THE CHRONICLES OF BURNTOWN
(PART 1)
a serial novella by
Peter von Harten
All rights reserved. Copyright 2012 by Peter von Harten
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This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Hux
My name is Markus Huxley, and I live in a world that doesn’t care. It’s been about three months since The Shock happened in our town. Up until that time, we all knew who we were…more or less.
Kentsburg was once a backwater hick village set smack dab in the mid-rural south of the United States. Good ole’ Kentsburg, Mississippi. That’s what they called us on the map, though you probably wouldn’t find it in an atlas. It’s not like anybody’s eager to take a road trip through here. When the Puritans came to settle this shit town, it probably seemed like a good idea. There was plenty of water, the land was perfect for livestock and crops, but our glory days ended about a century and a half ago. Now we’re about as useful as a burnt match.
What happened? Well...nobody really knows, and at this point, nobody cares. It’s mostly just the kids who are left; teens, preteens, burnouts, and throwaways. The best idea we could come up with in the aftermath of all the power going out forever was to get high and have a few parties so we don’t have to think about when the world’s gonna end. I can’t say I really mind, since I’m pretty much the one who started it.
This all began over the summer of ’21 this past year. No one remembers the exact date when I ask them, but we all agree it was sometime in July.
It was just getting dark out that night and the air was calm, really quiet. The temperature had gone down a few notches for the evening, which was pretty nice considering that during the afternoon it had sweltered up to 97 degrees with an ungodly humidity. The sky was cloudy, though dotted by stars here or there as they passed by. Some folks I knew were out sipping a beer on their front porches after a long hard day’s work in the fields. Cats could be heard here or there as they rustled through the bushes, dogs barked in the distance, cows mooing, crickets buzzing, horses settling down, and good Christian men and women were tucking their kids safe and sound into bed. There was just a peaceful aura about it that I can’t really describe. That was the last night I can remember that was like that.
I had been walking home alone from my friend Johnny Sabota’s place after hanging out with him and Mike Freeman, my two best friends since junior high. We’d lit some stuff on fire in the back yard since it was pretty spacious, practiced with Molotovs or something. I don’t quite remember, but Johnny’s dad wanted his stupid barn gone since they were gonna have a new one built, so we figured why not raze the thing ourselves?
We started off pretty basic. Firecrackers, Black Cats, Roman Candles, sparklers, general stuff. After a while, we figured it’d probably take too long to do it all in one session and grabbed a metal pail to put out the flames. I was burned out on energy anyways since I’d been smoking weed all day, so we called it a night and decided to go at it again early the next afternoon.
“You sure you’re gonna be awake tomorrow, dude?” Johnny asked.
“Man, you know me. Would I ever miss the chance to start a fire?”
“You’re gonna die by the flame, Hux,” he chuckled in that raspy way of his. He’d been smoking cigs since the age of seven, so his voice was getting all messed up. It was kinda funny to listen to.
“How many times I gotta tell you, start calling me Flare,” I insisted.
“That shit’s so gay!” Mike retorted. “Who the hell calls themselves ‘Flare’? Isn’t that like a superhero name?”
“Better than being called ‘Ghost’ like that little Viking boy up the street.”
“Oh man, fuckin’ Ghost man,” Johnny laughed. “Are you sure that kid’s not albino?” He took another drag off his cigarette.
“I dunno.”
Ghost is this weird loner kid everyone likes to make fun of. I think he’s around fourteen or so, but he looks more like twelve. His real name is Tim Andersson. He usually keeps to himself and doesn’t leave the house often. Got super-blond hair and pale skin like a ghost, so that’s what we call him. I think he got the brunt of his dad’s genes. That guy may as well have been a ghost too, seeing’s how nobody in the town remembers him. Big gruff Swedish guy or something, left the kid and his mom about five years ago at the drop of a hat, moved to the city. We figured he was probably cheating on his wife. More power to him, I say. No one in their right mind wants to stay in this rotting shithole.
