apocalypse rodeo
©
a novel
PREFACE
I began writing Apocalypse Rodeo in 2011, inspired by the worst decade of my life. I wrote to recover from trauma that felt unsurvivable, and I wrote it into fiction to maintain a safe distance from the material. Writing and revising it helped me to find meaning and agency as I translated my experiences into fiction. This novel became my crucible for insight and healing, and like me, it has been a work in progress.
I never intended Apocalypse Rodeo for publication, yet I have come to believe that sharing this story is as vital to my recovery as writing it. I offer it to demonstrate how chronic complex trauma can be transformed into metaphor and how writing helped me to externalize my inner apocalypse.
I hope to inspire others who have experienced trauma and its repercussions to write to heal. All you need are your stories and the desire to understand and transform them.
Content Note: This story includes references to sexual violence and harm to animals. These topics are depicted with care to underscore advocacy for human and animal rights.
read chapter-by-chapter
1
The Renewal Zone
The blistered ribbon of highway simmered, and other than miles of resettlement convoys, there were no signs of life. Barren prairie stretched to the horizon, veined with desiccated trees; pocked with bleached, gutted ranch houses; and abandoned trailer parks overrun with kudzu vines. After days on the road, the hot, crowded Resettlement bus reeked of body odors strong enough to taste. Sweat trickled down Vee’s neck, her hair and clothes were matted with it. They had crossed into what used to be Colorado, and this burnt moonscape felt like the maw of oblivion.
Vee was from Manhattan and had never been west of the Mississippi River. Like other Resettlers, she had subsisted on warm, bottled water and prepackaged rations. Her mouth was dry and sour, and she tipped her water bottle, swallowing the last drops. Her head throbbed, and the world shimmered in her peripheral vision. Was it the fever and hallucinations returning, or dehydration that made her woozy?
She shared a cramped seat with Casper, a stout trucker, who was returning to his family home in Flat Iron, a territory of the Renewal Zone. He snored under his cowboy hat, and when he shifted, his sweaty arm slid against hers. Casper was a prodigious talker, and Vee had taken to feigning sleep to avoid his incessant narrative. He smelled of body odor and synthetic pine cologne. He spoke with a drawl, a caricature of a cowboy with his Stetson and scuffed boots. It was a mercy when he slept.
For miles, the undulating sliver of the Rocky Mountains had been a marker as the resettlement convoy drove west, and now that they were heading north, the snowless, denuded peaks defined the western horizon. The climate apocalypse had come after decades of global warming. Massive ice melts caused by endless summer had swelled oceans until the earth’s tectonic plates rocked under the shifting burden. Seas erupted into tsunamis worldwide, and coastal residents who survived fled inland. Now Vee saw how the interior regions of the former United States had been decimated over time, drought-stricken and ravaged by fires. Her despair felt boundless, and she tried to imagine life in this godforsaken place. Out of habit, she pressed the tip of her thumb into the groove at the base of her left ring finger, but her wedding band was long gone. She had traded it for passage to the Renewal Zone.
The bus lumbered on, belching diesel; and they passed a faded sign that read Flat Iron, 5 miles - Home of the World’s Biggest Rodeo. A noxious, biochemical odor churned the air, as if the chemical toilet at the back of the bus had overflowed. “Oh my God,” Vee choked, “what the hell is that?”
“Stockyards full of cattle,” Casper yawned and stretched. Vee got a tart whiff of him and recoiled. He pointed ahead to a fence lining the highway, and beyond it, acres of undulating brown and sepia heads and backs, packed side by side, head to tail.
Vee stared at the penned animals, and as the acrid smell lapped the back of her throat, she felt a tremor, a vibration in her bones. This reality of thousands of cattle trapped under the hot sun shocked her, these were the cattle of her fevered hallucinations, a hallmark of VIROX-02. She pulled the stiff rag from her pocket and mopped the scrim of sweat and grit from her face, then covered her nose and stared at the acres of mangy animals, their spines straining from their own weight.
At the height of her infection with VIROX-02, hallucinations of tormented cattle had driven her to near madness. Now, she stared at the animals, trapped in sweltering heat and remembered Sandrine’s words, “There are consequences for brutalizing living beings. This virus is a reckoning.”
Vee had worked for Sandrine in a psychiatric clinic treating patients with the psychosis caused by VIROX-02. Sandrine was a gifted clinician and mentor, often at odds with her colleagues due to her unconventional ideologies and practices. Sandrine travelled to a remote village in South America for months at a time, where she studied alternative healing practices and herbal remedies. She always returned with new herbs and incantations and might as well have spoken a foreign language when she tried to explain to Vee what she learned. The scent of burnt sage and patchouli wafted from her office and emanated with a whisper of the occult from her clothing and hair. During the pandemic Sandrine was outspoken about the limitations of allopathic medicine, and she was the only person Vee knew who had recovered from the virus. Everyone else was taking UpTabs to stay alive.
A hot, acidic stench blasted through the bus window, and Vee coughed spasmodically.
“That’s the smell of money,” Casper said.
“What kind of monster says a thing like that?” Vee glared at him and reached for the blister pack of UpTabs in her pocket, fumbling with the packaging. “Those animals are being tortured.” Her hand shook as she popped an UpTab under her tongue. There was no known cure for VIROX-02. UpTabs controlled the symptoms but eventually lost their effectiveness. Vee guessed that everyone in this Resettlement convoy, like Vee, had a stockpile of UpTabs to keep them from losing their minds.
“Folks gotta’ eat,” Casper said, “The beef business is what keeps Flat Iron and the Renewal Zone thrivin’ even in times like these. You’ll get used to the smell.”
“Impossible,” Vee said. A dark memory stirred in her as she stared at the expanse of cattle, and Vee shifted in her seat, trying to stretch away the ache in her back. The bus rocked and groaned on the buckled highway.
“You’re lookin’ mighty peakid,” Casper said, “No need to get worked up. They’re just animals. They don’t know nothin’ better.”
“Do you even hear yourself?” Vee snapped, turning away from Casper to the sight outside the window. “You can’t tell me those animals aren’t suffering.” When there was still an internet Vee had searched: cattle and factory farms. Flat Iron topped the search list; a town surrounded by feedlots and slaughterhouses. Ground zero for the pandemic. She read about the anguish of cows separated from their calves, and calves who cried for days and had to be force-fed. Slaughterhouse workers reported seeing cattle weep and tremble with fear as they were forced through narrow chutes onto the kill floor. Vee stopped eating beef.
“Anyone who’s handled those animals knows they’re driven by instinct,” Casper said, “and they’re dangerous. Wait till you see what bulls do in the rodeo. Those cattle out there probly’ don’t hardly notice where they are, so long as they have food and water,” he sighed. “Water gets pumped in through those pipes. They’re doin’ ok by my sights. Better n’ most people nowadays. Who do you know has that kind of access to water? Most of us are on rations.” Casper sighed, “That’s the life. Nothin’ to do but eat. They’ll fatten up in no time. Once they come from the breeders, it takes about six months till they’re ready for processing. See those troughs, that’s their feed. Kind of like room service.”
“They’re knee deep in mud.” Vee said.
“Well, that ain’t all mud,” he shook his head. “What you smell is ammonia and methane generated by acres of piss and manure. Cattle are dirty animals.” He settled back in his seat and spread his knees, his thick leg, in unwashed denim pushing against her, his hot, damp arm pressing hers.
“Get away from me,” Vee shoved him. She was having trouble breathing.
“I can’t help it if I’m big,” Casper said, rubbing his fleshy arm, “We been over this. Anyway, when antibiotics don’t control infection, that’s what they have the pen riders for – those men ride around on horses and shoot any animals that are injured or sick.”
“That’s enough,” Vee snapped, “everything you tell me is worse than the last thing you said.”
“Keeps the population healthy so they don’t infect the food chain.” Casper mopped his brow with the back of his arm.
“Stop it,” Vee snapped. It felt like the air, saturated with the feedlot stench, could cook her from the inside. A tremor, intimate as death, shimmied up her spine. In that unnerving instant Vee felt the cattle understood they were destined for slaughter, “Cows are sacred in some cultures.” The futility of her words depressed her.
“Sacred here too,” Casper said, “Shiloh Industries is the biggest provider of grade A beef in the Renewal Zone. They process up to 6,000 cattle per day – that’s about two million a year.” Casper nodded with satisfaction, as if he had accomplished this himself.
“Factory farms torture millions of animals to package them for food.” Vee’s voice raised a notch. She felt hysterical and she knew she should stop there, but she didn’t, “We’re all having hallucinations of tortured cattle. Did you ever think about why?” her voice crescendoed and she sensed other passengers shifting in their seats to locate the disruption.
“I try not to think about it,” Casper said, looking at her warily, as if she might burst into flame, “maybe you shouldn’t either.”
Vee tried to slow her breathing.
“Anyway. There’s an explanation for everything,” Casper said, and tentatively took her empty bottle from the seat pocket in front of her, poured some of his water into the spout and handed it to her, “here. You’re dehydrated.”
Casper’s unexpected kindness rattled her. Vee took a gulp of water, suppressing the panic and fury she had outrun for months. Her thumb found the absence of the ring. Her grief for Daniel was stubborn and so complicated.
