The Apocalypse Reader (10 page)

"Dextrose-okay, listen carefully to this one. I'm going to try to pronounce it and then I'm going to spell it out, because I don't really know how to pronounce this one. `Maleodexetrine Sulfate'? Does that sound right? M-A-L ... Apparently, you inject 200 cc's of this substance into the slurry-E-O-D ..."

Burtson crawled over to the speaker of the shortwave and held his ear very close to it, listening very carefully, as if, in getting closer, he could actually approximate himself geographically to his son. It was an action he knew Toshikazu found pathetic. Burtson would find it pathetic as well, if he were watching from anywhere outside his own body. Unduly and egregiously sentimental. But the voice was arresting, dark and melodic, possessed of an assuredness he hadn't imagined Alan capable of. He could hear, in the brief intervals between breaths, or in the throat clearing, or during the pauses to keep the microphone from falling over in the wind, a tuneful, barely perceptible cough, one Burtson knew from those early years, the pre-KraftMark years, a time of unsustainable pressure, in which he was working late into the nights, away from home, high up on the twenty-third floor of an office building that, at night, might as well have been the bridge of an enormous spacecraft, adrift in deep space, all the city's lights like distant stars, his son the inhabitant of a planet he could barely remember. He'd come home and shuffle, on his knees, to the side of Alan's bed to tender him into sleep. The boy would twitch occasionally, shifting in the sheets, making that coughing sound, like the cough of a vole or some other burrowing rodent, an animal that wanted nothing more than to go unnoticed.

"He's transmitting from a mountain top," Toshikazu said, rising to scan the horizon, his voice suddenly fraught with tremors.

"Know what?" Burtson said, "I'm fine with this. I'm good. He's not doing anyone any harm. He's just crazy. Let him stay here, that's what I say. Let the crazy kook live up here on the mountain. He's not hurting anybody. Let's head back to base camp."

Toshikazu looked back sharply. "Don't do this. Allow your son the terminal dignity of dying by your own hand. Don't let them do it. They'll tear open his nutsack and scrub out his genes with a wire brush. They'll staple his hands to his buttocks and throw him out of a helicopter into the main square of some remote village. You want that for your son?"

"Nobody wants that."

"Pick up your things and let's go."

Burtson heaved himself up, scraping open a kneecap on a toothsome mound of jagged black rock. He wished for an aerosol can of Secret Skin, the kind he used to spray over Alan's playground injuries. He attached the nylon cords from the desk to his harness and lurched forward, following Toshikazu at a lame, distant pace.

As the night overtook the sky behind them, pressing at their backs like a suffocating tarp, Toshikazu spotted a silhouetted figure seated on a ridge. He crouched behind a stand of weeds, pointing the figure out to Burtson, who couldn't make anything out. It was all just jaggedness and splinters against the red flush of the dying sun.

"This is the end of my job," he said, squinting at the distant point.

"How do I do this?" Burtson's shoulders started to gyrate uncontrollably. He crossed his arms, pressing his palms against his ribcage, but he couldn't hold back the twitching muscles that hijacked his torso.

"Just like we did in the training sessions." Toshikazu slipped the rifle from its polyester case.

"Those were dummies. Those were stuffed dummies."

"The human body is really just a moist, complex version of those dummies." He loaded the magazine and powered on the infrared sight before handing it to Burtson, who held it like a candy bar.

"I think you're a little out of line."

"Nobody on this mountain is anything more than a brilliantly designed sack. The only distinguishing feature is what others have crammed inside us over time."

"An interesting take. I wonder what your wife would have thought about that."

Toshikazu pressed the knuckles of his right hand up into his top teeth.

Burtson held the rifle in front of him, as far from his chest as he could reach. "If you don't mind, please remind me how to aim this thing. I'd like to get this over with."

"Figure it out. Figure it out your goddamned motherfucking self." Toshikazu turned away and dropped down from the cliff edge in a swift, deliberate arc.

Burtson hefted the rifle. It was all trigger, all form factor; it fit into the crook of his arm like a newborn. There was a scope, larger in diameter than a baseball bat, and it looked like it needed to be turned on. He turned it over in his hands again and again, but it never made any more sense. He decided to give it a shot anyway. There was a sort of raised fin on the nozzle, so he used this for aim. He heard Toshikazu behind him. "That's not-look, you're going to hurt yourself."

He felt something surge up in him, something heavy and luminescent. It rose up in his chest cage, topping off at the back of his throat. It was a feeling he remembered not in his conscious memory but in the larger memory everybody shared, the memory of the flattened, husky humanoids who knocked around in squat forests in the years before time mattered, making a dim impression in their respective tribes by killing up whole herds with insensate panache. The feeling made sense-he was aware, fully, maybe for the first time, of the extent of his body's capabilities. There were no more illusions-he knew he was not a superhero-he knew he could not burst through a brick wall or kick a man's balls up through his chest. It was a sober, rational summary of what he could do with his body.

