The blonde girl didn’t look up. She was whispering something in the crying girl’s ear I couldn’t make out.
“That’s…that’s Violet,” Jon whispered. “Her fiancé’s name was Will. He…well…you know.” He paused a minute, and stared off into the darkness. “Jesus, that was fucked up…”
Just for a second, I flashed back to Pop dying in front of me. He was the first person I ever saw die, and to die that way…it was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen in my life.
In the two days after that, the horrible things just kept piling up.
“You think you’re numb,” Jon said. “You think you’ve seen it all, that it’s not going to affect you…I mean, Jesus, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen get killed over the last two months…hundreds? Thousands? But Will…I thought we’d made it out…I thought maybe it might be different out here…”
He rubbed his nose with his forearm. I think he was crying a little.
“Jesus Christ that was fucked up,” he said.
I just nodded. I was hearing him, but I wasn’t really listening. I still couldn’t take my eyes off of Noelle, who kept stroking the crying girl’s hair.
Her screaming had simmered down to a whimper now. The three of us guys stood around looking totally useless until a noise broke the quiet. The noise was totally normal to me, but maybe not so much to these new folks.
Shikka-shikka-shikka-shikka
The girl Violet looked up and started screaming again.
I turned around and saw the doors to the bunker. There was one of the bugs right at the crack, its tail whipping around inside.
The girls all shrieked and pulled away.
Jon staggered back and fell over the stack of cans, the wall I had going that sort of separated the main part of the bunker from the bathroom part. (Thank God I had dumped the bucket earlier, cause otherwise he would have knocked over a bucket of shit and jizz.) Cans went everywhere across the floor, which just startled the girls more, and now they were all screaming.
Besides me, Blondie was the only one who didn’t lose his shit. But he did point at the bug and start yelling, “Jesus Christ, shoot that fucking thing!”
“It can’t get in,” I told him. It was true; I had locked the door, and there wasn’t no way any bugs were gonna get through that little quarter inch crack.
“How do you know that?! Just fucking shoot it!”
“If I shoot, I’m not gonna hit it, I’m gonna hit the door, and the bullet might ricochet back in here and punch a hole in somebody,” I said.
The blond guy seemed all bent out of shape. “Well DO something!”
“I can’t!” I tried to explain. “You’re just gonna have to get used to it. Come sundown, there’s gonna be a whole lot more right there with that one.”
Jon was up on his feet by now. “There’s nothing you can do?”
“No.”
We’re all shouting to be heard over the crying girl’s screaming, which was fit to give me a splitting headache by now. It would’ve been bad enough out in the open, but cooped up in that tiny little room underground, it was like an icepick in your ears.
All of a sudden I see Blondie bend down and pick up a can, then haul off like a major league baseball pitcher.
WHAM!
The can hit the metal door right where the bug was whipping its tail.
I held my breath. It would’ve been nice for the bug to get scared away, just so that girl would quit screaming her fool head off…but another part of me didn’t want Mr. Blond Movie Star to have the satisfaction.
Unfortunately, the bug must’ve been startled, cause it disappeared. The can clattered down on the cement and rolled across the floor.
Blondie looked at me with a What did I tell you expression, then turned back to the girl.
“It’s gone now, Violet. It’s gone,” he said to the girl.
She stopped screaming and went back to whimpering.
Suddenly, the shikka-shikka-skikka-shikka-shikka was back, twice as loud.
Two bugs were at the crack now, their tails whipping every which way through the doors.
I ain’t never been so happy to see a goddamn bug my entire life, I’ll tell you that much.
I probably was smirking pretty good when I looked over at Blondie, a big Fuck You plastered all over my face.
He just stared at me like he was figuring out whether or not to pick up the can and slam it into my nose next.
I stopped grinning and turned back towards the door.
The crying girl was screaming again.
“Take her to the back of the room, as far away from the door as you can,” Blondie said to the two girls.
Noelle and Kristin didn’t say another word, they just dragged their friend back to the farthest corner of the bunker and put their hands over her ears and held her like a baby.
We stood around for a few minutes listening to the crying girl and the bugs whipping their tails, until Jon bent over and picked up one of the cans.
“Hey, man, do you mind?” he asked. “We haven’t eaten anything in two days.”
I looked at the can he was holding, then looked around at the five strangers I’d brought into my bunker.
Oh shit, I thought, and immediately wondered if I wasn’t going to be sorry I’d saved their asses.
12
It was like watching a bunch of pigs at a trough.
I started out with 15 cans of spaghetti with meatballs, 47 cans of soup, 67 cans of veggies (I had half of one for breakfast that morning), 45 cans of fruit, 23 cans of tuna, and 173 and a half liters of water (I’d had some earlier).
They tore through my food and water like there wasn’t no tomorrow. Which, in a manner of speaking, there wasn’t much of one, but that ain’t no reason to eat up all of a man’s food.
The guys were like hogs, eating two or three cans apiece and drinking down whole 2-liter cola bottles full of water. The girls were a little better. They didn’t eat as much, but still. I was beginning to like the crying girl the best out of all of them cause she didn’t do nothing but sip a little water.
