House of the Rising Sun, page 37
“Before I let you in,” he said, “I want to know how you think the world came to be this way. Who here knows what happened?”
“An alien attack!”
“It’s God’s retribution for all our sin!”
“The Federal government did this to us! Oppressors!”
“No!” yelled Larry. “It’s all this man’s fault! This rich and famous screenwriter! He wrote this world and now you’re stuck in his movie!”
Larry waited for the crowd to cheer louder, or at the very least jeer and boo Thomas. But they didn’t.
“Come on, sir!” yelled a woman. “Just let us in! My baby is starving!”
“We don’t even know who that guy is!” shouted someone else.
“But you know this woman!” bellowed Larry. He twisted Skylar around to face the crowd, the gun now pressed against the back of her neck. “Why would she be here except to make a movie?”
Surely, when these anonymous nobodies identified his dazzling princess, they would finally be convinced. Larry would accept the recognition he deserved after languishing in obscurity for so many years.
“Oh, my God!” yelled a woman. “That’s Skylar Stover! What are you doing to her?”
“Yeah, man,” said another. “What is this shit? Let the lady go!”
“Why are we even listening to this?” yelled a beautiful mother of three children standing not thirty feet away. “Who the hell are you?”
And that’s when Larry decided Skylar had been right, even if she no longer believed it. There was no way this scene could be real, not when he was forced to listen while a lovely young woman hurled insults at him. Larry wondered how long this temptress had been there, though it seemed as though she had always been there, that he would forever see her face, those big, lovely eyes and that tiny nose and those perfect pink lips. Of course a woman like this loathed him. She had always loathed him. She would always be there with him, waiting to cut him at the knees with her haughty smile and biting wit, her note handwritten in beautiful script, My boyfriend says you are a FUCKFACE, and suddenly the ringing in Larry’s ears rose up and clobbered him in the head. He seemed to fall to his knees, or the world turned sideways, and still the woman was there, hating him, looking at him as if he weren’t human, as if he were a bug she could squash with the step of her foot.
P.S. Don’t write back!
* * *
You probably didn’t know human screams sound just like the screeching in my ears. Until then, I didn’t either. It made me wonder if the sound I’d been hearing all this time had been a literary device meant to foreshadow my defining moment.
Dirty humans in the crowd went down by the row. It would have been nice to savor each kill, like the bittersweet flavor of lemonade, but the mass of them lost density as they fled from their fallen comrades. They spread in all directions the way a drop of liquid soap repels a film of greasy water.
The gun was a live thing in my arms, growing warm, punishing me. In moments I was through the first clip and was forced to replace it with another.
My targets were children, mothers, teenagers in football jerseys. A man in a flannel shirt and jeans was pointing a rifle at me when he fell backward, two beautiful maroon blooms spreading into the brown pattern across his chest. No good guy with a gun was going to stop me! And I get it, most of you think I’m a monster, but that’s only because you accept the idea of meaning in the world, that our puny decisions matter. They don’t matter. Nothing does. Whether or not this world is a movie is irrelevant. The important thing is I am not simply allowed to behave in absurd ways. I am obligated to.
Something whisked by me. A whip crack of a sound. A bullet.
As much as I enjoyed the carnage, the last thing I wanted was to be killed by one of my targets. By then the mass of them had pushed down the fence, and they were streaming toward the building, which meant my retreat would have to be careful.
When I reached the ladder, my path to freedom was still clear. But in the distance, running for the trees, I saw a woman and two children. The clip was nearly empty, so I switched the rifle to single-fire and allowed myself three shots. One for each of them.
Remember my dance in the rain, days ago, as I dodged bullets fired by Paige? This was the same scene except I had become the sniper.
I shouldered my weapon and fired. Fired again. And a third time. Finally, the woman went sprawling and dragged the children with her.