“Those hallucinations,” Casper said tentatively, “they say it’s because your unconscious hears things without you knowing it. It’s called -” he squinted, trying to remember, “what do they call it?”
“Power of suggestion.” Vee said flatly as she drank the rest of the water and closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the seat rest. Her heart wouldn’t stop racing.
“Yeah,” Casper said, “that. What with everyone talkin’ about tortured cattle, how are we not supposed to be dreaming about tortured cattle?”
“Sure.” Vee said, without opening her eyes. “Whatever.”
“Like what happens sometimes when people get organ donations. In surgery they hear the docs talk about the donor. Like, that teenager who never heard classical music, who got a transplant and suddenly wanted to listen to…” he snapped his fingers, as if trying to think of a name. “One of those foreign, old-time composers.”
“Beethoven?” Vee mumbled, it felt comforting to say the name of a composer from another lifetime. Before the climate crisis. Before the pandemic. Before the death, “Mozart?” She and Daniel used to listen together. In their living room that was now underwater.
“Probably,” Casper said. “You feel a little better?”
“Yes,” Vee lied, “thanks for the water.” She trembled. Instead of Daniel, she turned her thoughts to Sandrine, remembering the last time she saw her.
They were in a staff meeting. Vee had looked around at her colleagues, whose unkempt hair and rumpled clothes, like hers, gave them a desperate, end-of-the-world look, their skin sallow under the flickering tubes of fluorescent ceiling lights. What little sleep they got was riddled with lurid hallucinations of mutilated cattle.
Sandrine’s words still haunted Vee: “These aren’t hallucinations. They’re memories.”
The lime green walls and pitted linoleum floors of the conference room amplified Vee’s horror.
Someone muttered, “What the fuck?”
Now, the bus left the stockyards behind, and they were surrounded by crop fields. After a few miles, up ahead Vee saw what looked like a charcoal rendering of a fist pushing across the prairie toward the skyline of a town. Beneath it, dark bristles of rain slanted into the ground, pleating the sky.
“Another one,” she muttered, too exhausted to care. Tornados and rogue storms had become so frequent, there had been several already on this trip. How many times had she wondered what it would be like to die hurtling through the air? Daniel would have known if it was velocity or impact that would kill them. He had a way of reducing almost any horror into a clinical calculation.
“Heading straight for Flat Iron,” Casper said.
The driver decelerated into the breakdown lane, and the bus shuddered as the engine quit. Without its diesel howl, the hum of voices inside became audible as everyone stood and lined up in the aisle, fanning themselves in the stifling heat.
The driver opened the doors, and Vee hurried out with the others, ragged and unwashed, her stiff legs unused to standing or walking. As they huddled in the drainage ditch alongside the highway, the burnt umber sky bore down, compressing and chilling the air, raising goosebumps on Vee’s arms. Her heart raced as she crouched with the others to watch and wait.
The storm advanced on the town, a dark smudge traversing the plains, bending trees, stirring a lacy trail of debris as it gained momentum. The wind howled, and as it bore down, the sharp odor of stockyards snapped through the trench. The wind unmoored trees and rooftops, kicked up cars and tool sheds, and Vee hunched her shoulders, covering her ears.
Then, the drum of rocks dropping from the sky, as hail pummeled the metal skin of the bus. The roar was deafening, and Vee screamed with it into the void, feeling a monstrous darkness coil into her lungs. Hail stung her skin, and she sheltered her head with crisscrossed arms as the trench amassed a rising tide of ice. Time seemed to strain against the looming void, and Vee tried to count the minutes, but she couldn’t. Then an eerie, suffocating silence. The sun burnt away the clouds, the heat of the earth rose up through tar and dirt, and the hail began to dissolve.
Vee closed her eyes, leaning her head on her folded arms while they waited. If this was a twin storm, another funnel would form. She wondered how long she would survive on this gutted earth.
2
Cowboys
A halo of light-tipped, sunburnt straw frames the hot sky above her. Dirt. Blood. Ammonia. Breathe in. Taste the cattle’s souls. Beside her, a heap of black fabric. It is her dress.
Esme remembers dusk the night before, the dome of high wattage lights above the Flat Iron carnival grounds penetrated the sky. The rodeo arena shaped like a horseshoe, with the bucking chutes inside the curve, was filled to capacity. At its center, pinned in the spotlights, a bull twisted and bucked between the stubborn legs of a rider. Spectators bellowed in one thunderous voice to the announcer’s shrill call, “That’s 170 points on three bulls!” and released a feral echo into the sky.
Esme flexes one foot, then the other and learns she wears only one sandal. She pushes up from the packed dirt and pulls her dress on over her head. The pain is nothing compared to the burning when she pees into the caked earth.
The carnival grounds surrounding the arena pulsed, mimicking the beat of the living, as horses, cattle, long horns, caged wild cats and children howled and wailed. Beneath the stadium, Esme had stood in the line that snaked from the three stalls inside the Ladies, out past the crowded ticket booths. The world vibrated as Mechanical Bulls, Merry-go-rounds, the Abyss Turbo Drop, and Tilt-A-Whirls pulverized the air with bullhorns, sirens, and bells.
She glimpsed her Uncle Theo with the grounds crew leveling the dirt floor under the arena with wide, stiff bristled brooms. Sponsoreds cleaned up the waste of roving, baying crowds: grease-soaked wrappers and paper plates; ravaged chicken wings and pork ribs; fried candies; fried cola; chewed plastic cups; sticky, dented cans. The Sponsoreds emptying ripe, overflowing trash barrels into bigger rolling dumpsters. Eyes unreadable.
Above her in the stadium, applause, and the undertow of pounding feet on metal stairs.
Swallow the bloody dust. Cellophane heat waves shimmy, rising from the dirt. A thousand wasps sting the pads of her feet, the skin of her knees and thighs, stomach, ribs, shoulders, arms. She shivers in the heat.
Uncle Theo gave her the stink eye when he saw her in line with her friends in their skinny dresses and heels. But she had just turned twenty-one and did what she wanted.
When she was little, she and her mother lived in Mexico with her Abuela and Uncle Theo. Uncle Theo worked on a cattle ranch. He brought Esme to see a newborn calf nursing from its mother. “They are heifers until they have their first calf; then they’re called cows,” he said. She loved the calves, loopy from birth, unused to their legs, getting their bearings. Her uncle stroked the cow’s neck. “She was pregnant for nine months, just like your mother with you.”
He taught her that each animal had their own personality; some liked to visit, some shied away. He lifted Esme, so she could stroke the mother’s head and neck as he soothed her with the same gentle voice he used with Esme. She smelled cow and warm grass and hay, and her uncle’s pipe tobacco that he kept in his shirt pocket.
A man leads her from the VIP Club House and her muscles ache in the moment she knows she should run. They stumble to his truck, his hot, restless hands tugging her, “I’ll have you home in no time,” he says. Then his mouth, full of teeth and tongue, suctions her ear.
Last night, from the belly of the arena, the crowd cheered till they were hoarse. Their voices reverberated through the fairgrounds with the bleating of metal hinges, the rave of carnival engines and bull horns, bouncing against the stadium’s struts, and careening into the milling crowd. Then a rush of collective gasps overflowed the stadium walls, rivaling the nursery rhymes from the merry-go-round, the shrieks from the Abyss Turbo Drop riders. Then a lull.
The line to the Ladies stopped their primping and looked up with everyone else, as if the answer to ‘why’ was above.
“Well, that was a close one, ladies and gents,” the announcer’s voice, popping with electronic feedback, belched through the loudspeakers. “Sit tight, while we clean this mess up, looks like we have an injured animal.”
Esme cringed, she had seen this many times. An animal straining to rise and save itself, its maddened eyes focused inward, its mouth fringed pink.
“Looks worse than it is.” The announcer crooned, “These animals don’t feel things like you and me.”
Her heart explodes. Invasion turns her insides out. Skins her, punctures her. She suffocates in the sleeve of the man’s moist, mulch stink. She tries to sit and gags hot air as something drops her, penetrates, knocking the breath out of her bruised lungs.
In Mexico, her uncle Theo knew each animal. He taught her how to soothe them, smoothing their flanks, his voice a soft hum. The animals responded, lifting their heads, letting him come up close to stroke them. He explained that when he talked, his voice was a vibration of his vocal cords. Even if animals didn’t know the words, they knew the vibrations. “How do they talk to you?” she asked.
“Most people are too impatient; you have to learn how to listen,” he said, “If you close your eyes, you’ll hear better.” He walked slowly as he put out feed for the cattle, so she could follow, holding on to his shirt tail. She closed her eyes, smelling fresh hay, and his pipe tobacco, hearing the vibrations of her uncle’s voice, feeling the crisp, warm hay under her bare feet. She listened for the animals, but only heard the mew of calves, the murmurings of horses in the corral.
Esme feared she was different from her Uncle and her Abuela, and later on, even her half-brother Gabe, who all had mysterious abilities.
Under the stadium, the crowd made way for two Flat Iron Rodeo Wranglers in matching cowboy hats, shirts, jeans and boots, their faces ruddy from booze. They signaled to the grounds crew to get inside the arena, and Esme watched Uncle Theo lean his broom against a steel column. The crew would hook the animal with ropes to a tractor and drag it out of the arena.
