Solo

by Mike Kilroy

  The rain came down harder as they walked down the middle of the road and over a bridge. Solo peered over the edge at the rushing water of the river below. The rain drops hit the water and made thousands and thousands of tiny little bubbles on the water’s surface.

  It was the little things that helped him get by in the After. It was the simple pleasures that made him forget the hardships and the peril. Watching the bubbles form, and then pop, form, and then pop, soothed him. He took a deep breath, grinned and exhaled.

  But those moments of solace were fleeting.

  The cruelty of the After was always there, always present, always lurking.

  There was no escape from it, no sanctuary, no respite.

  Like now.

  Solo heard a growl.

  “Well, isn’t this fucktacular!” Tom bellowed. He had a way with words.

  Foam spilled out of the corners of the German Shepherd’s mouth. It was a large dog with matted, brown fur with swirls of black. It showed its teeth and growled again.

  Solo slowly removed the backpack from his shoulders and placed it on the wet pavement. He reached into the pocket for a Twinkie and tossed it toward the animal.

  It didn’t budge.

  Normally a well placed Twinkie was just as good as a grenade. It distracted the animal, which was usually hungry or rabid or both, long enough for Solo and Tom to slip away. Now they were in the middle of a bridge. There was no skirting around the dog. If they backtracked, the dog was sure to chase them down and feast upon them.

  The only route was through.

  Solo felt a sinking feeling as he reached toward his belt and pulled out his knife.

  He was going to have to kill it.

  The German Shepherd growled again and Solo pointed his knife at it.

  Tom snarled at the beast and then at Solo. “Don't be a faggot like you were with that bulldog. Kill the thing!”

  Solo hated when he was called faggot. He clenched his jaw and shot Tom an angry look.

  “Only if I have to,” Solo said.

  Tom threw his arms in the air and sighed deeply. He was disgusted. “I’ll kill it if you can’t.”

  “No!” Solo exclaimed. “I’ll do it … but only if I have to.”

  Solo made some loud noises, garbled sounds with the intent to scare. The dog backed off a bit, but then resumed its menacing stare.

  He was hungry and diseased. In the Before he was probably a very nice companion. In the Before he was man’s best friend.

  Now he was different. There were a lot of things different now. Most all of them were different in a bad way.

  Solo was different. He would have never entertained the thought of killing a dog, even when he was convinced the neighbor’s Black Lab could read his thoughts.

  The dog feigned an attack and Solo thrust his knife out and made more guttural sounds. The dog seemed unmoved by the caterwauling.

  Tom sighed loudly again. “Just kill it before it takes a bite out of us.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Solo crept forward. The dog stood its ground, showing more of his teeth and letting more foam slip from its jowls.

  Solo crept closer and the dog growled and snapped it jaws. Its eyes were bloodshot and weepy and stared coldly at him.

  Solo shed a tear. “This won’t hurt, I promise.”

  He clutched the knife tightly in his fist, so tightly his knuckles became white. Then he put it down to his side. The dog was unmoved by the gesture and growled one last time before leaping forward and knocking Solo back to the cold, wet pavement.

  Solo closed his eyes.

  The suffering would be over soon.

  Chapter Two

  Mila Kunis Eyes

  “It’s pouring so hard, she’ll catch a cold. Or worse, she’ll die. Look at her, lying there on the sidewalk in the rain. Her dress is wet. She is probably crying, but I can’t tell because her face is wet.”

  Solo’s breath fogged up the window of the front door. He wiped it clear with his small, pudgy hands so he could see her.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. It squeezed. Hard.

  “What are you doing, faggot?”

  Solo turned to look up at his father. His breath smelled of alcohol—it always smelled of alcohol—and he swayed as if he were on the bridge of a schooner in rough seas.

  “Noth … nothing.” Solo was afraid of his father when he was drunk. He was not a kind drunk. He was a mean drunk.

  Solo’s father nudged him aside and wiped a bigger swath of clear glass with his shaky hand.

