Up in flames, p.12
Up In Flames, page 12
part #8 of This Rotten World Series
He waved at the man above, the old dude, sitting perched in his window, scanning the maze for anything out of the ordinary. Carl's own rifle was slung over his shoulder. He didn't know how to use it really. Oh, Flash had been able to show him how to load it, the safety, all that stuff, but when it came down to taking this piece of metal and turning it into a lightning rod of death, he had no experience. For all he knew, the damn thing had been planted at the Walmart by the government and was a complete dud. He supposed he'd find out sooner rather than later.
Inside, he took a place at one of the windows on the back of the property. Through the window, he beheld cows, big brown ones, standing in a field, munching on grass as if there was nothing wrong in the world. Carl envied them. They had nothing to worry about. Behind the farmhouse, which was really more of a mansion in Carl's opinion, a long green field of tall grass rolled away to the west.
He tilted his head back and held the rifle up to his eye, wished he had one of those scopes like Ernie. Staring into the sun, it only took five minutes for him to feel like the entire world was moving around him, as if the grasses themselves were trying to sneak up on him. He blinked his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them, he found the field full of nothing once more, the grasses swaying, the cows munching, and his eyes swimming in his head. Watching the back of the farm was turning out to be more difficult than he expected. Of course, nothing ever came easy when it came to the government and their experiments.
****
On the other side of the mansion, Bubba sat outside on the side of the road, hidden in a stand of bushes. When he'd awoken, his nose sore from where Ernie had tried to push it to the side with his rifle barrel, he'd gone and found the old man, understood he'd fucked up. He promised it wouldn't happen again. Promises like that were easy to make when your head was pounding, and your mouth tasted like you'd been gargling on a mummy's thousand-year-old toe cheese.
Ernie had looked at him and smirked. "Just don't fuck it up, kid."
Then he'd told Bubba about his job for the day, saying, "Since you love spending so much time outdoors, I want you to post up along the driveway, find some bushes, lay low. Anyone comes along, gimme a call." They'd exchanged phone numbers then—even though service had been spotty—and Bubba had taken his ass out to the side of the road, began stuffing bits of tall grass into his clothes the way Ernie had told him, to help break up his shape for anyone who casually glanced in his direction.
Now he lay on the ground, itching like a motherfucker, concealed in a pile of bushes. He could see the road just fine, but anyone who looked his direction would have to look twice to see him, unless they caught the shine of his eye or the sun glinted off his rifle just right. The hardest thing about his guard post was that he couldn't smoke. Not only would he wind up setting fire to everything around him, but a puff of smoke was a dead giveaway. He held the cell phone close, and tedium found him, climbed on his back, made his aching head heavy.
He'd searched the bathrooms for Advil, but found nothing. The only thing he had to cure his hangover was a bottle of water, which he'd already worked halfway through. He picked up his phone, fired off a text message to the old man, not even knowing if the old man knew how to text. "How long do I have to stay out here?"
He set the phone down, not expecting an answer any time soon, so he was surprised when the thing vibrated. "Until I tell you to come back in."
Bubba was ok with that, knew he was getting off easy. Better goofing around in the bushes than ending up like Tim, holed up in a room with Jaiyama and Tarot. Those were two scary bitches, and if he could avoid getting on their bad sides by sitting out here all day and all night, he'd do it. Bubba wondered if Tim would still be around when he got back to the house.
He settled into his position, the warm summer sun somewhat diminished by the moisture trapping bushes and the shade of their leaves. "I wonder what they're gonna do to Tim," he said aloud, just to make the thought last longer, to soak up more of the time.
If it was up to him, he would have let the dude go. He'd already lost his best friend. What more did they want from the man? He obviously didn't want to be here.
At least they'd let him bury his buddy before they took him up to "the room." Uh-uh, Bubba wouldn't trade places with Tim for all the wine in the world.
****
"I know I fucked up," Tim said. "Don't you think I know that?"
