But it turned out to be something entirely different. Dad had friends in L.A., old war buddies, who told him that parts of the city were practically a war zone. They told him about gang violence, and shootings, and about the underbelly of the Hollywood experience. Dad was afraid of seeing my dreams torn open by the craggy reality of the city.
He relented, and I went, and I didn’t join any gangs, and no Hollywood actors offered me baggies of cocaine or tried to sell me into sex slavery. I didn’t see anybody famous, unless you counted Tom Arnold. Our instructor had to explain who Arnold was. None of us had ever seen his work before.
I was quite safe, as it all turned out, and I returned home glowing from the trip. I’d seen behind the curtain, and Hollywood, I found, was wholesome and creative, and it was going to be my future.
Dad would weep for me now, I think.
I don’t have any illusions anymore.
Grant tested me, as I later learned he tested all new recruits. He promised me food and a blanket, and told me that if I did well, then one day I might have a tent of my own, and a woman to share it with me. He would pick a good one, he said. I didn’t know if he was talking about the tent or the woman.
We broke over a town called Waterton like a thin but angry wave. Grant ran alongside me that day, and taught me how to kick open a door just right. It didn’t always work, so he also showed me how to break a window without slicing my arm to ribbons.
“Always carry a coat,” he said, wrapping it around his elbow.
He punched out the window and cleared the loose glass from the frame, then stepped back and gestured sweepingly, like a butler inviting me inside a palace.
The house was dark, as all of them were, and stank of sour milk and bad food and shit. I heard a scrabbling noise, and saw a small dog, nothing but hair and bones and nails, weakly run up the stairs. The kitchen was piled high with dishes, the pantry emptied, torn boxes and plastic strewn everywhere. There wasn’t a shred of food in sight.
Grant came in after me. “They’ll be upstairs, if they’re still here,” he said.
I pointed at a door beneath the staircase. “Not the basement?”
He shook his head. “Basements scare people,” he said. “Nobody willingly sits in a dark basement for any reason at all. Too much they can’t see. Bugs and nightmares are worse than we are.”
And he was right. We didn’t go in the basement. We found a skinny man and woman shivering with fear in a small closet. They had pulled clothes from hangers to cover themselves up.
“Get em out,” Grant said.
They kicked and swatted at me as I pulled the clothes off of them.
“Don’t touch her,” the man said, his voice weak and old-sounding. “Leave her alone, leave her alone.”
“They always say that,” Grant said, bored.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. They weren’t very old, maybe just six or seven years older than I was. Not yet thirty, still so much of their life ahead of them, at least before the wars. The man had watery green eyes, and was probably handsome once. The woman was plain but pretty, even with her knotted, frizzy hair like pulled cotton. In the old days, the days before, they could have been teachers. They might have been churchgoers. They probably owned a respectable, responsible car with four doors, in case they decided to have children.
“They’re already ghosts,” Grant said.
That was how he explained it, when he was feeling generous, or drunk. The clan wasn’t a band of vicious marauders, pillaging and taking for itself whatever it wanted, but a merciful battalion of angels, bringing an ending to people whose lives had continued on long after their souls had withered. He described the starving people we found as husks, as ghosts, as memories of the people they used to be.
“I was a mechanic,” he told me once. “Before. But look at me now. Doing the good Lord’s work, don’t you think?”
My family didn’t go to church, and I didn’t know much about gods, but I knew enough to think that Jesus probably didn’t want people like Grant killing his kids. But I wanted to eat, and I wanted a tent and a blanket on the cold, dumb nights, and I wanted Grant to give me a woman who would do whatever I told her to, and keep me from feeling the sting of every single day, the dread of every day that was lined up behind it, heavy and ready to fall on me, one domino after the next.
He made me hold the man, and he took the woman’s hand himself. She was too weak to get away. He laid her arm across a dresser, and splayed her hand flat. Her fingers reflexively curled inward again, and he leaned on the back of her hand with the knob of his elbow, and she cried out, and I felt the man try to surge forward, but it was easy to hold him back. He was flamingo-thin and hungry and had nothing inside of him, no fuel, no real fire.
“Flat,” Grant said to the woman, and she opened her fingers slowly. She sobbed, and I could see her bright pink skin in the wake of her tears.
“Maybe —“ I started, and Grant turned, and stared at me, hard.
“Maybe what?” he asked. He looked at the woman, then the man, then at me. “Maybe let her be? Maybe let him live?”
I swallowed hard and looked away.
“You know better,” he said. He wasn’t angry, just stern. He pulled a fish knife from a sleeve on his belt, and the woman jerked, and so did the man. Grant pointed the knife at her face and said, “You be still. Consider this your admission into the afterlife. Your ticket to a life with purpose. Doing the Lord’s work for those doing the Lord’s work. Understand?”
“Leave her alone,” the man grunted again.
Grant sighed. “Say a couple of prayers,” he told the man patiently. “She’s going to get through this. But you won’t.”
“Does he have to watch?” I asked.
