We walk toward the smoke, because that’s where the road takes us. It’s another killing zone. There’s a white house beside the freeway. It’s on fire. There’s a picket fence around it, and the yard has perfect green grass, but flames are pouring from the house windows. Bodies are lying in the grass. Lots of bodies. More than thirty, and so it wasn’t just the people from the house. The people are all dressed up like they just got back from church or something. I used to be a big TV watcher, and I’ve seen town hall meetings on television. Maybe that’s what it had been.
But this is where the meeting ended. Facedown. Old men with white collars biting into their flabby old necks. Old ladies with hair nets and gloves. Parents and high schoolers and a few little kids. The bodies of mothers and fathers wrapped around their babies, but there aren’t any survivors. The suits and dresses are shot full of bloody holes. Most of the shoes are missing. There isn’t a way to know, but I guess they were good people who didn’t deserve what they got. I know I should cry or blow chunks or something, but I don’t. I know Mel would think I was a savage if she knew what was going on inside my head, but I’m so pissed off I can barely stand upright. I won’t lie. I want to blow away the people who did this. I want to blow them right out of the world.
Mel froze up when she first saw the bodies, but she unfreezes and starts to run. I grab her and pull her behind a tree. It’s a big oak with a tire swing. Mel fights me, but I wrap her up and push her against the raspy old bark of the tree. For a second, I kind of like showing her how strong I am. Little brother isn’t so little anymore, is he? But now isn’t a good time to teach that lesson.
Mel struggles and starts to compare me to all different kinds of vile shit. I shush her and then I try to listen. No running footsteps, no guns being made ready to fire, no commands to kill us. I don’t feel any eyes on us—not living ones, anyway. There’s nothing but the crackling of the house fire and the wind blowing through bare branches.
I let Mel go, and she stays put. There’s some graffiti cut into the tree. Just beside our heads there’s a big carved heart with bare places above and below it, where the names were scraped away. A relationship gone bad. A symbol for our generation:
Nobody loves anyone
. But it makes me glad to see that the heart is still there, as if our fates are blank canvases and we’ll get another chance, and then we’ll be better and more interesting people because we lived through all of this shit.
I look up. The tire swing’s rope has cut through to bare wood. I wonder if anyone’s ever been hanged from the old tree. I look for hanging bodies but the tree isn’t a part of this. I like it then, and I hope that someday it will carry more love graffiti on its old bark, and that kids will play on its swing on some sunny day in the future.
Then a man comes out of the house. He’s on fire from top to bottom and he’s waving his arms. The fire makes it look like he’s shapeshifting. He flops down and rolls in the yard, but it doesn’t put the fire out. He says “help” and “please” and then “save me.” Dad rips a coat from the body of a fat man and throws it over the burning man and he gets the fire out, but the burned man is making a really weird sound, like he’s screaming but his vocal cords are cooked, and it freaks me right the fuck out. I don’t know if he’s good or bad, but I want the sound to stop. The guy is a melted pile of black slime but he scares the shit out of me. He whispers “please” but this time he also says “end it.”
Dad doesn’t shoot him because we can’t afford to make any noise. Dad isn’t without mercy, though. He stands and butt strokes the man’s head until the quiet screaming stops. The thud of his AR-15 butt plate against a stranger’s skull. Dad’s face is all twisted, but he’s never been the kind of man who runs away from dirty work. The work that has to be done because it’s the only thing left to do. He picks up a little cotton sweater and wipes the blood from his rifle butt. The sweater is white with pink bunny buttons that stand out brighter than all the other colors in the world. He looks at me, and then he looks away. I turn my back and hope the wind doesn’t blow the greasy smoke to us.
Mel bends down and just about pukes up her liver. She straightens up and wipes her mouth and looks at Dad like she wants him to drop dead. Mom and Dad search the bodies, but they don’t find anything we can use. We move on. We’re tired and cold but we keep our watering eyes wide open. Dad leads us the hell out of there. I keep the .22 at the ready. It’s a Ruger 10/22 with a 4-power Weaver scope. It’s the gun I used as a little kid to take my first shots. I try not to think about the times Dad took me target shooting, the casual-seeming way he taught me about safety and respect and marksmanship and fun and love and killing on all those sunny days. How tired and happy I was after a day of shooting, when we were comparing our ventilated targets, policing our brass, and picking up our shredded aluminum cans, Dad calling me Wyatt Earp and asking if the Marshal wanted to stop for ice cream on the way home.
