A Different Alchemy (14 page)

If someone else appeared, even if they weren’t a robber, Jeffrey would kill that man too. He thought of Katherine driving his boy to the stadium. He thought of strangers telling her everything would be all right before dragging Galen out of the backseat and carrying him into the giant structure. At that moment, he would kill anyone he could get his hands on. He would kill them in front of their crying wives and children just as they had surely shrugged as Galen’s flesh melted into the stadium seats.

To calm himself, he left the body on the ground and paced the aisles of the bookstore. He took
The Count of Monte Cristo
,
Great Expectations
, and
Rose Madder
because he wanted stories of revenge and anger.

Next, he walked to the grocery store. As soon as he stepped inside, even without seeing them, he could hear snakes sliding across the floor and rats scurrying for cover. The cat had been playing games with the rodent because it had as much food as it could ever want. Birds were squawking from the ceiling beams. Insects, maybe locusts, were chirping from every hidden recess. The supermarket had developed its own ecosystem.

Jeffrey looked down to the end of the cereal aisle. A pack or a swarm or whatever they were called of various kinds of snakes was intertwined like loose threads. Various animals’ shit covered every patch of the formerly glossy floor. There was even a bald eagle in the one corner of the ice cream section, eyeing the wildlife two stories below. When it turned and looked at the newcomer, Jeffrey slowly backed out of the store.

The man, bloody and broken, probably dead, was still at front of the tank. Jeffrey knew from the way he had come out of the grocery store alone and by the way he ran toward the tank without a second thought, that he had probably been by himself for a long time. The man’s face looked like a grotesque impression of cheese dropped in boiling water. Dried red and black bits were caked around both nostrils and both eyes. One eye was swollen completely shut. The other was purple and half closed. One eyebrow looked like it was missing, only to be replaced with black pus and blood. Flies were already landing on the man.

“Just kill me,” the thief mumbled, his eyes unable to open. The man offered sounds of what would have been crying if he could breath normally. “Please, just kill me,” the man sobbed.

“I’m going to leave you here,” Jeffrey said. “If you can get up and walk away, fine. If you stay here and die, that’s fine too. But I want to tell you something first, and I want you to listen, to truly hear what I’m saying. Your decisions are the reason you are here in this condition. It’s not my fault. It’s not the fault of anyone else who left already to go south. Just you.”

The man didn’t move as Jeffrey climbed back into the tank. Probably, he would never move from that spot.

The tank rumbled away from the shopping center and began heading north again.

Chapter 10

The skeleton and his adversary shared one of the few moments of silence that sometimes occurred between the barking and cynical laughter. Jeffrey was sure it was all scripted by the show’s producer to add more tension, to make it seem like the two men were afraid of what they would do if either of them argued one second longer. Katherine didn’t believe him; she saw the two men yelling and knew if she ever argued that way it would be because something made her snap, and that kind of emotion, that kind of outrage, was too serious to fake.

“And how are all these Blocks going to magically get transported to Washington? Are we going to find every spare bus in the city and have a caravan of thousands of helpless people trailing behind us? What happens when the first bus breaks down and obstructs the path for the other thousand buses? Is everyone else supposed to wait for them?”

The editorial in that week’s paper had offered the same sentiment: it was unfair for the normal people in Philadelphia to be burdened with getting all of the Blocks to Washington. The only people who felt this way, Jeffrey believed, were the ones that didn’t have Block relatives or, if they once had, had already dropped them off at a Block shelter. If you didn’t have anyone to take care of, it was easy to forget the world was full of people less fortunate than you. There would always be people who forgot about the world around them and focused solely on their own survival. What bothered Jeffrey was that these people now had an organized voice.

Each time he heard these things, he wanted to punch a hole in the wall.

It didn’t help the city’s growing panic that a lot of the families sneaking away in the middle of the night were leaving behind additional Blocks—a Block or two who would be added to all the others that everyone would be responsible for. Each day that went by meant more Blocks taking up space at the Block group centers. The converted high school gymnasiums, homeless shelters, and rec centers were spread throughout the city.

And each day, another regular person died of old age or sickness. The Blocks had become the city’s silent majority. Projections charted that the city’s population, if nothing changed ten years from now, would consist of ninety percent Blocks and only ten percent normal people. No one wanted to be one of those remaining few, to be responsible, on average, for nine bodies that couldn’t do anything for themselves.

The skeleton and the man across from him were still talking: “I can’t believe how reckless you would be with everyone’s lives if this relocation was up to you.”

“I’d rather be reckless than scared and inconsiderate.”

“What you are is fat.”