I take that back. Half of me was freaking out to see all my supplies disappearing, but the other half couldn’t take my eyes off of Noelle. She kept looking up every once in awhile and catching me staring at her, and I’d look away real quick.
One time she said, “Ben, right?”
I looked up, my cheeks blushing. “Uh huh.”
She smiled so sweet I about died right there on the spot. “Thank you.”
That made it all worthwhile.
For about 5 minutes, and then I saw the empty cans piling up again.
Shit, after awhile I tore in and ate like a hog, too, just cause I was afraid there wasn’t gonna be nothing left for me if I waited. I especially chowed down on the spaghetti with meatballs. That was normally my once-a-week food, my special treat, but just cause I couldn’t stand to watch them eat it all up, I ate two cans right in a row.
Jesus it was good not to be hungry. I’d forgotten what that felt like.
13
Jon was the first one to start talking while he was chowing down. He kept glancing over at the door.
“They always do that?” he asked.
I looked over. The bugs were whipping their tails through the crack, this way and that, shikka-shikka-skikka-shikka-shikka.
I’d forgotten all about them. By now, it was just background noise to me. Kind of like the freeway before It happened.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Are they trying to get to us?”
“Yeah.”
“Why aren’t there more of them, then?”
I didn’t want to point out the obvious: that their buddies were about a hundred feet away having an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Especially since that girl had stopped her crying and was lying down in the back just sort of sniffling.
“I dunno,” I lied, though I followed it up with, “They usually come out at night. There’ll be a lot m
ore later on.”
“Trying to get in?”
“Yeah. They can’t, though. Don’t worry about that.”
“You sleep out here?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
It took me a few seconds to realize Jon wasn’t kidding.
“Uh…cause they’d get me out there?”
“What, in the RVs?”
Oh, that’s what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about camping out under the stars.
“Yeah, they’re in the RVs. Some of them, anyway. I don’t know which ones they’ve chewed a hole through and which ones they haven’t, so I just stay out here. It’s safer that way.”
Jon looked like he wasn’t too happy to hear that.
“Where’re you guys from?” I asked.
“L.A.,” Noelle said.
I looked over at her in a daze. I didn’t know what to say, so I just repeated what she said. “L.A.”
“It’s a fuckin’ nightmare there, man,” Jon said, shaking his head. “Like, Biblical proportions.”
“Biblical?” I asked, not sure I followed.
“Yeah, like end of the world shit.”
“Were you the only people still alive?”
“No,” Noelle said, real sure-like. “There are other people still alive.”
She sounded like she was arguing, even though I just asked a question.
“We sure didn’t see any on the way up here,” Jon said.
“There are people still alive,” she insisted. “There have to be.”
“Just because you want something, Noelle, doesn’t make it true.”
“Jon,” Craig said from the side of the bunker, his mouth full of food. My food. He was sitting there chowing down on some canned peaches.
“Look, Craig, we gotta start facing reality here – ”
“Jon, shut the fuck up,” Craig said.
Jon looked like he was super pissed…but he shut the fuck up.
Craig went back to his peaches.
My peaches.
Noelle started talking in this voice like she was lecturing a little kid. “There’s 14 million people in L.A., there’s no way that only six of us – ”
“There’s not 14 million people,” Jon sneered.
“14 million people in Los Angeles County,” Noelle shot back, getting angry now. “With Orange County you’re definitely talking 14 million. There’s no way there were only six of us who were still alive.”
“Then why didn’t we see anybody else, Noelle?” Jon asked in a real sarcastic tone of voice.
“Because maybe they were all holed up,” Craig said simply as he finished the last of the peaches.
There was silence for a little while, and then Jon looked at me. If he was mad at the others, at least he was nice to me. “You ever see I Am Legend with Will Smith?”
A movie with a hero. Who also just happens to be a scientist trying to save the world.
I’d seen it on the TV, and said so.
“It was just like that…right out of a movie. Except without the grass growing everywhere. And deer running around.” Jon smiled a little, then the smile faded. “Cars parked everywhere…I mean, thousands, tens of thousands of them on the roads, just jam-packed on the freeways, dead. Nobody in them. Or worse, skeletons in them…”
“Jon,” Noelle warned him.
Jon looked over at the crying girl lying on the ground and lowered his voice. “Sorry.”
Then he turned back to me. “You ever been to L.A., Ben?”
“Yeah…I used to live there with my Mom when I was a kid.”
“You should have seen it, man. I take it back, it wasn’t like I Am Legend, it was more like 2012. You ever see that? John Cusack?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, exactly like 2012, well, except the part about California sliding off into the ocean. But the buildings…the skyscrapers and apartment buildings were half gone anyway, what with the meteors from the first night. Shit, entire neighborhoods were flattened. It looked like a thousand fuckin’ tornados set down at once and then left five minutes later. And fires…Jesus, the fires kept burning everywhere, it was like the whole city was on fire. Nobody noticed we were being invaded until it was too late.”
I frowned. “Invaded?”