The man’s hands skin her. Probing. She watches him grow four arms. She tries to kick, but he holds her down. A drill blasts, cracking her skull, vibrating her bones, defining her head and spine, reminding her that she has legs and arms because they feel this pain divide her. Someone moans, a vibration in her, and she wants to tell them to shut up, but her tongue is a stone.
With the endless summer, drought and death came to the ranch. The cattle starved and crops failed, and Uncle Theo joined the seasonal migrants traveling north to Flat Iron, Colorado. He found a job in the Lazaretto, a former prison, where sick people were quarantined during a mysterious viral outbreak. Esme, her mother and Abuela moved with him. Her mother found a job on the kill floor at Shiloh Industries, the meat processing plant, where the VIROX-02 virus had sickened and killed so many workers that there were now plenty of job openings.
Now, the pain deafens her. Is this what happens when you die? She hears the swish of speeding cars. She bakes. Riding the wake of grief.
She remembered when the two Wrangler men saw her last night, and the tall one winked. The thick one grinned. She had pretended not to notice, fished her lip gloss out of her bag and applied it. Then she looked up and smiled. She adjusted the hem of her short dress and lifted her bleached copper hair from her neck, fanning herself. Round Up Rodeo, one of the biggest parties of the summer, was in the clubhouse, and Wranglers were known for inviting young Sponsored women to come for free. Esme wanted one of those invitations. Her stomach growled thinking of the trays of food on buffet tables, and fancy booze served with ice. Only the Elites had ice. She was always hungry; Happy Homes trailer park, where most of the Sponsoreds lived, never had enough food. Sponsoreds weren’t allowed to earn money, only rations of food, water, and electricity doled out by the Elites.
“Darlin’,” the tall one said, “Come on with us. You can use the Ladies’ in the Wranglers’ Clubhouse.”
Her heartbeat quickened; as victim’s advocate in the hospital, she had seen what could happen to women who went to those parties. But her friends had gone to the Wranglers’ Clubhouse before and outwitted those stupid, drunk Wranglers. She looked at the two men ogling her, and she wanted to spit, but she smiled instead. She knew how to take care of herself.
She can’t find her other sandal, so she carries the one she has as she returns to town. The hot tar burns her feet, so she walks in the ditch beside the road.
Her mother married a man she met in the production line at Shiloh. They moved into his one-bedroom house with a dirt yard. Soon, Gabe, Esme’s half-brother, was born. Esme was afraid of the man, and she missed her Uncle Theo.
As she walks holding her one sandal, the sky turns to steel, plunging earthward, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. Black clouds swell, and freighted with rain, lean into Flat Iron, exploding it. She drops into the ditch beside the road and curls into a fetal position, digging her fingers into the weeds, holding on. She feels the sky bear down; she closes her eyes to sheets of rain and keens with the wind.
Uncle Theo told Esme the smell that came from Shiloh was “las almas do los animals” – the souls of animals. “That kind of suffering poisons the air,” he said.
3
Flat Iron Rodeo
Smithy sat in the back seat of his father’s air-conditioned, white Wranglers truck with red, white, and blue “Flat Iron Rodeo” decals on the sides. They were headed back to the carnival grounds where the rodeo was underway. His father warned him and his older sister, Missy, not to eat snacks or get their feet on the seats. His father was hungover from the Rodeo Round Up party last night, so no one was going to argue with him.
At age eleven, Smithy had given up on pleasing his father, and anyway, he was afraid of him. Missy was in 10th grade, and all she thought about was boys. As usual, she was hunched over her cell phone, probably texting her Elite friends about Gabe, the Sponsored boy she liked, who used to go to school with them before Elites outlawed education for Sponsoreds.
Their father would kill her if he knew. He hated Sponsoreds, who he said were poor because they were lazy. “It’s only right they work to earn their keep,” his father had said when the law passed that capped Sponsoreds’ incomes, with automatic deductions for housing and food rations. “We’re wasting valuable resources on them. Once the wall is finished, Sponsoreds will be exiled from the Renewal Zone, and crime will go down.”
Smithy stared out the window humming softly with the vibration of the engine. On the main road, they passed spindly trees and dried shrubs. Smithy tried to remember when there was green and everything wasn’t dying. And when their mother still lived with them.
“Fucking Sponsoreds!” his father yelled and swerved the truck to avoid hitting a ragged looking family.
The swerve made Smithy queasy like he had the flu. Everything felt wrong, but he couldn’t explain it even to himself. He pressed his forehead against the window, still humming into the vibration. His bones vibrated like when he was on the moving walkways they had at airports when there still were functional control towers, and planes to take off.
The last time they were in the Denver airport was just before the tsunamis smashed into the coasts. While he and his father and Missy waited for their flight Smithy had passed the time running on the travelators in the wrong direction. Then he’d let the conveyer belts carry him backwards pretending not to hear his father yelling until he caught him by the sleeve and hissed, “This isn’t a fucking playground, do you want to miss our flight? Snap to it,” his father barked, “we don’t have all day.” They were at the departure gate, going to Disney World to get their minds off missing their mother. Smithy lost his boarding pass. His father put his flushed face down to Smithy’s, “Jesus, can you do anything right?”
Then the loudspeaker cackled, “Attention passengers, air traffic has been suspended. All arrivals and departures have been cancelled.”
“I found it,” Smithy waved the crumpled boarding pass at his father.
“Quiet,” his father slapped the pass, as passengers waiting to board erupted into angry murmurs, and the flight crew pushed their way out of the plane.
They didn’t miss the flight. There was no flight. No power grid. No internet. No cell phones.
That was a month ago. Now his father steered the truck onto the street that led to the carnival grounds. It was divided into separate lanes by rows of orange traffic cones. The Wranglers had put his father in charge of traffic control and parking; Smithy envied the other kids whose fathers did the fun jobs like book entertainment or manage vendors.
The parking attendant waved them to the reserved lot for Elites who hung their tags from their rearview mirrors. Smithy watched the lines of beat-up cars at the Sponsored entrance, waiting to pay admission, their windows rolled down, fanning themselves. He felt bad they didn’t have air-conditioning.
Missy craned her neck toward the carnival grounds and Smithy knew she was looking for Gabe, who worked there when he wasn’t working at Shiloh. Gabe had always been nice to Smithy at school and wasn’t an asshole like the other football players. But then he was kicked out and forced to work shitty jobs when Elites took over and founded the Renewal Zone.
A potbellied man in jeans and a western shirt waved them through the giant iron Elites gate with his cowboy hat. They followed a row of cars and pickups to a gravel roadway lined with old banners that said, “Flat Iron Rodeo, the world’s largest!” Smithy tried not to think about whether there were other rodeos – or people - left in the world after the tsunamis.
His father parked the truck with the rest of the Wrangler trucks. Ten polished, white RamRod trucks all in a row, shimmering in the blazing sun.
“What’s this?” Missy asked, as she climbed out of the truck and held up a strappy black sandal.
For a moment their father looked like he’d eaten some bad food. “Where’d you find that?” he said this like it was Missy’s fault. He grabbed the sandal by its thin little heal.
“It was under the seat.” Missy took a step back.
“Must have fallen out of a box of donations I hauled,” his father said. Smithy felt a pit in his stomach. He knew when his father was lying, which was most of the time.
Missy and Smithy looked at each other and then watched their father toss the sandal in a metal trash can on top of dirty napkins and empty popcorn funnels. Then he signaled them to follow him. Smithy stared at the sandal until his father yelled ‘Hurry up.”
Smithy and Missy trailed behind their father to the clubhouse. Inside was air-conditioned and the Wranglers, all dressed like his father, crowded around the bar, drinking and laughing. Smithy shivered, and Missy got a root beer and sat in front of the flat screen TV. Smithy wasn’t allowed to stay and watch TV, instead he was going with his father to the bucking chutes because that’s where all the Wrangler fathers took their sons. The chutes were a row of heavy metal stalls, just bigger than the enormous bulls inside, where the rodeo hands got the animals ready for the arena.
First, his father went straight to the bar to pour himself a whiskey. He’d be there a while, so Smithy went to find the mini pitchers of syrup they kept in the pantry. He took one to the window that overlooked the carnival grounds, and watched the crowds of Sponsoreds lining up for rides, and popcorn and cotton candy.
Dipping each finger into the syrup and wrapping them with his tongue, Smithy searched the crowd for his mother. He looked for his mother everywhere, hoping she had escaped the Lazaretto. It almost made him cry thinking about the Lazaretto a few miles outside of town. It used to be a prison; but when VIROX-02 started, all the quarantined people were taken there. Quarantine was only supposed to be for forty days, but his mother had been gone for much longer than that. He had heard that it was also where Sponsoreds ended up when they got taken by roving Posses.
Smithy felt the air begin to purr, sending goosebumps on his arms. He swallowed what was left in the mini pitcher and walked through the clubhouse where the Wranglers were laughing and tossing back drinks.
He was always the first to know a storm was coming, and he went outside and watched the sky. Soon a cottony whisper churned the air, stirring up restless murmurs from cages and kennels and stalls. Still, no one in the Clubhouse or on the carnival grounds noticed. When hail the size of golf balls burst from the low, dark skies, pummeling the ground, ricocheting from roofs and metal rides, it took a minute for everyone to whoop and scamper for cover. Smithy let hail slam and bounce on his head and shoulders, breaking through his numbness. The numbness was a bad feeling, and he had it most of the time, like he wasn’t in the world. The hail made him feel like he existed.
