After the End Trilogy Box Set

by Mark Gillespie

  Linda nodded slowly.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah he is.”

  Eda fell back into the seat. She shook her head back and forth slowly in a trance-like motion.

  “He seemed so sure,” she said. “Back over in Grand Central, you should have heard this guy. He was so damn sure.”

  “They’re always so damn sure,” Linda said. Her face glistened with a fine coat of sweat as she spoke. “It’s a form of denial if you ask me. I don’t know, can you blame them? I mean it’s a pretty fucked up thing to come to terms with – the fact that Mother Nature doesn’t want us around anymore. Still, we have to try to persuade her to give us one more chance. Every time we leave Helen and a man in the bedroom, I pray to God, hoping that he still cares enough to give us a second chance. To take the curse away. Then we hear that horrible screaming and I know…”

  “Know what?” Eda asked.

  “That we’re screwed,” Linda said. “That maybe it really is all over and we’re just pissing in the wind here.”

  Eda listened to the dull thud of the falling rain outside. It might have been easing off at last.

  “Is Helen okay?” she said.

  It was a stupid question, but one that Eda felt compelled to ask.

  “She’s a little shaken up I guess,” Linda said, stepping away from a freshly fallen clump of ash on the floor. “This probably sounds terrible but it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before.”

  Linda inhaled deeply and the tip of the cigarette glowed bright red.

  “Poor girl,” she said. “Who am I to say how she feels? Just because she’s had more than one of them die on top of her, that doesn’t mean it gets any easier.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t,” Eda said.

  Linda exhaled and then fanned the smoke away from her face like it was a swarm of biting insects. There was a pallid, yellowy tinge to the older woman’s skin. Her face was sunken in around the middle, more so than Eda had ever remembered seeing before.

  “Worst thing about it,” Linda said. “I think she’s starting to get used to it. The craziness is becoming normal and that can’t be a good thing, not ever.”

  “The men’s orgasm,” Eda said. “Is it really that bad?”

  Linda looked at Eda as if she was a child who’d just asked yet another silly question.

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” Linda said. “Although nobody sticks around long enough to tell us for sure. But yeah, it’s that bad. The lucky ones die outright – it’s done and dusted but that doesn’t happen often. Usually they live through the pain and then…”

  She paused.

  “What?” Eda asked. “Go on, please.”

  “I’ve seen them thrashing and rolling around on the floor like madmen,” Linda said. “It’s like they’ve been stung by something so bad that they can’t stand being alive anymore. Jesus, the look on their faces. I’m talking about the worst pain you’ll ever imagine Eda, one that no matter how hard you try, you can’t ever get rid of, not while you’re still alive.”

  Linda kicked the growing pile of ash at her feet away. It scattered, making even more of a mess in the lobby. Linda didn’t look like she gave much of a shit. With a short burst of gargled laughter, she pulled both sides of her rain cloak closer together, as if feeling the cold all of a sudden.

  “Sometimes I think it’s all for the best,” she said. “Failure I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?” Eda said.

  “You haven’t seen it up there Eda,” Linda said. Now it was her turn to point towards the ceiling. “For the men who survive the orgasm, death is the sweetest comfort they’ll ever know. In a way, death becomes the orgasm and they’ll do anything to get there. They’ll run to the kitchen, grab a knife off the rack and stab themselves repeatedly in the throat. I’ve seen it. They’ll pound their heads off the wall until it literally turns to mush. One of them tried to jump out the window but he was so messed up by the pain that he couldn’t figure out how to open the damn thing. I guess what I’m saying is, do we really deserve a second chance? Because God, Allah, the Universe, Mother Nature or whoever put the curse on us, they don’t seem to think we do.”

  Eda shivered. She could taste the cigarette smoke in the air and it smelled rancid.

  “Is Helen as pretty as they say?” she asked.

  Linda smiled. “She’s beautiful. Poor thing, Jesus.”

