“Do you think Heaven will be worth all this?” his friend asks, squinting against the furnace winds from below, his hair fluttering like feathers around him. “What do you hope to find there?”
Paul finds the question boringly obvious but he welcomes the distraction. “Our reward,” he replies, staring into the flames. His face is still scorched from Boise, red and peeling, and his close-cut hair is singed. He thinks he must look like a man who’s fought dragons. “Mansions and streets of gold. A seat at the right hand of the Father to reign forever and ever. ‘Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’”
His friend doesn’t respond to this. Even in the orange glow of the flames, his face looks sick and sad.
“And you?” Paul asks, growing annoyed with his friend’s negativity. “What’s in your Heaven, Brother Atvist?”
His friend smiles. It’s faint, wistful, but it’s the first warmth to touch his face since they first started planning this fire. “A house,” he says, so softly he might be speaking to himself, or to some imagined listener far away. “A couch…a desk…a bed. A home and someone to share it with.”
Paul snorts. “You can have all that right here.”
His friend shakes his head. “This world hates us. We fight it for every breath. I want a home in a world that loves.”
Paul opens his mouth to laugh, to mock this gooey vision of the Kingdom, but then for some reason he shuts it. He feels a spasm in his chest, a tiny cracking open. He shuts that too.
Below these two boys, the city of Denver burns. The seventy-two fires have merged into one, spilling orange light across miles of Colorado desert, roaring together in unison like an ecstatic choir. But from a mile above, all of this is silent. And from five miles, it’s nothing at all. Just another city glowing in the night.
So we depart from there and then. We continue our rise, drifting across miles and years, skimming ahead to another dog-eared page, and on this page is Julie Grigio, newly twelve and still carrying her father’s heavy name, not yet rechristened by the friends who loved her, not yet bereaved by the parents who failed her, a stubbornly hopeful child who has only killed three people, who has not been abused by men or tortured and maimed by monsters, who can still imagine a future where she goes to school and rides horses and does not have to fight a war.
This bright young girl is walking through a dark tunnel. The light at the end is dim and gray and when she reaches it she is greeted not by angels but by a crush of malnourished humanity. The steady rumble of voices, the pounding and grinding of construction, the smell of piss and shit, mostly cow but with some human in the bouquet. Julie smiles. After months of abandoned ruins, creepy rural communes, and cold, cramped car camping, she has missed the mess of cities.
“John!” Rosy calls out, emerging from the crowd, and Julie’s smile widens. She has missed him too, this odd old man, growing through the years from her father’s subordinate to the closest Julie has to a grandfather, the warmth of a gentler wisdom always peeking through his military mask.
“Major Rosso,” Julie’s father replies with a restrained smile. He accepts Rosy’s effusive embrace but cuts it short with a crisp double-slap. Rosy pulls back, remembering how his friend thinks. A box for every occasion, and in this one he is not “John,” he is Colonel Grigio.
Julie does her best to smash these formalities. She lunges forward and tackle-hugs Rosy, knocking him back a step, and he laughs helplessly. “My God, Julie, you were barely up to my waist when our roads diverged in a wood! Was it ten years ago?”
“Six months!”
“Have they been feeding you that hormone-boosted Carbtein or something? Look at these armaments!” He squeezes her biceps and she shakes him off, laughing. He turns to greet Julie’s mother, and his warmth cools again. “Good to see you, Audrey. I imagine it’s been a hard road.”
“Hard enough.” Her tone is flat. Her face is blank.
“We’ll catch up properly later tonight,” Colonel Grigio interjects. “Right now I’m eager to hear your report on the enclave.”
Rosy straightens up and clears his throat, forcing himself to switch boxes. “I really think this is the place, sir. Exceptionally defensible, well-equipped, and lots of room to grow.”
“How does it compare to what you found in Pittsburgh?”
“Sir, if the reports of the New York quake are true, this might be the strongest fortification still standing in America.”
“Good work, Major.”
Julie hates it when they do this. Talking like action movies, pretending they aren’t just overgrown boys who get drunk together and cry about their wives and sing old Deftones songs at the top of their lungs. These silly characters they play when they think it’s time to be men.
Her mother hates it too. Maybe that’s why she’s abandoned the conversation and wandered off into the mess of construction.
“And what’s the current command structure?” her father continues.
“A mix of military and corporate, but their general manager just died and the chain is a mess. They’re glad we’re here, sir.”
“I want to meet them A.S.A.P. Arrange a conference with…”
Julie sighs and goes after her mother. She finds her a couple “blocks” away, wandering among the scrap-wood towers of this shantytown metropolis.
“What do you think, Mom?” She turns in a circle with her hands outstretched like a wide-eyed country tourist. “It’s not Manhattan, but at least it smells like it!”
Precocious wisecracks like this usually get a big laugh, but her mother doesn’t even smile. She isn’t looking at the buildings or the people. She is staring at the concrete wall that surrounds them.
“Mom?”
“I don’t know,” her mother murmurs, as if in response to some inner query. Her hands run down the sides of her gray mechanic’s jumpsuit, feeling the coarse fabric and sticky stains. After months of prodding from her husband, this is what she chose to replace her beloved white dress. As a statement of protest, Julie finds it a bit melodramatic, and Julie is twelve.
Her mother is usually quick to notice absurdities. She is usually the one to turn tragedy into comedy in the least amount of time. But something is different lately. She seems increasingly blind to irony, trapped inside her experiences, unable to step outside them and laugh. And Julie worries.
“You don’t know what, Mom?”
Her mother stares at the wall. She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t say a word for the rest of the day. Her husband is too busy to notice as he tours the stadium and meets the leadership, working his way in, but her daughter notices. She watches her mother warily as they carry their bags to their new home, a narrow tower of white aluminum glowing under the stadium’s floodlights.
“This is where we’re going to live?” her mother says, finally breaking her silence. Her emotions are still muted, but a note of horror leaks through.
“It’s austere,” Rosy admits, “but it has power and plumbing. All the luxuries, really.”
Two soldiers salute them from the third-floor balcony, leaning against turret-mounted sniper rifles.
“The guns are a bit much,” Julie’s father says, glancing sideways at his wife.
“Leftovers from the original project, apparently.”
The new general raises an eyebrow at the new colonel.
“By the looks of it,” Rosy continues, “someone was trying to convert the stadium into something else. Some kind of communications facility, judging by the wiring, but they didn’t get very far.”
General Grigio looks at the American flags dangling from the rafters of the open roof. The sun has bleached them almost white.