The Dog Stars

  The next morning they walked back downstream and he blew the one ford that crossed the creek with dynamite, and made the track impassable except on foot or horseback, and then only at low water.

  They swept their tracks as best they could and obliterated them thoroughly for two miles before they left the rough road for the creek trail and the canyon. It took them all day. And then, thank god, two days later it poured rain.

  All this she had told me over the last three weeks. So I understood the shock of seeing Grand Junction. It was one thing to lose the whole world as you knew it, another to see, to maybe smell your old neighborhood as charnel house and killing field.

  She had made it out the window, streaked the rearward glass, but the plane still reeked. I handed her the water bottle I always kept between the seats and stole a look back at Pops to see if he would be triggered by the smell or the sights below him. It happens that way on boats and planes, the passengers already queasy and one throws up and it’s a chain reaction. But he sat like a Buddha with a lamb in his lap, one strong claw on her shoulder, his face impassive and hard, leaning to the window taking it all in.

  This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is—well you can’t even look at it.

  But it wasn’t the burned and devastated city, the pockets of virid trees, that were somehow wrong or simply not quite right. I was now six miles out. I was nine hundred feet off the ground and aiming for the airport, for the tower, where three years ago I had gotten the signal, the beginning of a message. I dialed the frequency—it was still there in my GPS—and made the second call.

  Grand Junction Tower, Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha six southeast at five thousand eight hundred inbound for landing.

  Said it again. Then miracle: static. A loud burst of aural snow. I twisted up the squelch excited and called again.

  Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha—

  It wasn’t crystal clear but it was. It was! A woman’s voice. Maybe older, a little raspy. Slightly humored, kind.

  Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha, wind two four zero at five, make a straight in approach, cleared to land runway two niner.

  All formal, all perfect, by the book, just like before before. Said with a straight face. Like a normal business day at the old airport. Can’t fully describe what that harkening back to normalcy did to my spirit. As if in pretending that this were airport operations as usual I could also pretend that my wife lived and my dog, that she was in her seventh month and they were back on the Front Range and I was about to touch down after a three hour flight away from them, not one that had taken nine years and on which there was no true return.

  What wasn’t right was not even that. It was the beacon. Almost every paved airport, has, had, a rotating beacon green and white. And I had seen it flash from ten miles out, and thought nothing of it. And then at six miles I saw it flashing again, pulsing like the heartbeat of a living enterprise and the dissonance—the burned out city at the end of the known world, and the living, pulsing light, the voice of the controller transmitting everyday commands—finally caught my attention and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Can’t tell you why except to say that it was odd to say the least: that they had power. Or: why shouldn’t they? We had it at Erie. More and more airports had been supplementing with solar and wind. Or that the beacon shouldn’t be on in daylight in clear, VFR conditions. Don’t know why, except to say that something put me on edge.

  I lined up. I banked twenty degrees left and straightened out for final and there was the long east-west strip built for jets stretching out in front of us like a vision. Smooth too. Looked it from here. Didn’t have the buckled, cracked, potholed look of every strip on the east side of the mountains. Somebody had maintained it. Least it seemed that way from a mile out and descending. Backed off the throttle, set twenty degrees of flaps and let her float down at five hundred feet per, the Beast seeming to breathe relief at this reversion to past protocol. I swear she has an animus or a mind or something.

  And as we came down slowly and the strip grew wider and longer and rose to meet us, we could see the rows of hangars, some caved in, some roofs blown half off by wind. We could see the control tower on our left, the cantilevered, green tinted, bulletproof windows. We could see wrecks of planes, a few on either side of the runway, a big jet at the end. As there were at every airport—the tied down craft battered by weather, eventually pulling loose and tumbling, but. That’s when it hit me. Like a frigging bullet.

  I was maybe thirty feet off the ground. I had cut power, topped the prop, done all the things you do in the final moments, and was getting ready to pull back the yoke and flare for a soft touchdown and. And it hit me.