  Eda nodded. “Did the grinning man do everything right?” she asked. “Did he do the relaxation ritual? And the fertility blessing?”

  Linda raised an eyebrow. “How do you know about those things?”

  “Shay told me.”

  “Right,” Linda said. “Shay always said you were the curious type. Anyway, he didn’t want the relaxation ritual. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo jumbo, sitting down and talking with Zahra, a woman who used to be a hypnotist. Said he didn’t need to relax. Said he wasn’t nervous because the curse was bullshit. I’m sure he thought the same thing about the fertility blessing but Shay always insists on saying the words. He was so eager to get into the bedroom. What a dickhead. Well now he’d a dead dickhead.”

  Eda glanced upwards. “I’m glad I’m not up there,” she said. “That’s the last place I’d want to be right now.”

  As soon as she said it, Eda held up a hand in apology to Linda.

  “Sorry. That wasn’t the best thing to say.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Linda said, brushing it off with a sweep of the hand. There was an ugly wheezing noise as she sucked hard on the last of the cigarette. It was a desperate, almost pitiful sound.

  “Nobody in their right mind would want to be in the Presidential Suite now,” she said. “That son of a bitch ain’t grinning anymore. He split his head open off the wall. You should have seen it – it was like he was being burned with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time. I saw the madness in his eyes. He’d gone all the way to Hell before he’d even died.”

  Linda’s body trembled. It was obvious that one cigarette wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Thank God I’m just the chef,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be Lucia for the rest of the day.”

  “Lucia?” Eda asked.

  “That’s the cleaner. What a shitty job she’s got ahead of her tonight. Picking up all that…”

  Linda winced. “Still, she never complains. She’s a trooper.”

  The chef reached for another cigarette, even though they were in scarce supply these days. As she lit up a second smoke, Linda stared towards the front door of the hotel.

  Her eyes were distant.

  “There are at least fifty ambassadors out there looking for men,” she said. “If they’re not all dead then they’re working. And if they’re working that means more men will be showing up in New York and soon. That’s a lot of bad news waiting for poor Helen. She’s a smart girl too, she knows what’s coming.”

  “I’ll bet she feels sick every time someone knock on the door,” Eda said.

  Linda looked at Eda and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  3

  Eda leapt out of bed and ran towards the window.

  She’d heard a scream.

  She pressed her face up tight against the filthy cold glass and looked outside. It was dark out there as it always was in the early hours of the morning. These were the witching hours, when the dark forces of the world were at their strongest. Nothing good ever happened at this time of day, that’s why most people chose to sleep through it.

  The third floor window of the Fitzpatrick Grand Central hotel faced directly onto 44th Street but there was nothing out there, at least nothing that Eda could see.

  The rain had stopped at last. It was quiet, a little too quiet.

  Had she been dreaming? That wouldn’t be a surprise, not after what happened with the grinning man earlier on in the Waldorf. After talking to Linda in the lobby, Eda had walked alone through the rain back to the Fitzpatrick. There were only a few women from the Complex living in the Fi
tzpatrick, which held over a hundred and fifty rooms in a ten-story building located opposite Grand Central. The hotel was run down, partially by age but the looting and vandalism that had been so rampant after the war hadn’t exactly helped to keep it in good condition. Unlike the Waldorf, the owners of the Fitzpatrick hadn’t bothered hiring private guards to protect their property. Those who’d tried to protect their investments, like the Waldorf people, had hoped that the trouble would blow over and that somehow, as crazy as it sounded now, things would eventually get back to normal.

  It never did.

  Eda didn’t mind the wear and tear of the Fitzpatrick. The smell of old things, of decrepit furniture and worn carpet, was a strange source of comfort to her. Most of all however, she liked it there because there were less people and that meant more privacy.

  She stayed by the window, looking down both sides of the street as far as she could see. The soft hair on the back of Eda’s neck stood up and there was a cold feeling inside, like a warning alarm going off in her mind.

