A Different Alchemy (3 page)

“You touch that dog,” Jeffrey screamed, “and I’ll kill you. You hear me? I’ll kill you.” He had to wipe his mouth when he was done yelling.

Before the Blocks appeared, someone might call the police and a pair of men in uniforms might show up and ask Jeffrey if everything was OK. These days, however, no men in blue would arrive. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.

Jeffrey returned to his seat. “I’m really sorry you had to hear that,” he said to Galen.

A moment later, Katherine came to the front door and asked what all the noise was about. Instead of explaining what she heard or what she might have thought she heard, he simply apologized and squeezed her hand.

She rubbed the back of his neck the way he loved. “It’s time to come back inside.”

“It got dark out when I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Funny how that happens,” she said before telling him she loved him.

He handed his cup of coffee to her so she could carry it while he turned the wheelchair around and brought their son back indoors.

With Galen in bed, they watched the news for a couple of minutes. When that quickly became too depressing, they flipped to a current events show, but that wasn’t much better than the real news.

There was a story of a man in Great Falls, Montana, who had been in a coma for twenty years because of a motorcycle accident. Month after month, year after year, the man was stashed away in a back ward of the hospital. Piles of motionless bodies collected around the comatose patient. As time went by, however, more and more Blocks were being transferred to group homes.

One day, as another group of abandoned Blocks were transported from the hospital to their permanent resting spot—a gutted high school—the comatose man was accidentally taken with them. The mistake was an easy one to make: his IV looked just like a Block’s nutrient tube. Used to inanimate bodies, none of the workers gave a second thought to this man being twice the age of the others. To make matters worse, the man’s family had already gone south to Boise, so he wasn’t missed by anyone when he disappeared from the hospital. For two years, the unconscious man received all of the care, food, and hydration he would ever need because the caretakers treated him as if he were just another Block.

But then, the man in the coma, as people in comas will occasionally do, woke up out of the blue. Video surveillance of the Block shelter showed one of the bodies sitting up from the cot where it had been lying perfectly still for two years.

There were, unfortunately, no caretakers around at the moment the comatose man woke up. If there had been, they could have explained the world to him. Instead, as he collected himself, he realized he was surrounded by thousands of motionless bodies. There’s no telling what he thought had happened to the world in the blank space between losing control of his motorcycle and opening his eyes in a gymnasium where track and field banners were still hanging from the rafters. All he knew was that the entire world was made up of bodies hooked up to feeding tubes. He quickly went insane.

First, he tore the IV from his arm. Then he stumbled to the closest fire alarm, set it off, and disappeared into a stairwell. No firefighters responded to the alarm; they had already vacated the city. No one caught up to the man in time to explain that aliens weren’t enslaving us for food, or whatever scenario his mind had conjured up. The man, completely unaware that the Great De-evolution was talking place, that he was surrounded by Blocks rather than by mindless bodies harvested for some nefarious purpose, got in the first car he found and drove it straight into a wall at ninety miles per hour. He flew through the windshield and was instantly killed.

Everyone who watched the story that night would undoubtedly have nightmares of falling asleep one day, the world seemingly normal, and then opening their eyes to find everyone around them completely motionless and quiet.

“Why bother turning the TV on at all if this is what they’re going to show us?” Jeffrey said, but Katherine didn’t say anything.

With the TV off, the room became dark.

“Remember how nervous we were when we first found out I was pregnant?” she said.

He took her hand in his. “Seems like a long time ago. Like a different life.”

She put her head against his shoulder. “I love you more every day.”

Later in the night, he went back to the front door to make sure the dog wasn’t barking or that the man wasn’t wandering the streets looking for it. The streetlights hummed and made everything on the ground look slightly yellow, slightly sick. The street was still. The dog was sleeping somewhere where it felt safe. The neighbor was snoring off the alcohol and would wake up with a hangover. Both would be back the next day, both getting along as best as they knew how. And Jeffrey would take his son back out on the porch the next evening and the evening after that, and they would sit together and listen to the birds for those special few minutes of peace.

**

The fire behind him, still engulfing the remains of everything that had once been inside the stadium, Jeffrey continued his walk back to the base. The nights on the porch with Galen seemed like they must have been a part of someone else’s life.

His mind was blank. Every once in a while he looked back at the smoke. How could there be a giant fire in the middle of the city? He was more confused by it—a ball of flames certainly didn’t belong there—than he was alarmed. But each time he turned and looked, it was still there.

Cars continued to pass him on their way toward the disaster. He didn’t notice them anymore, though. A silver Mercedes almost hit Jeffrey without the driver ever noticing. His mind had slowed until it was only able to process two things: getting back to the base, and wondering how a giant fire could be burning in the middle of the city.

By the time he got back to Fort Dix the conference room was empty. The lights were off. Instead of a retirement party for one person, a going away celebration for the entire base had been taking place. Empty beer cans were strewn around the expensive room. Cake and icing were smeared across the dry-erase board. No one cared anymore. The revelers left it that way knowing it was their final day on the job. Their superiors were all gone and nothing they did mattered. The conference room, with its giant hand-carved oak table and array of flat screen TVs, had once been the pride and joy of the men on base. Now, beer was spilled all over the floor, where ants gulped it up until they were drunk and drowning. Some of the men had used the cake’s icing to turn the luxurious conference room into the inside of a bathroom stall. A finger-painted message, in delicious blue creamy sugar, said, “General Bay liked dick”. Red icing was smeared to offer a Bible verse that Jeffrey wasn’t familiar with. White icing was smeared to read, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

He went past empty offices, one after another, remembering the different people who had sat at each desk throughout the years. When he flipped on the lights to his office he was greeted with the same giant mound of boxes that tormented him day after day, each one filled with fifty pounds of outdated forms and receipts.

