by McBain, Tim
The city faded out around me as I rolled on. The buildings on the side of the road grew smaller and sparser until grass fields and woods took their place. Something about leaving the concrete behind almost seemed overwhelming, though I couldn’t say why. The world felt so huge and open without a bunch of vacant structures cluttering the horizon.
No more steel. No more brick or cinder block. Just organic material all around me, much of it green. It was natural, I suppose, but it made me uneasy, too. Kept me on alert.
I didn’t really have a particular destination in mind when I set out, but at some point early in the ride the notion of heading by the government camp occurred to me. I remembered the radio message saying that it was off of Interstate 376. Exit 58, I think.
Christ, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? To see the people at the camp. I didn’t think I’d get too close, at least not today. It’d be too much to be around them. But I’d get a look from a distance. See if anyone was still out there, and if so, see what they were up to.
I couldn’t stop picturing what this camp might look like as I rode that way. I pictured cabins, log cabins, I guess, but the slicker, less rustic looking kind that are built from a modular kit. Several rows of cabins with smoke coiling out of every chimney. I pictured laundry hung from a clothesline, sheets and towels and jeans flapping in the breeze. I pictured people sitting around a bonfire out front, a circle of grapefruit sized rocks surrounding the fire pit, kids poking sticks into the flames, prodding at the coals. Men splitting wood in the distance, army and civilian alike, taking turns. The ax falling, the pieces of wood tumbling away from the block.
Wind whipped through the cornfield around me in a way that sounded like sizzling, and that made me picture a cast iron skillet on the fire, bacon shaking around inside of it. Two eggs next to that, the yolks big and fat and yellow, that darker shade of yellow that only the organic eggs possess.
And then I thought about how silly all of this was. How I was picturing something like a summer camp, some place that might serve Bug Juice, when the reality was probably pretty hellish. Cramped, contentious, limited rations to go around, the smell of all of those people shitting in what I’d imagine to be close proximity to their living quarters. Not like they’d have a sewer system out there to take any of it away.
Still, after all of that Tang, the Bug Juice sounded pretty good. I doubt they’d have it, but you never know, right?
Clouds drifted in front of the sun, and the day went gray around me. That got me looking at the sky, thinking about how empty it felt without buildings blocking so much of it from my view, thinking about how small I would look from up in those clouds, pedaling this bike that would have cost more than a beater car had I paid for it rather than borrow it from some dead guy, thinking about why I was doing this, why I was bothering to do any of this, churning my legs, puffing my lungs, playing that endless drum beat with my heart.
But no. I couldn’t think those things. Not anymore. If I wanted to transform I couldn’t think those things.
And then my eyes snapped away from the clouds, and there it was. The camp.
Army green canvas tents covered a wide swath of land. Row after row of them. The big, sort of boxy ones that probably contained a few cots each. And then I saw all of the cars parked in the grass beyond the tents, the sunlight glinting off of the windshields. So many cars and military vehicles and a few buses as well. It looked like the parking lot outside of a mall or some big sporting event. Looking beyond that, I found the long row of blue porta-potties beyond the vehicles. Letting my eyes fall back to the long view, I realized that the whole area was framed in by a fence with barbed wire along the top. A big gate stood partially open by the cars and a handful of watch towers rose up along the fence line.
I hadn’t realized it at first, but I’d stopped. I stood and watched. I stood, in fact, on tiptoes to keep the bike bar between my legs from pulverizing my testicles. It merely propped them up a bit instead.
A lump raised in my throat, like my body had remembered before my mind how close I was to people, maybe even some from my building, maybe even some I kind of knew. The idea that you were there flashed in my head, unrealistic as it might have seemed before I got here. There were buses, right? Maybe that’s why your car was still in the lot. Maybe you rode the bus here. Maybe you were eating a Snickers right now that some soldier slid you on the sly because he thought you were cute. Maybe.
My eyes danced over the images, the new images, flicking from the tents to the cars to the porta-potties and back again, mixing up the order at random. I looked on it for a long time before I realized that something was wrong.
Though the evidence suggested that thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people might be here, nothing was moving. Nothing at all.
50 days after
I don’t remember choosing to set my bike down and walk up to the camp, to the motionless cluster of cars and tents. In my memory, it’s more like I floated toward the scene, like a tractor beam pulled me that way.
I drifted off of the asphalt and onto the grass, my eyes still dancing over the scene before me, but looking for any signs of life now rather than soaking in the images as novelties. But nothing obliged my search for life. No movements. No sounds.
I imagined what it should have looked liked. People swarming near the tents. Lines of them stretching away from the outhouses. More of them huddled over the picnic tables to eat. I heard all of their throats rise as one to chirp out a single, indecipherable sound.
Something brushed the leg of my pants then, and I realized that I gripped the machete in my hand, though I had no memory of pulling it free from the sleeve on my backpack. I looked upon it a moment, watched it bob along with my footsteps.
I asked myself why I would bring that. Why would that occur to me on an automatic, almost subconscious level? Was I scared? I guessed I was. It made sense, of course, once I thought about it, but things seemed to be happening without me thinking just then. My thoughts were always a couple of steps behind.
