by Adam Watts
It was Stan who eventually levered me from my coddling sarcophagus. The boy always had a certain way of wielding his optimism like a crowbar, ready to jimmy open anything old and stuck and stubborn. The day has barely begun and he’s already going about his work with all the childish energy of a festive elf. This is mostly on account of us having drunkenly agreed that it might be a good idea to blow some stuff up.
‘If this doesn’t get her attention, nothing will,’ Stan says, carefully feeding a pillow-slip into the petrol tank of some rusted hatch-back.
‘Or it’ll freak her out and she’ll run for the hills. Plus, don’t you think this is a touch wasteful? We could be syphoning this off and taking it back to the village. And what if it attracts the wrong kind of people? What if there’s some crazies hiding out here somewhere?’
Stan stops what he’s doing and squints up at me. ‘Stop getting distracted. Focus, Pres. We’re here to find Eve. We can load ourselves up with supplies another time, and if we end up getting hauled off to the Thunderdome by a bunch of post-apocalyptic fuck-wits, then so be it.’ He sets about his task once more. ‘Tina Turner can go fuck herself.’
‘I’m just thinking this might not be a good idea. It might draw the wrong kind of attention.’
‘When are you ever going to get the chance to blow up a car without consequence? This, my feeble friend, is an opportunity that has to be taken roughly by the nut-sack and savoured. So will you please just go with it? Or at least shut up and let me enjoy it.’
‘Fine, but if this goes tits up…’
‘Nobody’s tits are going up. Now… get ready to retreat to a safe distance,’ he says, striking a match and setting light to the pillow case.
I run, but it occurs to me that I have no idea how far I should retreat. I don’t want to get hit by a flying chunk of car, but nor do I want to run so far that I miss it completely.
I stop and turn back to the car just as Stan runs past me. ‘Further back than that, you div!’ he yells, before running another ten metres or so and diving behind some bins. I sprint after him and take refuge at his side.
We peer cautiously over the top line of our ‘bunker’, anxiously awaiting the thrill of the fireworks. But nothing happens.
‘When does it blow up?’ I ask.
‘Patience, Pres.’
‘But shouldn’t it have blown up by now? Are you sure you did it right?’
‘I put fire in the fucking petrol tank! What more was I supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know! It may come as a surprise to you but I’ve never blown a car up before. We don’t know what safety features they have.’
Stan looks like he wants to spit on me. ‘Safety features?’
‘Yeah… safety features. Things to stop silly twats like us blowing shit up in the street. Good thing too!’
Then the atmosphere momentarily contracts, before it’s torn in two by the almighty boom that emanates from the car. The windows explode out, fire and smoke billow into sky as flaming car parts rain down on the street around it. A scorched wing-mirror lands a few feet behind Stan. Both of us are breathing hard, unable to do anything but grin like a couple of hare-brained hard-ons and watch the wreckage burn.
Stan grabs me by the shoulder and squeezes hard. ‘Let’s do another!’ he screams, leaping up and running towards the closest vehicle he can find. ‘Blowing cars up is awesome!’ Before I can stop him he’s stuffing another pillow case into the petrol tank of a white van over near a kebab shop.
‘Stan!’ I yell, jogging over, my legs still a little shaky from the adrenaline of the explosion. But it’s too late; the match is struck, the fire is set and he’s running back towards me.
‘Leg it!’ he yells. But this time the van goes up before either of us make it back to the bins. The blast forces us both to the ground. We scramble up, clutching our heads so that we might shield ourselves from the falling debris. We lunge for the bins; our flimsy refuge from certain death.
‘What was that?’ I yell over the ringing in my ears.
Stan peers around the bins, checks his handiwork like some irksome schoolboy with scuffed knees. ‘The kebab shop’s on fire!’
‘So fucking what! You could have killed us!’
‘Don’t be such a drama queen. If that hasn’t flushed Eve out of her hole, nothing will.’ And he strolls off, casual as you like. ‘Let’s get busy then,’ he calls back.
