Summer of the Apocalypse Page 12

  Finally the van topped the next hill. Eric mounted his bike and rode past the abused bodies, still unsure of what to do, but determined to do something. Once again he was within earshot. Zippers whisked open. Bolt cutters clicked together. Beetle-Eyes cursed the driver’s squeamishness. “You’ll like what this stuff will buy later,” he said. Another finger flew into the weeds. “You got to cut bait to fish.” Eric felt his gorge rise.

  From the bottom of his backpack, Eric grabbed his slingshot and a handful of ball bearings. Without thinking, he folded the leather patch around the first bearing, stood, drew back, and fired at Beetle-Eyes. The bearing missed but whanged off the van leaving a very satisfying dent. The man yelled something and hit the asphalt. Flying end over end, the bolt cutters vanished into the weeds. Eric loaded and fired. The shot zinged off the pavement a foot from Beetle-Eye’s head, who was trying to crawl backwards under the van. He hadn’t seen Eric yet.

  Eric placed a third bearing in the slingshot, then Beetle-Eyes spotted him. He unsnapped his gun from its holster and started to aim it, but the van moved forward a foot and Beetle-Eyes panicked, dropped the gun, rolled to his back and pounded on the side of the van. “Stop, you stupid shit. Stop!” he yelled. “I’m under here!” Brake lights flared red.

  He glared malevolently at Eric and slid himself from under the van. Without breaking his stare, he reached for the gun.

  Eric drew the bearing to his ear; his arm was straight and steady. “Don’t do it,” he said. Forty yards separated them.

  Beetle-Eyes froze, his hand a foot from the pistol. “I don’t have to kill you, kid,” he said. “You can put that squirrel shooter away and walk right now, but if you try to hurt me again, I’m going to pick up this gun here and blow your head off.” His hand inched downward.

  Sweat trickled down Eric’s face. One good shot, one perfect shot, and Beetle-Eyes would be done, but if he missed, he wouldn’t have time to reload. Far away, a bird sang. Eric thought, meadow lark, and released the shot.

  He missed.

  Beetle-Eyes came up with the gun and straightened from his crouch. Holding it in front of him, he walked toward Eric. “You stupid little kid,” he said, then clicked the hammer back. The meadow lark trilled through his song again. Eric’s dad had taught him many bird calls. He couldn’t believe that the last thought he would ever have would be the name of a bird song. Beetle-Eyes stopped. “Oh, shit.”

  A rumble behind Eric startled him and he stepped aside. Like a black and white boat, the police cruiser flowed past Eric. Through the tinted windows, Eric saw the glint of mirrored sunglasses. The car’s brakes screeched loudly when it stopped. Beetle-Eyes stepped backwards, gun at his side, until he bumped into the van.

  The police car’s door clicked open and Gloria’s Dad, the ghost cop, unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, his gun gripped in his right hand, the black glove on his left.

  Without looking at Beetle-Eyes, he walked to a body bag. Caked mud clung to his boots. Eric wondered if it were from the football field.

  The ghost cop bent, inspected the bag, pulled a mangled hand out, then, holding the hand gently in his, bent farther, briefly pressed his forehead to the dead person’s hand, then tucked it back into the bag. He zipped it shut and stood.

  “We just got here,” shouted Beetle-Eyes. “The kid will tell you!” He pointed his gun at Eric, as if he’d forgotten that he held it.

  The ghost cop brought his revolver up and fired. Echoes bounced back. Eric had seen many movies. He’d seen a million shootings, but this wasn’t like anything he’d seen. The shot was sharper, more crisp, but less loud than he’d imagined. A very distinct puff of smoke drifted away from the gun. He followed it until it dissipated.

  Beetle-Eyes sat, his legs spread in a V, his head resting against the bumper. Tears slicked his cheeks.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. Eric couldn’t see any blood on Beetle-Eyes, but a single rivulet of red streaked the white van where he had stood. He sniffed, “I wasn’t doing anything.” His sack had ruptured at the bottom and rings and watches reflected sunlight in a pile beside him. The ghost cop dug into his back pocket and brought out a pair of hand cuffs. Keeping his gun trained on Beetle-Eyes, he clipped one wrist and reached for the other.

