The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read online

  No one notices.

  Looking for a place to practice, we enter the cold halls of the hospital and take the stairs up to the roof. A docked helicopter sits like a forlorn spider, and we can see the city from every direction. We see the blast-marks and smoke from our old neighborhood. When we start practicing, we face away from it.

  The princess makes us more powerful. She adds in sound where there’d only been silence before. She gets us, and maybe soon, if everything goes well, we’ll become the Four Ring Dragons.

  We play and look down on the kids on the hill. They move like puppets whose master keeps forgetting about them. I can’t look too long without a numbness floating up in me.

  We write a song about them. Not a song to start with, but one to end with. We’ve never written a song for so many people before. Maybe with the princess it will work.

  At dusk we walk down the cement stairs and out onto the overgrown field. Kids lie motionless on the grass. Others light a pile of dried brush and throw slabs of grey meat onto the flames.

  “Think it’s safe to eat?” Miranda asks.

  “No. It probably comes from around here,” Zaki One says.

  “Going to eat it anyway,” Zaki Two says. “No choice. We never get a choice.”

  “Let’s play first,” I say. “Let’s play hungry. It’ll give us an edge.” Something in the air feels different tonight. The fire reminds me of summer camp, sing-a-longs, and marshmallows.

  I tune my guitar and play like Jimi, then Page, and then Johnson. Just to show off a little. Then I start to play like me. Like everything I know and everything that’s happened comes into my music.

  “Been standing so long,” Miranda croons, and then repeats it.

  The princess echoes, “So long, so long,” on the backbeat. Zaki’s flute and harp come in under and over my guitar.

  “Been standing so long I forgot how to sit. How to leave. How to fly.” It’s one of the first songs we ever wrote together. We rock it. Even the princess doesn’t miss a note.

  Like mosquitoes at dusk, kids draw near and surround us. They stand too close. The princess swirls around and forces them to back off. We reach the end of our first song, and I see a few kids crying.

  Pain is good.

  Our next song cuts deeper. It’s stripped down and harsh. We wrote it a couple of years ago; back when we were playing to sold-out shows and kids remembered how to thrash. Miranda screams and I break a guitar string trying to match her. Around us kids sway like it is a love song.

  Feel, I think as I play. Remember. Wake up. We can still make something in this world. The anger in the song thrums out between my fingers like artery blood from a deep wound.

  We play another song, and another. It feels like every kid left in the entire city gathers around us. I see someone smile. I see a couple of people dance together. I focus on the music and what we are saying with every word and chord.

  Survive this. Wake up. Wake up.

  We are playing better than we ever have. I feel reality changing around us, just a little. Then it comes time for us to sing their song—the one we wrote today. My hand cramps. I feel thirsty and a little dizzy, but none of that matters. I let the music use me.

  Their song is big, brash, and violent. It starts hard and it keeps on going. We play it like the numb doesn’t exist. We play it to break them apart. As I play, I imagine we could start something here. We could grow food and keep everything bad out. We could have parties, make clothes, and maybe one day make babies. We could become a tribe.

  “Nobody remembers who you are. Everyone remembers what you want to be,” Miranda wails, twice as loud as any of our instruments.

  I see them changing just like I did, like we’d been trying to make people change from the beginning. Even if it wakes them up to an awful world, I want them here. I want them with me.

  The song hits the guitar solo and I start rocking. The princess takes a step forward and away from the band. I think she is going to swirl around again, but instead she starts singing.

  “To the roof, to the roof,” she yells. I look at Miranda and Zaki One. They shrug. I play louder to drown her out. Miranda starts ululating, but it’s too late.

  The princess bolts toward the hospital and, like lemmings, the kids follow in her wake.

  Miranda sings louder, but there are only a couple dozen kids left. They’re numb and stare at us dumbly.

  I play the wrong chord. Miranda forgets the lyrics, and Zaki Two isn’t playing his harp at all.