That was when the skeleton’s opponent—big-boned, not fat—lunged over the table separating them and tried to get in as many good shots as time would allow, before the producers and camera crew pulled him off.

Jeffrey groaned before making the TV go dark. Katherine got up and read in silence while Jeffrey sat outside with their son.

“Quiet night,” he said once Galen was positioned on the porch to face the street. “In a couple of days, the birds will have the entire place to themselves.” He took a sip of beer before adding, “That would be something to see.”

He watched Galen’s breathing. It was his favorite thing in the world. Always relaxed, each breath steady. Jeffrey was surrounded by men and women who were worried about transitioning to a new city, to a new phase in their lives, but here was his son, unflappable, always at ease, always at peace with the world.

Down the street, a van was pulling into the Sparts’ driveway. Their house had been vacant for two years. The one-time semi-celebrities of the neighborhood, famous for killing a home-invader and then daring the police to charge them with something, were one of the first families to disappear after the population started to decline. It was rumored the cops didn’t like being called out the way they had, and had made it look like the Sparts relocated south, when in fact they were at the bottom of the Delaware River.

It was common, as people vanished to go south, for old grudges to be settled by simply making people disappear. In a world where your neighbors left without saying goodbye, it was easy to believe your best friend might be capable of the same thing. But instead of getting a postcard from them once they had arrived in Texas or Florida, their dead bodies were eventually found. People who disappeared and were assumed to have relocated were found in landfills and in the woods with bullets in their heads.

Nowhere was this more common than in Russia. The oldest living Russians still remembered the days of Stalin and knew right away what was happening. They had been alive when millions of Russians disappeared over the span of a decade. They also knew, as the adage warns us, that history always repeats itself.

It wasn’t until bodies—people who were thought to have relocated to Greece or Turkey—were found, rotting in Moscow landfills, that a new generation of Russians began to understand the way the world worked. The Great De-evolution signaled the perfect way to pay back grudges that had been thought forgotten. Wave after wave of Russians came to their ends through these disappearances. Even Stalin would have been proud of the extent of the vanishings and the way they were carried out.

When a third of the Russian president’s cabinet members disappeared one night—the third of the room that had disagreed with his latest budget proposal—they were said to have all decided, on the same night, to pack up and head toward the Caspian Sea. Most of their bodies, however, were found in a shallow ditch just outside the city limits a week later. When his first wife disappeared, everyone was told she must have gone to their luxury home in India. Her fingers turned up in a field outside Moscow. Her feet were found almost two hundred miles away in Kovrov. The rest of her was never found.

The next time Jeffrey went to take a sip of beer, the can was empty. Katherine seemed to be in his head because she appeared with a new can, the tab already pulled. She didn’t say anything before re-entering the house, empty can in hand.

When she was gone, he watched a family of four get out of the van in the Sparts’ driveway. All four people, two men and two women, looked to be around his age. The Sparts’ old home was now their home. Maybe they were the last vestiges from New York or Boston. Maybe even Canada. It didn’t matter if these four people had been bank robbers, cannibals, or neurosurgeons; everyone had a fresh start when they moved to a new city; they were just more people traveling south with everyone else. Maybe they would leave with everyone else for Washington, or maybe they would enjoy the empty city after it was vacated, the same way they had stayed in whichever previous city they had just come from. Maybe there was something cathartic about being in a city immediately after everyone else had left.

Each of the newcomers had a single suitcase and backpack that they carried into the house. As he watched them, Jeffrey went to take another sip of beer, but this one had somehow completely vanished into his mouth as well.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Galen. “Hold the fort down.”

He carried the empty can back inside. There were only bottles left. He searched the drawer for the bottle opener, but couldn’t find the place where Katherine kept it. Like he did in college, he put the edge of the bottle against the countertop and smacked the top so the cap broke off. Normally he would get in trouble for that. Today, he knew it didn’t matter because the house would be empty soon. The indentations would stay behind as one of the million small reminders that a family had been there, had laughed and cried, had lived and loved.

Right at that moment, a voice, faint in the distance, could be heard to say, “I got his arms. You grab his legs.” Jeffrey listened for the TV, but there was only silence. Katherine was still upstairs reading. Even so, it didn’t register with him exactly where the words could have come from. He even paused for a moment, just long enough to hold his step and listen for more sounds.

That was when he heard giggling. But it wasn’t coming from their TV. It was coming from outside. From his porch. He darted toward the screen door.

Galen was gone.

The two chairs were still there, exactly where they had been, but his son was gone. Something was wrong; Blocks didn’t just get up and walk away. Katherine was still inside. Something was wrong. His boy was gone.

God help me,
he thought.

A small movement caught the corner of his eye.

