A New Day in America

by Theo Black Gangi

  He’s the only one standing. His blood is hot. He’s breathing hard.

  “Everybody get down on the fucking floor!”

  They obey, whether voluntarily or not.

  Nos grins like a kid—like Jay as Denzel. Overwhelming force. Some badass operator shit right there. Feels good to let the soldier out. His old unit would be proud. Officers Danny and Jet and Ferrell would be proud. Shit, they’d expect nothing less. They’d clown his ass if any of those scumbags had so much as nicked him.

  Bodies writhe on the bloody floor. Some have their masks turned around, with red-pocked and blistered diseased faces.

  The disease. Sorry sons-of-bitches. Lunatics in a U-Haul truck waiting out a death sentence.

  “Run,” Nos announces. “Get the fuck out of here.” He buries his foot into a writhing set of ribs on the floor. “Run from me, from Brooklyn. Swim if you have to. I find you in my borough and I’ll turn your asses inside-out.”

  One gets to his knees and stares daggers at Nos, debating his next move. Nos makes it for him. He grabs him by the neck and lifts him to his feet. He smacks the gasmask off his face and drives him out through the busted door, hurling him into the canal.

  In the street, the pregnant woman stands ankle deep in the stagnant water and flashes a hateful look, like momma’s gun remember you. Three others scurry back to the U-Haul, shouting, go go go!

  The truck moans and lumbers off.

  Nos inhales though his gasmask. The street is quiet with the dead. His front door is utterly destroyed. He creeps back inside. Are we alone?

  Nos can hear heavy breathing and the shuffling of fabric from inside the kitchen.

  “Who’s there?” he yells.

  No answer.

  Nos pops open a drawer, grabs a fresh clip, bangs it into the gun, and snaps a bullet into the chamber. He inches along the kitchen wall at the ready. He spies inside.

  A bike is on its side on the granite-tiled floor. A voice is repeating, “No, no, no, Jamie, bro, no.”

  “I’m OK, Sammy,” another voice answers.

  Nos peeks barrel-first into the kitchen. Two bikers are on the floor. One is on his back, a leg involuntarily kicking over and over again. Blood gushes from his throat. The other biker sits over him, both hands pressed firm on his brother’s neck.

  Nos inches closer. They don’t notice. Nos aims at the biker’s head—Sammy, his brother called him.

  “Jaime, please no, bro, no, please bro.” Sammy sits upright to get as much leverage as possible atop the gaping wound. The blood from Jaime’s neck pours between his brother’s fingers. He keeps his hands cupped firm and presses down with all his weight, but it’s no use.

  Jaime’s twitching leg slows. A half beat. A full beat. And it stops kicking altogether.

  Sammy is in tears.

  Nos presses the gun to Sammy’s head. Plug him, he thinks. You can’t injure a man this bad and let him live.

  Sammy’s is so lost in grief that he doesn’t realize the gun is at his head.

  Put him down, Nos thinks, but his trigger finger doesn’t flick. Just a pair of brothers. In my kitchen. His heart swells. Scavengers. Just trying to live. His brother was everything to him.

  “He won’t make it,” Nos whispers.

  “No shit,” spits Sammy.

  He turns furious eyes on Nos. Sammy’s face is ravaged by the disease. He stares long past the gun with all his hatred. He wears the rash like a phantom’s mask. The rash kills with less conscience than Nos Greene.

  This one is dead anyway.

  Nos hesitates. Maybe if he were on duty in some war-torn country halfway across the world he would have executed the enemy in a blink and been done with it. But these are Americans, with New York accents. Brooklyn neighborhood types. The sort his boys would have hung with, chased girls with, played ball with. Truth is, he’s not in the Afghan Kush. He’s home, in his own kitchen, confronted by the love of two dying brothers. By the fridge, where Mikey tossed the granola bar at Jay, and it fell to the floor.

  A deadbolt from upstairs clicks and unlocks. And another. And another. Naomi.

  Nos can’t believe his fucking ears. No, he thinks. Must have been too quiet, so she’s come out of her room.

  “NO! BACK INSIDE!” Nos shouts.

  Too late. Sammy slaps Nos’ gun to the side and flies up the stairs.

  Nos doesn’t dare fire.

