The Populace

by Patterson, Aaron M.

  Chapter 23

  All of Us

  We should have seen it coming. We would have been better suited for it when it did come. Fortunately, it didn’t happen until the very end. Unfortunately, it still happened, making a difficult task next to impossible.

  We’d spent all day up until sundown driving the roads south to Fort Sill. I watched the map very closely for every turn. The road was far worse than any roads we’d driven up to this point, with cracks, overgrown vegetation, large obstacles such as commercial trucks, and even some locations where all pavement had been weathered to dirt. But finally, at around 8:30 in the evening, we saw the sign—Fort Sill-Lawton 3 Mi. We were even able to make out, just barely, a view of majestic Mount Scott in the distance through the remaining clouded sunlight.

  The car we’d taken all the way from Minnesota decided it no longer wanted to take us the next 3+ miles, opting instead to hand us the disappointing insult of breaking down. The engine, a 6-cylinder something, began to smoke and rev very loudly. It then emitted a cloud of black smoke usually reserved for Indian smoke signals long before electronics were made available. It rolled another 100 feet or so before stopping, no press of the gas or changing of the transmission to get it moving again.

  “Fuck me,” Gene quietly said. “This is nice.”

  “We walk,” I returned.

  “It’s dark. We don’t know the land. Hell, we don’t even know for sure if Pauline is even in this development, if, in fact, we can find one. If, in fact, one exists here in Fort Sayre.”

  “Sill.”

  “Whatever!”

  The anger I’d grown to know but not enjoy was reemerging. My friendship with Gene was about a year old. Through many different moods I had seen him. But he never shifted through them as fast as he had since we left for Oklahoma, signaling to me that taking Flegtide pretty much ruined his will and modesty. I was no fan of the miracle drug. Who knew what it was doing to the rest of the populace?

  “Are we going or not?” I asked Gene, frustrated.

  “We’ll go. I will miss this car, Wallace. You know that, right?”

  “It’s a fucking car, Gene! This is your sister we’re talking about! The whole reason I destroyed my entire life was to reach your sister, and now we’re miles from her and you question which is more important, her or a car you’ve driven for a week? Get over yourself and let’s get moving!”

  I gave Gene a very angry, very violent strike to his face with my clinched fist. It was brutal and delicate, yet it hardly phased him. Gene flinched and gently touched his cheek, but nothing more.

  “Did I deserve that?” he asked me.

  “More than you know. Now come on.”

  I gathered my bag with a few cans of food, my cell, and a change of clothes and started walking along the road. Gene took only his cell and went beside me on the straight stretch in what could only be described as the closest you could get to pure darkness without actually hitting perfect darkness. The light in the distance, we assumed, was that of the Fort Sill Development.

  It took but a few minutes for me to finally, out of the blue, realize just how tired I’d become. So much had and had not happened in the past two days. My temporary sojourn from Gene, getting lost, my grief, my loss of sanity were what happened. What did not happen was much in the way of eating, sleeping, keeping my brain together, and observing possibly dangerous situations before they occurred. The latter would harm us right away.

  I stumbled with each step, as each step felt like it contained a denser atmosphere than the last. Meanwhile, we were progressing toward a cabin with lights on. A large cabin, affixed with glorious ornamentation covering its outer walls, stood directly before us. From the looks of things, more than one person resided inside on this particular night.

  “We gotta stop,” I told Gene.

  “What? Why? Wallace, we’re almost there. You just told me that.”

  “I’m weighed down, Gene. Also, don’t you feel that?”

  He was about to lie to me. I’d been around Gene too long to not pick up on such a thing. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Bullshit you don’t! I feel the Ire coming so there’s no doubt you do!”

  “We’ll go around that cabin, Wallace. I really don’t feel it.” All the while, Gene was inching closer to the cabin.

