Rotters (47 page)

Smoke sat in the air and the SUV’s alarm was going crazy. I unbelted and reached for my door but it was already hanging ajar. I took hold of my backpack, put one foot outside, then another, and then swayed as if an earthquake were twisting the planet. I hurt everywhere. The car was totaled. Across the metal carnage of the hood, I saw daubs of blood. But I was okay. I was okay. I walked, felt old like Lionel. Right, left.
One more step. Right, left. Over freshly trimmed grass and past a novelty mailbox in the shape of a tractor. Behind me metal crackled and plastic sizzled. “Rotter. Rotter.”

I teetered in the middle of the road. Dimly I was aware of white faces appearing at windows, men with ties in their hands and women with sleep-tousled hair. With reluctance I faced the disaster I had made of someone’s front yard. Boggs was hobbling from the wreckage, using Harpakhrad as a crutch. The bones of his left foot and ankle had been detached, and the dead weight drooped heavily in its fleshy sack. He took another hop and the foot flapped so freely I could see the outline of a snapped bone poke curiously at its soft container.

“Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter.”

Maybe the drugs had roasted the pain receptors of his brain. His suit smoked, his vest sizzled with motor oil, his hat was dented and oblique. He kept coming. Pages of Bradbury remained crusted to his skin but now popped as they were incinerated by razors of heat. He kept coming. His face was knotted and blackened except for the one perfect eye beckoning as beautifully as my first glance of ocean through trees. I felt my knees buckle in submission. Harpakhrad could split me in half, even if swung by a man as broken as this one.

Tiny puffs of air plumed his shredded lips.

“Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter.”

As he hobbled over a manicured stripe of flowers and past the tractor-shaped mailbox, I took a single step away. I didn’t even mean to do it. Surprise flickered across his face. I tried it again—I took a second backward step and he pooched his lip in consternation. Soon I was backpedaling with considerable speed. The blue eye burned. To me it was a signal: keep
moving. No car, maybe that was true, but there were always more cars. For now I would run—yes, my legs were running—and take every advantage of his injury. Hinges squeaked as people retreated to call 911. They would arrive too late, at least for me; now I was sprinting. Down the block, through the alley, and across side streets, his mutter chased me long after he had dropped from sight.

“Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter—”

O
VER FIELDS AND FENCES
, barbed wire catching my cuffs and cow patties baking to my soles, I kept myself aligned with the interstates by the stink of melted rubber. In Swenson, Indiana, I seared my fingers hot-wiring an early-model Skylark and in that tin oven crossed the Mississippi. I broke down in Tedrow, not fifty miles from Bloughton. I ditched the heap on the shoulder and made tracks through the ditch and the woods.

It took me nearly three days to make what should’ve been an eight-hour trip. I felt woefully late, yet made myself wait until dark before walking the last ten miles. To kill time I rifled through trash cans for food. It wasn’t until I noticed the inordinate amount of popcorn in one of these that I recognized the building as the movie theater where Foley and I had held hands. I squatted against the brick and munched discarded Mike and Ikes and relived the atrocities that had begun there.

The clock tower rang ten as I passed the Amtrak station where I had first landed, the store where I had bought an instant camera and a bar of soap, the library where Harnett and I had researched pawnbrokers. Bloughton now seemed preposterously puny, the corners too sharp and the streets too clean for it to be anything but an unoccupied replica. Life was proven only by living room windows flickering with evening programming. Unconsciously I began to slink. I was a criminal here, in all probability a wanted man.

The town square was lit with too many lights and I hugged a line of storefronts. Hurrying by was the only sensible course, and yet I paused. For so late at night, there was an unusual amount of people milling about. Upon closer inspection I made out several loose groups of children playing in the grass and a few teenagers threading among them. A few steps closer—I had strayed into the middle of the road now—and I discerned several large objects resting in the central pavilion. Aside from the yearly Christmas display, the structure usually sat empty. I could not resist; I went closer.