  Too late.

  A clash in the upstairs hallway. Sammy has Naomi clinched up, forearm under her gasmask. She struggles with everything she has.

  “Pa! Pa!” is all she can get out before he gags her.

  “I’m here, sweetie!”

  “Fuck off,” the biker cries. “I’ll kill the girl!”

  A dead man, Nos sneers, without the decency to die.

  “Put her down. Put her down, and you can run along,” says Nos, calm. Assertive.

  Sammy’s color is red as his bloodshot eyes. A vein along his temple bulges purple.

  “Put her down, now. Put her down, now. Put her down, now.”

  Tears squeeze from Sammy’s eyes like citrus from the peel.

  “You killed my brother, you killed Jaime!” he shouts, coming unhinged.

  Naomi is trying desperately to breath. Blood all over his hands, Sammy is choking the life out of her.

  “Put her down now, and you can walk on out of here. Put her down now. Put her down, now.” Please put her down, now.

  Nos eases closer, trying to calm his racing pulse, trying to hold himself together to get the lunatic away from his girl. Nos holds the gun with both hands, and aims off to the side. This lunatic I should have put down not forty-five seconds ago.

  “Easy, now. Let her go. Now.”

  “Jaime…”

  Sammy rips Naomi’s mask off and sinks the choke beneath her chin, crushing her throat.

  Nos fires. Brains him.

  Sammy’s eyes go dark. His grip relaxes. He sways forward. Nos grabs him by the hair and shoves him backward. He slams on the floor.

  Nay is crying. There is so much blood. Her face is a red-painted devil.

  Not her blood. Sammy’s blood. Jaime’s blood.

  Nos picks her up, and she buries her head in his chest.

  He holds her tight and cries into her hair.

  He looks down at Sammy, dead on the hallway floor. The scavenger wears the random gear he’s collected—a Gucci leather coat and Dickie cargo pants and torn Air Jordan 4s. Everything worth dying for: everything worthless.

  Just around the hole in his head is that pink, frothing rash.

  The disease.

  A dead man running out the clock. Nothing to lose. Like a suicide bomber. No man more dangerous. And I let him have forty-five more seconds. All he needed was ten more seconds to detonate. And I would have lost her.

  Nos dips a cloth into a tub of filtered water and washes the handprints of blood from Nay’s face. She has a couple of scratches from the biker’s grip. But what scares Nos is what he cannot see.

  Sammy’s rash.

  The gasmask that was ripped off her face lies bloody on the killing floor.

  The disease.

  Chapter 4

  The Things They Carry

  His fault.

  While the blast wiped out Manhattan, it’s the disease that finished off most of the city. First the rash, and then the rash consumes the body, and it’s a matter of days before they die, sometimes hours. Nos has seen too many bodies dropped in the streets. The smell of death in people’s homes. Every precaution he’s taken—from self-isolation to the gas masks—and he failed Naomi regardless. If Naomi has the disease, he can’t save her. If he cares so much, how could he have let that happen? Yvette and Mike and Jay are not his fault. Naomi is his fault.

  The deep green rucksack carries a dozen army MREs—beef jerky, chicken noodles, power bars, and two forks, a bottle with a layer of sand and charcoal as a makeshift water filter, a pouch full of twenty slim cigars he rolled himself, two changes of underwear,
two wife-beaters, a picture of Yvette and the boys beside a postcard she sent him eight years ago from Spain that simply says ‘Thank You.’ His skull-faced ski mask is folded up to the side. At the bottom is bar of soap, a first aid kit with a bottle of penicillin, a box of matches, some flint, a mini frying pan, and a box of nine-millimeter bullets. Twenty-five javelin-like .50-caliber bullets are in the side pouches beside two dangling canteens and a compass, with the dismantled Barrett rifle strapped outside the bottom. Joachim’s digital camera is tucked in a sacred corner of the sack.

  Naomi carries a Betty Boop bag with two changes of undies, two T-shirts, four ready-made army meals, an extra cashmere scarf, Blistex, four lighters, five books of matches, and Tammy the dolphin.

