The Apocalypse Reader Part 3

Tos.h.i.+kazu did not turn, just shook his head, holding up one hand to beg for silence.

"Okay, okay. No talking. I get your drift. I can appreciate that. Meanwhile, we're walking around in circles, my slacks are, well, I couldn't even give them away at this point. I mean, they're toast."

Burtson had hired Tos.h.i.+kazu from an ad in the back pages of a monthly magazine for harpooning enthusiasts. Burtson was not interested in harpoons or the people who built and serviced them, but he liked the idea that he could be a collector of things. He liked the thought that he could be master of some great weapon-that he could lean toward a tablemate at dinner and explain how sailors hundreds of years ago managed to pierce the tough armor of a whale's hide without batteries or sonar or rocket fuel. Tos.h.i.+kazu's ad took up a quarter of the page-a crudely designed block of text accompanied by a low-resolution photo of a man hanging upside down from a palm tree, aiming a blowgun at an off-camera target. The text read, "Taking care of loved ones can be a difficult and painful process. Kitano Tos.h.i.+kazu has trained in academies in Europe IV and South Paraguay for over seventeen years. He will treat your loved ones with grace and respect in their final moments, ensuring that they leave this world in peace and with dignity." Burtson did not want his son to feel pain when the time came to take care of him. Worse, though, was the thought of how the boy would be treated afterward if Burtson left the job to the special ops team at KraftMark. They were brutal and immoral, especially Douglas. Rand had once shown Burtson a snapshot of his son's corpse. The kid had packed a clutch of naked, hairlined friends into one of the branded delivery trucks and crashed the thing into a transmission tower. It made the evening news statewide, which was as good as a death sentence. Rand and Burtson were standing side by side in the corporate restroom at KraftMark headquarters in Delphine. Rand held up a blunt, smudgy Polaroid in the blank walls.p.a.ce at which Burtson was staring absently. "They gave me this instead of Julian," he said. The boy's naked body was covered in cigarette burns. A pair of panty hose yanked over his head made his face distorted and fat, as if he'd been stung by bees. There were a couple of finis.h.i.+ng nails buried in his chest, right through the nipples. Burtson didn't want that for his son. It wasn't necessary.

They trudged for hours, nothing visible ahead or behind them but a ma.s.sive, shapeless wall of treetop-ish gray. Tos.h.i.+kazu surged forward deliberately, silently-through the thick water, waltzing through the spidered vines. Alan was out here, somewhere, broadcasting via shortwave radio the ingredients to the Whatever!?!Round Whatever!?!Round, a new snack cake developed for KraftMark by Rand and his team for the fall "f.u.c.k You, School!" lunch series. It had already outsold Molt.com's Wearables Serious Action Fruit Fudge Wearables Serious Action Fruit Fudge in three of the test markets. The leaked ingredient list could sink KraftMark, though-everyone was nervous. One of the PR advisers, someone high up-he didn't know half the PR staff-had picked up the signal after getting a tip from the foreign bureau. So far, they'd contained the spread of the broadcast, but it was only a matter of time before it spread. in three of the test markets. The leaked ingredient list could sink KraftMark, though-everyone was nervous. One of the PR advisers, someone high up-he didn't know half the PR staff-had picked up the signal after getting a tip from the foreign bureau. So far, they'd contained the spread of the broadcast, but it was only a matter of time before it spread.

Something fell out of a tree. Something hard wrapped in something soft. It collided sloppily with a brittle tin roof from the burned-out settlement on the bank, voiding the night of birdsong with its clamor. Burtson crouched reflexively, breathlessly, hugging the rifle to his chest as he hunched in the muck. Tos.h.i.+kazu went on cutting through the water like nothing had happened. This was pretty much the way Tos.h.i.+kazu operated. One morning, Burtson had awoken to the sight of a translucent orange scorpion perched on Tos.h.i.+kazu's face. "Hey man," Burtson had whispered, lightly gripping Tos.h.i.+kazu's shoulder, "Hey man, I don't mean to alarm you? But there's something on your face." Tos.h.i.+kazu opened his eyes, trained them on the insect, and quickly stuffed it into his mouth, chewing fast. All the while, his features were as calm and composed as a white wooden chair. When he'd finished chewing he rolled over and his face went slack almost immediately, weighty with sleep.

