“I have so many things beating me up inside right now, Wallace. And do you know what hurts the worst?”
“What’s that?”
“Jack. The thought of Jack. He would be my drug to change everything. I wouldn’t care about anything if I had him. That includes you. I’m sorry.”
“No, no. I understand. Jack was your world.”
“He was more than my world, Wallace. Jack was the universe the entire galaxy needed to swirl around. You think I’ve put him up on an unreasonable pedestal and that my memory of him is stronger than the reality of him, but you’re wrong. If anything, I don’t give Jack enough credit. Why did he have to get taken from me, Wallace? Why?”
It was the same conversation. I could not avoid it. Jack Jack Jack. Nevertheless, I would never know what Gene was going through, so I could not complain. His love of Jack, or at least Jack’s memory, did not harm anybody else, including me.
“Gene,” I said, pulling my chair up next to him and wrapping my arm around him. “Jack is dead. He’s not alive. He is dead. Very dead.” So much for a future in social work. “You keep his image around, no matter how true or false, and it’s not fair.”
Gene wobbled back and forth in thought. “I know it’s not fair to me, Wallace. I can’t help it.”
“No, it’s not fair to me.” I removed my arm from his shoulder.
“Wallace?”
“I’m goddamn sick of hearing about Jack every conversation we have. Sure, he was the love of your life and he was taken from you so quickly. However, you are still alive. You still breathe. Jack hasn’t had a single breath in twenty years. I say this not to make you upset, but to give me a break from hearing his name muttered each time we fucking talk. Do you understand?”
In all honesty, I hated talking to my friend in such a manner. But I assumed I needed to play tough in order to get the point across that Gene required living, not to just be alive. Perhaps social work, or maybe psychiatry, was in my non-existent future.
“I understand that you’re being an asshole,” Gene said with a small chuckle.
“If you need me to be your asshole for a while, Gene, then I’ll gladly be that. I can whore smack you into coherence if need be.”
“It makes me happy that we can laugh again. Seriously, Wallace, we’re not the same friends we used to be. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
The bliss of brief mutual admiration. We chuckled because we were both certain it would not last. Our history dictated it. That, in itself, was sad.
“I can’t believe they’re hunting me,” Gene said.
~~~~
Chapter 38
The Other One
Over the next week Gene would make his way to my house every day except for the lone Thursday when he begged me to come to him. He used his recent proven hunted status as a pretense to see me, but undoubtedly he just wanted me to stay his friend. He sensed there was another person, a friend to ‘take’ his place. Had he not tried, I’m sure he would have been right.
I received a call from J. He had apparently stuck around for a while. For whatever reason I didn’t know, but he was still in our development. I agreed to meet him again at the coffee stand, for it was neutral and I truly did not feel like it was cheating on Gene if I met him at neither of our cabins, even if his was temporary.
“How have you been?” J asked me, sipping a cup of hot black coffee.
“Just the same as before,” I answered.
“Seems you’ve been keeping your distance from me, Wallace. Why is that?”
“I’ve been burned by new people.”
“A lot?”
“Twice. But once is enough.”
“Perhaps I need to explain my universe a little better.”
“What difference would that make?”
“Wallace, look around you. People are conversing and it is not the result of Flegtide. The Ire is all but dead. Society is returning. Civility is important once again. The truths we tell each other now mean something again. So do the lies. There should be no lies. I need to tell you my name.”
This was just unnecessary. J was trying too hard to be my friend.
“J, I’m fine the way things are now.”
“Well I’m not, so shut the hell up and listen. My name isn’t J. It’s Wolfgang. Wolfgang Hubert Babblerook. J is just something from my past. The past is just that, the past. I needed to move forward. I only realized this recently.”
“So you want me to call you Wolfgang?”
“No. J is fine. Or Wolfgang, whatever you like. Point is, I don’t want to hide from myself.”
“Well, J, it seems to me that you don’t like your Wolfgang title and were running from it. I’m Wallace. Who has that for a name? I mean come on. Wallace?”
“It’s a name of nobility. William Wallace. Scottish champion and a real good one. You should feel honored to own that name.”
“J, being called Wally as a kid did not make me feel like the man I wanted to be. It made me feel like a fucking plush doll. Wally, Wally, couldn’t catch the bally. But Wolfgang? Now that is a name with some testicles behind it, my friend. You probably have to shave your name it’s so manly.”
That brought on a good laugh. Not my intention, really. I was being truthful. And this was what J was mentioning. Since semi-marshal law was going the way of dinosaurs, we were finding the sudden requirement to endure our lives without covert veils. No more falsities.
All said, I wasn’t ready. I’d existed as a bundle of secrets and unspoken nothings for twenty years. It grew on me.
“So J,” I said, “are you willing to give up all you’ve kept inside?”
“I’ve no secrets. I have a history. I’ve lived, I’ve wronged, I’ve given, I’ve taken. And love. Damn. Why did I mention it?”
“How do you mean?” I asked as I saw J’s eyes begin to water.