Across from him, Jaiyama sat on the edge of her bed, her chrome-plated shotgun laying sideways across her lap. Off to her right, Tarot lounged in a chair with her legs draped over the arm, spinning her Glock 19 by the trigger guard with her index finger. To Tim, she looked like a cat all curled up in a sunny spot, only instead of soaking up the sunshine, she was soaking up Tim's discomfort.
Jaiyama nodded. "Yeah, you know it now, but you shoulda known it before you, your buddy, and those other two even considered leaving."
Tim knew what this was. This was a trial. Instead of a jury of his peers, he was being tried in front of two of the coldest individuals he'd ever had the displeasure of meeting, and he'd met a bunch, in the army and on the road. But these two were walking, talking glacial ice, cold as hell. He didn't even bother with Tarot. As far as he could tell, Tarot didn't see people when she looked at the world. She saw shapes, pieces on a chessboard to be moved about as she pleased.
"If I thought you woulda listened, I woulda told ya," Tim said. "Also, I didn't know we were prisoners in the first place."
"Bullshit," Tarot mumbled.
Jaiyama cocked an ear in her direction, willing to listen to Tarot elaborate.
Her eyes squinting with pain, Tarot said what she had to say, even if the words were sort of garbled due to her broken jaw. "If you didn't think you were prisoners here, you would have said something, seen if anyone else wanted to go along with you. But you snuck out like a couple of rats."
Jaiyama nodded her head, and Tim found himself trapped.
"Yeah, well, maybe you're right. Maybe we saw how you deal with people who don't do what you want, figured we might be better off leaving in the night."
Jaiyama nodded. "Makes sense."
Tim felt no relief at this response.
Jaiyama rose from the bed, the shotgun slung over her shoulder. "You fear us. That's good. But you have no loyalty. That's bad. If we're going to exist together, there has to be an understanding."
Tim's mouth went dry.
"So you… you've already showed us you're not loyal, and if you're not loyal, you're not one of us. But you know about us, know where we live, who we are, and so I really only see one option."
"Kill 'im," Tarot said, flat, emotionless.
"Kill 'im," Jaiyama echoed.
Tim sat still, thought of his name, rank, and serial number. If they wanted him to beg, they weren't going to fucking get it. He would not be less of a man for their amusement. If they wanted to kill him, by all means, they had the right, but he wasn't going to roll over and beg like some fucking dog.
"I see you getting your courage up," Jaiyama said. "I was worried maybe you were a little bitch, too scared to fight for your life."
Tim clenched his jaw, kept from spewing expletives at Jaiyama. He understood if he came at her like that, she would come right back at him, and right now, she had all the power.
"My lieutenants think I should kill you," Jaiyama said.
"Lieutenants?" Tim scoffed.
"Ernie, Tarot. You see, they're loyal. Even when we disagree, they at least tell me about it. They don't go running off in the night and bring down trouble on my head. They got something to say, they say it."
"Oh, is this a club now? You guys setting up bylaws?"
"Only one bylaw in this club," Jaiyama said. "Don't fuck us."
"Not a problem," Tim said.
"And maybe you didn't know about that little rule in the first place, which is the only reason you're still here. The only reason. So imma need to hear it from you, and imma need to hear it loud."
"What?"
Jaiyama smiled at him. Tarot stopped twirling her pistol, leaned forward in her chair.
"Tell me you're loyal, that you'll never fuck us again."
Tim hesitated, thought about Russ' last words, about how he didn't want Tim to try and go home, and his soul quivered with doubt. I always been good. I always tried to do what was right. But these people—they don't care about that. They don't give two fucks about it. But if he didn't say the words, they would kill him now. But fuck, part of being good was being a man of your word. There were too many moving pieces here, too many things going on.
The smile fell from Jaiyama's face, and he knew he was running out of time.
Her shotgun left her shoulder, and off to his left, Tarot put her feet on the floor, a greedy look in her eyes.
"Last chance," Jaiyama said.
Shit. "I'll never fuck you again."