  Out of sight from the cop, but where Eric could see, the passenger door swung quietly open. Slowly, a sneakered foot, then a bare leg slid into view. The ghost cop struggled to cuff the other hand, but the mechanism seemed jammed. Beetle-Eyes blubbered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me.” Stunned by the nearness of his own death, by the violence of the shooting, Eric watched slack jawed, as if the event were television. Whatever anger had motivated him to confront Beetle-Eyes was gone. A short-skirted woman hefting a baseball bat emerged from the door. She raised the bat above her head and ran around the corner of the van where the ghost cop knelt over Beetle-Eyes. Eric snapped out of his lethargy. “Watch out!”

  Arching her back like a woodsman, the woman paused before swinging the bat. The ghost cop rolled, fired; the woman fell.

  Beetle-Eyes stretched for his gun, got it, swung it around.

  The ghost cop fired.

  Two puffs of smoke floated away like carnival balloons.

  Dusting his pants off, the ghost cop trudged back to the cruiser, gun hanging from his hand as if it weighed a hundred pounds. From the back of the car he took two of the black plastic tarps Eric had seen earlier and unfolded them. They were body bags.

  As Eric watched, the cop uncuffed Beetle-Eyes, fitted a bag over him and rolled him over so he could close it; then he bagged the woman. He tossed her bat in the bag with her and drug both of them to the side of the road along with the other bodies. Everything he did, he did tiredly, seeming to barely have the strength to move himself from place to place.

  Stooping over the last bag Beetle-Eyes had robbed, the ghost cop placed the hands inside and zipped it up. He moved to the next one and did the same.

  Eric turned and looked behind him at the hundreds of open bags and beyond them where oily black smoke poured into the sky from the Coors plant. A meadow lark lilted through its notes again and the sun shimmered in waves off the road. Eric went to the nearest bag. Trying not to look in, he gripped the large, square zipper tab and pulled it shut. Soon the cop caught up with him and, not speaking, they worked together moving from body bag to body bag, softly putting hands back inside and closing them. An hour or so later, when they finished, Eric straightened painfully and rubbed his back. The cop’s face was an agony of exhaustion lines, the skin sallow and muscleless.

  Eric said, “Maybe you should go home.” The mirrored sunglasses reflected blankly back at him.

  “Nobody will know.”

  Wind flicked hair across Eric’s eyes. He brushed it back. The cop said, “I haven’t been relieved.” And that seemed to settle it for him.

  They walked back to the cruiser. Eric collected his bike and backpack from the road. When he left, the cop was sitting in the car, door open, his hands wrapped around the steering wheel. At the top of the hill, where Illinois Ave. met U.S. 6, Eric looked back. The line of body bags stretched almost to town, a black border on the road. Distinctly, Eric heard a car door slam and an engine start. Then the cruiser rose out of a valley in the road and headed for Golden’s smoke and fire and emptiness. Eric watched until it vanished from sight.

  Chapter Nine

  THE FLATS

  Our fourth morning, Eric thought, and we’re still in good spirits. Dodge led, dashing from side to side to pick flowers, Indian Paint Brush and Rocky Mountain Bee Plants. Rabbit hung back and whistled tunelessly. Eric strode up the highway, pleased by the hardness in his leg muscles that a few days of activity had given him. He did a skip step. Highway 93 roller-coasted generally uphill north out of Golden in front of him along the foothills to Boulder. Eric compared the landscape to what they had passed through before; this was the first that had not been a part of the suburbs. Ruins of shopping malls, subdivisi
ons and shopettes dominated the ten miles west from the Platte River, and the fifteen miles north to Golden. But here, he hiked through real country. Clean of brick walls, concrete foundations, or houses in varied states of decay, the grasses dropped away from the road through a gentle valley to lap against a scrub pine shoreline at the foothills a mile away.

  He rubbed his sun-warmed right cheek. Four days of stubble scratched his palm. He felt poetic. Perfect weather, he thought.

  Sun rises… like a great red whale.

  Mid-afternoon: cloudless, arching blue

  storm builds on mountain

  cool breeze wipes the day.

  He shook his head at that last part. Weather poems, he thought, are never as good as the weather. That bit about a red whale, though, that’s nice.

