Empire Of Salt (3 page)

Her brother Derrick happened to look up from the game of Death Fantasy III he was playing on his personal player deck just in time to see it. He sneered and asked, "What was it?"

"Another zoo animal," Natasha said, flipping her hand back toward where the creature lay dead and mutilated.

"Cool," Derrick said, his mind once more diving into the realm of hand-held video game land. "Tell me when you see another one. I want to see it too."

"When I puke on you, you'll know," she said.

Derrick grinned wickedly, then slew a roomful of tiny elf creatures with his Broadsword of Magnificent Doom.

As much as the idea of more road kill sickened her, Natasha returned her gaze to the window, where the desert rolled by. She and Derrick sat in the reverse facing seats in the back of the Rolling Avocado, their endearment for the 1970s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser with unearthly green paint that was their sole family vehicle.

The middle and top of the car were packed with all of their worldly possessions. A bad economy, the shutdown of a Chevrolet parts plant near Philadelphia, and a year of hospital bills that the insurance company wouldn't pay had conspired to send them into bankruptcy and a three room apartment more than a year ago. That her grandfather had passed away and left them his home and restaurant had been what Auntie Lin had called a godsend.

Then again, Natasha didn't believe in God.

God wouldn't have let the economy turn to shit. God wouldn't have let her grandfather die. More importantly, God wouldn't have let her mother die of breast cancer last year.

No. Natasha didn't believe in God and she'd continue to deny His existence until He gave her mother back and admitted that it had all been one big, tremendously cruel joke.

Until then, she had to leave all of her friends and travel, hat in hand, to a place she'd never heard of and meet people she'd never met so that she and her family could actually afford to eat and have a home. It was hard for her not to feel as if her life had been ripped off.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," Aunt Lin said from the middle seat. She sat wedged against the passenger side door, rope and bungee cords controlling an impending avalanche of suitcases and a giant bag of cheese balls that Derrick had begged her dad to buy at a truck stop in the middle of New Mexico. "It makes you look ugly and your mother never wanted you to be ugly."

At the mention of her mother, Natasha closed her eyes.

Aunt Lin wasn't really their aunt. She'd been her mother's Chinese nanny when she was little, had stayed after she got married, and become nanny to both Derrick and Natasha.

Derrick mimicked Auntie Lin's accent in a bad parody of a Charlie Chan movie. "Yes Auntie. Natasha
no rike ugry
."

Natasha flipped him off, then quickly hid her finger in her other hand. Thankfully her father hadn't seen, couldn't see, what she'd done. He hated "the bird" and would punish her if he'd seen her do it. She sighed, and let the weight of her woes bring her down.

Her father said that they were going to live in a resort, or what used to be a resort. Natasha supposed that something had happened for the place to lose its status. Whatever the case, Bombay Beach
was
in California. And it
was
a beach. And there
was
water. This was her mantra whenever thoughts about Willow Grove and her previously-perfect-then-turned-to-shit life intruded upon the reality of the Rolling Avocado and a life with no mother.

California
.

Beach.

Water.

The sun was setting as she stared out the window at the scenery rolling away behind them. Where Eastern Pennsylvania was filled with lush trees, grasses and bushes, the desert of Western Arizona was empty except for the occasional cactus. Some were multi-armed giants, some small and white-furred. She didn't know what any of them were called, but they all looked alien and deadly.

One of the things she liked to do in the woods by herself was track down sassafras trees. Usually only tiny saplings, no bigger around than her thumb, they stood only a few feet high. Their three-pronged leaves let off a citrus smell, reminiscent of lime when squeezed. Sometimes she'd pull them out of the ground so she could get to their roots, which had been used for tea or as a sweetener by the Native Americans long ago. Once she'd been brave enough to wash the root free of dirt, and then sucked on it for several hours. The taste had been pleasant, like gum but without the necessity of chewing. Even so, she'd probably looked ridiculous, like some wild frontier woman.

But like everything else in her life, those days were gone.

The old Natasha would have found the cacti intriguing. She would have wanted to know everything about them. She would have wanted to touch them, maybe even smell their bark. Now all she thought about was how ugly and disconcerting they were. The best she could do was squint her eyes and imagine them as people standing beside the road and waving at them. As if they were herding the Rolling Avocado and the people within it along to a certain destiny.

She wondered what her father was thinking about this whole change of life. She'd never really met her grandfather. He'd left her dad when he was very young, and never returned. There had always been a vacuum in her life when talking about grandparents. Everyone else seemed to have two sets of them, but Natasha only had one set - her mother's parents - who they'd left in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Grandpa Lazlo had represented an entire side of her family she knew nothing about. And now
he
was dead. They'd already had the funeral, the will had been processed through probate, and notification had gone out to Natasha's dad. According to the letter, her grandfather had been found washed up on the beach, missing a head and an arm. She shuddered. The letter her father had read said wildlife had probably been responsible for the missing body parts, even though he'd only been in the water for twenty-four hours. It didn't matter how many times Natasha thought about it, the idea of a missing head creeped her out.

