly installed drywall. All bare. Not a single coat of paint on anything. The mattress on the floor was the only furniture there.
The ceiling was also unfinished. He liked to lie on his back and look up at the exposed pipes and heating ducts and wires and joists. It felt like he was seeing the underneath of things, seeing how it all really worked. And he liked to listen to the squeal and thump of the wood when someone walked over the floor above his room.
Nobody walked overhead now, of course. They were all gone. Nobody around but the periodic cars going by out on the highway. He lay down anyway, and his feet dangled off of the end of the twin bed like a child’s.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
62 days after
His head dipped as his consciousness slipped away and bobbed back up as he shook himself awake. Oh, shit. Where was he?
He looked around. Sun shined through the windows, bars of light slanting across dirty plates and glasses on the floor all around him. He sat on his bed, his shoulders leaned up against the wall. Right. Yeah, he remembered being in here. A yearbook sat on the bed next to him with a razor and a rolled up dollar bill on it. Yes. He had snorted pills, some odd mixture he hadn’t tried before. It was... Wait. What was it again?
He thought about it, and his eyes closed, and he drifted, drifted... Out. His chin slumped to his chest, his whole body gone limp, arms turned to two noodles at his sides. The whole world went deathly still.
And then his breath sucked in with a creaking sound like a swimmer surfacing for oxygen. He popped back up, hands patting around on the comforter. Oh. Bedroom. Right.
Jesus, he was so high. He couldn’t think quite right, but he felt good as hell. He knew that much. Pleasure beat in his heart and throbbed in his veins and fluttered in his chest. He had to concentrate to see straight, and once more semen crusted his boxers.
He got a whiff of vomit then. It smelled old, he thought. Can vomit get stale? Wait. Did he puke or did the dog puke? He should remember puking probably, but...
His eyes meandered around the floor, looking for congealed throw up or dark patches on the carpet. There. He saw an orange looking foam with chewed chunks of green bean in it in front of his dresser. Definitely not dog puke. It looked pretty dry, too. It had been there a while.
How long had he been in here now? He wasn’t sure.
The rotation was no more. It seemed now he was in a race to snort these pills as fast as he could instead, mixing them together with wild abandon. Some of them fucked his memory. He could remember that. He’d been pretty drunk when he started along this path, so he couldn’t quite recall which ones had which effect.
He laughed, not really vocally producing sounds but his body shaking and mouth opening as though to laugh nonetheless. He didn’t know what was funny. The puke? Not that funny, he thought. Just more shit he’d have to clean eventually. Still, he laughed on silently, his abs contracting and relaxing over and over so his rib cage quivered in a way that made him hunch. It didn’t hurt, but he couldn’t stop, and the rib throb became overwhelming. He needed to lie down, to try to sprawl out and hope that’d help it subside.
He pushed his bare feet under the blankets, still shaking out soundless chuckles. Wiggling his toes against the cool of the sheets made him realize that he was dressed for bed. It seemed to be the late afternoon now. Had he been snorting pills in here since the night before? Longer?
The laughing died in time, and he lit a cigarette and stared at a glass on the night stand smudged all over with finger smears. He imagined his fingers pressing against the cup, leaving oily residue with every touch. He looked at the ceiling and breathed smoke as he imagined this, his eyes creeping closed.
He didn’t notice the cigarette fall into a fold in the blanket, the cherry pressing its red into the cotton poly blend until it plunged through to the sheet and then the mattress, all of them flickering to brown before going black. His eyelids fluttered. He smelled a smell like burning hair, like the time when he was 12 and he flicked a lighter right next to his ear to listen to the grind of the flint. A strand of his hair vanished into a sizzling sound and a terrible odor. This smelled like that.
The blackened spot on the mattress spread outward like a spilled cola. He felt something in his fingertips in the hand right next to the burning puddle, some shock of warmth. But he rolled away from it, and then the numb roiled up in him again, waves of painlessness and perfection and bliss, and he forgot the smell and the heat and drifted under once more.
The inside of the mattress burned hotter and brighter than the sheet or blanket. The flames licked out and cracked a little, violent snapping sounds like broken ribs and tree branches. The fire hissed its endless exhale.
His eyelids fluttered again. He knew that sound, but he couldn’t place it. It reminded him of the back yard, of sitting in the sun bleached chair, boiling water to make coffee.
And then there was a new sound, a sizzle that reminded him of sitting at the kitchen table, his mom standing at the stove with her back to him cooking breakfast. Scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, toast, and bacon. His dad sat across the table, somewhere behind the sports page, his giant mug of black coffee giving off swirls of steam.
For a moment he was aware these images were memories or maybe dreams. Some flash of clarity glimmered through, the notion that he must be asleep, and he wondered if maybe this was what it was like to be in a coma. Then his dad turned the page of the newspaper, and he could see his hair and his forehead, could almost see his father’s face, in that second when the pages came together before they fanned back out, and he smelled the bacon again, and he wondered how long it would be until breakfast was ready.
Sleep and pills anesthetized him. He didn’t feel the flames crawl over his back, charring the t-shirt, blistering the flesh. In his dream, he smelled the bacon stronger, worrying that his mom might be burning it. Her back stayed to him, her right arm working a spatula at the pans. Maybe it smelled that way on purpose. She liked it crispy to the point that it shattered into dried chunks when you bit it, he remembered.
The dog whined on the other side of the bedroom, high pitch bursts of sound. In his dream, he saw her sitting under the table. He knew, somehow, she wasn’t supposed to be there, that her presence didn’t quite make sense in some way he couldn’t figure, but he was glad she was there. He would give her some of the bacon. He thought she would like that.
He felt nothing when the fire shot up the curtain next to him, engulfing his face in the process. His eyes half opened for a split second, saw some impossibly bright light and closed again. He snuggled back down into the blankets. Too early. He didn’t want to go to school today.
And the dog barked, a lone shrill scream, her front paws bouncing up and slamming down with the force of the cry. The sound somehow returned him to the dream, to the kitchen table and the sports page and his mom’s back. He reached under the table, his fingers brushing back Hannibal’s ears, trying to calm her. He realized he’d never heard her bark before. What could
she be so upset about?
She barked again, paused, tilted her head back and barked four more times in a row, each time raring up and jamming her front feet down. She fell back to the sing song melody of a consistent whine, a pleading tone, periodically working her jaw as she whimpered as though she were trying to talk.
Fire roared on the whole mattress now, Travis an unmoving lump in the middle of it. Burning drips of polyester rained down from the curtains, hissing and spitting where they landed on his arms and chest. The blanket melted and fused to the skin of his legs. His boxers did the same.
In the dream, the smoke finally got to him. She was burning the bacon so damn bad that the whole kitchen was smoked up. Must be what the dog was so worked up about.
He tried to tell her, but he could only gag and cough now. He sat up in the bed, melted fabrics congealing with blistered skin, flames dancing around him and on top of him, his face blackened like a burnt rotisserie chicken. He hacked a few times, trying to cough, but the smoke kept catching in his throat, taking his breath away. Finally he lay back, slumping down to the bed in a heap that kept still. His final exhale seeped out, swallowed up by the fire’s hiss.
The dog waited a long time in case he might get up, whining periodically as though it might get her master’s attention in a way that would bring him back. Once the mattress burned out, the fire died down to a smolder, embers glowing on the floor, smoke spiraling away from a blackened circle on the wall. Eventually, Hannibal thumped down the steps, pressing her snout through the doggie door and walking away from the building.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
38 days after
Metal clanged against asphalt as she threw her bike to the road and ran toward the spot where Izzy went over the edge.
“Izzy!”
There was no answer.