This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (12 page)

Colin Murphy sat at the control
board of the Boardman Power Plant, his feet up on the console and his arms
behind his head. That he felt no sense of impending doom was a mystery to him.
The radio's reports had become even more dire, and the men and women that had
fled the power plant had yet to return. He should have been panicking, but he
had his job to focus on.

Murph watched the monitors,
moving from one mundane checklist to the next. The power plant usually had twenty
to thirty employees working there at any given time. Most of the members of the
staff were redundant. Power was serious business; there always needed to be a
replacement if someone became ill... and there also needed to be a replacement
for that replacement. But now it was just himself and the Chief.

"Get your goddamn shit
heels off that console, Murph," the Chief yelled as he burst abruptly
through the door to the control room.

Murph pulled his boots off the
console so fast that he ripped something in his guts, the muscles knotting in
instantaneous pain. He groaned as the Chief slapped him on the shoulder.
"How are things looking out there?"

Murph checked the instruments on
the console. The lights were right and the dials were normalized. "It's
all green, Chief." They stood in silence, watching the monitors flit from
one scene to the next. Murph had no idea what to do next. He wasn't much of a
conversationalist. You might even call him awkward. The thing was, the Chief
wasn't much better. He was comfortable shouting orders, but until this
afternoon in the cafeteria, Murph had never even thought of him as human. Sure,
he was shaped like a man, talked like a man, and ate like a man, but in all
other respects, he came off as something entirely emotionless and almost
robotic. To see him soften and actually agree to let power plant employees walk
off the job was completely unexpected.

"Hell of a thing, huh,
Murph?"

"What?" Murph was
caught off guard by the Chief's sudden words, and then he covered it up by
saying what he usually did in these situations. "Uh... yeah.
Totally." Nothing got a man out of an awkward situation like saying the
phrase, "Yeah. Totally."

The Chief continued rambling,
and Murph knew that he was safe for a little while. "Lots of people out
there counting on us. You know that?"

Murph did his best to focus on
the Chief's words. He seemed distracted, frazzled, the way Murph was whenever
he got up enough guts to talk to a woman who wasn't three sheets to the wind.

"You know, I got family in
Portland."

Murph swallowed and said,
"Yeah?"

"Yep. I got a boatload of
cousins that left the rez to find a better life there."

Murph's palms began to sweat as
his conversational skills kicked in. "What's a rez?"

The Chief laughed hard and
slapped him on the shoulder. "The reservation." Murph's face was
blank. "Where the Native Americans live?"

"You mean Indians?"

The Chief's laugh was booming in
the confined space of the control room. "Yeah, you got it." They
lapsed into another awkward silence.

The monitors flitted by,
never-ending parades of still photos with no one in them, the loading dock, the
floor, the conveyor belt, the gate outside, the boiler, the cafeteria. Nothing.
No movement. Just pictures of a world that had become still. Murph wanted to
see the workers there, moving about, laughing and jawing back and forth the way
they did, but there was nothing, just cold concrete, unused furniture, and
empty space.

"What about you? You got
anybody out there?" The Chief asked.

Murph had nobody, but he didn't
feel comfortable sharing the fact with the Chief. "I got someone in The
Dalles," he lied. He didn't know why. He didn't even know himself. The
Chief silently nodded, his brown-skinned face bobbing up and down in the
florescent glow of the control booth.

"Do you think they'll come
back?" Murph asked.

"It's been hours. I'm sure
if they were going to come back, they would have done so by now. I'm sure we'll
all be just fine." The Chief slapped him on the shoulder one more time and
then turned to leave saying, "Keep up the good work, Murph."

Murph just stared straight ahead
at the console and the monitors above it. When the door closed behind the
Chief, he relaxed, the tension draining out of his body so that it filled the
chair he was sitting in. He leaned back in the chair and put his heels back up
on the console.
What was happening out there?

His mind wandered, conjuring
absurd what-if situations. He wished he actually had a girl in The Dalles.
Hell, he wished he had a girl anywhere. He imagined himself tossing his work
badge on the cafeteria tables and rushing out with the other men and women to
save his true love. She would be huddled in a house somewhere, waiting for him
to appear and save the day. Then he would kick down the door, and they would
embrace. Perhaps sweeping romantic music would be playing in the background.