Suddenly the car hit a pothole and bottomed out at seventy miles an hour. Her father swerved violently to the right, then managed to correct to the left.

Natasha held her breath and grabbed hold of the armrest on her seat as she watched the fish-tailing view through the rear window.

Then an immense
pop
filled the inside of the car.

The tire?

The air was suddenly filled with a fine orange blizzard. The top of Derrick's black hair was almost entirely covered, as was her own, in a dusting of orange. Her father coughed and opened all the windows in the car.

"Cheeseballs!" Auntie Lin hacked and shuddered. "Ack!"

Natasha couldn't help herself. She released the breath she'd been holding and burst out laughing. Maybe everything was going to work out fine after all.

T
hey arrived at a rest area north of Bombay Beach just after midnight. The four of them were far too tired to unpack or even get out of the car. They'd collapsed in place, postponing their new resort life on the edge of a sea until the next morning, when they could see it and appreciate it more in the light of day.

As the next day dawned, they awoke to the screams of a thousand birds.

Patrick Oliver jerked awake. The cacophony was amazing; he couldn't hear anything else, including Auntie Lin's snores. He peered through the windshield, but saw nothing but a Vaseline-smeared sunrise, which is what he normally saw without his glasses. He sat up and groaned. His back felt as if he'd strapped a board to it and rode down a mountain. Worse. He'd driven across country in a car with a 30 year old suspension. Frankly, he thanked his lucky stars he was alive.

He pawed around on the dashboard for his glasses and found them about the same time that Auntie Lin woke in the seat behind him.

"What? Are the children okay?" she asked, with her hands blocking the light of the dawn from her eyes as she licked her dry lips.

Patrick slid his glasses into place and dug around on the floor beneath his seat for his flask. His mouth felt like eight miles of desert. He'd rationed himself as they'd crossed the breadth of America. He was proud of himself for managing the craving for so long. From the heft of the flask, there was still a quarter left.

"What's that noise?" Aintie Lin asked.

"Birds, I think." He grabbed a water bottle from the empty passenger seat, took a long swig, then handed it to her. "Here. You might need this."

"What? I can't hear you over the birds. Jesus. Where did they come from?"

Patrick turned to gaze through the windshield and for the first time saw the conflagration. He couldn't identify a single bird. Their wings, beaks and talons created a single, frenetic, ravenous beast, undulating along the edge of the sea, as it at once dove and rose, fighting against itself in a violent collage of motion.

"What the hell?"

He went to open his door, but Auntie Lin grabbed the back of the seat.

"Are you sure it's safe?"

Patrick grinned. "Come on. They're just birds."

Despite her protests, he opened the door and climbed out, allowing his back to stretch for the first time since 7 PM yesterday when they'd stopped to clean the residue of giant cheese balls from everyone's hair. He brought the flask to his mouth and took a deep refreshing drink.

And then the stench hit him.

"Oh my God!"

The alcohol burned acrid as he covered his nose and mouth with both hands. His eyes watered.

"Oh my God," Auntie Lin echoed from inside the car. "Mr. Oliver, for God's sake, please close the door. You're killing us."

He slammed the door, but remained outside, his desire to drink overruling his desire to get out of the stench. He leaned against the car, wondering how he was going to survive the reek, and swallowed the vodka he'd been holding in his mouth. If he took shallow breaths, he could breathe.

He took another drink, keeping his eyes on the birds, lest they turn and think he was Tipi Hedron. There had to be thousands of seagulls fighting to get to the shoreline of what appeared to be a beer-colored inland sea. The noise was as deafening as the smell was rotten.

Then, by some miracle, the wind shifted to an offshore breeze and the air was clean once more. Patrick stood straight and watched the sun rising over the far edge of the sea, its golden rays illuminating the water and the edges of the birds' wings in a glistening nimbus of light. Everything had gone from hellish to heavenly in a moment.

Suddenly a man appeared, stick held high, screaming in barbaric rage as he ran, all elbows and knees, towards the birds. They ignored him until the last second, then rose heavily out of his way. He swung madly, screaming over the shrieks of the birds with an edge of madness in his voice. His fifth swing sent him twisting in the air, his legs entangling as they failed to keep up. He fell face first into what the birds had been feeding on and lay there for a moment.

The back door of the station wagon opened and Natasha and Derrick rolled out.

"I gotta pee," Derrick murmured, looking around, then running to where a trashcan stood overflowing beneath a "Do Not Litter" sign.

"Is this it?" Natasha's hair was tangled into a brown-tentacled nightmarish mess that sought to go in every direction at once. Her narrow face still held the imprint of the seat. "This can't be it."