I crested the last small hill between myself and the tents and began the final descent. As soon as I passed that point, my perspective changed, and I saw them. The bodies sprawling everywhere. In front of the tents. Among the cars.
The vultures and buzzards hunching over the dead kicked up into flight when they saw me, curling into the air with minimal wing flapping so they looked more like planes taking off, all of them falling into their circles in the sky right away.
A hitch jerked my footsteps under me, my legs almost stopping right there, but the tractor beam’s pull didn’t let up. I pressed on, moving slowly, listening, hearing only my shoes swishing through the grass for now.
With some of them, the ones lying flat on their backs or in the fetal position, I could almost believe they were sleeping. They had a peaceful look about them. The ones that piled atop each other, however, looked limp in the way that only corpses can. Others still lay twisted, limbs and necks contorted into unnatural positions and angles.
As I moved closer, the buzzing faded in, the sound lurching and swelling with no discernible meter or rhythm. Flies flitted from body to body like this was a buffet, their wings beating out waves of fizzy sound.
But this didn’t make sense, did it? How could they die all at once? How could the bodies litter the ground this way? Shouldn’t someone have been quarantining the sick and clearing the dead? The few hundred or so people I was looking at couldn’t all just stumble out here and keel over, could they?
The whole scene didn’t look organic somehow. It looked like they all drank poison Kool-Aid together and died within minutes of each other.
And then I got close enough to see the wounds. Chests split open red. Heads caved in. Limbs sheared off into ragged flaps of meat. They were shot, and the severity of the wounds suggested maybe a mounted gun of some type.
The trucks flashed into my head, the tanker and the pickup. Could whoever was organizing that gasoline hoarding movement have
been part of this? The men had assault rifles. Maybe they had something more powerful, too.
But then it seemed so brazen to roll up on a military camp and open fire. Probably too ballsy for anyone to actually do. Right?
I took a left along the fence, walking toward the open gate. Nearing the cars, I saw that many of them were burned. Tires blown out, the rubber melted. Glossy paint jobs blackened to a matte finish. The grass around them looked fried to a crispy brown flecked with black spots along the perimeter of each vehicle.
My feet ground rocks into the sandy driveway now. I turned sideways to squeeze through the opening between the gate and the fence, my head trying to arrange these pieces of information in some way that might make sense.
Burned cars. Bodies broken by large caliber bullets. A government camp gone totally lifeless and still.
Maybe the cars were the distraction. They doused them with an accelerant and torched them to get people panicked and out of their tents, then they opened fire. That would make sense.
I could see it in my head, the blaze of the fire in the dead of the night, the flailing and the yelling and the rapid fire of the guns ripping through the blackness, that flash of flame from the muzzles as the bullets cut everyone down.
But was it those gasoline raiders? Or did the military do this themselves?
My eyes flickered over the bodies again. No soldiers. Shouldn’t there be some soldiers among the dead?
I closed on the corpses, and my eyes soaked in these images like they did all new images lately. Taking in these things no one should see and recording them to play over and over again in my dreams.
The first women and children I’d seen in some time, their faces blown to bits, their teeth sprinkled in the grass like sesame seeds on a salad.
Maggots squirmed where pectoral muscles used to be.
Film glazed over the eyes like opaque contact lenses the color of slugs.
In my memory, it seems I didn’t choose to look at any of this. My eyes pointed themselves at things, my feet shuffled me into the heart of it all, and nausea flexed in the center of my torso like a ball of cramping muscle. I didn’t vomit, though I don’t know how I avoided it.
The profanity was not the death itself, nor was it the lives turned to dead bags of rotting meat around me. The profanity was that someone chose this. In a world where life had been made as scarce as it ever was, someone defiled it anyway. En masse.
And why should I be surprised? I’ve seen what people do to each other so many times. What they’ve always done to each other. Why would I expect anything else?
Even breathing through my mouth, I could smell it. The stink was like a wave in the air, it stung my eyes. I almost thought I could feel it on my skin, some astringent chemical sting.
I gazed into the shaded interior of the tent straight ahead, a little light creeping through the places where bullet holes perforated the canvas. More dead lay within, flopped over cots at haphazard angles, blood congealed in pools below them.
I kept walking, moving deeper into the rows of tents. I don’t know why.
But I heard something rustle ahead of me.
50 days after
The soldier walked out of the gloom of the tent ahead of me, seeming to materialize in the air five feet from where I stood, his assault rifle at his side. He had a dim look about him, a mouth that looked at ease when opened for breathing.
He said, “What are you-”
I imagine he was going to say “doing here,” but his words cut off abruptly when my machete split his forehead at an angle from his hairline to his brow, the blade half buried in the top of his face. The wet crunch of cleaved bone mixed with a high pitched metallic vibration that cut off almost immediately like a muted cymbal.
