by Quil Carter
The red blood-stain on the bag was now a dull brown. I saw a maggot wiggle out but I didn’t say anything to Killian. If he knew the very bag he was carrying was chock full of them he would flip the fuck out.
“How the fuck did you carry your mom and dad up here?” I said. I grabbed onto a piece of pipe and used it to hoist myself up to the top of the concrete slab. I looked behind me and saw a steady trail of what looked like rice leading all the way up to me. I would ask if there was a different way to get back. Or stay long enough so the little worms baked in the sun and died. Maybe he wouldn’t notice them then.
“They were just bones and heads,” Killian said quietly, he was waiting for me on top of a gas station sign wedged between two slabs of concrete. “They fit into a tote all together, well… I got more of my mom back than my dad. Not what was important though. I had wanted to find their hands. Mrs. Kirkson had made a stew out of them. She was nice enough to… to give me them after.”
I leaned up against a bent street lamp and took a second to catch my breath. I gave him a sideways glance. “What, so you went from house to house to get their bones back?”
Killian nodded. “I filled up a bucket… most of them were really nice about it. I had to dig through some trash cans though.”
I believe the Massey flesh I got was from the ribs or the thighs; it was too far back to remember. If I had received bones though, I would’ve tossed them to the deacons or the cats, like a normal person.
“Greyson and Leo both made barbeque, you know… the usual. My dad loved barbeque, so he would’ve liked that.”
Fuck, this kid was something else.
I nodded. “That’s… that’s nice.”
“Jess’s mom had made a pie out of my mother’s meat; she always liked pie.”
“Oh yeah…”
“What did you make?”
Oh jeez, I should have known this was going to lead somewhere.
I thought back, trying to remember. “I usually just fry up the arian meat with some onions or potato, nothing fancy like pie or anything,” I said. Something occurred to me though. “Ordinary, boorish food, unlike fancy pies or barbeque. Looks like I gave your mother another reason to hate me.”
I cracked a smile when he laughed at that. It was always one of two things: either he thought I was hilarious or he burst into tears.
“Why did you want to know these things?” I asked. We were walking down the debris pile now. I could see a sliver of a small clearing behind a boarded up house. It was covered in yellow grass and looked relatively flat. Probably was once a backyard.
“To add to the list.” The boy shrugged. “I asked everyone what they had done with Mom and Dad and wrote it down. I was missing some though but at least I can write yours down now.”
What a weird thing for this kid to want to know. Well, who was I to judge his mental problems. “Do you write things often?” I asked. Thinking back I had watched him write in a spiral bound book when I had followed him.
Killian nodded. He stepped onto bare ground and waited for me. Behind him was the grey, mildew-streaked house I had noticed on the descent. The roof was intact but there was light shining through the living room. I assumed that was our path to the cemetery.
“I kept track of money and what was happening to my parents when they got sick, so Doc could get as much information as possible,” Killian replied. When I approached him he walked through the cracked door frame and called back to me. “I also kept track of which cats died and I named them. I kept track of the mercenaries and travellers that died on the way to Aras, and also who died in Aras and how they died.”
I stopped and stared at him as he walked through the living room. The ceiling was collapsed, with wires and insulation hanging down to the floor. “Why in Jesus fuck would you do that? You have your own little death book.”
“I just wanted to,” he said simply. Well, if all else fails he could get a job as a mercer doing the census. They kept track of worthless shit like deaths.
The light I had seen coming from the living room belonged to a gap in the north wall. I was curious as to what I could see through the opening. Grey bricks stacked one on top of the other, four or five stacks of them in the large half-acre backyard, completely enclosed by the ruins of the neighbouring houses. It was very private; I couldn’t hear anything but the flies buzzing.
I followed Killian as he walked through the hole in the wall and in doing so I got a closer look at the grey stacks. When I saw the black jiffy marker I knew what they were. Each one was a grave marker.
