She hid the blue Schwinn between the stairs and bushes, adjusted the duffel bag on her back, and slid into the dark, chilly vestibule. BHS was a two-story, bracket-shaped building likely constructed during the reign of Julius Caesar. Like the town hall and post office, it was built from giant, imposing, ice-cold blocks of stone that belittled the town’s moldering houses, chintzy trailer parks, and hollowed-out factories. Between classes, the hallways became reverberating hell-storms through which nothing but girls’ shrieks could penetrate.
This morning, BHS was a catacomb. She tiptoed past the vacant front office. It felt pigeonhearted to tread so tentatively down a hall through which she normally strutted, but she could not get her back to straighten. From afar came the mice-scurry of a clump of people making a run for it, but she didn’t see them and was afraid to shout. Besides, if she knew Conan, he would be hiding alone.
Pomp!—the sound of a gunshot, soggy with reverb. Greer flattened against the icy wall. The shot came from the floor above. If someone was shooting, there was something to shoot at, and that was the best lead she had. She bounded up the stairs, The brass gleam of the second-floor trophy case had just come into view when the water fountain next to her exploded—Pomp! Pomp!—metal peeling open like tinfoil, the water hosing her so cold it was scorching.
Greer let the water shove her to the floor, and rolled with it, over the duffel bag and its sharp contents, huddling behind a doorjamb. Frantic images from code-red active-shooter drills flashed in her brain. Cabinets piled in front of doors, students on stomachs behind tables flipped to their sides, listening for the knob-jingle of the gym coach playing the part of shooter, everyone giggling despite how fucked up the whole thing was, because if you can’t laugh at the theoretical shit luck of being murdered at your least favorite place on Earth, you’re going to have a tough life.
Pomp—the glass in the stairwell door shattered above her.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Pomp—a hole was punched through the door.
“Stop!” she screamed.
The shots echoed for eighteen years, making it impossible to know how many times her name was said before she heard it.
“Greer? Greer?”
She squinted from behind water-soaked hair, through wood-splintered eyelashes, over glass-crystalled cheeks. Fifty feet off but walking her way was Conan. Her instinct rejected it; Conan had never moved so confidently in these halls. But she’d know that short, pudgy shape anywhere. Even if it stood more proudly than usual. Even with the Browning rifle jutting from his side like an additional arm.
He kneeled over her. She felt his soft fingers, hot from a fired gun, brush fragments of glass and wood from her face and hair.
“Is that Dad’s bow? Did you bring the stupid bow?”
He laughed lightly. He laughed lightly. Conan Morgan, the kid who hadn’t smiled on school property in half a decade, who shuddered when he walked by certain lockers, who got up from being knocked down with the numb resignation of a person training for a life on the HortiPlastics conveyor belt. He was lively, buoyant. Greer distrusted the smile on her little brother’s face. It looked like a red ribbon.
Conan helped her up, led her by the arm, and positioned her behind him at the hallway’s corner. It was more physical contact than they’d shared in a decade. He unslung his rifle and peered down the hall like an action-movie cop.
“You should’ve brought the Remington,” he said.
“I couldn’t … It wouldn’t fit … and the ammo…”
“Dad hit it behind Parcheesi.”
“We have to … I’ve got a bike…”
Conan stretched his neck into the hall, rifle at the ready.
“You run into Mama Shaw?” he asked.
Unwillingly, Greer pictured the legless Jamaican inhaling Miss Jemisha’s braids into her toothless mouth. She nodded.
“I saw her and I knew,” Conan said, “I knew. I left Dad the Remington because it’s his favorite.”
Telling her brother their dad was dead would have been hard enough. But explaining what Freddy Morgan had become? She couldn’t explain it to herself. Conan cocked his head at something she didn’t hear. He raised the rifle. He’d always been a decent shot.
She leaned out from behind her brother and saw, near the end of the hall, a figure step from a classroom. Before the person had fully emerged, Conan fired—Pomp!—and blood fanned into the air from the person’s head before the person dropped from view.
