Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗

MAYBE LIFE WOULD NEVER be this good again. Kahle tried to memorize the moment.

“Are you sure, Captain?” The sergeant asked. Tree patterned fatigues made him seem more somber, the starched edges contrasting with the soft words he was speaking.

“Yes, please.”

The sergeant nodded once and handed over the packet. When they shook hands at the door he held on a moment longer. “If you change your mind, sir, we’ll still be here.”

“Thank you, sergeant, but I’m not a sir anymore.” Kahle descended to the parking lot and fired up his car. Time stood still the sixty feet to the stop sign before he turned onto the main drag and made for the gate.

The air conditioning exhaled the stench of armadillo mouldering at the side of the road. Kahle found it’s corpse without effort: it’s tongue and eyes black, boiling with the bodies of feasting ants. Its crushed shell resembled a tiny ruby-red whale, beached on an emerald shore. Blades of grass flourished around it in shades of virile green, fed by seeping entrails. Young plants poked out beside it’s carapace, their buds the color of bile.

The gates receded, framed in the rearview mirror as the car floated onto the turnpike, winding north from Fort Benning through angry red hills of Georgia clay. He was glad to be leaving the base behind, the clumps of slashed earth reminding him of so much dried blood.  

He pulled into a Citgo parking lot before Murfreesboro, Tennessee, settling on a patch of mud amidst standing water. Beside him, two children ate bookended by parents. Small legs wagged from the rear of their pickup truck: bone white except where rust grew in the crevices of past sins, proof of blunt force trauma on an unearthed skull.

The boys attacked cobs of corn puffing cheeks rouged brown with dirt. Their matching overalls glowed a brilliant blue. A strawberry blonde the color of milk made a half-hearted attempt to tame their dancing wisps of hair. The father watched from under a large straw hat, covered in brown freckles where he’d burned and burned again beneath a relentless sun. Kahle filled the tank and ate a sandwich as he pulled back onto the highway.

The roadway dipped gently and Nashville filled the horizon, shining like colored glass. Streetlights and neon signs painted the streets and river inviting shades of red and gold. He resisted stopping. He had a long way to go.

The adrenaline drip of all things military began to weaken at Kentucky’s Bluegrass Parkway, taking the colors with it. Passing barns and houses leached to ashen monoliths, his windshield covered with a thin grey film. He pulled into a rest area and set his alarm.

The feeling persisted through Iowa cornfields. Deer melted into nearby tree trunks. Cornstalks impersonated the fence posts that surrounded them. Pale ghouls haunted truck stops piloting aimless tractors filled with useless goods. The spell was temporarily broken at his parent’s driveway, the Cape Cod behind it exuding an old friend’s good will.

He settled into the lull before grad school, unnerved by the open space that was freedom, in all its possibilities. He sat in the kitchen after they left for work, accompanied by stillness and the second hand ticking on the kitchen clock. Invisible bars held him immobile until their returning cars whined up the driveway.

The University of Wisconsin was supposed to help him find himself. Instead, he found someone else. She wasn’t his supervisor. She wasn’t officially his peer, either. Five foot two inches tall and two pay grades above him, the photo he’d snuck of Beezor Wasikowska didn’t do her justice.

He’d arrived late to her lecture and sat the sixth row back. The flyer on his seat said she was one of the first women at her school to major in mechanical engineering. Finished in the top of her class. She was the engineering manager at Motomax Manufacturing.

She was saying, “...as scientists we're presented with a paradox. We model the present to predict the future, in an environment where the future is constantly changing.”

He noticed what everyone else noticed. Her lack of fingernails. The slacks and button down shirt. The steel rims of her glasses. The sweep of black hair. The way she lisped ‘scientists.’ The smell of her perfume.

Chanel Number 5 trailed her, bearing hints of machine oil, tinged with the ozone tang of weld flash. It recalled dinner with Captain Parr, her uniform redolent with rifle range cordite, her hands misted with unspent gunpowder.

He also saw more. A silver glow formed lively coils around her. It intensified as she spoke, pouring tendrils like dry ice across the lecture hall floor.

Kahle looked from side to side, wondering if anyone else saw. But the other students drifted in detached bliss, taking notes or staring with clinical curiosity. Swale Academy had dismissed his ability as a parlor trick. It didn’t feel that way now.

“Like a flexible bullet, the future bends it's trajectory, altering its path through time and space. So then the purpose of statistics is something else.”

Her aura wrapped his legs, exposing a memory half submerged in sediment: the moment with the fork and the light socket. The back of his throat tanged tasty and metallic with recollection, puckering his skin with a thousand pinpricks. He tuned out the room and she came into luscious focus. Tint exuded from below her skin, flowing in her blood, seated in her bowels.

