The Apocalypse Seven

by Gene Doucette

  The pig continued to pace him.

  They passed the movie theater on the right. Touré was about to turn from there, down one of the side roads that would get him to Washington Street, when he saw a horse.

  It was eating grass on the common, all by itself, not looking remotely concerned about the pig, or the human being chased by the pig, or any of the large number of other pigs loitering on the grass. It seemed vaguely interested in a wild turkey ambling along the sidewalk, but that was all.

  Touré knew very nearly nothing about horses. This one was brown, and it had a saddle, and if Touré got on its back it could take him places faster than a bike. It probably wouldn’t be willing to pull the trailer, but it would be so much better if Touré could find a carriage and somehow hook up the horse to it. He could get all their supplies in one trip, and also he’d have a horse.

  Touré had no carriage and didn’t have a clue how to hook one up to a horse and didn’t know if the horse would be even remotely cool with it, but he was willing to give it a go.

  Once he got rid of the damn pig.

  He pulled the bike over near another coffee shop—​Boston had a ton of coffee shops—​and stood in the middle of the street.

  The last time he’d seen one of these, he just had to stare it down, so he decided to give that a try again. Robbie had been with him then, but it wasn’t like Robbie was the intimidating one, of the two of them.

  “Go on,” he said. “Git.”

  The pig snorted, or oinked, or whatever that noise was supposed to be called.

  “You heard me.”

  There was a shuffle behind Touré from the side street at his back. He turned and realized his mistake.

  This wasn’t one lone boar running after him.

  It was a gang.

  “Oh,” he said. “You guys are meat-eaters, aren’t you?”

  He moved toward the bike, as the fastest nearby means of conveyance, but the animals were smart enough to cut him off.

  In the seconds before deciding to run and actually running, Touré had another epiphany about the magnitude of his error. All this time, he just assumed he was the plucky apocalypse survivor, the one you hate to root for but who you know will be there for the end credits.

  But that wasn’t right at all.

  Who he was was: the cocky idiot who makes a tragic mistake and dies before the end of the first act.

  “I thought for sure that was gonna be Robbie,” he said.

  Then he ran. Straight up Tremont.

  He thought about running for the common but decided he had no advantage in an open, grassy field. His advantage was being able to climb stuff and go through doors, two tasks pigs sucked at. He just needed to find something to climb or a door he could open.

  He wasn’t nearly fast enough to reach either. He got to a corner in front of a bank, tried to cut it at an angle, and lost the position to a boar coming off the sidewalk. He tripped over the animal and ended up on his back.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he muttered, trying to get to his feet before the rest of the pack got to him.

  It didn’t work out. He made it to his feet, but then the next boar to the scene stabbed a tusk into his right thigh.

  Touré screamed, punched the boar in the face, and fell onto his back. That boar staggered away, but one of its friends came up next, teeth out, going for the neck.

  Touré was about to die, and he was really, really annoyed about it.

  “All right, come on!” he shouted.

  The boar lunged forward, squealed . . . and then fell over dead on the ground next to Touré.

  There was an arrow buried in the back of its skull.

  Touré had no time to come to grips with this, because the one he punched in the face was back for more, and another two were flanking him. Touré couldn’t stand because of his leg, so he rolled over to the dead boar and tried to yank the arrow from its head. It wouldn’t budge.

  And once again, he was about to die.

  A leaping woman appeared on the scene, directly above the nearest boar, with a knife in her hands and a scream on her lips. She landed on the boar’s back and buried the blade in its skull.

  Touré fell in love with her immediately.

  Leaving the knife behind, she rolled over the dying boar and onto her knees, facing off with the other two, an arrow in each hand.

  “Who’s next?” she hissed.

  The two boars huffed and stamped their hooves.

  “Come on, piggy-piggy, try it,” she said.

  They made a show of challenging her, but didn’t. They ran off instead.

  “Hey, they’re gone,” she said over her shoulder. “You. You’re . . . real, right?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” he said, and gallantly blacked out.

  6

  Touré woke up on the floor of a food court next to a deceased boar and a few feet away from a small fire providing both heat and light to a space that would have otherwise had neither.

  “Aaah,” he said, in a not-at-all masculine way.

  He was on his back, wrapped in a blanket, with a sleeping bag under his head for a pillow. The boar was lying on its side, the arrow still buried in the back of its skull. It was sticking its tongue out at Touré.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “This is your fault.”

  He sat up and shouted again—​in what was hopefully a slightly more manly scream—​from the pain in his right leg. It felt like someone was going under the skin of his thigh with sandpaper.

  He pulled the blanket back to have a look.

  The pant leg had been cut away and there was a piece of a cotton shirt wrapped tightly around the wound, which he was bleeding through. He wanted to lift the bandage, but he also didn’t.

  “This is your fault too,” he said to the boar.

  A loud clip-clop echoed through the food court, presaging the arrival of the brown horse he’d seen on the common.

  “And yours,” he told the horse. “For making me get off the bike. Nice bandage, though, thanks.”

