Every nail on the deck a bluff, every crack a canyon, the jet jolted and jounced as it raced the length of the too-short runway, not diverted enough by the late parting of the rope to lose much of the exit path. Neck sprained, back cracked, teeth chipped, blood thick in the mouth, eyes flat to the brain. Metal screamed, straight surfaces bent—and they were off, wheels gasping, silent and free. The bob, the plummet, the sky gone, an ocean vastness, gray cutlasses of squall, the spit of salt water across cockpit glass—the tip of the F-18’s nose touched the Pacific, a goodbye kiss.
Forty-seven-thousand pounds raced along threshing waves like they were a second runaway, then up, the sky’s revenge, the sun’s return, soft handholds of clouds, blood down the throat, sizzling in stomach acid, the plane arcing, bending, vertical, a full four g’s, he’s in flight, they’re in flight, cupped in a god’s hand, one more whang, one last whoosh.
“Yes!” Nishimura bayed.
Jenny’s blood-slicked hand, rising from the front seat, a thumbs-up.
The Super Hornet banked, and the whole world spun. They were crossing back over Olympia to catch the western wind, still at low altitude, five hundred feet over the keel. Nishimura knew Jenny was showing off; she had just enough verve left to do it. He was thrilled by her, for her, and for himself for having the great fortune of knowing her. She had fighter-pilot swagger after all.
The lowness of the pass gave them a final glimpse of the situation aboard Big Mama, a sight with which Nishimura would grapple for as long as he lived. The upper catwalks still glinted with the guns of the tower guard, but none of Father Bill’s flock had spilled onto the flight deck to attempt to prevent the F-18’s launch. Something else was going on. The shining steel surface outside Pri-Fly was painted red. Men were queued up single file on the ladder, awaiting their turn at sacrifice. Nishimura heard again the last thing Father Bill said.
An offering. I think our men would gladly offer up a few pieces, don’t you?
These must be the “new rites,” the fulfillment of the chaplain’s vision to unite man and demon, the birth of a larger Legion. Sailors drooped over railings as they wound belts around arms to stop blood spouting from handless wrists. Others, who had chosen to donate a foot, lay on the floor amid darkening pools, Father Bill himself, his Hawaiian shirt drenched in blood, stood in the center of the mess, staring up at the overhead plane.
Jenny did not disappoint; she held up a bloody middle finger.
Worse things were revealed when the other side of the island came into view. Men ferried buckets of severed body parts to the platform edge, where Captain Page and his fellow demons were fed, piece by piece. Nishimura shuddered. TFOA, he thought grimly. It was the cheeky acronym sailors used for a flight crew’s never-ending foe: Things Falling Off of Aircraft. Things were still, in a manner of speaking, falling off.
His heart broke for good upon giving Olympia a final look, Hundreds of women, who’d survived ghouls and ghoulish men, were spilling from the deck-handler room and multiple access trunks, Perhaps they’d possessed functioning plat cams, and seeing the F-18 take off had compelled them to rush upward in hopes of being saved.
If the plane were armed, he’d ask Jenny to deliver mercy.
Nishimura closed his throbbing eyes and settled into his seat. Operation Bills-Lions had succeeded. His husband, his daughters, his sons, he might see them again, and that, no matter the state of the world, would be as much of a heaven, and a haven, as these quiet skies.
The cabin pressurized, Nishimura’s pains diminished. Based on Olympia’s location, he estimated the trip to shore would take three hours. That was nothing. There should be no problems. He decided to try to smile. Like Operation Bills-Lions, he pulled it off.
He did not know he’d drifted to sleep until he made out Jenny’s low voice.
“Wake up … wake up … wake up…”
Nishimura lifted his helmet visor. The day remained a bright, crystal gift. He yawned. His ears popped. He chuckled, a child’s reaction.
“Morning, pilot,” he greeted, “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, Good. Hello. There are two levers.”
“What’s going on? We close to home?”
“Two levers. The sides of your seat. You just have to pull one.”
“Levers. Why am I pulling levers?”
“To eject.”
Their small world, already dense inside the cockpit, thickened.
