“Hey,” Julie says, climbing out of her seat and standing indignantly in the aisle. “You’re the pilot, not the captain; you’re not running the show. We need to discuss stuff.”
Sprout stirs and whimpers. Abram freezes until she settles, then he steps out of the cockpit. He walks up very close to Julie and stares down at her.
“What stuff?” he says softly.
“All of it,” she says, returning his stare.
He ducks down to her eye level and speaks very slowly. “Canada? Is big. Canada is north. The compass says we’re going north, so pretty soon . . . we’ll be in Canada!”
I see Julie’s fists clenching, but she says nothing.
“It’s our best bet,” Abram says, dropping the baby talk with a hint of embarrassment. “Even if it’s empty, it’ll make a good place to hide. We’re going to Canada.” He returns to the cockpit, pauses in the doorway, and glances back at Julie. “Please keep your voice down. My daughter’s sleeping.”
He plops into the pilot seat and starts adjusting instruments.
Julie sits, folds her arms, and glares holes into the floor. I take my seat next to her and watch the back of Abram’s head. I find myself scouring my brain for any remaining fragments of Perry, something that might help me understand these people and this mess we’re plunging into, but I dig carefully and quietly. Other voices have moved into the space Perry left. My head is a dark house inhabited by strangers, and I don’t want to wake them up.
I AM STANDING in front of the door.
I am in a hallway. The walls are covered in gaudy printed wallpaper, a repeating pattern of a solitary house surrounded by trees, all of it scorched and peeling. From somewhere behind me, I hear the sounds of my life. The voices of my friends. I feel sunlight on my back, but it’s far away and cool. The hallway is long and empty, and at the end of it is the door.
The door is ancient. Crooked. A slab of rusty metal under layers of peeling paint. The plaster that once covered it lies in a pile at my feet. The door is free, exposed, unlocked. The knob protrudes toward me obscenely.
“Open it,” Perry says, standing at my side. I try to look at him but he turns his face, giving me only the back of his head. “This is your house,” he says through the hole I put in his skull, like a bloody, toothless mouth. “When are you going to move in?”
He gives the door a tug and it creaks open. I back away, horrified, expecting tentacles and swarms of locusts. But there’s only dust and silence. A flickering bulb taking weak stabs at the shadows. Steep stairs leading down.
“How long are you going to stand in the hall?” he says, and shoves me down the stairs.
• • •
“Hello? R? You still with us?”
Julie is leaning over me, giving my cheek tiny repeated slaps. I blink and sit up, eyes darting. “What’s . . . where . . .”
“Wow,” she says, stepping back, “when you sleep, you sleep.”
Everyone is standing in the aisle, watching me, some with concern, some with impatience. I glance out the window—we’re on the ground.
“What’s happening? Where are we?”
“Helena,” Abram says. “Need to pick up a few things.”
“And Marcus needs to puke,” Nora says, giving M a light elbow to the stomach. He glares at her.
They all start to file out. I stand up but don’t follow them. I’m disoriented, unsure if I’m still dreaming.
“Are you okay?” Julie says. “You were sleeping, right? That wasn’t another of your little fugue states?”
“I don’t . . . I’m not sure.” The plane is now empty except for the two of us. “We’re in Montana?”
She smiles. “It’ll make more sense when you finish waking up. Let’s go.”
I glance toward the rear restroom.
“They’re fine,” she says. “I told them where we’re going and they said they’d stay.”
“They said?”
“Well, they nodded.”
She turns to go and I follow her, my head still spinning but starting to slow down. The plane is parked in the middle of a runway, far from the airport terminal and any potential inhabitants it may be harboring, so we exit through the cargo bay. A narrow staircase in the midsection leads to the lower deck, a cold, musty underworld that I never dared to explore during my tenancy. I don’t know what I imagined lurking here, but the only horrors I detect are a few spiders.