  He caught a whiff of smoke, and . . . something else.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Is that bacon?”

  The woman who was definitely real came around the corner. Her appearance was so startling, he nearly screamed again.

  The knife she’d used to dispatch the second boar was in her hand, dripping with blood, which made perfect sense since the rest of her seemed to be doing the same. She had blood on both arms and across her chest. Her hair—​which was either brown or a lighter color, but dirty—​was back in a ponytail, revealing a face caked in mud and probably more blood. He thought there was a white woman under all of that, but at this point felt like he needed to see a hand not soaked in blood to be sure.

  “It’s boar meat,” she said. “I’m skinning and cooking it. I don’t know how to make bacon. I think I need salt. Right? Curing salts. I don’t know how to do that. How is your leg? You shouldn’t get up. Elton didn’t think you were going to make it. Excuse me a second.”

  “Elton?” Touré asked. “Is there someone else here?”

  She was right; he shouldn’t be getting up. The leg was furious with him when he tried, such that he nearly fell over again, both from the pain and the leg’s disinterest in supporting him properly.

  We have no doctor, he reminded himself, so don’t get hurt.

  Unless they did now. Maybe the woman who was deboning and cooking a wild boar on the other side of the mall was also a doctor. She didn’t look like a doctor; she looked like an extra from a Viking movie.

  He performed some combination of hopping and falling his way down the concourse and around the corner toward the smell of cooked meat. Yes, walking was bad, but this was the greatest smell he’d smelled in his entire life; the leg could be missing and he’d find a way to get closer.

  He realized they were in the Corner Mall, in Downtown Crossing. It was only a couple of blocks from where he was nearly gored to death. This w
oman must have dragged him there, then gone out and fetched the boars she’d killed. Or she collected the boars first and then went and got him. That wouldn’t be surprising; in this situation, the pigs were clearly the most valuable.

  Touré could only remember being in the Corner Mall twice before this, and both times were to get out of the rain. It was a peculiar throwback to when “mall” meant something far more pedestrian, consisting of wide concourses, a big food court specializing in inexpensive fast food (which was like a delicacy in this part of town, oddly), and three street-level exits.

  Even with electricity, it was a shadowy, not altogether welcome place, with stores that somehow reflected this aesthetic.

  He found the woman at one end of the mall, near the Winter Street doors, standing over another open fire. The glass doors were open, but she’d pulled down the metal security fencing to block any of the animals who felt like coming in for a bite. It was a good idea; the fencing gave the smoke a place to go.

  It was dark out. He was missing dinner with the others. Had they declared him dead yet? Probably.

  He got another three steps and then fell over. The leg just wasn’t cooperating. What he needed was a crutch.

  What he got was a horse. The brown-haired steed walked up next to him and looked down, confused at Touré’s inability to get bipedalism right.

  Touré got back to his feet, grabbed the side of the saddle with his right hand, and tried walking that way.

  “Um, help. Horse. Help?”

  This was the closest he’d ever been to a horse. He was probably doing it wrong.

  Or not; the horse started walking.

  The woman had both hands deep in the boar’s rib cage, and kept pulling out soft, mushy internal organs and dropping them on the ground.

  Touré was about ready to throw up two days’ worth of Noot bar.

  “Elton likes you,” she said, not even looking up.

  “Who’s Elton?” he asked.

  “The horse. His name is Elton, and he likes you.”

  “Oh. Hello, Elton. This is your horse?”

  “No, he isn’t anyone’s horse. He lets me ride on him sometimes, but he picks the direction.”

  She did something to the hide that sounded like a heavy blanket getting torn in half.

  “Could you . . . could you please stop doing that for a minute?” he asked.

  She looked down at what she was doing, then at him, then at Elton.

  “Is this gross?” she asked. “It probably is.”

  “It’s very gross, yes.”

  “I have to take what I need and toss the rest before the others come. They’ll leave us alone if they have all this. Cook it and move. I’m sorry—​I haven’t talked to anyone for a while who can talk back, and I don’t know when I slept last. Do you have a place?”

  “What others are coming? Other people?”

  “No, no, the pigs, mainly. I’ve seen bears, too. Wolves. Lots of wolves. Saw a cougar. But not here. It’s mostly pigs around here.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Just a couple of days, I think. It all runs together. When was the storm? Was that today?”

  “That was yesterday.”

  “Maybe three days. I thought it was just me and Elton from here on out.”

  She was cutting the meat from the rib cage now. Touré started to see black splotches in his vision, which he was sure was unrelated to the grisly show she was putting on. He felt incredibly light-headed.

  “Whoa, don’t fall over there,” she said. “Fall over somewhere else. There’s blood on the floor right under you.”

  “I’m trying not to fall over at all.”

  “That’d be better. You should go back and lie down. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  “What do you mean? We’re not going anywhere tonight, are we? We have to stay where we are until morning.”

  “I told you, we have to move before the others get here. I can’t lock this door, and the gate isn’t going to hold. We need another place. Do you have someplace safe?”

