Heat Death

Sweat dripped from Tara’s chin onto the sandstone. The heat coiled around her, settling oppressively in her chest. Even up in a shaded outcropping of the foothills, she could barely keep winding up the tangle of copper wire. Her hands moved slowly and mechanically. Twice the broken rebar she used as a spool slipped from her stiff left hand. She flexed her fused pinkie and ring fingers as best she could and resumed her task.

At least there’s not that much wire to deal with, she thought, grimacing. There’s the sad truth.

She’d had high hopes when she’d heard that they’d phased out Beatty’s formal evacuation and withdrawn the National Guard. She’d traded away most of her reserves for water to get there, a decision that was now best summarized as regrettable. The town had been picked clean by the time she arrived; all her salvaging had yielded was a couple hundred feet of copper wire, some inner tubes, and some cheap junk from the well-looted bookstore. Now, two days into the long ride back to Carson City, her haul seemed even more disappointing than it had when she’d left Beatty. The calendars from the bookstore were even a few months out of date. Maybe the refugee camp kids would be willing to pinch some jewelry for those bright, exotic pictures. Tara knew she’d better hope they would if she wanted to eat for the next month.

She tamped down the urge to climb down the boulders for the fourth time to see how much of a charge the motorcycle’s battery had. She would wait until noon to start her day’s ride like she’d planned. The bike needed the charge, and it wasn’t even that hot out yet. Her eyes swept restlessly over the flat plains beyond the foothills, pale under the sun-bleached sky, as her hands kept spooling the copper wire.

She froze when a faint shimmer flared up in the distance, right where the cracked ribbon of pavement met the horizon. Tara watched, riveted, as the wavering shine intensified, radiant in the thin hot air. Something metal, something moving her way. Something desperate enough to leave the protective shadow of the Highway Patrol for the abandoned municipal roads. Perhaps some refugees, or perhaps FEMA supply trucks headed down to Las Vegas?

Tara watched them come for a moment longer and then gathered the mess of copper wire into her arms. She needed to find a better vantage point.

***

Higher up, she could see their distant forms more clearly as they advanced. She refrained from using her binoculars while the sun was still high; the last thing she needed was a suspicious little glint of light off the lenses spooking the caravan. Six vehicles, two trailers. Their solar panels flashed blue-black like water mirages as they slowly made their way up the road towards her position.

Climbing up higher into the foothills had been more difficult than she’d expected. She rubbed the last of the menthol-infused tallow into her itching, aching scars and carefully did the stretches like the Oregon Separatist medic had taught her. Stretching would help reduce the contractures, he’d told her, though grafts would’ve been better.

She wondered about the medic as she worked the tallow into the scarred-over joints of her left hand, fingertips buzzing with menthol. How’d you wind up out here, she’d asked him one day, loosened up by Percocet. He hadn’t had the militia look. How’d you? He’d asked in return. Had she answered? She didn’t remember anymore. All that came back clearly from her time with the Oregon Separatists was the tang of antiseptic and the cloying reek that had percolated up from under her bandages, still fresh enough in her mind to make her stomach turn.

She kept her eyes on the distant vehicles and tried to get comfortable, resigned to a day spent observing the approaching caravan.

***

As the sun sank behind her that evening, the caravan pulled onto the shoulder of the road and Tara took out her binoculars. Children spilled from the vehicles, flecks of color and motion darting between the stretching, stiff adults. Tara studied them through the jittery magnification, piecing their relationships together. Five families, three singles. A total of ten kids and babies, two teens, and nine adults. Refugees, then. Perhaps she’d get her lucky break after all.

Evening labor commenced at a frantic pace in the cooling air. The adults and older kids worked quickly and efficiently to unfold auxiliary solar arrays to catch tomorrow’s early-morning rays. A man worked under the hood of a van. Clothes were sprayed down with cleaning enzymes and beaten on hastily erected clotheslines, dishes were scrubbed down, and children were lined up and handed portions of food from the small cargo trailer.

They worked hard and fast as if the show of resilience might improve their luck. It all had a nauseating familiarity to Tara. She’d never quite forgotten how it was to live knowing that her whole world was on the verge of falling apart. Always living under the shadow of the coming disaster. Don’t hurry so much, she thought to the refugees. It won’t make it any better.

She turned her attention to the trailers. She needed to know what they stored. A teenage boy ducked into the stock trailer, and she focused the binoculars, waiting for him to reappear. When he stepped back out, Tara saw his face clearly for the first time. A cold shock went through her, accompanied by a rush of memory.

Flames fell from Logan’s drip torch as he walked, leaving a line of fire that tore into the shivering waves of wheat. From behind, he seemed so much older than eighteen, bent-backed and weary. The reflective strips on his fire chaps flashed in the Kubota’s headlights as she pulled up alongside him.