The objects were coffins. The receptacles had become so prevalent in my life that it took me several minutes to appreciate the abnormality of their presence in the center of the square. People of great significance must have died. I reached the edge of the grass and stopped cold. Gottschalk, Woody, Celeste—what if what I had done had driven them to suicide and this was their ongoing elegy? No matter how bad they had been, I was worse. Self-disgust choked me. Three boys looked up and backed away. I wiped my mouth and edged closer to the pavilion until I realized that these could not be the caskets of my former tormenters. Not only was the workmanship and style of a different era, but I recognized
the evidence of tampering. The markings were more than familiar. They were my own.

A girl of six or seven stood next to me. Her curly black hair was split into pigtails. She wore pink shorts and a rainbow shirt further colored by the dribblings of long-gone ice cream. A Bratz doll dangled from her hand. Her teenage guardian, bestowed with the same curly black hair, was occupied with what looked like very meaningful texting. I forced a smile at the little girl and pointed at the coffins.

“Why—” My voice was wild and I coughed it down, fighting for stability. “Why are these here?”

“So they can catch the bad man.” She seemed grateful for the opportunity to flaunt her memorization. “And so to remember the bad things he did. And also to punish the bad man for the bad things he did.”

I spoke so carefully the words hurt. “What did the bad man do?”

“He took them out of the ground, silly.”

My intestines knotted.

“That
was
silly,” I managed. “Did they catch the bad man?”

“No, but they’re going to. My daddy says they’re going to.”

“When are they going to catch him?”

“Right now, silly,” she said. “They went down the road. That’s why my sister is playing babysitter.”

I strained to control my pulse.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Blood,” she said, pointing at my hip. Next she pointed at my shoulder. “Blood.”

“That’s right, I have an owie,” I said. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“Hazel,” she said. “Hazel Geraldine Gatlin.”

She held out her hand but I was already running down the same roads that had guided me to and from my reckless revenge. Now the revenge was theirs. This was what Boggs had been laughing about each time he had read Bloughton’s online news. What I’d done at the school had led to a manhunt, which had likely stagnated until yesterday, when a family by the name of Gatlin had shown up in town muttering an accusation that local citizens were all too ready to believe. It was not difficult to guess who had finally tipped off the Gatlins.

The blaze was evident before I hit Hewn Oak. I hurtled through woods made rapturous by the red glow and burst into a clearing where everything was rippling with fire—the woodpile was on fire, Harnett’s truck was on fire, and flames shot from the cabin with waterfall velocity.

The yard lamps, the nailed windows, the extra locks—every feeble attempt to keep out the world’s dangers now melted and stewed. I shot through a wall of men made mute by their own savagery and slung aside a stranger who held in one loose palm a container of gasoline. Seconds later the hot gusts became scorching and my own hair felt like searing tendrils of steel. With a shoulder I rammed the door and it exploded inward and I went tumbling into a fortress of burning books. I felt fire biting like ants across my arms and brought myself to all fours. Black smoke churned like the fur of a thousand beasts being pushed to slaughter. The molten lead of sweat rolled down my back.

Direction no longer existed. I kicked through flaming books, shoved past smoldering bundles of crackling newsprint. I was at the window, the glass bubbling and slopping over my wooden fingers; I was at the counter, where fire poured upward from the sink; I was at the fireplace, where,
strangely, there was no fire, just a noxious cloud of embers pouring down the chimney’s chute.

My toes, blistering. Boiling liquid smoke, pouring down my throat by the pint. I lurched through a ring of flame and bounced off the side of a mattress that was partially engulfed, and there was a shape curled up near the wall, the Resurrectionist, in position for the cremation he’d always wanted. I fell upon him and hauled him up the way I had hauled so many Diggers over the past few nightmarish weeks, only this one I treated with far less care, slinging him over my shoulder while I made for the window.

The bars, the ones we had foolishly installed, blocked my way. I took hold of one and immediately drew back—it was white hot. I dropped Harnett and spun around but there was no escape. The doorway through which I had entered was a stream of liquefied ceiling. I felt Harnett spasm against my shin and I crouched to protect him from the firestorm that was coming.

A red flash of light caught my eye. On the bed, where Harnett must have curled next to it in his sleep, was the Root. I had her in my hands in seconds. She felt wonderful; I felt whole. I pressed her warm metal to my cheek and laughed. I hurried back to the window and lodged her between the bars. Harnett had installed them well, but this was no regular shovel and I no regular shoveler. We worked together in a sublime madness. I saw one bar snap from its lodging. I heard the Root cry out as she irreparably warped. Another bar was knocked loose. The instrument’s handle fractured; the wood began to grind into shavings against the head. A cloud of fire licked at my neck. My laughter turned to the sobs of goodbye. I had destroyed the Root, but the bars were gone.