Murph punched up the boiler feed
and stared at it as he played scenes of heroic sacrifice in his mind. The
conveyor belt marched on in silence, dropping load after load of coal into the
boiler where it was turned into electricity. Murph didn't care about the
process. He didn't need to. He just needed to watch the lights on the console
and make sure all the needles on the numerous gauges stayed out of the red.

On the monitor, the light from
the boiler shifted as if it were alive. The monitor was black and white, and
the light brightened and darkened, fading in and out almost as if there were a
pattern. Murph was on the edge of understanding the pattern, understanding the
secret of the power plant, when a body tumbled over the edge of the conveyor
belt and into the boiler.

Murph's first reaction was to
check the gauges. Chunks of coal were one thing, but an entire human body was
something entirely different. There was no reaction on the gauges, and for a
second, Murph second guessed himself. Maybe he had imagined he had seen a body.
Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.

He unlocked the monitor feed and
watched as it cycled through each of the cameras. Cafeteria... nothing. Loading
dock... the Chief smoking a cigarette. The floor, machinery shrouded in shadows
chugging away. The conveyor belt... just a thousand feet of industrial belts
pulling raw coal into the boiler. The gate outside... oh shit. The gate
outside.

After the second indignity of having
to take their clothes off, Clara and Joan had made their way inside the arena.
They had eaten food on Styrofoam trays and milled about in the parade of
refugees. They had slept on the arena floor, on makeshift cots that had been
set up for that purpose. There were more people than there were cots, and Joan
and Clara had been one of the first to arrive at the Coliseum.

For a while, the flood of
refugees was fairly steady. Big green trucks would pull up to the fences after
a path was cleared for them and drop off survivors. Helicopters constantly
buzzed overhead, dropping off supplies and refugees. Soldiers stood on the
scaffolding, gunning down the dead, but in Clara's mind, something seemed off.

With the amount of dead on hand,
there should be a steady stream of gunfire, but their numbers had only swelled
throughout the day. Clara sat in the fading evening light trying to figure out
what they were doing. All of her inquiries had been rebuffed by the soldiers
that were in the courtyard. They weren't avoiding sharing information with her;
rather, they seemed too afraid to talk about their own situation, as if saying
it would make it all seem too real.

Clara clomped around the front
of the Coliseum, doing laps in her walking boot on an ankle that still hurt
mildly. In a thinly disguised attempt at hitting the soldiers up for
information, she had spent the better part of the afternoon bumming cigarettes
from random soldiers she sae taking a smoke break. They were more than happy to
give her a cigarette, the information not so much. Her throat was raw from
smoking when Joan appeared at her side just as the sun was going down.

"Why don't you come inside
and get something to eat?"

Clara didn't say anything. She
just kept surveying the fences, the worried look on the soldiers' faces, and
the growing throng of the dead. "Hey, you ok?" Joan asked.

Clara turned to Joan and said,
"No. I'm not ok. We're not safe here."

Joan laughed, dismissing Clara's
worries. "What are you talking about? Look at all these soldiers. If we're
not safe here, then where are we safe?" Clara looked around the courtyard,
taking in the somber faces and the worried looks.

"Nowhere probably,"
she replied.

Joan put her arm around Clara's
shoulders, and turned her around. "Come on. Stop worrying. You'll feel
much better after you eat."

Behind them a new group of
survivors was being forced to strip. Clara didn't want to see the large ginger
naked anyway, so she let Joan usher her inside. The Coliseum reeked of stale
glory and the spilled beer that had sunk into the spiderweb cracks that laced
the utilitarian concrete floor. The floor was lacquered to a shine, but the
smell was still there, clawing its way up her nostrils. It was a better smell
than outside. Damn that hot weather. The stench of the dead was starting to
become overpowering. A couple of hours ago, a soldier had begun handing out
camouflage bandanas for the men on the fences to put over their faces. She
wished that she had bugged the soldier for one, but he seemed in a hurry, and
she wasn't quite sure of her place in the refugee camp. Everyone seemed nice,
but she felt like a child in a classroom, the soldiers the teachers. She was
sure her autonomy was just an illusion, and that it could be taken away at any
moment.