Tara carefully put the binoculars down. Her hands shook too badly to use them. She realized that her breathing had gone fast and shallow, so she put her face in her hands and breathed through the spaces between her fingers.

What was Logan doing here? She’d never imagined that her family had left the farm, too, though of course they would have. In her mind, she’d preserved them as they’d been that day — perpetually hopeful that her mother’s genetic engineering would come to fruition at last, that her new strain of wheat could slow the collapse of the West’s agriculture. She wanted to picture them still working in optimistic defiance of the failure of the Colorado River watershed. She wanted to believe that they were still holding out against the terminally dry land and the violent sectarianism that had arisen all around them. She didn’t want them to be adrift in this world, where the crater of Lake Mead stared up like a dead, sunken eye at the ruins it once sustained.

Tara lurched to her feet and glanced down the hill towards her motorcycle. She stared down at its solar panels splayed out like wings as she considered her options. If she left now, she could put at least forty miles between herself and Logan before night set in. Forget raiding the caravan. Her hand itched for the bike’s throttle, but then her gaze drifted back to the small amount of copper. She had needed her trip to Beatty to pay off well, and it hadn’t. That copper wouldn’t trade for enough food and water to get her through the week, let alone enough to go out scavenging again. She’d been handed a second chance — God knew when the next opportunity would come.

With a sigh, Tara slowly sat back down, picked up her binoculars, and resumed her surveillance. There was a lot she needed to learn.

They kept communal supplies in the cargo trailer. There were three children under the age of five living with their mother in the beat-up pickup truck. The stock trailer was loaded with water and, best of all, gasoline. The kids liked to try to catch lizards when they weren’t being put to work on chores. Logan started reading with a flashlight when it got dark. That surprised her; he’d never been much into books. She wondered where her father was. How had he been separated from Logan?

By the time the sun sank behind the mountains, Tara had decided to take the small cargo trailer. She couldn’t outright sabotage the stock trailer; even the softest people would turn and fight if you cut their water supply. As night set in, a small group of men set out chairs in the back of the caravan and started a fire with trash and dry brush. They all leaned rifles against their chairs or across their laps. Tara supposed they thought they were keeping watch. She waited to see what kind of patrolling they did for over an hour as the night’s chill sank in. Eventually she concluded that they weren’t going to do anything; perhaps they considered their visible, armed presence to be a sufficient deterrent.

Some security, Tara thought as she picked her way down to the motorcycle. She rigged her ghillie tarp off the side of the bike and weighted down the loose end with rocks as quickly as she could. Under the tarp, she wrapped herself in her ratty Navajo blanket and tore open her last UNICEF emergency ration. After this, she was down to hardtack and stale bouillon cubes.

Waiting for sleep in the dark, her thoughts kept turning back to Logan. She breathed in the dense, musty smell of the blanket as if it could banish the memory of smoke.

“The wind is picking up. The wildfire’s right up on the firebreak by the house. We need to go back and get Mom out,” Tara told Logan. She had to raise her voice over the Kubota’s idling engine and the greedy crackling from the nascent fire.

“The firebreak will hold. Mom said she’d text if there was trouble,” Logan said without looking up. “If we can burn a controlled perimeter now, there won’t be fuel for the wildfire to cross over to the rest of the wheat. We can still save a few acres, and the house—” Another gust of wind buffeted them, and Logan’s fire line jumped higher. Heat washed over Tara and the smoke stung her eyes.

“What if it doesn’t work?” she asked, distantly aware of how plaintive she had to sound to him, how disloyal and cowardly she had to seem. Logan stopped and met her gaze. His eyes were hard, his chin jutting forwards a little. With a pang, Tara recognized an echo of her mother’s stubbornness.

“Don’t be stupid,” Logan told her. “The hotshot crews do this all the time. We’ll be fine.” Tara wanted to believe him with an aching desperation. After all, how could they return to their mother’s bedside and tell her that the fire had stolen her life’s work?

Tara shivered and wrapped her blanket tighter around herself. Sitting around in the heat all day must have messed with her head. After some rest she would be better. She would keep her memories locked down, and she’d get the job done.

***

The next morning, she packed her bike’s solar panels up and watched the caravan disembark. Once they were a safe distance away, she’d emerge from the shadows of the foothills and follow them. There was an anxious tightness in her chest that she still couldn’t shake.

It doesn’t mean anything that he’s there, she told herself. Don’t let it under your skin. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, fingers snagging on knots, and put her helmet on.

The long hours of riding helped put her at ease. The air coursed through her heavy armored jacket and pants, keeping the rising heat off of her, and her mind felt scrubbed clean by the relentless roar of the wind. The motor ran clean and strong, almost soundless beneath the wind. Once the caravan was over the horizon, she angled across the desert and got onto the road herself. It had been a long time since she’d been on pavement.

