by Trevor Zaple
“Schmon Tower,” she noted, “Brock. I wonder if we might find people there”.
Richard stopped beside her and looked out into the distance. The street led away to the left, crossing the ravine by bridge. He tried to judge the distance to the tower rising up on the horizon; it seemed like an awfully far way to travel. He judged that she was probably right, though; if there was going to be anywhere where survivors in the area might gather, it would be the university. For large scale shelter, food, and booze, if nothing else. It would take them at least a day to make it there, though. Probably a little more than that. He looked around with apprehension. There weren’t any buildings that he would be comfortable taking up shelter in; they were all office buildings and shops – open to the world and uncomfortable besides. There were houses along that ravine, though, if he recalled the area correctly, and they might be able to raid them for some more supplies if they took that way.
“All right,” he said. “That might actually be the best plan”.
“Might actually be?” she asked dangerously, but he ignored the tone.
“I think we should,” he began saying, but he would never remember what it was that he was about to suggest. From behind them, they heard the sounds of running shoes hitting the pavement at a rapid pace. They both whirled around at the same time and nearly ran into each other.
A woman in a dark green sundress was running towards them, waving her hands. Her wavy blonde hair seemed dishevelled but it might have just been from the running.
“Hey, wait!” she was yelling repeatedly as she ran. Richard and Samantha looked at each other with blank expressions, and then simultaneously began to walk towards the newcomer.
“Hey,” the woman greeted them as they got closer. She seemed to be a bit out of breath. Her fair skin was covered in a thin patina of sweat, and her dress was stained slightly at the armpits. She was pleasant enough to look at, Richard thought appreciatively. She had a bit of a long face but some really knockout blue eyes.
“Howdy,” he replied, a little awkwardly. Now that they had found someone, he wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Do they exchange names? Survivor stories? Maybe just talk about the weather? He was saved from the awkwardness of trying to figure this out by Samantha.
“Hi,” she said briskly. “I’m Samantha, this is Richard. We were out by the hospital and decided to come down here today, just to see if we could find anyone”.
The woman’s eyes went wide at the mention of the hospital.
“Oh, wow,” she replied, swaying a little. Richard caught a waft from here and realized that she was quite drunk. “You were out by the hospital? That’s fucked up. Ronnie was out there and he says no one can even get near it”.
“My apartment’s on the other side of a building across the street,” Samantha explained carefully. By her expression Richard saw that she had already discovered the woman’s intoxicated state.
“Fuck, lucky deal,” the woman said easily, and then shook her head. “My name’s Callie, there’s a bunch of us up in the Chili Pepper. We saw you walking by and Ronnie said we should go tell you we were up here. You know, so you don’t have to be alone”.
Richard looked at Samantha. He felt nervous about this invitation but she seemed to accept it with equanimity. He decided that he would follow her lead on this, since finding other people was the reason they’d come down in the first place. He decided to try to get a few questions in before they followed this drunk woman up into the top floor of a bar.
“Who’s we?” he asked, trying to keep the firmness out of his voice. Callie looked at him blearily.
“Well, uh, there’s me, Ronnie, Mark, Meghan, uh, Jaden, Melissa, and two girls whose names I don’t even remember, they just kind of showed up a few hours ago. Kind of like you guys”.
Richard nodded. “OK, what’s the plan?”
Callie’s expression was confused. “The plan?”
“Yeah,” Richard prodded impatiently. “The plan. What are you guys doing up there?”
Callie spat out laughter in a dissipated manner. “Doing? We’re getting fuckin’ wasted, man. What else is there to do right now?”. She laughed at this and the sound reminded him of a woodpecker.
“After that?” he pressed. Callie looked at him oddly.
“You sure are insist...ten...insistent,” she stuttered, hiccupping. “Just come get drunk with us. Are you doing anything else right now?”
Samantha shrugged her shoulders.
“Not really,” she replied, and Richard gritted his teeth. There was something wasteful about this situation, he felt. His neck muscles became tense. Callie saw this and gave him a dirty look.
