The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “You’re doing great,” he reassures her. She picks her teeth with a fishbone in lieu of a reply. “What’s your name?” he asks when the silence becomes unbearable.

  The girl shrugs. “Dunno.”

  “You don’t know your name?”

  “Uh-uh. The waves washed it away.”

  “Huh. Well, you have—a nickname, or something like that?” She tilts her head, perplexed. “Something people call you?” Wrong question. “Something close to your name?”

  “Oh! Abracadabra.”

  “Abracadabra?”

  “Abracadabra!”

  “Abracadabra.”

  “Abracadabra!”

  Ripple wonders if this is really happening, or if he’s getting the landfill equivalent of jungle madness. “How about I call you Abby? For short.”

  “OK!” She bumps her hip into his. He’s still sore from the crash landing, but he manages a wan smile.

  “I’m Duncan Ripple. Only fans call me by my whole name, though. They don’t know the real me.”

  In fact, Ripple has never met any of his fans; he’s actually never met anybody who wasn’t part of his family, his staff, or his underschool. One time a blind beggar lady came to the door of his parents’ mansion with a message for him, but he only saw her later, on the security footage, after the guards turned her away.

  His fans are out there, though. At the height of his popularity (ages fourteen to sixteen), his Toob series reportedly reached millions of unique viewers, though very few in the metropolitan area. Sure, some were the Empire Island unevacuated, the Survivors still waiting perilously in their flammable apartments or toting their portable electronic devices through the burnt-out streets, tilting them skyward for whatever faint rays of infotainment the battered monopoles could provide. A few were even like him, the city’s owners, sticking around to protect their properties and their turf, their presence a symbol to ward off urban decay: the Tangs and the Liddells and the Lowries, each with a full staff, commercial real estate holdings, a mansion the size of a city block. Even with the decades-long exodus provoked by the dragons, their city was still among the most populous in the country during the run of his show. So the local market wasn’t one Ripple could ignore. That might be different if the show were airing today—in the last six months, with the fire department’s mutiny and the shutdown of public transportation, the local max cume has taken a major dive.

  But even in those better times a couple of years ago, Ripple’s core audience was out there in the hinterlands, farther away than even Upstate or Wonland County, dwelling in unaffected areas as if no giant monsters had ever risen up out of the seas. Having never seen the rest of the country, Ripple learned his geography from viewership regions, ratings, and demographics. Turned out he was big in the Sprawl, that expanse of asphalt, mini-malls, corporate farms and their subsidiaries that stretches from the Huckleberry River to the Inhospitable West. Sometimes in his heyday, when he was having trouble sleeping, he would contemplate those likely recappers and tuners-in, snug in their single-family dwellings, tooling around via ground transportation, purchasing items in their unlooted stores, and wonder why they would spend their evenings chilling to the Very Special Episode when he had his first wet dream:

  RIPPLE (age 12)

  It’s like I just became a man. A desperate man.

  Ripple never did figure it out, but his uncle Osmond, who considered himself an expert on the genre of reality, was eager to explain. He said that the dragons had hollowed out the city’s center, its stabilizing core, and now all that was left were the high and the low, the opulent and the destitute, the chosen and the damned, those incarcerated by misfortune or the state—and those trapped in gilded cages of their own making. Against such a backdrop, according to Osmond, even the misadventures of a prurient youth such as Ripple seemed of mythic consequence. Ripple thought about the Sprawl and agreed that it did sound super boring where those people lived. By comparison.

  “Fems usually just call me the Dunk,” Ripple tells Abby now.

  Of course, Ripple doesn’t really know any girls his own age either, unless you count his fiancée, and he’s pretty sure her mom has been writing those letters for her. They have a lot of references to his “boyish good looks” and the need to get documents notarized pronto.

  “Dunk?”

  “Yeah.”

  The girl giggles. “Dunk.”

  In the awkward pause that follows, Ripple goes for another sporkful of stew, but half misses his mouth. The girl licks the drips from his stubbly neckbeard. Ripple grabs his hoodie from where it lies crumpled on the floor and casually arranges it in his lap.