The cabin’s refined interior gives way to the industrial rawness of the cargo bay, then a hydraulic ramp leading down to the runway. The feeling of solid ground under my feet steadies me a little. I glance back at the open ramp and feel the instinct to lock it, like this commercial airliner is the family sedan parked in a bad neighborhood.
And just how bad is this neighborhood? I see no movement in the terminal’s windows or on the tarmac around it. Just acres of bleached concrete, dust and leaves. Perhaps this airport wasn’t consumed by plague like Post’s was. Perhaps this place fell to something else.
“Wake up, Archie!” Nora yells back to me. “Let’s move!”
As I turn around, Abram points a small device at the back of the plane. The ramp rises and clicks shut.
Keyless entry. Nice to know my plane has all the late-model luxuries—and that I’m not the only one with uneasy feelings as we march toward this silent city.
• • •
Our group resembles a ragged military platoon, everyone walking with weapons at the ready. M and Abram carry theirs in the poised stance of disciplined soldiers while Nora and Julie’s swing against their thighs with easy confidence. The only element that doesn’t fit the picture is the half-blind little girl trailing behind her father. And me, as always.
I look at my hands. They’re steadier. I should tell Abram I’m ready for that pistol. I don’t.
“What are we doing here?” I mumble into Julie’s ear.
“Apparently Abram has some transportation stashed in town. They grew up here, him and Perry.”
I look into the pale horizon beyond the airport. Endless hills of rust-hued dust and stiff, woody shrubs that scrape your calves like cat claws when you try to run away from home wearing only your swim trunks—
I miss a step. My boots scuff on the asphalt. I rub at my forehead then quickly look up. No one is watching me. I can see the outskirts of the suburbs rippling in the heat like a mirage, or a memory from a night of hard drinking.
“So this is the town you were trying to leave?” Nora asks Abram. “When your family got attacked?”
Abram keeps walking.
“And you said Perry was five, so this was . . . a long time ago?”
“Your point?”
“Well . . . what makes you think your bikes are still here?”
“Because it’s not the kind of place that attracts looters.”
As we get closer, the heat ripples begin to clear, and the city comes into focus.
Black.
Everything is black. Black skeletons of houses burned down to their frames. The bricks of old buildings blackened like charcoal briquettes. Even the streets are black; melted rubber and soot from a hundred burned cars. The only splashes of color are the grass and vines overtaking the ruins, feeding on the city’s carbon-rich corpse.
“Let’s go back,” I hear myself saying.
Julie glances over her shoulder at me. “What?”
“We shouldn’t be here. Let’s go back.”
The distress in my voice catches the group’s attention and they pause their march, waiting for me to elaborate.
“Not safe,” I mumble.
“It’s a pile of ash,” Abram says, tossing his palms out. “Nothing and nobody. What’s safer than that?”
My eyes wander through the charred landscape ahead. Every single building. Even the ones separated by spaces too far for the fire to have jumped. A fire with a purpose. A fire with friends.
“What’s wrong, R?” Julie says.
M is giving me a look that I don’t like. Someth
ing like empathy. As if he understands. But he doesn’t understand. I don’t understand.
“I don’t know,” I tell Julie. My eyes fall to the ground. “I don’t know.”
Abram resumes walking.
“We need vehicles,” Julie says, touching my shoulder. “We’re not going to find anything if we stay up in the clouds.”
I nod.
“If you’re scared,” Nora calls back to me, “just picture yourself on a bad-ass hog, wind in your hair, bitch on your back. We’ll get you some cool shades and a tattoo.”
I expect M to join in with a quip, tousle my hair, and call me a little girl, but he’s still giving me that sad, knowing look. Anger overcomes my fear.
“Let’s go.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open,” Julie says, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “It’ll be fine.”
I feel a surge of disgust for her all-purpose platitudes. She has no idea what I’m afraid of; what makes her think it’ll be fine?
We walk down into the black city, and though it was razed years ago, I swear I can still smell the acrid perfume of a thousand burned things.