I climbed quickly down the ladder. On the ground, I crept toward the employee entrance and listened carefully. I could hear screaming. Gunshots. I darted away from the open door just in time for a bullet to scream past me.
My spare clips and weapons were inside, only yards away, but if it was Paige who’d shot at me, I wouldn’t get another chance. The moment she saw my silhouette in the doorway, I would be dead.
There was no option but abandon the other guns and remaining rounds.
I ran.
* * *
When Seth saw Billy and Miguel knocked to the ground by gunshots, a moment passed where his mind went completely blank, like an email someone had been writing but quickly deleted. After walking so far, having overcome so much to get here, he couldn’t believe it would all end like this.
“Put down your weapons!” Aiden yelled at them. “Every one of you, put your guns on the ground or I will open fire.”
The darkness was closer than it had ever been. All his life Seth had known it would come to this. All his life he’d been waiting for the end.
“I’m taking Thomas and Skylar outside,” Larry said inconceivably. “I want to show those people why they’re here. I want Thomas to pay for doing this to us.”
Seth understood how Larry felt. A couple of days ago, while he was drunk on whiskey, Skylar had convinced him to believe all this was Thomas’ fault. But in the sober light of day that reasoning seemed desperate and futile. This was no movie and there would be no happy ending. It was reality, and it was always going to end poorly.
“Seth,” said Aiden, “pick up your gun and throw it out the door. Throw Thomas’ out the door. I don’t want complications. I have work to do.”
Seth could barely make himself move. His family was in danger and these weapons were the only means to protect them. But at the moment his options were limited, so he carried out the orders as instructed.
Soon Aiden was swallowed by shadows, and the sound of his retreat faded in the distance.
“We need our weapons back,” Tim said. “Larry has lost his mind. He’ll drive the crowd inside before we secure supplies.”
“I’ll get the weapons,” Seth heard himself say. “The rest of you grab whatever you can.”
He approached the open door of the warehouse, the place where a truck would back its trailer to be loaded or unloaded. The floor was about four feet above the ground outside. He jumped to the concrete below and retrieved a military rifle and two handguns, including his own. He could hear someone in the crowd yelling. Or maybe Larry yelling.
Anthony took the weapons from Seth and helped him up, back into the warehouse. Outside, the sound of the crowd grew quiet. After so much noise, the silence felt ominous.
“My wife and children are back there somewhere,” Seth said to Anthony, pointing over his shoulder. “I need to find them.”
“We should all go,” said Anthony. “Now.”
Seth nodded. But when he turned around, toward the darkness, he saw Jimmy doubled over on the concrete floor. His face was tinted green and his eyes were closed. Seth approached and knelt next to him.
“Jimmy,” he said. “You want me to drag you out of here? I don’t think I can carry you.”
“Nah. My goose is cooked. Live fast and die young, right?”
“Just so you know,” Seth said. “I was going to pay. If it weren’t for all this, you would have gotten what was coming to you.”
“I had a nice life. I got what I deserved. Now, go get your wife and kids.”
“All right, Jimmy. Take care, man.”
Seth stood. Tim had emerged from warehouse depths carrying a small box labeled PETER PAN CRUNCHY.Anthony held his rifle at waist level.
“We need to—”
The sound of running footsteps interrupted him. It was a teenage girl followed by a woman who might have been her mother. The two of them ran into the darkness, toward the warehouse exit. A few others followed, nodding at Anthony as they ran past. These were other warehouse employees, Seth guessed. Everyone was leaving.
Everyone except an imposing figure that emerged from the darkness, coming quickly this way. Seth raised his weapon, afraid Aiden had returned to kill them.
But it wasn’t Aiden. It was Paige.
“Your wife and kids are safe,” she said as she roared past. “They’re waiting on you. I’m going outside to take care of Larry.”
“Thomas and Skylar are still out front,” Seth said to Anthony and Tim. “I can’t leave them. I should help Paige.”
“She doesn’t need your help,” Anthony replied. “You should go to your family.”