  Back in the dorm at underschool, when he and Kelvin used to look through Skin Pics together, they always picked out their favorite damsels, and the nasty-ass slags. Of the nasty-ass slags, they always said, “I’d never do her. Well, maybe on a desert island.” Sometimes Ripple has even daydreamed about this nasty-ass slag island scenario, about how the nasty-ass slag would be crying in her shark-bitten tube top, and he’d say, real offhandedly, “This can be our little secret, my videographers drowned,” and then he’d bang her in the sand and afterward she’d be all grateful and dance for him in a coconut bra and serve him mai tais and stuff. Now Ripple’s on a desert island with a near damsel in real life, zero cameras present, and he’s shunning her worse than a nasty-ass slag. Of course, it smells like a diaper pail, and his arm is probably infected, and there’s no hope of rescue, and a bird of prey is giving him the evil eye, but how often do chances like this come along? Hey, she even tended his wounds. That’s basically foreplay. He takes a deep breath and tries the yawn move with his good arm. The girl sniffs his armpit and smiles.

  “Time to feed Cuyahoga!” she says.

  “Oh boy,” says Ripple. He feels himself blush.

  The girl crosses the trailer and the vulture flaps once, hopping from the phrenology head up onto the girl’s shoulder.

  “Pretty, pretty,” the girl coos. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out another dead mouse. Ripple balances the spork on the rim of the cauldron. He’s lost his appetite.

  “You like Cuyahoga,” the girl announces. It’s not a question.

  “Uhh…sure.”

  The girl holds out the mouse by its tail. “Your turn.”

  Ripple gets up and edges toward the vulture. Cuyahoga’s black eyes gaze unblinking at the blood spots on his bandage.

  “Easy girl,” he says. He takes the mouse; between his fingers, the tail feels rubbery, boneless. “Here you—aah!” Cuyahoga snaps her jaws quick, nearly taking off the tip of his thumb.

  The girl smooths the vulture’s breast feathers. The vulture pecks her scalp. “Friends.”

  “I dig.” Ripple notices the phrenology head is balanced on a stack of ancient VD cassettes. The one on top shows a buxom blonde with a sputter gun, straddling a cannon amidst blowing sands. Pre-dragons, definitely—probably not a ThinkTank left in the world could read that data. “You must get really lonely around here, huh?”

  The girl twists a finger in her ear. “Not anymore.”

  Ripple grins. This is the opening he’s been looking for. Awkwardly, he cups his hand around her shoulder, knobby even beneath that puffy coat. “And what do you do when you get lonely? At night?” His voice sounds low and sexy, like that narrator from the cat-food commercials (“Feeling Feisty™?”). “When you just can’t stand it anymore? Huh, fem?”

  “Sleep?”

  “Oh…OK…”

  “Time for bed!”

  So they go to bed. The girl starts snoring right away, and wiggling her butt around and making little whimpering noises, and Ripple lies on his back, willing his laceration to heal faster and cursing himself for the many, many mistakes he’s made since the previous afternoon. He hears rodents scuttling on the dunes outside. He hears the ultrasonic cries of bats and the buzzing of insects. He wonders if anyone is looking for him. He wonders if his parents think he’s dead. He wonders how long you can s
tay a virgin before it gives you ball cancer. He dozes lightly, sitting bolt upright half a dozen times when nightmares—of a giant rat gnawing on his arm, of a skeleton with bright blue eyes, of his name spelled out in orange flame—startle him awake.

  Finally, he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he wakes up, the girl is straddling him again, slapping him in the face. This time he knows what to do. He doesn’t hesitate. He pulls her down on top of him and howls when she crashes into his bad arm.

  3

  THE DRAGONS’ NEST

  Torchtown is a hell of a place.

  It didn’t start out that way. It started with our best intentions. Long ago, before the dragons came, we used to export our criminals. We sent them to faraway concrete compounds, to think about what they’d done. Upon release, the ones who’d thought the hardest came back with a plan to do it all again. Why not teach them to live in a city instead, we asked ourselves. Why not build a city within our city that could teach them to be good?

