Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (7 page)

Chapter 18

The sound of something hitting the
front door HARD woke me up in the morning. I was groggy, and I couldn’t place
the sound until it came again, and a third time.

BAM—BAM—BAM-CRACK…

The wood was splintering.

I leapt to my feet and ran out
of the kitchen just in time to see an axe blade come through the shattered
door. Another chop, and then a booted foot kicked at the boards, and they
busted. A hand came through the hole, reaching for the door lock.

A few seconds later, the door
was open and Larry was holding the axe as CJ breezed past him.

CJ had a gun. A rifle. I had no
idea where it’d come from. We didn’t own one.

“You’re an idiot,” CJ said as
he came in, heading for the kitchen, “you didn’t really think that you’d be
able to keep me out of my own house, did you?”

I bluffed. “What are you
talking about, CJ?”

CJ walked up to Mom and hit her
in the jaw with the rifle butt. “And
you
—can’t you control your own
kids?” Mom groaned and sagged as blood burbled out of her mouth.

“CJ,
stop
!”

He spotted his keys on the
counter and grabbed them. “These,” he said, jangling the key ring in my face.
“Cute trick— stealing them while I was sleeping last night.”

“I didn’t steal them. You left
them on the counter, moron.”

He stopped and frowned, then
shoved the keys in his pocket. I decided to push my advantage. “And you just
destroyed our front door. You could’ve
knocked
, you know.”

He looked sheepish. Behind him,
Larry said, “I
told
you, CJ—”

CJ cut him off. “Shut up,
Larry!”

     I gestured at Mom, her jaw
already swollen and purpling. “You owe Mom an apology, don’t you?”

He looked down at his feet and
murmured, “Sorry, Mom.”

Mom held up her chained wrist.
“I’d accept that apology if you’d let me go.”

CJ seemed to consider it. “What
would you do if I let you go?”

“Clean up my face, to start
with.”

Whatever little attention span
CJ had briefly mastered was gone—he waved a hand in irritation and turned away.
“Ahh, you can do that here. Get her a band-aid, Joey. C’mon, guys, let’s go
hunting.”

They left. CJ didn’t even
bother to take his keys. I guess nothing on that chain mattered much when
rifles and axes could do just as well as keys.

I ran into the bathroom, got
rubbing alcohol and bandages and tissue.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, as I
cleaned blood off her face.

“You did your best, baby.” She
tried to give me a reassuring smile but winced in pain when her jaw moved.

Chapter 19

Privacy
in our neighborhood was a thing of the quaint past, as Debbie proved when she
ran in through our shattered front door early the next morning. “Did you hear
the great news?”

I was sort of dozing in a kitchen chair, and I
looked up, bleary-eyed. “No—what?”

“Your brother said we could go hunting with him
today!”

Alarm jerked me up to full wakefulness.
“But…what…”

“I know, isn’t that great? Come on!” She ran back
out.

I looked over at Mom, who nodded after Debbie. “I
think you better go.”

Mom’s face looked bad today, and I didn’t want to
leave her, but I knew she was right. “Yeah.”

I staggered outside. It was just after 8 a.m., and
the smog already burned hot and yellow overhead. I blinked as my eyes teared
up, then heard Debbie shouting, “What are you bringing?”

Debbie stood in the middle of the street with my
brother and his little armed gang. She held the ice pick she’d last used on her
mother.

CJ grinned. “She’s right, sis, you’re almost naked
right now.”

I didn’t like the way Larry looked at me as he
laughed.

And I didn’t feel well. My stomach was cramped,
probably from what I’d eaten last night. I wanted nothing so much as to go back
to my room, lie down, and get a few hours of real rest, but I knew that wasn’t
going to happen. Instead I went into the garage and rummaged until I came up
with…

“Oh, nice!” That was CJ, who stood at the front of
the garage, admiring the pair of hedge trimmers I held. “Now let’s go.”

I followed him into the street. He led us north,
toward the unseen foothills. “So,” I asked, “what’s the plan today?”

“Old man Turowski.”

