Dust to Dust

Brutality is still the norm, though the hard times are spoken of as past.  For those vying for this new world, from law officers to rebel agitators, cold bloodedness a given. It’s necessary, Officer Mike Ashton tells himself. Without Ashton and the other agents of the East Coast Reformed States (ECRS), agitators will shatter the peace that bandages their hurting society. And then where would they be, people like Mike Ashton’s wife and daughters? The thought of his family caught in the midst of the city’s darkness is one of his driving demons. 

Sickness and poverty spawn crime, but worse still are the vicious, calculated strikes of the agitators. Some, self-styled “freedom fighters,” claim to be fighting out of loyalty to the “true nation,” while others hail from outside powers, tearing with threats and fear into the still soft, embryonic infrastructure that survives so tenuously. It doesn’t matter what the cause is, the effect is the same – gut-wrenching crime scenes in broad daylight, dismal death tolls on the nightly reports.

Mike Ashton has seen the extent of utter depravity in the human mind, has seen horrors that people do to other people, for fun, for money, for loyalty. Ashton and his team, they stop it, or, stop what they can. Agitators are enemies, and must be treated accordingly; captured agents are valuable sources of information, and must be exploited accordingly; I am not a monster, because the things I do, I do in the service of good… Following this mantra, Ashton finds himself doing things that he used to think only psychopaths would be capable of.

Ashton’s team may stop horrors, yes, but they stop it with horrors of their own.   Are we still human? None ask aloud, but each officer has thought it, and each copes with it differently. Ashton knows that “Bug-Eye” Fredrick takes to drink as soon as he’s off work; he knows Aileen Martin has already become an alcoholic, and frantically hiding it. “Tank” Johnson’s weekend includes substances that were not legal in the old world, and are still not legal in the Reformed States. They’re the broken heroes of our brave new world. And who can blame them? thinks Ashton. Everyone needs an escape route. These escapes, though, have a bad habit of leading straight from one pain and right into to another. But not Ashton’s, no, not his. He may live by violence, and be constantly tormented by a cannibalistic conscience, but for a few blessed hours every day, he has a sanctuary to which he can flee – he goes home. 

He never brings work home; he won’t even wear his uniform back to the house. He ends each shift under a slimy shower head that dribbles cold water. He’s never has company down there – no one else uses those musty, dark locker rooms. The hurried shower in the brown water makes him feel clean enough to go home, and he can’t leave without it.

His still doesn’t feel clean when he eases wearily through the front door to be greeted by his daughters, Penny, Starla and Lucy.  They are pure – pure laughter, pure joy, pure innocence. He swears to himself that he’s going to keep it that way. “How was work, Daddy?” they ask.

“Good. Very good.” He smiles down into their small faces.

“Catch a lot of bad guys, Daddy?” asks Lucy. She is four years old, and knows that her world will be safe, so long as daddy can put away a few bad guys each day. She’s hopeful that at the rate her dad is going, one day he’ll catch all the bad guys, and then there will only be good people left. 

“You bet I did.” His fingers skim over tender skin of her chin, teasing with a quick, gentle pinch.

As always, Lucy is gratified with this answer, and imagines a “bad guy” toy box getting stuffed fuller and fuller, while the whole world gets cleaned up.

Hugs and kisses all around. Except from Penny. She’s fourteen now, and has started holding herself aloof. Ashton looks at his oldest daughter over the curly heads of the other two.  The just-got-home-from-work smile disappears prematurely. “Is that makeup you got yourself all covered in?”

Nothing can hide the flush that spreads across her pimply cheeks. “It’s not that much...”

“I don’t care how much it is!” Ashton stiffens. His voice has risen. His children shrink back. It doesn’t matter that he’s never hurt them, his eruptions are always scary.

There’s a noise behind him. Ashton turns, and there is Francesca. He is back to smiling, his anger evaporating as quickly as it overtook him. “Hi, baby.”

“Hi honey,” she gives him a kiss while the little ones giggle. Ashton strokes the long tresses that reach almost to Francesca’s waist. Beneath the cascading hair, her slouching blouse reveals one of her shoulders, perfect and unmarked; none of her skin is marked, she bears no burns, brands, or scars. She embodies a softness that is lost to the many others who came of age at the end of the old world; her family’s wealth had been like a shield. She too, is pure, and that purity is the radiating center of Ashton’s sanctuary.

“Dinner ready?” Ashton asks.