  He remembered last night’s sunset. The clouds broke and bands of color flowed from the west, first yellow, then orange and red, then indigo and violet. What a spectacle! As he hiked, he found himself thinking about dust in the atmosphere. The dawn and evening displays this year reminded him of the first few years after… plague, when the sun rose and set in sullen glory, which he attributed to ashes from fires in cities filled with the dead.

  By midmorning, Eric’s legs that he’d been so proud of burned with fatigue. He bit his lip and struggled not to limp. He envied the boys’ energy to run back and forth across the road in front of him, showing each other things they had found: a length of PVC pipe, a glass telephone line insulator, a rusted hammer head without a handle. They’re as fresh as the first day, he thought.

  Pain rose for another half hour, each step driving spears into his hips and calves. Small fires embered behind his knee caps. Head down, he watched his foot placement. A flat step hurt less, but any roll to either side flared new pains. I’m just plain old, he thought. Old and out of gas. The phrase made him smile. Dodge used it occasionally, so did Troy. Neither knew what it meant. Several expressions came to him: “Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.” “Give me a ring.” “Drop me a line.” “That does not compute.” He said aloud, “Put the pedal to the metal boys.” Dodge looked back at him. Eric shook his head. “Nothing, son. just a thought.”

  He concentrated on walking. Heat radiated off the buckled and fractured asphalt, and the weeds that grew with such enthusiasm a few miles earlier, looked dispirited. Everything about the landscape now seemed beaten down and tired. By the road, large parcels of caked and cracked ground were free of grasses altogether. He imagined how the dust must kick up here on windy days. Only bushes, laurels and what his dad used to call greasewood, thrived. He struggled with why the look of the land would change so drastically in just a couple of hours of walking, but his legs’ pains messed up his concentration. Step, step, step, he thought; even the sky has lost its color. It pressed down like a slab of gray slate, and the sun pulsed in its midst, its edges fuzzy. He kept his eyes down, watching his feet. Dust covered the road. Little puffs marked each footfall. Dodge’s small sneakers left perfect imprints and made Eric think of black and white photographs from the moon, where he supposed the astronauts’ footprints still existed around the pile of unrusting equipment they’d left behind.

  He bumped into Dodge, who had stopped. I’ll never get momentum again, he thought, and almost snapped at the boy until he looked up and saw what was in their way. Three wooden poles jutted from the asphalt, and impaled on their tops at eye height, animal skulls. Suddenly grateful for the rest, Eric fingered one, a cow skull, bleached and toothless. A fringe of bone pieces dangled on short strings threaded through holes bored in the back of the skull. He stuck a finger through an eye socket and wiggled it for Dodge mid Rabbit to see. The bone fragments clattered against each other.

  “Don’t,” said Rabbit. “It belongs to somebody.”

  Eric wiped his hand on his shirt. Totems, he thought. Every hundred yards in both directions, other poles held their bones to the sky. An uninterrupted line stretched east across the plain into the city, and to the west the line vanished into the pines. “We have to go this way,” he said, and shivered when he stepped across the boundary the totems drew across the road.

  Somber now, Dodge stayed close to Eric, whose leg pains had been replaced by a loose, empty feeling. Eric feared he might fall any moment. Rabbit quit whistling and walked next to the side of the road like a coyote ready to bolt. The grasses, what few patches there were, hissed in a hot breeze that didn’t dry the sweat on Eric’s forehead, and he caught himself weaving as he walked.

  The bones, he thought, mean something to someone. Something primitive. He imagined how wind must moan through the bone holes in the bone heads, how lonely it would be to walk upon them if he’d been by himself. He looked back. Heat waves shimmered off the road, and the skulls in the distance wavered and danced. Eric stumbled.

  A hand grasped Eric’s wrist, steadying him. Dodge’s eyes met his, and Eric could see the worry. “I’m okay,” said Eric, but Dodge held firmly, and Eric let him support some of his weight. Dodge’s fine-boned fingers reminded Eric of Troy at two, walking along the river. Troy loved to throw rocks in the water, and they’d spent hours making splashes. Dodge’s clasp on his wrist brought the memory back like it was all new again, and Eric’s eyes’ watered.

  “Maybe we should camp early today, Grandfather,” said Dodge. Rabbit looked back at them and nodded.