  “Please, let’s just stop here for a little bit. I’m hurting.” I had not noticed my own feet moving toward the cabin full of people. This new Ire I had, mutated into a new form thanks to my unprecedented bond with Gene, was far more irresistible than the standard Ire. I literally could not fight going toward the party cabin. Even as I walked faster and I smelled people the world was telling me to destroy, I could feel the rest of me trying to resist with total futility.

  Gene lunged at the big wooden front door, the result making it break madly from the frame and hinges. The people inside, two men and two women likely in their fifties, stopped their dancing and immediately looked over at us in mid-motion toward them.

  “Please!” the portly gentleman said with insurmountable fear in his eyes. “The drug! Take the leftover Flegtide we have! Please, take it!” He produced the bottle in Gene’s direction.

  But Gene was not listening, just as I wasn’t. He jumped on the portly man and instantly began to punch his face with his fists and knees, each strike accurate and worse than the last. He quickly bent down and put his mouth on the man’s neck to rip out an enormous portion of it, blood subsequently spewing from the brand new wound like a popped water balloon. He dug in deeper with his teeth, the man still barely hanging onto his life.

  I had since chased down the thinner of the two women after they had begun to run. I could almost hear the voices from Heaven’s loudspeaker ordering me to do away with her or I would not be able to live another day. I knocked her against a wall in the bedroom and immediately starting driving her head into the floor. She gasped and cried and moaned with each blow, each closer to her death. She died probably on the sixth bang of her head on the floor by my hand.

  I looked at her body, still warm yet lifeless. Blood streamed from her nose and ears. Her eyes remained wide open, enough to appear as though they stared back at me. This territory was a hundred times uncharted. She did not fight back. She tried to run from me, to escape death. This was kill number six, with all the previous five kills having my victim also trying to kill me. The versus mentality fueled my Ire each time into decisive victories for me. Without that mentality, as was the case here, I was soaked in regret even before starting my fatal assault on the woman. I had no desire to complete what the world needed me to do, unlike all other times. But my conscious brain would not react properly, opting to kill her and kill her worse than any other I’d killed before.

  The pain came at a rapid pace and it was nearly paralyzing. I cried right there next to the woman’s beaten, dead body. I cried as though I were a toddler watching my parents getting murdered with my puppy as the murder weapon. It lasted about three agonizing minutes.

  I looked around me to check my surroundings. Gene had dispatched all three of the remaining dancers. He ate mainly on the fat man. As for myself, I never once considered feasting on the woman I’d killed. Not a factor, lending more credibility that Gene’s presence beside me with Evans was the culprit, not my own Ire grossly transforming into a hungry cannibal as I’d previously assumed.

  But this brought on a bigger concern. Gene was not going to stop. He wasn’t thinking anymore because he hungered for flesh. These people, they were high in the presence of Flegtide, perhaps the only drug ever recreationally used simply for human contact instead of mind-altering effects. They weren’t Ired. It didn’t matter. Gene saw them as enemies. And I seriously believe his range of Ire initiation was growing, as we were a good distance from the party cabin when I saw his eyes changing.

  I wept more and more. Suddenly, Gene stomped over to me, grabbed me by my shirt collar, and forcefully took me outside. I could see dense pockets of blood slowly falling fr
om his mouth and it sickened me. He reminded me of a father taking his son to a secluded area away from people to get punished.

  “Listen to me,” he said, his voice deep and growling, not his normal voice. “You mope in your own time. Do not ruin the only thing I have left. Cry out here.”

  “Gene?”

  “Out here, Wallace!”

  The rollercoaster continued. I felt fortunate that a permanent change was almost here.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 24

  Sororicide

  The feral creature I toted with me seemed to irk my every second. The bodies he left at the party house could hardly be recognized as human corpses. And this man, without any remorse for killing people who had fought and defeated the Ire in the name of simple social interaction, seemed to lack any sort of human side. It was for this that I led him away from the road. He followed like a lemming.

  I stopped before a pond, Gene stopping with me. The Ire still burned in his eyes. He’d yet to come down from the high.

