The Sun Grew Hotter

The man, who had given himself the name of John, awoke under his tarp. It snapped in the wind. Tent poles held it up over him. He had dreamt of horses on a charred farmland, galloping together, frantic, ash raising from their pounding hooves. They ran from something that John could not see. They screamed in black panic with their lips folded, exposing pink gums and large, flat teeth. 

Everything he owned sat in a child’s backpack next to him. A coat of grime clung to its graphic of dolphins breaching. He wore a patched jacket, jeans that he rarely took off, and rain boots that reached his calves. Near his head, a wide-brimmed stetson. The drum of the sun, how it molted the skin and scorched the eyes, made it a necessity. The sun did not tire, an angry thing hung low. He dropped the hat onto his head, casting a ring of shade over his leathery skin and his beard spattered with white. 

John took a swig from his canteen, the water tasting bitter and metallic, and he lifted himself from the baking roof of the parking garage. He looked out at the old square of Burgus. The marble head of some forgotten leader rested in crumbles on the street. The sky was a cloudless, pulsing vault. There were cars long abandoned, empty vessels that harbored only vermin, their tanks sucked dry and their tires reduced to slabs of rubber. A movie theater gutted and a dollar store skinned and a bank burnt to its bones. Beyond the pale structures, distant cries could be heard. Witnessing the scene made him feel hollow, in crumbles with the leader. It would be a long trip across the city to Portum, a place where they couldn’t get him, those who wanted him.

Tucking his revolver into his jeans at the hip, he gathered his belongings and set off. His bike lay nestled underneath the frame of a hollowed out van a few yards from his tarp. He took the bike by its rusted spokes, flecks of paint falling from its crossbar like helicopter seeds. 

He took it down the street, wobbling over deep seams in the concrete where weeds reached out like lashes. The sun blotted out the square. The cries rose like a choir. John narrowed his eyes into slits. Trees burst from eruptions in the street and their leaves all hissed in the breeze. 

A preacher had gathered a filthy group who clamored around her at the loading bay of a hospital. It was the source of the cries. An ambulance lay prone, its windows blown out into little glinting pieces strewn around. On top of the ambulance, the preacher chanted invented hymns in a sick fervor. Her disciples sobbed and writhed below, missing limbs and eyes, pleading with Ra for atonement. The preacher, an old Persian rug draped over her shoulders, watched John pass on his bike. Her face was cracked and sunken at the cheeks, her mouth agape and pink. He evaded her looks, like a shamed child caught by his mother. 

Not Unums. Some other group. I’m okay. John thought. 

He rode down the interstate that stood tall on concrete legs. Over its side, a corpse had been strung down, swinging slow by an ankle. Unum doctrine carved onto its chest. It had been a man, his belly bare and distended in the hot light. A crow sat on the underside of his chin. John struck a match and puffed at a cigarette from the tin in his bag as he watched the man swing. He considered fishing him up, but as the stench made its way to him, heavy and noxious, he decided against it. 

He looked down at the small tin in his palm. On it were children jumping rope. Looking at the image, he assumed he should feel nostalgic, and he always grew angry when he couldn’t. There were two cigarettes left. He smoked to curb his appetite, but was that purpose worth the wrath of The Unums? When he had swiped the cigarettes from one of their encampments (they called them holy sites), he’d had no idea of their influence. Portum was his refuge, out of their reach. Its location eluded him. All this over some smokes.

John rode the interstate for two more hours, the sun following his course. 

Acid rain began to fall. As the first drops singed the road around him, he pedaled down an exit and took shelter inside what used to be a church. He stepped through the heavy double doors and into the vestibule. Orange light bled through long abrasions in the cathedral ceiling, fanning bands of color through the dripping acid. The rain turned to tufts of smoke on the crimson carpet, and amid the smoke was a dead woman, disemboweled on the nave. She laid at the feet of a Virgin Mary. She wore no carvings, so at least they were not Unums, whoever did this.

John took a few gulps of his canteen and a few bites of a granola bar. He did a search of the place. It had been ransacked, but he was alone. John sat at a pew and put his head in his hands. He tried to say a prayer, but found that he lacked the words. 

The sound of claws scuttling on hardwood broke his trance. Under the pew was a rat, hobbling, drooling. Burnt skin between matted hair. It had been caught in the rain and had found shelter there, just as John had. He dropped a piece of granola at its paws. The rat, emaciated, quivering, nibbled at it. John scooped up the rat and put it into an unused pouch in his backpack. 

Shortly after, the rain slowed and then stopped. He left the church, the rust stripped from its steeple by the acid, browns and reds weeping down it. 

John and the rat mounted the bike and went back up the exit onto the interstate.

They stayed on it into the night. The moon shone with the sun’s light, and the sun waited below the horizon, coiled. In this pale blue, he and the rat took an exit that lead to the woods bordering Burgus. John felt followed as he left the gridwork of dead cars. 