“Almost.” She turns away, and the hem of her skirt swirls like a surging wave around her ankles.

Ashton cannot eat dinner until a second shower. He never has. Only when the hot, crystalline water has rushed over him until his skin is red does he feel like he’s been purified. 

They eat dinner at the heavy wooden table under the saturated light of the chandelier’s lampworked bulbs. The little girls chatter and giggle, giddily free of all the truths they don’t know. The only difference between Penny and the younger ones is that Penny mutters and smirks, too old for blatant displays of joy. Still, even in her angst she is lively. The makeup is gone.

The exuberance of the little children dominates the meal. Ashton does not speak, only smiles, buzzed on a sweeter intoxication than alcohol.  When the girls go, his smile disappears too, and he falls to a familiar stone-faced silence. Francesca moves about the kitchen, her long skirt rippling, the beads of her jewelry tinkling together. Ashton starts, for Francesca has slid into the seat next to him. He looks and waits.

“Hard day at work?” She has been trying to figure out for years how to break the ice, and now cringes to hear how banal she sounds.

“It was fine.”

“Then why do you look so awful?”

She sees him blanch, and in that moment would give anything to know what he’s thinking. In fact, he is thinking about the blood he’s seen today, some inflicted by his own hand. He looks hard at Francesca. “You know I don’t talk about work.”

She unconsciously leans closer. There is a yearning in her, as passionate than that of a lover, as gentle than that of a mother. It is a tender warmth reaching out from inside her, reaching for her husband, to heal him, to help him, to ease the burdens he so resolutely keeps to himself. “But I can’t stand to look at you like this,” she whispers. 

“Then don’t look at me. Just let me be.” Unlike his normal volcanic outburst, this one is a cold, sharp slice.

All the warmth recoils back into Francesca. If she were younger, if she were not so strong, she would jump up from her chair, turn on her heel, and be savagely silent for the rest of the night. But I am strong, she tells herself. So she lets the blow break over her and does not retreat though she feels something inside her shattering. Finally she says, “How can I help you if you won’t let me?”

“You can help me by not asking what I spend my days doing. You can help by not trying to get me to bring that mess in here.” The volume of his voice hasn’t risen, but his words are coming harsh and fast. “And you can help by not letting Penny look like she’s trying to sell herself on the nearest street corner. I don’t want to come home to my daughter looking like that. That stuff’s out there,” his gesture signals the big, wicked world, on the other side of the window. “It doesn’t belong in here.” 

Francesca stiffens and does not reply, not until the following evening. “I’m thinking about getting a job,” she tells Ashton.

He rouses from trying to convince himself that sometimes, torture is justified. It’s obvious that some rogue agitators are planning something big, and he has to find out what, no matter the depths that drives him to. “What?” he grunts.

“A job. The kids don’t need me like they used to, and I think it’s time for me to get back out there…” she sees his answer in his narrowed eyes.

“Don’t I provide well enough for you and the girls?” He should, he thinks, for it’s the cost of his soul that his salary pays.

“It’s not about that.  It’s about me! I’m not even worried about getting a paying job. I was considering volunteering at one of the clinics. I’ve realized, my life has been so protected, and there are so many who are hurting. Why should I sit, separate, in safety? I’m ready to have more in my life than just…”

“Just what?” growls Ashton. How can she want the rest of the world, with its ugliness? The home isn’t “just” anything, he thinks. In fact, it is everything Ashton has worth living for.

“You live in a different world, you know that?” Francesca is not wearing jewelry today, so the gesture is silent as she waves a furious hand in the air. She will never mention where the jewelry went – a pawnshop – or mention the money, which was donated in the worst part of the city. She pushes on, “You go to work, and it’s this whole alternate life that you don’t let us – let me – be a part of! Why? Why can’t I be there for the other life you live?”

“Because I say so!” Ashton barks. How do you explain that you are staving off a world of horrors to someone who’s always been protected? He looks at Francesca, and his weary eyes beg her to understand. “That’s the only explanation I’ve got. It’s the best I can do,” he mutters.

But it’s not the best Francesca can do. She tried to hold her rage at bay, but it is coursing through her now. “Do you ever think how lonely it gets, trying and trying to understand you, to get through to you? I’m sick of it. If there’s not a place for me in your world, don’t try and stop me getting my own!”

