The Dog Stars

needed to set up the shot.

I stared at him.

You nailed the shooter through a gunport? Like through his scope?

Shook his head. Nah. Turns out they have two ports—a higher one, maybe chest level, for the long shot, one for the angle directly down to cover the base of the tower. He was looking out the upper one and I shot through the lower. You wanna blow the door, go up and pay a visit?

Damn, Pops.

He had shot whoever it was right up their skirts. Through like a four inch hole.

Oh yeah. We walked across. The door at the base of the tower was heavy metal painted green. He unzipped a greasy belt pack took out two sticks of dynamite taped them together with duct tape.

Been saving these. Seems like a good time.

He taped them to the heavy metal door on the hinge side, close to the ground, lit them and jogged back. We ducked inside the Jet Center for good measure. It blew. Small bits of pavement rained against the windows. Reminded me of passing a truck on a gravel road. We jogged back. The door hung cattywampus off the top hinge, swung a sad metronome in drifting smoke. Pops stood in the doorway like a hesitant messenger.

Give me your gun, he said. You mind?

I handed it to him, he gave me his.

This’ll be a little better for what we’re doing.

Reflex: he tugged back the charging handle, checked that a shell was chambered, and went into commando mode. Not as if he hadn’t before. Couldn’t wait for him to meet Bangley. That’s what I was thinking, even amused imagining the introductions as Pops covered the first flight of stairs and went up gun to his shoulder sighting up the stairwell both eyes open. The treads were concrete laid over steel and they beat a dull tong tong as we ran up. There were five levels. At each one he told me to stay in the well and cover it and he went through the door. He cleared each floor swiftly and we moved up. Leaned into my ear breathing in rasps.

You’re gonna love the decorations in this place.

I could imagine. The top door, the door to the control room was locked. Of course. He shot the lock out, pushed through. The smell. A barrier. I gagged and spit. Cats everywhere. Freaked by the shooting, running over the radar keyboards, the comm panels, arched bristled and hissing against the dead black flatscreens. Calicoes and blacks, blue eyed Siamese.

The air reeked of cat piss and swam with light from the tinted windows, infused with green like an aquarium. On the west side, the side we had come from, where I knew the shooter would be slumped on his side beneath the cantilevered windows, was a man choking and crying. He was holding his guts which were spilled onto the floor. Blood seeped from his back, pooled in reservoir and ran across the floor in a sinuous ribbon like a creek.

He was an old man, older than Pops. His beard was white, his grizzled hair uncut, matted now and soaked in blood from the painted steel floor. The one who had first called, the one I had heard years before, must’ve been. He wore suspenders. His cap had been thrown into the middle of the open room. It was printed with yellow lettering, Peoria Jet Center “Service in the Heartland.” Over the nausea, a wave of goosebumps. Fucker. The heartland had come west looking for a safe haven from the flu and hit this bastard’s cable. Probably. His rifle lay a few feet from the cap. An AR-10 with a long barrel. Cats drawled in the loud panicked mews of a vet’s waiting room. The old man gagged, gurgled, sobbed. One of the bolder cats was already lapping at the crimson creek.

Samuel! Cold shriek. Sammy my Sammy my Sammy!

I jumped. In the corner—there was no corner it was all corners, octagonal—on the east side was an old woman with her hair, no shit, in a bun. It was Aunt Bee. She stood next to a spotting scope on a tripod and wore, no shit again, a calico dress printed in blue cornflowers. She wore wire rimmed round glasses. Could have been your school librarian, your doting grandma, the face on the pancake syrup label. She was at once backed up straight against a nav screen and paralyzed mid lunge toward the shooter who must have been her husband, her hands clawing the air in front of her chest, and her mouth open in a scream. Pops shot her. Middle of the forehead. Twenty cats did hot laps around the tower, then froze in various poses of arched terror. Dropped the decibel level in the reverberant room by half. Now just cats and the old man.

Pops stepped to him, crouched.

Finish Gramps choked. His eyes swum up. They were filmed like poached eggs. Shoot. He begged.

Pops said How’d you spring the cable.

Wha—? He gurgled up a gobbet of blood.

The cable. How’d you spring it?

Bucko

Backhoe?

Gramps vomited affirmative.

Fuel? Where’s the fuel? You have hundred low lead?

Shoot plea—

Where is it?

Ea tak

East tank?

Yu

Pops tugged on a bunch of keys clipped to the man’s belt.

This the key?

Oauuuua

Is this the key?

Yu

Go to hell.

Pops shot him. I gagged.

Looked out the window once before fleeing the cats, the stench. Roof of the Jet Center covered in solar panels. Like Erie. How they pumped their water, fuel, powered the radios and beacon. East gas pumps right below not a hundred yards. Easy shot from here, how they protected it. The survivors? From any of the wrecks? Could have picked them off at distance, or Aunt Bee could have gone to her blocked spot like an actor, waved like a concerned grandma, gestured them urgently over. Easy enough. Damn.

Before we left the tower Pops invited me to the third floor apartment. I said I didn’t want to see. He said, You are going to want to see. Cats were already venturing down the stairs. I followed him.

Ever been in a retiree’s RV? The one they sold their house for? How spotless and neat, the bed made with a patch quilt, maybe a pattern of sunflowers smoothed taut, a plush bear on the pillow? Silk rose in a velcroed cutglass vase on the veneer booth table? It was like that. Single small bedroom, no window, immaculate plush wall to wall carpet, no cats. Except. In the room that would have been the living room where the TV might have been, one wall was pegged and on a hundred pegs were caps, mostly baseball caps with the logos of FBOs, aircraft service centers, aviation specialists of all types—cylinders, props, skins—from every corner of the country. The rest of the walls were covered with shelves. On the shelves, alternating, were pairs of spectacles—sunglasses, reading glasses, bifocals, everything—and crudely stuffed birds of every type. They were lumpy, dullcolored birds stuffed with some filler without benefit of armatures, eyes sewed shut without skill—owls, bluebirds, magpies, sparrows, ducks. And bird guides: antique Petersen, Golden, National Geo, Sibley’s. Seemed every one that had ever been published in the last century.

Hobbies still going strong, Pops said. That’s a relief.

Fuckin A.

We gassed up almost like before, just flipped the lever and heard the electric pump and watched the numbers roll out the gallons. I checked the color, and for water and particulates with a clear plastic tube I carried. We found six more five gallon gas cans and filled them too. Fired the engine. She ran smooth so the gas was good.