Tara still felt a vestigial stab of satisfaction racing along on the bike her mother had restored. She would have loved to see it working on the road at last. After Oregon State had pulled her funding and she’d relapsed, she’d abandoned that pet project altogether, turning every ounce of remaining strength towards engineering the seeds she claimed could save the West. Even then, despondent in her wheelchair, her eyes had lit up when she talked about her plans for the bike. In those moments Tara had been able to glimpse the version of her mother that had existed before her diagnosis, before they stopped talking about drought mitigation on the news and started talking about evacuation.

Her father had never exiled the project bike to the old barn with the broken-down tractor and Tara and Logan’s outgrown motocross bikes. As long as it waited in the garage, they could all imagine that the next remission was right around the corner. They had to support her mother’s work now more than ever, her father had admonished her and Logan. All they had to do was get this drought-resistant strain into circulation, and then everything would get better. Tara had repeated those words day after day like a prayer. Everything will get better. It was all she had been able to do during that last desperate summer.

Everything will get better, she’d whispered at night as the fire season approached, as early-warning evacuation notices showed up in the mail. Everything will get better. Everything will get better.

Tara hit a divot in the pavement and jolted back into the present. She hastily backed off her speed. Taking the road had been a mistake. It didn’t demand as much focus, so her mind was wandering and she was riding like it was the Vegas freeway. The convoy was doing her the favor of clearing out any traps set ahead, but carelessness never went unpunished for long.

For the rest of the ride, Tara forced herself to stay alert. As dusk approached, she veered off the road and swapped out her tinted visor for the clear one. It was time to close in. The caravan appeared on the horizon as clouds roiled across the evening sky, driven by the shifting temperatures. They glowed orange and red, burnished by the setting sun. She moved out further into the desert, slowly drawing parallel to the distant parked caravan as the light faded.

She mulled over whether to wait another night and dismissed the idea. She’d seen enough. She knew their security was weak, and she knew her target. She’d go in a few hours, once the half-assed guards were drowsy and everyone else was asleep. She stopped the bike behind a dense copse of brush and set about her preparations before it was completely dark. She cleaned and loaded her shotgun, then started on the flashbangs. She had enough supplies left for three if she skimped a little with the magnesium. The methodical work of assembling the PVC casings and building the fuses was reassuring but couldn’t quite set her at ease.

***

A paltry sliver of moon hung high in the sky hours later as she detached her belongings from her bike, leaving everything hidden under the ghillie tarp. She closed the miles between her and the caravan slowly, acclimating to riding in the minimal light. The bike was light and responsive without all the gear, and her blood buzzed with anticipation.

Murmured conversation drifted towards her along with greasy smoke as she approached. No light or movement came from within the shadowy hulks of the vehicles. She picked out the cargo trailer — they’d left it towards the front of the group, poised to bug out. Once she was within a hundred feet, Tara left her bike running and crept closer on foot, shotgun ready in her hands. Her faded black jacket and pants blended into the shadowy tangle of creosote and cheatgrass; moving slowly, she was invisible. At the back of the convoy, she heard the irregular murmurs of conversation.

Tara ducked from vehicle to vehicle, hunching over to avoid being glimpsed through a window. Warm firelight danced across dust-caked glass and pitted metal. Her shadow was distorted and predatory in the corner of her eye, her profile made inhuman by her full-face helmet.

Finally, she darted across the last exposed ground to the cargo trailer. The inert bulk of the stock rig blocked her from the sight of the three guards as she pulled the hitch pin and disconnected the chains and electric brakes.

She straightened, slipping the pin into her pocket, and caught sight of Logan’s van. For the first time, she was truly aware of their dizzying proximity. The time and distance she’d tried to put between herself and her family fell away all at once.

Instead of going to the north field as she’d been told, she’d taken the Kubota back to the house as fast as it would go. Logan was in denial. The firebreak wouldn’t hold. Embers could blow across the firebreak onto the house, and deep down, she knew that her mother wouldn’t call for help if they did. She wouldn’t let them abandon her work for her sake.

By the time Tara reached the house, there was smoke pouring from the upstairs windows. She sprinted into the house through the garage and up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom through the thickening smoke. The door’s handle seared her hand when she tried to open it, and she realized she was screaming her mother’s name.

Tara took out the first flashbang and grasped the fuse between gloved fingers. What did she want from Logan, anyways? To tell him what had happened in the house? To ask if he understood why she’d run? To learn if he’d felt the same dread that she’d lived with for so long, knowing that all their hard work wouldn’t save their family?

