Free Stadium: A Short Story by Scott Moon

STADIUM
by Scott Moon

    The sun rose and the sun fell. Beneath it, the corpse of the Great Society stretched from sea to shining sea. Again and again, light and dark chased eternity as the strongest died first.
    Noonday sun revealed a faux beach swerving around the stronghold like blood-drenched sand art. The creek had been a river, had been more than three fingers wide before geological changes formed a low mesa. The chorus from Oklahoma blasted from loudspeakers, reminding Kathy of a community college play where half the actors were in high school and the other half were bankers, farmers, mechanics, and housewives from town. A tear rolled over her sunburned cheeks, a tribute to the last day she had believed Guymon was a city and not a town of fourteen thousand damned souls.
    Pictures in her mind.
    Memories.
    A water tower standing one hundred and thirty feet above the town, a single red light blinking at night to warn small engine aircraft, ridiculous because all the planes in the county had been crop-dusters and crop-dusters only flew during the daytime.
    Wind turbines turned ten miles from town, blinking their lights in silent communication with the faded blue water tower. Some of the turbine blades still slashed at the summer sun, generating electricity that went nowhere. There was water in the tower, but the town had been ransacked not long after she built her first fence and only a fool would go there just for tap water, a shower, and a flushing toilet.
    The public address speakers crackled as they had during football games. After an uncomfortable pause, another musical, Grease , echoed across the land, drowning the sounds of desolation and wind gusts full of red dust. Once, during her life of middle-class ease, she complained of the feedlot stench from the edge of town — manure by the ton, which still smelled better than the beef packing plant. Her sixth-grade teacher had taken Kathy's class to the plant once. All Kathy remembered was ankle-deep blood being hosed from the killing floor.
    Those odors were gone. A chemical potpourri of dry, distant death remained.
    Ha! I'll call it the Triple D. She laughed and it sounded like busting a gut at a funeral or a wedding or an execution. Dry. Distant. Death. She worked the words into the theme song of Grease .  
    She tipped a white, red, and blue can to finished a beer that should have made her gag, then flung the can over her shoulder for luck. She had a small bladder that shrank as the gate to the outer fence squealed on its hinges during the pause between songs.
    Panic did nothing to ease her bodily needs. Running made the problem worse. None of that mattered until she crossed the no man's land between fences and found wide open the gate she thought she had welded shut. She cursed. She should have kept her killers in no man's land. She couldn't afford to be soft. Two of the Dobermans had been police dogs. All of them were territorial and protective.
    Kathy Korea, former PTA boss and soccer mom turned end-prepper, held a Mossberg 500 in both hands and unbearable pressure in her bladder as the desperate mob swarmed toward her one-acre stronghold. She’d been a Girl Scout, thespian, and third runner-up for homecoming queen in the last generation where such things mattered. Now she had tear grooves for what she was about to face even if she convinced herself sorrow had dried up like the rest of her dominion. Small, mean, without discipline — they taunted her with high-pitched howls and rhyming chants. At one hundred yards, they seemed to roll forward like banshee dust balls, knocking each other down and fighting over scraps. Crash down, lunge up, run forward like monsters across creek beds and lonely parking lots.
    At twenty yards, she saw the letter jacket of the lead boy and his goons, but most of the survivors were younger. She heard crying. She heard cursing. She heard the wind crashing the gate to the outer fence open and shut.
    For one second, she bent her knees,