Firebrand by Bethany Browning
*TW; drug use
“Why would those adults be riding child-sized bikes unless they were stolen?” I asked. “What kind of people steal kids’ bikes?”
“Meth heads,” Mike said, his mouth full of chili. “Stop obsessing. The more you look, the more you’re going to find.”
I’d been watching the pandemonium in the park from our new loft for about a week. My reaction to the new reality outside my window—open drug use, public urination, fist fights— was amplified by the fact that I was still unpacking the trauma from abandoning the life we built in California.
I was haunted by memories of the wildfire that had raced down the hill toward our wine country property. We scooped up our dog Igor and fled with little more than the clothes on our backs.
After three months of living in a boiling hot car in a Northern California parking lot with two hundred other fire victims, we’d had enough. We cashed the insurance check the minute it arrived and drove ten hours north to a downtown loft in place we’d never been to—a city in the Pacific Northwest known for its constant drizzle, continual cloud cover and cool, wide rivers bursting with fish.
And even though we fancied ourselves the outdoorsy types—hikers, paddleboarders, bee-worshiping gardeners—we settled downtown. Because City won’t burn down around us, I rationalized. City’s in the middle of a temperate rainforest. Some idiot running over a rock with his lawnmower won’t cause a raging inferno, I told myself.
And the loft? It was like stepping into a magazine.
“You’d never find something this nice for this price in wine country,” Mike said.
“Taxes are lower, too,” I agreed.
The loft overlooked City’s oldest park, and the view from the sofa was the upper canopy of a lush stand of thick red oaks, elms and alders with one or two hackberries thrown in for texture. The soft light of the afternoon sun glowed through the leaves, giving them a lit-from-within quality.
But the ground level was a different story. City had faced its own recent crises. There was water aplenty, cloud cover and old-growth forests, but downtown had been ravaged by police violence and riots. Squalid tent encampments had popped up like cold sores in nearly every neighborhood, their inhabitants immovable by law because of the recent pandemic.
Drug addicts convened on the park and shot up in the shade of the heritage elms. My neighbor cautioned me to scan the thick park grass for used needles that could pierce a soft paw. His dog had recently stepped on a syringe. The infection so severe his front right leg had been amputated.
I kept my complaints to a minimum. Mike hated whiny women, and I’d spent years working our wine country property—chopping trees, tilling earth, demolishing structures—to prove to him I wasn’t built like the other girls, namely his ex-wife Eden, who proved to be too delicate for the work of managing rural acreage.
“Wine country made you soft,” Mike said, when he finally noticed my new nervous habit of chewing my thumbnail.
I winced at the insult. I didn’t feel soft when I was pumping out the septic tank and digging post-holes.
“If by ‘soft’ you mean I need a pepper spray keychain, then ok,” I said.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said, turning on the TV. “Come watch Alone. This guy’s about to kill a wolverine with an axe.”
*****
The timing of our move found us in City at the opening edge of a record-breaking heat wave. Hundreds of people died in the span of one weekend, cooked to death in their homes or collapsing into heaps from heat exhaustion on sidewalks.
“Where’s my rain?” I asked, peering out the window again into the blinding mid-day light.
I stayed inside, parked in front of the A/C, dripping with sweat, watching the bedlam down below.
Junkies passed around needles like playing cards. One boy—he couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20—lay so still on the asphalt that I thought he might have died.
“Am I looking at a corpse?” I asked Mike.
“He’s fine,” Mike said. “The ones you need to worry about are those two.” He pointed to a couple. The girl was skeletal, her joints seemed to jut out in all directions independent of her movement. She was pulling a bike from the back of a truck. The guy looked like he’d corner you on an empty block and tell you some bullshit story about needing gas money.
“Don’t let them take you to a second location,” Mike said.
*****
The couple, who told me their names were Tyler and Laney and then offered me something called ‘ice’ (which I declined, prompting them to call me a “stuck up cunt”), set up camp underneath our balcony. And by camp, I mean three tents surrounded by the hacked-up remains of kids’ bikes, two cots, four cases of White Claw, a dogpile of torn backpacks with random contents spilling out, broken cookware, a portable butane stove, food wrappers, glass pipes, fistfuls of lighters and a mishmash of greasy tools.
Igor, a senior dog, required six walks a day to prevent accidents on the loft’s hand-hewn, reclaimed barnwood floors. The door to our building swung out directly into Tyler and Laney’s camp.
“Hey, that’s our stuff,” Laney would say to me if the edge of the door touched their pile.
“Sorry,” I’d mutter. I’d already taken to picking Igor up as we emerged from the building so he didn’t step in their waste, human or otherwise.
“We have rights,” Tyler would say.
“Ok, ok,” I’d whisper.
“They harass you because you look weak,” Mike said. “Toughen up.”
Before I could defend myself, he told me he had to go back to wine country for a few weeks to ‘get some things.’
“What things?” I asked. “Everything you owned went up in smoke.”
“I’ll be back in a few weeks,” he said the following morning as he closed the door behind him.
I got the pepper spray.
*****
The summer heat was relentless, and my mood was dark.
