Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “Check it out.” He grabbed the same chair Rook had used and righted it just beneath the swamp cooler.

  He waved at the bald cop and stepped onto the chair. “EMTs’ll get here soon enough. Leave him alone and give me a hand.”

  The bald cop rose to look but didn’t leave Adam’s side. Rook’s stomach tightened as she watched the one in socks pull a flashlight from his waistband. He didn’t need that light, she knew. He’d be able to see plain enough.

  She could slip out the front door. The policemen hadn’t seen her yet so she could make a run for the front door and possibly even escape unnoticed. Even if they spotted her she’d have a good head start. The money would be left behind, of course. Fuck the money.

  “Holy mother,” the one in socks was saying as he peered inside the swamp cooler. “I take it back. Make sure you keep that guy alive. He’s goin down in a big way.”

  But the bald one didn’t look like he was doing anything to help Adam. He was just standing there, looking at the gutted swamp cooler. Rook couldn’t see much of Adam because the bed obscured her view. He might still be convulsing or he could be dead.

  Her breath ratcheted in her lungs. She needed to screw up her nerve and just make a break for it.

  The bald one said, “Do you smell smoke?”

  “Man, we really hit the jackpot here.”

  The bald one looked around, sniffing.

  The one in the socks said, “These junkies, they’re always cooking something.”

  “Hey!” the bald one said.

  A wisp of smoke was drifting upward by the bed. And then in half a second the wisp bloomed into a column. Adam’s cigarette. Rook clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “Dumbass junkie caught his bed on fire.” The one in socks hopped off the chair and both of them stamped at the sheets.

  Now was her chance. She slipped from the bathroom but too late, she realized there was an EMT coming in through the front door.

  The EMT glanced at her. His name tag said “Speck.” Rook shrank back into the bathroom and pulled the door to. But Speck kept walking without any indication that he could give a rat’s ass whether she was there. She stared, petrified, through the crack in the door.

  But then he slowed, and looked back over his shoulder. This time, the wrongness of her presence seemed to fully register. He had short curly hair that was affixed to his forehead with a layer of sweat, which ran freely down to a thin blade of a nose. He stared at her with an invasive, stark gaze that seemed to bore through the bathroom walls past her clothes and past her skin until he saw inside her, sizing her up as an absolute freak and a fraud. She clutched her shirt into a ball at her chest.

  The lean, bald policeman looked up from the still-smoldering sheets and stared directly at her, too. “Glad you could finally join us.”

  The blood froze in Rook’s throat. All she could think of was Daryl in a home. Daryl gnawing her fingernails bloody and pulling her hair. Daryl finally subdued through a liquid lobotomy of psychotropics. De-fanged.

  “What did this guy take?” the EMT said, turning back to the smoldering bed without missing stride.

  The bald policeman’s stare followed the EMT. “What, you think we were partying with him when he went down?”

  But it wasn’t until a second EMT passed in front of the bathroom door that Rook snapped out of it, realizing the policeman had never seen her after all.

  The second EMT said, “We hit traffic. If you guys would ticket people for not pulling over then maybe we could improve our time.”

  Rook’s hand went from her chest to her throat and she looked over at that awful, grinning bathroom window that refused to open and let her the fuck out of there. But then, there it was. A sawed-down wooden dowel in the frame. It kept the window from being raised beyond six inches.

  You gotta be kidding me.

  She flung herself at the window and silently removed the dowel. This time, the window slid up—all the way up—without so much as a whisper.

  From the outer bay she heard the crew socks policeman say, “He’s lucky we got here when we did or he’d’ve burned up.”

  Rook slung her knee over the sill and pulled herself through like an octopus into a sea cave. A sandal tumbled off her foot and thunked the slide. She paused, listening, then eased herself onto the slide with her fingers gripping the sill for support. The plastic grabbed her sweaty skin with a squeak.

  The bathroom door flew open. Rook gasped and launched herself down the slide, but Speck the knife-nosed EMT seized her by the elbows. She fought to free herself but he held firm.

  “What did he take?” the EMT said.

  “Let me go!” Rook pleaded in a whisper.