By lunch time we’ve blown up three cars, a van, a kebab shop, a lorry and a mobility scooter. A fair morning’s work by anyone’s estimation. I feel like I’ve seen enough explosions to see me through at least a decade. Stan, however, is keen to send a few more vehicles into the sky, but the promise of lunch lures him away.
‘How easy do you think it would be to bring down a block of flats?’ he asks.
It’s hard to know how serious he is. ‘Lunch first, then lunacy,’ I tell him.
A POOR USE OF GOOD IRONY.
Stan and I sit in the square eating yet more processed carbs and sugared items. We figured that since we were drawn here, the same might apply to Eve. That’s if Stan’s campaign of shock and awe hasn’t forced her to seek refuge in some place we’d never find her.
Despite half the day being gone, Stan still seems confident that we’ll find her, or that she’ll find us. Women seeking absolution are drawn to explosions. Or at least that seems to be Stan’s understanding of the matter.
‘Hey. Look over there,’ Stan says through a mouthful of Pringles. I squint at where he’s pointing. ‘Voting booth!’ he says, before swallowing. ‘Not many of those left now.’
The voting booths were a concession to the folks who struggled with the idea of the PCP’s Digital Democracy. Generations had grown up with the idea that entering a booth and putting their mark on a slip of paper was the only way of participating in the civil process. The digital voting booths gave those people the comfort of the familiar whilst simultaneously ushering them in to the brave new era of Online Political Enfranchisement. Assimilation… I think that’s what they call it. I remember somebody saying something about Pagans and Christmas trees. It all seems so long ago. I never used a booth. Nor did I vote from my phone. I was happily disenfranchised.
‘Let’s go check it out,’ Stan says, grabbing up his lunch and wandering over.
I follow Stan across the square, once again noting the spray-painted letters spelling out Paradise across the floor. A poor use of good irony.
Stan ducks into the booth. ‘It’s not working,’ he says from inside. ‘Still stinks of piss, though.’
‘Figures. Don’t think they were used for much else once the PCP took back control. Surprised they left any installed.’
Stan pokes his head out. ‘Probably left it as a reminder of what happens when you let the plebs rule the palace.’
‘Probably,’ I say. ‘Seems weird that people actually went in for that whole shtick in the first place.’
‘Without exception, people love the smell of their own bull-shit. The PCP knew what they were doing, though. It’s no coincidence. PCP, MIDS… zombie plague. It’s all connected. Tearing the old world down to start afresh.’ Stan’s head disappears into the booth again.
‘How do you figure? Everything got torn down but nothing else got put up in its place.’
‘Not yet, Pres.’
‘So that’s the next step is it?’
‘You mark my words,’ he says. I hear him unzip his fly, and then starts the unmistakable sound of a thick stream of piss hitting the defunct apparatus of absolute democracy.
I step back to avoid the stream that leaks from under the booth door.
‘Real nice, Stan. You gonna take a dump on the console while you’re in there too?’
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘All these refined carbs have bunged me up something rotten.’
‘Well once you’re done can we head out and have a look for Eve? Maybe we could see if one of the cars will start. Cover a bit more ground.’
Stan reappears, doing his
fly up. ‘Batteries’ll be dead. Two winters will have done a royal fuck-job on them.’
‘Can we at least try?’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’
The Receding Tide.
Two proud men saving fair maiden from certain doom (or at least loneliness and hunger), kings of the desolate wasteland beyond the forest, surveying all they have conquered. Masterful. Heroic. Worthy of the legends that will follow them home. They will inspire the hopeless to dream again, to seek out opportunity and build a new world so that greatness might be restored to this green and pleasant land.
However, if their legend is to gain traction in this new society, and if they are to inspire future generations and be revered as the champions they are, then maybe the bit where they tool around in suburbia atop stolen push-bikes should be omitted. Or heavily edited. Particularly the bit where Stan fits a clown horn to his handle bars and endlessly honks the damn thing for no good reason. It’s amusing, I suppose, but it just doesn’t fit the lore.
