I WANTED TO GO ALONE. I KNEW firsthand how dangerous these newcomers were, not to mention the hazards of the altered roadways. But Trina persuasively argued that it would also be dangerous for her alone at home. Well, it wasn’t persuasive; she almost certainly would be safer hunkered down and unnoticed. But I could see the panic growing in her eyes at the thought of being alone permanently. Widowed.
She wasn’t going to leave my side until she’d adjusted to the new status quo. So I pretended to be convinced. Honestly it was a bit of a relief. It was absolutely selfish of me. She was my wife and her safety should be paramount, but I felt awkward without a partner watching my back. I was glad to have her along but felt guilty about it at the same time.
During the night the altered landscape had been terrifying, the unseen or hinted amplifying the strangeness that I could see. During the day the new world we lived in was horrifying–horrifying because in the stark light of the sun it was now so undeniably real.
We rolled down the hill quietly, the transmission in neutral. I could see Trina staring about her wide-eyed, taking in the new neighborhood that had supplanted her own overnight.
Turning right at the bottom of the hill I was forced to yank the wheel hard to avoid an unexpected obstacle: A towering pine had toppled, unable to bear the burden of abrupt merger with a statue, or idol, of Olympian proportion. Both lay sprawled now, fragments and splinters of wood and stone strewn across a broad plaza of closely spaced flagstones. Amidst the flagstones appeared the tops of fire hydrants, cable boxes, and mail boxes. The head of the statue had remained almost intact, rolling free of the wreckage. It was about the size of my patrol car, presenting a visage reminiscent of the faces decorating the base of the fountain outside the Martens’ house.
The public square, or whatever it was, had cut through the foundations of the neighborhood houses like a scythe. The houses, deprived of support, had pancaked, roof sections splaying out from the collapsed ruins. I had seen pictures of earthquakes that had caused less devastation.
Trina clutched at my arm as we drove by the first body. The upper torso of a young woman emerged from beneath the remnants of a fallen deck. Had she been coming home late from a night out? I cut off that line of inquiry as we saw the next body. And the next. That kind of speculation was unproductive. They’d died. How wasn’t immediately relevant.
I picked my way across the plaza, threading the cruiser through a maze of fallen houses, then taking another left, I picked up an untransformed street that descended through a burned over swath of land.
Not even the weird stone buildings whose advent had caused the conflagration had escaped unscathed. Their walls were scorched a uniform tarry hue and were misshapen from the heat. No one, newcomer or resident, could have escaped this firestorm alive.
God. How many thousands had died here? How many people had perished instantly, suddenly become a physical part of one of these strange buildings? Had the population of Portland been cut in half overnight? Or was the possibility of half remaining alive an optimistic assessment?
The torched zone terminated at a blackened wall of stone, probably twenty feet high. The street we were traversing passed under an archway in the wall, or at least one lane did, the other half of the road now one with the huge, shaped blocks that composed the wall.
The driver’s side of a Kia Soul jutted out a couple of feet, the driver forever stuck within the curve of the archway, like an ornamental feature.
Beyond the wall appeared small, well tended gardens sprouting from manicured lawns, and squat stone houses melded into Colonial Revivals and Cotswold Cottages. And amidst this confusion lay strewn the remnants of a pitched battle, a chaotic scrum that had been fought in the darkness between the baffled survivors.
I could only imagine the terrible struggle that had ensued as bewildered combatants met by flashlight and torchlight, exchanging blows with baseball bats or axes. Here lay a man on his back, a pitchfork protruding upwards from his chest like a shrimp fork from an appetizer. He still clutched a shotgun in one hand. The five corpses sprawled about him, unclad save for blood soaked linen kilts, told a grim tale.
After a few seconds Trina looked down at her hands folded in her lap, and stared fixedly at them, saying nothing until I’d passed through the battlefield.
Just past the last of the bodies I glimpsed movement. An old woman in a shapeless white tunic was sitting on a triangular, three-legged stool, fanning herself with a wide-brimmed, shallow hat. The stool rested against the wall of one of the low, simple stone buildings that I was beginning to suspect meant “peasants live here.”
In front of the house was a Prius. A shirtless man was gruesomely in the car, his head and shoulders emerging from the roof, his torso melded with the front seat. A cow was similarly fused, its head and front legs emerging from the hood and front bumper.