“You need to relax,” she brayed, and motioned to Samantha. “You coming, girl? I’ve got an open bottle of vodka I need help finishing”.
Samantha grinned. “You just sold me,” she joked, and began walking away with her.
“Hey, wait!” Richard exclaimed, and when neither of them paid attention to him he began to run after them, cursing under his breath.
They walked back to the Chili Pepper, a garishly painted two-story bar that was the last drinking establishment on the street. As they approached the front entrance, Richard looked up and saw that there were a number of people at the window on the second floor, looking down on them. He wondered blackly how he had missed them.
So much for walking carefully he castigated himself. We must have been advertising our presence to anyone we walked by. He wondered if anyone else had spied on them as they passed, and decided that they weren’t worth the trouble of flagging down. He followed this up by wondering if that made their current situation less tense, or more. Samantha seemed relaxed, however. She was walking arm-in-arm with Callie and they were chatting in a low voice about something Richard couldn’t quite make out.
They walked into the dark coolness of the ground floor and Richard immediately covered his eyes. He lowered it slowly, realizing how silly he looked, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the lower ambient light level. The ground floor of the bar looked as torn up as any of the other establishments that they had passed. A man hung naked over the bar, his hair dangling down and his arms hanging limply against the expensive-looking wood of the bar. Two other men huddled bonelessly in a corner amongst a jumble of cheap-looking chairs. They were both as naked as the first man, and covered in thin red cuts. A serrated bread knife lay near them, crimson stains soaked along the sharp jagged edges.
“This doesn’t inspire confidence,” Richard noted with distaste, stepping over the outstretched arm of yet another corpse, one that had remained hidden until they passed by it. He found that the smell had returned to his nostrils, probably due to the close quarters and the multitude of bodies. He wrinkled his nose, and felt his stomach grumble uneasily.
“Oh, it’s a lot better upstairs,” Callie replied amiably. “We’ve cleaned it out a bit, and brought all the stuff up there”. She chuckled. “Yeah, sorry. The downstairs is still pretty nasty. We try not to come down here a lot”.
“I guess,” Richard said uncertainly. “What have you guys done about the smell?”
“Room spray,” Callie replied, laughing her drunken bray. “Lots and lots of room spray. And those plugin air fresheners. They still work, for now”.
The climbed up the narrow stairs and heard the quiet shuffle of a few feet across the floor at the top. Richard found himself with his hands curled into fists. There was something off about the situation.
The room at the top had been a pool room; the walls featured shelves to hold drinks while playing, and there were four racks filled with pool cues. The tables themselves were covered in liquor bottles, most of them open and partially empty. One of the three tables was cleared and it was apparent that there was a game in progress, although no one was around the table at that moment. Richard’s first impression as the mounted the top of the stairs was that the people waiting for them upstairs were just as apprehensive as he was. Five women were gathered by the window ner
vously, while two men were leaning against one of the liquor-filled tables, eyeing them silently and aggressively.
The women were a fairly diverse cross-section of the city population, nothing out of the ordinary. They were all dressed in expensive-looking casual wear - sundresses like Callie’s, as well as halter tops and designer jeans. Three of them were in their twenties, one was an older woman whose tanned face was beginning to show the leather qualities of age. The last was a rounder woman whose age Richard couldn’t determine; she was the only one of the group that didn’t seem to be ready to run. He took a better look at the two men and started.
One of them (whom he figured had to be Ronnie) was a tanned, tall man with a broad chest and a strong, sharply-lined jaw. He had stunningly bright blue eyes and Richard could feel that those ice chips were boring directly into him. He would have worried about the off-kilter way he was looking at him except that he recognized the second man. He had changed out of the wrinkled green uniform, but his face was still covered with an even denser covering of stubble and his eyes were somehow even further gone than they had been the last time they had met.
“Hello Mark,” Richard said flatly after a moment. Mark did not move his head or change his expression.
