Part One: topic82303.html
It wasn’t much, just a bit of open field covered in grash. Abandoned buildings created the perimeter on both the right and the left, ugly barely differentiating structures that awaited the fate of either demolition or rehabilitation around the time the Site was to be built up.
The four were silent as they drove out into the desolate cut of minced land. Trask hastily parked the Tram near one of the windowless erections of cold cinderblock.
“Yeeeah!” he said, his voice not as booming as it usually was, but close.
“Reid, get the jackets from the back,” Maura commanded, her tilted eyes retaining their signature cold superiority.
Slowly Reid released the seatbelt from its catch and stumbled out into a clump of grash. They all followed reluctantly as he punched in the code that opened the hatch on the vehicle’s left side.
The air was both cold and gritty, it scraped against their cheeks as it slid by.
“Hurry up bitch,” said Trask, rubbing his hands together in a desperate attempt for friction, “It’s cold.”
Without even a glance at him, Reid tossed the first heater jacket in his direction. Trask’s hands fumbled blindly trying to cover himself with it.
He tossed the remaining jackets to Pammy and Maura who clawed them on just as fast as Trask had.
Reid didn’t. In his head, he counted the seconds that he could stand the bitter chill. He fingered the zipper and his skin reacted violently as he took in the horizon beyond the two adjacent buildings. His eyes roved over the dense overcast sky and distant cityscape beyond the crisscrosses of highways and gas checkpoints.
By the time he had finally slipped both of his arms into the gloved sleeves of the jacket, the other three had completely warmed. The hard and painful goosebumps began to retract as synthetic heat pumped into him.
It was Maura who was digging through the bag at her side for the Victory. Pammy and Trask were already seated on the floor of the Tram, their legs hanging out the doors and resting on the frozen ground, waiting.
Reid looked back into the hatch and noticed the long metal cylinder that contained the Quardent Waste from their house’s main heating system. The man-made resource would power a home, but not without leaving behind its toxic epilogue.
His muscles straining from the weight of the thing, Reid quickly hoisted it out of the hatch and into the open air. Heat had returned to his body, making the cylinder easier to grip.
“Where did you get that?!” Trask interjected, standing up with a square cut of Victory between his thumb and pointer finger.
“Mom gave it to me,” Reid said, still avoiding Trask’s gaze and twisting the top of the metal tube with a steady hand.
“To dump?”
“To dump.” The cap came off with a loud, popping sound.
“So she knew? She knew we were taking the Tram out here, and she just let us do it?! She sent you with an errand?!”
Reid sighed and tossed the cap back into the hatch, “Yes.”
“That bitch.”
Reid tipped the cylinder upside down and let gravity take care of the rest. The black, goopy liquid slowly began to trickle out and careen into the grash, turning the brownish green into the color of midnight.
“That shit smells disgusting,” complained Maura as she proceeded to whip out her handheld lighter and light up her cut of Victory before moving on to Pammy’s.
Reid shook the thing to get the last drops of Quardent into the grash before he closed up the tube and tossed it back into the hatch.
Maura handed the lighter over to Trask and inhaled deeply on the kazoo-like slab. Her eyes became even darker and more animalistic as the drug started to roam her insides.
“Vic?” Trask offered Reid the last of the slabs in a gruff, noncommittal voice.
Reid nodded and took it after Trask had singed the end.
It was only minutes before Pammy’s high-pitched voice distracted them from their burning Victory.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a hazy figure in the distance.
Trask whipped his head around and squinted in the direction of Pammy’s finger.
“It’s a… guy. Some guy,” he said.
“Is he, is he coming toward us?” asked Pammy, her fingers clamping the Victory quivered ever so slightly.
“Shit, what if it’s an officer!” whispered Trask.
“It’s not,” said Maura with definite certainty. They accepted her authority without another thought.
He was a little ways off but rapidly approaching, after about thirty seconds in suspenseful anticipation, Maura turned away and took a lungful of Victory.
When he was one hundred yards away, they could see him more clearly, his heater jacket was a hue of deep maroon, the only color worth looking at they’d seen in a long while. Their eyes feasted on that jacket’s color, even stone cold Maura couldn’t drag her gaze from it as the stranger advanced.
He was upon them quickly while their minds were occupied with the maroon. He stopped just a few feet away from where they were seated on the Tram’s floor.
