Small-town southern Colorado spreads out across a half dozen miles, painted in amidst mountains and desert plains, the town itself built out of that dull, mid-century architecture that runs like a bruise across this land, a place where no one comes from because no one ever goes, peaceful and quiet as far as these things go, trailer trash psychopaths and alcoholic assholes aside, but that black Dodge Challenger with an angry-looking blower sticking out of its front parked in front of the community bank seems to argue otherwise, what with the bored looking twenty year old perched in the front seat, one hand on the wheel, one on the shifter, checking his watch, checking the door, watching, looking, listening, sweat running out of his too-long, cheaply cut brown hair into his eyes, dripping onto his tanned skin, the radio crackling out about hundreds dead in a shooting in a Denver suburb, thousands in some terrorist attack in a towering city far away, and the kid slides the dial to some classic rock number, taps out the rhythm on the steering wheel, while inside the situation is beginning to reveal itself as the pretty red-head, tan as her boyfriend waiting outside, waves a shotgun and screams at everyone to “STAY THE FUCK ON THE FLOOR YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” while a bank employee stuffs small bills into a trash bag, and standing on the counter with a wild look in his eyes is a dark haired 15 year old wearing a Metallica shirt, and he’s scanning with his AK-47, modified up to full auto, watching, looking, waiting and the tension in the room rings and buzzes and everyone is coated in a layer of dust and grime, cheap clothes all soaked through with a nervous tension cause just cause no ones shooting now doesn’t mean they won’t and the guard, his Sig kicked off across the floor, lays flat on the ground but then some stupid fucker who wants to be a hero goes for the silent alarm, a big red button under the counter, only the crazy badass with the Kalashnikov sees it then everything goes completely, totally, absolutely fucking fubar, and he lets off a spray of gunfire and people start screaming and the woman putting the money in the bag stops and he starts screaming at her, gutteral and practically incomprehensible, and no one has any idea what the hell is going on, they know this kid, he’s slow, sure, but he always used to be such a good kid, and all those shooting trophies are looking really menacing right now, then he sees or he thinks he sees the guard start to move across the floor for his gun and he lets off another spray and everything erupts and there’s screaming and crying and more sprays of rifle fire and then a harsh, thudding blast from the pump-action in the redhead’s freckled arms, and there’s blood and gore everywhere, and someone throws up and a woman is screaming, trying to hold on to the life that’s fast escaping out the giant hole in her middle, and the redhead is screaming at the wild one and they’re screaming at each other, and one of them grabs the garbage bag and they’re out the door and they’re frantically piling into the car, the kid in back, and the driver is asking what the fuck happened and they just tell him to drive and he puts the car into gear and the blower’s going and the car hauls ass down that main street heading south, and the wild one, well he’s loading in a new magazine, and the look in his eyes is even wilder, then they see a cop, they knew that guy, they grew up with him, what’s his name, he was at her sixteenth, he knows her dad, but now he’s leveling his glock at the car and a shot rings out and it strikes the badass in the shoulder and blood sprays everywhere, across the leather, across the windshield, the driver, the redhead’s hair redder, but the kid doesn’t even seem to notice, and the cop is on the ground screaming, holding on to what looks like hamburger meat, crying out for his mommy but no one hears him because the engine roars loud, then its gone and there is a juddering silence echoing long down the street.
We three set out across the desert as wanderers, looking only to find something to look for. Our grand scheme, our plan, our “this is our only way” now lay broken and bleeding on the floor- what should have netted us tens of thousands had brought in just $2390, a bullet hole in an arm, and a half dozen dead bodies. When we got into the car and told Johnny to drive, to get us the fuck out of Dodge, he looked at us with a sadness in his blue eyes that I’ve never seen before.
I love Johnny, I think. I mean, I don’t begin to understand why. Sure, he’s handsome enough, funny, but he isn’t the smartest guy, the most interesting... but I guess in this town being handsome, funny, and normal is the best you can hope for. So long as he isn’t... off... like his brother, Adam, well that’s just about the best I can do. Adam isn’t so unusual, not in this time, in this place. We all grew up together, and every year it seemed to me there were more Adams, more babies born just a little broken. It seems to me everything in this place is just slowly running down, towns becoming deserted, people leaving and dying. The very country is decaying slowly like a piece of old meat, the mold and fungus spreading out and killing everything good and wholesome.
Johnny won’t even look at me now, he’s just driving, eyes on the road, the desert spreading out on either side of us as the mountains get farther and farther away and we haven’t heard sirens since we made it out of town, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find us, come after us. A lot of people are dead and its my fault, I know that. After all, Adam is slow. And this was my idea. I figured it would be easy, steal some money, go to Mexico, easy. I didn’t reckon on Adam, I suppose, and now we’ll pay for it. I know already this will end with our deaths.
