Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (8 page)

Chapter 20

The loot from Turowski’s provided
another big feast that night; this time Sandy was there, and Debbie, and they
let me eat with them. There was still plenty of beer, and I had my first can.
It left me reeling and burping after, but it also helped calm me down a little.

After the dinner, CJ hooked up
an extension cord and lugged a phonograph out to the patio. He put on Rolling
Stones records and Sandy danced while everyone else cheered her on. Her dance
turned into more of striptease; by the time it was over she was mostly naked, and
the guys were playing with her like an oversized doll, each one kissing and
fondling her before passing her on.

Watching left me both
electrified and disgusted. Below the waist, I wanted to be Sandy; above, I
thought she was nothing but a stupid girl who deserved whatever she got.

CJ and one other boy had their
shirts off already, but they were all still drinking; when the first one fell
back in the grass unconscious, I knew the rest would follow soon. Sandy was
next, and CJ didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t awake; he fell on her and
started grinding against her. But before he got anywhere, he rolled to the side
and was out instantly.

In fifteen minutes they were
all gone, snoring or quietly slumbering. This was my chance.

As I got the rolling pin out
again, Mom whispered to me, “Joey, even if you get the keys…how will we leave?
You said they shot at you…”

“It’s okay, Mom, I’ve got
something else in mind.” I put the pin down, grabbed a canvas knapsack from the
hallway closet and put together a bag of stuff I thought we might need: two
flashlights, a canteen of water, a knife, Mom’s billfold with some money, and
her checkbook.

“Do you think you’ll be able to
walk?”

She nodded grimly.

“Okay. Be ready.”

She didn’t say anything else as
I grabbed the rolling pin, slid past the door and out into the night.

I was less cautious this time,
because I’d stopped caring if I had to hit anyone. All I wanted were the keys.
They were my one shot at getting away from the desires that were starting to
crowd into my head.

I found CJ near Sandy and knelt
beside him. He was flat on his back, but Sandy was on his left, so I positioned
myself on his right, knowing I’d have to reach over him. Keeping the rolling
pin in my left hand, I extended my right, reaching, lowering, just resting on
the pocket’s rim—

“Cute, sis—very cute.”

I flinched and drew back like
I’d been burned. CJ was awake and looking at me, although he otherwise hadn’t
moved yet. I saw the moonlight glint off his bared teeth. I didn’t say
anything.

He laughed softly, then said,
“C’mon, twerp, we both know you haven’t got it in you, at least not yet. You’re
still just a kid.”

“CJ—you’re an idiot.”

Then I hit him.

Chapter 21

None of the others stirred, and I had
no idea if I’d killed CJ or just knocked him out. Frankly, I didn’t really care;
I only wanted those keys.

I found them in his left front
pocket. I ran into the house and held them out before Mom. “Got ’em.”

“CJ…?”

“I had to hit him.”

I undid the cuff around Mom’s
wrist, and she rubbed it painfully as she asked, “Is he…?”

“I don’t know. I just know we
have to go—NOW.”

Mom stumbled and winced as she
walked; a few days of being kept prisoner, burdened with six feet of chain and
no way to sit or stand comfortably, had taken a toll on her. “Are you sure you
can you walk?”

“I’ll be okay.”

I picked up the canvas bag and
eyed her. “We may have to hike a couple of miles.”

“Won’t they have all the
streets blocked?”

“We’re not taking a street.” I
nodded out the back. “We’re going through the wash.”

Mom frowned. “The wash…?”

“I figure it might be the only
thing they’ve forgotten to block off. There are ladders leading down into it
every quarter mile or so. We just have to scale the fence, find one of the
ladders, and climb down. Then we should be able to follow the wash south for a
few miles to get past the roadblocks.”

She looked pale, but nodded,
resolute. “Okay, let’s try it.”

The first part was maybe the
scariest for Mom: picking our way through the failed orgy. She wanted to stop
and examine CJ, but when Sandy moaned (and I hissed), she gave up and tiptoed
as quickly as possible to the back gate. As I opened it, I cursed its squeaky
hinges…but none of CJ’s sleeping gang reacted. I held it open as Mom stepped
through, closed it as quietly as possible, and led the way along the dirt
trail.

In the distance I could see the
orange glow of flames, and I knew that one of the houses that backed onto the
dirt road was on fire. It would block our way, and we might be in trouble if
there was no ladder into the wash between us and the burning house. But there
was a (locked) gate in the chain-link fence just ahead, and I hoped there would
be a ladder located there.

Mom had a little trouble
negotiating the fence. The wound in her thigh slowed her down, especially when
it started bleeding again through the bandage I’d wrapped around it; but I
finally managed to help her over. Sure enough, there was a ladder right there.
I descended first, so I could test it; it was solid, and we both climbed down
with no problem.

