by Mike Kilroy
SOLO
By Mike Kilroy
Solo
Copyright © 2014 by Mike Kilroy
Publisher: Fishtail Publishing
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In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book (other than for review purposes) without permission is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. All rights reserved. If you would like to use material from this book, prior written permission can be obtained by contacting the author at [email protected] or through the publisher at [email protected].
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Find out more about the author at fishtailpublishing.com or on Twitter @KilroyWasHere7.
To Karen
I write this with a smirk because I am quite sure I would not be where I am today without your help.
Chapter One
Dog Day Afternoon
She was cold as she pressed against him. Her eyes were fixed on his, and she never blinked. Her smile was locked and wide, and she moved in tune with him as they danced.
There was no music playing, but he hummed a song from Before that was quite popular.
He twirled her around; his hand squeezed her hand.
She wore that dress he liked—she always wore that same dress. It was cream-white with a flower pattern of pinks and purples and its flounce billowed in the breeze of their waltz.
“I do love the time we spend together, Livvy.”
He wasn’t sure if that was her name; she hadn’t told it to him.
She was so quiet and coy, but he thought she must be a Livvy because she was so vibrant and lived to the fullest.
He was sure it was short for Olivia.
He lifted her up with a grand twirl and set her down. She stared unblinkingly, lovingly, into his eyes.
“Oh, Livvy,” he said earnestly. “I don’t want to scare you away, but I think I—”
“Solo!” Tom had a grating voice. It was loud and it carried great distances. He must have been a train conductor or a day trader or some profession that required a booming voice in the Before. “What are you doing?”
Tom’s heavy, booted steps were loud, too, as they clumped along the grimy linoleum floor, past the empty shelves that were plucked clean of everything but the dust.
“I was just dancing with Livvy. Isn’t she stunning?”
Tom chuckled and shook his head. His lips turned into a grin under his thick, graying beard and his eyes, dark and sunken, rolled. “You’ve fucking lost it, Solo. That’s a mannequin you’re canoodling. You know that, right?”
Solo turned his gaze back to Livvy. Her plastic eyes stared creepily at him. Her plastic skin was cold, smooth and lifeless. He stabilized her on the stand, straightened the dress on her molded, plastic frame and frowned.
The magic was gone.
“Of course I know, Tom,” His voice quivered. “Of course I know that.”
Tom laughed mockingly. “There’s nothing here. No one here.”
There was always nothing here. There was always no one here.
But he had Tom and Tom had given him that blasted nickname.
Solo.
It wasn’t Han Solo or Hope Solo; it was just Solo, probably because when Tom had found him—just popped up one day with those tired eyes and scowling lips through that thick beard—he was all alone. Solo hadn’t remembered the last time he had seen another human since the Before. But he was happy to see even a gruff face like Tom’s.
Solo was as good a name as any, he supposed. Solo was having trouble remembering what his real name was because it had been so long since he had used it. He knew it started with an M. Maybe it was Michael or Malcolm or Mark or Max—with one X or two. He couldn’t be sure. He knew there was an X in his name somewhere.
It definitely started with an M—that he could be sure.
Tom had been with him for—well, he couldn’t recall that, either—and was a good friend. He always kept him straight. He always snapped him back to the here-and-now and out of his imagination. His imagination had always run amok Before. He had medication to handle that and it worked—most of the time.
There was little medication left in this world where almost everyone had vanished. Tom said he had seen others—maybe not so much as seen them, but sensed they were around. The signs were subtle. A trashcan ransacked. A door propped open with a bucket of piss, a half-eaten apple. Tom had estimated that about one percent of the population remained, give or take a fraction here or a fraction there.
Tom liked precision.
Tom also liked pragmatism. “We better get moving. It’ll be dark soon, and we don’t want to be out after dark.”
Solo cringed. He remembered the last time he was out after dark. That’s when the animals came out. He still had a slight limp and a scar on his right calf from the attack as a reminder.
It was a bulldog of all things. In the Before he was probably a docile creature, probably liked belly rubs and chew toys and long walks. In the After he was hungry and a human leg was as good a meal as any. Solo hadn't the heart to kill the bulldog, even as the dog clamped down through the fabric of his green cargo pants and into his flesh. The burning pain is what Solo remembered the most, a pain so sharp he could hardly brace against it.
He punched the dog on the head until he scampered away.
Solo was lucky he didn’t die. Animal attacks were dangerous enough in the Before. They were almost always fatal in the After. Rabies was the big scare. Just about every animal with teeth had the disease or would soon contract it.
But Solo bucked the odds. The bulldog wasn’t sick. Solo survived with just a slight limp and a scar.
Solo rubbed his hand through his thick growth of facial hair. He couldn’t remember the last time he had shaved, either. He used to shave all the time with a Gillette razor. He liked the close shaves that particular brand of razor provided. He liked the way his chin felt after a close shave when he ran his soft fingers over the smooth flesh.