  “This is not the road,” Gene said. “Get me back to the road.”

  “Do you know why we’re on the road, Gene?”

  “The road has it. The Ire, the road.”

  He was clearly in another universe at the moment, making my next move that much more justified. After a moment of silence, I pushed Gene into the pond, his vast structure making instant waves from edge to edge. His arms flailed and his legs kicked in panic. He was drowning.

  “Wallace!” he struggled. “Help!”

  I was perfectly unaware that Gene could not swim, that water was one of his greatest fears. And after all this time together too. I just needed him to clean himself both physically and metaphysically, not die in the pond. I jumped in and dragged him to the pond shore a short distance away. He lay on his back fighting for air as I looked him on, knowing he was fine but also something of a child again.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “Can’t swim, Gene. You can’t fucking swim.”

  “Slipped my mind.” He still breathed fast and heavy. “Why throw me in the water, Wallace?”

  “You’re dirty. You smell. And you had to get a little wet to make you start thinking straight. What is our mission here, Gene?”

  “What?”

  “What are we doing in Oklahoma?”

  The fact that Gene hesitated to find an answer to my simple question told me the vividly unhappy truth. “Um, my sister.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Her name is...” It was sad. “It’s Pauline, Wallace.”

  I surprised the man by throwing him back in the water, he again struggling. I pulled him right back. I’d assumed his weakness was the water itself.

  “What the fuck?” he roared. “I’m going to die if you keep doing that.”

  Once more, in the water I place my friend. I let him flail his arms wildly and shout at me as water entered his lungs. I watched and did nothing. The image brought on an epiphany. Gene could kill and cannibalize and destroy everything, everything except me. Yes, he struck me with his fists and dragged me out of the party cabin, but he never truly could hurt me. That also pertained to his dependence on me, as displayed by his motions in the water. He could easily remove himself from the situation, as the water was only about four feet deep. He needed me to get him out, just as he needed me to take him to Oklahoma. Without me next to him, he would not have gone whatsoever.

  I pulled him from the water for the last time. He still stank, but it wasn’t as pronounced, both from his body and his attitude. We sat beside the pond for what seemed like two hours in total silence, me taking out a small can of navy beans and eating them cold. I killed again and it took a lot of energy. Beans brought some of that energy back.

  The sun began making its way up over the eastern horizon. I was on no sleep. It didn’t matter, for adrenaline over the past day had kept me going with the fervor of a thousand cannons. I trekked along the dirt-ridden road west toward the closest cabin. Gene reluctantly trekked beside me. That’s when the onset of sudden confusion struck me.

  “Gene, wait.”

  “What now? Do you see a raging river you want to throw me in?”

  “Get your cell out.”

  “Why?”

  “Think, Gene. We have Pauline’s development most likely, but we don’t have her cabin. Call her and ask her.”

  “You heard Pauline the last time I called, Wallace. She’s lost her mind.”

  “Then how do you presume we will find your sister in this mess? Go to each cabin, find out it’s not hers, kill its occupant, and onto the next until we find her?”

  As I anticipated, he had no answer.

  “I’ll call.”

  It seemed burdensome to Gene. Somewhere along the way between Minnesota and Oklahoma, his stringent intent on finding his sister and swaying her from Flegtide dwindled and, as far as I could tell, was on life-support. This was not what I signed on for.

  “Eugene?” came Pauline’s voice. Her face, gaunt and very pale, finally shown on Gene’s cell screen for the first time as well.

  “Pauline, what is your cabin number?” His voice was a ball of wobbly nerves.

  “Cabin 88. Eugene, what is happening? Where are you? I never got any answers back from my calls the last few days.”

  “88, you say?”

  “Yes, cabin 88.” Her voice was more astute, alert, and conscious than it was the last time she spoke with Gene. “Tell me what this is, Eugene.”

  Luck must have been on our side that morning. We walked as Gene and Pauline spoke. The cabin directly before us was Cabin 87. Hers was next.