And I wonder if he knew all along that I’d end up carrying a rifle in hostile territory. Our trips into the woods to shoot didn’t seem, even then, to be all about fun. I don’t trust people anymore, and so I’ll have to rethink my memories.
But whatever. Right now I wish I was carrying a bigger rifle. The .22 is accurate out to maybe a hundred yards, but it doesn’t pack much of a punch. It won’t blow through cover, and even heavy clothes could stop the little bullets, but I tell myself it doesn’t matter because I’ll be making headshots, when the time comes.
A noise makes us stop. Dad holds up his fist and we drop to the ground. The rifle comes up to my shoulder and I take a look through my scope. I use the magnification to scan a clump of eucalyptus trees, but I don’t see anything moving. If I was a praying man I’d pray to God and ask for a good target, one of the people responsible for the killing. We wait. I reach into the small of my back and pull Dad’s Beretta out of my waistband. I try to give it to Mel for maybe the hundredth time. She doesn’t take it, but her “no” is softer now and her breath barely steams the air.
The noise wasn’t caused by people. Eucalyptus trees drop their branches in the lightest breeze, and that’s probably what it was. We walk until dusk and Dad chooses a camp in a patch of oaks that stand on a low, grassy hill. We can see for two hundred yards in every direction. There’s no higher ground close to us. No higher ground within easy rifle range, anyhow, and so it’s a good place to be.
I drop my pack. The blood comes back into my shoulders. It feels good to be sixty pounds lighter, but to tell the truth I
like
wearing the pack. Yeah, it’s heavy, but it makes me feel strong and more free than I’ve ever felt before. The weight reminds me that we’re doing something important, that our actions and efforts will decide whether we will live or die. And if there’s a God, He’ll be mad at me for saying it, but I don’t think this is such a horrible thing. Not really. Because I think boredom is worse than fighting, because of the way boredom kills you inside. And that’s all I had before, shitty days of school and dull days at the mall or the river, and it seemed like I had nothing but boring times ahead of me forever and ever until I fell into my boring grave. There wasn’t any real meaning at all, that I could see, so shoot me if I don’t hate this new world. At least this shit isn’t boring.
We don’t light a fire. I open an MRE pouch of Beef Stew and warm it with a heat tab. I try to share it with Mel. I like MREs just fine, but Mel doesn’t. She was a vegetarian, before. She takes a few bites of the stew and then she cleans her spoon and puts it away. Mom and Dad share a Chicken à la King. Nobody had to tell us to sit so that we face the four points of the compass, looking out while we eat. We can’t afford to slack off. It’s the opposite of boring.
It doesn’t look like we’re being followed. I’m not sure if that’s very good or very bad. But it gets me thinking about how the word “very” has lost its mojo. It doesn’t make much sense to use that word because everything is “very” now, after the bombs. Very dangerous. Very different, for us, but I’ve read enough about history to know that there’s nothing new about it. Most generations get their time of war. This is mine. I just didn’t expect it to happen here in California.
Dad stands the first watch while the rest of us crawl into our sleeping bags. My last bath was a month ago. I smell like a hobo. I pretend to sleep, but I hear faraway gunshots. I drift off listening to the very new, very old sounds of the world.
Some crazy bitch shot Ookie in the chest with a shotgun. A day has gone by since we sprung our last ambush, but I still can’t get used to the fact that my brother is dead. She shot him and he had his hands over it and he was saying, “She shot me, Billy; come see it,” like he’d just found a weird bug or an interesting plant. The other guys saw the blood coming from between his fingers and said, “Yep, he’s shot, all right,” and they watched me to see what I’d do about it.