The old woman just sat there and fanned herself, as I imagine she’d done all morning since emerging from the front door and seeing her man’s grotesque demise. She did not look up as we neared.
I pulled to a stop. “What are you doing?” asked Trina.
What was I doing? Responding to a situation, a citizen in distress? These people, whoever they were, were the enemy. And I was no longer, according to Trina, a cop. Still...
“She’s an old lady,” I said, “looks near catatonic. I don’t think I’m in any danger. Maybe I can learn something.”
I got out and approached her. She didn’t notice until my shadow broke her concentration, or fixation. A sunburned, wrinkled face peered up at me from beneath the straw hat. It was a weather beaten face, but one that suggested it wasn’t quite as old as I’d first guessed. This was a woman worn down by hard labor and neglect, not age.
“Your husband?” I asked, nodding my chin towards the macabre display.
Her shoulders pulled in slightly and her face shrank back a fraction beneath the shade of the hat. However, other than this expression of fear, I received no reaction. I hadn’t expected her to understand, but–‘know your enemy.’ Anything I could glean might be useful.
I squatted on my haunches. “Is that your husband?” I pointed with my finger this time. Nothing. I pointed at myself. “I’m Nick. Nick. What is your name?”
This first contact shit sounded stupid to me, and I guess it did to her as well. She stood up without a word, turned her back, and walked back into her house.
“You were right, I was wrong, Trina,” I said, climbing back into the cruiser. “It was a pointless exercise.”
She rewarded me with a smile and a condescending pat on the knee.
We rolled on through Wonderland, passing out of the new belt of agricultural land and back into the disastrous melding of two alien urban environments. The frequency of corpses rendered them just another aspect of the scenery. The I-84 freeway made a gentle curve south here, just to our right. But now it appeared that the freeway was sharing space with a canal, the road surface submerged beneath thirty feet of sluggish brown water.
Trina and I got out of the cruiser and walked to the railing. Things–dead things–bobbed in the murky current, spinning in slow orbits about each other. They bumped gently, linking temporarily or drifting off on different tangents.
A barge, a heavy timbered affair with a single squat deck house at the stern, crept by low in the water. A single crewman stood on deck, looking up at me open mouthed, the long pole in his hand, temporarily forgotten, beginning to slip behind. He was shirtless, wearing only the peasant kilt, though I noticed this one was a pale green. I gave him a little wave as he floated by.
We drove on, hoping at least one of the freeway crossings remained intact. We entered a small pocket of normalcy, a half a block that appeared unaltered, though not untouched. A body lay splayed across the hood of a car, the back of his head stove in, the back of his Trailblazers jersey a stiffening mess of crimson.
A man emerged from the front door of a split-level ranch as we crept along the street. I recognized the expectant look of hope. He’d seen the patrol car. Someone to help him. Authority. Stability. I saw that look fade as he neared and took in the lack of uniforms.
I lowered the window. “Good afternoon, sir,” I said.
“Are you a cop?” he asked with a last flicker of hope.
“No, he is not,” said Trina, leaning across my lap.
“Are you OK? Did anyone else survive?” I asked.
He nodded. “My wife and daughters slept through the whole thing. I heard a commotion and got up to check.” He pointed at the body. “I saw LeRon fighting with a bald-headed dude in a robe and two guys in skirts. One of the dudes in skirts busted LeRon’s head with a hammer. I tried calling the cops, but you know.” He gestured with both arms, taking in the totality of the new circumstances.
“Yeah, I know. Look, gather in what supplies you can, but keep a low profile. Watch out for these, whatever they are, especially any wearing armor and carrying spears or other weapons.”
“Aliens, man. Fucking aliens.”
“OK, watch out for the aliens. Do you know 62nd, 63rd Avenue, around Davis Street?”
He nodded.
“Well, it’s pretty much burnt to the ground. Good lines of sight now, you can see anyone coming for a long way. If you can, go there tomorrow, about eight in the morning. Maybe we can find other survivors, start organizing.”
“Yeah, OK. Thanks.” He turned and shuffled back to his house, his shoulders stooped from disappointment.
* * *
“They’re not aliens, Nick,” Trina said as we drove away.
“What?” I was lost in half-baked plans of armed resistance and building a new society, a jumbled mess of conflicting concepts and nonsense.