  We hear yells from the roof. Zaki One plays a fierce flute melody that should have, maybe, been able to reach them up there. I play with him. Miranda too. We aren’t playing a song anymore; we’re just making noise.

  I see a flash of long golden princess hair. She stands on the edge of the roof, and then throws herself over. She flies like a bird, like a triumph, and I ache to be up there with her. Only my guitar keeps me on the ground.

  Rivers of kids follow behind. Dark shapes drop off the roof. Down and down, and I would have thought they would hit silently, but they don’t. They scream. Their bodies thump and crunch.

  One scream is louder than the others. It’s nearby. Zaki One screams and flails and throws his flute down.

  I pull my gaze away from the flying, falling, dying kids and see that it’s only Zaki One screaming. Zaki Two is gone. My head whips back to the kids falling, and I think I see Zaki Two, but I’m not sure. Miranda moans and kneels beside Zaki One. I go to them, to my real tribe, and wonder how we are going to survive this.

  Zaki One scratches his cheeks deep enough to make scars. Miranda tears off her shirt, and I see the rough edge of her collarbone jutting out. I hold them both. I push up my sleeves to show them that I hurt, too. Behind us, the kids keep falling.

  After they blew up our neighborhood—after the rig and the axe, the deranged housewives, and the suicide party, we hop a train heading south. We talk about reaching avocado and salsa land, but our voices are brittle and fragile. It’s better not to talk at all. The train veers east and north, and it gets a lot colder.

  We watch each other and hold each other when one of us wants to jump off. The train moves faster and faster every hour. We see soldiers marching through wheat fields toward small towns. We see mountain lions running alongside the train. I tell a story about never getting off and riding until we become the wind. Or I tell a story about riding until we get so far north, up to the ice caps, that people can’t get sick because the air is too clean. Maybe there is a place like that left. Maybe.

  In the Seams

  Andrew C. Porter

  There isn’t much time. If I am going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it now. It’s late, I know, but the dogs are spooked and that means it’s on the way. The skin on my face is peeling. The backs of my hands are raw meat. If I hadn’t found Annie’s old tape recorder, then I wouldn’t have been able to document the facts. I can press record. I can pull a trigger. I’m going to tell the whole story because I know that when they find what’s left of me, or what isn’t, they’re going to ask questions, and I don’t want them...you, whoever you are, to think this was a murder. This was a feeding. You’d better just put down the cause of death as “mauled by animal.” You’ll probably have another name for it soon.

  This all started out in the fourth district a year ago when we got bogged down in the war with Iraq. Gas prices jumped a dollar fifty and as any coal man in Kentucky would tell you, expensive Arab oil meant it was time to clean off the dozers. Sixty dollars a ton, that was what did it. Who in western Kentucky had ever heard of that? Those East Kentucky mines got that, sure, but they pulled it out of mountains. That wasn’t cheap. Here we just peeled back the top soil and there it was: money.

  After the price went up, every old coal baron got into his equipment barn and started calling back the miners he’d laid off in ‘79. Course, most of them were dead or enjoying black lung settlements so they sent their kids. That’s how I came into this. I was on a road crew running
a backhoe when Snodgrass called.

  “Phe’ps,” he said, shortening Phelps like every Butler County septuagenarian does, “your daddy worked for me. Now I got a golden opportunity for you. What’s Scott paying you to run that hoe?”

  “Pretty good, Mr. Snodgrass.” I didn’t want to ruin any offer with the truth.

  “Would you come work for me for twenty-two an hour?”

  “Can I get overtime?”

  He laughed at me. “Boy, you’re gonna be begging me for a Sunday morning off. We’ll get going at Aberdeen Grocery at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  We talked for awhile about the old days, my father, his purchase of the Lindsey land back when everyone thought coal was dead. I was almost off the phone when he asked if I knew a good dozer operator. Two more seconds and I would have been off the phone. Two more seconds and I might not be sitting on my porch with a loaded shotgun and a tape recorder. I’m not saying that all this wouldn’t have still come down eventually had I not recommended Zan. It was in the seam after all, and somebody would have run across it before too long, but maybe, just maybe, if I had gotten off that phone, I wouldn’t be the one waiting to die.