The idea that Eve will see us like this; trading wheelies, jumping off curbs and kicking each other’s wheels like a couple of pre-pubescent dweebs almost makes me want to stop. It’s exactly what she’d expect of us, and just this once I don’t want to live down to her expectations. I want to be the hero, and I’m pretty sure real heroes don’t scuff their shins on their pedals whilst bunny-hopping a pile of bin lids.
It would be fair to say that Stan and I have gone a little off-mission. And whilst Stan is – as always – happy to be lost in the moment, I’m left feeling guilty. I imagine Eve somewhere close by, the hand of some marauder clamped across her mouth, the other holding a knife to her throat, watching us through a cracked and muddied windowpane as we ride no-handed and perform ‘endos’.
‘Pres! Watch this,’ Stan yells from up the street. He races down towards me then jumps off the bike, sending it free-wheeling into a parked car.
‘You ever think maybe Harry was right about us?’ I say.
‘In what way?’ Stan looks genuinely confused.
‘Don’t you wonder what it’d take for us to act like real men? I mean, look at us; we’re in the decaying ruins of a once bustling town, apparently searching out a friend who may be neck-deep in some seriously bad shit, plus… we’re facing the prospect of a second night in the pitch black and cold, and here we are twatting about on a couple of old bikes like we’ve got nothing better to do.’
‘Hate to break it to ya, Pres, but this is what real men do.’
‘I’m just a little surprised at how quickly we’ve become this complacent.’
‘Shit happens, my friend. Anyway, weren’t you supposed to be making a concerted effort to live in the moment?’
‘There’s a difference between living in the moment and being stuck in it.’
‘Hey!’ Stan says, looking to be on the edge of brattishly stamping his feet. ‘I told you that! Don’t fire my own bull-shit back at me. Especially when it’s not true.’
‘I’m just saying that maybe we are guilty of pratting about when we should be doing something constructive. Maybe living in the moment is just another bad habit holding us back. Maybe you’re so busy living in the moment, that you don’t see the consequences of your actions.’
‘Is this about Eve again? Look man, I’ve said I’m sorry. Do we really have to go over it and over it and over it like this?’ he says, looking deliberately drained.
‘I don’t want another apology. I just think that we’ve come here to do a job and we ought to get it done.’
Stan lets out a long sigh, then sets about collecting his bike from the floor in front of the parked car. ‘Which way then?’ he says, straightening his handle bars.
It feels like Stan and I have ridden every street twice. After a while they all start looking the same. Cookie-cutter dwellings in differing states of decay. Just like the ones we saw when we first arrived. Some seem to have been left for nature to slowly devour, whilst others have been completely trashed; ruined by a force not of this world’s reckoning.
When I was younger, town always felt so big; and I suppose it is compared to the village. But after I took my first trip to London, ‘town’ suddenly seemed so tiny and insignificant, like you could wipe it off the map and the world wouldn’t really care. But never-the-less, I always quite liked it here, and it never seemed insignificant to me. I liked that it was small.
But now it’s only the two of us – looking for just one person without the faintest idea where she might be – town seems to have once again taken on the sprawling dimensions of my early childhood. It’s like a vast labyrinth where the streets shift and change when our backs are turned. I’ve been half expecting David Bowie to turn up at any moment in some obscenely tight jodhpurs.
Our voices are hoarse from yelling, our legs ache from peddling, and my mind (and probably Stan’s too) is exhausted from trying to remember which streets we’ve covered. Time has slipped away this afternoon, but nothing has been achieved. It’s fair to say I had my initial doubts about whether we’d find her, but I could push them back, I could patch up the holes in my optimism. But now the decay is pushing through, seeping into the walls, rotting out the window frames, exposing me to the cold reality of our withering prospects.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ Stan says, pulling his bike to a halt. He looks like he has neither the will nor the energy to pull another wheelie or bunny-hop. ‘Plus, I think we’ve been down this street. I remember that burned out car.’