“Don’t’ you have any sense?” his father yelled and yanked him under the awning in front of the Clubhouse to stand next to Missy, who for once, wasn’t looking at her cell phone. Her eyes were wide and scared.
“Shelter!” someone yelled, and like an electric current activated people’s neural centers, they swarmed out the clubhouse door, trampling the plastic lawn chairs. The carnival rides and grounds emptied as Sponsoreds ran for cover wherever they could find it. His father’s big hands grabbed Smithy and Missy, yanking them past the other Wranglers toward the trap door of the Elites underground shelter. Cowboy hats tumbled into screaming arcs of wind, and the Wrangler men with bald heads looked naked, and the ones with hair looked shocked like in the cartoons, their hair standing up straight. Paper cups hiccupped, spilling red and pink and brown drinks that streaked the ladies’ shirts.
Smithy tugged against his father’s grip, “What about the animals?” he screamed. But his father, face pressed into the howling wind, shouted the animals weren’t their responsibility and hurry and get in the cellar. Then he shoved Smithy and Missy into the underground shelter and crammed himself in as the other Wranglers and their families, eyes wide, mouths agape, jostled for space inside.
They all pushed into the cramped space until no one could move, and then they pushed in more. Finally, someone shut the door, and they became one in the heaving, sweating dark.
“Where’s the light?” a man barked. Smithy recognized Brice’s voice. “Someone turn on the fucking light.” Brice was loud and bossy, like Smithy’s father, but he had more power because he was the Wranglers’ boss.
“Bulb’s gone,” said someone.
“Well, ain’t that a howdy-do?”
“Which moron decided it wasn’t necessary to check the bulb in the emergency shelter?”
Smithy closed his eyes and opened them to see if it made a difference in the felted darkness. It didn’t. Too many sweaty arms and legs and feet and heads squeezed into the damp square of space underground.
He tried not to breathe too much, trapped in the damp cocoon of his father’s sweat and whiskey breath. Missy smelled like booze, too; she must have been drinking from the glasses people left on tables and forgot they had.
The pressure from the tornado made Smithy’s ears hurt and gave him a headache. All around him whimpers and prayers in the dead air, and darkness molded to his face, merging with his damp skin, suffocating him. He wished his ears would hurry and pop.
He sensed the animals waiting in their pens and cages, huddled together, smelling each other’s fear, and the tinny moisture of the storm mingled with hay, manure, and wet cement. He had heard of twisters that vacuumed whole towns clean, sucking trucks, houses, sheds, barns, trees, cows into orbit.
He closed his eyes, and the world above them strained and groaned. Someone howled against the roar, “God save us, I don’t want to die.” Something huge crashed against the shelter door, then another crash and another, and the door trembled. Smithy imagined Godzilla out there, ramming stuff at the world. It was impossible to feel sound unless you were right next to a drum, or something, but he felt the animals, penned in, screaming from the corrals, the barns, the bucking chutes. Their terror possessed him like a nightmare, and he cried out.
“Stop it,” his father’s breath was damp and warm, “We’re all stuck in here; don’t make it worse.”
Then, silence, as if a drain had opened and sucked the noise out of the world. Smithy’s heart thumped hard against his ribs.
“Holy fuck,” someone said, and Smithy realized it was Preacher Chuck.
Smithy had heard the preacher cuss before, when he came into the Wrangler Clubhouse for free whiskey to fortify him before he climbed the stairs to the announcer’s booth, gasping and sweating, to say the opening prayer for the rodeo. He always wore a narrow purple scarf draped over his cowboy shirt with sweat circles under his armpits, and a rhinestone cross stuck in the brim of his cowboy hat. He carried a Bible, trailing thin silk ribbons, like tentacles, that held the places a preacher would want to have handy. Like the right verse to make someone feel bad when they sinned or to save a soul when someone died.
“We should be thankin’ sweet Jesus,” someone said.
“Open the damn door, and I’ll give thanks when I’m outside.” Preacher Chuck sounded like he had marbles in his mouth.
They were packed so tight that when one person moved everyone did. So, when they all wanted out, Smithy was nearly crushed in the steamy crowd.
“Watch out,” his father huffed, “Watch out.”
Outside the shelter, it felt hotter than ever. The ground looked white as winter from the hail; and as they watched, it dissolved into mud puddles, making the air so humid and heavy it was hard to breathe. The carnival around the rodeo looked like it had been shook and dropped, which Smithy guessed it had.
Smithy watched Sponsoreds shuffling out from wherever they all sheltered, looking dazed, like they just woke up. His ears never popped, and his brain was still whistling, screaming inside, like the storm got trapped inside him. Or maybe that was the animals shrieking inside his head. Or maybe it was his mother crying for help. Did Lazarettos have storm shelters? Was that where she was?
Once, after their mother had been gone for more than forty days, Missy had said “Sometimes they don’t let you come home. Even after you get better,” They had been snooping around in their father’s gun safe for any letters or notifications. That’s where he kept papers and things he didn’t want them to see. He didn’t know they had the combination. “I know about people who got put way out in the prairie.” Missy said as she shoved the file box back in the safe before closing and locking the door. “There’s nothing in there about mom. Fuck.”
Smithy was always looking for his mother in the crowds of Sponsoreds, because even if they put her out in the prairie, he knew she would find her way back to them.
4
Welcome to Flat Iron
Vee’s ears rang in the aftermath of the storm, and her heart throttled her chest. Dread and exhaustion pumped through her adrenaline addled limbs. Climbing out of the trench beside the highway she surveyed the skeletal, leafless trees, the fractured farm buildings, and upended grain silos. This landscape had taken so many beatings, it was difficult to distinguish what this storm had destroyed from the damage accrued in years of drought, fire and previous storms. The air vibrated with undetonated energy as she followed the other passengers back into the bus. Heat bore down, penetrating the bus interior as the engine rumbled to life, and Vee squeezed back into her cramped seat next to Casper.
The miasma of ammonia and waste fumes from the stockyards mixed with diesel exhaust, churning the air and Vee covered her nose and mouth with her hand. The bus roared as it picked up speed and she stared out the window at the dried crop fields. A billboard came into view: Welcome to Flat Iron, A Proud Renewal Zone, and just beyond it, a massive construction site. A giant grid of iron beams and cross bars extended east and west from either side of the highway. Vee felt a jolt, this must be one of the walls Casper had told her about that would secure the perimeters of every municipality in the Renewal Zone.
“Regulation twelve-foot military grade construction,” Casper said with awe, “They’ll have locked gates soon enough and top it with razor wire.”
“They?” Vee said, as she stared at the mammoth scaffolding.
“The Elites,” Casper said.
“Of course,” Vee said. The old U.S. government had collapsed as Elites coopted financial institutions, real estate, and businesses. With wealth concentrated in the 1%, Elites instituted laws that stripped rights from anyone who couldn’t buy favor. They seized private property and created a Sponsorship program. The Sponsored class, in return for labor, earned temporary housing and rations of food and water.
“Resettlers are screwed,” Vee said. “Without resources or income, we’ll be Sponsoreds.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Casper said, pensively.
“Who are the walls keeping out?” Vee asked.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Casper’s expression darkened, “I hear they’ve started sending disorderly Sponsoreds to the Lazaretto along with the infected.”
“What does ‘disorderly’ mean?”
Casper shrugged, “Don’t want to find out.”
Vee stared out the window, her sense of foreboding building as the bus left the highway, and the town of Flat Iron materialized, its cracked sidewalks dark with melting hail from the recent storm. It looked forsaken, with tumbleweeds in the streets, empty storefronts, some boarded up, others with smashed windows. People in western gear, sluggish and leather skinned, looked up as the bus approached, their faces etched with dust and sweat, their eyes glazed. Vee felt a wave of revulsion and fear at this monstrous reality.
The Customs checkpoint was a rusted trailer behind a row of four plywood booths--each with a uniformed, armed officer squinting under a sweat-stained cowboy hat. Next to the checkpoint, additional officers stood in front of a mobile medical unit where people in scrubs, masks and protective gloves checked vitals. Most ominous were the rows of windowless vans parked and waiting.
“Quarantine vans,” Casper whispered, nodding in that direction, “here goes,” and he popped an UpTab into his mouth. He looked defeated, his bravado gone, “Don’t want to start our time here in the Lazaretto.”
Vee’s hand trembled as she fished an UpTab out of her packet and dissolved it on her tongue. She still had nightmares about the first outbreak in Manhattan before UpTabs were developed.
There had been an unearthly silence in Manhattan when health officials quarantined the city. Only first responders moved about, wearing protective, biological survival gear. They put out fires, patrolled the streets, and staffed the hospitals, in a surreal pantomime of an alien invasion. All public buildings were shuttered; the clinic where Vee worked was shut down and all staff sent home. With residents confined to their homes, there were no blaring horns, no revving engines, no grinding metal, or curses or cat calls. Manhattan was like a tomb.
Vee watched Daniel suit up in protective gear before he left for the hospital. From their window she saw him lope across the deserted street, resembling an astronaut, slow motion in his hazmat suit.
