by Andrew Post
The Siren House
Andrew Post
Medallion Press, Inc.
For Traci
Published 2016 by Medallion Press, Inc.
4222 Meridian Pkwy., Suite 110, Aurora, IL 60504
is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Post
EPUB Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60542-726-3
Cover design by Arturo Delgado
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Track 1: THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS THE BEGINNING
Track 2: THE LAST DAY ON EARTH
Track 3: STRANGE CURRENCIES
Track 4: SCRATCH
Track 5: HOW BIZARRE
Track 6: WITH YOU IN YOUR DREAMS
Track 7: HAPPY NOW?
Track 8: DITCH
Track 9: SEQUENCE ERASE
Track 10: PARTICLE MAN
Track 11: WHEN DISASTER STRIKES
Track 12: UP TO NO GOOD
Track 13: FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT
Track 14: BEGGARS & THIEVES
Track 15: MONSTER
Track 16: TUBTHUMPING
Track 17: GROOVE IS IN THE HEART
Track 18: COME CLEAN
Track 19: EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH
Track 20: DIFFERENT STORY
Track 21: LIVE AND DIRECT
Track 22: POWER TRIP
Track 23: MOTHER, MOTHER
Track 24: FIRE ESCAPE
Track 25: ALL APOLOGIES
Track 26: EXPLODER
Track 27: HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Track 28: 2 BECOME 1
Track 29: JUST LIKE YOU IMAGINED
Track 30: STAR 69
Track 31: IN THE MEANTIME
Track 32: SONG 2
Track 33: FATHER OF MINE
Track 34: WALKING ZERO
Track 35: SABOTAGE
Track 36: BREAK STUFF
Track 37: LIGHTNING CRASHES
Track 38: USE ONCE AND DESTROY
Track 39: BROKEN
Track 40: THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS THE BEGINNING
Track 41: (WHAT’S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY?
Acknowledgments
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
—Albert Einstein
“I’m not a woman. I’m a force of nature.”
—Courtney Love
Track 1
THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS THE BEGINNING
Once upon a time, the world ended. Or maybe not. Maybe the versh where you live is fine and, if so, good for you. Maybe it’s as screwed up as mine. In that case, that sucks.
It all depends on which version of it you know as your own.
If they haven’t proven multiple-world theory where you live, you’re probably wondering what I mean when I say vershes, or versions of places. Really, no offense, I don’t need you to believe what I’m saying. I won’t try to prove it to you. Suffice it to say, if it wasn’t real, you wouldn’t be reading this. Versh theory is no longer a theory. It’s fact. And the man who taught me that, they burned at the stake.
Not kidding.
No metaphor.
I was there that day. Right in the center of town.
The Smocks did it. Which should come as no big surprise if you have them in your versh. For your sake, I really hope you don’t. But in case you do, hopefully what you’re reading right now will help you in some way. Things may not have turned out how I wanted them to—at all—but maybe you can learn from my mistakes. The problem is—and this is the question I keep coming back to—can someone be their own quantum Sherpa?
Let’s hope. This is as much for you as it is for me.
Don’t worry. It’ll make sense.
* * *
That day they burned Thadius, I felt safe deep in the crowd. Mostly. No one would suspect me, the girl on crutches, to be a scratcher. I never used my disability for pity, but when it came to playing the innocent, nothing worked quite like crutches. Of course, maybe a wheelchair would’ve cemented my facade as the harmless wanderer—roll around like Beth—but crutches seemed to suffice. I was overlooked, as always.
There but not.
The perfect spy.
Keeping to the back, I watched between people’s heads as the Smocks brought out the machine.
Thadius’s cauldron, as we scratchers called it. A molecular deconstructor reconstructor, if you want to get all technical about it. It’s the size of a one-stall garage. Took ten of them to move it. It was too heavy to shove, so they used good ol’ mechanical advantage, rolling it on logs. They certainly had enough, considering what they planned to do next.
We were on the street, what used to be a major intersection, the stoplights having long since shined their last green, yellow, red. Just like the people around me, the buildings encircled this spot, shouldered up, watching.
The Smocks parked Thadius’s machine in front of the soot-stained Duluth courthouse and angled it near the unlit pyre, their exhibit A. In their charcoal-gray cloaks, with masks so thin they didn’t require eyeholes, the Smocks surveyed the placement of the series five Flashcraft molecular deconstructor reconstructor as if deciding whether it gave the crowd the best view of its ousted owner burned to a cinder.
They nodded to one another, satisfied, and turned their attention to the cart with the barred windows. Hatch unlocked and thrown aside, they pulled Thadius out, shackled by his wrists and ankles. A lump formed in my throat when I got a clearer look. He was stripped of clothes, face reduced to slush. He’d always wanted to be described as dapper, and while he normally was, here, now, he wasn’t. He looked inches from death, beaten and wrecked.
Using long poles with wire hoops ringing Thadius’s neck, the Smocks guided him out of his wheeled pen like a rabid animal.
When someone blocked my view, I was thankful. I really, really didn’t want to be watching this.