They walked around the
concourse, Joan nattering on and on, as if they were at some sort of ridiculous
sleepover where the entire city had been invited, alive or dead. "I think
we have it good here," she said. "I've seen their set-up and
everything seems to be running nice and smooth. The triage center is largely
empty, but they're letting me help out."

"That's great," Clara
said noncommittally, imagining Joan as the teacher's pet of the classroom. They
stood in line, and Clara suffered through Joan's mindless chit-chat. They had
been through a lot together, and though Clara didn't necessarily like Joan, she
was the only person she knew in the entire city. Clara had kept largely to
herself. After high school, that had been the way of things. The friends she
had made in high school drifted away, people she had thought would be in her
life forever just seemed to sort of vanish into thin air. So-and-so had a
child. So-and-so went off to college. So-and-so moved to Europe.

Her own family had moved around
the country, dispersing after she graduated as if to say, "Well, we did
that. Another one fit for society. Now we can retire to Florida." Her
parents had only existed in post cards and Facebook posts for the last five
years. Then her mom died, and it was if her father had died as well. The post
cards came less and less, and they only occasionally talked on the phone. How
long had it been? Six months since she had talked to him? She hated herself for
that.

Her life had largely been a
solitary one, until Courtney came into her life. Rough around the edges, snarly
as hell, but sweeter than sweet underneath the tattoos and attitude. No one had
ever treated her like he had. She was his entire world, and he was hers. They
had spent years existing in each other's presence, and then he was gone.

"Look at that. I'm
starving. What is that? Chicken?" Joan was rambling on about the food while
Clara was lost in her thoughts.

"Could you shut up about
the food?" she snapped. Joan closed her mouth. They stood in silence as
soldiers ladled scoops of food onto white Styrofoam trays with different
compartments pressed into them. The silence was large, so large it threatened
to crush Clara down onto the concrete floor and press the life out of her.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."

"No, I'm sorry. I'm
treating this like some sort of vacation, but the truth is, I still don't feel
like I'm able to believe that this is all actually happening."

"I was thinking of
Courtney. I was thinking of how the entire last decade of my life was spent
being with him, eating with him, sleeping with him. We did everything together,
and it was always alright. No matter what happened at college, no matter how
the loans kept piling up, I always knew he would be there, and now he's not.
The time when I need him most, and he's gone."

Joan had no words for what Clara
was feeling. Her own existence had been one of petty self-involvement. The
moment she could move out from underneath her parents' Rockwellian existence,
she had jumped at the chance. They walked through the concourse, words dying on
their lips.

Rudy sat in a run-down bathroom stall
of the Memorial Coliseum. Shame still burned through his body. Rudy had never
willingly taken his clothes off in front of anyone, and then he had been forced
to do it right there in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever met... he
thought he was going to die from embarrassment.

Right there in the sunshine, he
had pulled his shirt off, exposing his pale skin. If he had to give a name to
the shade of his skin, it would be "milkworm," a special combination
of skim milk and maggot white, dotted with freckles that made him look like the
first drips of a Jackson Pollock painting.

The shirt was bad enough, but
the rest had been even worse. "C'mon. Pants too, Chubs," one of the
soldiers had said. He looked at the soldier, pleading in his eyes.
"Anything but that," his eyes said. The soldier's look was hard and
disinterested. He was too busy ogling Chloe to stare at the fat pale man who
looked like he was on the verge of tears.

Rudy had undone his belt,
digging underneath the folds of his gut to unbuckle it. Then he had wheezed as
he leaned over to undo his shoes, his breathing disrupted by the pressure of
his gut smashed between his chest and his thighs. His head was dizzy from
bending over, and with relief he finally kicked off his shoes. His socks were
next, and he bounced around on one leg, trying to pull the socks off of his
feet. They were slightly moist from the situation. It seemed that his feet were
always in a constant state of perspiration whenever stress was involved. He
managed to pull his right sock off, his girth jiggling as he bounced to
maintain his balance, but he fell to the ground while trying to pull off the
second sock.

Then it was time, time to do the
deed. With his pants unzipped, and his belt hanging open like floppy dog ears,
he hesitated. A soldier to his right yelled, "C'mon, fat boy. Let's see
that truffle shuffle." The soldiers laughed at him, and his skin went from
milkworm to strawberry milk in no time at all.

