Borderlands Read online

  “Say it in English, motherfucker!”

  “Where are the innocents?”

  “Get out of here! Get out!” Still casting grass seed at them as if engaged in some exorcismic ritual, he would walk toward them until he came close enough to see the death’s-heads on their collars, insignia of the Totenkopfverbände.

  “Wir mussen…we must guard this ground. It is our duty.”

  And he would wake up with his arms twitching and electric shocks convulsing his body, half paralyzed and unable to scream.

  He did not have the dreams every time he slept; if he had, Kirby’s developing psychosis would have swallowed him in very short order indeed. As it was, the disease process, already considerably advanced by the time Jenny left him, was merely accelerated.

  First to have some intuition that Kirby’s condition might well be clinical was Jim DeLuca, a friend who dropped over one evening to see how Kirby was getting along. Over beers, they bullshitted awhile, and DeLuca got the unmistakable and disconcerting impression that he was talking to a man who was gradually losing his handle on things. Although he did not have a catalog of symptoms to refer to, he had done enough general reading to be disturbed by Kirby’s free flight of ideas, his short attention span, his abrupt mood shifts. And even if he couldn’t go by symptomatology, the horrible mess of the house, Kirby’s haunted eyes and cadaverous general appearance were clues enough.

  Still, DeLuca wasn’t altogether sure. At this point, Kirby still had protracted moments of rationality.

  “There aren’t any jobs out there, Jim,” Kirby lamented, shaking his head. “There always used to be jobs. What’s going on?”

  “It’s called ‘deindustrialization.’ ” DeLuca gulped from his can of Miller’s, and belched loudly. “That’s what’s going on, Ted.”

  “I call it screwing the little guy. That’s all it is. Just another way to luck over people.”

  DeLuca nodded—and when he got home that night he tracked down Jenny’s number and called her. Jenny agreed that something was wrong but didn’t know what to do. Kirby’s parents were dead, and he had one brother in California, but Kirby hadn’t seen him in years and he had an unlisted phone number. There was little that anyone could do, at least for now.

  In the August heat of the house, the M16 was cool in his hands. The rifle had been easy enough to purchase, even though sale and ownership of this fully automatic model was totally illegal. A friend of a friend dealt in them and in other contraband weaponry. Could this friend of a friend interest Kirby in a good deal on a reconditioned WWII-vintage Army-issue Thompson submachine gun? Yes, he could, though Kirby had blown his already-depleted savings account on the M16 and didn’t know where the money for the Tommy would come from. Didn’t care. At that point Kirby just wasn’t thinking.

  He had forgotten about the lawn. Didn’t care. It was dying and he didn’t care. Fixations are variable. Other things were bothering him: his life, the shape and contour of it, the substance of it. He didn’t like it. It is difficult to describe exactly what he was feeling. His mind was a flux of half-formed thoughts, a tarn of half-congealed emotions.

  The Nazis still bothered him too. Particularly unsettling was their appearance in the daytime as flickering images at the edges of his vision, vanishing when he looked at them directly. He would turn his head away and they’d be there, standing guard in the vacant lot, black scarecrows in a field of weeds—and still those questioning eyes, eyes blue and steely, set in faces creased with the sorrows and pains of hell, eyes that spoke: Why are we here? There is nothing for us here.

  Kirby decided that Greenfield, the owner of the Tudor split-entry across the street, would be the first to get it. Kirby had the back of his neighbor’s Adidas T-shirt in the sights of the M16 as Greenfield sprayed the tied-down silver maple in the front yard.

  This was shortly after Kirby had screamed at some airhead of a clerk at an employment agency who, over the phone, had the tactlessness to use the phrase “a man of your age” when telling Kirby how difficult it would be to find him a job. Kirby shot white heat into the receiver, informing the clerk in so many words that the age of forty did not necessarily signal the onset of senility. He slammed the receiver down and cracked the ivory plastic of the pretty little Princess phone.

