His chin dropped to his chest as if he were too tired to hold it up any longer. “I’m a ghost cop,” he said.
“Except I’m alive and the city died.” Then he waved his hand vaguely in Eric’s direction. “You can go.”
Quickly, Eric filled his backpack and grabbed his headphones and cassette player. The policeman didn’t move. When Eric backed his head out of the window, he started to thank the man—he felt like he should—but then Eric realized the policeman had fallen asleep. His face looked peaceful, and Eric made a sudden connection, an’ understanding of the policeman in a different role. Eric shook with it, the empathy was so strong. The policeman looked like a man at halftime at a football game, tired from his day’s work, but at the game because his daughter was going to cheer. Eric wished that he could tell him the day was okay, that his bony daughter dazzled the crowd, jumping high, clapping her hands, throwing back flips for the team as it entered the field.
Instead, Eric stepped back quietly. Brightness of the sun through the smoke, after the darkness of the car, made him blink back tears.
Smoldering ruins dominated the north end of Golden, and the closer he pedaled to the Coors plant, the fewer intact buildings he found. Two jewelry stores side by side, A Touch of Gold and a Zales, had been cleaned out. A spray of velvet display pads littered the sidewalk. After a few blocks, he turned and headed south, but he had no idea where to go now. Should he return to the cave and wait for Dad? How long should he wait before searching again? The image of his mother’s body lying still under the plastic chilled him. Thinking about crawling into the cave again to face that lump under the black visqueen made him shake his head. He would ride the bike to Littleton. Dad might have gone there, though he couldn’t think of a reason that he would. What really decided him, was the idea of being home. He imagined his bedroom, the posters on the walls, the books lined neatly on the shelves, and his bed, a place of safety and normality. If he could just get home, things would be all right. All of this would go away. He wouldn’t have to think about policemen who lost their daughters or cars filled with frightened, angry people being shot at a road block.
At the bottom of Jackson Street, he reached the high school. “Have a good summer!” read the marquee in front of the school. A pair of unattended backhoes squatted on the torn up remains of the football field. One goal post lay on its side. The other stood, a solitary sentinel. He turned onto 24th Street, hoping that it would take him back to U.S. 6 and out of town.
24th ended at Illinois Ave and he could see the highway at the crest of the hill to his right. In the distance, a long way up the hill with several smaller hills between, the two roads intersected. Breaths came hard in the smoky air as he struggled to pedal up the slope. Because he kept his eyes closed part of the time, or stared at the goose neck of the bike so he wouldn’t have to look at the hill in front of him, he missed the first black shapes lying on the road’s shoulder to his left. When his legs were too tired to push the pedals any farther, he leaned the bike and rested. Then he saw the body bags, hundreds of them like black seed pods lined side by side along the road, stretching to the top of the hill. At first, he thought they were trash bags, as if the Highway Department had been running grass cutting crews along the roads and were storing the clippings. But when he put the bike down and stood over the closest bag, he knew the truth.
He blinked slowly. His eyes ached from the smoke, and he took a long time to realize what he was looking at. Sun glinted dully off the slick plastic, and the bag was unzipped. Inside, he saw a glimpse of pink flannel. The woman—though the bag covered her face, he guessed it must be a woman—had died in her pajamas. Her hands lay on top each other on her stomach. The top hand was disfigured; it was missing the ring finger.
Eric looked down the long row of bags to his left, toward town. All the bags were unzipped. Hands dangled over the sides of many, and even from here he could see others without ring fingers. He stepped to the next bag. A man’s well-tanned arm sprawled across the plastic as if he had tried to extricate himself and then died in mid-effort. A pale band of skin circled his wrist where he must have worn a watch.
Eric knew he should feel something about all these bodies, some sadness or revulsion, but he couldn’t. He walked up the hill, pushing his bike. In some bags he saw faces, eyes open or closed, mouths gaping or neatly shut. Some bodies were naked; one man wore a three piece suit. A few bags had more than one body in them, mostly children. All the bags were open, and all Eric felt was a mild curiosity about why.
Near the crest of the hill he heard an engine idling and then a voice. He put the bike down and, bending low, scurried to the top. In the little valley below, thirty yards away, the white van was parked in the middle of the road. A man, the beetle-eyed one he’d seen earlier, unzipped a bag, reached in, pulled out the body’s hands, inspected them, then moved to the next one. A gun in a shoulder holster swung from his chest when he bent over. He held a three foot long pair of bolt cutters. He unzipped again—the harsh rasp reached Eric—and grabbed a hand.
“Got one,” he said to the hidden driver in the van. Beetle-Eyes pinned the hand to the body with his foot, maneuvered the bolt cutters into position, then, without pause, snipped off a finger. Eric heard the click of the bolt cutters closing.
The man stripped the ring from the finger, then tossed the finger beyond the body bags into the long weeds beside the road. He put the ring into a heavy sack that hung from his belt and moved to the next bag.
Eric pressed the side of his face to the pavement and closed his eyes. Sun-warmed asphalt burned him, but he didn’t move. The enormity of what he was seeing boggled his imagination and sickened him. Surely nothing can top this, he thought. Nothing could be as gross.
He wondered how he was going to get past the van. He couldn’t see just riding by, and he thought about going back and finding another way to the highway, but he also wanted to stop them, to turn them in maybe—whatever it would take to get them to leave the bodies alone.
He heard another loud snip. The van rolled a few feet forward to keep up with Beetle-Eyes, who moved from bag to bag with ghoulish efficiency. He unzipped another one and looked the body over speculatively. “Nice tits,” he said, then threw the ringless hands back in the bag in disgust. “Why don’t I drive for a while?” he said. A voice from the van murmured back. Beetle-Eyes shrugged his shoulders. As the van move farther away and higher on the hill, Eric crept backwards to stay out of sight. He could no longer hear them, but he saw the pantomime as Beetle-Eyes crouched, opened, inspected, stood and cut, taking rings and watches as he found them, bag after bag.
Finally the van topped the next hill. Eric mounted his bike and rode past the abused bodies, still unsure of what to do, but determined to do something. Once again he was within earshot. Zippers whisked open. Bolt cutters clicked together. Beetle-Eyes cursed the driver’s squeamishness. “You’ll like what this stuff will buy later,” he said. Another finger flew into the weeds. “You got to cut bait to fish.” Eric felt his gorge rise.
From the bottom of his backpack, Eric grabbed his slingshot and a handful of ball bearings. Without thinking, he folded the leather patch around the first bearing, stood, drew back, and fired at Beetle-Eyes. The bearing missed but whanged off the van leaving a very satisfying dent. The man yelled something and hit the asphalt. Flying end over end, the bolt cutters vanished into the weeds. Eric loaded and fired. The shot zinged off the pavement a foot from Beetle-Eye’s head, who was trying to crawl backwards under the van. He hadn’t seen Eric yet.
Eric placed a third bearing in the slingshot, then Beetle-Eyes spotted him. He unsnapped his gun from its holster and started to aim it, but the van moved forward a foot and Beetle-Eyes panicked, dropped the gun, rolled to his back and pounded on the side of the van. “Stop, you stupid shit. Stop!” he yelled. “I’m under here!” Brake lights flared red.