“Pilot. Pagán. Jenny. I’m not ejecting.”
“The chairs are synchronized. We’ll both eject. But I’ll be dead.”
The bayonet blade to her chest. The squirting wound. The amoeba splashes. All the blood on the windshield, now frozen to rubies. He’d done this: killed her, killed himself. His chest hurt, like he’d been stabbed too.
“No, Jenny, you’re going to make it.”
“It’s not hard, sir. The canopy will blow. Boosters will take you away from the jet, The parachute will deploy. I’ve got us to eleven thousand. Not California, though. Sorry. Don’t worry. If the chute doesn’t pop, use the rip cord.”
“Jenny, talk to me. Let’s talk this through.”
“Your seat will fall off, Pull the two cords. Steer into the wind.”
“Jennifer Pagán, you listen to me. I put that hole into you. I am not going to let it end you. You’re going to make it to Detroit, you hear me? I’m going to get you to Detroit. You’ve got family there. Friends. When was the last time they saw you? When was your last liberty?”
Her light, feathery laugh crackled through a speaker system he could not locate. If it had a microphone, he could hold it to his mouth, shout into it.
“Liberty…,” she drawled. “Strange word, isn’t it … ‘Liberty has expired,’ they said … Hug your family and get on the boat … What’s liberty, though … Liberty’s freedom … This is liberty … I can feel it … Can’t you feel it?”
“No, Jenny, no, hang on.”
“I tried … but it’s going away now … it’s all liberty…”
“Jenny, no, please!”
“I represent … the fighting spirit of the Navy…”
“That’s right! You do! Come on!”
“I’ll obey the orders … of those appointed over me…”
“That’s me, Jenny! I’m the one giving you orders!”
“I am … a United States…”
“Sailor, Jenny! Say it! Say the word! You’re a sailor!”
The nape of her neck became visible as her helmet tipped to her chest. Her brown curls were greasy from life too long in the dark. Though the F-18 shook, a stillness settled through Jenny Angelys Pagán. And that was that. Some miseries came strewn out over time; the mystery of the man-overboard hoaxes, how strange to think it would never be resolved. Other miseries came fast, hammers to the face. He’d never get Jenny to Detroit. He’d never know anything about her except she was the bravest pilot he’d ever known.
He stared past his fallen comrade. Beyond stretched an ocean fading from royal to cerulean blue. Land was close. Among Jenny’s last rambles had been the mea culpa, Not California, though. Where was he headed? He could see a brown strip of beach emerge from clouds, land ahoy, Nishimura searched for the eject levers Jenny mentioned. They were easy to find, their brightness a warning.
Jenny’s helmet rose back up. Joy burst into Nishimura’s extremities.
“Yes! Pilot! Good! Jenny! Yes! Listen! Stay awake! Jenny, you can do it! You can land this thing! You can make it! You can—”
Her suit was bulky, her headrest formfitting. Yet she turned her head, several inches farther than should have been possible. The skin at the strained side of her neck split open with the sound of a torn rag. Jenny’s oxygen mask, slathered in blood, dangled from a mouth agape and pouring black gunk and pink saliva. Through her dark visor, Nishimura could see the white pellets of her eyes.
Jenny’s jaw unlocked and she hissed.
Nishimura pulled both levers despite having been told to pull only one, but he could
n’t be too careful, not anymore. He was gone, whipped into an airless, blinding sky, hurled across an endless, sparkling sea, a speck of dirt in the wind, subject to so many hot, cold, hard, fast, beating, bruising sensations at once, he could feel only one thing: alone.
Very Talented
The air-break hiss, the backing-up beep, the soggy smush: early-morning sounds so familiar it took Charlie half an hour of slumberous tossing before she realized she should be concerned. They were garbage-truck noises. She got up. She did not switch on the generator. She wasn’t sure she’d ever turn it on again, Last night she’d watched WWN’s last broadcast. At the end, the TV camera had been jostled so that it showed only the disco colors of the ceiling lights, while the audio continued: screams, restless grunts, scuffling feet, and smacking lips.