Jaiyama smiled at him, and Tarot leaned back in her chair, her pistol hanging between her legs. "That's all you had to say," Jaiyama said. Then she added, "And if you fuck us again, you ain't gonna get a second chance. You got that?"
Tim nodded his head.
"Good. Now get on up outta here. Need you watching the fucking place because of the mess you put us in."
Tim stood, his legs shaky, as they hadn't been since he'd been overseas. As he put his hand on the doorknob, Jaiyama added, "And shave that damn beard off. One of them zombies gets ahold of that thing, and you ain't gonna like it." He nodded again.
Outside, he closed the door behind him, and then rubbed his blistered hands over his face, the smell of earth still on them, the copper scent of Russ' blood still faint on his palms.
****
Tarot couldn't help herself. She had taken pleasure in seeing the man with the beard brought low. If she was in charge, she wouldn't have even talked to him, would have left him dead and bleeding on the floor next to his buddy as a message to the others.
Jaiyama turned to her and asked, "What the fuck are you smiling at?"
"Nothing," Tarot said.
Jaiyama harrumphed, and Tarot got up to leave. She wanted to get the lay of the land. She had been so tired, so exhausted from dealing with the pain of her busted jaw that she'd collapsed the night before. Hadn't even locked the door behind her, which wasn't like her. Didn't matter where she was, she always locked the door, always kept her gun close. You never knew when the ghosts of the past were going to show up to haunt you. That was never more true than when the dead walked the earth.
"You think I shoulda killed him?" Jaiyama asked as she headed for the door.
"I know you shoulda," Tarot mumbled, the small movements causing her pain.
Jaiyama harrumphed once more, and Tarot turned to leave.
In one of the rooms, she found Ernie leaning out of a window.
Without even looking at her, he asked, "Didn't hear a gunshot, so I assume Tim's still up and walking."
"Uh-huh," Tarot muttered. In her own ears she sounded like a female Frankenstein's monster, incapable of uttering anything more than monosyllabic words.
Ernie didn't take his eye from the window, and Tarot figured their conversation was over. With a guy like Ernie, you didn't need a lot of words, just a few.
She walked through the mansion's top floor, testing doors and throwing them open to see what was inside. There was nothing too exciting, just a few beds, closets, bathrooms. These people might have money and land, but they didn't use it the way Tarot would have. If she had her way, one of these rooms would be a movie theater with a massive screen to watch whatever the fuck she wanted to… which nine times out of ten was some stupid Disney movie, a fact that would have surprised most people. But when you were who she was, and you grew up without a childhood to speak of, sometimes that's all you wanted, images of simpler times, of people who were obviously good and obviously bad.
Black and white, that's how she tried to see the world, and it all worked for the most part, until she tried to put herself in one of those movies. She was no princess, that's for sure. She wasn't some lovestruck hero either. And that left the villain, which maybe she was, but she didn't feel like it. She'd done good in her life, saved quite a few people. Put quite a few people in the ground as well.
With a sigh, she closed the door and moved downstairs, taking the steps slowly so as not to irritate her jaw. Life would be easier if it were Disney, but there were no happy endings in this world. No one in the Disney movies died and then got up and walked around.
Downstairs, she wandered among the ground floor, poking her head into various rooms. Here there was a sitting room, there a massive kitchen, almost industrial in nature, clean looking with sets of stainless-steel appliances scattered about. Kitchen looked so damn good, she almost wanted to take it for a test spin, but that's another thing she'd lost out on, all the lessons one acquires over their youth to prepare food. If you couldn't microwave it, Tarot couldn't make it. Not that she could eat anything right then anyway. She moved through the kitchen, pulled a glass from a plastic rack, and filled it with water. Her teeth were covered in funk. She hadn't had the guts to open her jaw and brush them. She tipped the glass up to her lips, sipped slow, let the water filter around her grimaced teeth. It trickled down her throat, hit like a cold nickel in the pit of her stomach.