“Our use of statistics is fundamentally flawed.” Her skin glowed tawny, her lips red with blood; a lone colorized starlet amongst a sea of black and white. “As human beings, we don't predict the future, we create it. Statistics merely show us the place to twist. I say you that this world is malleable, and like that flexible bullet we can bend it to our will.”

He closed his eyes, but her aura pierced the lids, etching the tissues inside.

She folded her notes and spoke from memory. “We were made in God's image, not as left over scraps, but just below the angels. If you embrace science instead, then we are the highest form of consciousness in the world, the result of millennia of progress. Either path will suffice. And all of it leads to this; giants walk the Earth. You know them. It's you. Statistics are a tool, nothing more. If there’s a magic formula, you’ll be the one to provide it. Thank you.”

Blood rushed to his face. He wanted to get up. He wanted to ask. But before he could, she turned and left the stage. The colors left with her, returning the world around him to grey.

Kahle called his parents that night from his dorm, flying with what passed in his head for a plan.

“Well, Kahle how are you? How was your week?”

He ducked a look outside the phone bank at his classmates: math books open in their laps, writing letters, or propped on the concrete stairs nodding with their mouths open. “Good, mom. What’s been going on?”

“We saw Fleetwood Mac in concert, which was nice. Carly Simon wore this sequined dress that must have cost a mint. Your father finally finished rebuilding his Cadillac. I can’t say I care for the finish, but he insisted. And you know how your father is when he digs his heels in. Noyce is helping coach a local baseball team. Keeps him busy.” She continued to talk.

He enjoyed the pitch of it, only half hearing the words themselves: precise as a stylus writing on paper. They were clean and reassuring. Everything's in order. Everything will be fine.

He closed his eyes and tried to convince himself he was a boy again. They were at home in the kitchen where she tuned her Stratocaster, plucking the strings and tightening the wires. They were discussing a trip to the Wisconsin Dells where they would ride the amphibious cars.

“How are classes going?”

He returned to the moment. “About that. I met this girl...”

There was a long pause. Kahle could hear his father in the background, shuffling dishes and Dan Rather talking on the television until someone turned down the volume. “Um, don't tell me you quit grad school to chase a girl.”

“Well...”

“I can't believe it. I knew you were irresponsible but this tops your previous record. This is just like in third grade...”

“Mom...”

“When we had to tell you to stop hugging everyone.”

He knew this was the part that made her sad. He felt it too.

The stacks of photo albums said she missed them, but it that their dreams filled her with dread, knowing that year after year life would carry them away from her.

“Mom...” What he wanted to say he could not.

“The teacher even had us come to the school, said it was assault.”

“Mom...” That the auras had never left.

“Or 6th grade when you kept writing love notes to Mrs. Jaworski.”

“The feelings were mutual.”

“She said you had nice handwriting and a good posture. I don't think she was cultivating a future husband. Besides you wouldn’t want her blood on your hands.”

Kahle was silent, his face hot with shame.

“Honey, you have a good heart. But you can't just fall in love with any woman who's nice to you. Not everyone you love will love you back.”

He heard his father in the background. “Tell me about it.”

“Shut up, Glenn.” She turned back to the receiver. “You can’t always be so soft-hearted, Kahle. Life will crush you like a beer can. Did you even speak to her?”

He thought again of the retreating colors. “Well...”

“Glenn, did you hear this? I can't deal with this. He is so your son. You need to do something!”

He had to tell. “Mom, her aura was silver. Brilliant silver.”

He could hear her sit, the cord probably draped across her knees. Her legs shaking. He imagined what she would be thinking: it was back. That aura thing was back. She could’ve been holding that bird’s nest now, the dead baby chicks breathing their last.

A matter of time. It was just a matter of time. And then there was Swale. She would have blocked the thought out of her mind. She’d said before, if her son was soldier material then Mic Fleetwood was a monk. He waited to see if she would hang up the phone.

She said, “You could’ve lead with that. Tell me about it. Take your time, don't leave anything out.”

She  listened to his voice, soothing as his sleeping breath, perhaps enjoying the pitch of it, only half hearing the words themselves. She would try to convince herself he's a boy again. He's not dropping out of school to chase some girl. In this moment life has not yet carried him away.

“I was thinking,” he said, “I could come home and put in an application where she works.”

He could hear her waiting, his words expended. He tried to summon an optimism he didn’t feel. He had to own the decision. Against all their wishes he’d become an adult.

This aura thing was like a caul, a bloody veil that hung about his shoulders. He’d tried ignoring it.