SLABTOWN
Venus had come to Earth and brought its storms with it. Slabtown looked like a spilled toy box. A truck sat crashed into the front of a trailer. Wisps of smoke curled up from the smashed trailer. Bullet holes pocked its face. Red stains on the gravel in front of it. A lump that used to be a man.
Out in the desert past the trailer, a man wearing an apron, his bare butt hanging out behind it, dug a hole. Another dead man lying next to him.
Polly looked at all the craziness and she knew it had come from her dad. She knew she was breathing in air he’d breathed not long before. And she knew that something had gone wrong. That if her dad wasn’t dead now he would be soon.
I won’t let it happen. I won’t I won’t I won’t.
“Polly,” Charlotte said. She put a hand on Polly. Polly imagined breaking her fingers. She put that thought in her eyes when she looked at Charlotte. Charlotte pulled her hand away like Polly was boiling. Maybe she was.
“Polly, listen,” Charlotte said. “I know how to talk to these people. I’ll talk to that man out there. He’ll tell me what happened. Just sit here and let me talk to him.”
“Find out where he is,” Polly said. “Find out if he’s okay.”
The car started cooking in the desert heat the second Charlotte’s door shut. Polly let herself sweat. She breathed in and out three times the way her dad had taught her. She tried to keep her mind on the flow of the air, how she felt it the most in the bend behind her nose where the air headed south to her lungs. She felt it in her belly swelling against her shirt. She didn’t let any more thoughts come. The bear and she locked eyes until time went away.
Charlotte’s door swung open. The hot desert air felt cool against Polly’s skin as it rushed in.
“There’s a shack up in the hills,” Charlotte said. “They’ve got him. Some kind of rotten cops.”
“He’s alive?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said. But her face said something different, something like but probably not for long.