“HE didn’t have the votes,” Milo said.
Tears filled my eyes. “I couldn’t even hang on to my stock of MREs,” I said. The last colony seemed like an impossible dream.
“Don’t lose hope,” Skinny Liz said. She was walking very close to me now, and she began to gently blot my tears with one of her new dress socks. “It’s not all doom and gloom.”
“It literally is,” I said.
“No. There’s still good in this world.” She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “He has returned and walks among us.” Liz seemed to be waiting for me to give her a high five or something, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
“Um, are you talking about Jesus?” I asked.
“Nope,” Liz said. “I’m talking about the one who is always preparing.”
“I guess I’m not familiar.”
“You will be. You all will be soon. And when he announces his presence among us all will be well.” Liz smiled with creepy ecstatic joy. We’d heard similar things from Smokey Joe and other drifters who’d made their way through our boat camp and just kind of brushed it off. Milo and Cerise and I seemed to be the only agnostics left on the face of the earth.
“Oh please,” Cerise said.
“Rejoice in the good news!” Liz said. “Already his arrows of wrath have felled the mighty. He is coming to put his house in order.”
“Maybe that seems plausible under the terms of your religion,” I said, wanting to be diplomatic. “And no disrespect to your beliefs, but I just don’t see that happening, not in a literal way. This,” I said, pointing to the smoking ruin outside the smashed up windows, “isn’t a one person problem.” I finished the Big Red. “He can’t do a thing about it, whoever he is.”
Liz was getting mad. “Guys, let’s just take a breath,” Milo said. “We’re all friends here. Skinny Liz, I love your faith. I love the way you hold on to what you believe in even in these difficult times. Eric did the same thing for years, didn’t you man? You said the day is at hand and will soon be here and what have you, and everybody laughed. But now they’re not laughing. So maybe Liz’s boy will show up. I kind of hope he does.”
Liz stopped under a house that was nothing but frame and foundation, and turned her attention to Milo. She filled him in on this savior character she was expecting, all his mighty attributes and how best to honor him and so forth. Cerise and I pantomimed vomiting behind their backs. As we parted ways, she invited us to services in the evening.
“We’ll try to be there,” Milo promised.
* * *
After another hour walking in circles, we found a faded billboard that read Future Site of the Don Cheevers Planned Community but there was no community in evidence. An electric fence ringed the perimeter—the sign said DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE—but there was nobody inside. The whole place seemed deserted.
“They must be below ground,” Cerise said. She paced the fence’s perimeter, yelling for Hank, but there was no response. Milo was battling a mix of emotions. He had claimed he was ready to come clean with Hank and beg his forgiveness, but his girlfriend’s eagerness to see her husband again was obviously hurtful.
“Touch the fence Eric,” she said.
“No way,” I said, but she shoved me hard and I fell into it. There was no shock. I did not sizzle against the wire like a strip of bacon.
“We can just cut through it,” Cerise said.
It took forever to make a hole big enough for us to pass through, using Cerise’s pocket knife, and Milo was no help at all. While we worked, he stayed on his knees in the dirt mouthing silent prayers, and he even poured a small libation of Big Red to the new deity. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I assumed at first that he was joking around, but he bit my head off when I began to sing a sarcastic hymn. Milo’s irony quotient was lower, his need to really believe in something far greater. He had undergone an authentic conversion experience back there.
When the hole was finished Cerise began to crawl through it.
“You guys go on ahead,” I said. There were blank spaces in my memory thanks to the boy with the bat, but I recalled vividly that Hank Schoenfeld and I had not parted on good terms. He had rigged the apocalypse game for himself and against me, and now he was a person of consequence in the new order, and I’d be expected to bow and scrape before him. I was a loser who couldn’t protect my family whereas he had proved himself a doomsday prepper worth the name. No way was I going in there.
“I’m not coming either,” Milo said, planting his feet. He hadn’t given up on the Gulf, and the electric fence made him skittish. If somebody powered it up, it would function like a mosquito zapper when the waters rolled in, electrocuting everyone at once.