“I don’t think we should call them aliens. I mean, they’re obviously human, we both see that. That’s not what I’m talking about. I think...” She stopped for a moment, allowing her thoughts to coalesce into words. “I think they belong here, or something like here, or some other here, just as much as we do.”
I didn’t precisely follow her, but I was getting used to a constant state of befuddlement and let it go.
“What do we call them, then?” And what did it matter anyway? Other than convenient nomenclature for our use, what was the point in assigning appropriate names? Was she worried about offending them? It seemed important to her, so I tried to mask any dismissiveness in my response. Keeping certain thoughts to myself, and not betraying them by pursed lips, raised brow, or other facial signs that women are so adept at reading, was a skill I’d long practiced. I won’t go so far as ‘mastered.’
“I don’t know. But not aliens. It’s like when I was in the dorm, I was assigned a roommate. Neither of us wanted the other to be there, we were just forced upon each other.”
“I’m not calling them roommates,” I said.
“I’m not suggesting that. I’m just trying to explain what I’m feeling about the situation. I mean, from our point of view they are interlopers. Maybe from their point of view, we are.”
“It’s a little early for me to begin feeling empathy,” I said. I steered around the fire gutted remnants of a church and something that reminded me of a warehouse (though what the elongated, colorful stone edifice might have stored I couldn’t guess.) One end of the ‘warehouse’ was thrust across the entire width of the street, forcing me to drive onto the sidewalk to bypass the obstacle.
“They probably don’t want to be sharing Portland with us, but where can they go now? They’re like refugees living in an abandoned building. Squatters.”
“We called them ‘adverse possessors’ in crim,” I said. “I never thought that was accurate. It was like the instructor was compensating for not making it through law school and kept trying to shoehorn inappropriate euphemisms onto half-remembered concepts.” I eased the cruiser off of the sidewalk and back onto pavement that was now checker-boarded with broad paving stones. The alternating stone slabs of slate gray and dusty rose glittered with specks of quartz.
“Neither of those are quite right, anyway,” Trina said. “We’re like competing claimants for the same land.”
“Well, those claimants are going to lose the competition,”
I don’t think my words carried conviction. Fair enough. I was far from convinced myself. And I don’t think it mattered at the time. I think we were both talking just to avoid thinking too closely about what we were viewing outside the car. The sight of bodies was becoming commonplace, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. Thinking about why or how all these people died only led to maddening whirls of speculation.
Better to just talk.
* * *
We found the 39th Avenue (or Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, as I was slowly accustoming myself to refer to it) freeway overpass still in one piece, apparently unaltered. We crossed, and turned westward again, driving down the remnants of Northeast Broadway, looking for likely shops to ransack while picking our way closer and closer to the shops at Lloyd Center.
Broadway proved at first as much of a hopeless amalgam as most of the rest of the city, the buildings no longer discrete, coherent units, the roadbed comprised of varying surfaces. After a few hundred yards I noticed a row of stone buildings flanking one side of a section of cobblestone street–the type of structures I was now beginning to think of as ‘Claimant buildings.’ These particular edifices stood two stories tall and were narrower than the peasant housing or the elaborate villas I’d mostly observed today.
A trio of men sat on a neatly fashioned stone bench. All three were kilted, but these weren’t bare-chested. They wore short tunics, and one bore a leather apron over the top of that.
I kept my speed constant, cruising slowly by. Their heads turned as we rolled past, faintly lifted eyebrows suggesting a certain dulled curiosity, but nothing more.
A fourth man emerged from the door of one of the Claimant buildings. He was adorned in an embroidered, split-skirted robe of turquoise hued silk. A small, three-lobed hat–reminding me of a matador’s headgear–perched on his head.
He displayed none of the others’ dull curiosity; his response was unhesitating. He roared out something to the three spectators. They leapt to their feet with alacrity, demonstrating the sort of instantaneous, ingrained obedience I associated with recent boot camp graduates. They sprinted after the cruiser, workman’s tools clutched in their fists: a heavy pair of shears, a hammer, and some implement I couldn’t make out.
I gunned it and left them behind.
“Did you see that?” Trina asked.
I assumed it was a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. “Yes. Those guys sure hopped to it. Whoever the Claimant in the hat was, he sure had some juice with the other three.”
“I think he was a priest, a Claimant priest. When I see a robe and a hat, I think priest.”
I could see by her grin that she was pleased I’d adopted her appellation for the newcomers.