  “Look, I don’t give a flying crap who you are or what you’ve been smoking. I need you to tell me what he took or he’s going to die.”

  Rook stared at him, unable to speak. Her un-sandaled foot touched some kind of rigid fabric, and she realized it was the canvas duffel full of money at the foot of the slide.

  From outside the bathroom, she could hear the other EMT saying, “Speck got a bladder like a girl. Always has to take a pee in the middle of the action.”

  And the crew socks policeman’s voice said, “Remind me to not have a heart attack during you fuckers’ shift.”

  Speck gave her elbows a squeeze.

  She managed to find her voice. “Coke. He did a line of coke.”

  Speck nodded. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it. And some X. Well, coffee, too. He had caffeine. And… cigarettes.”

  Lord, Rook hadn’t thought of it before, but now it seemed a miracle Adam kept alive as long as he did.

  Speck looked disgusted. “What about his skin. Was his face like that before?”

  “Like… what?”

  He stared at her a moment longer. The light caught the sharp line of his nose, but the rest of his face was in shadow.

  He released his grip on her arms. Suddenly she was free.

  Rook’s body slid in a conforming arc over the hump of the slide before her belly skin grabbed the plastic and halted. She could see Speck’s shape turning back to the bathroom door and then disappearing through it.

  Rook lifted herself off the slide, grabbed her shoe, grabbed the canvas bag, and slipped out of the enclosure.

  Chapter 7

  Rain had finally broken the heat.

  Ingrid and Daryl were somewhere inside the house. Rook could feel the wide braided strap of the heavy canvas bag forming its impression on her skin. She fingered it as she stood on her porch. Rook was soaking wet and so was the bag, but she stood idiotically still while cars passed like ocean waves on Louisiana Avenue. The potted fern rocked gently from a hook in the tongue-and-groove overhang. The American flag was wet, the one Daryl had found through Freecycle and had insisted on hanging for the 4th of July. Rook had been meaning to put it away. It’d probably still be there by Halloween.

  Rook looked back toward the street. Adam had to have still been alive when she’d left. Otherwise, why would that EMT have been grilling her about which drugs Adam had taken? That was irrelevant, though. Even if Adam was alive then he could be dead by now.

  Rook stared at the front door, wishing she could just pass through it like a ghost, not saying hello to Ingrid or Daryl, just floating through to her bed and vanishing for about twelve hours.

  She lifted the lid of the galvanized trash can. Loud, loud, loud. She shoved the canvas bag inside and clanked the lid over it. The light came on over the porch.

  A sudden wave of pure, crushing exhaustion. She hadn’t slept. Really, seriously hadn’t actually closed her eyes and fallen asleep, not since the day Daryl had made them ride around on the bus to watch the spinning wheels. How long ago was that?

  “What took you?”

  Ingrid.

  She was standing in the doorway, backlit by the bare bulb from the living room. Her hair was mussed. Couldn’t see her grey-blue eyes or even the expression on her face. Rook wanted to act l
ike she’d just come off her shift. That was the planned lie. Or was it? She couldn’t think straight. Something was wrong. Something was different. Behind Ingrid, the living room seemed…

  Ingrid said, “Are you alright? Rook?”

  Rook wanted to say, “What time is it?” but her lips and tongue and face felt thick as lead.

  Ingrid lunged forward and grabbed her arm. A good thing because apparently Rook was about to topple over.

  “Get inside,” Ingrid said.

  She pulled her through the door.

  Rook stumbled after her. Daryl was in the corner hovered over Fleecey. The light seemed unreasonably bright. Ingrid was staring at her, her fingertips under her chin. But the walls. That’s what it was.

  Rook gaped at them, confused. “Did you hang wallpaper while I was gone?”

  Then she realized she wasn’t looking at wallpaper at all. They were palmetto bugs. Everywhere. From the floor stretching up toward the ceiling. Most were perfectly still except for the occasional twitch of antennae. The room seemed to tilt gently back and forth as though the house were floating on the sea. Even the curtains swayed.

  “What happened?” Rook breathed. “When did it start?”

  Ingrid followed her gaze and then looked back at her, eyes narrow. “What’s the matter with you? Where have you been?”

