A New Day in America

by Theo Black Gangi

***

  They are inside the van now, her pa lying in her lap beside the motorcycle. She strokes his head the way he would her in her forgotten bedroom. He turns and cries and sweats. His head is soaked and so is her lap. Everything is dark, so she only feels his squirming, shivering body, and she is so scared, so scared, but she cannot be. He needs her now. She has to forget that she’s scared like he told her to, but every time she forgets, she remembers again, so she forgets again and remembers, forgets and remembers, and wishes she were strong like him.

  It’s dark in the van and dark beyond the windows. She hears something rummage outside the van. Heavy breathing. The sound seems to be coming from everywhere. She looks from one window to the next but can’t see anything. Something hard scrapes on the outside of the van, and for a moment all she can hear is her own heartbeat going so fast it shakes her chest.

  A tap tap hits a window and heavy breath fogs the glass in the moonlight. Three dark round circles of paw prints suddenly smack against the dusty window. A desperate black nose presses hot holes in the fog and sniffs loud like a vacuum. Then the nose and the paws vanish.

  Naomi sits still and holds her pa’s head tighter now as he turns and shakes, his eyes open now but still blind—he doesn’t see her but something horrible that scares him. He isn’t supposed to be scared.

  A thump jumps on the hood of the van and nails flick and scrape against the front windshield. She looks to the back doors—they are open a crack. She knows she should shut them, but she doesn’t want to leave pa. Suddenly the sound of another sniff noses into the van through the cracked door, and she screams. She hears noses everywhere. The dog’s carnal face looks inside with yellow hunger.

  Forget that you’re scared. Forget it. Forget it.

  “No!” she barks at the dog. “No! No! No!”

  The dog’s brow crinkles in doubt as he glances away from the girl. Naomi slides Nos’ head from her lap and stands, her head to the side and pressed against the roof of the van.

  “No!” she yells again, stomping forward, and the dog slowly, unsurely slinks back away and disappears into the dark, and she pulls the door tight to her with a slam and locks it.

  Nay remembers what the crazy man said—make sure you eat something. Her pa didn’t eat all night. Maybe that’s why he’s so sick.

  Nay takes the can of beans and puts a spoonful up to her pa’s mouth. He is lying still now, and his mouth won’t open, so she pulls his mouth by her lower lip and slides the beans in. Only he won’t chew, and the beans just lay there and some fall down his face. She moves his jaw for him, hoping he will begin to chew, but he can’t. The juice from the beans slides down his throat, but he won’t chew.

  Nay takes a spoonful into her own mouth and chews it, but instead of swallowing she puts her mouth up to her father’s and fills him with the mushy chewed beans. She watches his throat as it dips like he’s swallowing, and he breathes and then so does she.

  Chapter 19

  Dreams

  I had a bad dream…

  Was that Yvette or Naomi? Brooklyn or Afghanistan? Where is he? Wake up in the middle of the night, still living the nightmare.

  He knows what is happening to him. Nos is powerless to stop it. He’s lost the endorphins that maintain mood and functionality. At least that’s what they told him happens back in rehab. Visions flicker, form, and dissolve: the van, the girl, the wife, and then the Afghan night. He has been here before.

  It was in the Afghan Kush. Living on mountain spring water and blackberries and opium.

  He had tucked the last pinch of tobacco opium inside his lip. Soon the terror returned, just outside his vision. He would snap his head at harmless mountain noises.

  The problem was that the opium was gone.

  Then he saw something out of the ordinary on the horizon. He had not seen a trace of a human being for so many days he couldn’t even count. The opium had taken both his pain and his sense of time: he worried more about how much to use and when and how to make it last than he did his own rescue. He had kissed the idea of seeing his family again good-bye. Yvette—the kids—Mikey and Jay—when he thought of them he already pictured their world without him. He pondered what man would fill his place, what type: would Yvette turn to a more stable version of himself? NYPD? A Latino detective with blue eyes? Or a man who didn’t even carry a gun, wouldn’t know what to do with one? A trial lawyer? A tax lawyer? No, never that. But she would have a man, Nos was sure of that. Yvette needed a man, she was built for one, and she still looked good, could flirt as easy as a cat purrs. Nos wondered if he already knew the man who would take his place. For some reason, he thought of his buddy Steve from St. Francis at the sociology department at St. Joe’s. He would be home all the time. He would get summers off. Mikey and Jay would be smarter than they’d ever be with Nos. And they’d have a father. The safe bet.

