A Chemical Fire (17 page)

Behind the wheel, Janet at my back and the other two standing outside, he tells me I just need to strip some wires and cross the right ones. There’s one set for ignition power, one for the starter, so on. If there are two red ones they go together. If not, look for complimentary colors.

To the plastic cover under the steering wheel he says, “Off.” I grab it and wrench it back and forth, snapping the old clips and pulling the whole thing away.

He points to a panel with six wires clipped to the back of the key tumbler and says, “Even easier,” then goes to the back of the truck and sorts through junk, throwing it around. He finds a tool kit and pulls it open, digging out loudly and returning with a screwdriver. “Your key,” he says. I push it into the ignition and turn, the engine turning and the truck rumbling to. I look at him and he says, “Try turning the wheel.”

I try and it doesn’t move. “Fuck. Wheel lock. It needs the key.” He grabs the wheel and forces it hard to the right, telling me to do the same on the left and we pull back and forth, trying to crack the lock until our arms are sore. The wheel not giving, he says out the window, “We can drive but we can’t turn. If you can move the mall right in front of us, we’re kings,” and the two of them turn away. We sit in our seats, truck growling around us and stomachs the same. Empty, tired, blood-lost. Then I look in the rearview.

I put us into gear and pull forward, Daniel and Adena watching us unsure, Janet asking what I'm doing, and I give the truck a hundred feet of distance then hit the brakes. He looks in his rearview, sees the corrugated metal door behind us, snaps his seatbelt in and says, “Fly, you crazy bastard.”

I hit the gas, slowly at first, then building speed. Hands off the useless wheel and the truck getting momentum, the speedometer reads twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five miles per hour, the mall in the mirror coming up on us. At forty my eyes shut and teeth clamp. We impact, bodies jolting and flopping, a crash all around us and then we’re passing into the building, destruction clearing the way. My foot goes for the brake, missing then finding it and pushing down, pulling us finally to a stop as things fall all around.

Daniel steps in through the peeled back metal, followed by Adena, into the delivery area with its loading vehicles and boxes, its steep step up for trucks to unload, its doorways small and large leading out. “Good work,” he says, checking boxes.

We walk through a door and then two more until we’re in the outlet mall, long hallways of glass store fronts extending down and snaking off. Shoes and videogames, wigs, imported furniture and home goods, jeans and ice cream and pretzels. A skylight above, triangled up to morning with sun coming through to light bushes installed in the center islands, drying them up.

He nods and we walk the hallway in a line, combing the place. We pass free-standing kiosks of junk toys and cheap jewelry then come to the food court and check it, finding nothing but putrid food crawling with worms and green growth. We split up to search further.

When the other two are out of sight, Adena calls me over. Behind the food counter and making sure they can’t see, she says, “Have you ever had food poisoning?” She takes a plastic bin of cutlets from a dead refrigerator and opens the top, a thick smell immediate and my stomach pulling down, saliva in the mouth. “I had it once. You’ve never lost so much weight in your life,” she says.

“That’s because you’re exploding all over yourself.”

“I know, it’s like magic.” She picks out a pink and gray cutlet, holding it away from her nose, and says, “All you need is a little Salmonella in your life.”

Or Campylobacter. Staphylococcus aureus. Bacillus cereus. Escherichia coli.

“Do you want any?” She holds it to me. I pass and walk away, getting around the corner before I hear her gagging hard.

Five minutes in I find a single vending machine off in a corner and bury the axe in it, pull out and bury again and keep going until the front gives and the other three join up and I reach in and get a handful of bags and hand them out, go back in and get more as everyone but Adena opens them and eats.

“I thought I checked over here,” Janet says, his tongue orange and black.

“You missed this.”

“Found something better,” he grins. We follow him back down the hallway, making rights and lefts around hair accessories and lingerie, chewing and swallowing and smacking until we round a corner and see it: wide and red with thick, black tires in the middle of the walkway, roped off.

Hotwired and through the mall, into the delivery entrance, we move the truck then get to the parking lot and onto the road, back to what we’d left behind: red barns and vanishing farms, sand hills ready to be spread over winter roads, towers of grain oxidizing their way toward final collapse. Getting through long silences and longer landscapes, identical scenes with bails of hay dotting tall grasses, sliced through by train tracks weighed down here and there by locomotives stopped dead.

***

We follow signs off the highway and to a hospital, a long, brute of a thing; brick buildings surrounded by parking lots at three sides and houses at the other. Rolling the SUV into the receiving driveway, four levels of cars to our left, we see crowds staring at us.