Those were better times—maybe. Definitely more complicated times. Things were complicated in the Before. Things were simple in the After.
He didn’t remember much from Before, just that he liked smooth shaves.
His chin was no longer soft and neither were his fingers.
The After was rough on everything, especially the skin.
It was hard to find razors now and even harder to find shaving cream. The stores that used to have a plentiful supply of each were now nothing more than cesspools with rotting food, toxic mold and animal feces that made one brace against the vomit rising up from a turning stomach.
They were not good places to be.
Pilfering such locations was now a difficult challenge.
It was easy at first, not long after ninety-nine percent of the people who roamed the planet vanished. What they left behind were empty streets, empty stores, empty houses and empty apartments.
Everything was still.
Everything was quiet.
It was like heaven.
Then the power failed. Then the infrastructure crumbled.
Food spoiled quickly.
Then the animals came out, desperate and hungry. Then the loneliness.
Everything was still.
Everything was quiet.
It was like a hell.
Solo adapted, however. Some places were better than others. In some places, the food stayed fresher and the animals were not as abundant.
Those places were getting more and more difficult to find. Solo was amazed by how quickly nature had
reclaimed her turf. The streets were engulfed by grasses. Vines snaked up buildings of steel and glass. Cars, abandoned in the streets, became tiny ecosystems for all sorts of wildlife.
It was really quite stunning at times.
“Let’s go!” Tom barked, pulling Solo out of his ponderings.
Tom was so pushy.
“Go where?” Solo snapped back. He knew the answer. He never liked the answer.
“Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“We can’t leave yet!”
Solo wasn’t ready to stop looking for her. Her soft hair and the way it flowed down around her face like a black, velvet frame is what he remembered the most. It made her face look even more fetching.
Her name started with an L. Laura. Lisa. Loretta.
No, it was Lydia. Yes, Lydia.
Solo smiled as he remembered the nickname he had for her: Eye Lyds. She had big, alluring, brown eyes—the biggest and most stunning he had ever seen. Her lids appeared even larger when they were shaded—periwinkle was the color he remembered—and when she batted those long lashes, his own eyes were nothing but fixed on them.
He couldn’t look away.
So, he called her Eye Lyds.
Solo had a terrible memory. Ironically, he remembered that. Names gave him the most trouble, so he gave people monikers he could more easily recall.
She quite liked “Eye Lyds,” as he remembered.
Solo was convinced she was still here, too, somewhere, roaming the city looking for him as he searched for her.
Eye Lyds made him so happy. She was always loving, always caring—even when he made it very difficult for her to have such affection.
Solo wasn’t an easy man to be around when he had one of his episodes.
His episodes were unforgettable.
Solo tried on shoes, tennis shoes and cross training shoes and sandals and boots and even moccasins, which were unpractical in the After.
Nothing struck his fancy.
The shoes he had now were worn nearly through.
Solo wandered outside and squinted in the light of the midday sun. A stiff breeze blew and whipped his tousled hair. The pavement felt hot on his feet through the worn souls of his shoes.
Solo knew what Tom was going to say. He knew Tom would insist they leave, that Eye Lyds wasn’t here and wasn’t coming back for him. That she was gone and he was going to have to deal with it some time.
And that now was that some time.
Solo was correct.
“There’s nothing here anymore. We plucked this area clean.” Tom’s voice was gravely when he was frustrated and tired and hungry. Solo figured he was all of those things now.
Solo gave Tom one last impassioned plea to stay. “I don’t wanna go. She may still come back.”
“She ain’t comin’ back, you dumbass. She’s gone. Just like everyone else. They’re all gone. Almost every last stinkin’ one of the lot.”
Solo fought back tears. He knew what Tom had said was true. He knew this city where he once lived in the Before was now just a hollow husk. It was mostly lifeless, save for the wild animals that roamed it looking for food and water and shelter. It was barren save for the memories that were becoming more and more difficult for Solo to latch on to.
Perhaps it was time to leave, to flee, to find another town or borough or village or municipality to call home. There was promise of food and water and shelter there. There was promise of people there, too, which was both a good and a bad thing.
It was the people who caused all of this to begin with. That was Solo’s theory, anyway. They were angry and short-sighted and boorish people who only looked out for themselves. They didn’t care about their fellow man and destroyed what could have been a nice world.
Solo always hated people—still did in a way—but he’d like to maybe see one now. A real one. Not a fake, plastic one like Livvy.
Tom was real enough, though, and he barked again through his thick beard that hid most of his round face. “Let’s find a place to hole up for the night and we’ll get our asses moving in the morning.”
Solo thought it a good plan. Tom always had good plans. He pulled Solo’s ass out of a lot of tight jams and, despite his gruffness, he truly cared for him.
He would always say folksy things like, “A clean conscience makes a soft pillow” and “A man warned is half saved” and “A man is judged by the company he keeps.”
Solo liked that last one.