  She wondered if someone else had turned up outside the station. Could it be another man? Usually months passed between the arrival of different men at Grand Central.

  It was possible, but unlikely.

  As Eda stood with her hands gripped tight to the window ledge, her mind wandered back to the years after the war. The wild years. They were full of things that couldn’t ever be forgotten by those who’d survived to talk about them. There were always screams in the middle of the night back then. The younger Eda wouldn’t have blinked at such a disturbance as the one she’d just heard or imagined, but the world during the wild years had been a louder, even more frightening place than it was now.

  Eda felt a chill in the air and shivered. Then she turned around and went back to bed.

  But it was no good – she couldn’t sleep. All she was doing was lying there, staring up at the yellowy-white ceiling.

  It was times like this, with her mind working overtime that Eda missed her best friend, Frankie. Eda had shared a room with Frankie, real name Francesca, in the Fitzpatrick for three years before her friend had all of a sudden gone missing. In all likelihood, even though it wasn’t easy for Eda to accept, Frankie had run away from the Complex.

  Eda had been devastated by the loss.

  Afterwards, Shay had encouraged Eda to move out of the Fitzpatrick and into one of the more populated hotels so that she could mix with the other women. But Eda stayed where she was. Most of the women in the Complex were a lot older than she was and besides that, they had little in common with Eda. Frankie on the other hand, had been about Eda’s age and they’d shared the same endless curiosity about the world that had existed before the war. It was that curiosity that inspired them to spend long happy days ransacking old bookstores in the city together. Not surprisingly, few bookstores had been looted after the war. Eda and Frankie mostly raided the history, science and biography shelves and dumped everything into an old wheelbarrow they carried around with them. After that, they’d bring the books back to the hotel and disappear inside the Fitzpatrick for days.

  Sometimes they’d read for hours at a time, shouting out interesting facts to one another from across the room.

  Eda couldn’t help but think that it was those same discoveries that had inspired Frankie’s wanderlust. She’d been a curious, highly intelligent girl and she would have fitted in well with the world before the End War and all its marvels.

  If only she’d asked Eda to go with her…

  Eda struck a match and lit a lemon-scented candle on the bedside table. She then pulled out a tattered hardback book lying under her pillow and thumbed lazily through the pages. It was a general history of the twenty-first century, which had been published a few years before the breakout of the war.

  She was re-reading a section about the arms race between the USA and China when she heard a booming voice shouting from afar.

  The book fell out of her hands.

  Eda stared at the window. Her heart was pounding.

  It wasn’t a scream this time. She could hear the sound of a man yelling from afar and there was something else too – a faint rattling or churning noise that sounded like something heavy clattering off a distant road.

  “Another man?” she said. “It can’t be. Two in one day?”

  Eda jumped off the bed and stood paralyzed in the middle of the room. Her mind was temporarily frozen with fear. A moment later, she heard frantic footsteps charging downstairs. Loud voices filled the hotel. Eda recognized those voices as belonging to two other women from the Complex who also lived in the Fitzpatrick.

  “C’mon,” Eda said, talking to herself. “Do something.”

  She hurried over to the coffee table next to the window and picked up her dagger. The dagger was a strange, exotic looking weapon with a distinct medial ridge on the blade. Eda kept the blade sharp at all times, even though there had been little use for it in recent years.

  She blew out the candle and ran towards the stairs. As she reached the first floor of the Fitzpatrick, Eda heard more shouting on the streets – it sounded like it was coming from a couple of blocks down. And it was getting louder all the time. It was the same male voice she heard over and over. He sounded angry and damn loud about it.

  Eda stepped outside the hotel. The cold air was like a slap in the face.

  She started walking towards the disturbance, keeping tight to the buildings and cloaked in darkness. With a light step, Eda moved off 44th Street and onto Lexington Avenue. From there she hurried south, ignoring the warning bell voice in her head that told her she was crazy.