  Maybe it was the opium, but these thoughts were not nearly as painful as they should have been. If he were being honest with himself, and there was no other choice but honesty when alone at the end of the world, the thought was a relief more than anything.

  What he saw in the misty distance was a parachute. The first sign of civilization he had seen in days.

  Nos waited and watched, unsure if a man or a box anchored the chute. Either way, it was the good guys. The tribesmen did not use aircraft or parachutes. The soldier kicked the O-head into gear—get to the chute.

  Nos hustled down his mountain. He tumbled and fell and kicked up dust and made a ruckus. He was spotted now for sure, but he could not let the Taliban beat him to a supply drop. It was not a coincidence that the chute fell so close to his location. The supplies were his way home.

  Climbing escarpments, shoulder on fire, woozy and barren from loss of blood and loss of opium, he spotted a small group of tribesmen maybe four hundred yards around on the other side of the mountain.

  Below the mountain men he spotted a mule. As he peered closer, there were three mules loaded with satchels on what passed for a pass up there. He paused mid-climb. Let them beat me to the box, he thought. I’ll have a surprise waiting for their asses.

  Nos found a way down to the mules and stayed out of their sight, creeping beneath the path. He lay flat on his stomach. He aimed his sights just under the bellies of the mules. The surveillance was somehow easier than waiting in his fort for his opium to run out. Surveillance he was used to, being strung out he was not.

  The Afghani’s feet came swiftly down the mountainside. They carried Russian AK 47’s and looked about with vigilance.

  One of them went to open a satchel on the other side of a mule. Nos fired a round through the mule’s belly that burst out its back and plugged the tribesman. The man stared at his mule. The mule rocked and stumbled. The others fired almost instantly, but had no idea where the shot had come from. Nos gunned them down and they dropped, one by one.

  When all was quiet he jumped up to the path. He went and kicked the guns away from the hands of the corpses. They did not appear to be Taliban. Their hair and beards were longer, their clothes older, boasting no colors. Just four tribesmen armed with AK 47’s taking their mules for a stroll.

  The first man he shot was holding the bag from the supply drop: a cell phone, a 55-90 radio, and several MRE’s. Tubes that read absurd names like Chicken Fajita, Beef Brisket, and Meatballs Marinara Sauce.

  When Nos checked the satchels he knew what four tribesmen were doing walking their mules in the night armed with stolen Russian artillery. They were trafficking goat’s milk. And opium.

  Nos couldn’t help his grin.

  He snuffed the opium tobacco in his lip and the wave hit the back of his knees and washed up his spinal chord and splashed in the base of his neck.

  He took it all. The opium, the goat’s milk, the radio, the MRE’s, the cell phone, and made off, high as the very mountaintop. He found a fort, great cover, a stream close by, where he could light the beacon for his rescue. He was invisible on the great hillside. He would make t
he call.

  They would find his position. Navy or Marines or whoever was closest would chute in. He would make the call. He would be back at base, and everyone would visit and show him love. They would give him metals and send him home for as long as he wanted. Home. Him. Not Steve from St. Joe’s, him. It was a simple choice: Home, or the End of the World.

  When he went to make the call, when his thumbs grazed the keys of the cell phone, he began to shake. Immense anxiety overtook him. The phone flew from his hand. He would realize later he was still in shock and had been in shock the whole time. His cells had, however slightly, reconfigured to the requirement of the opium. He couldn’t breathe, no matter how hard he sucked at the air. He choked and felt his face go purple. Tears were flooding. The convulsions erupted inside him like mortar fire, one after the other, and just when he thought they had passed, that the bombing had stopped, there were more explosions, successive, endless.

  He took another dose of the dreamy green stuff, and after a while, he was calm. His pulse was still way up, but he felt under control. He bent and picked up the phone where it had fallen, and his heart raced again. Could not breathe.

