Delicious Tacos - Finally, Some Good News

He almost said something.

Instead he paused and reflected. Prayed for an instant. Like he’d been taught. All right man, he said. Have it your way. Walked away up into the weeds.

He lay in the grass on the hilltop for a very long time. Just looking down. Finches burbling. Low wet paper color clouds cooling his neck with mist. Then the sun broke out. Finally the metal squealed. The hatch door flew up. Kent’s head with the Mitt Romney gray at the temples inched up and up. Looking around cautiously. Like a marmot coming out of its hole in an old cartoon. Squinty eyes.

He shouldered the gun. Like Dusty told him. Pulled it just slightly away from his face until he could see a magnified head in the scope glass, shaking along with his hands. Weird light effects from the dirty lens dancing around the hair. A black shape like a sliver of moon slid around under the crosshairs. When he moved what felt like a millimeter the black slipped over his whole field of sight. Then when he got Kent’s face again a bright beam was hitting it and Kent’s eyes got startled and he was moving. Dropping out of view. Red means dead. He pulled. A sound like lightning hitting a house. Like a bomb going off.

His forehead was numb. The top of his nose. Like one minute after the best coke rail that ever existed. The crack still echoing in the hills as his ears began ringing. Suddenly his eye socket hurt so bad it was… it was… what was the word for it. He couldn’t remember. What is this feeling. Did I shoot myself. Did the bullet come out the wrong end and hit me. Am I retarded now…. vibrating. His eye bones were vibrating. Now it felt like when your foot falls asleep. There was blood in his eye and his forehead by the eyebrow felt like a strong hand was pinching it. Someone was screaming. Inner ears shrieking with Tibetan bells. He couldn’t see.

When he looked up there was no one in the hatch and it was quiet except the screams. Over and over with big jagged breaths between. He smeared blood off his cheek. Pulled back on the cold gun bolt. A cartridge came flying out, just like it was supposed to. A new pointy bullet popped up and he levered up the bolt and pushed it forward and it stuck. He had to try a couple times. Finally he forced it hard and it went. He walked bowlegged to the cement steps down the hill, pointing the big black rifle at the grass in front of him, half crouched. Feeling like he had no knees. Screaming and screaming echoing up through the hatch. The finches quiet and he got to the ladder, put his shaking finger on the trigger, red means dead, pointed the gun down the chute and looked. Kent was twisted up twenty feet down with his skull gone. Scalp butterflied out with a tuft of white temple hair twitching. Blood pumping and pumping on the floor and on the Fuck Cunt Pussy painted walls like his brains were a wet towel being wrung out hard. He had a memory of running over a hostess Cherry Pie with his Huffy tire. He could smell it. Marcy, he said.

Oh my God–

We have to go.

You killed him–

He might make it, he said. She didn’t laugh.

YOU KILLED HIM!

I wasn’t gonna fight him, Marcy. The fucking… Morlocks are coming. The fat guys who rape people–

YOU KILLED HIM!

Call the cops, he said. Was he good to you?

…no

Then let’s take his shit and get out of here.

By the time they saw the ocean even the dog food was gone. Freeways and surface streets still filled with burnt out cars and corpses. Some fresh. Others just black bones. Every one in a posture of agony. Not one relaxed skeleton.

The old Mercedes took the vegetable oil fine, as Jamie and Adam had confirmed . But sipping it for calories made their hair greasy. Their guts slippery. The car had sat low on the back tires with weight of the water they carried, but not now. Lighter every day.

ISIS had thoughtfully annihilated not just Los Angeles proper but the Greater Metropolitan Area. Everyone and everything was gone. Outside Carpinteria the road broke for good. Chunks of asphalt tossed on their sides and scorched. We can’t get through, she said.

We’ll turn around.

All the roads will be like this. We have to walk–

We should at least try.

This car is loud. People can hear it. We don’t have much left to carry-

It’s a shelter. It can get us to the mountains– he shut off the engine. It kept idling. Guttural cast iron clacking and a smell like a Chinese restaurant on fire. Finally it sputtered out. Silence like a cathedral. She was right.

You’re attached to it, she said.

That’s not it–

You have feelings for your car.

OK I do. I bought this car for 800 dollars. Had her for ten years. I went to the mountains, the desert in this car. Through storms. She kept me safe. I brought my cat home in this car…

Her?

I’m sorry. I know it’s ridiculous.

It’s not.

It’s hard to leave her.

I know.

He turned the key. Waited for the glow plug light to flash. Pushed the gas just as the starter turned over. You had to. It took finesse. The open throttle made the motor whoosh like a leaf blower. He steered to the sand by the roadside. Into the ashy flood ditch between the freeway and the frontage road. There had been a CarMax before the fire tsunamis. One collapsed billboard only half burned. A grinning lawyer could make Mexicans millionaires if only they could get badly maimed. Dial dos dos dos- dos dos dos dos. The old wheel smooth under his palms. Tight turning radius for such a long luxury sedan. Old tires struggling in the sand. He shut it off. Waited while the engine grumbled, for a long time. Saying goodbye. It was his birthday. He was 42.

She helped him pile chaparral branches and tumbleweeds on the roof and the windshield and the blistered black hood. Took the sleeping bag and tent. He took the water, the sport duffle full of guns and bear arrows. Paused to pat the walnut on the dashboard.

We’ll come back for her if we need to, she said. But you can let her go. She kept us safe.

She was right.

The beach looked almost like nothing had happened. Just a few wrecked boats with names from Jimmy Buffett lyrics beached on their sides at the high tide line. Black clouds of flies shimmering around the putrefying seafarers in their cabins. They carried their shoes. Peeled off their damp Hyper Elite Disrupters. The sand felt like a mother blowing cool on the soles of your baby feet. Ocean hissing. 100 yards past the ruins of the state volleyball nets the sand meandered under a cliff. There was chattering in the sky. Green silhouettes racing over them in a loose V formation, crying back and forth. Wings stuttering.

Parrots?

They’re yellow crowned Amazons.

Invasive species–

No, it’s a sign. We’re going to make it. I let one out at Pet Smart. Maybe he’s up there.

You believe in signs?

I saw these birds, these exact birds, at the clay lick at the headwaters of the Amazon river. They congregate at a cliff in the jungle to eat minerals that soothe their stomachs. They got here by a guy trapping them and drugging them. Stuffing them in his pants to fly them to America to sell. Most of them suffocate. And the few that live have to live in a fucking cage. But not these ones. They survived. They got out.

I forgot you went to Peru–

When I went there I wanted to die. I was 40. I was working as a secretary at a fucking branded content consultant and the kids on the jungle tour with me were 25. They were rich and from Switzerland. They’d been traveling their whole lives. They had girlfriends and 8 weeks vacation. I was an old man who lived alone with my cat. And my cat died. And you know what?