  The beacon, the tower: the wrecks on the field were scorched like the cars. Can’t say I thought anything, nothing reasoned, articulated, there wasn’t time. It was just the shock of the image: the burned and crumpled planes. Different from Erie. Different from Denver, from Centennial, the old planes ripped from their moorings and cartwheeled over the airfield by wind. These were crashes. Live-engine wrecks. I did pull back the yoke, but not for a flare. I jerked it back and slammed the throttle to the panel and the engine caught and screamed and my palm slammed the carb heat knob back in and we lurched, reared skyward. We jumped off the field maybe steeper even than our takeoff half an hour before from the meadow. And the lambs wailed.

  I looked out the low side window, the bowl of plexiglas, and in the same instant the cable came up. Sprung taut, probably missed my wheels by ten feet. Sprung like a trap. Which is what it was.

  Holy fuck.

  Hig, you are a cool bastard. That was Bangley talking. Giving me the rare Bangley thumbs up. And in that moment too I glanced at the fuel flow gauge and saw we had two gallons left. Ten minutes at most. Fuck.

  I banked left to come around for a look and tensed for gunfire from the ground.

  Goddamn. It was Pops. A taut line. He had moved the lamb and he had his gun up and he was scanning the hangars, the wreckage.

  The cable stretched across the runway about a third of the way down and ten feet off the pavement, held taut by two sprung arms welded from T-bar steel. The arms were articulated downward like the bills of evil herons. The cable was painted black like the tarmac but I could clearly see its shadow and then the evil thread of it. No gunfire. I craned around.

  Pops?

  That was it, he yelled. Their one big trick.

  Want to? I called back.

  Get em? Fuck yeah.

  Cima?

  She looked confused, still sick, unable to appreciate the implications of what had just happened. She nodded.

  We don’t have much choice, I yelled. We’re about out of gas.

  I tightened the bank and swooped for another final, this time without checklists, without any thought at all except That motherfucker that motherfucker. I’m coming to get you. And the gut-punch feeling of betrayal. All those years, thinking about that radio call. The hope it had engendered. It drove me wild.

  Everything was on automatic. I banked tight and swooped and touched down a hundred feet past the cable. Pops leaned forward and said:

  Taxi past. There. Park behind that building, the second west of the tower.

  I kept her rolling fast. The radio crackled on. Nice landing said the voice and it didn’t sound like Aunt Bee now. It sounded frayed and hard. Then laughter. Laughter like hanging metal scraping over pavement, loud and sustained. Congratulations. You’re the first.

  I didn’t call back. I turned left onto a broad taxiway and found cover where Pops said and shut her down. We were in the cool shadow of Big River Flight School and Authorized Cessna Service Center and we were close enough to the wall that we couldn’t see the top of the tower and they couldn’t get a bead on us, whoever they were. Climbed out
moved the seat forward for Pops so he could squeeze out. A cricket chirped loudly from the base of the wall. Cima sat. Hadn’t unbuckled. I didn’t know what to say, I had never seen her like this. She seemed in shock. She was in shock. I walked around to her door opened it. Her long hand pressed against the panel over the oil pressure gauge and a new bruise spread along her forearm. She turned. Her eyes were bleary.

  It’s not just the meanness of it. The trap. That too. It’s the city.

  I nodded. She and Pops had retired early from the world before it had fired into full conflagration. They had seen enough, enough to flee but not the full demise. Not what I had seen every day from the air. What Bangley and I had known in the middle of our nights. The charred town and all that it implied.

  You want to stay here?

  Nodded.

  Okay.

  I walked back around, reached across my seat and unclipped the Uzi from its rack and held it out to her.

  If someone shows up that doesn’t look like me or your dad, plug em. It’s charged.

  She hesitated, nodded, took the gun.