  Zan had come back from Iraq six months before. He’d joined the army after high school, encouraged by his recruiter and the possibilities opened up by his unusually high ASVAB scores. His daddy was a dozer operator and so was his older brother. The army would get him out of that terrible inevitability. That was what the recruiter had said. Two months after signing up, Zan was in Felujah, running a dozer in the grand task of pushing down neighborhoods deemed “lost to the insurgency.” It turned out he was genetically predisposed to being a top notch dozer operator.

  I found Zan that very night, lying in his underwear on his blue couch in the den of his pink trailer, smoking pot.

  “Come in!” he hollered when I knocked, not bothering to find out who it was.

  “Zan, it’s me, Andy,” I called out as a precaution.

  “I know, I could hear Annie’s car from a mile away. What’s new? You want to hit this?” He extended the three-foot red plastic bong toward me.

  “No, I’m fine. I got you a job.” He pulled a long, gurgling lung-full of smoke as I talked, then held it in, his upper body poised awkwardly upright by the tension of maintaining his expanded chest cavity. Curling fingers of blue-white smoke trailed out of his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, drifting in the stale dead air of the living room and into the cone of light emanating from the television. It was the History Channel showing a documentary called The Battle for Felujah.

  “They drug test?” I told him they didn’t, and he agreed to meet up with us at four-thirty in the morning.

  He was on time. Everyone was; the money Snodgrass had promised was too good. I left the house at four; the stars were bright and cold, as I warmed up the truck and my breath fogged heavily in the pre-dawn November air. Aberdeen grocery was a ten minute drive from the house, but I planned on getting a sausage biscuit down while I was there and buying a bologna sandwich for lunch. Aberdeen grocery would slice off the bologna as thick as three slices at other places, and they steadfastly used real mayonnaise. I came into the grocery and immediately found the crew. Surrounded by the haze of a dozen cigarettes, twelve men sat around the picnic table that occupied the middle of the fishing tackle room. I sat down beside a bleary eyed Zan and ordered a coffee while we waited for Snodgrass to arrive. It was a good crew. I knew three of them well. The rest I knew fairly well. I had played ball with Curtis Ward; he would be a mechanic. Owen Kelley and B.J. Smith would be on equipment. Eric Ingram and his brother, Jay, would be running the trucks. We were all about the same age. Only Johnny Lindsey had experience from the days before the ‘79 bust and, as Johnny was a mute, he wouldn’t be telling any stories. He would be another mechanic.

  Our small talk ran in short rounds, punctuated by yawns as the low, wet gurgle of the minnow tank aerators lulled us all to sleep. Occasionally, one of the group would fall into light slumber only to be jolted awake as the table shifted on the ancient and uneven planks of the floor, sending coffee spilling everywhere. Then Snodgrass arrived and we were caravanning north on Highway 70 to the wide open ridge-top fields of the county’s fourth district. Zan rode with me in the old Chevy truck I had resurrected from my yard the summer before. Its front wheels had been scavenged from a smaller truck, causing it to ride at a pitched-forward angle that made your butt want to slide off the cracked vinyl bench seat.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this shit again.” Zan said, as we whipped along the dark, cold, ridge road.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Dozer work. I mean, Christ-sake, dude. I wasn’t meant for this. I can do so much. Remember all those ferns and fossil fish your dad used to get from the shale? You know I learned the name and age of every single species of those things. I was only eight! I should be a scientist or something.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “You remember that trip to the Kentucky Museum in the sixth grade? That tour guide was showing off those worm fossils and you told him they belonged to some other species and he tried to say you were wrong, but when we went back in the seventh grade they had changed all the tags on them to what you had said.”