  “That damn doll again,” his father bellowed, pulling his face away from the glass and peering down at Solo with a derisive grin. “You really are a faggot, aren’t you? Playing with dolls. You just aren’t right in the head, are you, faggot?”

  His father swung the door open and stumbled out into the rain. Solo watched as he grabbed the doll and looked at it, lifting up the dress and poking his finger into the crotch.

  “You got a hoo-hoo, Little Girl?” His father chuckled loudly. He was amused with himself.

  Solo’s bare feet sloshed through the wet grass to his father. He reached up for the doll, but it was beyond his grasp.

  “Oh, you want her back, faggot?” His father held the doll higher and laughed. He then broke off her head with a twist and dropped both pieces to the sidewalk. “There. She’s all yours.”

  Solo began to cry. He grabbed her head and peered at it. One of her blue eyes had popped off with the force of the torque. Solo collected both of the pieces, one in his left hand and one in his right, and mourned for his loss.

  ***

  Solo watched through the blur of his tears the blood drip from his knife.

  The dog lay dead on the pavement. Solo sat next to it and Tom looked down at him, smiling proudly.

  “I knew you could do it.”

  Solo didn’t remember doing it at all, but he must have.

  He hated what he had done, even though he knew it was what had to be done. It was the humane thing to do.

  The dog was in a better place.

  Even more to the point, it was survival. Kill or be killed. Tom’s motto—one of many. You’re either the fox or the hen, Tom would say.

  That thought reassured Solo as he and Tom marched briskly north.

  Tom’s strides were long and purposeful. The city, it’s crumbling buildings rising into the ashen sky, were well behind them now. There was only grass and dirt and a two-lane road that was quickly being overtaken by the Earth.

  Solo peered into each car they walked past them. They were like monuments to the Before, metal tombstones to a world Solo could hardly remember, and wondered if it ever really existed at all.

  The automobiles were like time capsules. Inside they contained cell phones and iPads and iPods and laptops and gadgets and gizmos of varying makes and models, those devices long dormant, useless, obsolete in the After.

  They could not keep your belly full. They could not warm you against the chill. They could not protect you. They served no purpose, even though in the Before, people were tethered to them like technological umbilical cords, lost without them.

  Solo and Tom were free of the trappings of the Before.

  That was one good thing, at least.

  Tom trudged ahead toward a smattering of buildings. When they reached the town center, Solo was in awe of how well-preserved the structures were. Stone and brick store fronts were only slightly defaced. Almost all the windows were unbroken.

  The sight of the nearly pristine borough brought a smile to Tom’s face. “See, shithead. We should have left that fucking city sooner.”

  Solo agreed. He still pined for Eye Lyds. He still wondered if they had left her behind. He gazed back toward from where they had come with sadness and longing.

  Change was difficult, even still.

  They walked ahead. Not far from the town square they came upon a grocery store—a mom-and-pop operation, small and quaint. Tom was delighted to see the shelves still stocked with canned go
ods and boxed foods. Solo was just delighted it was stench-free—no rotting meat here—and had an ample supply of Twinkies.

  “We hit the jackpot, Solo,” Tom exclaimed. He smiled. Tom rarely smiled and when he did, Solo always took notice. It was like Halley’s Comet or frogs raining from the sky or a pretty girl smiling at him.

  It hardly ever happened.

  Then Solo caught a sight of something even rarer: a fully stocked pharmacy.

  Tom scowled. “Don’t go back there. So help me God, if you go back there!”

  Solo ignored him. He rarely did, but this time he felt compelled to do so.

  Drugs have shelf lives, too, Solo realized, but most can be effective well past their expiration dates as long as they were stored properly.

  This grocer seemed to have held up well in the After.

  Perhaps its pharmaceuticals had held up just as well.

  He felt giddy as his finger slid across the shelves. The pharmacy was dry and cool—perfect conditions for storage. The bottles were still carefully aligned with the labels facing out. It was as if time had stopped here. It was as if this place was in a vacuum.