Milo stayed outside the perimeter with his arms crossed. “We need to talk, Cerise. I want to sort all this out. No more hiding, no more lies. I want to know that I matter to you.” His voice was breaking. It was very uncomfortable. “I want to know that you’re going to tell him about us before I take one more step.”
“Come in or he dies,” Cerise said, gesturing casually my direction with one of her shotguns.
“She wouldn’t,” Milo said, but I had an entirely different read on what Cerise was capable of, and I was already pushing him through the fence hole. We found the door to the shelter and climbed down the rickety stairs toward the underground condos. It was too quiet;. I knew it from the moment my foot hit the first step. There were many doors with fancy looking steel numbers, but they opened up into empty space. There was exactly one finished condo, the same one Hank had taken me to—it was the model, evidently—and when Cerise put her fist to the wall in a fit of rage, she busted right through it. My backward pipe shelter had been miles ahead in terms of construction and quality.
Blaine’s neighbor Andrea had called it. Don Cheevers was a con artist.
* * *
The walk back to camp was grim. Cerise and I hardly said a word, but Milo chattered on about the one who is always preparing and how if we turned to him now, if we truly believed, he would fell the rednecks and save us all.
We heard the horses halfway back to the camp, on an open stretch of cooled lava. There was no cover in sight. Thehorses were getting louder, coming toward us behind a slight hill, and we couldn’t see them yet. Milo put his ear to the road like a guy in a Western and listened. Cerise rolled her eyes.
“How many?” I asked. We were in an open stretch of road and there was nowhere to hide.
“Honestly, it sounds like just one really enormous horse,” Milo said.
That was wishful thinking. Two really enormous horses pulling a cart blew past us. Their terrifying drivers wore helmets with grills made of human teeth. They paid no attention to the three of us, who were hacking and gagging in all the ash the hooves and wheels kicked up. The cart they pulled was packed with human beings, and as the miserable faces of the doomed rolled by, I saw that staring out at me from the back was Lisa.
* * *
“Man, wait. Let’s get a posse together first,” Milo said. The sight of our fellow residents loaded up like cattle had brought him back to his senses. There had been ample opportunities as of late for a higher power to intervene in human events, but in spite of the newfound popularity of libations and hymns, in spite of the horrors that were now commonplace among us, the higher powers were doing squat. But we’d always known this, Milo and I. Our survival was in our own hands and it always had been.
“Milo, you get who you can. I’m going now.”
* * *
The barracks were full of prisoners, packed in tight, and I couldn’t see Lisa in that miserable crowd. Well-fed men with long guns were streaming into the Alamo. The mission’s hump had collapsed onto the bricks below, but it still stood. The plaza was cracked and uneven from the shifting ground, and small geysers of fire shot up from tiny fissures in the earth. I kept the collar of my shirt across my mouth to keep the groundsmoke out of my lungs.
The Rodneys were standing guard around the perimete
r, looking sharp in their paramilitary outfits, but I shuffled through the doors with the crowd and nobody stopped me. The mood was festive, like a sales convention, and people shook hands and introduced themselves, comparing notes and dropping names. One name kept coming up—Hank S. Crockett. That was who everybody was here to see.
Bat Rodney called for silence and said he was proud to introduce the man with the plan, father of the new Texas, Hank Crockett! To my absolute disgust, Hank Schoenfeld strolled in from the side door and the crowd went wild. His hair was longer, and he was sporting a beard that would have made even Milo feel inadequate, along with one of the helmets the riders wore. Human teeth lined his forehead like bangs.
“I have just one question.” Hank crossed his arms over his burly chest and studied the crowd. “Why should you trust me?”
“You shouldn’t!” I yelled, but a man with a tattoo of the Virgen de Guadalupe punched me in the gut and I fell to the floor, the wind knocked out of me.