It was very ironic these days.
He followed Tom like he always did into a skyscraper in the middle of the city. He couldn’t remember the name of the city. It started with a P, he thought. Maybe it was Portland or Philadelphia or Phoenix or Pittsburgh. He couldn’t be sure.
The skyscrapers were holding up well enough. Their facades were crumbling and most of the windows were broken. Birds lived on the top floors. Various other animal species rooted out homes on the lower floors. The middle floors, though, were pretty sparsely populated and Tom found it a suitable place for them to stay.
Solo found a lounge on the thirty-third floor of a building that used to be the corporate office of a giant national banking chain. He pushed a rather ugly green couch with wood frame against the door and stacked a few small tables and uncomfortable-looking chairs from the lunch room in front of the broken windows to keep the elements—and the other things he couldn’t think of at the moment, but were always lurking—out.
It was a nice place to stay for the night.
“Goodnight, Tom.” Solo always said that before he rolled onto his side, tucked his hands under his head, and readied for sleep.
“Fuck you.” Tom always responded.
***
Morning came with a clamor. There was a disconcerting thumping noise on the outside of the stack of furniture Solo was able to press against the broken window. The tables and chairs and that horrible green couch rattled about.
Solo backed away.
He looked for Tom, but he wasn’t there. Solo hated it when Tom disappeared on him. He often wondered where he went. Probably to find supplies and food. There were still M&Ms and Snickers, various brands of potato chips and corn chips and Funyuns and an array of mini chocolate and frosted donuts in the vending machines in these office buildings. And they remained relatively fresh.
The thumping continued and Solo finally gathered up enough nerve to investigate. He stood on one of the chairs and peeked over the edge of olive couch.
He smiled at the sight. It was a group of pigeons. I wonder what a group of pigeons are called? A gaggle? No. A kit. They are called a kit.
Solo was amazed at what he could remember.
And what he couldn’t, which was oh so much.
Solo gathered his belongings and shoved them into his rucksack. Every once in awhile when he gazed at that rucksack he’d experience a sinking feeling in his gut, like when he was told he would never amount to much, like when he was told he was “not right.”
His whole life was reduced to the stuff shoved into the compartments of a Bergen—not much different in the After than in the Before.
Solo was quite fond of that backpack. It was a present from Eye Lyds for a birthday or Christmas or just because. Gifts can be given just because, too.
He couldn’t remember what he got her.
The bag was olive green, an army-like green, and he often wondered why he would even need an army-green snugpack? It had a set of initials stitched on it: MXF.
Perhaps the M stood for Michael or Malcolm or Mark or Max—with one X or two.
“Tom,” Solo called out as he pushed through the door into the hallway. Everything was still. Everything was calm and quiet—almost forbiddingly so. Solo liked the quiet, but he figured he’d never get used to it in the After.
The Before was loud. The After was muted, silent, reticent like a shy girl standing in the corner at a dance, waiting for some boy to ask her to waltz.
Like Livvy.
“Tom,” Solo yelled again as he wandered along
the hallway toward a large room. As he entered the open space, he squinted as ample light cascaded through the large, glass windows that were still, shockingly, intact. Tom stood in front of a row of vending machines.
“Well,” Tom said. “There’s a bunch of stuff in there. Get it.”
Solo gazed through the glass face of the vending machine at the trove of candy bars and cookies and donuts and chewing gum. He smiled at the bounty.
“It’s not gonna fall out of there on its own,” Tom grumbled.
Solo grabbed a chair that was tucked under a lunchroom table and heaved it at the vending machine. The metal legs smashed through the glass and Tom yelled with joy. “There you go! Nice chuck.”
Solo collected the candy bars and bags of chips and rolls of gum and packages of donuts and Twinkies and packed them carefully in his bag.
“Let’s go. We have a lot of ground to cover.” Tom was so pushy.
It was much easier descending the thirty-three flights of stairs than it was climbing them and they spilled into the rain that had begun to fall.
They walked down the middle of the four-lane street, the cars, long dormant, parked at meters and stalled in the lanes, some in the middle of turns in intersections. The cars didn’t start anymore. The gas in the tanks had long since broken down. The oil in the engines under the hoods had long since been reduced to sludge.
It made traveling difficult. Bikes worked. Pretty much anything human-powered worked. They found horses once, but neither Solo nor Tom knew the first thing about riding on such a beast, so they relied on their own two hooves instead.
Today they decided just to go on foot. Solo needed to find a new pair of shoes and he scanned for store fronts that may have sold them. Finally, he spotted one.
It stank of animal urine and feces. Solo pinched his nose and scanned the shelves for his size. He always liked Nike, but he thought he’d switch it up this time and browsed the Sketchers.
“Hurry up, you fucking woman. Pick out a pair of shoes and let’s go!” Tom was always rude.
Solo found a pair he liked—they were black with white soles, light and had good traction. He hoped they lasted longer than his last pair.
