Nguyen throws a piece of chalk at him and we’re all totally shocked. “I’m not talking about God! Who cares about that idiot! I’m talking about the devil. You don’t have to let him out. Scramble for some false promise of salvation; climb over your own neighbors for crumbs. I won’t leave my family to live in some hole! I’m going to die with dignity!”
The bell rings.
We all kind of sit there. What the hell? Is he having a nervous breakdown? At least he picked a good day for it. Then I figure it out—clear as the open gates of heaven: Mr. Nguyen has a ticket.
Jules and I eat jerky in my shelter after school. I’m fantasizing about stealing Mr. Nguyen’s ticket and saving Cathy from our idiot parents. I’ll show up at their barracks, baby bunny in hand, and for the first time since the five days they’ve been gone, Cathy will stop crying and smile. Then I’ll glare at my mom and dad until the guilt drops them dead. They’ll resurrect again after Aporia, turning them into decent people instead of assholes. We’ll live a few years down there, until I figure out the environmental cure for ejecta that will make Earth’s surface habitable. Then everybody will elect me king and they’ll all say how awesome it is to be gay.
We’ll wear as much goddamned pink as we want.
It’s the first happy fantasy I’ve had in a long time, and I wish I could keep it going. But the shelter’s cold, and Jules is smacking her lips. We’ve got the crank-CB tuned to the scabs. They were worked up about a missing rig a little while ago. Somebody broke through a checkpoint with it during the night.
Then the call we’ve been waiting for comes in: The steel cage at the top of a catalytic reformer went smash.
“Wanna check it out?” Jules asks.
She’s been kissing me and I’ve been letting her. Once, we tried to go all the way. The experience was miserable, which she tells me is normal.
“Okay. Let’s go chase an ambulance.” I start climbing the wooden ladder out. I built this shelter with my dad. We dug for more than a week, then realized that under any seismic stress, the whole thing would collapse. Son, my dad had said, looking down the twenty-foot hole. Buried alive’s an unaccountable way to go.
When I was twelve, my dad found my Freenet porn. Nothing crazy—just guys on guys. He called me a perversion. It made me feel like I was covered in herpes or something, and I’m starting to think it’s why they left me behind. And you know, with all these dead-puppy-skinned-meat-people fantasies I’ve been having, maybe he was onto something. Then again, maybe calling somebody a perversion makes them act like one. Or maybe everybody’s having these thoughts, because the apocalypse sucks.
The truth is, my parents are the real perverts. They’re love perverts. You’re supposed to care more about your children than about yourself, and they messed it up. The whole fucking world of adults messed it up.
Jules and I get on our bikes and ride through Sacket Street. The grocery is dark. So’s the pharmacy. It’s blue-dick cold. We’re over the tracks, racing just ahead of the supply train headed for Omaha. It’s a thrill. The kind that makes you feel like Superman.
“Arm or leg?” Jules asks as we race, out of breath and too cold to cry.
“Arm?”
“Okay. Arm, your turn. Leg, I get to be the doctor,” Jules says.
“Game on.”
We drop our bikes and head for the crowd. The grass is long in spots, dead from spills in others. I want to take off my shoes and feel the cold, frozen earth. Squeeze it between my toes and tell it to remember me.
We push through. Catalytic reformers look like space needles wrapped in steel scaffolding. They’re the size of Manhattan buildings. You’ve seen them, probably. They turn low octane raw material into high octane fuel. But unless you live in a refinery town, you probably had no idea what you were looking at. You just blinked, then checked your distance to Chicago.
About twenty eight-by-two foot beams have collapsed. As Jules and I approach, some rent-a-cops retract a jaws of life. They pull a guy out from the wreckage and amputate his leg, thigh down. Then they give it to him. He’s holding his amputated leg, high on morphine. Jules and I clench hands. I wonder if this turns me on, touching her. Or if it’s the suffering that has my erection going.
Thirty minutes later, the generators start cranking. Dirty smoke spouts all over again. Jules and I book after the ambulance.
There’s nobody in admission or reception at Pigment Hospital, just this janitor mopping floors. He picks at this stuck-on bit of grime with his fingernail.
I’m Jules’ bitch today, so I take the nurse coat, and she doctors up. We head to the ER, where they always take the scabs.
Some doctor is just closing the curtain on our lucky refinery scab. She’s one of the last in this skeleton crew. I wonder why she comes at all. But then again, why not?
Jules walks with purpose. I’ve got my clipboard and Nguyen’s Bic pen. I’m thinking about Cathy, who was born here. She smelled like milk and I loved her.
I love her still.
“How are you this morning?” Jules asks once the doctor is long gone.
The scab kind of blinks. He’s pale from blood loss and won’t let go of his leg. Does he think we’re going to steal it?
“Not so good?” she asks.
I’m completely serious when I tell you that Jules would have made a great doctor. She’s not squeamish.
She peeks inside his bandage. He bites his lower lip to keep from crying, but that doesn’t help; he cries anyway. He’s one of the rave guys. I can tell because he’s got glitter on his cheeks.
“I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry,” Jules says with this big smile.
The guy calms down. “Do I know you?”
“We’re gonna take great care of you, mister. That’s what we do in here in Pigment,” she says with this made-up hick accent and I grin because it’s funny, this whole thing. It really is.
“Can it be saved?” he asks. He’s talking about his stump, which he’s holding like a baby.
“We’ll try real hard,” she says. Then she turns to me. She’s smiling that angry smile from this morning. I’m a little scared of her, and a little turned on. What’s wrong with me?
“You’ll need to change his bandages every few hours,” she says.
I scribble Bandages x2hrs because I’m a terrible liar, so it’s important to make this as real as possible. When I play the doctor I just stare while Jules does the talking.
“And you’ll need morphine every six hours. Three em-gees per.”
I jot that down, too.
“Dwight here’s from Kansas,” she says, nodding at me. “Where you from, sweetness?”
The guy’s sweating from the pain—morphine comedown. “Jersey,” he says. “But really no place. Bopped around the rigs in Saudi a while… You sure I don’t know you?”
“I’m sure,” she says. “Any family? Because there’s some experimental treatment for your predicament, but it’s a hella lotta dinero.”
The guy looks at her funny, shakes his head. “No family. I got six gold bricks, another coming tomorrow.”
I’m waiting for the punch line, because Jules usually makes this game fun. We even help a little, make the guys feel better. Listen to them talk about their ex-wives and good times. You’ll be saved, we reassure them. We’ll all be saved by the giant nukes in the sky!
“Aw,” she says. “Then I guess you’ll just have to pray the fuckin’ thing gets all spontaneous regeneration, you fucking cripple.”