  Maybe not Greenfield. What was it the Nazis kept asking? Where are the innocents? How about this group of kids on bikes coming down the street? Unschul-something kinder. Kinder. Didn’t that mean children? These looked like unschul-whatever-the-fuck-it-was children to him. He swung the barrel until he was tracking the kids. There were five or six of them, furiously pedaling bikes with smallish wheels and oversize handlebars and plastic colored streamers flying from the handgrips. He tracked them until they flew past the house, then ran to a window of the family room to pick them up again. They raced on down the road—and here a strange thing happened.

  It is said to happen usually when a person is drowning or is close to death. But in Kirby’s case, it came at a critical decision point in his life. His life didn’t actually pass in front of his eyes. It was more like this: the entire geography of his life appeared to him, laid out on a detailed map in bas-relief, viewed from an aerial perspective. Here he was at this set of coordinates, in this house—go back three years and he and Jenny were in the house on Delia Street, into which they had moved shortly after marrying—go back from there…The map showed everything clearly. Here the small town of his boyhood in Michigan; there the Air Force base in Texas where he had undergone basic training, then had been discharged because of a recurring peptic ulcer; there the small college in northern Pennsylvania where he had taken his BA—here was every place he had spent time in, all the physical points of his life, all connected by dotted lines drawn in orange Magic Marker. Parallel to the lines lay red arrows pointed in the direction of forward tune. And now as he crouched in the sweaty interior of his empty house (Jenny’s brother had come and trucked away most of the furniture—Kirby hadn’t protested), the last orange dotted line left the barrel of the M16, leading directly to the kids. A huge, floating red arrow swung with the line as it moved in a broad arc…

  …until one of the guards stepped into his line of fire, holding up an admonishing palm, shaking his onyx-helmeted head. His eyes were preternaturally sad.

  Kirby screamed and fell backwards, sprawling on the parquet floor. He left the dropped rifle and fled into the basement. In a few minutes he was busy mixing paint—he had been meaning to whitewash the exposed concrete block in back of the house—the incident having failed to leave a mark on his mind, running from it like ink on waxed paper.

  No, Kirby didn’t fire his rifle until the day the whistle-blowing Poseidon employee (long since terminated by direct order of the board of directors) was proved undeniably right.

  Kirby was dozing in one of the spare bedrooms on the only bed Jenny’s brother had left him. Sirens, shouting, and general commotion startled him to full consciousness. A loudspeaker was blaring somewhere—a distorted voice announcing something unintelligible. He had lain down shortly after lunch, feeling weak and slightly nauseated. Up to that point, he had been feeling a little better, had been drinking less, and had run out of the pills he had driven into the city to buy on a street corner in the ghetto. He hadn’t seen or dreamed of the Nazis in two weeks. It was mid-September, a Saturday afternoon, and the lawn was completely brown, though temperatures had been keeping to the mid-seventies.

  He sat up and knew he was very ill, his stomach inverted and ready to erupt. He found it difficult to breathe. He got up, tottered to the bathroom, and threw up. After rinsing out his mouth, he went to the open sliding window in the family room.

  Outside, the world was in the process of turning upside down. People were running everywhere. Volunteer fire trucks raced up and down the streets. A neighbor woman a few houses down was standing in her front yard, screaming, holding the limp body of her three-year-old daughter. He could hear the loudspeaker now. The voice was saying something
about the necessity for immediate evacuation.

  He noticed a film of yellow powder covering the windowsill. He ran a finger through it and rubbed his thumb and finger together. The stuff felt oily and burned slightly. He rinsed his finger off under the kitchen faucet. Something told him to get the M16.

  Outside, he stood on the concrete slab porch and watched with a curious detachment. Many people were visibly ill, staggering out of their homes, some already collapsed on lawns, driveways, and in the street. Kirby saw that the yellow powder was everywhere, showing up plainly on the concrete of the walk and driveway, less so as a light dusting on the grass. The air had a slight yellowish cast, carrying a rank vinegary smell.