“Is there nothing we can do to move Tyler and Laney?” I asked my neighbor.
“No one will move an established tent during COVID,” he said with a sigh. “Problem is, they don’t even live there.”
“What are you talking about? They’re homeless.”
“There are the houseless,” he explained, rubbing his eyes. “Single mothers who lost their jobs and are trying to get back on their feet. People with mental illness who receive no support from the system. But Tyler and Laney have set up what we call a Meth Motel. They live in an apartment in the suburbs. They come here to work on the park. To sell, I mean. They don’t sleep here most nights. They drive away in their truck.”
I took a minute to synthesize this information. It seemed impossible to me anyone would use the trauma of homelessness as a cover for criminal activity.
“They have a chop shop,” I pressed. “They use and sell drugs openly. They harass me when I walk my dog. They urinate in our doorway. We’ve got cameras set up. Can we show the footage to the police?”
“Camera got broken in the riots,” he said, unmoved by my evidence. “No one wants to pay to replace it.”
“What if this doesn’t improve?” I asked Mike over the phone. “What if we bought a gorgeous loft in a neighborhood that’s permanently full of Meth Motels?”
“It’s COVID stuff,” he said. “They’re not moving anyone right now because they might move the wrong people. In two years, this park will be full of families having picnics and your loft will be worth a fortune.”
“Two years?” I asked.
“You should eat something,” he said. “You’re starting to look like Laney.”
*****
My shirt was drenched. Rivulets of sweat slithered down my abdomen. I kept Igor to the grass as much as possible, even though it was more difficult to locate sharp and dangerous objects; the pavement was too hot for his feet.
I wasn’t sure if my dizziness was from the heat or from panic.
“You got A/C?” Laney was in my personal space. She smelled like the inside of a dive bar: cigarettes, dried beer, B.O., farts.
“You should invite us up.”
Igor was losing patience in my arms.
“Um, no thank you,” I said.
She put her arm up across the doorway. The sour smell of her hairy armpit nearly knocked me over.
“You could always go home,” I said, making myself as big as I could.
“Tyler, she thinks knows something about us,” she said, unbothered.
I shifted Igor into the crook of my left arm. He yelped and I tried to shush him. I fished my keyring out of my pocket and dropped it on the ground.
Laney dove for it, snatching it up before I had a chance to register what was happening. She maneuvered the pepper spray off the key ring in one deft move and tossed my keys across the street and into the park.
She ran.
Tyler looked up from the handlebars he was dismantling and laughed. “She’s quick,” he said with an appreciative laugh. “She’s real quick.”
A pang of jealousy punched me in the sternum. Mike had never complimented me like that.
*****
Mike was coming home, and I had rehearsed a speech. He was two hours late.
I watched the oven clock. The minutes flashed by.
My phone rang.
“Mike? Did you get a flat tire or something?”
“Yeah, so I’m staying.”
“What? You’re—what?”
“I can’t live there with you,” he said. “I’m staying with Eden.”
I let this information wash over me. My mouth went dry.
“Anyway,” he continued. “I put you up there because it rains and you were just bitching, bitching, bitching about the heat and the fires. I can’t—”
“You stashed me in a place I’d never been because you thought I’d like the weather better and then went home to Eden? Her house burned down, too. You’re, what? In a hotel with her?”
I heard him release a breath.
“Sums it up,” he said.
I opened and closed my mouth to try to respond, but no words formed.
He continued. “This situation—I’ve been reading the reports—is going to clear up. City is doing stuff to take care of it. In a few years, you’ll be sitting on a fortune—”
I clicked off the phone and sat in stunned silence.
Igor sniffed at the door. He whined.
Sweating, shaking, mute with rage, I braced myself for our final walk of the night.
*****
It was late but the sun was still stubbornly hanging in the sky, another indignity of moving farther north. After wine country’s forty-degree diurnal temperature swings, sun and swelter after nine o’clock felt like a personal attack. The heat rammed me head on as Igor and I emerged from the door and into Tyler and Laney’s sidewalk setup.
I tiptoed around them, but they kept their eyes on me.
“Was that mace for us?” Tyler asked, flicking a lighter on and off under a spoon.
“Were you plannin’ on spraying us?” He made a motion like he was pressing a button and a sound like ‘psht psht.’
Igor, spurred on by his full bladder and the discomfort of being pressed up against a hot human body in 108-degree heat, wriggled loose and dropped to the sidewalk. He romped into the street toward the park.
The heat was an impenetrable wall. I couldn’t move. The world was wavy, my brain bloated, my stomach churning. I couldn’t muster the energy to call his name.
“If I hadn’t gotten this,” Laney, emerging from inside one of the tents and holding the pepper spray canister in the air, said. “We’d be blinded by now.”
Laney approached on my left, Tyler stood up and closed in on my right, sandwiching me between them. I could smell whatever he was cooking in that spoon, sickly sweet, toxic.
As I drifted into a heat-induced malaise, nearly resigned to the idea that Tyler and Laney were about to gut me, a sensory memory gripped me like a vise: smoke.