Scorpion on his face face.

The swamp deepened without fanfare. The water rushed up to his chest, roiling up into the trough of his armpits, suddenly and outrageously cold. He smallened.

"What's this? How much deeper will this go?"

Tos.h.i.+kazu did not respond.

"So that's it? Once we're in the thick of it, you ignore me? You certainly had a lot to say back at base camp. You certainly had a lot to say during that impromptu session of baccarat. Remember the fleecing you gave me? Remember the noogie? I do. It's still right here, pulsing at the back of my head. Just like you were giving it to me still."

Tos.h.i.+kazu turned around abruptly. "Simmer down."

"What? What was that? Could you repeat yourself? I could hardly understand what you were saying-you know why? Maybe because you were actually using language."

Tos.h.i.+kazu launched a stare, something hard and remote, so that Burtson wished he hadn't said anything. "You want to know why I don't talk to you out here? You're an embarra.s.sment."

"No disrespect? I know a certain ball team, a well known team of young black men, a team of men that I own, all of whom would disagree with you."

Tos.h.i.+kazu paused by a felled, half-submerged tree and climbed silently onto the warped trunk. "Look there."

Up ahead they saw a tiny square of light flickering in the dark humidity.

"That's it? That's the stronghold?"

"No. That's a trap."

"How can you tell?"

Tos.h.i.+kazu hefted a small rocket launcher to his shoulder, aimed, and fired a purplish, whiffled sphere, which made a bright howling noise as it tore through the black shrubs. The house from which the light emanated lit up for a moment from the incandescent spray of the rocket-it was a boxy, pitched-beam hut, nailed in with tin sheets and old traffic signs. Then it exploded in a wild, thudding ring of gas and wood chips.

Burtson fell back without realizing and got a mouthful of swamp. The inside of his skull went green and bright.

He floated in place on his back, his jacket snagged on a broken branch. Tos.h.i.+kazu crouched at a distance, poking carefully at the rubble with a twig. Burtson struggled briefly to uncouple himself from the branch but he couldn't reach far enough behind him to unhook his collar.

"Please don't do that again," he said when Tos.h.i.+kazu finally waded back to release him. "Please don't blow anything up. That's not necessary."

"There were bodies in the rubble."

"Come again?"

"Neither of them were your son. Let's keep going."

Burtson crawled up the outcropping and poked at the charred hunks of wood with a long branch. "Hey could you-I mean, I'm just wondering you said there were bodies? In that rubble? The rubble that you, essentially, well, caused?"

Tos.h.i.+kazu was off already, his arms lifted above his chest as he sank deeper into the swamp. Burtson tugged at the cord-his desk was wedged between two half-submerged root b.a.l.l.s. He quietly conjured a plume of regret for having overpacked.

It was dark, so dark that even the still things seemed to heave and quake, their outlines no longer registering-the border between the objects and the indefinable world beyond hopelessly blurred and blackened. The night always made him think of Alan, of the terror the moon brought. Marion insisted Alan sleep in their bed as a baby instead of in a crib, so that when he grew too big to fit, he was incapable of sleeping on his own. In order to wean Alan from the master bedroom, Burtson stayed awake night after night, escorting the boy through the nameless hours as they advanced and ebbed with monolithic fury. He read the boy to sleep, literally bludgeoning Alan with language until the words took him out of commission. He burned through all of the books on the boy's shelf, and when he'd read them again, and through a third time, he began to read from his own collection, books about power and influence, how to broker a deal, books on military strategy, books on the construction of factories, of networked enterprise systems, of team leaders.h.i.+p and supply chain management, of ancient battles.h.i.+ps and the gray'd, stoic men at their helm. He read until his voice went flat and wisped, until the thought of words was so unbearable he couldn't read any more-like there was a man standing behind him, stuffing his mouth with dry paper towels each time he flexed his jaw. He'd gag and spit; unable, suddenly, to concentrate on anything else. By the time dawn flickered, he felt nearly drowned. He longed for the moment when the light through the window finally overpowered the light from the boy's nightstand, but when it came, he couldn't help feeling that something was being taken from him as well. Those hours he shared with Alan were his-those interminable vigils during which he could truly believe that he was keeping the boy from something.