Adam is bleeding still, but its like he hasn’t even noticed the pain. All we have is duct tape to try to hold the wound closed and it helps a little, but still he bleeds and still we drive.
“We need gas. Soon. The blower...”
I point vaguely at a faded road sign- “There, a couple miles.”
We’re driving on one of the two lane highways that wind their ways across the forgotten spaces of America, held still yet sacred by the last of the wanderers and the gasoline junkies. Our search for fuel takes us off that road and into a town was called Fordston, back when anyone still bothered to live there.
All the store fronts stand crumbling and empty, windows shattered, brickwork going all to pieces in a red, pasty dust that seems to hang in the late afternoon air, casting the light in a chalky pink. We pass a motel and we aren’t alone in this place- another old car stands in the parking lot and Johnny slows as we pass to look because it looks recently driven, broken fender and rusted hood aside, and as we roll past I see eyes watching us from between the curtains of a broken window.
Then the gas station is upon us, looking brand new and shining, bearing the logo of some big oil company. There is a clerk inside the little shop, and he looks young and clean. The whole thing is absurd, out of a bad trip.
Johnny pulls the car up to the pump and gets out.
“Amy, you pump. I need to take a piss.” He walks off in the the direction of the bathroom, and I stare after him for a moment before I get out of the car. Adam pushes my seat forwards and follows me. I see he’s still wearing a 1911 on his hip and this makes me wary. Then I see the blood drying on his arm and before I can say anything, he catches me staring at it.
“Don’t worry about me. I will be okay.” Then he holds up his hand, half cased in a dried red shell, and he curls his fingers to show me. I shiver though the air is still warm in the haze of early evening. I pick up the pump as a state trooper pulls into the station.
Adam and I begin to watch him, watch him get out of his car, watch him walk into the store, watch him chat with the clerk, watch him as the tank finishes filling, watch him as he walks out and starts to look at us.
The crack echoes loud over the old concrete, and my ears ring. The trooper stares at his chest as blood begins to ooze out and he looks like he’s trying to breathe but he can’t. He stumbles and falls and bounces off the hood of his car, hitting his head on the way down, blood now spraying in a floating, graceful ribbon from a gash across his forehead, then he’s thrashing on the ground, then another crack and blood explodes out of his head with a concussive force alongside chunky bits of brain and skull, and then he stops moving and I look to Adam.
“He would have stopped us.” All I can do is look at him, gun held in front of him, his pasty skin eating the sun out of the sky, big smile on his face. Then he sees something and I look at the handsome young clerk as he comes out of the store, and two more cracks in quick succession and the shop window is painted in a huge red stain and the kid slides to the ground. In the blood I see Christ on the cross. Adam holsters his gun and Johnny comes over to us and he can’t speak.
We drive through the night, sticking to back roads, moving in a brooding, crackling silence that feels like it could, at any moment, become a flash of violence. I watch America flee past me, towns drawn far away from our highway, little more than glows on the horizon most of them, distant vacation slides of young men and women moving around like we should be, in a sort of love unconcerned with the grand decay of it all, driving for the serpentine pipe-dream of freedom, not to chase it’s concrete tail. At some point that night I switch on the radio, check if they’re looking for us, and I hear about acts of terror and violence all over this idea that someone once called America, and it occurs to me that no one really cares about us anymore.
As the sun rises, I turn my head to look at Adam- his eyes are bloodshot, his boxy features strikingly brutal. His face is taking on a primordial tone, and where I once saw innocence now I see corruption. Everywhere around us all is corruption, rotted out husks of towns, junked old cars, broken frames of a million woken up from American Dreams. As we approach the border it only gets worse and I consider images on television of a war on drugs turned to a total war on the very notion of man.
I figure, we get to the border, that’s it, end of story, end of life. There’s no way we won’t be recognized, arrested, or more likely, just gunned down, because I guarantee you Adam isn’t going peacefully and I don’t think I will either- there’s nothing left for me in this world. Not for me or for anyone else.
We crest a hill and what we see is utterly unbelievable- desperate, clawing, violent chaos at the border, flames licking tall at humanity’s underbelly, gunfire on both sides. Border security looks harried and broken already, crouching behind wrecks of cars and concrete barricades as what I assume are cartel members bare down on them, seemingly unaffected by the swirling storm. These aren’t kids with kalashnikovs anymore, no, these are hardened soldiers, their souls power-washed in a baptismal spray of blood. I look to Johnny and he looks grimly over to me, turns on the blower, and slams the car up through the gears, past the gunfire, through the checkpoint, and then we’re in Mexico, just like that.
When we get a few miles from the border, when the gunfire finally fades into the distance, Johnny slows down and I see him shaking.
“What the fuck... oh god what the fuck...”
“Looks like we picked the right time to send our lives to hell, cause’ it seems to me the whole world’s following.” I shoot him a grim little smile with the line.
