by Paul Bishop
The dogs, however, partnered up and reformed their society much faster than we did. It was like they’d waited for their chance to go feral again. And this time, they didn’t ask permission.
Packs roamed the streets. Great turf wars began after nightfall and the screams of dogs killing each other replaced the chorus of crickets and traffic as the soundtrack to the city at night. They stopped taking orders. There was no more fetch, no more sit, and no more good boy.
This particular one was a big sucker. His growl, I felt, seemed like a courtesy—like jumping me without warning would somehow be bad sportsmanship. He wanted me to know I was lunch.
When I turned to him, I could see he was a specimen that deserved to be noticed. Black fur matted into a thick carpet and his rolled shoulders hunched as he stalked forward slowly, his yellow teeth on display for my viewing pleasure.
I slid my hand into my pocket for my knife and had it out and halfway open too when the arrow struck as a single spike to his heart. I gaped and finally understood the meaning of dead shot. When I gathered my wits and swung my head around, the food cart guy walked forward, a bow hanging slack in his hand.
He watched me as he approached, wary rather than smug. He knew damn well he’d nailed that dog in one shot. It was me he wasn’t so sure about. He put a foot on the animal’s chest and yanked on the arrow. It slid out and he shoved it into the quiver on his hip, although he didn’t bother to wipe it clean of blood. Still watching me, he grasped the dog’s tail and dragged it away toward his cart.
I felt kinda glad I didn’t have any money for his meat skewers. The feeling only lasted a second. As hungry as I was, I could probably have eaten that whole nasty beast on a stick. But I had to keep on walking.
Finally, I reached Sammy’s at dusk and at about the same time that I began to feel a little unsafe. Which didn’t mean the outside of my destination made me feel any better—a cinderblock rectangle with a spray-painted sign, and the only light to invite the masses was a burning trash barrel out front.
I paused before I entered, partly to catch my breath and partly to give myself one last opportunity to turn away from a life as a stripper for weird dudes who like damaged girls. The rumble in my stomach again made itself heard and felt. It had to be the last sound all strippers heard before they unhooked their first bra in front of a crowd.
Resigned to the inevitable, I adjusted my leg strap, wiped drops of sweat off the bald spot on my head, tucked my crutches under my armpits, and went inside.
Sammy had power, which I felt was a start. Not that they used a whole slew of lights and it was probably better that way, but he had enough and he had music. I’d almost forgotten how much music was piped into our lives without us realizing it before the Collapse. Now, even the strains of thirty-year-old heavy metal settled on my ears like an old friend’s voice over a telephone line.
The establishment seemed to have only a bartender, two guys seated at the bar watching a girl on stage, and one guy up front in the midst of a number of empty chairs. The girl working the pole was black with a tall, natural afro. At first, she looked totally normal to me, but when she stood from a long slide down the tarnished pole, I saw she only had one breast and a vicious scar where her other one should have been.
I turned to the bar and found the bartender watching me. Given that there wasn’t much else to see in there, I decided it was a natural reaction. He was tall and thick with dark-brown skin like a Native American or a Mexican maybe. Same difference, I decided. Long hair was tied back in a ponytail. He ran a dingy rag over a glass in his hand, but I could tell he did it only to keep his hands busy, not to clean the glass. I limped over to him.
“Is Sammy here?” I asked.
“Yeah. You here for a job?”
“What gave me away?”
He smiled. “My name’s Cruz.” He held a hand out to me and I shook.
“Janet.”
Cruz gave me a once over and nodded his head with approval. “Sammy’s gonna like you.”
He wandered off down the bar to fetch the proprietor. I knew what he meant—that I was more damaged than the other girls. If the gal on stage only had one missing breast, I’d be the star attraction in no time.
I turned to the stage, where the girl was close to the end of her song and writhed her body like she had no bones. A red light overhead gave her a strange complexion and I immediately wondered if I could get them to turn that off when I went out there. If I had the guts to get on stage at all, that is.