  “They were called nautoloids. Yeah, I remember.” We rode along in silence, then Zan continued, more subdued, “When I was in Iraq, we had this job where we were looking for hiding places in some rock outcrops. While I was running some equipment I uncovered some caves. At the end of the day I got down off the dozer and all of a sudden all these towel heads who lived nearby came running up to me screaming and waving their arms and shit. The infantry guys who were with us almost popped ‘em right then and there. One of them spoke some English and managed to convince the guards to come and get me. Turns out they wanted me to cover the cave back up. They said they wouldn’t sleep until the cave was closed. I was shit tired, but they were practically in tears. Kept saying the Djinni will come out.”

  “The gin?”

  “No, Djinni, genies. Like with the lamps.”

  “I thought those were good luck. Three wishes and all that.”

  He was quiet for awhile, staring off to a bright star rising on the horizon, “No, that’s just Disney shit. Over there the Djinni are terrible things. They’re like spirits of hate made from the elements. Some of them are just like pranksters, the Djinni from the sky. They steal your goats, knock over your piss pot while you sleep. The ones from underground—” He chuckled. “Well those are the bad ones. They’re imprisoned underground by the gods, or by God I guess now, and they get loose and it’s all your asses. They come down from the sky and eat the skin off whole herds, not one goat, the whole herd. They carry village girls out into the middle of a field and tear their arms and legs off, then when people come to help them they tear off their limbs until the whole village is a big pile of limbless bodies.”

  “Well, I know what I would do with three wishes,” I offered lamely. Zan didn’t reply.

  Two semis waited at the site. The drivers had already unloaded the two dozers and two end-loaders, and Snodgrass had signed for them. After a brief consultation with a surveyor who showed up in a shiny new Dodge truck, Snodgrass gave us our orders.

  I was put on one of the end-loaders, a heavy dirt shovel that had seen better days, and dispatched to the middle of the bowl-shaped expanse that made up the Lindsey mine. Zan followed me on the E-6, a mammoth dozer, and Eric brought up the tail in a dump truck. The other crews were dispatched at the back of the five-hundred-acre mine.

  We went straight to it. Zan peeled back the topsoil and I scooped it up and put it in the dump. When the truck was full the spoil was packed off to a pile for later use in reclamation. Zan and I worked well together. I could anticipate his moves, his strategy, and before noon we had two trucks packing off our spoil. Zan was good. There were no wasted moves. He seemed able to predict the material under the brown sage grass of the field. He knew rocks were there before he hit them, an
d when a clean run of clay was found he pushed it hard. We worked like that for the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After a week of prep, we got into the black.

  The seam was not deep. We cut through a layer of clay, then shale, and that was it. The run of coal was around two feet thick and looked good. The crew on top of the ridge had been pulling coal for two days so we were both anxious to get it out of the ground, and get it out we did. We had a smaller crew, thinner seam, and older equipment but, by the second day, Zan and I had already matched the others ton for ton.

  When we kicked off at dark we busted on the other crews. “How two dozers and two loaders on a four foot seam can’t keep up with me and Zan can only mean one thing!” I yelled at the ridge crew.

  “What does it mean?” Zan called out from the truck bed, shot gunning a beer as he did.

  “Pussyitis!” I cried to a reply of ‘fuck-yous’ and the high-pitched throat squeals of mute Johnny’s damaged laughter.

  That’s how it went. For a week, a month, all the way to spring we cut and busted the ground. Hundreds of tons became thousands, tens of thousands. The Lindsey mine was rich, unusually rich, and now so was Mr. Snodgrass. We all got raises. Zan and me both got up to forty dollars an hour, and I knew we were the highest paid. Zan moved into a house not far from mine on Green River. I got a new truck. Zan got a motorcycle. Annie started talking about us having kids. That’s how it goes when times are good. Slow changes. Nothing good happens fast. It may seem good, but it’s really just difference playing tricks on you. Abrupt things are hateful to life. I could not appreciate that until recently, so when Zan and me were on my porch drinking beer and half watching the grill on a warm March Sunday and he suggested that we try a new strategy at work, I didn’t have the sense to say no.

  “That seam we’ve been chasing, it’s been the same thickness since we started,” Zan said.