The disturbance hadn’t registered at the front of the room, and Hank continued, while I struggled to breathe and return myself to an upright position. “You’ve heard a lot of things. At a time like this, a lot of people come out of the woodwork and say: ‘I’m the guy. Follow me.’”
He chuckled. “Let me tell you the difference between those guys and me. I flew in to be here. Understand? I took the last plane into Texas—ask my pilot Mark if you doubt me. Mark, where are you?”
Mark waved from under the flags that jutted out from the wall. “That was a hell of a flight. Let’s all give Mark a round of applause.” We all hooted and clapped, even me, because the guy with the Guadalupe tattoo had an eye on me.
“While other guys were hunkering down in their coward holes, throwing up their hands and saying It’s the end of the world! I was thinking.” Hank tapped his skull, to illustrate the abstract concept of cogitation for his audience. “Because you can’t prepare for doomsday. Can you prepare for doomsday?” Hank demanded in his thundering twang.
“No!” the crowd roared.
“Such things are out of the hands of man. Baby, when it’s over, it’s over. But I’m here to tell you, this is just the beginning.” Hank’s speech had more applause lines than the state of the union. I was doing the minimum to keep from getting my ass kicked, but already my palms were numb.
“We aren’t beaten. We’re down but we’re not out. And don’t tell me what the experts say about the state of this planet. Don’t tell me what you can’t do. Don’t tell me it’s too hard. Because I say bull!” Now we were stomping our feet, too.
“We are launching a new Texas here today and each and every one of you is a part of it. It’s going to be bigger. It’s going to be better. We will return to the values of our forebears and we will survive. We will endure. We will not be beholden to weaklings and pessimists. We will rise again from these ashes, brothers!”
My throat was getting raw from screaming my full-throated assent to Hank’s drivel, and I was relieved to see he was winding up.
“I’ll address you again later. Now let’s break into small groups—see your team leader if you’re unsure of your small group assignment. Be sure to stop by the expo booths because we have got some very exciting products on offer. And don’t forget to get yourself a plate of barbecue!”
We screamed “Crockett, Crockett, Crockett!” and clapped and stomped our feet like the bunch of jerks we were, and then we poured out into the plaza.
* * *
I hadn’t eaten meat besides poultry since before, and the smell of woodsmoke and beef was intoxicating. I fell in line behind some men in helmets and waited my turn.
“What’s your team?” the cook said, looking askance at my crossbow.
“The two-steppers,” I said, guessing. It was a good guess. He handed me a plate and I began to devour it. It tasted so good it brought tears to my eyes. When I had cleaned my plate I made my way toward the barracks to find Lisa. A shapely human thigh was turning on a spit, and the cooks were cutting slices from it. In my opinion, it belonged to a pear-shaped woman under 5’5. “That’s fresh,” a man said, smacking his lips.
When I saw the birthmark near the ankle, I vomited.
“You can’t do that here,” one of the Rodneys said, poking me in the back with the butt of his gun. “If you’re diseased you got to clear out.”
“Lisa!” I screamed.
“I said clear out.” The Rodney kicked me and I fell over, still screaming.
“Eric Estrada,” Hank said, crossing the plaza to confront me. “How in the hell are you still alive?”
* * *
Hank was extremely amused to see me again and delighted to find that I was faring very badly in the new order. He was more than content with how things had panned out. The Don Cheevers had been a disappointment, as had Cerise’s betrayal, but he was determined to stay positive. “I’m not going to lie down in the ash and die. I’m a leader, and a leader leads.”
“But where are you leading them, Hank?” I didn’t care that I was crying. It was just a matter of time, probably no more than half an hour, before Hank finished gloating and smashed my head against the nearest wall.
To my surprise, Hank choked up too. “I want the same things you want. I want my family back. My life back.” He cried without shame, like a football coach at a press conference, just sobbing away. He sniffed loudly and pulled himself together. “But I won’t get my family back. Cormac is dead, and my wife is in love with a millennial.” His pain was palpable. A man who once proudly rode a fixed geared bicycle in a bowler hat had usurped his wife’s affections. No wonder Hank now commanded a loose militia of cannibals under an assumed name: he had no self-respect left at all.