I didn’t feel the machete rising up over my head or really even feel the swift downward stroke of its swing, but I felt it striking the skull. His neck buckled, chin tucking toward his chest and then I felt the force in my arms and hips unload like a home run swing sending the ball 650 feet into the upper deck. There was almost a recoil as the follow-through got cut off, a shocking vibration in my hands as all of that momentum bashed into a man’s brain and stopped like a head-on collision.
Again, I don’t recall choosing this action. My arms just did it.
He dropped to his knees, and his eyelids fluttered for what seemed like a long time before he toppled over, his lips whispering out little stuttering consonant sounds, lispy ess and sh sounds, mostly. My eyes drifted to the patch sewn on the chest as he blinked. It said BENNETT.
The blood crept out from around the blade, slow red tears draining down from the wound. Not as much blood as I would have thought. Not like that politician shooting himself and turning on the faucet.
I cupped my hands under his arms and pulled his body into the shade of the tent. That machete was lodged in there pretty good, so I worked the blade back and forth, trying to get it free from the skull’s grip.
Endorphins flooded my brain, but no particular thoughts occurred to me. No righteous feelings of having vanquished one of the mass murderers of this camp. I couldn’t say for sure if this guy was responsible, of course. He was a threat, so I eliminated him.
I didn’t let the rush of animal delight over handling the situation diminish my focus, though. I suspected he wasn’t alone.
50 days after
The blade squeaked against the bone before I could get it free from the skull, a scraping moan like something I’d only ever heard at the dentist’s office when the hygienist got a little feisty in taking those hooks to my teeth. A little shrill.
I wiped the blood off, smearing the machete on the sleeve of the soldier’s shirt, one side and then the other like a butter knife on the edge of a piece of toast.
Then I hooked my hands under his arm pits again and pulled him deeper into the tent. Nestling the limp body among the cots, I flopped a couple of the other corpses on top of him on the diagonal, covering him as best I could in the limbs of the elderly people.
I didn’t really know what to do after that, so I crouched at the edge of the tent and waited. I listened for a time, hearing nothing, my thoughts beginning to stir. I wondered, if the soldiers had really done this, and if the orders had come from the top, what might the reason have been? Not enough supplies for all of the camps so some have to go? Too many sick in a particular camp means they pull the plug? It seemed like such a leap to go straight for murdering people, but the only motivations I could come up with were of the cold, calculated variety.
Well, two could play at that game. This guy’s buddies would come around looking for him before long, and I’d be waiting on them. My arm flexed and I felt the heft of the machete in my hand again, my muscles wanting to remember that unwinding and recoil, wanting to feel it again.
Around this time, the notion that I’d killed someone, a flesh and blood human being, finally started down the long road toward sinking in. I wasn’t upset. Even with the ambiguity regarding this individual’s involvement in whatever massacre went down here, I wasn’t upset. I couldn’t get over that level of force I’d felt, the torque I had created, the power I expelled. It felt nothing like I’d felt hiding in the gas station, quivering under the counter. I felt like a beast. I felt in control.
I shifted my weight from foot to foot and pushed up onto the balls of my feet to stretch my calves. In the process, I kicked the M4 carbine at my feet. Okay, yeah. Fuck the machete.
I placed the blade down. I’d try to remember to grab it on the way out, maybe.
The assault rifle seemed so light. It almost seemed like a toy at first. I turned it over a few times, tucked the stock against that place where the deltoid and pectoral meet, pinched one eye close and gazed down the barrel.
This was no toy. It felt right.
I didn’t flinch when I heard the snare-roll-like burst of automatic gunfire somewhere off to my right. I moved out.
50 days after
I squat-walked forward, passing through
the opening in the tent, moving from the shade into the sunlight. The gunfire had come and gone in one quick burst, but my ears still felt it somehow, an inward suction feeling like my inner ears had the wind knocked out of them, or maybe like my ear drums were attempting to retract further into my head to get away, wishing only to be swallowed up by my brain.
I weaved my way there between the tents and used them for cover as I advanced, peeking around every corner, inching toward the source of the sound. My feet tousled the tops of the blades of grass and smashed oblong sections of green down with every step, bodies still sprawled to my left and right, though they seemed to be getting sparser as I moved deeper into the rows of tents.
I held the gun in front of me, watching it bob along at the bottom of my field of vision, feeling almost like I was playing out a tense video game moment in real life.
No intricate strategies occurred to me here. No thoughts of flanking or outmaneuvering anyone. No plans to create a distraction to try to isolate my enemies and take them out one by one. No words at all passed through my skull. Just feelings and heat and a throb of electricity. Wet, hot, red feelings that pulsed in my brain and hammered in my chest and shuffled my feet forward and made my finger tremble against the trigger. An uncontrollable urge that demanded satisfaction.
About seven tents deep, I rounded a corner and found myself facing the backs of two soldiers. Their rifles stood ready before them, aimed at a fidgeting body on the ground. I watched the helpless figure squirm at their feet, a bald man with a sickly yellow complexion. He made no attempt to beg for his life, didn’t even look the soldiers in the eyes.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d looked like that on the gas station floor and as they dragged me out onto the glass covered asphalt. Did I writhe around like that?