While Seth stood there, deliberating, a gunshot erupted. It was barely yards away, just outside the warehouse door. Then Paige appeared near the dock. She was gesturing to someone, imploring them to run. The roar of the crowd swelled enormously.
And then from above, on the roof, more gunshots.
Bitter bursts of gunshots.
People began to scream. Everyone began to scream. And still the industrial battering of gunfire, like something Seth would expect to hear on a battlefield. So many shots. So much screaming.
Coming this way.
“Natalie!” he yelled into the darkness. “Take the kids and go. Run back to Tim’s house as fast as you can! Go now!”
He hoped she could hear him. He hoped she was already headed for the exit.
While he stood there, watching for the silhouettes of his family, Seth heard Paige climb into the warehouse from the dock. Anthony hurried over and reached for Skylar. Seth helped Thomas inside.
“You guys need to run,” Paige said. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”
But Seth knew now what he was meant to do. This was how he would save his family. Not by crawling into a car and going to sleep. Not by deserting them.
No, he would stand here and fight for them.
“Please take care of my boys,” Seth said to Paige. “Help Natalie get them away from here. That’s all I ask.”
Thomas and Skylar were already running toward the rear of the warehouse. Tim followed, struggling with his case of peanut butter.
“Many people are coming,” Anthony said. “I will stay and try to negotiate with them.”
“Please,” said Seth to Paige. In her smoky blue eyes he saw empathy. Ferocity. Admiration.
“Natalie will know what you did for them,” she finally said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Then she turned and sprinted away. Seth watched her go, running past Tim and into the darkness of the DC, where Thomas and Skylar had already disappeared.
The shooting above them stopped. Seth remembered Aiden’s declaration, how he had “work” to do. The nature of that work seemed clear now. Seth imagined Aiden climbing to the roof with all the ammunition he could carry, standing above the crowd, firing into them, another mass murderer, only this time there would be no television coverage, no breaking news banner, no active shooter alerts.
Just a man with a ruined mind killing innocent, starving people for no reason other than he could. A crowd fleeing in fear, hungry, desperate to survive.
Now, the first faces of the crowd reached the docks. Hands appeared, reaching for purchase on the warehouse floor. Seth pointed his weapon toward the door, but there was no reason to kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. These people were hungry and wanted to eat, just as Seth and his family had wanted to eat.
The first man finally hauled himself up and stood in front of the dock door. He held a handgun. Now another man with a shotgun. They crept forward with their weapons ready to fire, and Seth wondered what the impact of a bullet might feel like. The worst injury he’d ever sustained was a broken finger. There hadn’t even been pain at first. Just an anxious sense of something terribly wrong.
More people on the dock were climbing up.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t feed us,” said the man with the shotgun, looking at Anthony. “We stood out there for three days. Then you ordered your man on the roof to open fire on us. Why?”
“That man on the roof acted alone.”
Anthony held a weapon. He could have pulled the trigger at any time.
“I was just doing my job,” he explained.
“And I’m just doing mine,” said the man with the shotgun as he fired.
The image of Anthony being hit at close range was something Seth refused to see. He looked down at his leg. Something had stung him in the thigh, the ankle. Something like a bee or a wasp. He reached down to swat his leg, to scare the bug away, and fell over.
Something was terribly wrong. He was on the ground. Fireworks were going off above him. Blood was spilling out of him.
That couldn’t be right. Blood was supposed to be on the inside. He wanted to scoop it up and save it because there was no way to get it back. But he couldn’t move his arms. They were bound to his sides.