  Home.

  Or the End of the World.

  Petty Officer Nos Greene put the phone down.

  Chapter 20

  Junk-Sick

  Nos is overcome with feverous visions—Naomi the creature, wild and feral child of the new dawn, now a fanged wolf cub with yellow dilated eyes, not Yvette’s any longer—not even his, but the daughter of the hollowed out skull-faced ski mask. Then the demons come and fill the bleak spaces—ox and horse-head demons like hieroglyphics with AK’s and AR15’s and belts of rounds strapped across their chests laughing with teeth like flames. Then Saks Fifth Avenue when the white blast consumed the city and Yvette and Jay and Mikey were sifting through racks of clothing and suddenly all flesh incinerated into black howling skeletons without even enough time to scream. The magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree adorned with dead babies dangling with bald heads like holiday bulbs. Hyenas like mutant dogs with painted clown faces with cocks and cunts dangling and fucking each other and cackling. The matriarch hyena pregnant above her long cock and crying and smiling through labor pains and giving birth to the serene and beautiful Naomi, still-born, effortless face and high cheeks and tiny teeth quickly devoured by a thousand maggots.

  The morning is an epic hangover. Nos stirs and opens his eyes and sees Naomi’s chin, her head leaning against the back of the front seat. She rustles awake along with him. Nos is numb to his fingertips, but he gets up anyway, feeling the creak of his joints. He blinks away the visions. Fuckin’ PTSD bullshit.

  Nay clings to his jeans, and he picks her up and looks in her eyes, trying to see the horror of last night.

  “You’re OK,” she says, half statement, half question.

  “I’m OK. You took good care of me.”

  “I tried, yeah.”

  She presses her head to his chest.

  What did that mad scientist give him? He’s never heard of a drug so potent, so fast. Was the opiate mixed with arsenic? It’s not possible to get a physical dependence after one to two days. Those savages violated him. Doc shot him up and pumped him full of poison—shit, he injected Nay…

  He can only guess what concoction is now running inside Nay’s veins, but he is going to find out.

  Nos climbs in the back of the van and empties out the pack. He cuts two holes in the bottom and assembles the Barrett sniper rifle.

  “Nay, come here hon.”

  He slides her legs into the two holes in the bottom of the pack and straps her onto his back.

  “How’s that?”

  “OK” she says, holding onto his shoulders.

  He picks up the ski mask and wears it rolled up on his head like a skullcap.

  “We’re going for a ride,” he says.

  “Where?”

  “Central Park. We’re going to see the doctor.”

  “Why are you bringing the big gun?”

  “We need some answers, hon. About why your pa got so sick. And they may not be so friendly this time. And frankly, neither will I.”

  Naomi is only slightly heavier than the pack was when full of supplies. The Barrett .50-caliber is slung over one shoulder, and the bullet belt is strapped over the other, just lighter than Nay. He sits on the Suzuki bike and revs the motor.

  Nos cuts west at 59th and manages a route to the park that allows them to stay on the bike. At the mouth of the park shapes of men rustle.

  Two cops in unbuttoned uniforms take turns driving their boots into some wretched dude on the ground. Nos slows and stares at the men, ready to kill every last one.

  They stop chuckling and stare back. The man on the ground is the creature from last night that had followed him, now taking a beating. Nos rides on, satisfied that there is balance in the food chain.

  The highest hill point he can find is about seven hundred yards from the castle. He tucks the bike at the bottom of the hill behind a boulder. He climbs the hill and surveys with his scope 360 to make sure no one can see him. A few cops make rounds here or there. He digs a ditch with his knife and lays the sniper rifle inside and covers it with a pile of leaves.

  He marches with Nay in his arms back to the castle. They reach the station outside the tents and the hound dog cop recognizes him and says nothing, as his return was expected. Three cops man the three towers in lawn chairs with rifles on their laps.

  The pigeon coop tent is just as twitchy and unsettling as it was yesterday. The junkies are bruised and broken. Cops’ stares are hard. Junkie beating is clearly a popular hobby. The rotten apple smell is heavy in the air like a sauna.