Charlie removed a cutting board from a slot in the boarded-up front windows, her secret viewing hole. She nibbled from a bag of stale almonds and assessed the activity at the end of the block. It wasn’t one garbage truck. It was three. The night they’d fled the morgue, Luis had relayed from social-media feeds that mobs were blaming the violence on Latino immigrants, who happened to dominate local trash-collecting.
Charlie’s guess was that some of these Latinos, recognizing they had the strongest vehicles out there, had banded together. The trucks’ crews were too distant to make out, but she could see people toting long objects. Rifles, maybe. Maybe crowbars, baseball bats, wrenches, and hatchets, like those fuckers who’d accosted Luis’s Prius.
“Men with sticks,” Charlie whispered, “They’ll be the death of us.”
They were methodical: Fifteen or twenty people would encircle a house, then enter it while others, outside, dealt with neighborhood ghouls. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the raiders exited, loaded with supplies, at which point the garbage-truck caravan rolled to the next house. Charlie grinded almonds, tasting nothing. She guessed she had an hour before the crew got to the Acocella house. By then, who knew if they’d be in a charitable or shoot-first mind-set.
She didn’t have it in her to run. She’d take her chances with the garbage-truck gang, see where it got her. There was just one thing she wanted to do first, something she’d put off for forty-eight hours. She didn’t have to worry too much about noise. The trucks were loud; nearby ghouls would be drawn their direction.
Luis’s body was wrapped in a pretty quilt. Charlie had done a fastidious job of it, binding the edges with belts she’d gathered from dresser drawers. She couldn’t help but grin. It looked like a burrito. Luis Acocella, world-class complainer, had loved griping about the overstuffed monstrosities of American burritos, usually while inhaling one. The quilt was handmade, the quilter’s name stitched onto a corner square. Whether from Luis’s or Rosa’s side of the family, Charlie didn’t know. The point was, it had sentimental value, and though Charlie wasn’t generally a sentimental girl, she was fine with getting a little sappy about this.
She opened the back door, checked for ghouls as well as the starving dogs she’d heard tussling on the road last night, and dragged Luis’s body onto the back lawn. Luis and Charlie had been medical examiners, not gravediggers, and Mamá Acocella’s burial spot was a dilettante disaster, egg-shaped and hastily filled, though it had so far evaded the noses of those dogs. She could do better. She ducked back inside, grabbed the shovel, and got to work.
Without regular watering, the California earth had desiccated. The shovel sliced through it like ash. Charlie had a three-foot-deep hole dug, next to Mamá, in thirty minutes. Ten minutes more, it was filled with Luis’s body in fetal position and refilled with dirt. She hunkered next to it, her shadow forming an umbilical between mother and son. Forty minutes for the whole operation; for her goodbye, she’d only need seconds.
She held a handful of dirt. In its crumbles she felt the textures of Luis’s hair, the skin on the back of his hands, his clouds of cigarette smoke, his folder of autopsy reports, his medical scrubs, the plastic case of his stupid phone, the wiry scruff of his jawline, his raspy chuckle.
“You’re home,” she told him.
Charlie didn’t want the garbage-truck crew busting down the Acocellas’ door. When they were one house away, she stepped outside, toting a bag of clothing and supplies in one hand, waving one of Luis’s white shirts in the other. The global signal for peace, but the globe didn’t spin like it used to. Two men jogged over, faces red and raging, Their sticks were shotguns pointed right at her head.
“What is your name?” the first shouted. “Como te llamas?”
Did she look lousy enough to be mistaken for a ghoul?
“Charlie Rutkowski,” she said.
“Take your clothes off,” he said, “Desnúdate.”
“What?”
The second man grimaced but didn’t lower the shotgun.
“We need to know you have not been bitten,” he said.
So she took off her clothes, a degrading act, but halfway through, she snickered. She was stripping in her boss’s front yard. Always making a scene. Same old Charlie.
The men were, in fact, Latino. In the four-car wagon train behind the garbage trucks, she spotted a scattering of people of all kinds, probably liberated, willingly or not, from barricaded homes. These people—passengers all—were still and silent. After a fortnight of persecution, the garbage collectors were in charge.