The guy seated alone in an audience of none had turned away from the stage and now looked at me. Something about the way he stared at me was unsettling. He had thick glasses, a ridiculous comb-over, and a thing on his lip somewhere between caterpillar and eyebrow, although he’d call it a mustache.
“Well, hello, gorgeous.”
For a second, I tried to work how he threw his voice so far and without moving his lips, but I caught sight of Sammy waddling toward me along the bar. A hugely fat man, he grasped the rail for balance as he lumbered forward. Even under the layers of jowl, his smile cut through, brighter than all the lights in the place combined.
He extended a hand. “I’m Sammy. And you are…”
“Janet,” I said and shook his hand. It was surprisingly dry.
“Yes, you are. Let me get a look at you.” He stepped back and held my good arm out until I stood shakily on my mismatched legs. The crutch under my arm slipped and clattered on the floor. He simply ignored it.
“This comes off, yes?” He pointed a toe at my fake leg.
“Yes.”
“Good, good.” I expected that he would stare at my tits or make me turn and bend over—or even the sickening thought of him wanting to test the merchandise on his new hire. But he only looked at my stumpy arm, the plastic leg, and the bald patch on my skull with the same lustful eyes anyone else would look at a bare pussy in their face.
“Can I see it?” he asked. Here we go. Right here in the middle of the floor, he wants to see my bush. Like it could hear the conversation, my stomach cramped on me and grumbled.
“Only down to the panties or you want the full Monty?” I asked.
Sammy laughed. “No, no, the leg, honey.”
He released my arm and pointed to my thigh. I could tell the guy in the audience was still staring. The song ended and the girl on stage stormed off and gave me the stink-eye since no tips had come her way with all the attention on me.
I shifted my remaining crutch under my right arm, unbuckled my leg strap, and lifted my hip until my stump came out of the contraption. Sammy gasped like he saw a Monet painting or something.
“Very nice, yes.”
I noticed Cruz giving me my space. He polished his glass carefully in the other direction and I decided I liked him already.
“And up here?” Sammy asked and pointed to his own head to indicate mine.
“Metal plate,” I said.
A breath caught in his throat like he’d had a tiny orgasm. “Excellent. Let me introduce you around.”
He stooped, retrieved my fallen crutch, and took my hand like I was the queen of England or some shit. I began to wonder if maybe he was a queen himself—one with a really weird fetish. He pulled me down the bar.
“You met Cruz already,” he said. The bartender turned his head over his shoulder and gave me a nod. “Welcome to the club.”
We reached the end of the bar and he aimed me to a curtain of glittery hanging beads, many of them missing. Clearly, this took us backstage.
The greasy guy who’d been the only audience watched us the whole way. Another heavy metal song started, but no girl came on stage.
In the back was a small dressing room. What they needed a dressing room for in a strip joint I had no idea, but there it was. Two girls were present, both casual in their nakedness.
“Gigi, Rowena, meet Janet,” Sammy said with a flourish. “Our newest star.”
The former was the black girl from the stage. She stood and held a
hand out.
“Hey, Janet. Welcome to it.” She studied me. “There go my tips.” She laughed about it and I didn’t feel any rivalry like I had expected to.
The other girl, Rowena, stood. One eye was missing and a deep cavern yawned where her left eye used to be. Something about her not wearing an eyepatch made her seem more naked than the fact that her tits swung between us like a couple of fresh grapefruits in a stiff breeze. I held my good hand out and she stuck a mangled clump of knobby flesh-covered knuckles into it.
I did my best not to recoil. I knew how that felt, but it caught me off guard. When I looked down, I realized that both of her hands were gnarled masses of anything but fingers. They looked like birth defects, not anything that happened in the Collapse like me.
“Rowena,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
“If your tits are as good as your gimps, Gigi’s right, there’s a new sheriff in town.” They both laughed at that.
“My gimps?” I said.