Tara slipped across the open space towards the van, glancing warily towards the campfire.

She preferred breaking into vehicles once their occupants were dead or gone. Picking the lock in the dark was agony; with her shotgun back in its sling and not her hands, she felt too vulnerable. Crouched on the far side of the van, she assured herself she was out of sight of the guards.

The side door of the van made a small chunk as it yielded to her lock picks. She eased it open and glanced inside. Watery moonlight slanted through the windows, falling onto Logan and two older people Tara didn’t know. The van’s suspension creaked as she stepped inside, and she froze, waiting for a reaction. Nothing. She gingerly stepped over the two adults and knelt in front of Logan. Her shadow fell over his face.

She opened her mouth but found that no words would come. It was hard to think straight past the aching welter of old remorse and longing. She reached for her brother’s shoulder.

She got halfway back down the stairs before she realized she was on fire. She stumbled back out into the garage, ripping at her clothes and choking on the smell of her burning hair before collapsing onto the dirt drive outside.

Logan must’ve sensed her leaning over him; he woke up before she touched him. His eyes went wide and Tara heard him suck in a startled breath. She put her hands up, placating, as he lurched upright. She still couldn’t find words for the all the things she’d wanted to say for so long — She wanted us to save her work, not her. I didn’t see her. It took two tries just to open her door, and a wall of fire rushed out when I did. Do you recognize my face?

The silver light fell directly onto him as he sat up. As their eyes locked, Tara realized that he didn’t look quite right. Logan would be older. He would be twenty-one now.

The strange boy’s mouth opened, and he might have said something. Tara heard only the roar of blood in her ears as she brought the butt of the shotgun down onto his temple.

The boy’s eyes rolled up and he fell back. The other people — his parents? — stirred at the sound. Tara stepped over him and crouched against the back doors of the van, pumping the shotgun. Her mind was reeling, scrabbling for a plan and coming up blank. The boy moaned. The woman opened bleary eyes and leapt up when she registered the intruder cornered in the back of her van.

Tara pressed a single finger to her helmet and shook her head in warning. The woman sat up and screamed, clutching at her husband.

Shouted queries came from the campfire at the back of the camp. Tara fumbled for the latches of the van’s back doors and burst free, lobbing a flashbang in the general direction of the guards. She bolted for her bike as headlights and flashlights ignited, scratching blurry streaks into her vision. The flashbang detonated behind her, and a gun popped off a few shots in blind retaliation as the guards faltered in the wash of light and sound.

Tara leapt onto the bike and circled the caravan, surveying her work. Shrill children’s screams needled through the air. The big stock trailer rumbled to life and began to pull forwards. People were leaping out of vehicles to fold up solar arrays, throwing them into truck beds as they pulled away. The first few cars were already tearing away down the road.

She watched as the truck hitched to the cargo trailer took off across the bumpy ground. In a matter of seconds, the trailer came loose, fishtailing wildly. A car swerved to avoid it, but nobody stopped. The truck hauling the stock trailer took up the rear of the fleeing formation. It was over — just a grocery run. No problem.

Tara came to a stop and leaned on the handlebars, catching her breath as the cluster of taillights shrunk into the distance. The adrenaline subsided, and her scarred joints began to ache.

When the fire was finally smothered, she’d barely been able to get back to her feet. Her left leg wouldn’t take her weight. Soon the flames would engulf the house all the way. The bike sat in the garage, a few yards from where she’d fallen. She hobbled towards it.

At last she found the words she’d wanted for Logan.

“I didn’t mean to run,” she said to the empty black sky. “I was gonna take the bike down to get Dad from the field. Get help. I don’t — I didn’t…” Tara hadn’t cried much since she’d kicked Percocet three years ago, but now racking sobs folded her over against the bike.

The last thing she remembered of that day was racing down the dirt driveway towards the open road instead of back towards her father. Had there been conscious intention beneath the blinding pain and panic? The wind had torn at her burned flesh like sandpaper, but beneath that, there’d been a cathartic rush that was almost like joy. The thing she’d feared most had come to pass, and now it was over. She was free, she was roaring down the road at last; and it hurt, but it felt like flying.

The Oregon Separatists had told her that they’d found her in a ditch some forty miles away from the burned-out farmhouse. They said it looked like she’d stopped and put the bike’s kickstand up before stumbling into the ditch on foot, delirious. She still couldn’t remember that for herself; she had to rely on the accounts they’d given her as she convalesced in their improvised infirmary.

When they had first gotten her lucid, their medic had asked if anyone would be looking for her.

She’d said no.

---

KAITLIN GOSSETT is a sophomore biology student who plans on studying animal behavior and cognition. She also writes and edits for the webcomic Romantically Apocalyptic.

#fall2017 #fiction