“Nothing. My past. Glorious, genuine past. But the past. J was then too. This all makes sense, Wallace. Believe me. It’s all part of the same system from where I came and has brought me here.”
“What exactly are you still doing here, J? Weren’t you here for some Yves person for only a few days?”
“I spoke to Yves. He’s not the same person. I tried investigating what his problem was and I got nowhere other than that whatever haunted him had changed him too much. He’s a fine fellow, of course, but suspect to being duped by the pretend ills we’ve placed on ourselves since the Ire went away.”
Speak English or say nothing at all, you shit. “Could you please elaborate, J?”
“Yves thinks everybody is out to attack him. He doesn’t have that latent extreme version of the Ire like I’ve heard in the news, but he’s still too paranoid.”
This sounded far too familiar.
“Yves has lost himself in the process of fearing everybody. I’m sticking around to talk to him since we can now do that in person. There is a life waiting for me back in the Upper Peninsula. Good life. By the way, did you know the state of Michigan is trying to become an actual state again with a government and borders and everything?”
“I didn’t know that, but it feels about right.” I just didn’t care a damn thing about that.
“And Minnesota is trying too. Bern thinks we’ll have functioning states within the next five years.”
J could see my fervent lack of interest. After eating people, perspectives change drastically.
“It’s not a big deal to you, Wallace, but it’s immensely important to me.”
“So will you see Yves again soon?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s elusive. It doesn’t matter. I’m from this area originally, as you know. You were one of the first I contacted when we got in the huts. Applied and transferred to a Michigan development.”
“Why is that?” So deep in the rabbit hole already, but I had nothing left to lose.
“I was haunted.” The manner in which he stated that showed me he had thought of this many times, as though it had been pressed so deeply in his
psyche that it was almost no longer an issue. “Things weren’t here anymore, things I wished were. But again, I was too buried in the past with no regard to my future. That’s different now. Wolfgang Babblerook hence forth looks forward.”
“You sound like an old public service announcement. Wolfgang changes lives.”
I laughed. However, it didn’t carry over to J. He was breaking himself or something, for in speaking his last few sentences it seemed to take away something from within him. It was apparent talking about his past made him think of it, thus hurting him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You!” the coffee stand lady shouted at me as she was suddenly hunched over with a dreadful scowl planted on her face. “What the hell are you doing back here?”
“Easy, Lela. There is no Ire, just like last time.”
“I will destroy your ugly white ass if you don’t leave my fucking coffee stand area this very minute! Do you understand?”
“Fine.” I stood and turned to her. “There is no future for you, Lela, if you think you’re going to be bringing back the monetary system.”
“I’ll think what I want, bastard. Now you need to take your boyfriend there and head away from my stand before I let loose the hounds of hell on you.”
Wow, so angry. It made J and I laugh. Much of me thinks she was doing it to get a rouse out of us, like she wanted us to have a story to tell. Otherwise, she would have likely pulled through with her veiled threats.
“I must go,” J said. “I promised a woman I knew from long ago I would go to her cabin and catch up.”
“Knew her as in you dated her before the Ire or something?”
“No, no! She was one of my cell-only acquaintances at the beginning of cabin life. We chatted each other through some hard stuff. Megan was her name. We promised if ever the Ire went away, we would face each other in the flesh. I always keep my promises, hence being here to help Yves too.”
“Well nice talking with you again, J. I mean Wolfgang.”
The pleasantries of our second meeting were over, and quite pleasant. Again, it felt like cheating on Gene. And for some unknown reason I kept the entire presence of Gene out of our conversation. I think I was under the impression that if J knew I had a friend as messed up as Gene, he would not want to associate himself with me anymore. It was illogical indeed, but my illogic seemed to always supersede pragmatism in my case. Perhaps J knowing of Gene would make him see the my own borderline insanity. I wanted him to be my friend. Goddamn it, I was wanting another friend.
~~~~
Chapter 39
Upon the Shadows of These Forests
Looking at myself in the mirror, I was observing what was becoming of me. My life was rapidly deteriorating into bitterness, ugliness, and cynicism. I was always alive and aware, but now the thing in the mirror was about to be a soured lame duck. I could not have that. I would not have that. Changes were afoot for me; otherwise I would live as something I hated.
The shift toward pardoning myself, as I called it, began with one person. It would not be Gene, but also it would not be J. Absolving my wrongs against them—although I was being incredibly gracious in Gene’s case by not demanding full absolution from him first—would prove to be Herculean in difficulty and stress. Furthermore, I was wisely unsure of what I needed to apologize for to J, as the only wrong I could see I’d done to him was not telling him about my other friend.
Instead, I needed to start small. I needed to start on my sudden pseudo-religious escapade where I’d been the previous day. What was required of me at this moment was bagging up a big, fat apology, lugging it all the way to the center of the development, and producing it for that horrid coffee vixen Lela to play with. Why her? I seemed to bother her for some reason. And frankly, I knew nobody else anymore. She was one of three people in need of my apologies, no matter how unreasonable I was being.
