Excerpt: Summer of Loathe

Rubble. Far as her eye could see. Smoke drifted up from the city in tidy columns scattered throughout the basin – the only upright structures visible, if you could call smoke columns structures, except for one lone tower in the distance, an office tower or maybe a hotel with two helicopters circling above like vultures. Rubble uninterrupted from here to the coast. Face pressed against the glass as best she could, head tilted so the bulky protective headgear didn’t get pushed from her left ear, she contemplated the distant coastline. Serene ocean, calm in the early morning. The helicopter’s shadow danced across the landscape ahead, the broken buildings, cluttered streets, abandoned vehicles. She stopped watching the ground, afraid corpses might come into view as the helicopter descended. This was a scene worse than Banda Aceh two weeks after the tsunami. And that had been the worst experience of Penumbra’s short, sheltered life.

Twenty-some hours travel. Three hours of sleep, if that, in small snatches interrupted by nightmares of Glenda lying broken amidst the ruins of her mansion. Too worried to sleep on the British Airways flight, in spite of the spacious first class seating and non-stop martinis delivered by flight attendants who pretended not to know she was too young to be pouring martinis down her throat at such a rate. The martinis an ill-considered attempt to blot visions of poor Glenda from her mind. The first leg of her journey was the longest and easiest, and a succession of shorter hops to seedier airports through rougher turbulence in smaller aircraft flown by sketchier pilots ferried her across the continent in the middle of the night while her hangover faded and her head spun in slower revolutions, until a frantic phone call from Leland somehow bought her passage on this military helicopter. Belted to a barely-padded seat by two tight straps forming an X across her chest, she squirmed in a vain attempt to find a comfortable sitting position. Her arse hurt from the constant vibration and her legs were falling asleep. Leland should have found something better than this ancient, banana republic helicopter. She tapped out a series of heel scuffs and toe tips to keep the blood flowing to her feet. It almost helped.

The headgear clamped to her head blocked most of the noise. Still, her skull throbbed in time with the helicopter’s rotors. No martinis on this flight. No water, even, but what should she expect? The military weren’t in the business of catering to celebrities. No flight attendants on this flight, just four men and two women of mixed ethnicities with greasy hair visible beneath their headgear. She`d invented a nickname for them to keep herself amused: the B Team. They certainly weren’t A Team material. They wore dirt-encrusted military camouflage and kept fearsome machine guns pinned to the floor beneath their scuffed boots. A mysterious crate at the back of the compartment stencilled with the words “secret” and “urgent” bumped and rubbed against Penumbra’s Gucci shoulder bag, which had been wedged in beside it when the soldiers brought her aboard, her bag’s green python leather no doubt being scratched by wooden slats with every small shift of the crate. When she first boarded she fought to keep the bag on her lap. The soldiers insisted: all cargo at the back. She prayed her toiletries would survive the jostling. Given the destruction below, she doubted she’d be able to buy cosmetics. Or new clothes should the few items in her bag be drenched by perfume and infiltrated by broken glass. When Leland’s call reached her in London, all she could think of was grabbing the clothes at hand - her street clothes – sweeping random items from her make-up table into the bag, and rushing from the dressing room still wearing her hard-knock-life costume. The rush to Heathrow was a blur of traffic lights and paparazzi, of passing tall busses on the right side of the road, of blaring horns sending pedestrians scurrying to safety, of phone calls on her mobile to the concierge who performed miracles to courier her passport to the airport and book her on the flight on such short notice. She wondered, when the jet engine thrust pushed her into her seat, had her understudy been informed yet? Would the curtain rise on schedule?

The helicopter swept to the right bringing the ocean into full view. She pressed her face further against the glass. Hills a few miles to the north. Green space nearer. A lurch brought her head away from the glass and smacked it back against the window before she had time to react. She rubbed her forehead and cursed under her breath and took a furtive glance to see if anyone had read her lips. She had a prim, proper reputation to maintain. The helicopter dropped and her stomach lurched and she bit her tongue. She would have thrown up except she’d not eaten anything more substantial than peanuts in half a day. She wanted to scream at the pilot, berate him for his poor flying, but she knew her words would be lost in the constant noise.

The helicopter flew low over the green space, recognizable now as a golf course. An oasis of green amidst the destruction. The golf course survived the disaster nearly untouched but for a few large trees lying across the fairways. Ahead, a street bisected the golf course and as they flew across the street she looked toward the ocean again, the coastline no longer visible due to their low altitude. Two yellow bulldozers sat on the street at one end of a strip cleared of rubble while five trucks poured cement over the street and the property to each side. A long section of concrete had already been constructed. A runway. Apparently someone was building a new airport here in the middle of what, judging by the large number of swimming pools visible beside fallen buildings, had recently been residential property.

Ahead of her, one of the soldiers – the one she named Chipper because his oily complexion reminded her of chip grease - leaned in close to the one she named Private Troglodyte and yelled something while pointing at the construction site, and Private Troglodyte nodded and yelled something back. Penumbra sat oblivious, unable to hear the conversation.

The helicopter slowed and eased toward the grass. Finally. After at least two hours aboard this flying mechanical bull she was more than ready to escape the noise, the constant vibrations, and the dour company and stretch her legs on solid ground. Trees blocked her view as the helicopter floated down. She closed her eyes, praying for an easy landing, and they were on the ground without a bump, the landing softer than much of the flight, which proved the pilot possessed at least one skill. Couldn’t fly worth a damn but he knew how to land. The most important skill, on reflection. The pilot flipped switches in a quick sequence and the engine noise died. The rotor blades began to spin down. She could tell by the decreasing pitch of the whine they produced.

The soldiers of the B Team unbuckled and stood and removed the giant headsets protecting their ears, hanging these on hooks on the wall. A soldier of recent African heritage – she called this one President Muntu - threw open the door on the right side of the helicopter and jumped down to the ground. His skin was like night compared to the twilight of her pigmentation. Penumbra struggled with the clasps on her belts. Slowpez, an uneducated Latino women, leaned in and, with a few deft jabs, released Penumbra from the straps. She motioned for Penumbra to remove her headset. This proved problematic. Her hair had thoroughly tangled the headset during the flight. She dug in with her fingers and prised the curls loose until, finally, the headset came free of her curls, pulling out only a few hairs. Her eyes watered and she imagined the damage done to her eight hundred pound perm, damage probably unfixable without the services of a professional Broadway stylist, and she doubted she’d find such a person in the ruined city. She hurled the headset to the ground and ignored the soldier’s cross expression.

Though loud, the throb of the rotors was bearable without the headset.

“This is as far as we take you,” Slowpez yelled. “You’re stuck with the toy soldiers now.” She pointed her thumb toward the doorway like an umpire calling a base runner out.