14
Craig and Jon looked at each other and kind of laughed, like they understood a joke that I didn’t get, and now they were laughing at me for not getting it. I blushed a little.
“What would you call it when a whole bunch of aliens fall out of the sky and start killing off every human being in sight?” Jon asked.
“Aliens?” I said in disbelief. These things weren’t aliens, they were bugs.
“They’re extraterrestrial life,” Jon said in superior tone of voice, like he was talking down to a kid. “That means not from earth. Extraterrestrial.”
First Craig had been pissing me off, now Jon was, too. Jesus, I wished they’d all died except the girls. The screaming girl, too. I hate to be mean, but that’s the truth. I wished she wasn’t there, either.
The other two girls…especially Noelle…I would’ve saved them.
Definitely Noelle.
“I know that, I’ve seen E.T.,” I said, annoyed.
“He’s seen E.T.,” Jon repeated to Craig, as though I’d just said something hilarious.
“Aliens are, like, little green men and UFO’s and shit,” I said.
“That’s in movies,” Jon said. “These things are from some other planet. They’re not from Earth, that’s for damn sure. The only thing we don’t know is if it was by accident or on purpose.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Craig interrupted. “You saw L.A. Those asteroids hit every major city around the world – destroyed every major city around the world. Look out here – do you see anywhere near as many scorpions out here in Buttfuck Egypt?”
Scorpions. It was true, they kind of did look like scorpions, what with the tail and the legs. But I didn’t think of them that way, because we had real scorpions out here in the desert, with claws and a real tail with a stinger at the end.
Well…had real scorpions. They got eaten up just as fast as the rattlers and rats and cockroaches.
The bugs acted like real scorpions, too. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I’d go out and catch scorpions with the tongs we used to put stuff on the grill with. I’d throw two or three of them in an empty mayonnaise jar. They would scramble all around, tails all up, trying to sting and kill each other.
The bugs were sort of like that. If one was wounded, anyway. If one was hurt or bleeding, there wasn’t no way the others were letting him walk out alive.
Pop used to say that if you put alcohol on a scorpion’s back, it would go crazy and sting itself to death. So I asked Dale Biggs for some beer one time. He wouldn’t give me none until I told him what it was for, then he made me bring the mayonnaise jar over so he could watch. We put in a bunch of beer, but it never stung itself once. I think we damn near drowned the thing instead. And Dale was pissed cause he’d wasted his beer.
Then I realized I could just do it with rubbing alcohol, so I tried that. But I think it was drowned already from the beer.
If alcohol would kill the fucking bugs, that would have been awesome…except I only had half a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the bunker. Used up most of it that time the fucker bit my leg.
I figured I’d just use bullets to kill them instead.
Craig was still going. “This was an invasion, pure and simple. You send in the first wave to fuck everybody up, and then after that you can colonize the world. That’s obviously what they did.”
“‘They’?” Jon asked with a kind of smug look. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“Whoever sent the fucking scorpions,” Craig said.
“Well why haven’t we seen ‘them’ yet, huh? Where are the UFO’s? Where are the little green men, like Ben here said?”
“I don’t know,” Craig snarled. “What I do know is that there’
s no way in hell that asteroids fell by accident on every major city in the world, while Buttfuck Egypt here got maybe one percent as many.”
“One percent was enough to kill everybody I know,” I said.
Jon and Craig looked at me. Noelle looked at me, too.
Mostly I said it to shut them up. But if I was gonna be honest, I’d have to admit that I said it so Noelle would feel sorry for me, too. I had this picture in my brain of her coming over to me and giving me a hug, and maybe taking my head and putting it down on her boobs to comfort me, like a mom might do to a little kid. Patting my head and saying, There, there. There, there.
It worked…sort of. But not the way I wanted.
She left Violet lying on Kristin’s lap and scooted across the bunker floor until she was right next to Craig.
That wasn’t in the plan.
She asked, “How long has…everybody been…?”
“About two months.”
“You haven’t seen anybody else in two months?” Her eyes started to get wet with tears.
I shook my head ‘no.’
“Jesus,” she said.
Noelle reached out and took Craig’s hand, and he gave hers a little squeeze.
“Well, at least we’ve got each other,” Noelle said, looking into Craig’s eyes.
Jesus Christ. If I knew she was gonna go over to her boyfriend and hold hands, I wouldn’t have brought it up in the first fucking place.
Then she looked at me and smiled. “And now you’ve got us.”
That smile melted right into me. I smiled back, all happy and shit, even if I wasn’t going to get to put my head on her boobs.
Then I saw the empty cans at Craig’s feet and thought, I wish I just had you, Noelle.
I could do without the rest of you.
15
They went on talking and arguing for awhile. I mostly ignored them. If Noelle was going to get all gooey with her boyfriend every time I said something, I was just going to shut the fuck up.
I did a count on the cans after they were all finished eating, though.
10 cans of spaghetti. 43 cans of soup. 61 cans of vegetables. 41 cans of fruit. 21 cans of tuna fish. And 164 liters of water. Jesus, they drank water like they were fish.
Bottle Full Of Scorpions Page 4