Quarantine patrols were everywhere, and Vee watched unmarked vans roll through the deserted streets at regular intervals. Rumors spread that quarantine was like Siberia - no one would return. Quarantine stations, called lazarettos, were set up all over the country.
Now, the Resettlement bus shuddered to a stop. Its door opened to a path defined by parallel ropes strung waist high, zigzagging to the podiums. Casper stood and pulled their backpacks from the overhead luggage bins, handing Vee hers.
They filed out with the other passengers onto the sidewalk, and surrounded by the sharp tang of the feedlots, formed a line for Customs. Outside the ropes, people stepped over downed tree limbs from the recent storm and piles of trash. Cars dodged overturned trash barrels, their tires lisping through puddles.
Casper looked flushed and logy in the late afternoon heat, and Vee realized she probably did as well. She hadn’t anticipated a health screening. It had been a while since the last outbreak. Either there was a new hot spot, or Resettlers were suspected of bringing the infection with them. She wondered how many Resettlers were destined for the Lazaretto and shuddered realizing how vulnerable she was.
An officer scrutinized Vee’s passport and her English proficiency certification required for entry into the Renewal Zone. He waved her to the Health Station where, with dread, Vee took a thermometer and put it under her tongue. Her heart raced, and she tried not to gag, from nerves and the feedlot odor.
When Vee turned in her thermometer, the officer looked at her, “Ma’am,” she signaled for Vee to stop. “You’ll need to give us a second reading.”
“I’m not sick.” Vee fought panic, as she looked at the woman’s masked face. Had she finally developed resistance to UpTabs?
“Go on, Ma’am,” the woman said, keeping her distance, and pointing to a row of chairs under an awning. Then she said, without conviction, “It’s probably just a temperature variation caused by the heat on the bus. Sit in the shade for a few minutes, and then we’ll take it again.” Vee joined the group of dirty, exhausted Resettlers and took a seat, wondering if she would soon be climbing into one of the vans destined for the Lazaretto.
Why was she trying so hard to survive? Would death be so bad?
She had met Daniel when she was in graduate school, earning money as a work study student in the grants administration office of a teaching hospital. One night she was sent to collect signatures for a grant application in a remote wing of the medical center that housed the anatomy labs. The place spooked her, and her head ached from the odor of formaldehyde that leached into the hallway as she waited for the grant to be signed.
Finally, a medical student came through the heavy metal doors of the lab and handed her the folder. His stained white lab coat smelled of formaldehyde, and he hadn’t shaved. Dark haired and dark complexioned, he was disheveled and preoccupied, sleepwalking really, his face a mask of exhaustion and something remote and sorrowful. His tortoise shell glasses were safety pinned where the hinges had failed, his shirt cuffs frayed, and khakis bleached from washings.
They smiled the way survivors smile without being happy, and she felt as if they had always known each other. In their early weeks together, they met at night when the rest of the world was suspended in the limbo of sleep; they found ways to escape for a few hours at a time, releasing into the mercy of touch, speechless and blind in the dark.
He told her about the anatomy labs lit from the ceiling with banks of high caliber fluorescent tubes bathing rows of stainless-steel tables, dissecting tools, and bloodless, gray cadavers. The bodies got names like ‘Slim’ and ‘Flo’, and sometimes stories came with them, of tent cities in Queens or prostitution in the Bronx, though there was no one to confirm their stories’ veracity. Soldiers for science, the dead were flayed and disemboweled by a fleet of gowned students who memorized Latin medical terms for organs, muscles, and bones.
The smell of formaldehyde was impossible to wash out, though Daniel wore gloves, lab coat, shoe covers, goggles, and showered before he came to her bed. From all the dissections, his hands smelled the worst. As he told her these stories, Vee imagined the souls of the dead, gathered like clouds above their earthly bodies, watching the gowned, gloved medical students take them apart.
On rare nights when Daniel wasn’t studying in the library or the labs, Vee made dinner at his apartment. He struggled to stay awake, and when they got into bed, she lost him to ardent slumber. She lay next to him, pressing her nose against the skin of his arm, his shoulder, his back, or his chest, inhaling his scent, a mix of musk, Ivory soap – and in that first year the faint cloy of formaldehyde, no matter how many times he showered. In the winter Vee drew the covers up, as if a cocoon of warmth could protect them from the unknown. This was how she loved him, enduring his absences during medical school and residency, and then when he joined a clinical practice in the hospital.
Then, when the climate crisis turned the world into endless summer, New York City baked, and most of their friends and colleagues moved to the countryside in search of a sustainable life. Vee and Daniel remained in the city, eventually packing their winter clothes and dumping them into bins placed throughout the city to be recycled into God knew what. It felt like a death. It was a death.
Dropping her winter boots into the recycle bin, Vee longed for the days of cold and snow when she first moved into Daniel’s sixth floor walkup with its bathtub in the kitchen. When she still believed that he loved her. Breathless, and shaking the snow off their boots, they had carried up the last boxes, drawn a bath and toasted the future with cheap champagne. The world was deceptively beautiful then, encased in ice. Now everything was collapsing.
Daniel often came home after Vee was asleep. Or she pretended to be asleep, and they lay in bed, parallel and apart, in the languid heat. One night, when she couldn’t stand it anymore Vee whispered into the void between them, “Are you awake?”
In the humid darkness they lay on their backs. The window fan turned warm air in feeble rotations, and Vee felt the heat radiating from Daniel’s damp skin inches from her. He was quiet for so long she thought he was asleep.
“Yes,” Daniel finally answered.
“I can’t go on like this,” she said, not sure what that even meant. Sweat formed around the crescents of her breasts and rolled down her ribs. Her heart raced. Daniel shifted, and she held her breath. She rolled on her side to face him, leaning toward the musk of him, thinking he was reaching for her.
But he didn’t, and she didn’t cross the inches that separated them, as she had done countless times before, to make him fold his arms around her. She could barely discern his features in the dark.
“I’m tired,” Daniel murmured, “my shift starts in four hours.”
“We are the living dead.” Vee felt sick and doomed. She couldn’t distinguish anymore what was Daniel’s despair, and what was hers. “I want to live,” she said.
"I don’t feel anything,” he said.
She understood that he didn’t love her, and in her despair, she hoped this was because he couldn’t love anyone.
After his death she felt confounded when the odor of formaldehyde made her weep, as if the cadavers’ souls had trailed Daniel home from their first year together and claimed her.
When the officer returned for the second reading of Vee’s temperature, she was joined by an armed Medical Escort. Vee felt light-headed and swallowed hard, as she took the thermometer and put it under her tongue. She stared at the ground under their watchful eyes. When it pinged, she didn’t read it before handing it back. She watched them each examine it, and look back at her, before turning away to confer.
“Well, I guess it was the hot bus ride. Temp’s normal,” the woman said as she took Vee’s Health Clearance booklet. “If it goes up again, you’ll be required to turn yourself in for quarantine screening. Do you fully comprehend and agree to your obligation to support a healthy Renewal Zone?”
Vee nodded.
“I need a verbal.”
“Yes.”
The woman stamped the booklet and made a notation, before handing it back to Vee and pointing her to the Resettlement gate. Vee wiped the sweat from her face, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and joined the line waiting to be cleared through the exit.
“Ma’am,” a guard motioned to Vee and reached for her documents. His meaty fingers left damp smudges on the Health Booklet as he flipped to the Health Status page. Her pulse hammered in her neck and head, and she held her breath until he waved her through.
To her astonishment, Casper was waiting for her on the other side of the gate. He smiled when he saw her. “I guess you’re just too ornery to get sick.”
Vee choked back a sob and wiped her eyes roughly with the back of her wrist.
“Woah,” Casper said, putting a tentative hand out to pat her back.
“Oh Christ,” Vee hissed and swatted his arm.
Casper blushed and backed away. He looked around at the people holding signs that read: Welcome to the Renewal Zone with names written in magic marker. “You going to be ok on your own?” he asked, avoiding her eyes.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Casper hoisted his backpack up on his shoulder. “Ok then.” He hesitated, looking confused and wounded, and Vee felt a pinch of remorse. When he turned away, she watched his Stetson bob above the crowd until he disappeared.
Vee reached into her pocket and touched the packet of UpTabs. Her time was running out.
5
The Bucking Chutes
After the storm, the Elite clubhouse filled up with Wranglers looking for air-conditioning and cold beers to fortify themselves before heading out to prepare for the rodeo show. Smithy and Missy followed their father inside. Missy stole a six-pack of wine coolers and took off to the carnival grounds with her friends. Smithy stayed behind, watching through the window as Sponsoreds commenced cleaning up rubble left by the storm. He was imagining the rampage of Godzilla when he realized the Wranglers were all huddled at the end of the bar lowering their voices and getting worked up. He moved closer so he could hear.
“You all need to hear this.” Brice’s face was flushed and he was mad, “Where’s Ted?”
“He’s headed to the bucking chutes,” someone said.
“Chief of Police called with a heads-up this morning,” Brice said. He took a swig of beer, and swallowed hard before continuing, “Some shit about a Sponsored in the emergency room. She was messed up pretty bad.”
“How is that our problem?” someone asked.