THE SUN.
It soaks into my arms and legs and face, filling my cells like warm water balloons. Its heat radiates from the tar paper shingles and soaks into my back, saturating me from every direction. I am lying in the crook of the roof, next to the chimney, hiding. No one knows I can climb the oak outside my bedroom window and jump here from its branches. Most seven-year-olds couldn’t, but I’m different. I’ve been practicing a long time.
I have my toys with me. Two plastic men. One is a good guy, a hero. I can tell by his big jaw and flat haircut. The other is a monster. I don’t know what kind of monster but he is ugly and his skin is blue, so he is bad and I make him fight the hero. They stand on my chest, poised to attack.
“I will kill you!” the monster says in a shrill snarl.
“Not if I kill you first!” the hero says in the closest I can get to a baritone.
Far out in the yard, near the woods, I hear my father shouting something over and over. It’s probably my name. It has the blunt cadence of my name, but it’s distant and inconsequential. The violence in his voice is softened by the warm air. I can almost imagine he’s looking for me because he wants to give me a present.
I mash the figures together into a frenzy of battle. Plastic fists clatter against plastic jaws.
• • •
I stretch the balloon’s ring and slip it over the faucet. I turn on the water and watch the balloon swell.
“Who you gonna hit with these?”
I look up at my father. His huge, meaty face. His hands thick and callused from decades of brutal labor.
“Paul,” I say.
He pulls one of the finished balloons out of the bag on the counter and squeezes it. “It’s warm.”
I nod.
“You trying to give him a nice bath? Use cold water.”
“Why?”
“Getting hit isn’t supposed to feel good. It’s supposed to make him scream.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how games work. Winning is supposed to feel good and losing is supposed to hurt. What’s the point of being a winner if losers get to feel good too?”
He hands me a fresh balloon. “Use cold water.” He opens the freezer and sets a tray of ice cubes by the sink. “And a few of these.”
• • •
I stare at the beige carpet, looking for patterns in the stains as the youth pastor harangues us with harsh truths.
“Don’t let the long hair fool you, he’s not some peace-and-love hippie. Luke chapter twelve: ‘Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.’ He didn’t come to make friends. He’s got fire in his eyes and a sword in his mouth and he came to cut the world in half.”
Stacks of chairs with purple cushions. Folding tables. Pale fluorescent lights. Monday through Saturday, the hotel rents out this shabby conference room for political rallies, corporate training sessions, and the occasional flea market or gun show. On Sundays it belongs to a few dozen families who set up guitars and mics and hang a vinyl banner that reads HOLY FIRE FELLOWSHIP.
“He came to divide!” the pastor shouts into his mic, pacing back and forth in front of thirty squirming teens. “Brother from brother. Wheat from chaff. Saved from damned. He’s here to draw a line. Which side will you be on when the Last Sunset comes?”
I force myself to look up from the floor and face his fevered gaze.
“Maybe you think you’ve got plenty of time to decide. Maybe you like living in this cesspool so much you want to hit snooze and tell God to come back later. Maybe you think if you do enough good works, if you feed enough refugees and build enough schools and recycle enough pop cans, you can make God change his mind.” He shakes his head, and his voice drops to a low simmer. “God doesn’t change his mind. You can’t put out his fire. It’s coming to burn away this twisted world, and I don’t know about you, but I’m praying for it to hurry up. I’m soaking my house in gasoline.”
• • •
The skeletons of Helena, Montana, loom over me, charred rafters stabbing at the sky like the ribs of ancient animals. Bits of charcoal fall onto my upturned face and I wipe at them, drawing smudges that revert my faintly pink skin to gray. I see clean white siding superimposed over the houses’ black frames. Neat vegetable gardens under jungles of ivy. Children riding bikes through the glass-strewn streets. Voices in the silence.
“R,” Julie says. She is walking alongside me, watching me with deepening concern. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I say to the street ahead, my face slack, eyes far away.