In the fading light of dusk, he saw three figures, trying their best to remain still, huddled by a telephone pole. The three of them held a long, slender object in their arms. They appeared to be young men, maybe just slightly older than Galen, but in the fading light he couldn’t be sure. They stared at him without moving until they were sure he saw them. As soon as Jeffrey started toward them, one of them yelled, “Shit!” and the three took off.

The thing they had been carrying—Galen—was dropped where they stood. His son fell three feet before hitting the ground. His poor boy couldn’t do so much as put his arms out to brace for the fall, and Jeffrey watched as his son’s face smacked the earth. In any other circumstance, Jeffrey would have raced to his boy’s side and made sure he wasn’t hurt. This time, though, he raced after the three kidnappers.

As he gave chase, he realized he was chasing three young men who should either be studying for finals or resting after a long day’s work. But, without a reason to go to college, these kids, who all looked like they might have been born around the same time the Blocks started appearing, resented that their lives were pointless in the changing world. Maybe the boys thought Blocks like Galen would get them sick. Or perhaps it was just juvenile fun to kidnap someone who couldn’t talk or move, the same way it had been fun for Jeffrey to spray-paint billboards or toilet paper people’s houses when he was their age.

Didn’t these stupid kids know they were the lucky ones? They could move and talk and live their lives. His son couldn’t do any of those things. If anyone had a right to resent the world, it was his son. And yet the boy was a quiet Buddha to the world’s chaos.

As he gave chase, he wondered what the boys had planned on doing with his son. There had been a story on the news three days earlier about a group of young men who had been found in an abandoned house torturing a Block. When the cops busted in, one of the young men had been holding a lighter to the Block’s ear just to watch it burn. The Block had sat there, unfazed, unflinching, and would have continued sitting there until he was dead or the kids lost interest in him. A year earlier, the Block Butcher had finally been caught and arrested in San Francisco. The Butcher was thought to have tortured and killed more than one hundred Blocks in California. Some reports said he had eaten parts of his victims to see if Block flesh tasted like regular people.

It was also possible they merely wanted to move Galen to a porch further down the street. How funny it would be for them to watch Jeffrey’s expression as he went outside, saw his son was missing, only to see him sitting on a porch two houses down the road. The kids would be howling with laughter. Or maybe they would think it hilarious to dress Galen in weird clothes before delivering him back to the very spot where they stole him.

Without knowing their intentions, Jeffrey assumed the worst.

Still running, he wanted to kill anyone who would harm his boy. “You motherfuckers,” Jeffrey yelled as he ran.

Two of the three young men seemed to appreciate the trouble they were in. The third one burst out laughing after hearing Jeffrey’s threat. When Jeffrey yelled at them a second time, the three kidnappers darted in different directions. One of them seemed defeated just by hearing the threats and began looking behind him to see how fast Jeffrey was closing in on him rather than looking for where he could escape to.

Jeffrey wasn’t sure if he yelled, “I’m going to kill you,” or if he merely thought it, but the boy cried out and started running in a different direction again. The young man, gasping for breath, was barely jogging anymore, looking absolutely petrified to have a fifty year-old man running down the street after him. As far as Jeffrey was concerned, the other two kids were gone. The one remaining thief was only ten feet ahead now.

The young man turned once again in the hope that Jeffrey was too tired to keep up the chase. Instead, Jeffrey was only five feet behind him now. The kid whimpered as he gave a hobbled jog forward. At the Matthews’ lawn, he was almost able to reach out and grab the kid’s shirt. When they got to the Garcias’ old lawn, the kidnapper started zigzagging, a desperate last ditch attempt to get away. But this only lasted for another ten seconds and then the boy was done. Right before Jeffrey was able to grab him, he turned to face his punishment head on.

Instead of tackling the kid to the ground, Jeffrey drove his foot into the kidnapper’s stomach as hard as he could, as if stomping forward, a simple push-kick taught years earlier in basic training. With the kidnapper barely moving and with Jeffrey having a running start, the force of his kick was incredible. The boy flew backward through the Caseys’ front yard before coming to a rest in the fetal position. As Jeffrey stood over the young man, he saw the kid gagging to get more oxygen. A goat could have appeared and offered noises that made more sense.

Jeffrey didn’t bother asking the kid why he had tried to steal Galen. He simply ran the ten feet to where the boy was huddled on the grass and soccer kicked him as hard as he could, square across his face. The young man was motionless and quiet. There was no giant pool of blood the way there always was in movies. There weren’t sirens approaching from the distance. There wasn’t even a scream from a concerned neighbor. In that moment, alone, the city might as well have already been abandoned.