“Hello fuckface,” Mark replied acidly. “How’s tricks?”
NINE
“Oh Mark,” Samantha said sadly. “Can’t we just act civilly?”
“Probably not,” Mark replied with venom. “After all, didn’t fuckface Richard over here fire me yesterday?”
“You were being insubordinate,” Richard said stiffly. Ronnie snorted out laughter.
“Wow, you’re a piece of work,” he said in a nasally frat-boy voice. “What, you think you guys were in the fuckin’ army or something?”
“I was his manager,” Richard said, his fists clenching even more. “He was acting like an asshole yesterday so I fired him”.
This caused Ronnie to laugh even more. His eyes turned to Samantha and he eyed her up and down in a salacious way that Richard didn’t find particularly pleasant. This is going to get really bad he thought grimly.
“What the fuck were you even doing there, man?” Ronnie asked incredulously. “Running a fuckin’ store? It’s the fuckin’ end times out here, man! There ain’t no more stores!” He seemed to find this inordinately funny, and he sprayed laughter everywhere. Mark scowled at him but turned his hateful gaze back to Richard a moment later.
“Are we going to have a problem here?” he asked, his voice calm and lethal. Richard wanted to reach out and drive his curled fist directly into the man’s nose but he kept himself under control. He swallowed hard and stuck his pride into a hiding spot in his mind.
“No, of course not,” he replied smoothly. “Past is past, right Mark?”
Mark smiled, a shark’s insincere smile.
“Sure, Richard ol’ buddy. Past is past”.
This seemed to break the ice in the room. The five women who had been waiting nervously by the window for the exchange to play out relaxed and went back to what they had been doing before Richard and Samantha had come upstairs. The pool game resumed, drinks were refilled, and someone turned music on. The Ramones blasted out of the overhead PA system, jolting Richard a little and setting his teeth on edge. He hated the loud, raucous music, preferring to keep music to being background filler – smooth jazz, light rock, and the like. The others in the room had to shout to be heard over the pile-driving power chords, and Richard found himself missing the strange, eerie stillness that they’d spent the last few hours walking through. He turned to say (or shout, as the case would be) something to Samantha, but she had already been spirited away by Callie, toward an observing position on the pool game and a tall glass of vodka mixed with something orange. He pursed his lips, a little distressed, but decided not to press anything. Maybe the drunk woman was right. Maybe he did need to relax.
He wandered over to the table of liquor and considered his options. He’d always been a rye man, and there was ample rye on display – he spotted the half-full bottle of Canadian Club almost immediately. He passed over the vodka; he’d always considered it only a short step up from rubbing alcohol, in both smell and taste. The gin was passed over as well, although he did enjoy a glass of gin mixed with orange juice from time to time. There was a number of soft plastic bottles of various colas on the table near the rye. He chose one at random and proceeded to mix himself a rye and cola. He kept a steady hand on the rye as he poured; there was no point in losing any sort of control, especially in a situation that still made him tense. He could feel Mark watching him, even with his back turned to the man. Those cold eyes felt like twin shovels digging into his shoulder blades. Why couldn’t the man just accept the situation and move on? Why couldn’t he? He didn’t seem to be able to come up with any sort of acceptable answer to these questions.
Feeling awkward, he wandered over to the pool game and stood near Samantha, who was chatting amiably with Callie. He felt like a third wheel, but managed to sip at his drink until the feeling began to go away. It was replaced by a spreading warmth radiating out from his solar plexus. Four of the women were playing, two per team. The plump woman was the odd one out, but she didn’t seem disturbed by this fact. She had a rather large tumbler of clear liquid and ice, and she was downing large gulps of it at a time. Her warm, inviting face had deep red blushes forming on the cheeks, and Richard thought that she might be well on her way to getting quite drunk.
The woman caught his eye as he was observing her and winked. Richard looked away, startled, but she walked slowly over to where he stood and sidled up beside him.