Jeffrey Massey was written very neatly on the first one. 192 to 229 were underneath it, and ‘Dad’ at the very bottom. Right beside it was another one - Kristin Massey. Then two smaller ones, the first one reading Moggy, and the second Beanie.
Killian was walking towards the farthest one, a few feet away from Beanie. It didn’t have writing on the brick marker like the others.
As I carried Perish closer to it I noticed the hole had already been dug.
“You were here recently?” I asked. I jumped into the hole and placed the rotting scientist down. I took the bag from Killian and put it where his head should’ve been. I brushed my shoulder as I leapt out. No maggots from what I could feel.
I gave my surroundings a glance. I wished Killian hadn’t turned this place into a cemetery. It was a very secluded area. It reminded me of Greyson and Leo’s backyard and the place where we had dumped the loader bucket for bathing. There were probably at least a hundred similar backyards in the suburbs. The houses had been built so close together that when they all collapsed the backyards were locked in by the ruins. You could have three acres of smooth, flat ground and never know it. I bet there were lots of places in this area of Aras that had never been properly explored. All we got for a visual was what we could see from the wall and usually the bigger buildings or the piles blocked everything.
“I was here the day before yesterday, when you were working,” Killian said. His hands were stuffed into his pockets and he was starting to slink down a bit. I looked around for a shovel, hoping to get this over with. I spotted one up against what used to be a fence and grabbed it.
“No, I gotta do it,” Killian said taking the shovel from me. “You’re supposed to bury your own.”
“Who the hell said that?” I asked. Pre-Fallocaust people had some retarded traditions. We should have just eaten him. Why give food to the maggots when it could be ours?
“In a book I read.” He leaned against the shovel and gazed down at the sheet-wrapped Perish Dekker. Smelly, covered in maggots, grey and green with rot. His neurotic, rapid voice never to be heard in person again. No more weird hand rubbing, no more ‘okay?’ ‘okay?’. The greywastes had surely lost a hero.
He would be buried with Nero’s cum still inside of his ass and with the tears inside of him, never healing. Did he still have a look of terror on his face? Would it be recognizable under the rotting chunks of flesh? His eyes would be wrinkly pits in his head, shrivelled and dark like dried prunes. His tongue would be black and infested with maggots, climbing in his nose and eyes. Those pink full lips that had so eagerly pressed up against my boyfriend’s would be peeling black leeches.
Well, now I wanted to see his head.
“Say… say something nice, please?” Killian’s voice wobbled.
I won, you pathetic waste of life.
“You probably started out nice,” I said instead.
Killian sniffed; he nodded his acceptance of my eulogy and wiped his nose. I knew from the expression on his face that he was saying what he had to say to Perish in his head, a smart attempt on his part to dissuade any fighting or hurt feelings. Indeed I would have had something to say if he decided to be too sympathetic to the man who imprisoned us.
“Your suffering is over, Perry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
I’m not.
He steadied the shovel up against the gravestone and reached into his satchel. He pulled out a VHS tape and place
d it on top of Perish.
“Burying him with his porn?” Why do I say these things?
Yep, I got a look that could start an ice age. “It’s Jurassic Park, it was his favourite movie.”
I would probably swipe that when I came back for Perish’s skull. Give it to Reno so the kid could never find it. I always wanted to watch that movie but had never found a VHS of it. No reason for a good working movie to go to waste. I hoped the dirt didn’t bugger up the tape, but even if it did Reno was good at fixing them. He could lie and say he traded for it or something.
“Too bad you forgot his stuffed dinosaur,” I said that in a rather mean-spirited sense but Killian either ignored it or didn’t realize my tone.
“I know…” He shovelled grey dirt on top of the corpse. “I sent a list with Leo. I asked him to bring it back. You wouldn’t mind would you?”
“As long as I never have to see it,” I grumbled. “What else was on that list?