“This is your world!” He leaps from his seat without meaning to, and towers over her. “Don’t you think I wish I could belong here too? But I know things I wish I didn’t, I’ve seen things I’ll never forget. I’ve…” even in his rage, he manages to stop before he blurts, I’ve done unforgivable things. He gulps back these words, and continues, “All I have on this whole earth is a few hours of peace in this house. Is that so much for me to ask?”

Francesca gazes coolly up at him. Her anger is not like her husband’s. Hers is not sudden to explode, quick to recede. Hers grows silently until it is hot enough to sear, and she wields it to the same destructive effect of a white-hot blade. 

She waits for his heavy breaths to settle, for him to ease back into his chair. When he finally does, she leans forward. There is not intimacy in the motion, but rather something akin to menace. “You’re demanding a few hours out of each day of your life, in exchange for all of mine?” She slowly shakes her head. Even the earrings that would usually jingle against her cheek are gone, so the silence is utterly unbroken.

“I’m dying to be your partner, but you won’t let me. And now I’m telling you, I won’t be your prisoner.”

Ashton evaluates her warily, sensing the venom in her, unsure where it will manifest. She turns away, he lets her, and nothing more is said that evening, or the following, or at any time for the next few days.  They speak, but not about the thing that is really going on between them. Francesca’s long, beautiful hair is now kept tied up tight, tight as the strain between her and Ashton. This makes her chin look narrow, and her high cheek bones stand out starkly; sometimes there is almost an appearance of gauntness to her.

One day the unthinkable happens: a rouge team of “freedom fighters” triggers a bioweapon – half the city is covered in the 21^st century version of mustard gas. A state of terror and emergency reigns. Ashton cannot go home – all agents are needed at their posts; citizen volunteer groups are enlisted to aid the efforts to care for the sick. The hardest hit are the Catacombs: deep, underground compartments, like skyscrapers, but inversed. These are cheap, cramped living spaces. Now they’re packed with the dead and desperately sick. It is a fine line between heroism and suicide to delve in and pull out survivors. Government resources have been stretched from thin to breaking. Volunteers with the necessary training can go down, but it is not encouraged. Still, heroic groups organize and flock to the disaster zone, doing what good they can. Sometimes, volunteers don’t come back up. 

Ashton hears it all, his mind buzzes with the news flashes, his eyes are overlayed with image after image of damage, of death, of the mushrooming death toll. “Bug-Eye” doesn’t wait for his drinking now; Aileen Martin is never sober; no one cares. Ashton wishes he could be a hero, tirelessly pouring himself out. But all he really wants is to go home, to be in the warmth of his children’s smiles, to cling to Francesca, to cleanse himself in a steaming shower, to enter his sanctuary, if just for a little while, just long enough to replenish his suffocating soul. 

Finally he is granted leave. He does not bother with the brown showers. There is no transportation available for commuters in the midst of this disaster. He walks all the way home. His feet are raw by the time he staggers through the front door.  

It is quiet in the house, no gap-toothed smiles or curly heads greet him. Immediately on high alert, Ashton does not call out, but creeps through the house. It feels cold. He makes his way to the kitchen. Francesca turns to him. “You’re home?” Her hair is in a knot on her head. Her straight trouser legs are stuffed into heavy work boots, and her figure is bound down by a canvas jacket, two parallel rows of buttons marching down her chest, where colorful beads used to swing.

“Where are the girls?” Ashton asks.

“Your parents take them every day; it’s safer there.”

Ashton nods. “And what about you? Why aren’t you with them?”

“I want to do some good.” When Ashton doesn’t reply, Francesca goes on, “And don’t worry, it’s not about—” she spits, “the paycheck. I’m not getting paid for what I’m doing.”

“What are you doing?”

“They say we’re back to the worst days of the old times.” Her glance takes on a sardonic cast. “You couldn’t do anything to stop the city being torn apart. But I can do something, now.” She continues her work.  Ashton realizes she’s packing a tactical-issue duffle bag of provisions. “Don’t wait up for me, I don’t know when I’ll be back. Or if I’ll be back.”

He’s too numb to feel the sting, and only stammers, “Who’ll take care of girls?”

“I raised them alone for all these years. Your turn now.”

She starts to head for the back door. Ashton wants to stop her, but his body is too heavy to move. “Wait,” he manages through leaden lips, like calling for help in a nightmare, “where are you going?”

She meets his eyes for the last time. “The Catacombs.” Then she pulls the door so it drifts softly shut behind her.  She steps outside, leaving a shattered sanctuary in her wake.