“Yeah, that leg and your arm and that head. Damn, girl. Charlie’s gonna love you.”
“Who’s Charlie?” I wanted to know.
“Did you see the guy out front?” Gigi asked. I nodded. “That’s Charlie. Get used to him. He’s here every night.”
“Sometimes, he’s the only one, like tonight,” Rowena added.
“Not for long,” Sammy said. “Now, we have a superstar.” He turned and winked at the other two. “No offense, girls.” They both gave him looks to confirm none taken. “They’ll line up in the streets screaming, ‘Dammit, Janet. I love you.’”
They all had a laugh. I couldn’t help it, so I joined them.
“Jacqui’s gonna hate her,” Gigi said to Rowena and they shared a smile.
“Jacqui?” I said.
“Our top earner,” Gigi said. “Former top earner, anyway.”
“I don’t want to take anyone’s job…” I began to backpedal out of the room.
“Nonsense, nonsense,” Sammy responded quickly me and caught my arm to make me stay. “Jacqui will be fine with it.”
“Yeah, yeah, she’ll be fine,” Rowena said. I wasn’t convinced.
“Okay,” he said briskly. “I’ll let you girls give her the rundown. Tomorrow night, a star is born.” He left the dressing room with a flourish. The girls chuckled at him as he went. Alone in the tiny room, the laughter died down. Gigi looked at me.
“So, who’d you lose?”
For a second, I was taken aback, but I saw in her eyes that she genuinely wanted to know.
“My fiancé,” I said.
“Shit,” Rowena said. “That’s tough.”
We spent the next hour talking about life before. Every few minutes, one of them would go out and dance, then come back and join the conversation again. I hadn’t felt so at home since the whole world went to shit.
3
As much as I feared it, stripping wasn’t so bad. Rowena put words to a notion I’d had in private. “It’s nice to feel sexy again, isn’t it? It makes you feel like a woman.”
I knew they were looking at my tits and my stumps, but either way, they didn’t avert their eyes and tug on their children’s hands to make them stop pointing.
The girls were right. Charlie came in every night and true to everyone’s prediction, he became my number-one fan.
I finally met the fourth girl, Jacqui. She had all her limbs, her fingers and toes, and both eyes, but she’d been burned. The left side of her body from her neck and all down across her shoulder, her left breast, and on to her hips was a sheath of bumpy pink scar tissue. To look at her from the right side—the way I did when we first met as she put her makeup on in the dressing room mirror—you’d never know she was burned. The rest of her was painful to even look at until you got used to it, but you accustomed to it fairly quickly.
As predicted, she started out fairly cold to me but it was a surface cold. I knew she’d warm soon enough. We all had this strange thing in common and no amount of petty rivalry could beat it.
What finally broke the ice was when she found out I’d lost my fiancé. Her husband Jeff, she said, had been killed in front of her too. Her standing in dumbfounded shock was the reason she hadn’t moved when the acid reached her.
“Yeah, not fire, acid,” she said. She and her husband both worked in a chemical plant—scientists, which equaled geniuses in my mind. “No,” she said. “Jeff was the genius. I was only his assistant.”
“That’s still smarter than me,” I said.
“The pole doesn’t care who’s smarter.”
“Charlie either.” We both laughed.
She told me about the day when the ex-military stormed the plant looking to take over any building they saw as strategic. What they made there were industrial solvents.
“Manufacture and research for the perfect toilet cleaner,” Jacqui said. “It wasn’t exactly the nuclear launch codes.”
But in those terrifying days during the active part of the Collapse, when we could see it falling down around our ears, logic didn’t win the argument very often.
“Jeff tried to keep them out of the room and these three douche bags insisted. He stood in front of the door and told them they’d die if they went in without the proper hazmat suit on and asked if they even knew what was in there. I think they thought he must be hiding something.” She sighed when she recalled how stupid the three idiots were and how senseless her husband’s death had been. It made as much sense as any of them, I decided—zero.