“She almost died, and they’re sayin’ it happened at the Round Up party.” Darla said, pushing her way through the group to stand next to Brice. She was the only woman who ever got involved in Wrangler business. She was married to Brice, the big boss, and she always acted like she was the real boss. “It’s our problem because one of you was careless.”
Smithy’s stomach lurched. For some reason he thought of the sandal his father threw in the trash.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” Smithy’s father asked, “since when do police get involved over a Sponsored?”
“Since today,” Darla snapped, “The rodeo is a family friendly event. Sponsored or not, this gets out it tarnishes our name.”
“One of you all better fix it,” Brice said.
Smithy watched his father work his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, moving his lips like a smile. Smithy knew that look. His father wasn’t smiling. Smithy backed away when his father came toward him, but it was no use.
“C’mon,” his father said, squinting at him the way he did when he had a hangover, “We’re goin’ to the bucking chutes.” He clamped his teeth around a toothpick like he was working something out in his head. “While we’re there you can learn how they prep the animals for the arena.”
Smithy knew not to protest even though it was hot as fire outside, and he hated the bucking chutes. He trailed behind his father whose pointy-toed cowboy boots stomped the dirt, full of menace. The grounds were littered with spilled food like buttered popcorn and cotton candy that had been blown around in the storm and smashed into yellow and pink gunk. It was crowded again, and Smithy wondered where all the Sponsoreds had sheltered, since they weren’t allowed in the bunkers. His father said it didn’t matter.
As they got closer to the chutes, Smithy sensed a disturbance, as soft as the vibration of a thousand zippers opening. It made him tremble, and he looked around even though he thought he must be imagining it. Then he collided into his father.
“Watch where you’re going!” his father barked, and Smithy saw that they were stopped at an archway with a view into the arena.
At the highest point above the stadium seats, surrounded by grids of equipment and speakers, Preacher Chuck was spreading his arms wide. “We’ve experienced a miracle right here in Flat Iron,” the preacher called out. “Storm tossed us around a mite, but no severe damage. Nothin’ we can’t persevere with the help of our Lord. Praise Jesus!”
“Praise Jesus.” Came hollers from everywhere, as people kicked at debris and shoved their way back to the arena.
Smithy wished they’d stop shouting; it made him feel like he couldn’t breathe, and it intensified the vibration that he couldn’t escape. He leaned against the concrete archway and tried to concentrate on the preacher instead of the vibration.
“The grounds crew is cleanin’ up, so let’s get back to the business of rodeo!” Preacher Chuck pumped his Bible with a stubby arm, so its ribbons trailed the air. “The almighty Lord saw fit to spare us. Praise Jesus.”
“Praise Jesus!” came the crowd’s response.
Smithy covered his ears. The vibration became a cry in his head, “Help!”
“What?” Smithy’s father looked at him, distracted and irritated.
Smithy didn’t know he’d said it out loud. “Nothing,” he murmured, wondering how the animals could scream into his head like that. Wondering if he was crazy. He leaned against the concrete archway and stared into the arena.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” Preacher Chuck called out. “Let us give thanks to almighty God for our beloved rodeo – the biggest in the world.”
A roar filled the arena, joining with the stout preacher, whose microphone bounced out high-pitched feedback. “Lord, we ask that you bless us as we celebrate your daily miracles in the Renewal Zone. And help us show our appreciation for the brave cowboys who are about to give us a show.”
The crowd went crazy, shouting themselves hoarse and hammering the concrete floors with their feet. Smithy’s heart sped up, and he didn’t even know why. He straightened up and looked out at the crowd.
“C’mon,” Smithy’s father signaled to follow him under the stadium to the chutes. Smithy took small steps and scuffed his sneakers like he was skating. He didn’t want to go. It was dark under the stadium, and it smelled of piss and shit. He jumped at the rat-tat-tat of the metal rails as the beasts stomped their hooves and battered the pens, and he stared at the bulls’ horns and the humps of their backs. The vibration radiating from the animals penetrated his bones, and their fear burned through him, like a fever. He approached the stall closest to him where a giant, shaggy head and a shining black eye watched him. They stared at each other, and Smithy put his hand on the warm metal latch.
“What the hell are you doing?” his father yanked his arm and dragged him away.
Smithy watched the animal staring at him as his father thrust him toward a huddle of rodeo hands sitting, standing, shouting on the rail above another frantic animal in the chute. They prodded, kicked and beat the animal, using their boots, whips and electric prods. His father told him this was how they got the beast riled up to give the crowd a good show.
The meanest handler was Ted who had short, bristly hair and the face of a blowfish. Smithy thought he was big and loud enough to be a villain in a movie, and he thought again about the sandal in the trash and glanced at his father.
Then his father took Smithy by the shoulders, forcing him to look at his flushed, sweaty face. “Those animals are dangerous, so you can’t go near the bars, and don’t even touch the doors,” his father said, and Smithy tried not to look in his eyes, “Now, pay attention. When they open the gate, that sucker’s goin’ ta stampede into the stadium bucking and raging, givin’ the crowd what they came for.”
Smithy tried not to breathe the stale smell of booze, as his father lectured him about how lucky he was to be able to see the handlers prep the animals. Blah, blah, blah, his father went on and punched him on the shoulder like other fathers punched their sons. Smithy felt bile raise in his throat and the vibration became a howl.
Ted hollered and motioned to Smithy and his father to come over.
His father shoved Smithy through the rutted, stinking dirt, and they stepped over piles of hay and dung.
“Gotta have a word about last night,” his father called up to Ted, “C’mon down.”
“You still thinkin’ ‘bout that?” Ted guffawed and shook his head, “she was a hellcat.” He touched a bruise on his cheek and winced.
“One of these days you boys’ll take things too far,” a man holding a metal stick said from up on the rail.
“Can’t help it if we like a little fun,” Ted said, and shoved the bull with the heel of his boot.
“Shut up, Ted.” Smithy’s father snapped.
“Oh, looked to me like you were helpin’ it,” the man with the stick said.
Smithy thought they made everything sound dirty, and he glanced at his father, who adjusted his hat even though there was no sun to watch out for under the stadium.
“Come on down so we can talk,” his father called to Ted. Then he bit so hard on his toothpick it snapped in two, and he spit it out.
“Son,” Ted said to Smithy, like he hadn’t heard Smithy’s father, “You watch your Uncle Ted with the ladies, and learn from a master.”
Smithy didn’t like looking at Ted’s face, so instead, he concentrated on the animal in the pen. It was trying to tell him something.
“Your boy deaf?” Ted said to Smithy's father.
“He ain’t deaf,” his father said and knocked Smithy’s arm, “Just interested in seein’ these animals up close.” Lots of people asked his father if Smithy was deaf or dumb because he didn’t look at them when they talked to him.
“Here.” Ted held up a cattle prod to Smithy’s father. “Give this bull something to remember you by.”
His father took the prod and fired at the massive animal in the chute, and Smithy felt the explosion in his own bones. He squeezed his eyes shut when his father zapped it again and again. The animal had nowhere to go; the metal gates rattled and shook as it tried to escape. When his father shoved the prod into Smithy’s hand, Smithy opened his eyes and aimed away from the bull, then pulled the trigger.
“What the hell?” his father shouted, dodging the prod.
“Your boy’s tryin’ to kill you, I do believe!” Ted crowed.
Smithy felt the beast trying to come into his thoughts, and he looked right into its eyes. He felt an electric jolt, burning his hands and dropped the prod in the dirt, staring at the beast.
“Somethin’s wrong with yer boy.” Ted straddled the gate and used a whip to lash the animal’s hide. “Don’t he know better than ta throw good equipment on the ground?”
Everyone was always asking his father what was wrong with his boy. Smithy couldn’t tell if he did these things on purpose or if he couldn’t help it.
“You best come hear me out.” Smithy’s father was red in the face, and his eyes looked like they could drill holes through Ted. “We got a situation.” His father then turned to Smithy and picking up the prod he shoved it at him, grabbing him by the shoulder and hissing in his ear, “Take it and don’t be a sissy.”
Smithy didn’t budge, arms at his sides, he stared at the animal’s eyes. I won’t hurt you, he tried to say with his thoughts, even though he wasn’t sure how to do this.
“We’re wasting time.” Ted reached down. “Gimme that prod.”
Smithy’s father aimed the prod and lunged at the animal delivering a battery of electrical shocks that sent the animal into a fit, banging the gates, leaving his blood on the metal. Smithy stared through the bars and tried to send his thoughts, I’m sorry, into the chute. Then the men opened the gate on the other side, and the animal burst into the stadium sending up a roar in the crowd.
Ted jumped down from the rail, and Smithy’s father signaled for Smithy to stay right where he was while he talked to Ted and while the bull bucked and spun in the arena, sending up jets of dust and spittle and blood.
Much later, hours later, Smithy and Missy and their father were back in the truck, in the Rodeo parking lot, finally going home. Smithy’s head ached.
Someone blew their horn, and his father rolled down his window and pulled up next to Roy Pettijohn’s green pickup. Missy rolled her eyes. Roy, the town commissioner, lived across the street from them. He never stopped talking once he got started.
“Dad, let’s go,” Missy said, and Smithy got a whiff of wine cooler.
“Lush,” Smithy whispered halfheartedly.
“Shut up,” Missy snapped.
“You kids be quiet back there,” his father said, then turned back to Roy, “You hear anything about that foreclosure next door to me?” His father asked, “Prime hideaway for Sponsoreds.”