“Woo!” Conan cried. “Greer, you see that?”
He snugged the rifle into his elbow and jerked back the bolt. The spent rounds twirled free and clattered to the floor. Conan dug a hand into a pocket of loose bullets, loaded three rounds, and chambered them with a facility no one else in the Morgan clan ever achieved. Greer got the feeling her brother had been at this since dawn.
“There’s a couple more in that room I need to get.”
“What’s wrong with you? Let’s go.”
His round-cheeked enthusiasm faded.
“Go? No, Greer, you don’t get it. When I got here—I mean, I always get here early, but I just, you know, sort of hide out. I had no idea how many people are actually here that early. People in singing groups, rehearsing plays, doing sports stuff, yearbook stuff. They’re dedicated, man. It kind of blew me away, Did it spread fast at the Last Resort?”
Greer nodded, flapping her hands, Let’s go, let’s go.
“It spread here like mono, man. Like herpes.” This was the boy Greer knew, bitter about missing out on even the unpleasant things others experienced. “Most kids didn’t even run from those things. They ran toward Them. That’s dedication too, I guess. Dedication to their school.” He shook the Browning, “This is how I show my dedication, This is the chance I always wanted. I’m going to keep shooting and keep piling Them in there till I’m done.”
He gestured his chin down the perpendicular hall.
Across from the trophy cases was the French/Spanish room. The idyllic European posters on the outside bulletin board felt like traps: the room’s door was closed. Greer realized she’d never seen any classroom door closed before. A dread colder than the building’s walls rose around her like water.
“Here we go,” Conan whispered. He aimed his rifle at the distant room.
But Greer was gone, She’d been pulled to the left, as if by chain. Fugitive daubs of sunlight pawed the dusty trophies. The French/Spanish door grew bigger, its silence more insidious. Conan was muttering, impatient for the perfect shot, and wasn’t watching when Greer took the doorknob. ¡Bienvenido! read one paper taped to the door, Entrez! read another. Both pages rustled as she pulled it open. A heavy door, she acknowledged, which is why she’d heard nothing through it.
Inside were over a dozen students and teachers, They’d been pitched there like laundry. Some were dead, twisted and limp. Some were alive, squirming and weeping. Some were that other thing, white-eyed and sliding like snakes, jaws wide for live flesh. It was a lurid mash, the rabid eating the living, the living becoming the dead, the dead rising. As the living and the dead turned to look at her, Greer identified the characteristic shared by all: a gunshot wound.
Pomp!
“Hoo! Yes! I’m on fire!”
Greer turned slowly to the right. Conan shifted the rifle to one hand so he could pump the opposite fist. He spotted her.
“Hey.” His tone chilled. “Better close that.”
“You shot them,” she gasped.
“Close it. They’ll get out.”
“I thought you were … They’re kids. Conan, you’re shooting living kids.”
His whole body seemed to darken, fading into unlit brick.
“What did you think I was doing?”
She’d been right to recall the active-shooter drills. Her brother wasn’t playing a sheriff riding up to prove his mettle to a disdainful student body. He was playing punisher, exploiting civilization’s collapse to have his revenge. He smiled again, that wonderful sight, and sh
ook his head like the misunderstanding was silly.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, “No one cares anymore. This won’t even make the news.”
“You’re killing the wrong people.”
“Don’t be a dumb-ass, Once They’re dead, They don’t recognize faces.”
“So?”
“So, it’s like we don’t have faces. I don’t have to be some little puke people push around, You don’t have to be a worthless dark-skinned chick flunking class. We don’t have to eat people’s shit at HortiPlastics. We can be anyone. We can do anything. We can take whatever we want.”
“What the fuck is at this shit-ass school you could possibly want?”
He gestured at the hall down which he’d been shooting. “The—” The gesture failed; he puffed his chest. “There’s the—” This faltered too; he throttled the Browning. “There’s got to be something!”
Greer pointed toward town, “People out there are killing each other!”
“I know. I know that.”