At that point we switched on
the flashlights and started to hike. It hadn’t rained in months, and the wash
was bone dry. (At least we didn’t need to worry about being swept away in some
sudden rush of water.) Once we heard screaming and shouts overhead, so we
switched off our lights and hugged the wall, trying to make ourselves as
invisible and small as possible. The voices passed directly over us, and then
vanished into the distance. The only words I made out were, “…God damn it, I’m
going to kill him when I find him…”

Our flashlight batteries gave
out after an hour, and we rested for a while, our backs against concrete,
sharing the canteen. I rewound Mom’s thigh bandage, and I knew it hurt when she
tried to smile at me. We finally got to our feet and continued on. We heard
gunshots once, but they seemed at least a block away. We kept going.

We walked until Mom said she
had to stop. At that point we just squatted down and waited for dawn.

When it was light, I told Mom
to wait while I checked everything out overhead. We’d camped near a ladder,
which I climbed now.

We’d come out near a major
intersection—I wasn’t sure where it was, but there was normal traffic, and
stores were nearby.

We’d made it.

I went back for Mom, helped her
up the ladder and over the fence, and together we found a phone booth. As Mom
used it to call a cab, I looked up into the sky and realized:

There was no smog…or at least
the smog here was light and pale, none of the canary-colored muck I’d grown
accustomed to seeing.

And I could feel it, too. I was
worried about CJ again. I felt shame for what I’d done to Turowski. And I
wanted nothing so much as to be a million miles away from here.

I’d escaped the smog.

Epilogue

The cab took us to Mom and Dad’s bank,
where Mom withdrew enough money to buy us plane tickets to Indianapolis. A day
later, we were living with Aunt Nancy and watching reports on the six o’ clock
news about the San Diablo quarantine. They called it a flu outbreak. They said
thirty people had already died from the disease.

I tried not to remember what
had happened to Marge, and Larry, and Mr. Turowski, and Matt’s father, and all
the rest.

A month later the quarantine
was lifted. Order was restored. CJ, it turned out, was fine. I wondered how big
a goose egg I’d given him.

He stayed in California.

Mom spent a lot of time on the
phone with Dad, who begged us to come home. She answered him by filing for
divorce. He didn’t contest it.

We settled into life as
Midwesterners. I didn’t really like it at first—the winters were too cold, the
summers humid—but at least there was no smog…or teenagers who wanted to kill
and eat their own mothers.

Debbie and Sandy had both
survived as well. Sandy ended up marrying Steve, who never became a rock star.
Debbie ran off to San Francisco; the last anyone heard of her, she was turning
tricks as an underaged hippie chick in Haight-Ashbury, with an arrest record
that included numerous drug-related and assault charges.

Mom and I got pretty used to
visits from government men in plain black suits. They asked us what we knew
about what’d happened in San Diablo; we lied and told them we couldn’t
remember. It’d been a terrible flu bug.

Mom’s wounds healed, and she
gave up drinking. 

I talked to Dad a few times on
the phone. Once I asked him if he’d been the one who’d finally cleaned out the
smog. He told me he didn’t know what I was talking about. After that, I got
cards from him for my birthday (he never got the date right) and Christmas, but
after a few years even those stopped.

It’s been a long time now since
1965. I’ve gotten used to being an adult, although I’ve never had children of
my own. Call it a trust issue. It’s hard to share the popular image of innocent
tykes when you’ve seen an adolescent girl you used to like tearing apart her
mother.

Instead, I went to work for my
uncle’s printing company. It turned out I had a minor talent for graphic design
and layout. I still read comic books from time to time, although nowadays
they’re called graphic novels.

CJ has fared better than I have;
he’s the CFO of a Fortune 500 tech company now. He has a gorgeous trophy wife,
three sons, and a mansion in Malibu. One of his kids recently got in trouble at
school for bullying. CJ made a large donation to the school’s athletics
program, and the trouble conveniently vanished. Most people still like my
brother; those who don’t can be easily bought off.

I don’t see him often. When I
do—maybe at the holidays, maybe every other year—I smile and pretend I’m
happy…but the truth is, every time I look at him, I see a teenaged brother who
forced me to mutilate the corpse of a man he’d just slain. I know we were all
affected by something, and maybe if I’d come of age earlier, I would have been
just as bad…but I remember making choices, even while the smog was working its
way through me.

In my pensive moments, I try to
remember 1965 before the moon blew up and the smog came, when my brother was
just one of the teenagers out on his front lawn on a summer evening, listening
to the latest hit record on a transistor radio. I try to remember how we had
fun, how we laughed when he put a cricket in my bed…but no matter how hard I
try, it doesn’t blot out the bad memories that came after. The blood, the sex,
the killings. I’ve spent my life since trying to forget. So far I’ve been
unsuccessful.

I guess I can’t get no
satisfaction.

The End

Lisa
Morton is a screenwriter, a novelist, a short story writer, and a
world-renowned Halloween expert. Her fiction works include 
The Castle
of Los Angeles
 (winner of the Bram Stoker Award for First
Novel), 
The Lucid Dreaming
, and 
Monsters of L.A
. 2013
sees the release of her second novel,
Malediction
, and the paperback release
of her Bram Stoker Award-winning 
Trick or Treat: A History of
Halloween
. She lives in North Hollywood, California and online at
www.lisamorton.com

Baggage of

Eternal Night

JournalStone’s DoubleDown Series,
Book II

By

Eric J. Guignard

JournalStone

San
Francisco