“Leo is bringing back most of Perish’s personal items to make it seem like he took off. I asked for a couple other things: the dry goods, some books.” The shovel scraped through the dirt and rock as he plunged it in, then threw another load of dirt onto the body. The corpse was fully covered now. “We’re splitting the fruit and vegetables. I thought we could can some of them before they spoil. I have some pre-Fallocaust recipe books too; I wanted to cook you some things.”
“Why didn’t you ask for something cool like his computer or the TV?” Now that was something I’d blow up the side of my house for. I’d make it fit into my living room somehow.
“They need to make it look like Perish just took off. They’re cleaning up his blood and erasing the videos. We have to keep those things in place for when Nero comes back.”
My own little clean-up crew, or Killian’s rather. I hadn’t made a mess, though if I had gotten a hold of him I would have.
Still, the change in food would be nice, as long as the rest of the block didn’t know. No fucking way I was sharing any of my shit with those greedy bastards. Let them risk their own lives for fresh fruit; that shit was all mine.
When Killian was finished burying Perish he got out the black marker and kneeled down. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest that he not write Perish’s real name but who the hell besides us would ever find this place? And even if they did, the odds of them knowing who he was were minimal. So I let it go. Chances are it would wear off during the rainy season anyway; it looked like his parents’ stones had been redone recently.
When he backed away it read Perry. Nothing else, no date of birth, no epitaph, just Perry. It looked oddly sad and empty.
I took the pen from him and bent down in front of it. Killian made a small nervous noise as I did.
“Saw Killion and lost his head?” Killian read when I finished. I stood up and handed him back the pen. The look he gave me was confusing; like he was either going to laugh or cry. He started to laugh but a fraction of a second later he had tears rolling down his face. I cracked up and gave him a hug. He was so fun to torment.
“You didn’t even spell my name right, you illiterate dick,” Killian sniffed, hugging me back. “It’s K-I-L-L-I-A-N. Can you even spell your name? Didn’t you go to school?”
“I spent my time learning to shoot and defend myself.” I smiled. “Next time a raver wants to chew your face off, just tell them how to spell their name, while I snipe them right between the eyes.”
“You’re almost as funny as you are smelly.” Killian pulled back and shuddered. “Let’s get some clean clothes; that smell isn’t going to come out easy.”
“It might make the local jokes leave me alone.” I smelled my shirt and gagged before I started to walk back to the house. “Kill Ian? Did Ian try to be your friend too?”
“So funny, so, so funny.” Killian pinched my side hard, making me retract. He had done it the last time I joked about his recent murder. I think it was to keep him from beating me with a cinder block.
We made it back to the road unscathed. I kept lightly teasing Killian just to distract him from the maggots baking on the rubble. It worked, he was too busy trying to match wits with me than to notice them.
After going home and getting the rot smell off of my body, we gathered some of the more important items and made our way to Greyson and Leo’s. We would still be sleeping back in the basement, but the bosses wanted us to hang out where the locals could find us easily. It would help offset the extra fuel I had been using as well.
No one else besides Reno, Greyson, Leo, and I guess now Doc knew where I lived. I wanted to keep it that way. The last thing the mayors wanted was for half the town to get murdered and me not know it because no one could reach me. I wouldn’t mind, we could use a cleansing, but they would get pissed off.
I had to also have the radio turned on at all times too during the night in case of emergency. It was a lot of hassle over something I didn’t really care about. Well, it was only for a couple days.
At least Redmond was taking care of most of the tedious paperwork and record-keeping that kept Aras running. I wasn’t going to be in charge of shit like inventory or distribution. They were wise not to trust my math skills.
I groaned in my head. That’s probably why they were happy to have me with Killian. He was a record-keeping, book reading nerd; if they got their way that would be Killian’s job.
When we got to Leo and Greyson’s house Redmond was waiting for us. He was in his fifties and had been around when the previous mayor, Greyson’s father Stoen Merrik, was running things. Apparently Stoen had died a year before my parents and I had sought Aras. Greyson had been running things here since he was twenty.
