The Triggermen - Chapter Two

An ongoing novella serialized here for your time-wasting enjoyment...


Chapter Two

The next thing Boone knows he’s sitting on the asphalt in his running shorts with two skinned knees and a long scrape that runs from elbow to wrist, staring down the long shallow green bowl of the common area to the flames and smoke rippling into the mid-morning air. He still can’t hear any sound at all, as if his ears are stuffed with cotton. What if I blew my eardrums out? is his first, stupid-selfish thought. Dear God, I’m supposed to be Pennsylvania’s answer to Waylon Jennings and I can’t hear music, what am I going to do?

Looking down, the first thing he sees that makes any sense is a child’s bicycle, lying crookedly on the pavement with the colored tassels tangled together. The tassels are familiar, the way they flap, and Boone realizes numbly that it is Mara Wilson’s bike. She was riding alongside him with her backpack on her back, saying something, when—

He looks up the road. Mara is crouching by the side of the road, her wire-thin eighth-grader’s body, dressed in khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top, bent over, carefully picking up the items that spilled out of her backpack, notebooks, pencils, sun block, her little palmtop computer, a Blackberry is what it’s called. Boone moves toward her, feeling like he’s floating along on a slowly melting block of ice.

“Hey,” he says, or tries to say. His voice is still inaudible to him. “Are you okay?”

She turns around and looks up, holding her palmtop in her hand. The right side of her face is scratched and covered with tiny bits of gravel from the road, but she doesn’t seem badly hurt. She blinks at him slowly, her large green eyes sharpening into focus. “Boone? What happened?”

He stares past her, unable to answer, until she turns around and looks in that direction too. Beyond the road in the distance, where his condo is, a roaring tornado of fire has risen up, cooking the air and warping the sky with heat. In the midst of the flames, Boone thinks he sees vast pieces of wreckage, burning twisted steel.

“Plane crash,” he says, and for the first time he’s able to hear his own voice, just a little. It doesn’t sound like him at all. It sounds like an answering machine version of himself: Boone isn’t here right now, please leave a message at the sound of the tone. “It came down right over there, I think. Just behind those houses.”

Looking at the fire, Mara’s face sags into a washed-out windsock of dismay. Her mouth opens and closes but she doesn’t appear to be speaking, or even making the effort. Boone thinks he see the colors of the fire painted faintly on her skin, or it might be the way the blaze has already imprinted itself on his retinas, or just his own simple shock. Does it matter? He feels as if his mind has been taken apart and reassembled by clumsy hands that left out a few crucial pieces, but even so, it takes only a moment longer for the realization of what happened to penetrate his stupor.

“Andy.” It’s the first word he fully hears himself say that sounds like him. “Andy’s back in the house.”

“I better get home,” Mara says, but as she steps forward to get her bike, a pickup truck comes tearing down the road in front of them, blasting its horn. An American flag flaps from its oversized aerial. Boone reaches out and grabs her by the shoulder, yanking her back at the last moment. The truck shoots past, less than five feet from where they stand. It runs over Mara’s bike, flattening it and spitting it out the back in a jangle of chains and broken spokes, without so much as slowing down.

Distantly, sirens begin to rise in the background. Boone doesn’t think they sound like typical fire engine sirens. They sound more like civil air alerts, drawn-out, slow-rising glissandos that repeat endlessly long after everybody who could’ve heard them is dead.

“Boone?” Tears shine in her eyes now. “What’s going on?”

He shakes his head. “Is your mom home?”

“I told you, she’s still at work. She works first shift today.”

“You should stay with me. You’ll have to run.”

Mara nods and they cut across the long stretch of common area, over the low rolling hills leading back toward the other side of the loop. As they get closer to the wall of fire, Boone begins to see pieces of the jet’s wreckage scattered in the grass around them, the pieces getting larger as they get closer, many of them still burning, like some infernal sculpture garden. One large metal shard is implanted directly in a rock. There are letters painted on the side of it in blistered white paint, but Boone can’t tell what they are. In truth he doesn’t look all that thoroughly.

Up ahead the trees are on fire, big oaks and maples blazing orange and red like autumn come early. The grass up there is brown, going on black. He can see the thin creek that runs through the common area behind his house. Part of the burning fuselage lies across it, and that portion of the creek is actually boiling, steam seething off its surface like mist. The bridge that runs across it, where he and Andy sometimes stood and threw pebbles into the water—that’s on fire too.

The sirens are getting louder now.

From somewhere up ahead a bald man comes running up to them, moving with a scrambling, panicked crookedness. He’s wearing a red T-shirt and as he gets closer Boone sees that the shirt was originally white. Both the man’s arms are missing, sheared off at the shoulder. Pale bits of flesh shiver from the tatters of the shirt, gleaming in the odd combination of light.