"You guys are real
assholes, you know that?" Amanda said.

The soldier that had said the
comment looked slightly embarrassed by Amanda's comment, but it was nothing to
the embarrassment that Rudy felt as he placed his hands on the top of his pants
in preparation to do the deed.

"Go on, Rudy. I won't
look," Amanda said.

Rudy watched her put a hand over
her eyes, and then he became even more embarrassed when he realized that she
was already naked. Quickly, while her eyes were covered, he shoved his pants
down, exposing his elephantine thighs and buttocks. His ginger fluff glowed in
the fading daylight, and his penis was little more than an acorn.

He heard a musical laugh from
his right, and he realized he had forgotten all about Chloe. He turned to look
at her. He didn't notice her perfect breasts or the shaved smoothness of her
own nudity. All he saw was the amusement on her face, her hand pressed to her
mouth to stifle the laughter.

"Is that good enough?"
Rudy spun in a circle for the entire world to see.

The soldier nodded his head in a
professional manner, and Rudy pulled his pants up as quick as he could. He
threw his shirt on over his head, and stuffed his thick feet into his shoes,
stomping on the heels as he ran inside the Coliseum, his bag slung over his
shoulder.

He stalked into the building,
its age showing in the dated designs, cold concrete with little consideration
for comfort. The concourse was twenty-feet wide, the ceiling was an off-white
laced with pipes and cheap florescent lights that gave the entire place the
feeling of a morgue. People milled around, their faces forlorn and haunted. It
was a solemn place, like a library. Rudy headed immediately for the bathroom, a
door-less expanse lined with stainless steel troughs for urine, and stalls that
were barely wide enough to accommodate Rudy's bulk.

It was his intention to live out
the rest of the days of his life in the bathroom. He had never been so
embarrassed, not when his third foster mother had caught him masturbating, not
when they had pulled down his pants in gym class, not when Becky Jurgenson had
caught him staring dreamily at her in the middle of Mr. Patterson's social
studies in middle school. This was the type of embarrassment that could kill a
man... it could kill a Rudy even quicker.

Rudy squeezed his eyes shut.
That
look. That fucking look on her face.
The words played through his head in a
loop, over and over. Tears came to his eyes, and great bursts of pent up
emotion escaped his throat in sobs, like a seal gagging on a fish. He bashed
the side of the toilet stall with his hand, not minding the pain that he felt.
It was better than the embarrassment.

"You alright in
there?" a man asked, his voice strained.

Rudy rolled his head to the side
and looked heavenward.
Could this day get any worse? A world full of undead,
showing my little penis to the hottest woman in the world, and now crying next
to some guy taking a shit. What's next?
He tried to sound as if he were in
command of his voice, but he blubbered as he said, "I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine,
man," the voice said. "What the matter? You run out of toilet paper?
Here." A brown-skinned hand thrust a wad of toilet paper under the door.

Rudy couldn't help himself, he
laughed just a little bit, wiping his snotty nose with the back of his arm.
"No, I'm fine."

"Well if it ain't toilet
paper, it must be family. You lose someone?"

Rudy sighed, a ragged hitching
thing that somehow made everything not seem so bad. People out there were
losing family, dying, killing loved ones, and here he was crying about someone
seeing his penis. "I don't have anyone to lose."

"Then it must be girls.
That's nice. Girl problems is much better than the problems most of us got
going on right now."

"Yeah. I suppose you're
right."

He heard the man straining in
the stall next to him. "Goddamn right I'm right."

"Thanks," Rudy said.

"No problem," the man
said.

Rudy waited for the man to
finish his business and leave before he wiped his face, and tied his shoes.
Maybe
it wouldn't be so bad,
he thought. He pushed the stall open and walked out
into the concourse, the sting of the embarrassment fading. It would always be
there, just like Becky Jurgenson, but he could deal with it. Rudy looked down
the concourse and spotted a black man walking away, baggy pants, a shiny bald
head, and heavy tan boots on his feet. He thanked him silently from a distance and
went to find Amanda. If Chloe was there, well, then he would just swallow his
pride and deal with it.