What am I paying you for? To sit in that trailer all day and do nothing?”
I didn’t know what he was paying me for, and I’d hoped it would never come up. Cameron smiled down at us. Shane pursed his lips to conceal his teeth. Lawrence watched Marie. Marie watched me. Whatever my strategy had been, whatever I’d been practicing and preparing for, it wasn’t this.
I said, “Come on, Marie. Ease up, okay? It’s just until Jay gets back.”
She met my eyes like murder.
* * *
That night at the campfire, Lawrence and Marie wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t pass me a beer, wouldn’t take the cigarettes I offered, nothing.
“It’s not my fault,” I said. “Shane’s an asshole, you saw it.”
But they picked up talking about the zombie apocalypse like I wasn’t even there.
“Fire might be the best way,” Marie said. “Thorough.”
“Like a Molotov cocktail?” Lawrence said. “Way too dangerous. End up blowing yourself up instead of the zombies.”
“Haven’t you heard of delayed ignition?” Marie said.
“I don’t trust it,” said Lawrence.
“If you pour brake fluid over swimming pool cleaner, the mix ignites after fifteen minutes,” Marie said. “That’s plenty of getaway time.”
“And if Jay were here, he’d say, where’d you so conveniently come across that swimming pool cleaner?” Lawrence said.
“Add it to the kit,” Marie said.
“Right next to the quick rice and the potato,” Lawrence said. They bumped cans. I sucked on my cigarette.
“Fuck it,” Marie said. “What I really want to do is to take a crossbow, stand way up on a hilltop overlooking one of these sites, and shoot flaming arrows. One. Two. Three. Four. Down into gas tanks, one after another, right where it counts. Watch the whole fleet go up in flames. Beautiful.”
“Score one for humanity,” Lawrence said.
“Zombies zero,” Marie said.
Me, I was no zombie, but I didn’t quite feel like part of humanity, either. When I stumbled to bed, too many beers, not enough conversation, I was more wretched than a ghost, but I was a ghost.
* * *
But what did it matter? I stayed on the job. I stayed while March turned to April. I stayed while Marie and Lawrence continued to drive me to work but ignored me as neatly as slicing off dead skin. I stayed while every day Cameron ran the excavator and Marie and Lawrence worked on the ground. I stayed while every morning Cameron propositioned Marie, saying, I’d make your knees knock, Tiger Lily, and Marie saying, Fuck off, douchebag, and Lawrence saying, You heard her, you need to stop, and Cameron saying, Hey, can’t blame a guy for trying, and me saying, Okay, people, let’s get back to work. I ate lunch alone. I watched the computer map. I watched the green line go red. I hid in my trailer and I watched the crew on the monitoring screen and tried to imagine I was far away from it all, that everything happening out in the yard was of only abstract interest to me. I was making money. I’d made almost enough. I’d spend the bus ride home figuring out what to say to Lily and, most of all, what to say to Perley when I saw him again. My mission was almost complete.
Then one morning toward the end of April, Cameron swung the boom of the excavator down and glanced Marie in the head with the corner of the bucket, a ton if it was a pound. If it had hit her square on, it would have killed her. As it was, it split her hard hat in two pieces, easy as opening a grapefruit. Marie was knocked out cold.
When I burst out of my trailer, Cameron stood up in the machine to meet me. “You want to fucking talk to me, dyke, I’ll kill you, too,” he said. I grabbed him by the leg and hauled him out of the excavator, went for him with whatever was on hand, which happened to be a pipe wrench. Backhanded him across the face with it while Marie lay out next to us. Now there were two of them on the ground. I turned nurse, considered triage, went to check on Marie first. Lawrence was already there, holding her head on his lap. There wasn’t any blood, the hard hat had done that much, at least. She opened her eyes, focused them. I unlaced her boots. She could wiggle all her toes. She could say her name when I asked.