Burtson lined up the fin with Alan's figure and squeezed the trigger impulsively. The rifle was surprisingly quiet. The figure turned, startled, as a congregate of broad leaves exploded in the air over his head. "They're here," his son shouted into the microphone. "This is it. I'm not going to make it out of here. They won't leave until I'm taken out. Don't let the recipe die-keep it going. Keep it-"

Burtson fired again, and a third time. The figure jerked backward. "Holy crap," he said. "Holy crap." He wished Toshikazu had stayed; he felt a queer pride click into place somewhere inside, but quickly he thought better of it. Shooting your son: it was a private thing, composed of a sweet, crushing sense of impossibility. You didn't want to share it, in the end.

Burtson dropped the rifle and sat at his desk, where Toshikazu had left a Post-it note with his billing address. He took his cell phone from the top drawer and tried his wife. Somehow, he got a ringtone. A woman answered the phone in another language. "Hello? Marion?" he said, and the voice replied in a fluttery, unrecognizable tongue. Realizing it was a stranger, he whispered, "I just shot my son," feeling each word turn in his dry, dirty mouth like rocks in a tumbler. "I took aim and I shot him. Has that ever happened to you?" The voice erupted again, and then died off sharply. He thought the woman might have hung up. "It's a thing you remember," he said. "It might be the only thing you really remember. You take back what you've given. It goes against-it's a powerful thing, what you've done when you do that." He stopped when he heard the silence of the disconnected call. He wasn't sure if the woman hanging up had hurt him more than the sight of his son slowly folding up into a compact hump on the horizon. He was sure he'd know later, on the plane, speeding ridiculously over a charcoal-dark, midsize, failing industrial hub. When he got farther away from the jungle, he thought, he'd be able to measure the two events, hold them, one in each palm, and divine to himself the thing he felt worst about.

THE HOOK

Shelley Jackson

TRAVIS BROUGHT IN a dog's leg that he said fell out of the sky. One end was ragged and chewed-looking, its bloody bits gone hard and dark. It was still enrobed in short brown fur. I was glad about that. Betsy had been redder. The leg had landed right beside him, cracking a sheet of plywood, and bounced. It could have brained him, I thought, with a familiar wooze of panic. He was laughing, waving it around, touching things with it. "Give paw," he cried, and extended it to me.

Then he hurled it down (I heard the nails click against the floor) and his face caved in. I held out my arms and he buried his head in my stomach. As his jaw worked it felt like he was trying to eat me.

"Come on," I said. "We'll go look at the fire."

He sniffed and choked. "Really?"

THE FIRE WAS kept burning all the time. It was in the fenced-in lot behind the former supermarket, where they used to take in deliveries. The supermarket was used as a morgue, now, and the dead were wheeled out back in shopping carts. At the loading dock they were draped over the hook. The bodies were hoisted and swung into the center, where they were received into the oily smoke. The crane performed a jerky but practiced dance, and the hook returned empty.

The crane was the tallest thing around. It was visible from all over the neighborhood, leaning over the pyre in an attitude of grave attention. We knew, though we could not see him, that the crane operator, too, gave the dead his full attention. We believed this, though we also believed that the crane operator was the crudest sort of person, given to rude jokes about the dead, and never clean. His face and hair were slicked with black grease "from the hinges of death's door," said Loss, with relish, quoting some song. His long skirts were always scabbed with disgustingness. The crane operator was a figure invoked by children during sleepovers to induce giggling and shivers. We trusted him, all the same, and felt there was none better for the job. We would not have trusted our dead to a diplomat. The hook must not be coy or self-conscious. It must have no protocol but need. That was exactly what made it the closest thing we could imagine to holy. That's how I felt, anyway, and I'm sure others felt the same.

The crane and the crane operator were always there, minding the dead. Even if, as he must sometimes do, the crane operator slept at his controls, he was still presiding, and we believed that even his dreams concerned the dead.

I WRAPPED THE dog's leg in plastic and threw it away, but it turned out that Travis kept it. I saw him playing with it, using it like a golf club. Well, let him. He has few enough toys.

Travis had taken to wearing a gigantic coat he'd found. It puddled around his feet. To walk without tripping, he had to take wide strides, punting the skirts forward at each step. So when he steps his legs apart and hunches over, adjusting his grip on the dog's leg, his sleeves almost touch the ground. He straightens, letting the dog's leg lean against his legs, and rolls them up into two big donuts around his arms. Then he resumes his pose. He taps the dog's foot lightly on the ground, then swings.

Something thwacks into Loss's shack, a dome of filthy rugs draped over a hutch, and a gentleman staggers out, laughing, and looks around. Loss pokes her head out after, laughing too. Her nose is bleeding, but she doesn't seem to notice.

Travis gives the gentleman a Nazi salute with the dog's leg.