  But something was happening and it was like a magnet pulling her in.

  As she approached the corner of 42nd and Lexington, Eda saw two women huddled tight together with their backs facing her. They were both peering out from the edge of the building, pointing down East 42nd Street towards the entrance of Grand Central.

  Eda caught up with the two women and when they heard her coming, they spun around and nearly jumped out of their rain cloaks in fright. When they saw it was Eda, they looked both relieved and angry at the same time. Eda vaguely recognized them both as gardeners. She didn’t know their names but they were in their mid-sixties approximately and both worked inside Grand Central, tending to the crops.

  One of the women, short and skinny, with Oriental features and smooth brown skin, raised a hand as if to halt Eda’s progress.

  “You can’t go any further,” she whispered.

  “Why not?” Eda asked, trying to get past them so she could look around the corner. “What’s going on for God’s sake? Who’s doing all that shouting?”

  The other gardener – pale-skinned and with frightened blue eyes – pressed a finger tight to her lips.

  “Not too loud,” she said.

  Eda scrunched up her face in confusion. There was no way anyone on 42nd Street was going to hear them talking. She forced her way past the two women, just enough to poke her head around the corner and see what was going on for herself.

  She looked down 42nd Street towards Grand Central.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  There was a brown horse pulling a small wooden cart with massive spoked wheels. The cart was parading back and forth in front of the station entrance like it was performing in a parade.

  Eda crept out further. She slid around the corner, all the while getting closer to the action. She ignored the faint protests of the women behind her.

  She had to see this.

  A fat, heavily bearded man stood up in the driver’s seat of the cart, holding the reins and yelling wildly at the top of his deep voice. He bellowed an ear-splitting command to the horse and it turned left, spinning the cart around yet again. The cart then raced back along the center of 42nd Street over the faded white lines that had once divided traffic. Now that she was closer, Eda saw something at the back of the horse-driven vehicle.

  Two dead bodies.

  She gasped.

  The corpses w
ere attached to the cart by two long stretches of gnarled rope tied around their legs. It was two women and they were lying flat on their backs, their arms outstretched in a cross-like pose. Their bodies shuddered violently on the wet road as they were repeatedly dragged up and down the street.

  “What the fuck?” Eda said. “What is this?”

  Further back, a large group of about thirty men stood at the side of the road. They were dressed in a variety of torn rags and even from a distance, Eda could see – she could feel – the ravenous, inhuman look in their dead eyes. Their long hair and thick beards made them look like a pack of wild animals that had just crawled out of the woods.

  Eda looked back at the two gardeners. They were still hovering at the corner of the street. The Asian woman gestured with her hand, urging Eda not to go any further along 42nd Street. Her pale-skinned friend looked like she was about to be sick.

  A gentle rain began to fall.

  Eda looked up at a black, starless sky and smelled a fresh, earthy odor in the air. Another big downpour was imminent.

  The man driving the cart let out a loud, primal roar that would have been heard for miles across the city. He was like a conquering barbarian and he roared with unrestrained laughter as he continued to drag the two corpses behind his rickety chariot like a pair of mangled trophies. The bodies were covered in dirt, bruises and patches of dried blood – it was hard to discern their features and even harder to guess how long they’d been hooked up to the cart and how far they’d traveled like that.

  Eda turned back to the gardeners. They were gone.

  She looked at all the men gathered in close proximity to the station. She hadn’t seen so many men standing in one place, not since she’d been a child. It was a miracle of sorts, albeit an unwanted one. Linda had been right – the ambassadors were out there in the wastelands telling the world all about the Complex and the Project.

  But at what cost?

  Further down 42nd Street, the cart finally rolled to a stop close to the station entrance.

  “Where is she?” the fat man bellowed. He was still up off his seat with arms stretched out, displaying the sheer enormity of his girth for all the world to see. Like the other men, he was dressed in worn, colorless rags.