  A wave of nausea passed over him, and he bent his head over until it passed. Straightening up, he saw a helmeted figure rushing toward him. It was in fact a local policeman wearing a gas mask, but the midnight-blue uniform and the mask made him look enough like one of the dream-figure Nazis to make Kirby take a step back and raise the rifle.

  The cop stopped in his tracks and threw his hands up, looking sideways out of the goggle-eyes of the mask.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelled. “Haven’t you heard?” The voice was muffled, and Kirby couldn’t quite make him out.

  “Go away,” Kirby told him.

  “The plant—there’s been an accident. This stuff is killing people! You’ve got to get out now! Is there anyone else in the—?” The cop put a hand to his chest and coughed.

  “You people have to leave me alone,” Kirby said.

  “Drop it! Drop the gun!”

  Kirby shifted his eyes to the right. Two more cops in masks had him covered, crouching behind the doors of a squad car. “Drop it! Now!”

  Kirby stood there, statue-like and implacable.

  The tableau lasted until the first cop doubled over and fell to his knees. He ripped off the mask and vomited on Kirby’s brown lawn. Kirby watched.

  The cops fired two shots each, three going wild, one creasing his back and shattering the glass of the storm door. Ignoring the searing pain along his shoulder blades, Kirby emptied half the clip on full automatic at the squad car. He lowered the rifle and looked, not bothering to take cover. The cop on the near side of the car was down. He couldn’t see the other one. The first cop was writhing on the lawn, thin bloody foam dribbling from his lips. Kirby turned and went into the house, shutting the front door.

  In the kitchen, the shakes hit him. Bracing himself by holding on to the front of the sink, he waited until the seizure passed, then picked up the rifle and lurched out the back door.

  The surviving cop was waiting for him, and this time the cop’s aim was better. He dropped Kirby with one shot to the upper back.

  Facedown in his lawn, Kirby noticed an amazing thing before he died. The bottommost parts of the grass stems were green! The grass wasn’t dead; it was waiting. It hadn’t died after all! It made him happy.

  The substance released by the minor explosion at Poseidon Chemical was so toxic that cleanup efforts were hampered. They never did get all the bodies out. The three-square-mile area, pronounced “semipermanently nonutilizable” by the bureaucrats whose job it is to be creative with language, became the final repository for some 2500 unrecovered corpses.

  A five-year-long investigation began. Why had officials at the plant delayed three hours in reporting the incident? Why had safety procedures been so laxly adhered to with the plant so near a heavily populated area? Why had warnings been ignored? Who was responsible?

  It seemed that everyone had just been following orders.

  One mildly interesting note: the cleanup crews marveled at how some of the lawn grass around the houses had survived. Everything else had died—forests of trees stood bare-limbed and gray, scrub brush had died to the ground, even the lowliest weed had refused to germinate. But in one area a patch of healthy grass was spreading outward year after year. No one knew what to make of it, and no one had a clue to why the grass looked as if someone were cutting it. And nobody bothered to find out why except one scientific team from the agriculture department of the state university, who went in to get samples. But they got the hell out of there fast and never came back.

  The guards saw to that.

  ON THE NIGHTMARE EXPRESS

  Francis J. Matozzo

  It is always refreshing to discover a story that takes an old idea or traditional HDF symbol and turns it inside out. Something that really rips up all the tired old clichés. Good stories always do this–provide the reader with a new way of considering the seemingly familiar. Not only is "On the Nightmare Express" by Francis J. Matozzo very well written, but it also does a dance number on a couple of HDF's hoariest icons. I won't tell you what they are because I don't want to defuse the power of Frank's tale. Don't worry, you'll know what I'm talking about when you get there.

  Frank Matozzo (he pronounces it "muh-tah-za," even though we Sicilians would say "muh-dotz") lives in a small Pennsylvania town with his wife and three-year-old son. He says he's been writing for "quite a few years and my progress has been slow." With recent sales to Pulphouse and Modern Short Stories, and now Borderlands, I think Matozzo is ready to make a profound impression upon his professional peers. I'm not saying this just because he's a good Italian boy. This guy is a writer, friends.