Grant opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. “Genius,” he said to me. He turned the fish knife over and held it out to me, the blade loosely pinched between his dirty fingers. “She can watch instead.”
I stared at the butt of the knife, and the man struggled in my arms like a dog that doesn’t want a bath.
“Go on,” Grant said.
It was my first kill. I held the knife in my hand, and for a long moment I stared at the woman, her red, pleading eyes, her quivering mouth. A million thoughts ran through my head, and all seemed to lead to one stupid idea: I could kill Grant. I could save these two.
But it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t see how to make it work. And the clan had warm food and blankets.
“It’s never easy the first time,” Grant said, his voice almost warm. “He’s a ghost already. It’s humane. It’s kind.”
I tightened my arm around the man’s neck and lifted the knife. Grant told me where to put the blade, and when I had it right, he told me to cut. The woman screamed herself hoarse, and Grant stomped on her foot, and she slid down the dresser to the floor like a doll. She tried to crawl in my direction, but Grant’s boot was heavy, and he leaned all of his weight onto her foot, and she cried like a child.
He nodded at me, and I closed my eyes and swiped the knife across the man’s throat. The man screamed and I heard the wet sound of him pissing himself.
“Not like that,” Grant said.
I opened my eyes and looked down, then at the dresser. In the mounted mirror there, I could see the man struggling in my arms, his grimy neck exposed. There was a perforated line on his skin, with little beads of blood welling up.
That’s when Grant told me how you had to play a man’s neck like a violin, how to grip the knife handle at a certain angle, how to dig the blade in, slightly upward, to make the first cut easier, and how to draw it hard and fast and deep.
“But point him that way,” he said, finally, and I did, and as the woman’s exhausted cries filled the room, as the man limply struggled in my grasp, I listened to Grant’s instructions, and I opened the man’s throat, and all I saw was red. I felt his hands fall away from my arm immediately, felt them flapping around, felt his fear fall over the room like a black cloak. I co
uld tell when he died, because he fell silent and still, and the blood stopped pumping, and began to just leak out of him.
“Let go,” Grant said.
I did, and the man fell to the floor like a thing, not like a man, and he sagged onto his side and the rest of him bled onto the wood floor. I stared at him, his dirty skin growing pale almost quickly enough for me to see it happening.
I felt the knife slick in my hands, felt the sudden wet heaviness of my own clothes, and realized that I was drenched in a stranger’s blood. The smell was overpowering, and I threw up, and bent over and coughed up everything that was inside of me.
Behind me I heard a heavy thock, and a choked scream, and then a ripping sound as Grant shredded a bed sheet for a tourniquet.
Then he said, “Alright, let’s go, boy,” and I stepped over the spreading black blood and followed him down the stairs. He opened the door and we left like respectable people. The last thing I heard was the click-click of tiny nails on hardwood, then a terrible, small lapping sound from the nightmarish bedroom.
And then I was one of them.
Grant gave me a tent. “Yours for a few days,” he said.
I hammered the pegs into the ground, and while the rest of the clan slept on the damp earth that night, I crawled into the relative darkness of the tent, and all night long I stared up at the fraying plastic sheet above me.
One of them.
A wolf.
In every town we stole things. Most men wanted the women, and fought over them, and some wanted the children, and Grant made a new rule: He who took the woman’s hand could have her, but only for a few days, like a tent, and then she would become common clan property, passed around and made to work. The women were tied together by their good hands and forced to walk behind the trucks, tired and dirty and lifeless, the fight and color gone from them.
After I killed my first man, I stopped wanting my own woman. Every time I looked at one of them, I heard the horror of their screams, saw the men who died to protect them. Every man who failed lived on in their haunted eyes.
Instead, I stole books. I didn’t read much before the wars, unless I had to. I lived for movies. Video games didn’t make you read books. But in the dark days there was no electricity. I dreamed of movies, and they lived on in my memory like old reels, slowly coming apart over the years.
So for me it was books. I read anything I could find, and when I was done, I would put the book on the truck for someone else, and steal another from the next town. It took a long time to realize that nobody else gave a shit about them, and my collection of books grew large.
Grant dumped them off between towns one day.
“Not a damn library,” he said.
The others started calling me Librarian, and my habit made me different, and different was unpleasant. I slept at distance from the others. If they bunked in a house, I slept in the yard. If we spread out in a field under the black sky, I picked the farthest edge of the group, and slept there.
And so the days became a long, slow trudge. Every morning we woke with the sun, and loaded up the trucks, and tied the women back up, and started walking again. Grant wouldn’t tolerate questions about our destination, but we all knew there was none. We walked, and we killed, and we stole, and we ate, and then we slept and walked again.
The life after the war wasn’t really an afterlife. It was a purgatory, and the living were doomed to walk in circles, while the dead gratefully sank into the dark.
Grant sent a dozen of us into the thickets and brambles to scare up some rabbits. None of us expected to find anything. I hadn’t seen a living rabbit in more years than I could count. There were a few dusty birds, their black eyes beady and mystified, and they took flight and plummeted again amid the echo of gunshots.
