“There’s nothing on TV,” he said. “They just play reruns — old shows, soap operas, twenty-four hours of reruns. The radio stations are on, but they’re all broadcasting the same old swing dance music. Now the power’s out. And for some reason, they stopped the dam. I take it you’ve seen what’s happening down there in the streets. I’ve watched it all from up here.”
“I’ve been through town,” I said. “I’ve seen it. But I don’t know what I was looking at.”
Dad said, “Think what’s happening in big towns like Omaha and Des Moines. Just look at what’s left of our town. You know what’s next, don’t you? You know what they’re going to use those fires for.” He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my head to his chest. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he told me.
I was too tired to feel anything right then. I just looked past his shoulder to that fire. Within its white core, there was much movement — objects deep inside the furnace would suddenly incandesce, then rise, hover, and turn in pulpits of heat. These were the ashen husks of hogs, burned free of weight, light as carbon, floating round and glowing like paper lanterns. My mind kept trying to imagine what human bodies would look like in that convection, but I wouldn’t let it.
I said, “I have to find my students.”
Dad turned to me. “Is that what you want to do?” he asked. “You don’t know how much time you have. You know I’ll help you, but you may not have much time. I was talking to this man on the street. Sure, he was coughing, but he looked normal, and then, all of the sudden—”
“Dad,” I said, “tell me what’re you going to do.”
“I have to find Lorraine,” he said. “I have to know.”
I looked again to the river, where a mile-long ash shadow covered the banks. The open water was fouled by runners of oil that blacked the current and washed rainbows of animal waste upon the ice. Like pink buoys, bodies bobbed in the eddies. They’d bloated large enough to tear any clothes off, and they turned and rocked in a river that was slowly running away.
“Whatever we do,” I told my father, “we do it together.”
“There’s a snowmobile in the basement. I can get the key.”
“Everyone out there has a gun.”
“We’ll go tonight,” he said.
Before our eyes, we witnessed that little helicopter swing too near the hog fire. When its mist of poison floated down to the flames, that whole section of the sky exploded, and the chopper disappeared inside a cylinder of blue flame.
* * *
While we slept, the snow clouds rolled in, a slow-moving, snow-burdened front that worked through steady accumulation, so that nine or ten inches could fall in a day without your really noticing. Dad and I shared the bed, fully dressed under a mound of blankets. My sleep had grown accustomed to the syncopation of distant gunfire, but the snow slowly hushed this. Eventually, all you could hear was the moaning of ice loosened by the falling river, and the quiet progress of snow.
The room was black when we roused ourselves. In the dark, I couldn’t see my breath, but it was there. Without speaking, we gathered our gear. Through the windows, you could only see the muted glow of some fires burning unabated.
In the basement was a trailer that held the snowmobile. Once the tarp was removed, the thing looked pretty mean, with large, forward-facing air scoops and an anodized suspension. I held the flashlight as Dad connected the battery and primed the carburetors.
“Do you really know how to drive this thing?” I asked.
Dad answered, “Do you?”
“That wasn’t the question,” I said. “So — whose rig is this?”
Dad hit a red button and the engine fired up. “It’s ours,” he said.
This engine didn’t purr. The exhaust was high-pitched, full of raps and pings, and oily smoke hung in the air. You could tell it was high-performance. We waited for it to warm up. The basement was pretty much a cinder-block parking garage, enough for twenty cars maybe, with a cement ramp up to Main, which meant, once we backed it off the trailer and got it out on the street, we’d somehow have to make it through one of Sheriff Dan’s blockades.
I don’t know if it was the sound of the engine or what, but a woman suddenly stood up. Suddenly, there she was. It made me drop the flashlight. She must have been sleeping in one of the cars. “There you are,” she said to me. “I’ve been looking for you.” When I grabbed the light and shone it on her, she was walking toward me, wearing a sweatsuit with one of those quilted robes over it. I started to back up.
“Tony,” she said, “I’ve been waiting all this time. Where have you been?”
The woman was older, and she looked drunk or drugged or something. She wouldn’t stop walking toward me. I was circling away, but she kept coming closer, her arms out to me. When she coughed, red spittle came out.
“Get that thing going,” I told Dad.
I was shining the light right in her eyes, but she didn’t even see. She put a palsied hand on me, and I pushed her away. I mean I shoved her good.
“Come to me, Tony,” she said. “I’ve been right here, all this time.” She came at me with her arms open and those zombie eyes. “Don’t you love me?” she asked.
“Get away from me,” I told her and knocked her down. Dad had the snowmobile pretty much backed off of the trailer, but I yelled at him, “Get that damn thing going.”
He revved the engine and whipped the tail around, the steering skids scraping along the cement. I jumped on, and I wasn’t going to look at her again. She was Tony’s nightmare, not mine. I killed the flashlight, and we raced up the dark ramp by memory.
Headlight off, we rolled across the sidewalk, felt the track drop into the street. Dad turned left, but it was so dark there was no way of knowing for sure where we were headed. The square was completely black. The snow was thick and steady enough that light wouldn’t travel too far anyway. I dragged my foot — there were maybe four or five fresh inches on the ground. We were idling along about the speed of a trot, and we could’ve run into anything, anything at all. Though you couldn’t see them, people were out there. We heard a slam — a trunk or a tailgate, you couldn’t tell — and there was some kind of distant chatter. Certainly they could hear the brap-brap of our engine.
Soon, I started to hear a certain sound out there. It was transient, so I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. There was a hissing aspect to it. Also a mechanical whir. Though it was dulled in the thick air, its source was up ahead, and we didn’t dare turn on our headlight. I imagined a large robot ahead in the darkness, a thing with hydraulic arms and ram presses for feet. This sound would stop and start, hiss and whine, and when it sounded like it was right ahead, Dad stopped. The sound stopped, too.
We idled a moment; then Dad clacked the snowmobile into reverse, backing up a few feet. The sound was unmistakable now. It neared some, and paused. I whispered to Dad, “Hit the light.”
When he did, we saw, hovering in the air before us, two men with biofilter masks and rifles. They were suspended above the ground in the cherry picker, its long boom extended sideways across the square. I screamed and threw my flashlight, hitting one guy in the neck, which scared the crap out of them.
Dad gunned it. We tore one wide loop around the square, chasing the bouncing white cone of our headlight. Through this light wheeled bullet-ridden cars, half-looted stores; in front of the pet shop was a pile of blackened birdcages, all of which must have been thrown on a fire with live parrots, macaws, and lovebirds inside. There was a stack of men in various uniforms, piled like cordwood to be burned in the morning, and the last thing we saw before we shot the two-foot gap between the wall and a fire truck was an empty Chardonnay bottle, standing upright on the pump truck’s chrome fender.