Redmond was a very serious, no bullshit man. His grey hair was thinning and the lines around his mouth were a testament to the fact that he rarely smiled. If there was anything to be said about Redmond it was that he was serious about his job as councillor of Aras. If there was anyone to prevent me from lighting the refinery plant on fire it was him. We have never had a problem with one another; he kept to his business and I kept to mine. We rarely spoke outside of work.
“Reaver, I need to speak to you about the Kerry family.” Redmond was holding a clipboard in a dirt-encrusted hand. “Greyson –” he gave out a sigh. “– he decided to spend the morning outside of Aras and I never got a chance to speak to him about them, which is regrettable.” He handed me the piece of paper and I started to read it.
“Gina Kerry has come down with a fever, and the baby Madison. They’re at home right now with Mr. Kerry and the two boys. This is what Doc was able to make of it before he left.”
Fever, 102 degrees, vomiting, diarrhea, no shaking, no seizures. I gave the paper to Killian, he looked at it and paled slightly.
Recommendations: Quarantine.
Doc’s recommendations seemed good enough. I would just give them each a bullet but not every fever and evac meant death. Sometimes it was just food poisoning, the flu, or a bug. Heck, I’d gotten sick like this over food just a few years ago.
“Keep the two locked up in the shack, put a guard in front of Mr. Kerry and the kids’ house.” I took the paper from Killian and handed it back.
“On the family? Is that necessary?” Redmond asked. “They’ve never given us problems. If we ask them to stay inside they will.”
I shook my head. “I’m sure Greyson would rather have hurt feelings than the town infected with disease. I just put a new kid through training; stick him in front of it. Give him a Game Boy and a bit of jerky and he’ll be fine.”
Redmond nodded. He thumbed through the clipboard before handing the entire thing to me. “You’ll need to read all of these and sign your name on the ones you approve; cross off the ones not approved. I’ll be by in the morning to collect.”
Killian’s new job.
“And we also got intel back from Anvil. The activity around the bombing of Typhus Canyon is dying down. The patrols are thinning and the merchants are talking of making one last trip bef
ore the rains flood the river. In your papers is a proposal from Sparrow of the Coldstone Caravans. He’ll make the trip but he wants us to send guards.”
I gave a snort. That would be a deny; we weren’t sending men over just so he could sell all his shit here for a profit. Those merchants could be selfish fucks sometimes. Menkin would have rather died than ask for help to cross the greywastes, though in a way he did.
“Anything else?” I asked, pretending to flip through the clipboard papers.
“That’s it for today, at least for me.” Redmond looked behind me and nodded towards the wall. “This job is twenty-four hours a day, but you’ll be fine.”
With a nod and a short goodbye he walked down the street. I gave the clipboard to Killian and walked inside. “You’re mayor, do the paperwork.”
“Mayor Massey! I like it!” Killian sounded a bit too excited to be in charge of Aras. To prevent him getting any ideas, I took the clipboard back. “Nooo!” He reached for it but I put it above my head.
“We’re not leading Aras once the dads kick off, so get that out of your head right now,” I said. Killian started jumping up to try and snatch it.
“I know, being mayor for twenty years would be horrible, but being mayor for two days might be fun, right?” Killian smiled. “We get the best meat from the Slaught House, and just think of how much you can abuse your power. You can even book Matt for double shifts and cut off Reno’s rations.”
Hmm… true.
“We can even collect on Greyson and Leo’s liquor tax from the Tulley family. We can get drunk off our asses on their token.”
“Alright, alright.” I gave him the clipboard and locked the door behind us. “Though your version of a fun time differs from mine. I’d rather build a makeshift coliseum in the square and make everyone fight each other for water.”
The mental image was amusing. Why not shake up their lives a bit? They were living just a bit too comfortably.
“There is something I wanted to ask though,” Killian said, in his voice sweet. Sure enough, he gave me the begging eyes. Oh boy, I wasn’t going to like this.