Her gnarled remains disappeared into the smoke. I struck
the window glass with my fist. It detonated on contact. I lifted Harnett and crammed him through the opening, heedless of shards, and punched at his shoulders and hips and knees until he slipped from sight. Behind me half of the house collapsed with a sound like a massive felled tree, and the blast of fiery air tossed me to the wall. Things all over me were ablaze. I looked up and saw the suck of poison air coursing through the busted window. I followed its path.

It was no cooler outside. I landed on top of Harnett. The cabin shuddered and leaned over us. The roof began to slide. A thousand nails pinged as they snapped in two. My hands took Harnett’s shirt and hair. I felt his hands moving, too, and his legs cycling senselessly. We ran. The cabin flattened somewhere at our heels and hot shrapnel glued itself to our skin. I was still on fire. But running. I steered us over the tumorous terrain of a backyard hollowed and filled a million times over. Random patches of grass were burning. There was a slope; we stumbled. There was water; we clawed our way into it.

The Big Chief River, where Harnett had once caught fish with his hands, now caught two new wiggling creatures. Knees, waist, ribs, neck—suddenly the water was over my head. The fires on my clothing turned to gray clouds. A mouthful of wet soot, the weight of my backpack dragging me down. We were moving. A current now pulled us. I wrapped an arm around Harnett’s shoulders. He had me by the neck. The sinewy ripples of the water were black, red, gold, blue, purple, yellow. Somewhere behind us an inferno drew white outlines around the faceless men gathering to see us drown. In their fixed postures I saw not just the horror of what they had done to us but what we had done to them, the befuddling inhumanity of what we’d done to those they’d loved. It hit me like loss. No other loss compared. The Root,
reduced to cinder. The irreplaceable archive of newspaper and books, now ash. The scores of Foley’s metal CDs, now puddled plastic. The locked safe containing our every last asset, now dividends for bickering arsonists. The sink calendar, all those days made irretrievable. And the garden, the beloved onion plants, shriveling to wire, the pungent white smoke weaving with darker threads.

S
COTLAND WAS A GIANT
cemetery. Each patch of grass was a plait of knolls—filled holes, that was what it looked like to me, an entire country seeded with bodies. We were just two more, moving above the ground but just as dead.

And then we came back to life. I saw it in him first, the way he looked to the skies in the morning astonished as an infant; the small smiles of genuine pleasure as he purchased pasties from a bakery and self-consciously murmured “Cheers”; the bottle after bottle of water he gulped down and peed out, as if flushing all venoms from his system. We spent the first week in Glasgow, walking slowly through streets smelling of rain, and with each day the creases in his skin loosened and dirt fell out. Sometimes I’d brush it from his coat while he slept.

We had little money. After escaping from the Big Chief we had spent a silent night shivering under thorned bushes, huddling against each other and holding our breaths each time we heard a distant noise that might forewarn men or dogs. When morning came, Harnett led us south. By dusk we were at an isolated intersection somewhere near the Missouri
border, digging with our hands exactly fifteen paces from the base of a giant, three-forked tree. Four feet down was a metal box, and inside, wrapped in a towel, was a secret reserve fund of nearly five thousand dollars.

I had never been on an airplane before, but forty-eight hours later I was on the last and longest leg of an overseas flight. The passport I had kept updated my entire life finally found use; I peeled it from the bottom of my green backpack and presented it to the agent sopping wet. The backpack and trumpet were our only carry-ons, and the surviving half of my mother’s bone I hid inside my pant leg before cruising through security. The plane was full and I sat in J, he in M, each of us wearing XXL tourist tees we had purchased from an airport gift shop in Detroit. A flight attendant gave me headphones and I watched sitcoms I’d never heard of. I fought to control a urine stream in a tiny, jostling lavatory. I fell asleep wrapped in a thin flannel blanket, luxuriating in the safety of knowing my father could see me from where he sat.