“Hey,” she breathed, and there was a length to the word that spoke volumes about her inebriated state. “My name’s Annie”. She smiled at him and took another sip of her drink. From the smell of it, it was mostly gin.
“I’m Richard,” he replied politely. He took another sip of his drink to try to quell the nervousness that was still rooting within him.
“Pretty crazy shit that happened, eh?” she continued. Richard snorted, and then grinned.
“This whole thing is pretty crazy, if you ask me,” he replied, feeling more confident. “I mean, just yesterday I was still trying to go to work”.
Annie laughed and it was quite a pretty laugh, pretty and earthy. She flashed her greenish-brown eyes at him.
“I gave up on that a week ago,” she confided, “but I work at Oratel and they wouldn’t have noticed even if there wasn’t a plague going on”.
Richard nodded and laughed at this. Oratel was one of the big call centers in town – the only real growth industry in the city, truth be told. Retail jobs and call centers were the only way to get employment, it seemed. Had been the only way, he corrected himself. Employment, as a concept, seemed to have completely deconstructed itself.
“I’ve heard stuff like that,” he said vaguely. “I had some friends that worked there, they said that all you had to do was call in to this number and they would count you as sick. No having to fake it with a supervisor, no fumbling around for excuses, just beep beep beep and back to bed”.
Annie grinned and swayed unsteadily.
“It was a good racket,” she slurred. She leaned in close to him and put her mouth close to his ear. Her breath tickled at his skin, hot and sensual. “Wanna go fuck?” she asked throatily. Richard blinked at her, surprised.
“Uh, I, uh, you see...” he stammered. She was a good-looking woman, curvy in all the right places, full lips, pretty eyes, and all of a sudden he very much wanted to take her up on the offer. Then he shook his head.
“I can’t,” he answered grudgingly. She looked at him with her head cocked, unable to understand what he was saying. Then she looked beyond him and nodded.
“Oh, right,” she said, stumbling over her words with a thick tongue. “That girl you came in with. She’s a cutie, too. She’s got a nice set of, of,” she burped loudly, and put a hand to her mouth, laughing and embarrassed. “You know”.
Richard grinned weakly and was thankful when she turned her attention away.
“Hey, Callie,” she slurred. “You wanna check these out?” She pulled down the edge of her neckline and exposed a great deal of tanned flesh. Richard stepped away to give them some room.
Callie swung her head around and regarded Annie’s breasts with slowly gathering excitement. Samantha looked over, grinned widely, and drank back some more of her orange drink. She looked at Richard and winked. Richard shook his head, but put a smile on to soften it. He was trying to relax. From across the room he thought that he could still feel Mark’s eyes on him.
He looked over to where the two men were sitting and saw that Mark wasn’t looking at him at all. He was hunched over what looked like a cheap flip phone, hammering away at the small plastic keyboard with his swift thumbs. Ronnie was staring at him, though, his filled-out college-jock’s face sculpted into a mask of antipathy. Richard caught his eyes for a moment and looked away hurriedly. He turned his attention back to the women and worried at the brief exchange in his mind like a tough piece of gristle caught in his teeth. What was the man so upset about? He chalked it up to the lion’s hatred for any male that entered his territory, but how to explain Mark, then? Surely the two of them should have fought it out immediately, if Ronnie was the sort to behave in that fashion. Had they run into each other before? Richard didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean much. In his (former, he realized sadly) life as a retail manager he had met any number of people that he would never have recognized out of the context of the store. He snorted softly. Maybe Ronnie had tried to get a deal, or sneak past an expired coupon at some point, and Richard had turned him down. It made as much sense as any other explanation. He had heard of people holding grudges for far less.
He saw that Annie had divested herself of her shirt and that Callie had her hands all over Annie’s star-spangled push-up bra. His eyes widened as he saw them drunkenly mash their mouths together, and realized that there were definitely tongues moving between them. Samantha had stepped back and was watching them, snickering. The women playing pool carried on with their game, obviously aware of what was going on beside them but too engrossed in drinking and shooting pool to do more than casually observe it.