Anyways, Ghost is also the only gay boy in the entire town. He came out right around when summer vacation started out of fear of getting beat up at school, but it’s not like anybody cared. He really is a good kid, we just like to give him a hard time since there’s no one else to pick on around here.
“You have any M-80’s left at your place?” Mike asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Nah, I set ‘em all off last July. You guys got gasoline in the shed?”
“Four containers, but my dad’s waiting to go into town for the next couple weeks,” Johnny explained. “His leg’s really killing him and we’re still waiting on the disability check. He says we’ll go when it comes, but no word yet. Shit’s about three weeks late.”
“Goddamn,” I breathed. “Alright, well I’m pretty beat. We’ll figure something out tomorrow?”
“Yeah, no problem. You cool walking home?”
“Why, you scared I’ll get raped?” I laughed. “I got my lighter. That’s about all I ever need.”
“You’re crazy man,” Mike chuckled.
Johnny gave me a high-five. “Check you out, dude.”
“Peace.”
That's Mike and Johnny for ya. As far as friends go, I seem to have lucked out with those two. They’re honestly the best friends I could have asked for, and I guess each of them lends their own differences. Johnny’s a bit more responsible since he lives with his dad, but Mike is definitely the crazier of the two. I like to think I’m somewhere in between, though I’m sure a lot of people would disagree.
Mike lives with his grandmother because his own parents went through a nasty divorce some time ago and didn’t wanna take turns juggling him back and forth or figuring out custody, so they sent him to take care of her. We figure she probably doesn’t have much longer to live. We’ve been on standby to take him in if necessary, though Mike’s the kind of guy who can hold his own pretty well until then.
I met Johnny Sabota back when we were kids, so I’ve known him most of my life. He lives with his disabled dad Joe. They were doing fine surviving on his payments as best they could up until our power got cut off. Nowadays, the guy’s in so much pain that we all try to avoid going over there if we can help it. The day he whipped out a shotgun on me was the last draw. I haven’t been back since, but it’s not like we don’t know how he feels. None us will ever forget the night it all happened.
As I started walking down the Sabota’s long driveway that evening, the crickets had just begun to chirp. The air felt better even from a few hours before. Less constricting, strangely cool outside. A gentle breeze swept its way over the horizon as the last of the gray light gave way to dark storm clouds, sending fields of grain swaying in amber waves. A fine mist had started to fall by the time
I turned onto the road home, and for once it felt easier to breathe since we’d been through a bit of a drought in the past three months. Our town needed a good dose of moisture. Summer weather had been pretty dry so far and some folks were concerned their crops would die off. If it wasn’t one thing going wrong, it was another, especially with the wave of killer bee swarms around the first of spring. Recovery from that hadn’t exactly been speedy.
The crackle of my feet as I dragged them across the gravel of vacant streets began to make a nice little rhythm. Not wanting to spoil the moment, I dug my crumpled pack of cigs out of my pocket to light up. Seemed fitting somehow in the way it gave me a small rush. Not the cigarette, the flame of my lighter. I’m sort of a pyromaniac. Long story, goes back to my childhood. I just love to see fire and feel things burning. There’s this quiet power to it all that I really respect. A lot of people around here think that’s weird, but it gives me an odd sense of comfort to flick my lighter constantly. They say it’s a compulsion. I think it’s ‘cause the third-degree burns I got as a child sorta messed with my head, but who knows. I haven’t bothered to figure it out and it’s not really a story I like telling.
So there I was taking a long drag off my Newport, still scraping my feet over the road like a lazy bum. I started humming a Nirvana song that had gotten stuck in my head earlier as I considered the next day and tried to plan out exactly how we were gonna burn that whole barn down. It was a challenging prospect for sure. I’d never set something that big on fire before, so it’d come with a nice bit of adrenaline once we really got it going. Afterwards, we could sit on the ground and sip a couple beers, maybe smoke up in the garage. It’d be awesome.