She reaches for my hand. I let her take it and I let her squeeze it, but I don’t squeeze back.
“Here,” Abram says, stopping in front of what might have once been a two-story Craftsman house. It’s now just four black walls slumped against a collapsed roof, windows smoked over, sickly brown vines creeping through every crack. “This is it.”
“How can you tell?” Nora wonders, gazing up at the vaguely home-shaped void, indistinguishable from the ones around it.
Abram kneels in the yard and runs his fingers through the weedy grass. He looks up at the dead tree near the fence and the remains of a rope swing dangling from it. A very faint smile touches his face.
The top floor is crushed under the collapsed roof, but the bottom is still standing, and a steep driveway ramp leads down to a basement garage. Abram climbs the steps to the front door and pulls on the knob. The scorched wood creaks and flexes but doesn’t budge. He turns and heads for the garage.
“Wait,” Julie says. “We can break it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Bikes are in the shop.”
“You don’t want to go in the house?” She’s incredulous. “The house you grew up in?”
He stops in front of the garage door and looks at her flatly. “I didn’t grow up here. I played with toys and rode bikes here. I grew up in an Axiom training center.”
He pulls on the garage door and it slides open. A cloud of charcoal dust rolls out like a curse from a disturbed tomb. He coughs once, then steps inside.
We follow him at a respectful distance. M stays on the sidewalk, holding his rifle in the deceptively casual stance of a veteran soldier on guard duty, slipping back into his first life like his second never happened.
“So this is The Shop,” Nora says reverently, turning in a slow circle. “Mr. Kelvin talked about it all the time. Eyes got all dreamy like it was paradise lost.”
The garage is actually the entire basement, work benches covered in tools, engine parts piled in the corners, and enough cans of fuel for a ride to Brazil and back. The center of the space is clear except for five mounds under canvas tarps. Abram unveils them one by one: five gleaming black motorcycles, compact BMW street bikes devoid of any spread-legged swagger—they would look very serious and practical if not for their vintage flair. They’re classics
bordering on antiques, their clean lines and abundance of chrome evoking an era of peace and love, love is all you need, it’s easy if you try. I hear songs and poems and protests and I wonder: Has any generation since then really believed in something? Or did that one failed leap embarrass us into never trying again?
A sad smile touches Julie’s face. “Perry’s Slash-Fives. He rode some modern shit for salvages but these were the ones he loved.”
Abram inspects the engines, tests the brakes, taps at rusty patches with a screwdriver.
“I used to think they didn’t look tough enough,” Julie says. “I wanted him to get a Harley. He said I had no taste and if I ever brought up ‘gorilla bikes’ again he wouldn’t teach me how to ride.” She laughs, lost in nostalgia. “He was kind of a dick.”
Abram ignores her, puttering around the shop, sifting through tools and grabbing parts off shelves with a familiarity that must have been etched deeply to have lasted this long.
“Your dad kept saying he’d come back for his babies someday,” Nora says, trying to catch Abram’s eyes. “I bet he’d be happy to know you’re doing it now.”
Abram slides a pan under one of the bikes and begins draining the oil.
“Hey,” Nora says.
“What,” Abram says.
“Why don’t you want to talk to us?”
He gets up and digs through a drawer, pulls out a box of oil filters.
“You spend half your life looking for your family, you finally find people who knew them, and you don’t have a single question for us? You don’t want to know how I knew your dad? You don’t want to know what your brother was like?”
“I wanted to meet my brother,” Abram says, going to work on the next bike while the first one drains. “I wanted to see what kind of man he turned into and I wanted to get to know him.” He moves the pan into place. “What I didn’t want is to listen to strangers describe him to me like a character in a fucking book.” He unscrews the cap and the old black sludge puddles into the pan. “Perry’s gone. Perry doesn’t exist.”
The garage is silent except for the clink of two wrenches that Sprout is forcing to dance with each other.