  We nicknamed our plan the Nest. We chose a section downtown where buildings stood empty and derelict and we walled it off, an irregular hexagon. We decorated the iron gates with birds in flight. The Metropolitan Police Department provided guards, but we also hired rehabilitators, men and women who could teach a trade—carpentry, masonry, rooftop farming, first aid—to the most jaded of pupils. We went ahead and made the Nest co-ed. That was our first mistake.

  The early inmates took to their new home in the prison colony. Carefully selected among available offenders, their crimes were serious, but never damning, and for some, the Nest was their first, best chance at redemption. They set up shops in the storefronts; they set up house in the apartments. They worked alongside rehabilitators until they learned the trades, and then the inmates taught these trades to one another. Guards strode through the Nest’s twilit streets with no more fear than the police strode through any part of our city. For the first few years, the experiment was a success.

  That all changed when the dragons came.

  We could not have predicted that the dragons would attack, much less that they would attack the Nest with a vehemence unparalleled even in the rest of the city: it would become, in short order, the burningest locale per square mile that statistics have ever recorded, ten times more likely to flare than anywhere else in the metro area. What drew the dragons there? What draws them still? Is it the strange boundary formed by the concrete walls, a jagged shape like a character from an unknown alphabet?

  Or is it our hubris, our notion that the city, in this measured dose, could be an inoculation against all future harm?

  We should have evacuated the prison colony at once, but in the early days of the dragon attacks, we made a lot of big mistakes. We were distracted, just trying to survive. We were stretched to our limits. HowDouses swooped in to extinguish the prison colony’s first few fires, but soon were needed elsewhere. We promised the prisoners relief and left them to their own devices for a time, a few days, a week at most. We did not forget them. But they felt forgotten.

  First they rioted. Then they killed their guards.

  We could have reacted differently. But it was a moment when retaliation, swift and brutal, drew cheers and votes, in the sky or on land, it made no difference.

  We sentenced the prisoners to life, unilaterally, without the benefit of trial. We no longer sent guards into their zone. Instead, we topped their walls with electrified barbed wire, automatic sniper rifles, observation platforms with hourly patrols. And Torchtown, as it was now called, became the destination for cold-blooded murderers, rapists, the perpetrator of a zillion-dollar Match King scheme—the worst of the worst, irredeemable. We threw them all in together and dropped crates of supplies over the wall: canned goods, bottled water, live chickens, mass-market paperbacks. We released no one. We figured it was just a matter of time before they killed one another off.

  But the inmates didn’t kill one another off, at least not entirely. They made some kind of society in there, amid the abandoned buildings we deprived of city gas for fear of explosions—amid the daily jets of dragon flame that burned the roofs above their heads. Under the shadow of those wings. They certainly made some babies. Even now, with our own streets nearly empty, we hear their new babies crying in the night. These are the Torchtown natives, born into the original sin of their ancestors’ convictions. In the last fifty years, who knows how many have lived and died behind the walls? Nowadays, none of the originally incarcerated remain; “inmates” have taken on the aura of legend. The only inhabitants are their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children, generation upon generation, fast to breed, fast to die, born into a nest of violence with no knowledge of the world outside.

  We should knock down the walls. We should let them all out. But we cannot, for fear they might deal us the justice we deserve.

  The prison colony is a special kind of damage to the city: a collaboration between the dragons and ourselves. A hell we built together.

  But in all the years of destruction, all the blasts and combustion, one corner of Torchtown has remained untorched. It’s a small building, three stories with a basement, unassuming dark red brick. SHARKEY’S CHAW SHOP reads the sign. The letters are made of solid gold. No broken windows. No lock on the door. There’s an alligator chained to the fire hydrant outside—the only working fire hydrant in Torchtown.

  Sharkey is IN.

  Eisenhower Sharkey is the oldest man in Torchtown. He’s forty-three years old: a native, yes, but with firsthand memories of those inmates of yore, the fabled ancient dead. Sharkey’s lost most of the hair on his head, but none of it on his chest. Or back. He shaves twice a day. He had a mustache for a week twenty years ago. One of his swillers made the mistake of asking if it was ironic. He shot the swiller twice in the chest, dumped his body onto the roof of a burning building, and looted his apartment. Then he shaved the mustache. He’s been clean-shaven ever since.