  She pulled on her elbow until Rook was sitting on the wooden stool.

  Ingrid said, “You didn’t take your pill tonight, did you? You said you did before you left but then I saw them all in the sink, and I could tell…”

  That’s when Rook realized Daryl wasn’t just watching Fleecey. She was breathing for her. Mouth-to-nose.

  “Daryl!” Rook reached out and took her sister’s shoulder.

  Ingrid said quickly. “She won’t stop. I’ve tried. You always let her have her way and now she’s dug in. Can’t break her in one night. I just—”

  “Dar, honey, she’s gone,” Rook said. “Fleecey’s not gonna come back.”

  Daryl raised her head and turned to her sister. No glasses, the scar gleaming white over her face, her braids frayed. The cuts on her arm had re-opened and were weeping. She must have given poor Ingrid a real run for her money.

  I ought to get those cuts cleaned up again, Rook thought.

  Daryl turned back to Fleecey, pressed her lips to her nose, and blew. The cat’s chest rose and fell.

  Ingrid was holding Rook’s hand.

  “Rook, I know,” Ingrid was saying.

  Rook was still staring at her sister, and then her gaze blurred to just beyond her, where the palmetto bugs watched from the walls. Their heads were ringed in gold like coronas. Instinct told her not to mention the walls to Ingrid again.

  Ingrid went on, “I tried to call you. Daryl was in an unstable way when the kitty cat died. I couldn’t make her leave it alone. Almost had to take her in for observation, the fit was so bad, Rook…”

  Rook was only half listening, fascinated by the bugs, by the artificial rise and fall of Fleecey’s chest, by the way Ingrid was trying to make it sound like she actually could have done something.

  “…and so I called the pharmacy, and the manager told me you’d been fired. Hours ago.”

  By the sway of the room. Rock-a-bye.

  Ingrid was squeezing her hand. “It’s going to be OK, Rook. Do you hear me? You and Daryl can come live with me. I love you. I want us to be together. Finish your degree, honey. You can still see other people. Nothing changes except that we’ll be living together.”

  Rook blinked her eyes so very slowly.

  Ingrid said, “You were with a man tonight, weren’t you? You don’t have to hide it from me. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  Rook nodded. “Yeah. I was.”

  She felt Ingrid’s gaze leave her face. They both watched Daryl for a moment as she streamed air into Fleecey’s lifeless body. Daryl sat up and watched Fleecey for a moment, then bent over and breathed for her again.

  Ingrid said, “What is it about the men, Rook? Why do you feel the need to sleep with them?”

  Rook said nothing, felt she could barely speak even if she had an answer for the likes of that. Her body yearned to lie down on this floor next to Daryl and Fleecey and fall right to sleep. Hope those fool bugs would leave her be. Hope that Daryl would get tired and let it go. Even though neither was possible.

  “It’s alright,” Ingrid was saying. “You’re young. You’ll grow out of it.”

  Rook said, “I’m sorry, Ingrid. It ain’t gonna work.”

  Ingrid snapped her gaze back to Rook’s face. Rook forced herself to look up, straight into Ingrid’s eyes. She could oblige her that, at least.

  “What?” Ingrid said.

  “We gotta stop seeing each other,” Rook said. “I’m sorry.”

  It struck Rook that Ingrid was staring at her with the same intensity as that EMT over at Adam’s place. Only Ingrid’s stare got processed differently. She packaged what she saw into something she could manage.

  Ingrid said, “You’re exhausted. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Rook’s eyes fell closed, and she struggled to open them again. “No. I mean we can if you want to. But I ain’t gonna change my mind.”

  Ingrid’s lips were pressed to a thin line, white as her face, pale like her hair. She stared at Rook with a gaze of grey-blue ice. The palmetto bugs seemed to fall still. They were still watching, but none was moving—even their antennae held.

  “You been real good to me on the one hand, but this thing ain’t right…” Rook’s voice trailed off.

  “You’re out of control,” Ingrid said in a contained whisper. “Getting fired. Sleeping around.”

  A muscle was twitching at Ingrid’s upper lip. It seemed more like the motion of an insect than a human.