“City’s sendin’ someone over to assess the damage.”
“Dad.” Missy thumped the back of the front seat with her foot, “I’m bored.”
“You kids excited ‘bout the rodeo now your dad’s a Wrangler?” Roy called through the window, and without waiting for an answer he turned back to Smithy's father, “How about our barbecues? To be honest we’re all ’fraid to eat Shiloh beef cuz of the VIROX-02.”
“Cleaning crews already been there. No need to worry.”
“I hear tell hospital’s picked up business the last few days.” Roy squinted at Smithy's father, “and emergency room’s chock full since this mornin’. They’re settin’ up surge tents to manage the overflow.”
“Can’t go blamin’ Shiloh every time people take sick.”
“Tell you this much: Shiloh’s going to have to stop usin’ Sponsoreds on the production line. You know that’s how the meat got infected.”
“Gotta go now, Roy. Kids are hungry.”
“Tell you what,” Roy winked, “ship all them Sponsoreds outside the wall and git yerself honest workers to do the job right. Won’t have no more outbreaks, I’ll wager that.”
“Pretty soon we’ll have that wall completed, and we can start cleanin’ up the town.” Smithy’s father said.
“Don’t s’pose you could do somethin’ ‘bout ‘eau de stockyard’.” Pettijohn chuckled.
“Don’t want to. That’s the smell of money.”
“One more thing,” Roy said, “The wife’s hankerin’ for a couple of Gold Saddle tickets to the Rodeo. I figured you’re the cowboy to ask, now you’re a Wrangler.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Dad, c’mon,” Missy whined.
“Gotta get the kids home.” Smithy's father tipped his hat, “I’ll see about those tickets.”
“Hey, I better git goin’. I’m late pickin’ up a resettlement gal comin’ to live with the Missus and me. All the way from the Big Apple.”
“You see you don’t talk her to death.” Smithy's father said, “And let me know if she’s worth a look.” Ward laughed and rolled up the window.
Smithy watched Roy drive away and thought about a resettlement lady coming to live across the street from them. He couldn’t wait to ask her about the tsunami.
6
Endless Summer
Vee waited at the depot for a long time. The crowd dispersed and she wondered what she would do if no one came to pick her up. She didn’t know the name of the family she was to stay with. Overcome with heat and thirst and exhaustion, she sat on the curb, and resting her head on her knees, closed her eyes. She plunged into a cottony oblivion.
“I’ll wager you’re Vee,” a deep voice jolted her awake, and she looked up to see a man’s silhouette above her.
Vee stood and grabbing her backpack stepped back, ready to bolt. She was face to face with a peculiar man in a plaid cowboy shirt, faded jeans and a Stetson. Her heart hammered as she tried to get her bearings. How long had she slept?
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Elroy Pettijohn, at your service. You can call me Roy.” He extended his hand.
Vee looked at him warily, and he smiled, displaying uneven, stained teeth. His sunburnt face was nicked from shaving, and he looked as though he’d just stepped off a tractor, or a horse. Vee knew nothing about ranches or farms. Keeping her distance, she reached out and shook his hand.
“That’s a firm grip you got there,” Roy said.
Vee scanned her surroundings for other people. She had been taught as a child; never be stranded alone with a man.
“The wife wanted to come with me to pick you up, but she’s feelin’ poorly,” Roy said, and as if reading Vee’s mind he added, “That ain’t no story. It’s true. She’ll be waitin’ for us at home.”
He reached for Vee’s backpack, but when she backed away and hoisted it up onto her own shoulder, he nodded. “Independent, I see,” he said and gestured for her to follow him to a dark green pickup truck.
Vee didn’t move.
“I ain’t fixin’ ta hurt you or take yer things,” he cocked his head, “You look half starved to death, but I recon even half-starved you’ve got more bite than a prairie tomcat,” he chuckled, “so come on along.”
Vee understood she couldn’t stay at the depot indefinitely, so she followed Roy to his truck.
He opened the door for her, and she climbed in. She put her backpack on the floor between her feet, aware of the reek of stale sweat, dirty hair and the musty smell of the bus that clung to her.
Roy came around to the driver’s side. “Terrible thing you been through,” he said, and started the engine, “We saw the tsunamis on the newsfeeds here. Looked mighty bad.” He steered the truck from the parking lot onto the road, “The missus and I knew right then we wanted to open our home to one of you resettlers.”
“I’ll get my own place as soon as I can.” Vee said.
“No rush,” Roy said, “we have the room, and you need a place to get your bearings.”
“Thanks.”
“I never was a big fan of New York City, but I sure hated to see Lady Liberty knocked clear over and lyin’ under water like that.” He shook his head, “All them wrecked buildings and ships piled around her.”
“Please,” Vee said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She’d seen digital recordings of the damage when she reached one of the temporary inland resettlement shelters in Ohio. She and other evacuees, who had walked for miles once their vehicles ran out of gas, had watched the images in exhausted horror. Consecutive tidal waves deconstructed whole cities, sucking them into the ocean’s dark underworld. Filmed from above by cycloptic military drones, the roiling ocean swirled and heaved, churning up brick and stone, arching into the sky, blasting the coasts, spraying the drones with salt water. Wave upon wave thundered so loud that many evacuees insisted they had heard the roar from twenty miles inland.
Now Vee stared through Roy’s dusty windshield, taking in the sun-seared, rutted streets of Flat Iron. Hard to imagine this was on the same planet.
“The tsunamis were kind of like the flood, but without Noah’s Ark.” Roy said philosophically, “The Lord’s way of cleanin’ up,”
“What?” Vee hoped she misunderstood him.
“All the sin and pestilence,” Roy said, “just too bad He saw fit to wash away the good with the bad. Prob’ly sort it out in heaven, don’t you guess?”
“What are you talking about?” Vee’s heart hammered in her ears. She was on full alert now.
“You’ll understand once you’ve been here a while,” Roy said mildly, “We’re a community, livin’ by the laws of God – we practically have a church on every street corner. Me and the missus will bring you with us on Sunday. Do ya good.”
“No thanks,” Vee said.
“Oh, gosh,” Roy said, “Our church is a place you’ll want to go. We held a clothing drive, and that’s how all you resettlers have clean clothes to change into.”
Vee shut up. Until she got her bearings this man was letting her live in his home. She didn’t want to become a Sponsored, which is what would happen if she was unhoused and unemployed.
Roy continued to talk, hardly stopping for breath, and Vee had trouble concentrating. Religious fanatics repelled her. After the evacuations, as she trekked inland, she and other evacuees were confronted by missionaries preaching doom, handing out pamphlets exhorting repentance. The farther inland they got, the more missionaries met them with seductive promises of redemption tinged with judgement. Was everyone in the Renewal Zone a religious zealot?
“You see that?” Roy gestured toward a row of shops with signs written in Spanish. He shook his head. “It ain’t right. This is the Renewal Zone,” he said, “We shouldn’t have to hable Espanyol or any other gobbledygook language in our own country. This here’s why we require people to pass the English language test ‘fore they can come in. Once the wall’s finished, this town will do a cleaning.” He made a sweeping motion with his hand and gestured toward the line of crumbling brick storefronts where shadowy figures hovered under awnings and in doorways as if habituated to the watchfulness required of fugitives.
“What do you mean ‘a cleaning’?” Vee asked. A powerful aversion to Roy welled up in her.
“I reckon you’ll understand once you see what they’ve done to our town,” Roy said and grimaced, “For now, though, that ain’t your concern. You’ll be livin’ in the Elite part of town. Matter of fact, you’ll be livin’ across the street from Shiloh’s V.P., Ward Petrie. Won’t see much of him though. Got his hands full, cleanin’ up after a new VIROX-02 contamination at Shiloh. Plus, he’s joined the Flat Iron Wranglers. Rodeo frat boys is what they are, but don’t go tellin’ people I said that. Course, when they’re sober enough, they operate the Rodeo.” Roy shrugged, “Now Ward and I been neighbors a while. He’s raisin’ two kids by hisself.” He shook his head, “and just as well. His wife was trouble.”
Vee looked at Roy, whose pinkened skin sagged under his jaw giving the appearance that he had no chin. “What kind of trouble?” she asked.
“No respect for God’s law. I’ll leave it at that. My wife tried savin’ that woman’s soul, but some just can’t be saved.” Roy adjusted his Stetson exposing a band of sweaty white skin at his receding hairline, “Yep. Ward’s raisin’ a boy and a girl. Boy’s strange, I’ll say that.” Roy steered the truck into a housing development with generic faux brick houses, and two-car garages. Several houses looked abandoned. They were posted with “No Trespassing” signs.
“Since the outbreaks, there’s been foreclosures,” Roy said, nodding toward the signs, “But not to worry. We ain’t lettin’ the Sponsoreds move in.” He pulled into a driveway in front of an unremarkable two-story house. “Here we are.” Roy shut off the engine, and they climbed out.
Vee was shocked. She had expected Roy’s place to be some kind of old west ranch with farm machinery and animals. This was a tract home.
