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.
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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.
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.