“You’re the same! You’re doing the same thing!”
Conan shook his head violently, “No. No way. You know how many school shooters are Black?”
“Conan!”
“Like none! None, Greer!” He brandished the rifle. “This is how white folks kill each other, and do they ever catch hell for it? They ever pass laws to make sure they don’t kill again, that they don’t get to vote, that their leaders are taken the fuck out? Fuck no! Why should we act any different?”
Greer waved her hands at the French/Spanish room.
“There aren’t just white kids in here!”
Conan’s laugh was the sound of snapping twigs.
“Well, shit, sis. If you’re taking power, you might as well clean house, you know?” His smile collapsed. “Listen. Will you just listen to me? You’ve got Dad’s bow. Some other good stuff in there too. We could do this together. Remake the whole fam, Pick any big, fancy house in town we want to live in. Me and you, What do you say?”
The soggy slapping sound to her left had been growing for a time, but it was only now, with motion tickling her peripheral vision, that Greer looked. A single person had dislodged himself from the fleshy, blood-lubricated mass, a young man dragging himself with only his arms, his legs apparently paralyzed by the hole blown through his back. With his sharp, shining brown eyes drained to white, Greer almost didn’t recognize him.
The last time she’d seen Qasim, his broad nose had been buried in the shirt she’d wadded at her sternum, one of his hands clenched over her bare breast, the other slid down the front of her unbuttoned jeans. His shirt was off, but guys got away with that at Remy’s parties. She recalled the skillet heat of their close-pressed stomachs. She’d spent half the night tracing his abs with a nail.
Here was that stomach again, rolling into view as the Qasim-thing reached for her waist—flesh to be unbuttoned this time. Qasim’s abs remained conspicuous, except this time as loose red coils Conan’s shot had ripped apart.
Greer stumbled back until she felt trophy-case glass at her back. It was all gone. Her dad, her brother, her near lover, her home, her neighborhood, her school, her town, her future. She felt a gust of mad hilarity. What future? She’d never had one—Conan was right about that. This rabid strain had only brought her hopelessness to the fore, swept the suicide cliff to her toes. There was nothing to do now but tip herself over it.
She gripped the duffel bag with her left hand and offered her right to her brother.
“Come with me,” she pleaded.
“What? Greer, no. You come with me.”
Despite Qasim, still crawling, and the living, still dying, and the world, still caving under her feet, she let her eyes shut, like a girl who believed people might still cradle her, and held out her arm straighter, like a big sister should, and whispered her wish like a prayer, like all prayers, an exchange of rationality for magic, the only hope she had left.
“Come with me?”
Dark silence for seconds, except Qasim’s slap-slap progress. Greer heard a quick, quivering inhale and the bone-crack of the Browning’s bolt, She opened her eyes, hoping for miracles, but Conan remained miles from her outstretched hand. Her lashes were so matted with tears she did not, at first, notice her brother’s lashes were as well, He was never one to let others see him cry, no matter what they’d done. He snorted back his sniffle and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
“Can’t, Greer, It’s too late. I got to finish what I started. There’s been nothing for me for a long, long time, you know? This was always the way it was going to end. Me versus Them, until there’s no me left. It’s not your fault. Be careful out there, all right? They’re coming to get you.”
She left, Just like that. Without another look at the thing that had been Qasim or the boy who’d been her brother, she charged the way she’d come, the soles of her naked feet withstanding broken glass before hitting the stairs and forcing herself to think of nothing but Fadi Lolo’s Schwinn and how fast she could ride it. When she heard the pomp, pomp! of resuming shots, her sneaky brain thought of the pomp of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the march they played at graduation, not that she’d ever have one. Unless this right here was graduation: the close of one phase, the start of another.
Capricious Gods
A jokey navy saying came to Karl Nishimura as he chewed his third straight meal of dusty peanuts: “An aircraft carrier is a dictatorship defending a democracy.” The dictator in the adage was the ship’s captain, though in reality a captain was beholden to a scaffold of brighter brass, leading all the way to the commander in chief. Aboard the USS Olympia, however, this platitude had become proverb. Here a dictator reigned. His every edict was followed, and he felt no duty to any higher authority than what he called God.
Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg, still going by the stainless moniker of Father Bill, had taken absolute control of the topside of the boat. Nishimura’s spells of incredulity were becoming more infrequent, which worried him. Only two days into the strangest coup in history, the impossible was being normalized, Here, the chosen few, cloistered high atop a steel high-rise, were isolated from those belowdecks, taking literal shots at them when they surfaced on the flight deck, whether seeking help, escape, or prey. All upper-floor units are filled, sorry. We don’t want your kind up here.
The status of the residents increased as one went up: meteorological room, radar room, flag bridge, nav bridge, Pri-Fly. The food up top, Nishimura guessed, must be better than peanuts. Down here, you ate what you got in personal spaces smaller than racks. The confines of each man’s area had been drawn on the floor in chalk by Father Bill’s second-in-command, O-3 Boatswain’s Mate Tommy Henstrom. The chalking had taken several hours. The island’s final census was forty-two souls.
Make that forty-one. How quickly Nishimura wanted to forget what had happened to yeoman Jacobo Leatherdale. Nishimura dry-swallowed a peanut. He was so thirsty, and so tired, and though his assigned patch of steel floor was uncomfortable, it was also beneath a work counter, which meant it was dark and promised the possibility of sleep. No one dared close their eyes until after Night Prayer, of course. Disrupting Evening Prayer was what had doomed Jacobo Leatherdale. No, don’t think of it, not if sleep is what you want.
Nishimura’s bunk was Henstrom’s cruelest sketch, an oval no bigger than Nishimura’s body, Naturally, he was in the meteorological room, the lowest level, Weather equipment was bulky and bolted down, giving the room the feel of a hurricane refugee camp, or something worse. Soon enough, he figured, tracked mud would be the least of the problems. The place would begin to smell. Sickness would spread. Nishimura could see it all coming.
The island had just enough guns for five armed guards, one of whom was posted at each level to keep any ambitious riffraff in line. Ladders had been reinstated, except for the one connecting Nishimura’s level to the flight deck. The concept was clear: if the meteorological level was overcome, it could be amputated from higher levels by
retracting ladders. It would be no big loss. After Leatherdale’s exit, only Nishimura and seven other pariahs lived in this squalid part of town.
Resisting the urge to resist was a kind of strength; he tried to convince himself of this. After Jacobo Leatherdale had met his fate, Nishimura had tried to discreetly rally his fellow bottom-floor outcasts.
“It’s going to happen to all of us,” he hissed.
The other men shot him furious glares and turned away. Leatherdale might be gone, but another of their sorry lot, a turbine systems mechanic named Lavar Pomeroy, had been bumped up to radar-room digs. All he’d had to do was grovel long enough to Henstrom, That’s all the meteorological men wanted, to distance themselves from the smoldering hell of the flight deck and get one level closer to Pri-Fly, the holy home of Father Bill.
Nishimura choked down his last peanut, his throat aching for liquid. It seemed like hours since anyone had been by with the water bucket and ladle. With Night Prayer overdue, the bucket might be finished until morning. The bucket. The goddamn bucket. It was all that mattered anymore. How quickly Saint Karl, straight-backed and proud of his khaki dress, had devolved into a dog, hunched for trouble, ears perked for the bucket’s clanging. After a few more days of this, what sort of beast would he be?
Nishimura credited his survival to two things. One, Henstrom enjoyed watching him suffer. Two, he knew Big Mama better than anyone else up here, and they knew it. Father Bill had not deigned to descend from Pri-Fly since the Long Walk, but Henstrom, busy helper bee, made frequent visits to the proletariat, always accompanied by one of the guards, to find help in locking in the new world order. It was perhaps ironic, certainly tragic, that no one had helped more than Nishimura. He did not see himself having a choice, not if he hoped to get all the way to Buffalo one day to find Larry and the children.
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