Eventually we come to a town, the architecture less old Mexico than Soviet-style concrete, all cracked and broken. There are bodies everywhere, men and women and children, some gun shot, but many more cut with knives, strangled, beaten. Organs and entrails spilling out of cavities across the bodies, festering sores of destruction of the flesh itself. Lives now just piles of gore littered with flies and maggots. The smell is intolerable. I think of saying something but I don’t. We pass a kid, can’t be more than four, five years old, and there’s the world’s biggest vulture picking at his guts, pulling out his lungs, then the bird looks up at us and in those eyes all I see is humanity, and I know I should feel sick, but I don’t. I just feel tired.
Out of the town we pass cars surrounded by men with guns. The cars are souped up low riders, the guns blinged out, covered in big stones and gold, and these are real cartel, the look of hyenas in their eyes, a thirst for blood. And they start to follow us and I yell to Johnny, but he’s already seen him, and the blower is back on and he jumps the car off the asphalt, onto the yawning sands of the desert.
The western landscape billows out around us, sun soaked and beaten, cacti spots of green scattered across the white sand, all sketched beneath the wide blue sky. Golden cliffs lie a few miles ahead of us, and I hope we’re not going to run up to a wall, because they’re behind us already.
We bear up on the cliffs and we see our salvation, a narrow gap in the rock, and after the opening we find ourselves in an arroyo, a narrow stream cut through a high walled canyon, and I can’t be sure, but it looks like there’s a way out at the far end. Johnny sees the same and he guns the car through the sand.
And then all at once the car is fishtailing, and Johnny is struggling at the wheel, fighting it like an animal and he’s losing and he screams “FUCK!” but I hear the word in my head before it leaves his lips, a tire gone flat and the angriest motherfuckers on earth right on our tail and Johnny and I freeze in shock horror but Adam doesn’t, instead ripping the door open, pulling us out with him, just as the gunfighter-wannabes pull into the arroyo behind us, and the canyon is filled with echoed explosions leaping wall to wall, slamming into our ear drums, and I take cover behind the car, let off a round from my shotgun, feel the thing leap with a thudding force of god, and I hear rifle rounds slam into the side of the car, the entire thing rocking with their force, and I look up and Adam isn’t even taking cover, instead he’s standing tall, holding the Kalashnikov pressed hard to his shoulder, spraying rounds in the direction of our attackers, and I peer my head out briefly and I see a bullet enter a man’s eye with a pop, then I see blood and brains spray out the back of his head onto the guy behind him, then Adam drops to one knee, slams in a new magazine, god knows where from, and he’s up and firing again, and he looks to me and he winks and mutters something about his brother not being a real man, and with that Johnny has his Glock in his right hand then Adam’s 1911 in his left, and he stands too, and he unloads both guns quick-like, and I watch my beautiful man shoot like Chow Yun-Fat glowing hard in the sun, but then a bullet slams into him and he screams out as I see a long bit of flesh start to snake out his side, sun glinting off his large intestine, and he’s on the ground screaming and crying, and Adam’s saying to fucking move as he starts pulling me by the hand but Johnny isn’t moving, he’s just laying on the ground screaming and there are more bullets now, then Adam points his gun at my man’s head, and I scream out and I can’t watch but I know I have to as I see his skull crumple then explode outwards in a wash of red and white and I feel sick as the warmth of his brains spread out across my blue jeans, and then Adam is carrying me in his arms, sprinting for the back of the canyon, and I wonder how he’s isn’t getting shot but then I feel his body rock with a great force as if hit from behind but he doesn’t seem to notice, he just keeps running, then we get to the back of the place and I start to cry because I see there’s no way out, but Adam hardly seems to notice, instead he sets me down and all he says is “Are you ready?” and I stand next to him and we both start firing like its the only thing we have left because it is- my mind wanders as men’s bodies are ripped apart before us, flesh and blood bone all exposed, made hollow and naked and raw- my mind wanders and I remember kissing Johnny at a football game in high school, fucking him for the first time, his body supple beneath me, planning our futures together, but I find myself not giving much of a fuck, not about him or the men bearing down on us hard, and I look up to Adam and he has a satisfied smile on his face, not the smile of a happy moron, but that of a man enlightened, and then I feel a slug hit me in the chest and my body is ripped round by the force of the thing, and the shotgun drops from my hands, clattering uselessly to the ground, then a second time I’m hit and I feel it all begin to slip away, my vision blurring out in a reddish, dusty haze, and as I’m laying there hearing the echoes of gunfire on stone, I look up at Adam and I see a round smack directly into his forehead, and he takes a hand from his gun, feels the blood, looks at it on his fingers with what can be described as no more than passive curiosity, then goes on fighting like its the most normal thing in the world, and he looks down and, despite the bits of brains and blood leaking out of his skull, he smiles at me, and, with my last act of living, I smile back.
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