They took a trail at the mouth of the forest that had long been overgrown, only its vague impression still existing. They rode through the brambles and past trees with bark flayed like the skin of the rat. Ahead was a blur of twisted wood. Intermittent coos of night birds between long gaps of near silence. Silence and John’s slow, labored breath. 

He tried to make camp, but the sound of distant howling voices kept him moving. The rat squirmed in his bag.

On the second day of travel, deep in the belly of the woods, his bike’s chain snapped as he traversed a small ravine. He left the rusted thing there and continued on foot. He cried as he marched. He mourned his steed.

On the third day, as he rooted through his pack for food, he saw that the rat had died. He forgot to feed it. Worthless. John roasted and ate it, despite having other food: a can of baked beans, another granola bar, and a piece of chocolate wrapped in gold foil. He felt like he didn’t deserve any of that. Later, he was sick. He retched under the sun. 

He finished his water on the fourth day. It was after his last gulp that he saw a tail of smoke wagging in the midday air. 

At the base of the smoke’s tail was a camp and a fire tended by a boy with red hair. He wore rags and was no older than fifteen. Tied to a near stump was a horse, white with brown splotches, sputtering and shaking away mosquitos. 

John took out the revolver from his hip and trained it on the boy’s head. The boy tried to speak, his face scrunched up. John shot him and the left side of his face fell away. The horse squealed, kicking up dirt and tugging at its rope. John dragged the boy away and left him by a creek out of sight. He turned his head away from the boy as he searched his body. 

A note from a girl named Ruth was in his pocket. “The Unums finally visited” Ruth wrote: 

“They seem nice. When we said we weren’t interested in their leadership, they left. They said they wouldn’t return unless we sought them out. They say everything is one. That if you take care of everything else, everything else will take care of you. I like it. Sending you good energy from Portum. Be in Burgus soon. Can’t wait to see the city.” 

No mention of where Portum could be. 

He returned to the camp and went to the horse, undoing the knot that held it there and watching it run frantic in the direction of the creek. The animal had looked at him with horror, and he could not bear it. 

John ate some of a deer carcass that hung at the kid’s camp, putting what he didn’t eat into his pack. He enjoyed it immensely, hunched over the fire. It made him feel better about his bike. 

After awhile, regret about the horse overwhelmed him. It could’ve been my new steed. Or at least a few meals.

He stayed at the boy’s camp, taking care to snuff out the fire and make limp the trail of smoke. The Unums occupied his thoughts. Would they blow him away as he did the boy? He considered tossing the cigarette tin now that it was empty, but he kept it where the rat had been. He had killed many Unums for those smokes. If he tossed it they would be dead for nothing. 

That night, as he slept in the boy’s tent among his clothes, the boy’s sweatshirt as his pillow, he heard movement in the brambles. He clutched his revolver close and unzipped the flap of the nylon tent, tremors in his arms and legs.

A coyote, lurking low, watched him with shining, crystalline eyes. Neither of them moved. They stared, each a creature in the other’s eyes. It had pulled the boy from the creek and left him near the blackened rocks where the fire had been. The boy was mostly gone, gnawed away. Parts of him were littered around the camp. Some of it was stuck on the coyote, smeared on its snout. John fired a shot, missing by inches. The coyote ran from the shot and John lost sight of it. He was sleepless that night. 

In the morning, John left Ruth’s note in the tent, thinking it to be a curse. 

In the following days of horrible trudging, he felt the coyote stalking him with the eyes of the sun. It was always in his periphery, invisible if looked at directly. But he knew it was there. 

On the seventh of those days, there was a break in the trees. John emerged onto a shimmering backroad from the womb of the woods. Above the treeline was an old cell tower, hung from it a billowing cloth. On it, the same words that had been carved into the swinging man. 

“NOT EVEN DEATH CAN WIPE OUT OUR GOOD DEEDS.”  

Unum doctrine. John was gaunt with hunger, and his canteen was dry, and the coyote followed. John knew the cell tower overlooked The Commericum, an old suburb where merchants came to trade, where he could swap for food and water. He knew also that The Commercium had been proselytized, as marked by the billowing cloth.

Portum could be an hour or a week away. 

He walked, the cell tower his compass, towards The Commercium. 

. . . 

The man, who had given himself the name of John, swung by an ankle from a billboard advertising nicotine gum. There were words carved in his chest. The traveler who found him wanted to cut him down, but John was much too high up. Her name was Mary. She found orbiting the billboard countless circles of pawprints. 

Days later, she came across the remains of the ginger boy, laid cold and blue in the shade. She took the note in his tent to Portum, a day’s walk away, where she would ask around for its owner. 

The sun grew hotter and began to peel John away, layers at a time, taking him back.