  Tom’s voice was almost panicked. “You’re gonna fuck this up big time. You’re no doctor. You don’t know what dose to take. You’re gonna kill yourself and then what am I gonna do?”

  “It’s okay, Tom. I know what I’m doing.” Solo didn’t really. He just thought it a reassuring thing to say.

  Solo was overwhelmed by the plethora of bottles, all with long, pharmaceutical-sounding names: Fexofenadine. Omeprazol. Escitalopram oxalate.

  It was all very confusing.

  As Solo scoured the shelves, Tom fumed with his arms crossed on his broad chest and his sunken eyes slit and fixed on him with disdain.

  Finally, Solo found what he sought.

  Olanzapine. Solo recalled taking this medication. It was called something else—some snappy drug company name with a commercial on television with smiling people having fun and being loved.

  Tom’s eyes grew bigger as Solo shook the large bottle, the pills inside making music like a maraca, and then popped it open. He shook out a few of the small, round and white pills into his palm and studied them.

  He smiled. Yes, these are the right ones.

  Tom protested. “You think that’s gonna help? Look around. No pill’s gonna help us.”

  Solo shook his head at his friend and Tom backed away, defeated. Solo could tell Tom knew when to surrender. Tom always seemed to know when a battle was lost and this one surely was. Solo didn't have much sway with his friend, but occasionally he summoned enough will to thwart him.

  Now was one of those occasions.

  One of the small, round and white pills slid roughly down Solo’s parched throat. He gathered bottle after bottle—hydrocodone, azithromycin, amoxicillin, zolpidem, vicodin and many others he couldn’t read, let alone pronounce—and packed them carefully into a pocket of his Bergen.

  “Let’s go,” Solo said as he slung the pack over his shoulder. The bottles of pills rattled in the pocket, creating an almost rhythmic song.

  ***

  “What did you wish for?” Eye Lyds asked as she turned her eyes from the dark sky and the twinkling stars to gaze at Solo.

  Solo sighed. “To be normal.”

  He turned his eyes to Eye Lyds. “What did you wish for?”

  Eye Lyds sighed. “I wished for that, too.”

  ***

  It was hard for Solo to recall things from his life Before. He had memories, most fleeting and many in fragments. A scene here, an act there—a play without a plot, a movie without form.

  It was as if his life was a book with some of the pages torn out, typography faded, sentences and paragraphs redacted.

  He remembered staring at the stars well enough. He remembered he lived in a rural community, far away from the pollution of street lights and car headlamps. He remembered lying in the dewy grass with Eye Lyds, staring up into a clear sky and admiring the canvas of a universal portrait that made him feel small and insignificant—in a most splendid way.

  It wasn’t just the view he remembered, but the conversation. He and Eye Lyds talked of topics both profound and mundane. Every once in a while they saw a shooting star and made a wish upon it as it streaked across the sky.

  Those wishes never came true. That wasn’t the point. The point was to dream and to hope, and they did that well.

  It was a good memory, and Solo was glad he was able to hold on to it.

  This night was very much like those from his memory, only now all Solo had lying next to him was Tom, who didn’t talk with him about things both profound and mundane. He didn’t wish upon any shooting stars.

  He was just surly.

  He was just Tom.

  Tom stirred. “It’s too fucking cold to sleep. Why the hell are we sleeping outside, anyway?”

  “Because I wanted to look at something sublime again.”

  Tom groaned, rolled to his side and shivered.

  Solo rolled to face Tom. “We never talk, Tom. You know, about the important stuff.”

  “What’s important stuff?”

  “You know, like what you did Before?”

  “I protected people.”

  “That’s vague.”

  “What do you want, my life story?” Tom bellowed. “What does it matter anyway? The past is the past. It don’t do us no good to think about it. Best move on.”

  “It matters,” Solo whispered, sullenly. “It all matters.”

  “Why are you trying to remember all that stuff for anyway? It wasn’t good, was it?”

  “Not all of it was bad.”

  Not all, but most.

