the simple trap: 8

The only light falling on Karl’s face was the skull glow from the stove. They had managed to haul it all the way from the neighbors shed to the spring house. They slid it across the whole yard, opening two long scars in the grass, like a giant arrow to the cellar. Karl imagined it showing up on satellite imagery, a television show. God he missed theatres, like a missing tooth. He noticed he was wringing his hands. He put them down beside him.
There were a few of the samples sitting in the dirt beside him that Darryl had managed to toss in the car, back at the greenhouse, that were already germinated. It seemed to Karl as if the little tendrils were crawling towards him in the wavering orange light. It was already too warm. He peeled off his coat.
Jagged chills ran down his spine, over and over again, at ever flicker, every scraping rustle through the forest around him. He had never felt so outside of the orbit of humanity in his life. It was as if he was going to die of loneliness, of the feeling of being so ultimately unfamiliar. He thought of cosmonauts, set adrift; he thought of angry animals, seeking his prey-smell, just outside the door. He thought of chicken, and of sex.
And then, he thought of his father, and the pool of blood he had been laying in, when he saw him last.
He’d done well so far, keeping that image suppressed. He had closed the door in his mind every time it threatened to surface in the car. Keeping it back was damming a lake. The whole scene flooded his mind, in surprising detail, vibrant, as if to make up for the dark in this hole he was buried in.
Karl let the whole scenario wash over him, like a tepid bath.
They had a good thing going; the only good thing among the waste after the world began to cool precipitously. Luke had noticed some of Darryl’s produce on the barter market that had sprung up after the wars.
It was that simple. Luke had connections with everybody, as a bartender. He was a market facilitator after the wars, getting the right thing for the right person, for a price.
The food Darryl had been growing in the old greenhouse was perfect. Plus Darryl hated leaving the place. He had real trouble with any people. The apocalypse was part of it, but Karl suspected epic disaster wasn’t the sole cause. Lucky Luke; otherwise, Darryl might have traded it through other means.
And then somebody had the bright idea to get Karl involved. Luke wanted to make sure his cash cow, Darryl, was properly under his power. What better way than to send the son. As soon as he got involved, essentially as Darryl’s gopher, he saw what the real opportunity was.
Karl had almost left his experiments die in the biology lab at the Richmond college, and the ones at his house had long since become something less than scientific. But there were a few samples of the best strain of cannabis sativa that he had ever grown left over, still alive in a fish tank, a few stalks and a five year old gecko that should have been dead. Years ago, he started growing strains, and originally, he had strongly disliked the taste. It had grown on him. He still liked to think of himself as the Pot-leaf Mendel.
They started to grow on Karl’s insistence. It made sense to him. The country had been addicted to psychological drugs at the dawn of Armageddon. What better way to supply that need than with a little ganj, right? Little galang goes a long way when you’re getting paid with gasoline, eh? He remember saying those words to his dad, dismissing the arguments about what the rival militias might do to get a hold on that kind of production.
And his father, he had been right and wrong. Darryl called him down to the greenhouse, to deliver 12 pounds. The biggest haul they’d ever had. But there was no 12 pounds. Darryl shot Luke in the belly with an ancient .22 pistol. Then he leaned over and apologized. Karl saw it play over and over, Darryl leaning over, pained look, the thread of saliva.
Then the guys walked in, all wearing the stinking catholic rosaries. It sort of sunk in. Darryl had betrayed Luke to the Rosaries. And of course, the Rosaries took the opportunity to kill both Luke and Darryl off.
That’s what all the shooting was for. By a fluke, Darryl was in the only corner that was distant from a door. Darryl was shouting something, and then Karl was tackled to the floor, and his hands bound behind his back with a ziptie. Darryl held him to the floor with his knee.
It had been a simple double cross. Why hadn’t Darryl missed that in all his overwrought planning? Why couldn’t he have seen it coming?
Karl wondered what time it was.
He lifted his head up before he had registered any sound. Then he heard the cars roll up like all Armageddon. It wasn’t that they were driving fast. It was that they hadn’t seen cars the whole way up to West Virginia. They were still miles away, when he heard the first crunching of gravel beneath tires. A list of names flew through his mind, a list of the possibilities, some options, a bit of psychology. He realized that at some point, he’d picked up the thirty-ought-six, and he was gripping it as if to keep the crunching tires away by dint of hand pressure alone.
It struck him as a true indication of his own will. Suddenly, he knew that he did not want the cars to come, no matter what. He knew he was going to burst out the doors, and attempt to shoot at the tires, and the engines, but not the windshields. Could his father be alive?
Karl stood up, and pressed his shoulder to the door. He had to pee, suddenly. The cars were so far away. He wondered if he could make it to the house without them seeing him. Was that the right course of action? What time was it? Would Lena be walking across the yard, coming to relieve him? He creaked the door a hair, and attempted to look down the road. He was looking into flat black, like a new blackboard.
Then he saw headlight reflecting, bouncing along from a great distance away. But he had gravely misjudged just how far they were. He wondered if the rest of the people could hear the cars too. It was very possible that they could not, he thought. That was why they needed him.
Karl was caught in the headlights of the Jeep and the CRV when they came crashing into the Cory’s clearing, his little hilltop. He couldn’t see any of the people in the car, but he dove out of the way, to the left, rolling down a few feet towards the creek.
He tried not to breathe as the jeep in front pulled an e-brake. The car ground to a halt in the gravel, not a dozen feet away. He picked up a handful of rocks and threw it into the trees behind him, as three men leapt out of the jeep, and another two with a young woman in the Subaru. He saw them turned their heads. He realized it had been a terrible idea.