  “God,” Pauline whispered. “Eugene, please tell me that isn’t you walking down my road.”

  For all the shit I’d swam through and the hell I made for myself these last two weeks, it felt incredibly rewarding to know we had certainly found our goal, our destination. This was Pauline’s cabin. Gene was successful in his trip, all thanks to me and my loss of a normal Ired life.

  “Stop walking,” Pauline adamantly ordered. “Eugene, you can’t come see me. I know you’re on Flegtide right now but—”

  “Why do you think I’m on Flegtide now?”

  “You’re not alone, Eugene. There’s a man beside you, meaning you’re on the drug right now.”

  Gene had to play it through. “What if I am? Can’t I still come to see my baby sister?”

  “No, Eugene. I feel you approaching.”

  Gene’s new dream was dreadfully apparent now. He no longer wished to keep Pauline from taking Flegtide. It was replaced with the idea of him and his sister able to converse free of any drugs, much like he and I were able to do. Our situation was strictly a fluke, but Gene surmised it would carry over to his relationship with her. And when he heard Pauline say the Ire built as we gained ground on her, his heart began to break.

  “Stop!” she growled.

  “It’s temporary, Pauline. It will go away.”

  “I’m not on Flegtide so it won’t work! You’ll kill me, Eugene!”

  “You are on Flegtide,” Gene insisted, fooling himself completely. “I heard your voice the other day. High on the stuff.”

  “A big mistake and I haven’t done it since! You have to stop. You, the guy next to my brother. Please stop him!”

  I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t stop myself either. We were probably about 100 feet from her cabin, watching her terrified face through the window. I could smell her now. I wanted to kill her. I needed to kill her. I don’t know what Gene was feeling at that moment, for nothing had prepared me for anything like this. He may have been sensing the same as me, maybe the feast of her too, but he also may have felt nothing for her, just as he did with me. Nevertheless, Pauline felt us through the Ire, and that was all I needed to know what was happening.

  “Pauline,” I said. “You need to listen to me, okay?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Listen to me.”

&
nbsp; “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Wallace, but listen. We aren’t on Flegtide. I’ve never taken Flegtide. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you run.”

  “Huh?”

  “Run!” It was loud. It was gloriously raucous, violent, and supremely terrifying. My voice had never reached such a powerful volume. I just knew if she did not remove herself from our line of sight that second, we were going to reach her and the whole reason for turning my life upside-down would be gone in a morbid flash.

  I could feel the burn grow as we got closer and Pauline hadn’t moved. We lost sight of her in the window just as the Ire began to loosen in my head. I was barely able to make out the image of the very short lady running out the back of her cabin into the fields behind her. It was nothing short of relieving.

  “No,” Gene said while stopping our movement. “Wallace, she doesn’t want to see me.”

  “You really need to tell me what you feel right now, Gene. The Ire? Super-Ire? Nothing?”

  “She doesn’t want me near her. That’s all I need to know. Let’s go home.”

  Home? You fuck, we probably don’t have a home to return to! Leave now? You sick asshole, this has all been a waste. “I’m very sorry, Gene.”

  The stress, tension, bitterness, violence, it was all gone in this instance. We were simply two men, friends, who had no immediate goal anymore. We threw away most of what was important to us back in Minnesota. Nothing to return to. It was a depressing feeling to be sure, but moreover it was the world’s most oppressive weight off my back. For that, I was able to guide Gene to an old cemetery where we sat down by some tombstones and simply slept. We slept through the hot Oklahoma sun of the day into the night. Slumber had never felt so goddamn great.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 25

  From Here

  Wouldn’t you know it, another storm readied to dump its load all over me and Gene in the cemetery down the hill from the row of development cabins. I welcomed it this insanely humid evening. It would refresh me and clean me and somehow, perhaps illogically, wash me clean of the horrendous things I’d done to reach this place, both the land of Oklahoma and the land of unabashed misery. Bring on the new.