Trask’s eyes narrowed, “Who the hell are you?” he asked, the Victory smoking from the crannies between his fingers.
They stranger smiled coldly. He had a beard and a full head of course, unwashed hair. His eyes were hard, even when he smiled.
“I’m Jarles Hendricks,” he said, digging through a small, leather bag from where it was slung across his back.
“Sorry, you can’t bum a Vic,” said Maura pointedly, “We’re out.”
Jarles’s face further hardened as he pulled a stack of papers from his bag.
“I don’t want none of that trash,” he said.
Like a teacher, he began passing a piece of the folded paper to each of them.
Trask wrinkled up his face as Jarles tossed a pamphlet into his lap. Smudged ink spelled out the words ‘Our World Is Dying’ in bold print across the top of the page.
“Oh no,” Trask chuckled sadistically as he spoke, “Don’t tell me you’re a Missionary.”
“This constant development is going to kill us all!” was Jarles’s answer.
Trask rolled his eyes and wadded the pamphlet as Jarles continued to speak, “After the Green Movement died out one hundred years ago, it seems that the human race has set up their collective minds to treat the earth worse and worse!” His hard eyes took on a sheen of enlightening delirium. “Like we all want to self-destruct! The air itself is a deadly cocktail of pollutants changing us all into disgusting, broken human beings! The Earth is what keeps us alive and if we kill it, we kill ourselves!”
As he spoke, all four of the kids had wadded up their pamphlets and threw them to the ground.
Jarles shrieked as they fell into the grash, doubling over to pick them up, continuing with his spiel all the while, “Litter! This litter is choking the very core of this planet!” He scrambled around, waddling like a duck bent in half trying to scurry after papers caught by the wind.
“All the grass is gone! Replaced by this grash: the disgusting death of that beautiful, green grass of yore!”
Trask was almost beside himself with laughter as Jarles scurried and desperately attempted to evangelize at the same time.
“Look at this fucking homo,” he said, even though they were all already looking at him.
“You’re not listening!” screamed Jarles in a frightening evangelist voice, his arms full of crumpled papers.
Maura took another drag of Victory. He honed in on her.
“Why are you smoking that?! Why? You are ruining yourself, you’re ruining your body!” he screeched, his hair wild and his voice rising in intensity.
Maura didn’t react for a second, just letting the hate and the superciliousness wash over her quietly, “At least I’ll be thin,” she said.
Jarles became silent, Trask started laughing again, Pammy along with him. Maura took a drag. Reid took a drag. The wind started to whistle. Pammy took a drag.
Slowly, Jarles reached into his bag and pulled out a small circular object. It’s red hue faintly visible between the maroon of his gloved fingers.
In a fraction of a second he flipped its switch with a violent flick of his thumb and hurled it at the Tram’s hood. It exploded within seconds. The four only had another fraction of a second to hurl themselves from the Tram and out into the scattered clumps of grash.
“Holy shit!” screamed Trask.
“The world would be better without fuck-ups like you!” snarled Jarles, his face contorting and reddening. He fumbled in his pack for another explosive.
They took off running back to the gate, reaching desperately for the haven behind the crisscrossing iron. The ground exploded behind their heels as their lungs burned from the sudden shock of exercise.
Trask made it first, he clawed like an animal at his heater jacket, the gloved sleeves making it impossible for him to display his Stamp without removing the entire thing.
The milliseconds were like hours as he tossed the jacket aside and shoved his arm up against the sensor.
It denied his Stamp. The screen reddening and beeping after the attempt. “No!” he screamed, jamming his arm against the thing over and over. Pammy and Reid were beside him now and anticipating at every moment something so intrinsically awful that his mind exploded in paranoia as his skin broke and bled from the force of his attempts at escape.
The second he released a guttural and animalistic scream into the air was the second that the tiny, circular explosive landed at his feet and the entire world became fire.
&&&
Maura stood with her arms wrapped around her torso as she watched her siblings go up in flames. She had run in the other direction. A column of cinderblocks obscured half of her face.
She watched the Missionary carefully smooth out the pamphlets and place them back into his bag, buckling the leather straps calmly. As her eyes were occupied with the sight of the retreating maroon jacket, she wished for the candy-like taste of a Victory between her lips.