The vehicle comes to a stop and Daniel steps out, sword drawn, and the rest of us catch up. Three of them rush Daniel and he cuts into them, the heavy blade throwing them back, splitting their stomachs and arms. Victims converge and we start working on the crowd, axe and machete going, shotgun blasting, four against forty.

Daniel calls out victims and takes them, the whites of eyes showing and giddy laugh all the way. His face and body register the joy of each slice, the result of each kill, and we join his victories.

We agree and get in, finding the doors open and more Victims inside. Signs point our way and we kill our way there, corpses with stethoscopes and IV bags melted to them, reaching around corners and falling down stairs.

Into the emergency room we find piles of ash on stretchers and what used to be a girl, her chest open for surgery and her mouth looking to eat. Janet takes the head with his machete. Then we wait for Daniel, finding towels and supplies.

Adena runs to the corner and throws up, then turns to me and crosses her fingers, smiling. Five later the doors swing open and Daniel falls in, face wired with adrenaline and cuts.

“A pile of fresh bandages and a cabinet over there,” Adena points, filling her pack. Daniel goes to it and picks through, stopping at a small, brown bottle and throwing it to me. The label reads morphine. I look at him, his eyes on, and I nod. He finds what he needs and brings it to a table. I pocket the rest of the bottles and some needles.

He works on Janet, sewing his gums while Janet struggles, then hits it with cleaning solution while I shoot the morphine, the blood mixing up and then back in, eyelids coming down. He tells me to take off my wrapping and I do, scabs along with them. He does what he can, sewing and cleaning, then wraps my face again.

“I’m not a plastic surgeon,” he says, “the cuts will close but-”

“I’ve already had this conversation."

He turns and looks at Janet, busy tying a doctor’s mask over his mouth, at Adena gray and trembling, her eyebrows going up pretending she’s fine. Then she turns away and spills bile out of her mouth, all over an EKG machine.

He says, “In this group you don’t have to worry much about looks.”

Mouth Parts

Back in the SUV and down the road a while, Daniel takes out the sealed foods from the hospital and passes them out to everyone but Adena. I eat a little of the dry stuff while driving, then hand the rest to Daniel, him and Janet already done with theirs.

“Thank you for that,” Daniel says, “but I still want to know, honestly, why you got rid of our food. You don’t like to eat, I get it, but you could have left ours alone. You have the willpower, I’ll give you that.”

Adena looks out at the cornstalks as they pass by the thousands, the morphine in me warm and slow. “I have my reasons.”

“We deserve to know.”

“Because you don’t realize how fat and lazy you are. You sit in that seat on your big ass with your gut hanging over your belt and your neck hanging down, breathing like you just ran up eight flights of stairs, and you chomp and chomp away. I worked with people like you for years. You don’t want to better yourselves. You’ll say you do, but you can’t do it. You’re too weak. So you need your food forcibly taken away from you for your own good. That’s the truth and I’m done apologizing for myself.” She looks at Daniel, turned around in his seat. “Just like you want to win fights all the time and claim every place we come across, because that’s what you do and it feels right when you do it.”

Through his mask Janet says, “You know what makes me feel good? Pull over.” I stop the car and we all get out because no one gets out alone, Daniel’s rules, then watch the road while Janet walks into the field, dry corn rustling all the way to find a place to squat.

The sun is bright in my pupils and I wipe the sweat from my palms. Daniel turns to me and says, “I don’t need to bother asking what makes you feel good.” The breath so light in my lungs. He says, “Can you drive?” Skin itchy on my arm, scratch it but the itch keeps moving. "Hello?"

“I don’t remember what we’re talking about,” I say as the blackness folds in all around the edges, an old movie iris blotting out the sun too bright anyway and still not enough to warm my toes, not doing its job, and it shakes me saying to wake up with Adena’s voice but I push it off.

Then the sound: a moan, a scuffle. Janet getting attacked out in the corn, shouting and falling over. Daniel and Adena run into the field. I still can’t see and I follow their sounds, my arms out I step down off the road into the dirt, a few fast ones and I’m hitting stalks hitting my face and pushing them away, more shouting up ahead. Voices getting closer and forcing my eyes to see, dark pulling back enough to see tall corn and movements.

I keep moving, tripping, fumbling over, finding my footing.

Catching up to them, sun coming through my eyes a little more and I’m there but I can barely see, no weapons, they’re pulling a big Victim off Janet, his back against the dirt and his pants down, saying, “Get it off” through the mask. The Victim is reaching out, trying to grab Janet’s face and it gets a handful of his mask, clawing it off, Janet’s mouth coming out disease and all and the victim stops, enough pause for Daniel to pull it away from Janet and shove it off tumbling into the cornstalks.