Ookie was bleeding all over the place and I could see that he was fucked, but the other guys were watching me, too, and that meant I had to be a certain way. I wanted to scream for a doctor. But there aren’t any doctors and I couldn’t sound like a pussy in front of the men.
I’m in charge here. I’ve been the boss since the electricity went out and we escaped from juvie. I was the one to notice that most of the guards had hauled ass out of there, and I was the one who came up with the plan to escape, and I was the one who killed the first guard and led the attack against the others. I’ve only been alive for sixteen shit-ass years, but I’ve learned a lot in that time. The weight of leading people isn’t so heavy anymore, except that I hadn’t counted on losing Ookie.
It seemed like I stood there for a long time, thinking, trying to put off going to him, like I was trapped in one of those shitty dreams that you can kind of control but kind of can’t. But I couldn’t have been standing still for very long because Ookie was only on his second sentence after getting shot. The guys were in a cluster-fuck in the middle of the road. I grabbed Luscious and told him to set up a perimeter with half the guys while the others searched the bodies. I said, Holy shit, dude, you know better than to let down our guard. Luscious has just about every kind of race in his blood, and he’s six foot five and almost as wide as he is tall, but he isn’t a schemer. He’s the kind who’ll take suggestions from a leader, as long as he respects the leader who makes them, but God help the man he doesn’t respect. He’s my second-in-command, and when I said that shit about letting down our guard, he looked embarrassed and then he was all action, giving his orders and the guys were moving like whipped dogs at the sound of his voice.
I had a syringe of morphine from when we ambushed that last little National Guard convoy. We used to have lots of morphine, and we kind of had a party with it one night when we were bored, but I saved a few syringes for the bad times. I took a knee next to Ookie. I set my rifle on the ground and pulled out the morphine and held it up so he could see it, and he smiled his little-kid smile. He was only fourteen, but he was a moose of a kid, and only his smile made him look younger than me. I shot him up with the morphine and his eyes went far away and he laughed a little bit.
“We were really pirates, weren’t we?” he said, and I said, “We still are.” The drug got to him right away and his lips were bloody and his mouth was like it was made of jelly. He mumbled something, but then he fought the morphine buzz and came hard awake.
“I’m dying, bro.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t need to blow sunshine up my ass.”
It was one of the sayings our usually worthless old man taught us.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just stay here with you.”
One of the little Kelly twins let out a yell behind me. He’d found something on one of the bodies. He had a handful of coins and they were gold, and the other guys searching the bodies found more gold coins, and then they were hump dancing and tossing coins and whooping it up. They acted like kids for a while. But then they remembered that Ookie was shot and they quieted down and finished stripping the dead.
I motioned for the Kellys to toss me a couple of coins. I caught them and they were warm and heavy. I held one of them up in front of Ookie’s face and he said, Wow, but he only said it to make me happy, to show that he was paying attention to his big bro. He tried to sit up, and blood came out of his mouth.
“Listen,” he said. I put my ear close to his mouth. He started coughing and shaking all over, but he pounded the flat of his hand against the road until the shaking stopped. I didn’t wipe his coughed-up blood from my ear.
“Listen. I’m no good. I’m all fucked up. But there’s one thing I can still do.”
“Quiet,” I said, but it was a dumbass television thing to say. God knows I’d run my mouth nonstop if I was shot and dying. Ookie smiled a huge smile that was like the smile he had when he was twelve and he stole a bottle of whiskey from our dad and gave it to me for my birthday.
“For you,” he said. “I can help you one last time.”
“Don’t worry about helping anyone, kid.”
“It’s for me, too. It hurts bad, Billy.”
I had some idea about what was coming. Part of me didn’t want to hear it, and part of me was curious to see if I was right. He whispered so no one but me could hear.
“Pop me one in the head.”
“No.”
“Do it. You know it’s the right move.”
A gust of wind blew through the trees and set the meadow grass to bobbing. The guys were quiet in their plundering. I heard the clinking of gold coins and grabbing sounds as loot was pulled from pockets. They all had their heads tilted sideways, watching. It seemed like even the animals in the woods were watching.