“Your tent’s on fire,” I said, involuntarily. And again. “Fire.”
Every cell in my body screamed to run the other way, yet I was compelled by a force I didn’t have time to comprehend. I wanted to be consumed by the heat that was already half done with finishing me off.
“Don’t touch my shit.” Laney screeched in a panicked voice that was nothing like her usual blasé, disaffected tone. She snatched me by my shirt collar, and I didn’t understand why.
The violent yank woke me up from my hypnotic state. The sight of the fire made me ferocious, like a beast let out of a cage.
“Your tent’s on fire.”
The pepper spray hit my eyes like a thousand tiny darts, and I heard an unearthly yowl escape my throat. The heat from the fire joined forces with the broiling pavement and the stinging sensation in my eyes, and I feared I would be obliterated.
Half blind, I grasped for anything to ground me. My hands wrapped around something narrow and metal. Handlebars.
I hoisted myself to my feet. I swung.
“Ho-ho. She’s not playing,” Laney said. I swung again and felt the sharp thud of resistance in my wrist, exactly like the feel of hitting a tennis ball dead center on the racket. The sound was a nauseating thoink.
The force knocked her into the street.
Searing pain thrummed through my sinuses.
“Laney!”
I blinked and squinted. I could make out Tyler’s hulking form lunging toward Laney. But the car? None of us saw that coming, least of all Tyler. It cut the corner of the curb and hit him square between its headlights, missing Laney by a few feet.
I recoiled at the crunching sound of his body flipping across the metal of the hood: Bone snapping and sinew ripping, a skull crushed on impact.
Sirens mourned in the distance.
One of the tents had already been incinerated and a second, smaller one was alight. Laney was on the move again. She gripped me by the hair and dragged me toward her truck across the street.
Mike’s voice reverberated in my ears. “No second location.”
I twisted free from Laney’s grip. I swung again, hard, connecting with her jaw and sending her flying like a side of beef into the center of the pyre. A tooth skittered across the pavement.
Tyler’s body twitched in the road, the faceless driver of the car long gone.
The butane stove exploded, and Laney’s ending was written.
I retched.
“Stop, drop and roll!”
It was my neighbor. He waved his arms. “Your shirt’s catching.”
An errant ember had landed on my sleeve and was beginning to smolder. I whipped the shirt off, dropped it, and stomped.
I stood there in my bra, covered in soot and blood spray from the lashing I’d given Laney. Pebbles were embedded in my elbows and back. My eyes were inflamed and swollen. Tears ran in polluted rivers down my cheeks.
A crowd had gathered. A fire truck swept in.
The firemen swiftly dispatched with the fire, nothing left but a wet, soggy mess and Laney, scorched beyond recognition.
EMTs whisked in, and I observed their efficient movements through blurry eyes with calm detachment. I didn’t want to know if Laney was alive. Tyler was, barely. But judging from the blood splattered across the asphalt, and the crumpled shape he was left in, he’d never be the same.
My neighbor appeared at my side.
“The cops are going to want to talk to you,” he said. “You up for that?”
“Igor. Where is he?”
My eyes stung badly but I had a sliver of vision. Igor was limping a few yards away.
“Damn needles,” my neighbor said.
I swept Igor into my arms. “Is it still in there?” I had trouble holding him still. I was shaking uncontrollably. The irony coursed through my veins like a lethal poison. I was terrified of these tent squatters, but all along, Tyler and Laney should have been afraid of me.
My neighbor extracted the needle from Igor’s foot. “You’re going to need to get that checked immediately,” he said.
“I don’t have a vet,” I said, my voice hollow, not my own.
“You stay here,” he said. “Talk to the police. I’ll bring him back to you as soon as I can.”
Commotion continued all around me. A basketball game resumed. How did the clocks start ticking again so quickly after time stopped for two human beings?
I didn’t belong in this place.
I didn’t belong anywhere.
No one noticed as I slipped out of the park and walked east, streetlights flickering on one by one, illuminating my path.
The first gentle puffs of chilled air off the river felt like long-awaited good news. I moved toward it, a ghost longing for renewal. Hot, shit-smeared sidewalk yielded to the plush, cool mud of the riverbank. I stepped out of my shoes. I wiggled my toes and savored the feel of real earth.
I strode into the water. The river welcomed me, enveloping me completely until everything I understood was cold, liquid tranquility.
I released what was left of myself into the stillness, my singed and tattered heart sinking into the deep peace it could only find at the bottom of a river, where no light or heat could ever reach me.
“I trashed the story because I couldn't get it to come together quite the way I wanted it to, especially the ending. I was going for more of a horror vibe, but I'm not sure what this ended up being. Kinda scary? Sorta gross? Not sure... It's based on an experience I had last summer in Portland.”
Bethany Browning's work has been published in Stories We Tell After Midnight Volume 3, Allegory, Angel Rust, Drabbledark II, Mudroom, Flash Flood, Filth, The Sunlight Press, Sage Cigarettes, Esoterica, Halloween Horrors, and Flash Fiction Magazine (pending). She's on Twitter @buzzwordsocial and you can visit bethanybrowning.com for links to her work.