  I unsnapped the AR. Also took the handheld radio. Turned it on and dialed in 118.1, the tower. Sometimes it’s a good idea to talk to your enemy. Not usually. Bangley had taught me that—the value of reticence. Also the value of overwhelming firepower. I reached back under one of the lambs and pried out the stuff sack that held the grenades, nodded at Pops, and we moved around the south corner of the building. I followed him. He hugged the wall so that we were still out of sight of the tower. Before we cleared the next corner and crossed the open ramp where small planes had once tied down, and came into full view of whoever was up there, we pulled up. It was about fifty yards to the next building, a single story brick, the offices of the FBO, a hangar adjacent and behind. We could see the back of it: a row of dark windows still mostly intact, and a metal door toward the rear.

  Hig that old lady up there sounded just like my grandma.

  And?

  We’re gonna clean her clock and whoever else. No questions asked. He looked at me.

  I nodded.

  Those cocksuckers invited you out here under false pretenses. Did you see all those goddamn wrecks? How many planes you think they did like that?

  A lot. Scores. It’s the biggest runway on the way to L.A. between Denver and Phoenix.

  He leaned against the bricks.

  Why? he said.

  Why do they do it?

  I mean not for the fuel. Half those wrecks burned. Not for the damn meat. Unless you like charcoal.

  There’d be survivors. Some maybe not badly injured. And sometimes they didn’t burn. Not all the way, sometimes not at all. There’d be supplies, food, weapons. Lambs. Bahhh.

  Okay so what did they do with the pissed off survivors?

  Silence. He stepped around the corner and the shot cracked. Blew brick dust into my face. I thought he was cooked. He fell back. I grabbed at him blindly, hugged him to me.

  Fuck. Losing my edge, Hig. Thanks.

  He was fine. He was breathing hard. I wiped my eyes.

  That’s what they do, Hig. Pick em off one by one. Come out of the wreck injured, dazed not even sure what hit em and bang. Or use em for whatever they use em for. Okay now I’m really pissed.

  He unbuttoned his patched flannel shirt, scanned the ground behind us and picked up a two foot piece of rusty rebar. Hung the shirt on it.

  Stick this out past the edge when I say. Up here like this. We get into that next building we’re made. Do NOT move from here until I tell you. He slid the bolt back, checked for a chambered bullet, crouched. Three two one, go!

  I shoved out the shirt, the shot cracked, zinged, he was gone. He was sprinting toward that back door running like a halfback, feinting and zagging and two more shots exploded up pavement behind and ahead of him. He made it to the sight shadow of the building, to the spot where he could no longer be seen from above, and walked the rest of the way to the door. Turned, gave me a thumbs up before he tugged it open and disappeared inside. Fucking Pops. Hope I can run like that when I’m—what?—my age. I could never run like that. Damn. I pulled back the shirt. There was a neat hole halfway down, repeated in three folds. Gut shot. Ouch. I waited. One minute, two, began to count like I did for Bangley. At two hundred I wondered what was going on. At two twenty three: one shot. It rang over the airport like a bell. A single toll. Echoed and died. It was Pops’s .308. I knew the sound. Half a minute later the door in the back of the FBO scraped open and Pops waved me over. I ran. He held up his hand patted the air like Take your time, relax.

  What the fuck? What happened?

  A fool, that’s what. Those windows up in the tower are thick bulletproof. Been like that since 9/11. But they have to shoot out somewhere. They have gunports. Like an old fort. I knew once I was inside, I’d have all the time I needed to set up the shot.

  I stared at him.

  You nailed the shooter through a gunport? Like through his scope?

  Shook his head. Nah. Turns out they have two ports—a higher one, maybe chest level, for the long shot, one for the angle directly down to cover the base of the tower. He was looking out the upper one and I shot through the lower. You wanna blow the door, go up and pay a visit?

  Damn, Pops.

  He had shot whoever it was right up their skirts. Through like a four inch hole.

  Oh yeah. We walked across. The door at the base of the tower was heavy metal painted green. He unzipped a greasy belt pack took out two sticks of dynamite taped them together with duct tape.