Charlie expected no quarter and received none. They made her lift her breasts, separate her butt cheeks, and display her bite-free armpits and thighs. She was scared and a little angry. Maybe she should dig up Luis, show these bullies he’d been Latino too. Maybe by proxy, they’d start treating her better. Of course, by now Luis’s skin was gray or blue. A girl just couldn’t win.
The trucks hissed to a halt in front of the Acocella home, trailing blood. They must be pitching ghouls inside to save on bullets. Men hopped off and surrounded the house. Charlie would have gladly told them what was inside, but they didn’t ask. The slightly kinder of the two men gestured for her to get her clothes back on, then herded her, with the barrel of his gun, to the last car in the wagon train, a silver Suburban. He rolled the side door open.
The SUV was crowded with women and children.
Uncountable sets of shiny, scared eyes stared at her. Charlie shivered as if she were still naked. Men, and some little boys, were outside waving their sticks, while the women and girls were stowed like luggage. Charlie wasn’t stupid. She knew what was bound to happen when men got used to keeping women behind locked doors and tinted windows.
“Full up.” The man sighed, “You’ll have to cram in back.”
The man opened the trunk, revealing a narrow storage space behind the vehicle’s third bench. There was already one woman back there, sitting against the driver’s-side wall. Charlie crawled in and took the opposite wall. After the trunk closed, the space didn’t seem so spacious.
The woman was a plump, unsmiling Latina with black hair and huge, beautiful dark eyes. Charlie forced a smile; it felt wrong, like they were pretending this was okay. She cleared her throat to say something, anything, but the woman spoke first.
“You don’t remember me.”
Charlie closed her mouth and took a longer look.
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I don’t actually live near here.”
“We met at a Christmas party,” the woman said.
“Did we? I don’t—”
“This is my home.” She raised her eyebrows. “Rosa del Gado Acocella.”
Charlie nodded. She could think of no other way to respond. The nods diminished until they were but tremors. Rosa was alive. She’d stuffed her mother-in-law’s hand into a garbage disposal. She’d crawled through a window to escape. She was more capable, it seemed, than Luis Acocella, even Charlene Rutkowski.
There was no point in hiding the truth. Rosa had probably picked up on Charlie’s attraction to Luis at the Christmas party Charlie didn’t recall and had been, with a wife’s grim foresight and patience, waiting for this day to come. Char
lie knew she should apologize, but she was exhausted, not just from administering to Luis’s last days but from hewing to the rules of a vanishing civilization. Maybe this new world could make allowances for shades and complexities. Maybe both Rosa and Charlie could love Luis, maybe even more for how he’d brought joy to everyone he touched.
“Do you want to go inside?” Charlie asked.
“Luis is dead?” Rosa asked.
Charlie nodded.
Rosa inhaled sharply and directed some tangled hair over her ears.
“Then no. There is nothing left I want.”
The raiders finished with Rosa’s home. The garbage trucks chewed their bone-cracking, blood-gushing trash. The Suburban jerked and jounced as it swung around the cul-de-sac to start up the other side.
“Luis said tienes mucho talento,” Rosa said simply. “Very talented.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you had to, ah, matar … ah, how do you say it. Have you had … to kill?”
From Rosa’s perspective, it wasn’t a non sequitur. Slicing up dead bodies with Luis in a lab; slicing up dead bodies with Luis in the suburbs. While Charlie had been inside a boarded-up house ducking harsh realities in favor of silly things, the outside world, Rosa included, had become more straightforward.
“Yes,” Charlie said, “I have.”
Rosa nodded softly.
“It is difficult, no? What happens to your heart when you must kill what you love?”
Charlie gazed out the window. Men argued before a garbage truck compacter too full of mangled corpses before piling four still-moving bodies beneath a family swing set, which received a gasoline drenching. Soon the pile of bodies spouted in flame, engulfing the old swings, the rusty slide, childhood lost. Charlie tried to feel the fire’s warmth. Rosa, she figured, had burned like that and come out charred, harder. Charlie was ready for the ritual. One more death, one more renewal, another one for the fire.
The Living Dead Page 44