  She wears her favorite memento around her neck—a vial with shrapnel flakes inside. Nos had found her with it years ago. Lots of soldiers kept mementos like slugs or shrapnel if they’d been shot or blown up or almost killed. The vial wasn’t his, maybe one of his buddies’, but Nay’s appreciation for it made him smile. She loved the trinket ever since she was little, the sound it makes when she would shake it.

  Nos wears a hoodie beneath his trench and a pair of fingerless gel gloves so he won’t worry about breaking his hand next time he has to deck somebody. His harness carries five full magazines, his notebook, and a ballpoint pen. Forty hundred-dollar-bills are folded in his left pocket, thirty in his right beside his driver’s license. His pigsticker knife, near as long as his calf, is strapped above his boots. His Sig Sauer nine is holstered beneath his left arm. Nay is in sweats and a fleece-lined goose-down coat. Nos hates how her gasmask covers all her prettiness, but it’s just as well. She needs the protection in case she’s well. Pretty is a liability where they’re going anyway.

  He has decided to brave the trip to his father’s home in Bay Ridge. Every other friend is dead or gone. It’s past time to check on his old man. Maybe he’ll know about a doctor. Worth a shot. Anything is better than staying here.

  The Suzuki bike is damn near brand new and probably looted right off the showroom floor. Nos walks the bike to the busted-up front door. He rips the door from its busted hinges and hurls it aside. Violence for breakfast has given him a taste for rough stuff. He remembers Nay and looks to her shielded face and cannot tell her reaction. Probably hates it, but she’s got to get used to this turbulent new way of things. He lifts her onto the bike seat and walks her out the front door.

  He chuckles into his mask. He has abandoned most of what he just killed for. Soon, the vultures will be on the brownstone like a carcass.

  Chapter 5

  Blue Traffic Lights

  Her pa was famous. There was a room in the house with medals and pictures of Pa shaking hands with great men in front of big bright flags. There were photos of their own home full of huge men like Pa who came and stayed for weeks when they thought he was dead. Men with suits and sunglasses would show up at their door with wires hooked to their ears. They would ask her pa to go places and her ma would refuse and Pa wouldn’t care either way. He would stay in the basement where Nay wasn’t allowed and come out smelling that red-faced way he would smell when he would come home late at night and pass by her room. He would pace all night. He wouldn’t know she was awake.

  Sometimes in the morning his hands would be bandaged up and her mom wouldn’t speak to him for the whole day, sometimes two. Then he would stay in the basement. Sometimes he would come out and sit by Nay’s bed and pet her head and tell her he was sorry. She never knew why he was ‘sorry’, only that she liked when he pet her head and she always felt safe with him. One day she went down to the basement, even though she knew she wasn’t allowed, and saw big, ferocious guns and knives and lots of empty bottles. There was a hood down there, a mask you could pull over your face that hung on a hook and had the white shape of a human skull without a jaw. The mask scared her. She looked inside an open toolbox and saw the Shake.

  She called it the Shake. It was a little glass case with metal flakes inside. Nay liked the shape of it and the feel of the glass and the shaking sound. Then her mom saw the open basement door and came down and yelled and yelled at her and asked her over and over if she touched anything. She told her she could never, never come down there again, and Nay never wanted to. It was dark and musty down there anyway, and it smelled like his red face. She didn’t see what the big deal was, why Mom yelled at her the way she did, the way she would yell at Pa late at night when their bedroom door was closed. Nay hated when Mommy yelled, the sound was quick and mean and high-pitched and it hurt. She would carry on behind the door until Pa would respond—he would growl like a wolf—he wasn’t mean, he was just scary. Her mom found the Shake and took it away. Nay went and found it in her bedroom and took it back. Pa saw that she liked it and asked Mommy to let her keep it. It took a week, but eventually Nay was allowed to keep the Shake and even wear the chain around her neck. She could tell that Pa was proud.

  Now she’s strapped to his back, and they’re moving so fast. It’s light and she can barely see. She blinks and blinks until the red spots go away. Her eyes miss the dark, but she’s happy at the same time. As her sight clears she tilts her head and presses her chin to Pa’s big back. It’s so blue. Not like the blue in her room—it’s bright. The sky is blue and the sun is new. She holds the necklace by her chest. She gives it a good shake.