She stood that way for half-an-hour, trying to get as much fluid in herself as possible. She didn't know how things were going to go down, but she had a bad feeling. As she became aware of that feeling, she thought about her ride, about one of her few treasures hidden in the saddlebag.
She walked outside, noting where people were stationed. No one was having fun today. The death of Russ had put everyone on edge. Maybe it was Tarot's fault for not saying anything when everyone had started relaxing, but she knew this was the way it was going to go. Jaiyama was trying to walk the line, to be both princess and villain. But you couldn't live that way. That shit scared people, made them feel like you were unpredictable. No, Jaiyama would figure it out, as Tarot had before her when she'd helmed the Cunning Stunts. You had to be consistent. One way or the other. If you waffled back and forth, showing kindness one day and wrath the next, it freaked people out. In the end, Tarot had settled on being the villain with her crew. Knew that kindness killed, and killers lived. Villains survived in this world. Everyone else got chewed up and spit out—literally these days.
She scanned the horizon as far as she could. The south side of the farm stood bounded by the sprawling corn maze. The grand house faced east, looking out onto the gravel road. A cobblestone courtyard connected the front porch to the gravel parking lot and the unpaved road beyond. To the north sat nothing but fields planted with low-growing crops, stretching off to the horizon. No one was coming from that direction. Anyone who tried to approach from the north would be picked off by Ernie, if he was as good as he said he was, and she had no reason to doubt him, even though he only had one eye now.
That left the back of the house, a large field containing a few sparse trees, a dozen cows, and blade after blade of neatly cropped grass, all fenced in to keep the wandering livestock safe and sound.
A lot of ground to guard in the daytime. At night, it became less so, as visibility dropped to nothing. Only an idiot would attack them in the daytime. It was nighttime when they would come, unless they were fucking morons, a possibility she didn't rule out since she had yet to meet anyone from Wyoming who was all that bright.
Confident she wasn't going to be massacred on the spot, she bent down and undid her saddlebag, pulling out a small, cardboard box, rectangular and purple, lined with shiny metal foil. She turned and headed inside, water sloshing around in her belly.
In the tasting room, she took note of all the empty wine bottles. A bevy of fruit flies floated around the space now, doing little laps in the air. She sat at a wooden table, made sure the surface was clean. She placed the box on the table, removed the lid, on which was drawn an illustration of a cute tabby cat holding a few cards in its mouth.
She pulled the tarot cards out and began to shuffle, closing her eyes and melding with the cards, feeding them what little reserves of energy she had. She shuffled and shuffled. When she felt like they were charged, she laid them on the table, spoke the words in her mind, knocked once on the cards, and then cut them in half. She placed the lower half of the deck over the top half, and then she dealt her hand.
For this drawing, she laid out a simple spread of three cards. Flipping the cards one by one, she laid them down flat, their images hidden to her. When she was ready, she thanked the cards in her head, tapped into the energies the world had gifted her, and reached out with her left hand to flip the first card.
The first card revealed the High Priestess, one of the major arcana. In this version, the cat wore a giant yellow Croc on its head as a helmet, reminiscent of a pope-style hat. It was a silly image, but Tarot didn't find it silly. The first card represented her past… the benefits of wisdom in her life. She soaked it in, dwelled on it, finally decided that though she had lost all those she cared about, she was still here because she had stayed true to herself. Her wisdom had led her to this point. She was still here, still kicking, broken but alive, which she couldn't say about her friends or most of the world at this point.
When she was ready to flip the next card, she held her hand over the second in the row. This card represented the present. She flipped it over and hissed inward through her gritted teeth. The Tower, the card Tarot most dreaded pulling. On this particular card, a cat climbed a massive cat house, but it leaned to the side, ready to fall over at a moment's notice. The look of surprise on the cat's face was to be expected. The tower is about trials and tribulations, a great challenge that needs to be overcome for growth. But, just knowing about the trial doesn't mean you're going to make it. She sat back, trying to apply the card's meaning to her life, to her situation, and finally she realized they were all fucked. All the things they were worried about, they were going to happen. The best she could do was be ready.