“What happened?” the man asks in a flat monotone, his eyes fixed on Boone. “I was watering my flowers. I saw a light. Did you see it? What was it?”

“Oh my God,” Mara says, clutching her mouth. “Oh my God, Boone—”

Boone catches the armless man just as he falls, the surprising weight of him almost bringing them both to their knees. The sirens he hears now are fire sirens, and when he turns around he sees a row of long red trucks coming down Oxford Court with their lights flashing. He can’t tell if they’re moving slowly or if that’s just his perception but the whole thing has a stagy, parade-like quality that makes the moment feel even less real, certainly less real than the bald man bleeding to death in his arms.

“Help!” Boone shouts, waving in the direction of the trucks. “Help, over here! Someone’s hurt! Help us!” Even as he says this, he’s looking at the fire in front of him. It’s spread across the first row of condos toward the units where he and Andy live, but he can’t tell exactly where the flames stop. Certainly Andy knows enough to get out as the fire got closer, but Boone wonders if Andy’s circuits would be fried by the immediacy of the thing, no previous experience to give it scale, no comparison available. He sees his brother standing in his bedroom, frozen in front of the window, as the fire creeps up the stairs pinning him against the far wall until the roof gives way.

The fire trucks don’t stop. They are still moving, circling around the far side of the condos that have already caught fire. No, Boone thinks, that’s not enough to take care of what’s happening here, not nearly enough—

Beneath him, the man with no arms lies on the grass, still trying to tell him about how he was watering his garden when he saw a light, and what happened? His chin goes up and down, the motion growing more mechanical until it looks like his teeth are chattering. Throughout it all, his eyes are fixed on Boone even as the awful, lacquered glassiness creeps up to envelope them like bad taxidermy.

“Just hold on,” Boone said, “hold on, they’re coming to help you, okay?” He sees now he’s going to have to leave the man, not in a minute, not in a little while but right now, because now he can see the fire from the wreck shifting northward, toward their condo. If Andy isn’t out by now then Andy is going to cook in there. Boone knows that with the clarity of a man in a corner he’s never been in before. You can’t talk to people about something like that but in the end it’s what makes the difference. The difference between what? You almost have to be standing at death’s door to look backward and see the real dimensions of it.

Across the gap between condos the first group of firemen, three or four men in long black coats and helmets, are charging toward him. Seeing them, Boone puts his hands underneath the armless man’s back and lifts him up. He wants the armless man to see that help is on the way, that these men are going to do their best to save his life, because the moment he perceives the armless man gets this, Boone fully intends to leave him here. Whatever his appreciation of the armless man’s current scenario—or Mara Wilson’s scenario for that matter—he is willing and able to walk away from both of them at this moment in order to ascertain the safety of his brother.

“Here they come,” he tells the armless man. “You’re going to be all right. See that? You’re going to be okay.”

The man gapes up at him, in all likelihood already gone. The last things in his face that hold color are his eyes and even they seem to dim, the sucked-out depths paling in increments to match the flesh surrounding them. His fish-gray lips move up and down one last time. They look as white as paper and the whiteness makes them look flat and the flatness makes them look dead.

Dropping him, Boone cuts across the last of the common area toward the blazing horror that has overtaken a full quarter of his world, the quadrant that consists of his life with Andy. He is fifty yards in front of the blaze, and from his new perspective he can see, thank God, that his condo was not yet burning. Theirs is an end unit, the last in a row of five. The townhouse on the far end is much closer to the jet’s wreckage. The broken tailpiece juts alongside it. It looks like those last units might be on fire, the flames spreading this way, rising as they come. But they haven’t reached here yet.

The roaring heat is intense, enough to dry his eyes and parch his lips. Running for the back porch where he was sitting earlier that morning with his guitar, Boone feels a hand taking hold of his shoulder. For some reason he’s sure it’s Mara.

“It’s okay!” he shouts, not looking around. “I’ll be right back.”

“You can’t go in there,” a man’s voice says.

Boone turns. One of the firemen grips him, a tall man in a yellow helmet with the face-shield reflecting Boone’s own face back at him. “My brother’s in there. This is my house!”

The fireman shakes his head and moves Boone away. “We’ll take care of it.”

Tearing free, Boone opens the back door and runs inside. Except for a low rumbling noise, and the increased heat, his house feels oddly peaceful—untouched by the chaos outside. His guitar is still leaning against the couch, the morning paper spread out next to his coffee cup on the kitchen table.

“Andy!” he shouts, running upstairs. “Andy, come on!” At the top of the steps he sees the other bedroom door closed, and Boone grabs the knob and swings it open. “Andy—”

The bedroom is empty.