‘There’s been a lot of burned out cars,’ I say, feeling frustrated by the seemingly infinite destitution laid out in front of us. It’s like all this place has to show us is its ugly side, and all I want is for Eve to emerge from some dark doorway, having heard our call. I think about how nice it’d be to have a fire in the town square; there’d be talking and laughing and drinking, like old times, and maybe we could start to forget what happened. I don’t even know if I care anymore. All I want is to know she’s safe, and then we can get ourselves far away from this town.
‘We’re going to need to spend another night,’ Stan says. ‘Unless you want to go through the woods in the dark.’
‘As much as I hate to admit it, I think another fretful night in the bed shop is just about preferable to a midnight stroll in the woods. My legs have had enough.’
‘Mine too. It’s been a hell of a day, though.’
‘How can you be so bloody chipper? We’ve achieved nothing.’
‘Why so grumpy? We blew some shit up and scored some free bikes. I always wanted a Marin.’
‘But the plan was to find Eve.’
‘Well yeah, but look at it this way: we’ve scraped through the day unharmed, and even you can’t deny that we’ve had some fun out here. Therefore… if Eve’s out here too, then it’s pretty bloody likely that she’ll also be fine. It’s like I told you, this place is dead.’
‘I’ll feel better when we’ve found her,’ I say, thinking that dead feels like a horribly apt word.
‘We’ll try again tomorrow morning, then head back to the village if we have no luck.’
‘Yeah…’ I say, resigned to the fact that there’s not much else to be done.
‘Come on,’ Stan says. But just as he’s about to set off, he glances past my shoulder, performs a little double-take. He squints at something in the distance.
‘What?’ I say, turning to survey the road behind me.
‘There was something there,’ he says, still squinting.
My guts plummet to my knees. ‘What kind of something?’
‘I don’t know, but I could swear something moved up the road there.’
‘A person?’ I say, turning my bike for a proper look.
‘It was just a quick flash of something out the corner of my eye.’
‘Shall we check?’ I say, somewhat regretting the words as they leave my lips. Stan recoils a little, his eyes become unfocused and wide. ‘What if it was Eve?’ I say. ‘Stan, we need to check.
’
‘It was just my mind playing tricks. It’s getting dark.’
‘But what if it was Eve?’
‘If it was Eve then she’d have come over. Can we go please?’
‘Stan. We should check.’
‘Tired eyes, that’s all.’
‘Well, even if you’re too spooked, I’m going for a look,’ I say, even though I’ve got a severe case of the Bambi-legs. ‘You coming?’
‘I’ll keep look out,’ Stan says, folding his arms low across his stomach.
‘Fine. But promise you’ll yell if you see anything. Don’t just scarper.’
‘There’s not going to be anything.’
I ride slowly up the road, telling myself that he’s probably right, that it probably was his eyes playing tricks. We’re both tired… and tired eyes see things that aren’t there.
I scan every house and front yard on both sides of the road but nothing catches my eye. Empty homes with over-grown yards, pitted roads and forests of weeds rising from banks of wind-blown grime. Nothing moves, not even the breeze.
I get a couple of hundred yards up the road and stop. The road stretches on for another fifty yards or so before taking a gradual bend to the right. To my left there’s a cul-de-sac.
I check behind me for Stan. He’s still where I left him, arms folded, propping up his bike. ‘Nothing here!’ I yell. Stan’s arms stay folded. I decide to have a quick ride around the cul-de-sac before heading back to him.
There’s eight houses in total, a sheltered little nook that’s holding its own against nature. I find myself wondering whether this is where Eve lived. If she found her way back here there’d still be something left for her, still a house full of memories, untouched by fire or looters. But then something odd catches my attention; something that doesn’t quite fit. Between the two houses tucked in the corner, something has flattened the towering weeds; like something heavy has churned the earth and rollered them down and they’re just starting to grow back.