But I had to. Swallowing hard, I shifted on my crutches to see around.
The Smocks brought him to the edge of the woodpile, slipped the hoop from around his neck, and undid his shackles. They pointed at the flat piece of wood in the middle of the pyre, a platform. Thadius, naked as the day he was born, took his first step. I can’t tell you how many times I’d seen him take the stage at the Siren House. Normally with a skip in his step, he’d reach the top and turn with a flourish, jazz hands, and a gleaming smile.
Here, now, he trudged. Head down, no show. A species apart from the Thadius I knew.
My Thadius was always dressed divinely, so sharp in his high collars and tails, his moustache greased to two fine hooks. Always. That impish grin. That wink—you could practically hear the ting—freely dispensed to anyone he liked. He used it with me a lot. Practically ended every zinger with it. He was full of ’em: zingers and winks.
Not now, though.
The Smocks had taken him from that—proud, flamboyant, bighearted—and violently shoved him out of it, a butterfly not quite ready to leave the chrysalis. Thrust out of his papery husk, here he was now, before everyone, facing his death, torso polka-dotted in deep bruises, one eye swollen shut.
Without a higher-r
anking priest among them, the acolytes spoke quietly to one another in their Smock talk. The speedy, chittering language seemed entirely absent of vowels. I understood some of it: a quick poll to decide on something, I managed to parse out. It was typical of the Smocks to approach things this way, all orderly. The Regolatore way. (Regolatore: what the Smocks call themselves, BTW.)
One of them was appointed.
A torch was lit.
Even then, as he must have seen the rag-wrapped stick ignited in his peripheral vision, Thadius didn’t move. He waited, free to run, sitting as casually as a man at a bus stop on a summer day.
The Smocks gathered around their torchbearer, he at the front of the pack holding the crackling stick high overhead for all to see. The crowd hushed.
And as if on cue, Mom emerged from the courthouse, dressed in her full Smock regalia. Her face wasn’t visible to me, but I knew it was her. Just by that posture, that high-held head.
The Smocks paused, silently waited for orders from her. She wanted only to be present, it seemed, not involved. She gave them a curt nod, and they continued their march toward Thadius.
My mother, the Smock, watched from the background. All performers carried out the play like mimes. So much silence—theirs and ours. While she and everyone else watched the torchbearer, I watched her. I expected a speech, a condemnation, praise to the higher power the Smocks get their orders telepathically e-mailed down from—or whatever.
Nope.
A small gesture and the torch fell. The gas took. Someone next to me gasped. Shit, no. Me.
Thadius stared down the hateful crowd, eyelids fluttering when the smoke streaked his face. He seemed to be thinking, So this is what you want? This is what you like?
His gaze found mine.
I’d been waiting for it, but I still looked away. But for that speck of time when we’d looked into each other’s eyes, he’d managed to loose a tiny smile at me. Quick draw. Reassurance, I guess. I felt it, an earnest warmth—but it also killed me.
My eyes welled. The flames became a flare of orange with a dark spot in its center; Thadius, a slumping silhouette.
Mom watched from behind her mask, steering her gaze one way and then the other. As it passed over me, I pulled my hood a little lower. Staring at my feet, I felt the tears spill. The heat thrown from the fire reached me, that far back. I tried to tell myself that was why I was crying. Then when Thadius broke his silence, moaned once, hissed through his teeth, I knew it wasn’t the smoke in my eyes making me cry.
Make your face spell it, I told myself. You hate this man, you hate this man.
I dared a peek. Mom was looking right at me.
What did she see, know? Did she remember any of our talk?
I couldn’t stomach it either way. I turned, nearly involuntarily. So fast I almost tripped.
Clack-thumping away on my crutches, I pushed out of the crowd in spite of my orders to watch till the end with everyone else.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered at my feet. “I can’t.”
My arms blazed with pain by the time I reached the port, but I maintained my momentum. Down the dock, the boards thudding hollowly below me, the lake ahead smeary. Just get there and go. My boat, my green fiberglass rowboat, tied to the cleat with a length of fuzzy rope. I threw my crutches in, fell in after them, untied the knot, took up the ores. I rowed, the oil rig in my sights: home. It felt good to be through with the crutches for a while. I didn’t really need them. They were just a way to keep up the guise—to be the old me, unchanged.
I rowed and rowed, trying to propel myself away from it all.
Tough, since rowing a boat meant I had to sit backward and face what I was leaving. Shit. Through the fog and tears, I could still see orange painting the buildings of downtown, reflected in the black surface of Lake Superior, a shifting yellow stain on the underside of the clouds. A wonderful man burning alive.
Halfway to the rig, I paused to rest my arms and turned my walkie-talkie back on. Within a moment, above the slosh of water, a voice crackled in, nearly unintelligible with interference. But the gloom made it through the airwaves just fine: “Did they buy it?”
I picked up the radio.
Watching the flickering lights from a distance, even alone, I was still wrestling my sobs. I don’t know why. I didn’t need to act anymore. “I think they did.”