Mr. Turowski lived about six houses up. He was a
widower with a thick accent and no children. He wasn’t directly mean to kids,
but he plainly didn’t like us. He kept to himself, and I doubt that he’d ever
exchanged more than two words with my parents.

“Why Turowski?”

“Why not? Nobody’s ever gone in that house, so who
knows what he’s got in there?” The others murmured agreement.

I didn’t ask any more questions. Just stayed at
the rear, kept my mouth shut and tried to pretend we were going for a nice
visit. Maybe tea and cookies. A beer and barbecue. A Saturday-afternoon ball
game on the television.

We reached Turowski’s house. It had a neat but
unspectacular lawn, just simple grass divided by a concrete walk that led up to
the front door. A tan house with a brown door. Some low shrubs. No sound from
inside.

They didn’t even knock first or try the
doorknob—Larry just started chopping.

Wood chips flew as the door started to split.
While Larry worked, the others stood by cheering him on, clutching their ice
pick, or baseball bat, or rifle, or crowbar tighter. On swing number five, the
doorknob flew away and the door swung inward slightly. Larry lowered the axe,
grinned back at all of us, then stuck his head around the edge of the door.
“Yoohoo—Avon calling—”

BLAM. Something exploded from within the house,
and most of Larry’s head splattered against us. I wiped away blood and bits of
skull, resisting the urge to vomit.

My brother screamed and looked up to see Turowski
standing in his front room with a smoking shotgun. He was just shoving another
shell in.

CJ didn’t give him a chance to finish that; he
fired first. The rifle shot hit Turowski in the chest and flung him back and
down.

My brother jumped on top of him and began swinging
the butt of his rifle into Turowski’s head, screaming, “You killed Larry, you
bastard, you miserable old rotten stinking Polack bastard!” I head the
sickening sound of bone cracking and meat splattering and saw Turowski’s head
starting to cave in from CJ’s blows. The old man’s blood was spilling across
his wood floor and seeping into CJ’s pants where he knelt in it, but he didn’t
care.

“CJ, he’s dead,” one of the other guys said.

“I don’t care!” CJ did stop then but only long
enough to glance back at me and motion at the hedge clippers I’d forgotten I
still held. “Joey, cut off his hands.”

“Why? He’s already dead—”

CJ’s scream shocked us all, I think; even the boys
flinched. “Because he killed Larry! Now do it.”

And I did.

Or at least I tried. I edged around to where I
could stand without my shoes slipping in blood, put the blades on either side
of one outstretched, dead hand, and pushed. The skin, of course, separated
easily; I danced backwards as blood gushed out, but I couldn’t cut through the
bone. The rest laughed at me as I gritted my teeth and struggled to no avail.
Finally CJ made a little grunt of irritation, stood, grabbed the clippers from
me, and pressed on the handles, until there was a sound like
shllick
,
and the hand was severed. He moved around to the other side of the body and did
the same, then handed the clippers back to me. “Good try, kid,” he said, and
again the other others laughed. Then they tromped off throughout the house in
search of plunder.

I stood there holding the clippers, looking down
at the blood and carnage, and I realized the strangest thing: except for my
slight stomachache, I felt fine. I didn’t feel faint or nauseous. I didn’t even
feel disgust.

I basically felt nothing.

I heard a whoop from the kitchen and went in to
see what the commotion was about. CJ was pulling stuff out of Turowski’s
freezer and putting it into grocery bags. “We struck gold! Old bastard had a
freezer full of meat. And here’s a little something for you, sis…” CJ tossed me
something. I caught it and saw it was an ice cream bar. I tore the wrapper off
and devoured it; I hadn’t had ice cream in weeks. It made my stomach feel a
little better.

There wasn’t much else worthwhile in Turowski’s
place. He’d pretty much lived like a miser, with nothing but a few pictures of
his dead wife that made me sad, so I didn’t look at them. CJ gave us all bags
of food to carry back to our house. It looked like Mom was going to be busy for
a while.

As we walked out of the house we stepped over
Larry’s nearly-headless body, and I was surprised to see that the others
ignored it. “CJ,” I called after him, as he headed for the sidewalk, “what
about Larry?”