  Chapter 6

  Bensonhurst

  The bike gets up to 115 MPH on the BQE. Another waste of gas. He could take the streets and spare fuel and let the wheels roll downhill, but marauders stalk the streets and probably won’t bother with the highway. Plus he wants to get the whole ordeal over with. He’d never bothered counting the years since he last had contact with his father. Since Black Sun, he’d considered it now and then, but never wanted to leave the brownstone and never had wheels. Now he’s plum out of options. He’ll take family he can barely trust over strangers he can’t trust at all.

  Bay Ridge is a ghost town, like Clinton Hill, like all of Brooklyn. Plastic bags drift and sing in the wind. Irish pubs and Italian restaurants are hollow beneath old timey signs. Brownstones have wood boards covering their windows. While boarded up homes used to be a sign of abandonment, they now indicate life. Someone is, or has been holding out inside those buildings.

  He rolls up to Paddy’s Pub, infamous dive bar of retired Sgt. Benny Greene. Barstools are scattered and windows are cracked, and there’s not a trace of liquor anywhere, but shattered glass on the floor. Grime and soot cover everything: the wall of black and white photos of Benny Greene, the blue-eyed, sandy-haired old bull with celebs, police chiefs, politicians, Mayor Kelly, Frank Sinatra Jr., and Marty Markowitz.

  The bike wheels crack against the caked filth, and he dismounts by the staircase. He sets Nay down on the floor, and she stomps to get her blood going. The stairs lead up to a bolted door. Nos pounds on it; Naomi jumps. He sits on the dirty steps and waits. His and Naomi’s footprints are fresh in the dust over old footprints. Nos remembers his own adolescent feet running bags of ice, cases of beer and wine, and mop buckets in old, worn-to-hell, busboy shoes.

  Nos pounds again and again on that door, now a grown man and yet still shut out of the home he was never allowed inside of in the first place. He remembers the years of working at Paddy’s and wanting to get inside that door, always shut out by that woman who demanded her husband not, under any circumstances, have any past whatsoever—as though his father had miraculously sprung out as a fully formed adult for the pleasure of their marriage. Bridie would not look at Nos as she came and went and drank at the bar. Nos hated her so much he would not even admit in conversation that Ben was indeed his dad, causing a ton of confusion in the old neighborhood. Yet he wanted in that door as a kid, as an adolescent, and now as a father himself. How little has changed.

  But what little has changed now clings to his leg with tiny hands.

  “Tired?” asks Nos.

  “Yeah,” Nay says in a small voice. “Why are we here?”
<
br />   “To see your granddaddy.”

  “He’s not around anymore.”

  “Not your mother’s dad. My dad.”

  “You have a dad?”

  “Everyone has a dad.”

  She looks at him like she’s not sure, but she’ll go with it if he says so.

  Nos nods. “Some more than others,” he concedes.

  In Nos’ teenage years he would imagine what his father’s house looked like inside that door; a castle-like interior with a red-carpeted staircase spiraling in the center, and Ben’s young son, Tommy Greene, sliding down the railing, diving into his Christmas presents. The kid sitting cross-legged and opening gift after gift under the red and yellow-lit tree, big as the one in Rockefeller Center, his cheeks glowing, his mother and father smiling with their cheeks glowing. Nos couldn’t watch Christmas movies.

  After a while of pounding on that door and feeling like he’s gotten absolutely nowhere in life after twenty-five some odd years, he pulls his Sig Saur and tells Nay to cover her ears and pounds a round into each lock and goes so ceremoniously inside.

  Chapter 7

  The Greenes

  Ben Greene’s home is no palace. If the carpets were ever red, they are now the same putrid brown-gray as everything else. A noise sways and creaks from inside. A baby grand piano stands in the living room. The top is raised and its insides are ravaged. Framed pictures lie around the piano like they were tossed and left where they fell. Nos turns them over and wipes them off: the family, Pop and Bridie and Tommy, baseball, graduation, recitals, Lieutenant Tommy Greene in Army greens with his star and two stripes, a picture of Pop and Bridie and Tommy and another couple that look like friends with a daughter about Tommy’s age, Ensign Tommy Greene looking young as hell without a trace of booze in his face. A span of lifetimes. Not one of Nos. No surprise there.