Sky on Fire

22 DEAN

I SCREWED THE TOPS ON tight and shook them. A little spilled on the top of one of the bottles. I wiped it on my T-shirt. They had to look perfect.

I set them in my cart along with the soup and the crackers. I raced over to the paper plate aisle and grabbed some of those blue keg cups.

When I came wheeling back toward the Kitchen, the boys were just finishing sets of frog jumps. They started from a squat and then had to jump up and touch their heels together and then land and do the whole thing again.

It looked hard as hell and the cadets, and Jake too, all looked like they might puke.

‘Thirty seconds more! You can do it!’

I set up the juice on the table and chucked a Duraflame in the brass fire pit.

‘Fifteen seconds, don’t give up!’

I set the soup cans on the counter and grabbed a saucepan.

‘Done! Good work, men!’

There were groans and curses from the cadets as they all basically collapsed.

‘You guys should hydrate!’ Payton commanded them.

Payton strolled over to me in the kitchen. He picked up one of the juice bottles and looked at it.

I tried not to stiffen.

‘Drink water,’ Payton directed over his shoulder. ‘You gotta hydrate with pure water.’

He put the juice bottle down and my heart sank.

I’d put all the pills in those bottles.

Dear God, what if Payton didn’t like juice?

Payton headed off to the Food aisles. Maybe to find plain water.

I cursed to myself. I should have saved some of the pills. Were there more? Maybe there were more in the Pharmacy…

But then Kildow and Greasy came over. Both were sweaty and thirsty, apparently.

Kildow opened the bottle and poured a keg cup full. He didn’t notice that the seal on the bottle was already broken. Or if he did, he didn’t care.

Greasy grabbed the other bottle and drank right from it.

‘That’s gross, man,’ Kildow told him.

‘Who cares?’ Greasy answered. ‘There’s aisles full of this stuff.’

He looked at the bottle.

‘Ew, what is this?’

‘It’s juice, but it’s got, like, vegetables in it,’ I said.

‘It’s juice, but it’s got, like, vegetables in it,’ Greasy parroted, mocking me.

I shrugged.

Zarember came forward, taking the other bottle. He poured a tumbler of it and drank.

‘Tastes good to me,’ he said, winking at me.

I felt bad, Zarember was definitely the nicest one. Here he was standing up for me and I had just drugged him.

Jake ambled over.

‘What’s this?’

I tried to tell him with my eyes, but he didn’t see me. Too dark.

‘Juice,’ I said. ‘That kind Chloe liked.’ I was trying to tell him somehow that, I don’t know, the juice had the sleeping pills Niko had given Chloe and then I realized he wasn’t even there when that happened. He had been out on the road.

Jake picked up the container and chugged.

‘Jake!’ I shouted, before I could stop myself.

And the cadets all looked at me.

I tried to play it cool.

‘He’s gonna puke, he chugs it like that…’

And somehow I was right. Jake set the bottle down (now only half-full) and took two steps away and vomited all over the floor.

The cadets laughed and clapped one another on the back.

I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.

Payton came back hauling two gallon jugs of water.

‘You idiots,’ he scolded good-naturedly, ‘I told you to hydrate with water.’

Payton set the water down next to Jake.

‘Welcome to the Air Force, son! You earned your first curl hurl!’

Laughing, Payton picked up the bottle of juice from the counter and smelled it.

‘Smells off,’ he said.

Payton hadn’t drunk any and neither had the tall, gangly cadet, Jimmy Doll Hands.

Then Anna came back.

‘There’s a room,’ she announced, sounding as bored as she could possibly sound. ‘There’s a camp stove and bunks in the back. It was all hidden away.’

‘What?’ Payton asked.

‘They hid it from us,’ Anna said. ‘And there’s lots of clothes there and stuff.’

Payton strode across the Kitchen, to where I was stirring the soup.

He grabbed me by the hurt shoulder.

The pain seared through me and I cried out.

‘A secret? We take you in, we hook you up, make you part of our squadron, and you’re keeping secrets from us?’

He threw me down to the ground and my head hit the side of the fire pit. Sparks flew up in the air.

Payton marched over to Jake.

Just then, Kildow sat down, heavily, into a bench.

Payton grabbed Jake by the hair and dragged him to his feet.

‘WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO TELL ME, JAKEY?’ he screamed.

‘Payton, please!’ Jake pleaded. ‘I’m sorry!’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘We meant to tell you but then it was too late!’

‘Yeah it’s too late!’ Payton shouted. He punched Jake in the face. ‘Hit me back! Hit me back, you lying sack, and then we’ll see what happens!’

Jake was bleeding from the nose. His head hung down. He looked defeated.

‘You won’t hit me back because you know I will destroy you!’

Payton kicked Jake in the side and he fell to the ground. Jake didn’t move. He was out.

Then there was a heavy THWOMP kind of a sound and Greasy had passed out.

Zarember groaned and fell to his knees and then face forward onto the floor.

‘What the hell?’ Payton hollered. ‘What did you do to my men?’

He looked up, and looked at me.

‘It-it-it must be the juice,’ Jimmy stammered. ‘You and me didn’t have any!’

‘Grab him!’ Payton shouted.

I tried to get away, but Jimmy caught my leg and tripped me.

Payton snatched a handgun from a pile of the cadets’ gear.

Then he grabbed me and slammed me down onto the top of one of the tables in the Pizza Shack.

It was the same table I’d hidden under with Astrid during the earthquake, one million years ago.

Payton pressed the gun into my eye socket.

‘I should never have trusted you, Deano. You got the look of a freakin’ intellectual about you, you know that? What’d you do to my boys and why’d you keep secrets from me?’

Then there came two delicious sounds.

First a scream – ‘Uncle Payton!’ – from Anna.

And then the ROAR of a battery-powered chainsaw.

Astrid stood in the middle of the fallen cadets out on the gym space. She held the chainsaw in one hand and in the other she had Anna by the hair. In the darkness behind her, I could see the little kids.

‘You get away from Dean,’ she commanded.