Now the boy was reading on his own-material he was never meant to read. Now, in this part of life, Alan was doing all the talking. What had happened? How had the boy taken Burtson down like this? He couldn't remember when Alan lost his terror of night. It must have been slow, gradual, imperceptible as evolution itself. But suddenly the boy was out there, acting on his own recognizance. Burtson had expected rebellion, sure. But this betrayal-he could very well have handed the company over to Alan at some point. All the kid had to do was hang in there. Now he was blowing the secret to the world's most successful branded snack cake?

Tos.h.i.+kazu set up a tent on the bank of the swamp, next to a hideous decaying trunk. The tent was low to the ground, so you had to get on all fours to enter. It was barely big enough for the two of them.

"This is how they do it these days?" Burtson said, running his finger along the tent fabric, which was gauzy and light, right up against his face.

"Keeps in the heat. Keeps a low profile."

"Last time I camped, the tents were canvas."

Tos.h.i.+kazu turned over.

"You have anyone?"

Tos.h.i.+kazu opened one opalescent eye. "Once."

"Really? A wife?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about it." Burtson turned, propped himself up on an elbow. His head made a zipping sound against the tent fabric.

"It's not something you want to hear."

"Sure I do."

"No."

"Come on-we're out here-might as well burn off the night."

"You asked me, and you are only American," Tos.h.i.+kazu said, breathing lightly, "So I will tell you what happened. It's an interesting story. My wife and I moved to America shortly after we married. We didn't know much about the country. We just flew to America. It was something we both felt we needed. We didn't have a plan-we just rented a car at the airport and started driving. We drove until it started to snow, and when it snowed so hard we couldn't see, we turned off the highway into the parking lot of a family-style restaurant. The restaurant was in a shopping mall, which was surrounded by deep, man-made moats. It was difficult to navigate through the parking lot of this mall because of all of the lakes and moats, the man-made waterways, what have you. The whole parking lot was blanketed in snow. We drove very slowly, hoping to navigate by feel. I thought about our old house, how I had rigged up all of the lights inside to turn on automatically whenever we were away, to give the impression that we were still home. I thought about those lights, coming on at dusk in the empty house. It occurred to me then, and never before, who was I creating this display for? Who were we trying to fool? I thought too hard about this, because I drove us into one of the man-made lakes. There was a horrible grating noise as the car plowed through the ice ringing the lake's perimeter. The car floated out into the middle of the lake, sinking slowly as it did. I managed to get out of the car through the driver's-side window. I climbed on top of the car. It was so quiet out, I could hear only the snow falling on the parking lot. It was loud, like the cheer of a thousand fans at a soccer match. But there was no other sound. The city was choked off."

"Your wife-"

"She was caught inside. I was on top."

"But couldn't you-I mean could you not help her?" Burtson conjured the words as a scold, but they emerged more plealike.

Tos.h.i.+kazu blinked twice. It was the first time Burtson had seen him do this. "I don't know. I felt like only one of us was going to make it. I might have let her die there."

"That's nonsense. You wouldn't be able to-to do that. No one could let someone die like that."

"Now that you know what I am capable of, I would like to get some sleep." Tos.h.i.+kazu drew a section of sleeping bag up over his head and turned over, facing away from Burtson.

THE NEXT DAY they had to climb a sheer cliff, which took longer than it might have if Burtson had not taken along his desk, which was heavy, even though it was only imitation mahogany. The rolltop kept opening up, jettisoning a cloud of yellow legal paper, which tumbled wildly, scatteringly down the face of the rock. Every time this happened, they had to secure the desk to the cliff face using spikes and rope, and Burtson had to climb down and retrieve each piece of paper.