  Almost all of what Solo could remember was colored by his illness. Solo was sick. He knew he was sick and everyone around him knew he was sick. He had his lucid times, his functioning times—long stretches even. But those good times became more and more difficult to secure. Those good times became more and more infrequent. The bad times flooded in as if the levee of his sanity had broken.

  No one understood him. He was cast aside. He slipped through the cracks. He was ignored and shunned. He was discarded and called “crazy.”

  There were times, many even, when Solo wished he had cancer or Huntington’s or Muscular Dystrophy. At least then people wouldn’t have treated him so poorly.

  Jerry Lewis never had a telethon for the mentally ill.

  Only Eye Lyds stuck by him. She was gone now. He could take most everyone disappearing. Most people were cruel to him, but not Eye Lyds. Not having her was almost too much to take.

  “Too fucking cold!” Tom moaned. Solo smiled. He had Tom. Tom stuck by him, too. He was a bastard, yes, but he never treated him badly because of his illness or shortcomings.

  “Why do you think we were left behind?” Solo had wanted to ask that question for some time now. He had wanted an answer for just as long. He figured maybe Tom had one, but he knew deep down his friend didn’t. Tom was just as alone and in the dark as he; Tom was just better at hiding his heartache.

  Tom simply shrugged and curled his lips in confusion through that weathered beard of his.

  “How the hell do I know? A disease? Some sort of weapon? Mother Fucking Earth flushing the toilet on a harmful species? The Rapture? Perhaps we are unholy and were left behind in this purgatory. Lucky assholes, I guess.”

  That made Solo feel oddly better. Perhaps I couldn’t find Eye Lyds because she had ascended to Heaven?

  That also meant he was in purgatory.

  Or worse.

  In hell.

  “What did we do to deserve this?” Solo wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer.

  He got one anyway. “Look, there are a lot of theories, okay. I’ve thought of them all. Thing is, we’re probably never gonna know. We have to be fine with that and survive. Top priority: Survive.”

  Solo drew a cross in the dirt. He was never the religious sort. He always questioned things, always had to know why and how. He a
lways had to know the reason.

  Religion was contrary to all of his beliefs. Faith was foreign to him. If he couldn’t see it, touch it, smell it or taste it, he had a hard time believing in it.

  It took an apocalypse to alter that thinking.

  It took Armageddon for him to find God.

  Solo heard Tom’s deep sigh. “It’s just a fucking theory. It’s just as likely Dr. Who took them all away in his TARDIS for Christ’s sake.”

  Solo chuckled.

  “This was a stupid idea to sleep outside,” Tom barked as he pushed himself off the ground. “Sometimes I don’t know why I listen to you.”

  “Where you going?” Solo asked as Tom stomped away, toward a shadow of a housing development that cut across the horizon in the distance.

  “To find a decent place to lay my head.”

  ***

  They found a suitable house with a suitable bed. Tom slept on the floor on account of his bad back. Solo figured it was a work injury, or perhaps even a war injury, but he didn’t press the issue. All he needed to know was Tom had a bad back from Before and he needed a firm, unyielding place to lie down.

  And this hardwood floor would do quite nicely.

  The room once belonged to a teenage girl. She had posters of famous teenage boy actors and singers hung all around her pink room. There were lots of frilly things and stuffed animals and mirrors.

  Solo hated to look at himself in the mirror. He always thought himself quite ugly.

  “It looks like fucking Hannah Montana threw up in here,” Tom grumbled. “But at least it’s warm. Get some sleep. We have a long day ahead.”

  Solo lay in the girl’s soft mattress and peered up at the ceiling above him. It was covered in florescent stars that once glowed in the darkness.

  They were cold and dark now.

  Solo wished on one anyway.

  ***

  “Why did you do it?” The principal sat on the edge of his desk, his legs crossed in front of him.

  All Solo did was look down at his black dress shoes, polished to a shine.

  “He called me crazy,” Solo answered, his words barely audible.

  “That’s still no reason to hit someone. You really hurt him.”

  “He called me crazy.”

  “We’ve called your parents.”