“I’m not sure it’s love, exactly,” I said recalling how she’d threatened Milo with her shotguns and used him to pay a bar tab, but Hank’s face clouded over with rage. Nobody wants to hear his wife’s affair is strictly a physical matter. “Well,” I said, feeling awkward. “These are crazy times. Please make it quick,” I said.
“Your death? Oh, hell no. I’m thinking something more in the prolonged category.”
* * *
My new blue uniform was too big and the kitchen was dirty and chaotic. Thigh bones protruded from under the lid of a Dutch oven. A rancid smell of garbage and spoiled meat hung over everything. I was on staff at the Alamo now, stewing up the less palatable trimmings that weren’t worthy of the barbecue pits. It wasn’t easy, but our shift manager Gary liked my positive attitude and the way I put my back into it when I dragged the dirty mop over the filthy bricks. “You won’t stay on the sludge line for long, Estrada. You are destined for better things.”
“Thank you, sir. I certainly hope so,” I’d said. I’d already earned a reputation as a kiss-ass, thanks to that remark, and I’d only been on crew for two and a half hours. I hated myself for that, for my inability to quit trying. Whatever miserable workplace I found myself in, even this one, I threw myself into it with everything I had. I just couldn’t break the habit of trying to scramble to the top, and I looked forward to the day Hank would break it for me, by scrambling my brains on the pavement. My colleague Tanya was wiping at the dishes with a dirty sponge, singing a hymn.
“So does anyone ever escape from the barracks?” I said, poking a spoon into a bubbling pot of don’t ask, don’t tell stew. I’d begun to hope the leg hadn’t been Lisa’s after all. Wasn’t it a little longer than hers? Wasn’t her birthmark slightly higher up from the ankle? I knew that only the truly deranged were capable of this kind of chipper optimism, but I couldn’t beat back these hopeful thoughts, even as I labored in a kitchen full of gore. I supposed that when I’d bitten into those tender slices of human brisket I had gone completely insane.
“Nope,” Tanya said. “Nobody gets out of the barracks. Only the ghosts.”
“The what?”
“The ghosts,” Tanya said, smacking chewing gum that she made herself from tendon and cartilage.
“You see the
m too?” I said. “I thought I was the only one.”
* * *
On our break, Tanya led me to the backside of the Alamo. “There’s a real good one here. It’s strong stuff, so go easy,” Tanya said. “The last guy completely flipped. You’ve got to build up a tolerance.”
“I can handle it,” I said. I bent over the fissure and filled my lungs with groundsmoke. The air began to shimmer. I breathed in again. I wanted to see Lisa one more time. My lungs were aching but I exhaled and bent over the fissure. I sucked up as much groundsmoke as I could stand, more than I’d ever breathed in before. The empty space around me began to fill.
“Easy,” Tanya cautioned, but I ignored her. I took one last huff and stood up, filling dizzy and sick. Every square inch of the plaza was packed with the dead. Mexican regimentals, Franciscan priests, Payaya families, a smattering of tourists who’d died of heatstroke on vacation, still holding bags of commemorative Alamo merchandise.
Blaine Raddax was standing with his pants unzipped, splashing the shrine of Texas liberty with his ghostly urine. “Show some respect,” I chided his ghost, but he just grinned at me. “What happened to you, man?” I said.
“I got killed!” Blaine said. He was as surprised as I. “Real bad earthquake right after you guys left. So yeah, I’m dead. But I’m not going to let that change me.”
“I’m looking for Lisa,” I said. I was having trouble standing upright.
“You need to take it easy on the groundsmoke, buddy. This whole place is going under like real soon and you better sober up, because I don’t think you’re prepared.”
“I’m never prepared,” I said bitterly.