  We sat quietly on a wooden bench outside the Jenkintown train station waiting for the 7:15 from Philadelphia. Joe had taken the precaution of wearing a thick wool sweater beneath his raincoat and, unlike the others waiting on the platform, he was quite warm and snug. It was unseasonably cold for October, and the below-freezing temperatures had caught most people by surprise.

  As we sat, a tumbling circle of leaves swept along the wooden planks in front of us, driven by the wind. I watched them dance along the boards and float off into the shadows–they had a hypnotic effect. My nervousness about taking Joe out faded and I began to relax. I closed my eyes and, despite the cold, dozed off.

  Instantly the dream came–the black steam engine rose from some dark corner of my mind, breathing smoke and fire like some terrifying iron-clad dragon. Behind the engine the swaying flatcars stretched to infinity, carrying thousands of naked bodies and the choking odor of decaying flesh. It was an exhibit of death in all its horrendous variety. Bodies were shot, slit, shredded; dismembered and disemboweled, hacked-off pieces dripping from the barbed wire fencing that enclosed each overstuffed car.

  Down the tracks the real train appeared; its shrieking whistle cracking the cold night air, and I awoke in terror, heart pounding. As the crowd surged forward to board the train my dream slowly faded, like a fog bank rolling out to sea, leaving behind faint wisps on the shores of my consciousness.

  Although the train was crowded, Joe and I managed to sit together. A man in front of us was smoking a pipe, and the fruit-scented odor of tobacco permeated the car like fresh cherries. There was little conversation among the passengers. Everyone was simply enjoying the warmth of the train–everyone except me. My nightmare had left me chilled to the bone and strangely light-headed. I felt so weak that I was afraid I was going to faint.

  Breathing slowly, I tried to focus on the people around us to distract myself but succeeded only in transposing their faces onto the dead bodies in my dream. Only the woman sitting across the aisle interested me enough to take my mind off the nausea.

  I had seen her on the platform waiting with the others. She was a striking young woman, tall and slender with long black hair that hung below her shoulders. She was leaning forward, drawing in a sketch pad. Her face was partially obscured–I could see an ear, a smooth white cheek, white neck, delicate hands. The sight of her drawing brought back memories of art school and my own miserable endeavors in that area. She appeared young, though not so young that I imagined her a student. She was dressed in tight designer jeans and a soft white blouse that was visible beneath an unbuttoned black leather raincoat. Her legs were lifted slightly, the tips of her white sneakers touching the floor, enabling her to bala
nce the sketchbook on her knees. As I watched, she paused to scratch her ankle. A woolen sock was nudged down and her long fingers lingered on the smooth flesh. Then she was drawing again, the ankle left uncovered, sock crumpled.

  I heard Joe's heavy breathing next to me. He had seen the woman also. For him the train and everyone else in it ceased to exist. Only the girl remained–the black hair, the delicate hands, the glimpse of naked flesh. The sickness inside him began to grow like the invading tendrils of some obscene plant, and the evil filled his veins. He loved the thrill of meanness, the rush of adrenaline that savagery gave him.

  The conductor called the names of towns and junctions in a deep, operatic voice. Slowly, the train emptied. By the time we reached Lansdale there were only a handful of passengers left. Lansdale was her stop.

  She left the train with a half dozen others, then walked by herself to the lone car parked at the end of the lot, her raincoat billowing out like a cape, reflecting the yellow light from the overhead lamps. Tucked under her right arm was the sketchbook; a red satchel was slung over her opposite shoulder. She walked smoothly, her steps long but unhurried. The others that had departed the train wasted no time getting out of the cold. Car engines roared in an almost simultaneous overture. By the time she reached her car, the lot was empty, the last car disappearing down the driveway of the station. Silence returned to the lot, broken only by the jingling of her car keys.