I headed down to the coffee stand. I expected the place to be busy, for the day shone brilliantly with unusually warm sunshine for November. I got none of that. The place was dead. The entire development, in fact, appeared barren, with the typical groups of people chatting I’d seen in recent weeks all gone.
When I reached the coffee stand, Lela was busy doing something in her little structure.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Lela? Remember me?”
She popped up from behind the counter, her eyes daunted and sweat dripping from her brow. “You’re that guy. The one who kept ruining my business.” Her eyes kept darting around me, not precisely into mine.
“Yes, and that’s why I’m here. Lela, I’m sorry for—”
“No need, no need, son. It’s all water. Consider it done.”
“Well, I was hoping to get an apology to—”
“It’s over, guy! Now please, I have to get my shit together and leave. It’s not safe here.”
“What? Why? Oh no. Is the Ire back?”
“Your name.”
“Huh?”
“Your name, son!”
“Wallace!”
“Okay, Wallace. You are apparently woefully out of the loop for some reason. No, it is not the Ire. The Ire may be welcomed over this.”
“Then what is it, Lela?”
“You really haven’t gotten the alerts on your cell? For three days, son. Three goddamn days!”
The last time I touched my cell was the previous morning when J asked to get coffee. Then I remembered removing the emergency alert system because we were getting so many and all were not important, such as tips on in-person chats, possible plans for the CA, and governments being rebuilt. Boring.
“What’s the emergency?” I asked.
Lela repeatedly looked behind me as she kept on packing things in a box. “Fucking sniper, Wallace. We have a man, or men, out in the tree lines shooting at us. Three people from this colony have been killed in the last three days. One was right over that by the common stores. Poor little Dougie Halstead. He was just going for some toothpaste. Shot him down.”
“It makes no sense, Lela. Why would somebody want to kill us now when the Ire is pretty much kaput?”
“You just said your own answer, young Wallace. The Ire was felt by everybody who walks around today. For some people the release of killing felt good. They gladly did it.”
This was sounding mournfully familiar.
“There are those who have the residual mega-Ire thing. That’s not this guy. This guy kills because he misses the feeling the Ire gave him. He’s in longing of the release of death by his own hands, and so this is his way. Whereas during the Ire this sort of thing would be very mildly investigated and quickly dropped, now the CA takes such things very serious. The word ‘murder’ has returned to our vocabulary. He’s murdering people, Wallace. And he’s whacking his dick to it. So I’m packing up my stand and heading back to my cabin. Fortified walls, areas away from my windows. We had our differences in our brief time, Wallace, but I don’t want to see you dead. You’ve obviously fought this hard to remain standing. A fellow opting survivor. I would hate for that to happen to you. You should find sanctuary in your cabin too.”
I had no allusions of sanctuary at the moment. I had to reach somebody immediately. I left Lela and her sudden shift toward kindness for the cabins, one in particular.
Outside of Gene’s cabin I stood, waiting on my feet to drag me forward. I was stuck with no good reason. Move, damn it! It would not happen. I could see him moving inside from my position on the road before his cabin. He was busy with something. I would have called him on my cell if it were not being charged back at my cabin. I had to know. I had to know right away.
“Open up please, Gene,” I said while knocking on his front door after finally being able to walk toward his cabin.
He opened, his big body naked less the puny boxer shorts that exposed his balls from the pee gap. He was very sweaty and out of breath. “No ring first, Wallace?”
“Let me ask you something. Are you aware of what is happening in this development
at the moment?”
“The sniper? I am.”
“I see.”
Gene walked out onto the front porch and slammed the door behind him. He made his nose touch mine in a very intimidating manner. “Don’t say another word, Auker. I know what fucked up rags of thoughts are floating through your mind right now. No, I am not the sniper. No, I do not sympathize with him. And no, I do not wish I had the idea. Contrary to your beliefs, I do not harbor a grudge for the human race. I like people. My cannibalism aside, I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Very strong words that seemed to negate themselves on the spot. “Can you blame me, Gene?”
“Well—”
Gene’s continuing statement was cut short by the greatly recognizable sound of a gun shot very close in proximity. He grabbed my by the shoulders and pushed me inside his cabin. He then led me to the area behind his couch beside the wall to his bedroom and forced me on the ground.
“You may have heard a gunshot, Wallace, but what I heard was proof.”
“Huh?”
“Proof that it’s not me. See? I’m frightened.”
His hands shook. Truly, he had fear in him. However, his actions—the ease of taking me inside, shielding me from the possible bullet, his nonchalant demeanor of the whole experience—told me Gene was actually enjoying his fear. He felt comfortable there. I let him think I believed he was truly afraid.
“That’s the second one I’ve heard today,” Gene whispered. “First was early this afternoon. Farther away than this one and possibly from the east that time. Daylight then, so I looked but saw nothing.”
As Gene rambled on in his excitedly quiet way, I began to notice something different about his cabin. Namely, the recliner had been pushed to the door beside his pantry in the kitchen as if to keep it shut. Something began to form on the floor under the chair. It was dark and thick. No delineation was necessary. It was blood. Gene had just made a kill.
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