He thought about taking the boxes to the nearest window so he could watch them explode on the concrete two stories below, paper bursting everywhere. The entire base would be covered in the uselessness of carbon copies, faxes, and printouts. Maybe a piece of paper would get carried away by the wind until it got stuck in the bumper of a truck heading south, or maybe a piece would stick to the foot of a man heading on board a vessel to Europe. The possibilities were endless. The realities, however, were as painful as what the world offered every day: most of it would eventually collect against the base fences. Some would become additional garbage gathered at the already polluted pond just off base.

Out the window, the smoke was taking over the entire sky.

A random thought made him think of Galen then, but when he thought of his son, he envisioned the boy sitting at home where he always was.

Without thinking, he picked up one of the boxes and launched it through the window. The lid came off in mid-flight. Half the paper was floating away in the wind before the box even hit the ground.

It was only then, when he turned to sit down again, that he saw Lieutenant Griggs sitting in his corner office, staring out the doorway to see what Jeffrey was doing. The man must have been sitting there in the quiet the entire time.

“Don’t worry about it,” Griggs said. “I think General Bay would have been more irritated about the writing on the conference room wall. If he was still here, that is.”

“What are you doing here?” Jeffrey asked, the only thing he could think to say.

Griggs didn’t reply, only turned back to face his desk and the family photos arranged there. Griggs, he knew, had a Block daughter two years older than Galen. The man took one of the framed pictures in his hands and, without turning around to face Jeffrey, held it up so it could be seen. In the picture, Griggs was wearing khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt on the beach. His wife and Block daughter were lying in hammocks on either side of him.

The black cloud was hovering over the entire city now. There was a good chance Griggs’s daughter was there. He didn’t ask about Jeffrey’s son and Jeffrey didn’t ask about the man’s child.

“Was your wife near the stadium?” Jeffrey said.

“No!” Griggs snapped around to face Jeffrey as if a threat had been issued. But then the man had a flicker of recognition, maybe remembered the day Jeffrey had brought Galen to work on what had ended up being the very last “Bring Your Child To Work” day. “No,” Griggs said again. Then, “But my brother was. He thought of Stacey as his own daughter…” Griggs put his face in his hands and shook.

What could Jeffrey say that would make anything better? It wasn’t worth trying to joke about how much it might cheer the man up if he threw useless boxes of useless paper out the window.

“What are you going to do?”

“Hang out here for a while,” Griggs said. “Collect myself.”

“I meant in two days, for the city’s relocation.”

“Oh, we’ve all been planning to go. I’ll still go.”

“You’d still go there with your brother? Like nothing happened?”

Griggs didn’t say anything else. Only stared blankly at the picture of his daughter.

From the window, Jeffrey could see some of the papers swirling around on the ground. Griggs put the picture of his family back on the desk before offering a nervous laugh, the type of hysterical laugh someone would give if they had a gun to their head with someone telling them to be happy or else have their face blown off.

Jeffrey shifted from one foot to the other. “Do you know where the keys are for Hangar 3?”

The other man shrugged.

“Take care of yourself, Griggs,” Jeffrey said, but the only response he received was another shrug.

Before leaving, he looked back one more time. Griggs was still there, still sitting at his desk without picking up the phone or doing anything at all, simply sitting there as if that would allow time to freeze and keep anything else from happening.

Jeffrey didn’t see anyone else on his walk to the hangar. Its main door, large enough to accommodate the planes, tanks, and whatever else might be inside, was closed, but the side entrance, miniature in comparison, was unlocked. With the lights off, only the outlines of the giant machines could be made out. With the click of a switch, however, a series of overhead lights revealed a selection of green, grey, and camouflage metal.

There were no planes in the hangar. Jeffrey had no idea if they were someplace else on base or if someone had already taken them for other purposes. He saw two helicopters, three tanks, and one Humvee. A single golf cart was parked in the corner. It too was painted camouflage as though that would help it be taken more seriously. With another flip of a switch, the hangar doors rumbled to life and the enclosure opened to the world.

Everything in the hangar, even the helicopters, was to be used in the migration south. Strangely, nothing made the citizens feel more comforted about their upcoming journey than armored machines of war.

But, Jeffrey thought, they could handle having one less tank to lead the charge south. The same group that had set fire to the stadium, letting part of its population burn with it, would have to do without. He noticed a tarp strewn on the ground where another vehicle had been parked until recently. There was no telling where the transport was now. It was possible that a military Jeep was currently making its way down Interstate 95 on the way to Florida, a family trying to get away from the madness before everyone else. It was also possible the vehicle was sitting at the bottom of Colliers Lake with a drowned Colonel still sitting inside, an empty bottle of whiskey in the seat next to him.

In all of his years in the military, Jeffrey had never actually been inside a tank. But then again, he had also never fought in a war, jumped out of a plane, really, done anything related to actually protecting the country. In front of one of the machines at last, he was surprised at how much bigger it was than he thought it would be. He envisioned an oversized Oldsmobile elevated on motorized tracks. What he saw was more like a fortress traveling on a conveyor belt. He tapped the metal body with his knuckles. There was barely a sound at all.

At first he thought he might jump up to the tracks, then to the hull. Instead, his knuckles ached as he pulled himself up the side of the tread, his knees scraping over the nuts and bolts as he righted himself. In basic training he had been able to climb a thirty-foot rope without using his legs. Now, he grunted as he hoisted himself up the side of the machine.