  Sharkey is six feet tall with his hat on. He’s five foot two without it. He wears high-heeled boots with silver taps on the soles and wife-beater undershirts beneath the jackets of his zoot suits. He has eleven gold chains and one gold medallion shaped like a dragon tooth. The knuckles of his right hand read FUCK. The knuckles of his left hand read FIRE. Sometimes he carries a backpack full of explosives. Most of them are fireworks. Some of them pack a little more punch. He uses a pince-nez when he reads. He likes the classics: The Governor of Illinois, They Call It Criminal, Richard III. He calls himself a “cultivated man.” He never forgets a face. He can rattle off the name of every man he’s killed to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” Of the women, he says, “Aw, let ’em rest in pieces.”

  It’s been a while since Sharkey killed a woman. It’s been longer since he’s had one. He’s picky. A connoisseur. And the women in Torchtown are too young for him. Not too young in years, though he does like ’em on the older side. But too young in attitude. With no culture, no respect for what came before.

  Eisenhower Sharkey steps outside the Chaw Shop, chewing. He’s wearing the pin-striped slacks of his zoot suit with the suspenders down and dangling in loops around his hips. His undershirt is white. His gold gun glints in its holster. No jacket. No hat. He paces on the stoop and chews some more. It’s a beautiful morning in Torchtown. The sky is blue. No fireballs. Two club rats, laughing, round the corner to his block. They’re still dressed from the night before in flashy mesh tops and latex pants; one of them carries a fire extinguisher. They see him out on the stoop; they duck their heads, they cross the street. One glances over his shoulder, his eyes curious beneath singed-off eyebrows. Sharkey spits emphatically down the concrete stoop stairs. The club rats quicken their pace.

  Sharkey’s got no family and won’t say more on the subject. But rumor has it his mother died in a fire, his father died in a fire, his uncle and brother and sister and cousin died in a fire. There sure aren’t any of them left, and wherever they’ve gone, Sharkey’
s not telling. People sometimes say that Sharkey knows where the fires will be because the ghosts tell him in his dreams. Sharkey says, “I’m alive. They ain’t. Maybe they should take some pointers from me.”

  Sharkey scrapes the tap of his high-heeled boot against the stoop, looks at the pale line it leaves on the concrete. Nobody knows how he knows where the fires will be. But he does. If Sharkey’s in a place, it won’t burn. Sometimes at night, when Sharkey bothers going out, packs of natives follow him from club to club. Sometimes Sharkey’ll lead them to a club, order himself a drink, then drop an unlit firecracker and slip out the door. When the place explodes behind him, the firecracker goes up like a warning. Don’t follow too close.

  Sharkey used to lead raids out of Torchtown. The last one he led was thirteen years ago. He’s through with all that. It’s a young man’s game. These natives are too soft, anyway. Brought up to duck and run. Out on an expedition, one fuck-up and it’s curtains for everybody. The inmates back in the day, they had discipline. He still thinks fondly back to the Siege, nineteen years ago now. That was an operation with scope. Vision. Five raiding parties, a dozen men to each, working in tandem: it wasn’t a jailbreak, it was an uprising. The kind of thing that gets your name in the history books. Brass knuckles and baseball bats, an oil drum for a battering ram. Chain saws. They marched through tunnels with their dragon-flame torches lighting the way. When they came up to daylight in Empire Island, they hijacked a packboat full of cheap plastic crap off the docks and made their way to Wonland.

  Out there, they took over for the better part of a week. Felt like the better part of a life. They lived like pirate kings. Bashed in the doors of houses and pillaged. Some of the places were empty. Some of them weren’t. Sharkey saw his first private bowling alley, shot his first horse. He’d been on plenty of raids to Empire Island, but this was different. This was nature, unspoiled. It makes him sad, how it ended in so much bloodshed, a man’s head spiked on a fence, but he wouldn’t trade those days for the world.