  Eric didn’t argue, and let himself be led to a shaded spot part way up a hill above the road. Cottonwoods will keep the sun off my head, he thought, and after a lunch that seemed bland and a little nauseating, he laid back, enduring his legs’ throbbing. Dodge gathered leaves to spread under their sleeping bags. Eric pressed the heels of his hands into the tops of his thighs, rolling the muscle down to his knees. He bit back a cry. How can so little muscle hurt so much?

  Closing his eyes and pushing hard, he started the massage. again. Then he felt hands on his. Rabbit bent over him, his long hair obscuring his scars, and rubbed Eric’s legs. His strong hand kneaded the calf muscles, pressing them against the bones hard enough to hurt. He winced, and Rabbit let up a bit. Such a strange boy, Eric thought. So quiet, so distant, and he does this for me. Eric rested his hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. The boy didn’t look up, but he didn’t shrug the hand away either. After a few minutes Eric relaxed; the pain subsided to waves of comfort, and not soon after, he fell asleep. Something punched him, and Eric roused himself from a dream of a cop car appearing at the crests of hills, then disappearing until it was just a dot that blended into the burning town at the end of the road.

  “We’re not alone,” whispered Dodge.

  Blue-gray predawn shadows colored the bushes and cotton-woods. Dodge huddled against him. “I’m scared,” he said.

  “What is it?” Eric said as he groped in his backpack for the slingshot. He sat up and looked around. Only the faintest blush of light of the horizon told him it was other than night. The trees stood starkly in their shadows. The grasses were a wash of gray.

  Dodge pointed. “Can’t you see them?”

  A gust rustled the cottonwoods. Eric shivered. At the edge of where a cooking fire would cast light if it were lit, sitting or crouching in the grasses, a dozen still figures surrounded their camp site.

  “Are they men?” asked Dodge.

  Eric squinted, tried to use the dim light to discern more of the watchers’ features. “Yes,” he said. “Who are you?” Eric called. Leaves brushed together, muttering in the wind. The figures didn’t answer. After a moment Eric said, “Go away. You’re frightening the boy.”

  One figure stood. He carried a staff or a long, unstrung bow. Darkness hid his face and the kind of clothes he wore, but Eric saw a flicker of light in his eyes when he turned and walked into the shadows. The other watchers faded into the landscape. Eric blinked. The visitors had made no sounds.

  “Where’s Rabbit?” Eric asked. A flat sleeping bag marked where the boy had slept. Eric scrambled from his bag, ignoring the stiffness in his legs, over to Rabbit’s spot. Where
is he? He dashed a few steps away from camp. As far as he could see, black, blue and gray shapes formed the landscape. To the west, the foothills and mountains behind them loomed like tidal waves on the horizon. Below their camp, the two-lane highway cut through hip-high weeds. “Where’d he go?”

  Dodge said, “A noise woke me.” Now that the dark figures were gone, he seemed more self assured.

  “Maybe what I heard was Rabbit. I didn’t see anything. Then the men came.” Eric placed his hands into the small of his back and pushed. He worried that the men had taken Rabbit, but he said, keeping his voice calm, “We won’t find him until it’s lighter. Let’s eat, then we can look.” As they finished their breakfast of dried fruits and beef jerky, the sky lightened and the wind died down. A couple of hundred yards away, on the crest of the hill overlooking their camp, Eric saw the group that had surrounded them, sitting. They too appeared to be eating. Watching them closely for hostile movement, Eric put on his backpack and prepared to track Rabbit. From the dew-cleared path of grass leading from his sleeping bag, it was clear that he had headed north, parallel to the highway, but as soon as Eric and Dodge broke camp, the group on the hill stood and walked down toward them.

  “Stay close,” said Eric. He kept himself between Dodge and the strangers. The men drifted toward them like a mist. In the dawn light, they moved… deliberately. He could think of no better word. Each watched where he was stepping, missing twigs or patches of dry leaves, like deer crossing a meadow. They wore leather skirts— their bare legs were sun browned—and what looked like homespun-wool shirts. Moccasins. No socks. Each carried a bow, a spear or a staff. Several were weighted with heavy, leather water bags. He guessed they were in their twenties except for the one leading, who might be forty or fifty. A broad-chested man with a weathered face and light blue eyes above a gray-flecked beard, he planted himself in front of Eric. The others spread out in a semi-circle. He raised an empty hand to Eric and Dodge. “I’m sorry, old one, but you can’t go farther on this road.” The voice rumbled.