Scrape scrape my feet went over the gravel. I skipped and turned between strides, lost in the whole fantasy of everything. It was a weird night. Usually I was never that comfortable. But between the weather and knowing I had something huge to freely destroy the next day, I guess I was feeling on top of the world. As I suddenly forgot the rest of the lyrics to “Pennyroyal Tea”, I went into singing “Negative Creep” as I took another drag and stopped to catch my breath and check out the night sky.
“Fuck, yeah, drone, stoned!” I nodded, whispering the lyrics as I found the Big Dipper hiding between bits of rolling clouds. That’s about when I noticed something was causing my rhythm to fall out of sync. It took me a minute of listening real close and stamping out my cigarette before I could tell what it was. Even the right notes escaped me. “Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more, daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more! Fuck, that’s not it…I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a…”
A strange noise had suddenly begun to echo out all across the fields, some sort of high-pitched tone like a heart monitor. My breath immediately caught in my chest and I just froze right in my tracks. At first I thought it might be the crickets, but this was loud enough to drown them out. Get a grip, Hux. I hated to think I might be going paranoid. All my friends used to tell me I would someday, seeing as how I was so obsessed with fire that my lighter never left my side. But it wasn’t that. Was that weed laced? Nah…I had some of it yesterday. I put a finger to my neck to check my pulse and rubbed my eyes thinking maybe I’d just had too much for the day, but it was definitely a real sound. I covered my ears a minute and then let go, staying as quiet as I could. That noise was all I could focus on.
Mist began to fall in thicker drops. Great, I thought, now I’m gonna be caught out in the rain and I’m still a full mile from home. What the hell is that noise? I backed up a few steps and tried to find the source, but it seemed to be coming from every direction. As I squinted through the large stalks of corn that had grown taller than me—convinced I’d seen something—I started pacing back and forth in panic with firing nerves and open ears. Crazy how such a small sound can drive you nuts, but soon enough I did notice a hazy color out there between the stalks and was finally able to pinpoint the thing. It took a couple seconds of really blinking my eyes and flicking my lighter against my hand before I decided it wasn’t just some bizarre hallucination.
I reluctantly stepped off the road to check it out. My heart was pounding as I tiptoed up to the field, pushing some of the corn stalks out of the way to see more clearly what it was. A large flashing red light several yards away appeared to be emanating from what looked to be some sort of metal plate stuck in the ground out there, the sequence pulsing in a beat of 1, 2-3, 1, 2-3, almost like some sort of Morse code. By now, my heart had sunk to my stomach and forced it to growl. I wanted to puke, though I just would have ended up dry heaving. I was starting to sweat too, unless it was just the rain hitting my skin. I don’t really recall.
Beep, beep, beep, the noise continued.
“What the hell?” I started to back away and bolted for the road. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the exact same noise and flashing red lights were coming from the field directly across from it too, almost echoing the first. With the rain now falling harder and the breeze growing cold, my shirt was already stuck to my skin. I briefly checked over the next field on the same side of the road before moving on. Sure enough, it had the exact same rhythm as the others. All of this plus the torrential downpour that seemed to have come out of nowhere was more than enough reason for me to start gunning it back to my house as fast as I could. Are they radio transmitters? Mines? They sure as hell aren’t farming equipment. I had no clue what was happening, and I wasn’t about to stick around long enough to find out.
My thoughts were racing every which way as my feet pounded the pavement relentlessly through the cold wet darkness of the summer night, and I felt trapped. No matter how far or how fast I went, I couldn’t get away from the sounds or the red flashes that by now were lighting up the entire horizon in pinkish-colored hues. They were everywhere, going off one at a time until it was me who had to catch up with them. Every quarter-mile or so, these things were setting off.
I splashed along through the puddles and soggy muck of our neighbors’ yards until I finally slid around to my aunt’s place, not even sure if it would be safe for me to sleep at home that night. Very few things have ever scared the piss outta me and I don’t give a damn about the end of the world, but when I saw all this happening firsthand, it almost made me want to sober up my life and start believing all those whacky conspiracy theories. Almost.
Yeah right, I thought. Ain’t nobody else gonna steal my chance. If we’re about to die, then I’m going out in style by my own doing. I’ll sooner burn this whole town down myself.