“Looks like the missus is waitin’ for us,” he said pointing to the front window. “She’ll take a shine to you, I’ll wager. Now, you’ll be staying upstairs in Roy Jr.’s room. Our son’s overseas doin’ the Lord’s work, savin’ souls. Don’t mention him to the missus; you’ll just start the waterworks. Haven’t heard from him in a while. What with the tsunamis, international communications are down.” Roy opened the front door and led Vee inside to a shock of cool air. It had been a long time since she felt anything but heat, and goosebumps spread over her; the feeling was so extreme it approximated pain. Vee hugged her arms.
Roy’s wife, Jolene, met them at the door in a pink cotton house coat and pink terrycloth slippers. She looked sickly, and when she hugged Vee, murmuring “Praise Jesus”, the papery skin of her arms quivered, and she smelled of talcum powder and medicinal ointment, “Oh, honey,” she said, then sniffed, patting Vee’s dirty arm, “you poor thing, we’re going to get you in the shower real soon. But first, you look about starved to death, follow me, I’ve made you a good dinner.”
The thick aroma of simmering spices, onion and meat overhung the room like a physical presence and Vee nearly swooned as Jolene filled three bowls with stew and put them on the kitchen table. They sat down to eat, and Roy and Jolene bowed their heads. Vee waited awkwardly, her stomach rumbling as they blessed the food. She hadn’t eaten anything substantial since she fled Manhattan weeks ago, and her mouth watered with something like lust. Finally, they said, “Amen,” and Vee scooped a thick, steaming spoonful into her mouth and chewed.
Jesus, she nearly wept from the intense, rich flavor. She hadn’t eaten beef since the first VIROX-02 outbreak, and she tried not to think about the cattle trapped in the stockyards, or the horror of the slaughterhouses as she chewed.
An electric spasm radiated into her jaw and down her neck. She gasped, squeezing her eyes shut against light beams that drilled into her head, nearly thrusting her backward. Something slammed into her, and as she tried to inhale, a pair of bloody, gloved hands aimed a cylinder between her eyes, smashing, cracking her skull as a cold metal hook lanced her shoulders and she fell back.
“Good lord, honey,” Jolene exclaimed, as Vee’s chair rocked back, “Roy, catch her.”
A scuffling, and Roy’s arms scooped Vee up, righting her chair. Vee looked up at his pale face, his mouth a gash of surprise, remnants of beef caught between his yellowed teeth.
“What on earth?” Roy mumbled as he fought for balance, “guess you better slow down there. I ‘xpect you haven’t eaten much for a while now. You’ll have to take it slow.”
“What’s wrong honey?” Jolene asked, hovering over Vee, her concern palpable, “Has this happened before?” She spoke to Vee with the placating, fearful tone of someone trying to tame a crazy person.
Vee shook her head, “I’m exhausted and haven’t eaten much since I left Manhattan.” She thought of the UpTabs in her backpack. This hallucination had been more vivid, as if transmitted directly from the beef itself. Cell memories. She stifled a gag.
“I’ll make her some plain toast,” Jolene said to Roy, going to the counter and opening a loaf of bread, “keep her away from rich food to start. Poor lamb.”
They ate in silence, Jolene and Roy keeping a watchful, wary eye on Vee as she nibbled toast, foggy headed and disoriented.
“Let’s get you settled in your room,” Jolene said, when Vee was done eating, “and while you’re here,” she jingled a ring of keys hanging by the kitchen doorway. “My baby would want you to have the use of his truck. He’s always helping others,” Jolene’s voice was barely audible as she began to cry.
“Now, Jolene,” Roy scolded, “We’ve talked about you carryin’ on like this. Our Roy weren’t no saint, and now he’s doin’ the Lord’s work like he should of in the first place.”
Vee imagined a younger version of Roy with a legion of other sanctimonious white missionaries quoting bible verses and teaching English prayers in remote villages. Had they, or anyone in the rest of the world survived the tsunamis?
“I know,” Jolene cried, “I know.”
“Go on and show Vee where she’ll be stayin’. Get her clean towels for a shower.” Roy took his hat from the hall table. “I gotta head out to a council meeting.”
After Jolene took Vee to Roy Jr’s room and showed her the neatly folded towels on the bureau, she wished her goodnight. Vee shut the door and looked around. She found a wooden desk chair and propped it at an angle under the doorknob. Her head buzzed from the quiet. It was the first time she’d been alone in weeks. The bed was made, and a Bible placed on the bedside table. Vee put it in a drawer. Flat Iron Rodeo posters with pouting cowgirls, in low slung skinny jeans and checked shirts hiked up and knotted above their navels, covered the walls. The window faced the street, and Vee looked across at what Roy said was Ward Petrie’s house, then pulled down the shade. After a shower she put on a clean t-shirt and sweatpants, took another UpTab and got into bed, wrapping herself in a blanket, grateful for the air conditioning, unaccustomed to such comfort.
As the UpTab dissolved, she shut the light and closed her eyes to conjure escape from Flat Iron’s hell-world to autumn in Manhattan years ago, before the endless summer, when trees still had leaves to shed, and the cold sky bellied low, pinched between tall buildings. She loved the chilly walk to Central Park, crossing over subway vents that belched stink and heat from an underworld that still felt separate and contained. The cold air, spiked with soot and car exhaust, burnt her lungs, and the words of passers-by puffed white clouds. Those were days she didn’t know to celebrate, because she could still believe nothing memorable would happen.
The endless summer changed everything. At first it was gradual as global warming disrupted ecosystems around the world. Natural habitats degraded and indigenous species became extinct. As more lands became uninhabitable, humans and animals shared smaller and smaller quarters, increasing exposure to previously unknown viruses, like VIROX-02. Spillover, the transmission of zoonotic disease from animals to humans became commonplace. This was how the pandemic began. And how Daniel died.
That fateful night, alone in their apartment, Vee got the phone call she had dreaded.
“Vee,” Daniel had said, with eerie detachment, “I won’t be home tonight. I’m in the Isolation Unit.”
“What happened?” but she knew. So many of Daniel’s colleagues had died from the deadly mutations of VIROX-02.
“We discharged a patient. He collapsed as he was leaving,” Daniel paused, “we couldn’t save him.”
“But you had your hazmat suit on – how could it have gotten through your suit?”
Daniel was quiet. Vee felt her knees buckle and she sat on their bed, cradling the phone to her ear. “You had your suit on, didn’t you?” She was trembling so hard, her teeth chattered.
“No. I had finished my shift, and was on my way out,” Daniel’s voice was low and measured, “he was in the lobby.”
“Oh, God,” Vee whispered. She imagined Daniel in his street clothes, bent over an infected, dying man, as others backed away. Daniel touching the man’s infected skin as he felt for a pulse, breathing the viral air as the man exhaled. She thought of the anatomy lab, and the ghostly cadavers Daniel had learned on years ago. They had caught up with him at last.
“I couldn’t just leave him,” Daniel said, his rebuke stung.
“Why not?” she demanded, seized by uncontrollable rage, “He was going to die anyway,” she screamed, “Why couldn’t you at least try to stay alive?” Her first sob sounded like a hiccup, and then incoherent cries cascaded from her mouth. Her rage and grief caught fire in her lungs and she screamed the truest words she could find,
“You’ve been trying to die for years.” She pried off her wedding ring and threw it across the room. “What the fuck made me think I could stop you?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” Daniel said flatly.
“No,” Vee cried, “please don’t hang up.”
Then nothing. She stared at the blank phone screen.
She ran the seven blocks from their apartment to the hospital and took the stairs to the floor that housed the Isolation Unit two at a time. But the door to the corridor was locked, and they wouldn’t let her in. A nurse in a hazmat suit spoke through the intercom, promising to let Daniel know Vee had come. “I need to talk to him,” Vee banged on the door, “Please.” She wanted to take back her last words. She thrashed the door again and again, but no one responded. Vee’s knees gave out and she sat on the floor. She looked at her ringless finger and wept in the dim, sweltering stairwell.
Now Vee trembled and stared into the darkness of Roy Jr’s room trying to anchor herself to the present. Muted streetlight bled through the window shade, reflecting dimly in the mirror above the dresser. Sports trophies lined a bookshelf, and medals glinted on the wall, ghostly remnants of a time when high school sports were a focal point of the Pettijohns’ lives. Her eyelids were heavy, and she thought she could sleep when suddenly the murky dark seemed to churn around her and the buzzing in her ears became unbearable.
A chimera appeared of a young woman caught in the headlights of a white pickup truck. The woman scrambled to her feet, her mouth stretched into a scream, as two, then four arms wrestled her to the ground. She strained to break free, batting the air with her arms. Her brown cheeks were streaked with mascara and her lips bruised purple. She lurched forward as if from a blow, and Vee, feeling the impact inside her own body convulsed in pain. The young woman looked Vee in the eyes, as if she was trying to communicate something. When no words came, Vee reached for her, but the woman vanished, and Vee stared into the ruptured, empty darkness. Her body ached as if her insides had been pulverized.
Until now her hallucinations had been of cattle; this young woman scared her more. The woman’s terror felt as real as memory. Vee wrapped her arms around herself and rocked.
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DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. While it may draw loosely on real world events or situations for inspiration, all characters, names, dialogues, and plot elements are entirely imagined. Any resemblance to actual people, living or deceased, guilty or innocent, is purely coincidental and not intended to represent those individuals.
© 2026, Ellen Szabo.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews or analyses.