One of the rocks hit a tree, but the others landed in leaves, nearly noiselessly. He imagined the sound as a glowing arrow pointing back to his location on the sod. They had certainly seen him regardless. The men turned on their flashlights, beams like railroad ties of light, bludgeoning the darkness.
A few moments later, a bent silhouette clambered out of the jeep into the grass.
Hs face was pressed against the wet, cold grass. He had left his coat inside the cellar, and the cold had already begun feeling up his bone marrow. He stayed rigid, knowing they’d shoot him. They’d shoot him over and over. In the day light, he’d be able to see them, they were so close. He wrestled with the urge to find out whether the man struggling to stand up was his dad. Suddenly, a flash light beam spotlighted him. Problem solved.
“Hey, hey! Who the fuck are you? Are you okay?” asked his dad, Luke. A wave of relief washed over him. He was surprised. His voice sounded exhausted.
“It’s me dad. It’s Karl.” He rose to his feet.
Someone turned on the trailer floodlight. Karl was blinded for a few seconds. He shielded his useless eyes with his wet sleeve.
“Stop right there, freeze…you bastard,” said his dad.
“You know, that’s a funny thing for you to say,” said Karl. There was a hint of laughter in his voice. He lowered his hand. He notice his father was clutching his stomach. He looked terribly old haloed in the bright light.
“You had me killed. I mean bastard when I say it. I got something for you. Don’t fucking move, son.” Luke spit a bullet into his hand. He held it up. The small piece of brass and lead glimmered in the light. “This is yours, son, take it back.” He snapped the bullet at his son. The bullet hit Karl in the hand. He grabbed his right hand with his left, cursing and spitting. Two or three of his Dad’s men were yelling for him to freeze.
He felt like the damn thing had burst a blood vessel, one of the big ones in the back of his hand. It occurred to him, that relatively speaking that must have been a lucky shot. He wondered for a brief second just how much slower the bullet was when it hit his hand, than when it lodged wherever his father had retrieved it from.
“You might as well have pulled the trigger yourself,” said Luke. It sounded like he was wincing from the effort. “Hit me in the stomach. Sure Darryl thought he got me back there at the greenhouse. Sure he thought the Rosaries would have let him stay there. But they didn’t. They been indebted to me since two weeks after the apocalypse,” Luke had both hands over his belly, as if holding his organs in place. His voice was getting weaker, but he continued. Karl noticed that Luke’s entourage were all wearing rosaries except for the woman.
“Did you know that? No, you didn’t. He thought he was betraying me for whatever fucking honorable reasons, and you fucking helped him every step of the way.” Luke walked over to his son, and slapped him across the face. Karl fell on the ground, a trickle of blood where his dad had opened up his eyebrow a little. It shocked Karl, with the finality: it seemed like it might be the last that the big man might have in him.
One of Luke’s men had to wrap his arm around Luke’s ribcage to keep the old man from falling. The rain was already mixing with the blood, getting it all over Karl’s face. “I’m not going to fucking kill you, but I’m putting a bullet in Darryl’s face. Where is he?”
Karl didn’t respond.
“Look, Karl. We’ve had our problems, but” said Luke. He swallowed. He pushed the man holding him up away. “I didn’t want it to be like this though. You’re my son. I love you. I just can’t let this go down. You betrayed me. Now you gotta earn the right to be my son again.”
Karl laid there on the ground for a second. Darryl had bound him up, in the back seat of the car, didn’t stop to let him be carsick, and that’s not even considering the thousand indignities he’d put Karl through when they were establishing the greenhouse. His eyebrow throbbed.
“Fuck you old man,” said Karl, who was crying, “You don’t know, but I had nothing to do with any of this. I can’t seem to escape this shit though. You might as well just fucking shoot me.”
Luke’s old face cracked into a grin, slowly. It grew like plants in a dark cellar. “You know I’m gonna shoot you, all familial sentiment aside? Why did you have to,” he shot Karl in the arm, “say something like that.”
Karl screamed into the grass and mud, and rivulets of rain moving towards the creek. He screamed like a rabbit in a steel trap, high, animal, ululating. It echoed like it was bouncing down every declivity within fifty miles, repeating, perfectly harmonizing with the continuing original. It didn’t sound like it was coming from where Karl was lying on the ground, Luke standing over him, haloed in flashlights.
He could feel his mind shutter into shock. He heard his father turn, and mumble something to one of the other men. Someone tried to pick him up. He felt bones shift. He screamed in such a way that the man let him lie there.
As soon as they got him off the ground, the shattered arm hanging there, Darryl kicked open the front door. But nobody was standing in the light from inside. Suddenly a twelve gauge belched from the bottom right corner of the door.
Three of the men had guns in their hands, and they ducked behind the jeep. Karl could see where they were shooting because of the holes that opened up near the door. There was no chance that Darryl had survived the first volley. It looked like at least five bullets would have passed through where he must have been lying on the floor to shoot through the door like that.
Silence descended into the little valley. One of the men opened up hatch of the jeep. Karl fell onto the ground, writing in a pool of agony. Two of the men picked him up and roughly tossed him onto the floor. He could smell the stink of their rosaries.
Automatic Klashnikov fire perforated the noise of the rain. Both men were blown off their feet. Karl tried to lift his head. An odd clearness descended on him. Philosophy and chemicals. He couldn’t move. He tried hard to breath calmly. He wanted to see who was dead, where Cory was shooting from.
Everything was silent. Burned gunpowder bent up his nostrils. And then it stopped.