  Been saving these. Seems like a good time.

  He taped them to the heavy metal door on the hinge side, close to the ground, lit them and jogged back. We ducked inside the Jet Center for good measure. It blew. Small bits of pavement rained against the windows. Reminded me of passing a truck on a gravel road. We jogged back. The door hung cattywampus off the top hinge, swung a sad metronome in drifting smoke. Pops stood in the doorway like a hesitant messenger.

  Give me your gun, he said. You mind?

  I handed it to him, he gave me his.

  This’ll be a little better for what we’re doing.

  Reflex: he tugged back the charging handle, checked that a shell was chambered, and went into commando mode. Not as if he hadn’t before. Couldn’t wait for him to meet Bangley. That’s what I was thinking, even amused imagining the introductions as Pops covered the first flight of stairs and went up gun to his shoulder sighting up the stairwell both eyes open. The treads were concrete laid over steel and they beat a dull tong tong as we ran up. There were five levels. At each one he told me to stay in the well and cover it and he went through the door. He cleared each floor swiftly and we moved up. Leaned into my ear breathing in rasps.

  You’re gonna love the decorations in this place.

  I could imagine. The top door, the door to the control room was locked. Of course. He shot the lock out, pushed through. The smell. A barrier. I gagged and spit. Cats everywhere. Freaked by the shooting, running over the radar keyboards, the comm panels, arched bristled and hissing against the dead black flatscreens. Calicoes and blacks, blue eyed Siamese.

  The air reeked of cat piss and swam with light from the tinted windows, infused with green like an aquarium. On the west side, the side we had come from, where I knew the shooter would be slumped on his side beneath the cantilevered windows, was a man choking and crying. He was holding his guts which were spilled onto the floor. Blood seeped from his back, pooled in reservoir and ran across the floor in a sinuous ribbon like a creek.

  He was an old man, older than Pops. His beard was white, his grizzled hair uncut, matted now and soaked in blood from the painted steel floor. The one who had first called, the one I had heard years before, must’ve been. He wore suspenders. His cap had been thrown into the middle of the open room. It was printed with yellow lettering, Peoria Jet Center “Service in the Heartland.” Over the nausea, a wave of goosebumps. Fucker. The heartland had come west looking for a sa
fe haven from the flu and hit this bastard’s cable. Probably. His rifle lay a few feet from the cap. An AR-10 with a long barrel. Cats drawled in the loud panicked mews of a vet’s waiting room. The old man gagged, gurgled, sobbed. One of the bolder cats was already lapping at the crimson creek.

  Samuel! Cold shriek. Sammy my Sammy my Sammy!

  I jumped. In the corner—there was no corner it was all corners, octagonal—on the east side was an old woman with her hair, no shit, in a bun. It was Aunt Bee. She stood next to a spotting scope on a tripod and wore, no shit again, a calico dress printed in blue cornflowers. She wore wire rimmed round glasses. Could have been your school librarian, your doting grandma, the face on the pancake syrup label. She was at once backed up straight against a nav screen and paralyzed mid lunge toward the shooter who must have been her husband, her hands clawing the air in front of her chest, and her mouth open in a scream. Pops shot her. Middle of the forehead. Twenty cats did hot laps around the tower, then froze in various poses of arched terror. Dropped the decibel level in the reverberant room by half. Now just cats and the old man.

  Pops stepped to him, crouched.

  Finish Gramps choked. His eyes swum up. They were filmed like poached eggs. Shoot. He begged.

  Pops said How’d you spring the cable.

  Wha—? He gurgled up a gobbet of blood.

  The cable. How’d you spring it?

  Bucko

  Backhoe?

  Gramps vomited affirmative.

  Fuel? Where’s the fuel? You have hundred low lead?

  Shoot plea—

  Where is it?

  Ea tak

  East tank?

  Yu

  Pops tugged on a bunch of keys clipped to the man’s belt.