“So they killed him. Virtually cut him in half with bullets and went inside and about half a minute later, a few thousand gallons of concentrated solvents splashed through the door. And all I did was stand there like a mannequin and let it soak me.”
She waved a hand up and down the scarred left side of her still naked body.
“The rest is history, although one good thing is those assholes died and they died badly. Getting it on your skin sucked but getting it up your nose and in your lungs like they did when they drowned in it—I can’t even imagine those last few seconds of pain.”
Jacqui smiled at the memory. We all took comfort where we could.
From then on, Jacqui and I were friends.
Aside from Charlie, the crowd on that Friday night consisted mostly of biker dudes who came in pairs or quartets. Never ride alone seemed to be their motto and it was definitely safer that way out on the streets. One night, we had a couple of military types, but Cruz gave them such a stink-eye the whole time they were inside that they grew uncomfortable and left.
A few people came in simply to drink the bathtub moonshine Sammy served. Proper distilleries were a long way off from coming back, and booze was one of the first commodities to run in short supply in the aftermath. You could get a gallon of gasoline for months longer than you could get a bottle of Kentucky whiskey. That was American priorities for you.
Me and all the girls lived in an old motel building out back behind Sammy’s. The beds were lumpy, the water never got above lukewarm, and the cockroaches acted like they had more right to live there than we did, but it felt more like a home to me than any place since I woke up in the hospital.
On my seventh day working there, the crowd was kinda thin for a Friday night. Charlie sat right up front, of course, his hair as greasy as ever, and two biker dudes lurked at the bar and paid only partial attention to the dancing on stage. Not that what I did could be called any kind of dancing. Sammy, of course, wanted me to wear the leg, at least at the beginning of a routine. I’d start out with it strapped in place so the reveal when it fell away would be dramatic and, I guess to these guys, sexy. Never mind that the damn thing was the least sexy leg ever constructed of wood and resin. I’m surprised no one painted stubble on the thing. After I dropped the fake, I had to clutch the pole for dear life for fear I’d fall and tumble off the stage into Charlie’s lap—which he probably would have loved.
“It’s a slow night,” I said to Sammy whi
le Rowena was on stage. He’d asked all four of us girls to come in that night and had anticipated a bigger crowd. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d let him down somewhat by not being the big attraction he thought I might be.
“It’s early yet,” he responded.
“How come you can always look on the bright side?”
“Oh, honey,” he said. “When you’re flat on your back the way we are these days, all you can do is look up and see the sunshine.”
He smiled at me and I wanted to believe him so badly, but I couldn’t. Not yet.
“Hey, boss,” Cruz said. and beckoned him down the bar. Sammy curled a finger and invited the bartender to where we stood, letting him know the owner didn’t intend to walk a step he didn’t have to. He joined us.
“Have you seen that guy in here before?” he asked and jerked his head to the corner of the room where Jacqui sat on the lap of a tough-looking customer. She worked overtime to make flirty faces and cute, baby-talk voices, trying to lure an extra couple of bucks from the guy. His face was a stone, although his hands traced the contours of her scarred flesh like he was reading braille.
“I’ve never seen him,” Sammy said. “But he seems harmless enough. Is he running a tab or paying cash?”
“Cash,” Cruz replied.
“Then keep an eye out, but I don’t see the problem.”
The barman wandered back down the bar, polishing his favorite glass, but he didn’t take his eyes off Jacqui and the stranger for a second.
Rowena’s song ended and Charlie clapped while the bikers ignored her and drank more hooch.
“I’m up,” I said.
“Break a leg, kiddo,” Sammy said, his little joke every time I went on stage. I should have been offended but I found it charming. After such a short time, I already had an inside joke and it made me feel like family. I walked to the stage entrance and could hear Jacqui squeal with schoolgirl laughter. Man, she really was working hard for that tip. The lap dances were something I hadn’t found the courage for yet.