“He’s dead.”

“I know, but…are you going to just leave him
here?”

CJ shrugged. “We’ll come back for him later. Right
now let’s get this food to Mom.”

He walked away, laughing and kidding with the
other two boys and Debbie. I stood over Larry’s body, holding my bag of frozen
food, feeling cramped and confused and vaguely angry. I hadn’t much liked
Larry—especially not since last night—but he’d been CJ’s best friend for four
years, ever since they’d started junior high together. Now he was just a corpse
on a dead old man’s front lawn, useless and forgotten.

What if I’d been the one shot? Would CJ have just
walked away from me?

I finally followed them home. When I reached the
kitchen, Mom was already shoving frozen food into our freezer; the gang was out
back, celebrating.

There was a fresh, oozing wound on Mom’s thigh.
“What happened?”

“Debbie thought her ice pick was thirsty. CJ told
her to save it.”

Dread arced through me; who knew if CJ would stop
Debbie the next time.

Mom saw a splatter of blood on my knees. “What
happened? Did they—”

“Mr. Turowski shot Larry. Now they’re both dead.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel so good.”

I submitted as Mom felt my forehead, decided I didn’t
have a fever but told me to go rest for a while. Like that was possible.

I used the bathroom first and got another shock
when I glanced down at my underwear. There were strange, brown spots there.
What were they? Something the smog had done? Was I sick with some new disease?
A Russian flu, maybe?

Nervous and embarrassed, I started to tear the
panties off, then realized I wasn’t about to go from the bathroom to my bedroom
with no bottoms on and CJ’s friends out there. So I pulled the underwear
gingerly back up, re-zipped my shorts, and ran for my bedroom, where I changed
everything.

As I pulled on new panties, I realized I should
probably tell Mom. Maybe she’d know how to treat it.

I went out to talk to Mom, bringing the evidence
with me. Mom was working at the sink, thawing a big roast.

“Mom…I think something’s wrong…”

She looked at me, concerned. “What is it, honey?”

I thrust the underwear at her. “I’m sick or
something…”

She looked at my panties—and
smiled
. Not a
big smile but more of a little melancholy smile. “Oh, Joey, you’re not sick.”

“I’m not? Then…?”

“You’re having your first period.”

We’d had “the talk” last year, so I thought I’d
been prepared for this…but it wasn’t what I expected at all. “But it’s brown…”

“It’s just dried blood, Joey. It’s your first
time, and sometimes it’s a little spotty at first. Welcome to adulthood.”

My head whirled. I grabbed one of the kitchen
chairs and sagged into it.

My first period. Then, that meant…“It’s not
adulthood I’m worried about.”

Mom looked at me strangely and then the
realization crossed her face. “Oh,” she said. After another few seconds, she
added, “Oh God.”

Adulthood was one thing…but now I was a real
teenager. My changes wouldn’t be limited to just breasts or boys. My strange
new urges might be
really
strange.

After all, I’d cut off a man’s hands today and
felt nothing.

“You don’t have to be like them…” Mom’s tone was
pleading, desperate. She knew that if I went the way of CJ and all the rest,
neither of us stood much chance of surviving this.

“I did something bad this morning…to Mr. Turowski…I
mean, I had to—I had to. CJ was there and the others, and Mr. Turowski was
already dead—but…it didn’t bother me. I’m already starting to be like them.”

“You can fight it. You’ve always been strong,
Joey, you don’t have to give in…”

I nodded. “I’ll try.”

But I knew I was lying, because I
could
already feel changes working in me. It wasn’t just spotting or cramps; I was
angry, and I wanted to take it out on something. I wanted to hit things, make
them bleed. I wanted to find Steve again and tell him I wasn’t afraid anymore.
I wanted Dad to come home so I could kill him…

“Mom, we need to get out of here. I don’t think I
can make it for long.”

“Okay, but…?”

“I’ll get the keys from CJ tonight. I promise.”

Mom looked at me with doubt written across her
face…and I had to stifle the urge to hit her.