They’d promised $1,000,000 to the first to hold onto the island, that’s what I remember as our aluminum boat motors through the oil’s rainbow swirl. And our chattering teeth and ARs’ butts and boots scraping the bottom, I can’t help but ask, “Is this the best way to do this? Couldn’t like, the professionals work out…”
“Hush!” says Dutch. Blonde bowlcut still swinging with the force of the finger upheld and the head turning all about like a radar dish. In the boat’s back row, where Kyle steers and Chalermon’s pot helm has twisted around so the loose, wooden handle unicorns out of his forehead, I can feel palpable anxiety.
“Opensource invasion, we trust the American people to do what needs must be done.” I still don’t know from where Dutch obtained real, paper, newspapers, his thumbprints inking their way across the pages with his reading. “Why, the commander in chief says it’s already in the bag. We just need some patriots to put the fear of the American people into the enemy.”
Four friends, four ways, a down payment on a modest tiny home in some tertiary Houston suburb. Dutch, the eldest, who speaks in a near geriatric whisper which bears senexed weight, put us on this path, with a “Well, I’d either like a sexbot or to rent two at the same time.” Kyle, Chalermon, and I had sipped our cat’s tongue pils quietly, until Chal’s: “It would be good to see my parents again.” Kyle, did not need to speak. We had all seen the piles of scratch-offs, the nubbins of pink slips discarded behind his door and which sometimes fluttered out on the wind when he came to sit with us in the bare patch between concrete towers. I just wanted to be as excited as my friends were for once.
Because I had a fan and a little computer that ran the classic dating simulators and a closet with a gas hotplate that got cup o’ woims to its perfect tongue searing temperature. It also made a pretty good cup of postbiotic coffee. I can smell it now. Feel the grounds on my fingers, hear the grinder whir.
Dutch’s magnificent, massive ears are to the wind, listening to the hum coming from behind, from where we launched the boat among a mass of fortune seekers in the early night and who all split and separated as we sought by ourselves the way to success. “Well, I think they’re ours.”
Dutch was the first to explode in an incredible shower of gore. We did not have time to consider the event, the water itself turned to flame as we fell into it. Even diving, I felt it on my back, the flame eating into my skin, feasting upon me as I swam as deeply into darkness as I could, unable to accept this obvious fate I had been assigned, arms paddling for depth and digging into stone and sand as I found it and it carried me to climb up onto a shore of pebbles and look back.
If there were screams in the rush and roar of the forever flames, I could not hear them. I waited there, as the fires raged and the pink concern of dawn revealed towers of black smoke. I kissed my knees, I rocked back and forth, I tried to imagine what next. And then the lander passed through the flames. From its open mouth, an all-black luxury SUV issued, little flags gayly waving above all-black headlights, six tires gaining purchase on the boulders, rolling toward me. He would step out. He would open the door and give me the money.
I clasped my hands behind my back, til they nearly bled, til I felt my knuckles in my burns, til my fingers felt near breaking around the fist sized stone hidden in them, waiting for my reward.