  Nos heads past the line as he holds his breath. The junkies curse at him. A cop gets in his way.

  “Hey—the line.”

  “Get out of my way. I’m going to see the doctor.”

  “We don’t want any trouble here,” says the cop.

  “Then make a counter-offer.”

  The cop gets distracted. The junkies smell his fear. Nos brushes past him.

  The doctor is injecting another victim as Romo sits and looks on, powerful and smug on his stool. Romo is likely a cop too violent for the old civilized New York, marginalized in the force for excessive force. Then the world ended and opened up to him and his kind.

  “What the fuck did you give us?” Nos announces in the plastic-covered room to whoever cares to respond.

  “Just the cure, Sergeant,” says Romo the hard-ass. “Has some unfortunate side affects. Very addictive.”

  Nos looks at the doctor, who hides behind thick plastic-framed glasses and shoots up a junkie. The rash covers the patient’s back with red-pocked bumps. The pink fluid pulses into his track-marked arm and a visible relief washes over him, his face gaining color. Nos cannot look at the pink fluid. His very blood craves it.

  “The fuck did you give us?” Nos repeats. I’ll have peace, but not like this.

  The doctor looks away. He is the white lab coat power behind all of this. Nos wants his eyes. The doc never looks at people, only vials and needles. He never even looks at Romo.

  “Come join the force,” Romo answers. “Best offer I got. Keep you satisfied, healthy.”

  “The inoculations?”

  “Good,” says Romo.

  Nos addresses the doc. “The inoculations, doctor?”

  Romo opens his mouth to speak.

  “Let him answer,” Nos commands.

  Romo stands down.

  “The inoculations work,” the doctor says, still avoiding eye contact. “The infected need treatment.”

  Bullshit, thinks Nos.

  “How about it?” Romo asks. “I’m sure you need another dose of the cure. How you’ve held out this long is absolutely beyond me. You’re sick, and you need it. Scratch the itch.”

  The itch begs and craves. Just one, deal with the rest tomorrow. One more won’t matter. He’ll be able to see Yvette again. The doc will pump hi
m full of that fluid, and he’ll take Nay back to riverside and watch the water until he sees her. Maybe Nay will feel her, too.

  “Well?”

  Nos turns and walks out.

  Chapter 21

  Return of the Controller

  Nos doesn’t look at a soul, only counts the heartbeats as he passes through the pigeon coop, past the hound dog cop up onto the hill.

  It’s been a while. Maybe too long, maybe he’s lost it. Maybe the years of drinking and brawling and hiding and self-pity have dulled the soldier in him. Beating up scavengers on bikes was one thing—these men would be armed, healthy, and strong. Even the bikers got to Nay. He is weak from the cure.

  He tells Nay to lay down and covers her in the orange and brown leaves. “You have to stay still now, at all costs, OK hon? Breathe, and nothing else.”

  She nods.

  “You understand me?”

  “Breathe,” she repeats from the cover of leaves. “And that’s all. What are you going to do?”

  “They didn’t tell us what we need to know, Nay.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We have to get the answers.”

  She looks about her, thinking, thinking. “Are you leaving me?”

  “No, sweetie. I wish I could do this alone, but you’re coming with me. No choices today. There’s only one way to go.”

  He pulls the ski mask over his face. He lays belly-flat in the leaves and steadies the sniper rifle at the castle. The .50-caliber bullets better suited to stop a tank or a helo.

  “Cover your ears, hon.

  Through the Leupold scope he lays the crosshairs on the cop at the highest tower point. He makes a mental note to keep his heart rate down and his muscle memory takes over—stock firmly into the shoulder, cheek positioned behind the scope, eye focused on the center of the crosshairs rather than the cop.

  He pulls.

  He feels the gratifying recoil of the rifle. A thunderclap breaks the sky and the cop’s head is red.

  Scan. Pull. The cop in the next tower has time to be startled before a round punches through his chest. Scan. Bolt. Nos lays the crosshairs on the narrow-barred window of the last tower and pulls. The cop convulses and buckles, falling backward.