In the afternoon, Tos.h.i.+kazu grew tired of waiting and picked up a healthy pace. He set up camp along the ridge, sauteing mushrooms while attempting to zero in on Alan's transmissions using a squat red crank radio. Burtson threw a leg over the edge for balance and asked Tos.h.i.+kazu, "A little help?"

His face was purpled and splotched, spattered with dirt and mucus. His hands were trembling so that he could barely grasp the nylon cord. Tos.h.i.+kazu yanked the desk up over the ridge while Burtson collapsed next to the fire. His eyes stung with hot sweat. He could barely open them-he had to struggle, like at the end of a dream when suddenly things go dark, and it takes all of one's strength to move inches.

"Just set it up over there," he said, motioning lamely to a dirty clear spot by a stand of trees.

Tos.h.i.+kazu put the desk down and returned to the fire. "You made me burn the mushrooms," he said, staring evenly into the smoldering pan.

"Good," Burtson said. "I don't go for mushrooms. Humans weren't meant to eat dirt."

"I'm afraid that's your only choice tonight."

Burtson palmed the dry soil before him. He bunched it up, cupping the mound in his hand, as if it were a breast.

"I still don't understand why you would let her die like that."

"I don't know that I let her. It's just that I didn't let her live."

"Are you going to kill my son?"

"Isn't that what we're here for?"

Burtson turned over. At the horizon, the sky was a raging, red cloudma.s.s, like the throat of an old desert lizard. But up above, he could see stars punching through the navy impossibility of outer s.p.a.ce. "I want to offer him a chance. Just one."

"Your staff will kill him if we don't."

"I know, I know. I'm just thinking that I could s.h.i.+p him off somewhere. Put a sombrero on him, a false mustache, send him down to Argentina. Isn't that where all the n.a.z.is went after the war?"

"They'll find him. There is no Argentina."

Tos.h.i.+kazu scrolled through the stations on the shortwave. There was a popping noise, and then a sort of phased, intermittent tone, and then a voice. At first it seemed to be running backward, generating a childlike nonsense language. But Tos.h.i.+kazu homed in on the voice, setting the dial so that it was crystal clear. It was Alan, listing with a patient and even tone the ingredients of the Whatever!?!Round Whatever!?!Round.

"Dextrose-okay, listen carefully to this one. I'm going to try to p.r.o.nounce it and then I'm going to spell it out, because I don't really know how to p.r.o.nounce 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 Tos.h.i.+kazu 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 a.s.suredness 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 s.p.a.cecraft, adrift in deep s.p.a.ce, 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, s.h.i.+fting 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," Tos.h.i.+kazu 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."

Tos.h.i.+kazu 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 n.u.t.s.a.c.k and scrub out his genes with a wire brush. They'll staple his hands to his b.u.t.tocks and throw him out of a helicopter into the main square of some remote village. You want that for your son?"

"n.o.body wants that."

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

Burtson heaved himself up, sc.r.a.ping 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 Tos.h.i.+kazu at a lame, distant pace.

As the night overtook the sky behind them, pressing at their backs like a suffocating tarp, Tos.h.i.+kazu 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." Tos.h.i.+kazu 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."

"n.o.body on this mountain is anything more than a brilliantly designed sack. The only distinguis.h.i.+ng feature is what others have crammed inside us over time."

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

Tos.h.i.+kazu 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned motherf.u.c.king self." Tos.h.i.+kazu 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 Tos.h.i.+kazu 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 c.r.a.p," he said. "Holy c.r.a.p." He wished Tos.h.i.+kazu 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, crus.h.i.+ng sense of impossibility. You didn't want to share it, in the end.

Burtson dropped the rifle and sat at his desk, where Tos.h.i.+kazu 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. "h.e.l.lo? 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.

Sh.e.l.ley Jackson.

TRAVIS BROUGHT IN a dog's leg that he said fell out of the sky. One end was ragged and chewed-looking, its b.l.o.o.d.y 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.