Someone maybe stepped on him, crushing his bones together. He was rolling the bones. Standing at the head of a crowded craps table. A suited man on his right swallowed the rest of his whiskey and dropped $500 on hard eight. An Asian kid barely out of college explained to his three buddies how to bet. The boxman was bulky but observant, nothing distracted him, not even the famous actress who stood at the far end of the table holding Seth captive with her sea green eyes. She was speaking to him. The sound of her words was swallowed by cheers but he knew what she wanted. He threw bones at her. Tossed them against the interior wall of the craps table, little red cubes spinning in slow motion before settling near each other, four white eyes on each surface staring upward, and the suited man roared, the college friends cheered, and Natalie’s words finally resolved themselves as if they’d traveled a great distance across post-apocalyptic plains to reach him.
Thank you, Seth.
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
THIRTY-NINE
Though she couldn’t see any reason to live, Skylar was nonetheless afraid of death. It was all she could think about now, the moment when she would stop being aware of the world around her, when Skylar Stover would cease to be while the universe cruelly continued to exist. What a spiteful joke to be given something as lovely as life when the only point of the gift was to take it away.
In her mind the Walmart warehouse had always been more fantasy than reality, and during the journey she had bobbed like a fishing cork, sometimes floating on the allure of an alternate film reality and other times submerged into the dark truth of her imminent demise.
But watching two men be killed in front of her—first Blaise and then Larry—had condensed these possibilities into one. She wasn’t going to survive this, none of them were, so now she was adrift.
As they wandered through the woods, as Tim told pointless stories about Billy and Miguel, Skylar thought she saw a moving form in the trees. She considered telling Thomas but didn’t. If someone was hunting them, why bother to fight? Why not just get it over with?
When they were back at Tim’s, a long discussion ensued about whether it made sense to go back to the warehouse. Even if every person in the crowd had grabbed an armful of food, Tim argued, there would still be more. But Thomas didn’t believe it was safe, especially not for Skylar and him. Everyone had seen them. They would forever be associated with Aiden, who had opened fire on innocent people. The mood of the survivors would be dark. Savage. Power struggles were sure to develop, and eventually someone would seize control of the warehouse. Probably someone awful.
Eventually Thomas led Skylar into one of the empty bedrooms and announced his final plan to carry on with the charade.
“There’s a lake east of here where I almost bought a cabin. It will take us a day or two to walk that far, but maybe one of those cabins will be empty. Maybe the air will be cleaner and we can, I don’t know, hunt and fish.”
Skylar laughed. She imagined a million people could be walking in that direction.
“You still think we can survive all this?” she asked.
“Don’t we have to try?”
Not knowing what else to do, Skylar agreed to go with him. They probably wouldn’t get far.
The roads headed east were less crowded than she imagined, and when they encountered other people, these interactions were brief and guarded. It was frightening to discover how little was understood about what had happened. The farther they walked from the city, the more terms like “EMP” and “pulse” were replaced by “aliens” and “God.” Some believed the United States had been attacked by Russia or North Korea or both and expected military allies to eventually save them. One creative fellow explained, using disparate Bible verses, how the pulse had begun the Lord’s tribulation period. The destruction of technology was meant to cast divine confusion on the Arab enemies of Israel as a way to stop them from attacking the Jewish state. All this, of course, was a convoluted prelude to the Rapture.
With every step she took, Skylar’s mood sunk lower. So what if they found a place to stay? So what if Thomas could use his handgun to hunt for food? He would eventually run out of ammunition, and she didn’t care to eat game, anyway. She preferred her steaks wrapped in butcher paper or sizzling on a plate topped by a pat of butter. Except she would probably never eat butter again. She would never see her family again. She would never ride in a plane or visit Paris or sit on her deck and watch the sun set over the Pacific. She would never win an Oscar. She would never buy another pair of shoes or put on makeup or stand under a curtain of hot water in the shower.
She would never feel safe again.
They walked and walked and eventually Skylar realized it was easier to breathe and the sky looked almost blue. When Thomas tried to talk to her, she answered him with silence. She didn’t want him to believe, even for one minute, that she was happy to be here. She wanted him to be miserable the way she was. And if that meant she was an ungrateful, spoiled bitch, then so be it.
