A Chemical Fire (19 page)

Daniel’s cheeks stretch, his teeth coming out. He brings his hand up and runs the blade over it, more red onto metal. Walking down the hill, leaning back and fighting the pull he stabs a Victim coming up at him then puts his boot to it’s shoulder and pushes it back. As it falls the ones around it catch the scent and turn, going hungry down after it.

Daniel laughs. Deep, hard, the sound of it up from his stomach.

Victims are creeping from the tree lines along the road, driven out by the blood. Janet’s mask says, “This has been absolutely lovely stopping like this, now can we get the fuck out of here?”

I brush the street dust off.

Adena says, “I should have stopped, I don’t know why I didn’t. I was going through a lot with my father. I was so full of toxins I couldn’t handle more and I had to get home right then. So it was wrong, but that doesn’t mean you can put your hands on me.”

Tumbling through the trees, dragging up the road, more bodies. Daniel wipes his hand on the sword again and runs past the SUV, slashing at a few and getting them onto each other.

“Please start the car,” she says, looking away.

We all get back in and I fix my gauze, one try and the car starts up. I tell them we’re all connected darkly. Adena says, “Get us to the dam. After that, I want you to disappear.”

Believe me, I’m trying.

Receptor Antagonist

Along another sunlight’s time we butcher the landscape, stopping to cut into the victims when they get thick. Daniel makes new slices in his skin when more blood is needed to jump their cannibalism, and in between there’s driving, always driving the red through mesas; dried out tables weathered and eroded by the pressures.

Adena’s skin is like a lizard’s just before molting, whitish and loose-fitting against the breeze when she says, “I need another scale,” and we go and find a store and get one.

When Daniel gets the itch he says, “I need to find a hunting supply,” and we track a store down and get inside, taking it apart to find what we want.

Janet pushes a Victim into the backroom saying, “I need some time,” and we give it to him, watching the entrance. Twenty minutes of sound later he comes back and we ask him nothing. Then before we leave he says, ir cI think I’m in love,” and when we look he’s holding a black crossbow.

I lose track again, a string of photographs leading through a storyline of battles and driving. In some of the pictures my hands are driving, some are of the interstate, some of fighting against ancient, red rock. Freeze frames of abandoned and rusted out cars are laid out with close-ups of ammo clips, then one of Daniel’s face, then road signs pointing the way to a stadium.

***

The image of the arena is a modern block of glass; round like a puck here, the jut-shape of a ship there, guarded out front by a sculpture and four towers retired from their lights. More shots of Victim kills, breaking in, getting inside, then the still goes choppy video and I’m real-time again, navigating the wide hollows spread with ash, the quiet food counters and souvenir stands, the restrooms, the posters of cancelled shows and trophies separated from their weight. We pull them apart with giddy energy. We shove each other, fall, get back up, kick in glass.

The doors push open and we step into the deep space of the center, a capsule shape of air and scaffolding, the plastic seat ocean descending down to the flat of the stage- a room so thick it swims the head. Between each section a stairway runs down to the bottom and we step, step, step down and out into the middle, the size of the place sitting on us. Crosswalks and support beams weave the ceiling a hundred feet above, lights hanging around a cube made of scoreboards and television screens.

“Pathetic.” Daniel points to the two flags hanging at the far end, well over the heads of the seats: a red-white-blue and a red and white maple, side to side.

“What’s the point then,” Daniel asks. “If we were on the same team, no wars and more or less an open door policy, then why separate ourselves at all?”

Adena says, “Well…”

“Lines are drawn between separate sides so they can stay separate sides. When someone crosses your line you crush their ears in, and when soldiers come to learn what's happened to their friends you bleed them out, too, and you send the coffins home.” He looks at us, no one has an answer. “A border you can cross isn’t a border at all. You either fight for yours or you join up and become stronger, expand your line so that when someone steps over it you have one army to beat them back and invade.” He adds, “And if hockey wanted to be a serious sport, it should have been us against them, every game. Not this inter-mingled sometimes-my-enemy-sometimes-my-friend shit.”

“That actually makes a little sense,” Adena says.

Is this why we came here?

Daniel turns to me. “We’re against numbers no army in history has ever faced. Even the most severe underdogs have had more than four soldiers, not to mention training and time. What we’ve done, statistically, is impossible. Yet we’ve done it. Have you looked at us out there? When we hit our stride we’re a fluid and precise monster, like a goddamn Swiss clock with swords for hands.”

White blood cells in his cuts fighting microorganisms, stem cells regenerating lost tissue. “We are what we are, anyone who can say different was burned alive.”

A few thousand seats watch us, folded up and empty. Then Janet says, “There’s too much ash in here to camp. Let’s eat and get out.”

We all turn away and go to our bags and get what’s needed; Dan and Janet take out canned food, Adena unwraps a slice of spoiled meat and runs her tongue over it, I go to my supplies and open to nothing. No morphine, no sleep hypnotics or antipsychotics or anticonvulsants, no stock of benzodiazepines, no acetaminophen and codeine cough medicines, not even diphenhydramine or dextromethorphan or the rest.

Someone took it all.