The men and I kept pushing deeper into the forest, and I angled away from the rest of them. More and more these days I just missed the quiet of that old apartment. I missed it more than I missed the old world, more than I missed my parents or my friends. They were all dead, and there was no bringing them back. And the apartment was probably burned-out now, squatted in by others since I’d abandoned it. Probably blood on the walls, shit on the floors. That’s how most of the houses looked these days.
I couldn’t go back to the apartment, but I could bring a little of that quiet to me. I felt it when I drifted to sleep in the fields, a quarter-mile from the rest of the camp. It enveloped me as we trudged up the broken, weedy blacktop of another forgotten state road, as I fell behind the group, behind even the tied-up, stumbling women.
It came to me in the forest, too, as I made my way into the dim gray hollows. I could hear the other men for a little while, crashing about in the papery dead leaves, but the farther I walked, the more muted their footfalls became. I could still hear the clan outside the forest, some shouts, the sounds of camp being set up for the night.
I walked as the forest grew dark and the shadows short. There were no sunsets left in the world, just a general draining-away of the light. I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley’s comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large.
I rested against a tree and looked around at the quiet forest. The trees had somehow survived the wars, but they were dying now, a bone-white rot consuming them, turning them to rot and pulp. They smelled cold — dull, as if their greenness had been scrubbed away.
I heard the whistle before I felt the burn, and then I felt it good, and looked down, horrified to see the slim line of a quivering arrow clean through my calf. I bit back a shout and fell over, and stared wide-eyed at my leg. The arrow had gone through, but the friction of muscle and tissue had slowed it to a stop. The feather-brush of its end was dove-gray. The sharp, flat head was stained with blood and bits of flesh. My flesh.
I couldn’t hold it all back, and let out a low moan. Some of our men carried bows — had they circled around and shot me? Did they think I was game?
And then I saw her.
She came from the woods like a specter, dressed in a ragged costume of torn strips of cloth, all bound together to create a distinctly inhuman shape. She terrified me. Her face was in shadow, half-blanketed by a hood. She carried a bow before her, a fresh arrow slotted against the drawstring, pointed at me.
“Wait,” I whispered.
I could imagine what I looked like to her. My skin, layered with years upon years of dirt and blood. My clothing, ripped and sagging and old. My beard, peppered with debris and beginning to turn gray at the roots. I was a monstrosity, tall and lanky and strong. She saw the blade at my hip, the broken old gun that had fallen out of its holster. The spinner-thing had fallen out and tumbled away, only two bullets showing.
I felt her change, a little, when she saw the book that had fallen out of my pocket.
Then I passed out.
I woke to the grumble of a generator.
In my past life I had never seen a generator before. Who needed one? We had electric lights, electric magic. My father had just installed a toilet that read your biometrics and knew if you were actually finished shitting before you even reached for the toilet paper. The future had arrived, and it was boring. The promises it had made to us years before — they weren’t enough. When it finally delivered, we wanted bigger, faster, better.
Toilets that could shit for you, maybe.
The generator fascinated me. It chugged loudly in the corner of —
Where was I?
I was on my back. I felt something dense but soft beneath me, and felt at it with my hands. It had a slippery surface, and I recognized it instantly, the memory of it swimming up from the past li
ke a ball bobbing to the surface of some murky lake. All the ships went down when the end came, when the war started, but old memories rose from the depths all the time, as we picked over burned and ruined houses and found dented, rusting old coffee makers, and remembered our mothers brewing a cup for breakfast, or cameras with broken lenses and cracked cases, churning up some forgotten moment: our fathers snapping photos at our first baseball games, cheering loudly from the sidelines — click, wind — click, wind.
But this texture, the slippery, fibrousness of it — this was a sleeping bag. I knew it intimately. My mother had signed me up for Boy Scouts as a child, despite my protestations. I’d spent several nights in the woods in a hastily-constructed tent, asleep inside a sleeve just like this bag.
I blinked and blinked and looked around and realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t outdoors. There were sloping walls around me, curved and rising up to form a sort of dome above my head. I shook my head and leaned up on my elbows and squinted at the wall closest to me. It was made of thousands of sticks, from large ones down to little, tiny ones, all packed together in a hardened mud shell. Leaves and irregular bits of twig jutted out from the hardpack.
The room was not large at all — maybe only a little larger than the tent of my Boy Scout days. The floor was smooth dirt, free of debris, as if it had been swept clean. The generator sat unattended a few feet away, shuddering. A thick black cable rose up, and I followed its path to a burning lightbulb.
A lightbulb. I hadn’t seen one in what felt like a thousand years. It was dim, but it was glowing, and I stared at it until it imprinted its yellow worm on my vision. I blinked and blinked some more, and as my vision settled again, I saw my paperback resting on a short, square table. There was a rickety wooden chair beside it. A leaf marked a place in the pages where no leaf had been before.
Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything Page 2