“I am in awe of your analytical powers, professor,” I said. “Robe and hat.”
I pulled to a stop at what I can best describe as one-third of an auto-parts store. I’m not sure what the other two-thirds consisted of now. Maybe it was a bakery. The upper section was more rounded than I’d come to associate with Claimant buildings, and it appeared open at the top, like a chimney.
I managed to salvage a half-dozen car batteries. I figured a quiet power supply could be useful.
“Nick!” Trina called.
The urgency in her voice brought me sprinting. The last two batteries swung from my hands by their handles, threatening to dislocate both shoulders.
Incredibly, the three Claimants hadn’t given up. Trina had spotted them jogging down the street. Had they just assumed we’d continue along the same road? Or had they carried on running because they’d had no orders to the contrary? “Go,” they were told. And they went.
I didn’t know and I didn’t wait around to speculate. They didn’t worry me; I could just shoot them if I had to. But I certainly wasn’t going to let it come to that, especially with Trina along for the ride. So I cranked over the engine and pulled away from our frustrated pursuers.
* * *
Shopping for the apocalypse was not something I’d prepared for and the vast cattle pen now inhabiting the same space as the mall didn’t make it any easier.
I found a place to park underground near one of the entrances to Sears. By that I mean I backed up to the door and opened the trunk.
Neither of us were prepared for the smell that assailed us when I pried open the locked doors. It was a musty, wet, earthy smell–the scent, we soon discovered, of feces and frightened cows. Some lowed and stalked in bewildered fashion past the Binyons, Hot Topic, and Banana Republic. Others floundered helplessly across the ice-skating rink.
There was something odd about the cattle, other than the setting that is. I’m no country boy, but I’ve seen cows, and these seemed bigger than the grazing dairy cows I’d glimpsed through car windows.
Still, we carried on looting as efficiently as we could manage.
I caught a glimpse of another group of ‘shoppers’ in Sears. I waved, but upon sighting me they scrammed through the nearest exit.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Think, Nick. Even out of uniform you still scream ‘cop.’”
Smart woman, my wife. I guess the new paradigm hadn’t sunk in. These folks–in the midst of a massive five-finger-discount junket–saw a police officer. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they didn’t stop to think that law and order was on hiatus. They didn’t stop to consider that I was doing the same thing they were.
I began to wish I’d boosted a pickup truck; the cruiser’s cargo capacity was limited. I manhandled a small gasoline-powered generator into the trunk and added an assortment of tools.
Trina stockpiled blankets and warm clothing for the winter. We weren’t going to have the luxury of relying on central heating. We ransacked the outdoor department. We picked our way through wandering cows, giving the massive bulls a respectful distance, trolling the shops for any oddment that struck us as useful. It was a spree, a downright guilt-free lark. I found myself grinning foolishly, tried to hide it, and then gave up when I caught the same gleeful expression on Trina’s face.
After cramming the car full from floor mats to ceiling liner, we found we still had a bit of room on the front seat. And with the bungee cords I’d picked up, we could make even more space by strapping a few items to the roof. So we drove across the street to the grocery store, loading up on non-perishables and pharmaceuticals. Anti-biotics and the like.
The shelves, I noted, were already conspicuously sparse. A positive sign I hoped.
“Don’t forget condoms and birth-control pills,” Trina said.
“Huh?” I replied. I’m not stupid, I don’t believe, but at times I do open my mouth before taking time to ponder my words.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to receive a new birth-control injection anytime soon. I don’t really think we want to bring a baby into this situation. Do you?”
“Oh, right. Condoms and the pill, check.”
The sun was beginning its decent behind the West Hills when we commenced our drive home. I noticed evidence of looting at some of the other more-or-less intact storefronts that we passed. I was amused by the conflicted response the smashed plate-glass windows evoked in me. I was relieved by this additional sign of survivors, but the cop in me was irked at such lawless, uncivilized behavior. I mean, sure, people needed the supplies. But did they need to break the windows?
Is it possible to be both consistent and human?
Points of light glowed on Mt. Tabor, like candles on a giant birthday cake, growing brighter as dusk deepened and we wended eastward toward that ancient volcanic remnant. I wondered what had ignited these new fires.
Nearing home we stopped at an unscathed liquor store. By the orange light of the increasing conflagration we stuffed the remaining crannies of the cruiser’s interior with looted booze. The end of the world was nothing to face sober.