“You finished everything. You’ve been eating pill meals,” Janet says, popping a jar of olives and drinking the juice under his mask. Pores raise up, the primeval shiver response flexing hairs on my arms. Hot twitches, ant colonies on my slippery back and under the hug of the face wrapping. He says, “I have to admit, you raped my expectations. In my whole career I’ve never seen anyone who can handle what you take.”

Color shifts and I claw his bag open, sinuses filled with smells of iron and poison. I find the bottle of opioid powder, dust synthesized from morphine extracted from poppy and I pop it open to snort.

“No, no, no, not like that.” Janet takes it from my hand and offers to cook it. I pull back to let him but only because it's his. From the bag he gets a burnt metal spoon and a packet of citric acid, one bottle of water, one filter, one lighter and tells me to give him one of my needles. As I shake for it he mixes everything in the spoon, then puts the flame under. “People will tell you you don’t need to cook the high quality stuff, but I think it takes the ritual out of it.” He sucks it up through the filter and into the needle, the line up to twenty ready. “Without tradition what are we? Just monkeys, humping in the trees.”

I tie my arm and flick, flick, the vein pushing up and I stick, pull up and let in. There’s a hesitation- nothing happens, and I think I've been tricked. Then it goes: the blood-brain barrier my own border to cross. The invader deacetylates and binds to receptors. Respiration shoots up and then falls down, heart rate and pulse come down, a rush to the head and a slackening of the musculoskeletal as all my fuses burn slowly inside.

When I was young I went to the ocean to overcome my fear of it and was met at the shore by a wave taller than my head slapping into me all at once. This is like that, if water made you come.

“Wait,” Daniel says. “Do you hear that?” Wet sounds coming off the wavy dome, slop-mashing and blending from every angle. “Something’s moving over there.”

“Run, now, run,” Daniel screams and I’m blacked out but my eyes work, that same feeling but this time I can see it all, see them running, see the Victims in the floor, all of them in here, the sold-out crowd of ashes turning to damp flesh, forming and heaving from the ground. We sprint up the stairs with hands reaching out to grab our feet and legs, tripping us up as we take the steps two and three at a time, reaching the top of the section as the crowd is completing. The doors swing open to the walls and we crash into the horde of Victims waiting in the outer corridor and without pause I sever a path into them, through them, fury fighting, separating from the others in the groaning and shouting confusion, carried apart by the tide of scabs.

Through new vision I am a massacre. A message sent from the dead to the dead. Heads, hands, I undo all.

I’m the first to the doors and I shove and stumble out them, ataxia hitting my legs and flopping me to the ground. I look back to the wall of fans, arms stretching, teeth grinding, all of these reborn at once, and it seems impossible. And then my eyes open. And my mouth, too, because I see now what I couldn’t before. Somnolent and alone and down on the concrete I realize the truth, because there's no other explanation.

This is all because of me.

All of this. The births, the Victims, the birds and the fish and the fire, I’ve done it all. Every time I’ve used, an equal reaction. My parents, the kids, everyone, I’ve turned populations to ash and then drawn them back out. Every milligram and ounce of my chemicals has fed this end.

The Americas. Dead. Europe and the United Kingdom. Dead. Australia and Africa and Iceland and Greenland and all of Asia, cities and villages and jungles and suburban towns wiped of human life because of me. I’ve killed every person on Earth minus three, and now I’m finishing them off, too.

The head swells, brain against skull, ready to rupture, hurting so much my eyes water because it’s true, it’s all true. I can feel it and I know it.

I pull up, lurch and stagger to the red car and get in behind the wheel, watching the shake and shudder inside the doors, the three of them struggling in the middle. If they survive the swarm the last thing they deserve for it is me. They're not looking my way. They're focused on survival, as they should be, and the only chance they have is to be wherever I'm not.

I get the engine going, pull out and drive dizzy until the stadium leaves the mirror, deep into what I’ve created.

Act Four

Church

Nerve Signal

With less in my way I’ve never pushed so hard, no cars to move out of the way or slow down and get around, only the occasional Victim. I have no one asking me to stop to eat or piss or start a side mission. There’s only me, watching it all die and go to dirt and cactus.

The sky is a patch of purples through these eyes, punched through by black clouds wearing gray armor. Under every rock is the pure outline of spiders and scorpions, the talons on every vulture above visible to me alone, running their hunger circles and asking my help.

When the heroin is metabolized I pass a camper that burns red for me and I get into it. I split apart the trapped family with the axe and find their drugs, my eyes bringing me to it. I chew a few bitter pills and pocket the rest. My clothes ripped and dirty I go through theirs to find a hooded shirt, put it on and get out and drive more stopping whenever my eyes tell me there’s a reason to.

The first signs for the Hoover Dam are washed in the water-green of the struggling moon. I listen to them, keep moving through the succulents and desert roses until the horizon bubbles up with something I haven’t seen in a long time: electric light; Las Vegas blazing neon and halogen in the distance. I slow to stare, then drive the headlights through the desert, bugs crawling in all directions.

***

All this time, all these brutal miles and finally the dam is under me. The victory is bitter-sweet; there’s no real reason to be here now except finality, completing a goal held through violent odds.