Track 2
THE LAST DAY ON EARTH
When I was eleven years old, the apocalypse—or what we’d later call the A—hit.
It was necessary to shorten it, I think, because we said it often enough. Cursing it, talking about life before it, cracking self-deprecating jokes about what we had to do to survive it. And let me tell you, the expression fucking A sure took on a whole new spin then.
Back in the day, everyone was sure the world would end in their own lifetime. According to my parents, it was a big topic over casual get-togethers. Dad said it almost seemed like people were stupidly looking forward to it, like a good global reset would put us all on the same playing field again. Like it’d be all campfires and making ponchos on looms and men growing epic beards and wearing leather and flannel and lugging axes on their shoulders while the women would sit on log cabin porches cracking corn while simultaneously nursing twins or something.
If your versh suffered an A, you know it wasn’t like that. And you also know it’d be wrong to argue over which one thing would prompt the end times. It ended because of three things. But just in case you didn’t have an A in your versh, let me tell you about it. It was a great time. Oh yeah. Super fun.
Part one of three was when a dozen nuclear power plants melted down because of an anarchist’s computer virus. That was the real kick in the teeth. I think we all could’ve made it through parts two and three if it weren’t for that. At last count I remember, fifteen nuclear power plants violently melted down. Like, kaboom. Which would’ve been mostly fine—if we lived on a planet without wind. Most water was as safe to drink as whatever they used to use for spray-on tanning, and plastic suits became the most commonplace item of fashion since blue jeans.
Part two: hoof-and-mouth disease made the jump from animals to people. Yeah. Not good.
Rounding out the trilogy of misery was the earthquakes. Classes eight and nine hit, sometimes upward of three times a week, all across the world for two straight months. It was as if the planet were set on top of a paint mixer that turned on and off whenever it wanted. Everything that was vertical became horizontal. I saw a picture of Seattle online after the first big one. It looked like someone sat on it.
Communication broke down. When the cable went out, that’s when—no big surprise—people really started going nuts. The government issued a “Well, good luck, everybody” over the FM, and that was it. We were on our own.
Luckily for us, my family lived in a small town in central Minnesota, far from any coast blasted by earthquake-induced tsunamis and a full state off from the closest detonated nuclear reactor. We received a couple of semibad aftershocks, my aunt in Iowa died from radiation poisoning, and we had to put down everything that walked on four legs to contain any possible spread, but we survived.
School went on break the summer of the A and never went back in session, and I was disappointed. Naive or just ignoring that the entire world got the crap kicked out of it, I wanted to see my friends, do activity sheets, eat PB&Js—gushy ones with the jelly soaked into the bread and the peanut butter almost caulk-like.
See, even now when I think back on school, I automatically divert from the big points. The idea of dealing with the A during childhood is an armored thing. Still, the memories of a simpler suburban time soothe me, so humor me for a minute.
I miss the smell of school. You know that smell. The sweet, gluey tang of new books. That burning whiff of overenthusiastic erasing. Paste. Hmm. Nice. All right, I’m good now.
So a few days after the A finally stopped, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I found ourselves living in the school gym. Novel at first. But soon, wit
h so many people packed in there, it didn’t smell like books, erasers, or paste any longer. It smelled like a zoo. And lunch consisted of saltines and ketchup and the occasional slab of beef jerky. Not a congealed-to-perfection PB&J in sight. We had toothpaste for dinner one time. Toothpaste.
Still, my parents were okay. My sister was okay. And because of that, I was okay. Not good. And sure as hell not great.
I think Dad saw that as well, that we were just okay and how easily that could turn to bad. It must’ve been the seed for his plan to get us somewhere better.
See, Dad worked for a company that went around in this repurposed fishing boat, the Sassafras, scouring the Great Lakes to pull up old shipping boats and sunken equipment to cash in the metal. When he was out in Lake Superior a few weeks before the A, he and his crew came across this old oil rig. It was still standing and, as he put it, in reasonable shape. Best of all, as far as they could tell from outside, it was completely empty.
Mom said, “You cannot be serious, Ken.”
Dad looked around the gym. Food was getting scarce. Fights were becoming more and more common. A rule—I can’t remember who had made it—said if you didn’t have a family, you had to leave. And then, less than a week after Mr. Thompson, my old biology teacher, got the boot from our happy little group, there was the rumor that whichever family had less than five kids had to go. Which meant us.
“Safer than here.” Dad threw in another handful of dead leaves to keep our meager fire going. “Thing’s a mile from shore. We could build some planters, grow our own food. Be protected from the weather. The girls would be safe. You and I would be safe. Given enough time and elbow grease, we could thrive, Suzanne.”
You knew parents meant business when they started using each other’s names.
My sister was using her GlowSquiggle to draw a bent-headed puppy in the air. She stopped midstroke, leaving the snout unfinished. “But what about everyone here?” Through her fading light-pen drawing, Darya pointed out the other families in the gym with us: neighbors we now shared an even closer proximity with. “Where are they going to live?”