  “Not here. In Cambridge.”

  “No, that’s no good. May as well be Wisconsin.”

  She stopped what she was doing to look at his leg.

  “You need antibiotics, too,” she said. “That pig might’ve killed you and we just don’t know it yet.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated, meaning either she forgot her own name for a second or she was making one up on the spot.

  “Win,” she said.

  “Win? Like, Winnie? Short for Winifred?”

  “Nobody calls me Winifred. Or Winnie.”

  “Well, I’m Touré, and everyone calls me Touré. It’s nice to meet you and thanks for saving my life. Please stop saying things like that; it’s been a rough day already.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how I’m already dead from infection that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “But you might be. We won’t know until later. I remember this horse we had at the ranch, got bit by a snake—”

  “Please.”

  “Right, okay. I’m usually better with people. It’s the lack of sleep. Maybe the diet.”

  “I’m sure I’m not doing any better. Now I definitely have to pass out again, hopefully after I reach the blankets. Wake me when the food’s ready.”

  7

  Touré’s first taste of non–Noot bar sustenance since who knows when was perhaps the best thing to ever happen to him.

  He was prepared to go so far as to say that it was worth getting his leg gored and also nearly worth what he went through next.

  Nearly.

  The problem, as stated repeatedly by Win, was that the fresh meat and the cooking of such was going to attract a lot of predators to the Corner Mall. Touré joked that predators were always attracted to the Corner Mall, but Win either didn’t think that was funny or lost her sense of humor when she started living off the land.

  They had to leave, was the point. After getting her arrow out of the undissected boar’s head—​which took a lot of work—​Win dragged the carcass next to the same entrance where she’d set the fire. Then she scattered the remains of the other boar, including that pile of internal organs, around different parts of the mall: a carnivore scavenger hunt.

  She washed up next, thank goodness. There was evidently a functioning sink in the food court somewhere. She didn’t get all of the blood off of her, but nothing short of a high-pressure hose was going to do that.

  Then came the fun part. Touré couldn’t walk, and his hopping skills weren’t exactly championship caliber. He also didn’t know how to ride a horse and was a risk to faint from the pain. Not certain what to do about this, Win had a long conference with Elton to hash out their options. Touré had neither a vote nor an opportunity to voice an opinion, which was a shame.

  “Elton agreed to let me tie you to him,” she said, after.

  “Like, in the saddle? Okay. I mean, I can probably hold on all right if he doesn’t go too fast.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. I’ll tie you tohim. You’ll be on the saddle, but not sitting.”

  “So, basically the most undignified way to get me around town that you could come up with.”

  “Also the fastest. C’mon.”

  She helped him onto the saddle, belly first, and then tied him down. He could barely move, which—​she explained—​was so Elton didn’t end up dragging him if he started running. Touré countered that if he couldn’t untie himself and something happened to Win, Elton would end up running around with a corpse on his back. She laughed, and shrugged, and made the rope a little tighter.

  He could sort of see where they were going by looking up and to his left, but it was exhausting, holding his head up like that. Win positioned herself to the right of Elton, near Touré’s head, and half the time she blocked his view anyway, so he gave up on trying to see.

  She held a bow in her right hand, with the quiver on her back. He on
ly counted ten arrows.

  If this were a video game, he’d tell her to look around for a reload, maybe near the body of a dead archer.

  Hyperrealistic video game was actually on his list of apocalypse scenarios. It was the only one he hoped was correct—​once they beat the game, they’d be back home again. But they had to figure out what the big quest was first. Thus far, to his extreme annoyance, there didn’t appear to be a big quest. All he had was a bunch of side quests, necessary only in order to continue to survive.

  It wasn’t a game; he knew that. But thinking of it that way made all of this much easier, especially when he was lashed to a horse like some expository NPC. Suddenly, saving him was a side quest and Win was the player.

  “How well do you know your way around here?” she asked.

  “Pretty well,” he said. “But everything’s upside down and I’m looking over a horse’s shoulder, so I don’t know how helpful I’ll be.”

  “We need someplace with multiple doors so we can break in through the outer door and lock the inner door from the other side. It has to have water and elevation, but Elton needs to come in with us.”

  “You want maid service too?”

  She hesitated. “That was a joke,” she said.

  “Yes, it was a joke,” he said. “This might have gone better if we had this conversation before you tied me to the horse.”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “What?”

  “‘The horse.’ Don’t call him that. He doesn’t think he’s a horse.”

  “Right,” he said. “Where are we?”

  “Shhh.” She stopped Elton, then turned to look past his hindquarters. “They found the meat,” she said. “I can hear them arguing.”

  “What kind of ‘they’?”

  “Wolves, I think.”

  “Which kind? We have regular, and supersize around here.”

  “Regular. The big ones aren’t wolves. They’re crossbreeds.”

  “With what?”

  “Dunno. Tell me where to go. We have to get off the streets.”

  He strained his neck more to get a look around. All he could see was the side of a department store, but it was enough. They were on Washington Street.