  Rook couldn’t look at her any longer. She reached out and put her hand on Daryl’s shoulder. “Honey, let me.”

  Daryl turned around and looked at her sister. From somewhere the twin-bell Westclox was ticking. They’d never found it after the Coke machine had gone mad. Daryl scooted back to make room.

  Rook slid off the stool and sank to her knees next to her sister, a hand to Fleecey’s chest. The body was still warm. Not as warm as if it were alive, though, and it held a strange sadness in those few degrees of temperature drop. Rook leaned over and breathed into Fleecey’s tiny nostrils.

  Behind her, Ingrid said, “Look at you! You’re not fit to take care of Daryl!”

  The cat’s nose was dry. Drier than it had ever been in life, probably. Rook could smell the familiar, comforting scent of Fleecey’s fur. Rook breathed one, two, three, four, five, and six for Fleecey. Then she rested.

  Ingrid rose and stormed off to the back room, most likely to get her purse. What a relief if she’d just leave for now. Rook was probably being callous. Thanks for watching my sis, now get out. But what else could she do?

  Daryl was watching Fleecey with unblinking eyes. Rook leaned over and breathed again. One, two, three, four, five, six.

  Daryl slipped her hand in Rook’s. Rook found herself wondering, what if Adam is dead? All that money. They could keep the house. What a horrible thing, to mull over what she could get out of Adam’s death. If Adam were even dead.

  And yet Rook couldn’t help but think, with Adam’s money, how she could afford to truly help Daryl. No way was she going to send her off to one of those facilities the doctors used to tell Mom and Dad about. No matter how much she paid someone, no one could look after Daryl the way Rook could. If Rook would stop being such a fuck-up. And selfishly, Rook knew she’d be lost without Daryl. Daryl was the only good she knew anymore.

  One of the palmetto bugs turned and darted behind the Coke machine.

  One, two, three…

  The cat’s lungs moved with each breath. The air went in and out. Fleecey’s body, made mostly of water and the minerals of the earth, filled with the oxygen left in Rook’s own lungs, held no spark of life. Rook knew this before she’d even begun. This was
nothing but a ceremony for Daryl.

  … four, five, six.

  Now when Rook looked up, she saw that Daryl’s eyes had gone wet. She put her arm around her. Daryl let out a half sob. Rook encircled her with her other arm.

  Rook said, “I’m sorry, baby. So sorry, baby.”

  She could hear Ingrid in the back room, and wondered what she was doing. Didn’t take that long to find her purse. Daryl’s shoulders were shaking.

  Rook heard a sound from Fleecey’s box. She arced her neck over Daryl’s head and looked.

  Fleecey was kicking.

  Daryl turned to look, too. “Fleecey!”

  The two sisters leapt to either side of Fleecey’s cardboard box like she was a Ouija board. Fleecey kept kicking, no actually, she was convulsing. Already foam was forming at her mouth.

  “She’s alive!” Daryl cried. ”You breathed her back to life!”

  “No, I… she just…”

  Rook stared at the cat, knowing that this was impossible. Fleecey had been dead. Full dead. No way could Daryl’s clumsy mouth-to-nose have sustained her this long.

  A spill of yellow-green bile erupted from Fleecey’s mouth.

  Rook thought of the money stashed in the trash can just outside. This time, Fleece was going to a vet.

  “Get online,” Rook said. “Find us an all-night vet.”

  Daryl leapt to her feet, but she didn’t immediately go to the computer. Rook tried to stand but found she couldn’t. Her own body was far too heavy to lift.

  Daryl was staring at Rook. “You saved her. You’re an actual angel.”

  Rook said, “No, baby, you’re the angel.”

  But Daryl was having none of it. “No, you are. Dad used to say. He told me you were beautiful because you took after mom. And he said you were an angel because you took after God.”

  What a plain fool thing to say. Rook stared, her throat cramping. Dad wasn’t as good as Daryl remembered, and Mom wasn’t as beautiful. They were just people. People who had marched off to heaven and left their children behind to fend for themselves. If Rook could have found her voice she would have told her sister that. How ridiculous that Daryl believed Rook to be an angel. An instrument of God. Irresponsible, whoring, thieving Rook.