The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist's Guide to Louisville: a novella

by Stephen Lawson

  “Are you going to eat me too?” Thursday asked. He still felt drained, and he knew there was no way he could fight his way out of this house.

  Wendy ran her paw through his hair again. The tingle ran the full length of his spine this time, and down through his legs into his toes. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. He shivered.

  “You only get one question,” she said. “Now you need to sleep. Mum will come to check on you later.”

  ~~~

  Thursday awoke to another hand on his forehead, and eyes much like Wendy’s looking down into his. Lines around the eyes told him they were older, but the same wild light danced in them.

  “You need to eat,” a voice said, and a spoon full of broth came near his lips.

  Thursday’s eyes widened. He did not open his mouth.

  “Relax,” the woman said. “It’s potato and mushroom soup—no man-flesh in it. Packers are good for growing mushrooms in too—so you are eating them indirectly—just a bit farther along in the circle.”

  “Why are you helping me?” Thursday asked.

  “My baby said you were full of questions,” the woman said. “My name is Anise, but you can call me ‘Mum’ while you’re here.”

  “Are you going to eat me, Mum?” Thursday asked. He opened his mouth, and she put the spoon in. Warmth flooded down his throat, and his head filled with clarity.

  She laughed, much as her daughter had. Thursday noticed that she’d placed a long-barreled black rifle with a scope on the parquet floor next to her. These women were never far from their weapons.

  “Maybe that depends on how soon you’re able to walk,” Mum said. “The cellar is full of salted packer-meat right now. We did just harvest some mushrooms though, so we have a vacancy.”

  Thursday took another spoonful of soup, and found it seasoned with spices he’d never tasted before.

  “This is...really good,” Thursday said.

  “Takes a long time to get that way,” Mum said. “Gran slow-cooks everything. She takes a lot of pride in her spice garden too. You’re tasting rosemary, bay leaves, and parsley.”

  “How long have you lived here?” Thursday asked, fascinated that three women had a better quality of life in one house surrounded by packs than his whole clan did in their fortress.

  “Me?” Mum asked. “I was born here. Gran survived the invasion in a bunker off Lexington Road, up by the Cave Hill Cemetery. She worked here—this is the Conrad-Caldwell House, if Wendy didn’t tell you—showing people the artifacts from the 1800’s, but she’d been dating this man who ran concerts in that bunker. ‘The Workhouse Ballroom’ is what they called it back then. It was the only time they opened it—the rest of the time it was just a locked door in the side of a hill—but he had a key to it, and he had a bunch of supplies ready to put in it. So when the ships came, he hid Gran—her name’s Marla, but call her Gran—in this bunker. They’d come out at night to get water after the water plant went down, and dump a chamber-pot far away. At some point in all that hunkering down and waiting—at least this is what Gran tells me—they made me. This man—his name was Raymond or Randy or something—was one of the ‘doomsday prepper’ people they had before the invasion, and he didn’t think having me was a good idea. He told Gran they should try to make a miscarriage, but she decided he’d served his first purpose well enough—well, that and the whole bunker thing too—and it was time to serve the second. She’d been keeping his rifle in the safe on the first floor here since he wasn’t allowed to own guns—the people who owned the place didn’t know, but she was the only one that ever went in the safe—so she came back here and found his rifle with thousands of bullets stashed away. I imagine she rubbed her pregnant belly with me inside, pulled out the rifle, and barricaded the stairway going up to the second floor. The first floor’s a mess, and a shame that is, but the packers didn’t mess with too much up here. Raymond or Randy—whatever his name was—had seeds in his doomsday survival supplies, so Gran started growing things on the top floors of other houses nearby where the roofs were smashed in.”

  “Why doesn’t my wrist hurt?” Thursday asked. “It was broken. It should—”

  “It still is broken,” Mum said, “and you’re still running a fever. Gran doesn’t just grow herbs for soup. Let’s leave it at that. Now hush so I can get the rest of this soup in you. Then you need to sleep some more.”

  ~~~

  “Filson!” Thursday yelled, waking himself from a fever dream. It took several seconds for him to realize where he was, and that there was another person in the room.

  The old woman studied him with eyes that held both a wild light and the glow of deep wisdom.

  “Your fever’s starting to come down finally,” Gran said. “I guess I haven’t lost my knack for soup-making.”

  Thursday tried to sit up against the down pillow under his head, and found that some of his energy had returned. He noticed the old woman’s cane—knobby and wrinkled like the tree he’d seen at the other side of the park.

  “You know you’re laying on the site of the great Southern Exposition?” Gran asked.

  “The what?”

  “It was a forty-five acre building they put up to show off the incandescent light bulb and such. It was open a hundred days a year from 1883-1887 till they tore it down and St. James Court took its place. Probably helped that Thomas Edison lived in Louisville sixteen years before. I wonder if that house he lived in has survived the packs.”

  “Thank you for helping me,” Thursday said, not knowing how else to reply.

  Gran chuckled.

  “I was a museum curator until the invasion,” she said. “I’m not much for chit-chat but I thought you’d like a bit of history.”

  “Forty-five acres is a lot of ground,” he said.

  “Can you imagine electric lights?” she asked. “The Southern Exposition had the largest showing of them to date when it got lit up. We used to have them on all the time when I was a girl. We didn’t even think about the power bill spinning. I think all they were good for was making people work longer hours, though.”

  “What did they do all day?” Thursday asked. “They couldn’t all have been farmers or soldiers with so little farmland in the city.”

  “Oh, they did important things,” Gran said. “There were accountants that moved numbers around, and people who tested video games, and pharmaceutical developers—”

  “What’s a video game?” Thursday asked, ignoring the thought of pharmaceutical development. “Those weren’t in any of Grandpa Cornelius’s books.”

  “Gracious, you do ask a lot of questions, Rabbit,” she said. “A video game’s like real life—people try to shoot you and take your stuff—but when you get hurt, it doesn’t really hurt, and when you die, you can go back to an earlier point and try again.”

  Thursday considered this.

  “Sounds like a better way to learn things than just dying if you mess up,” he said finally.

  “For some things, it was,” Gran said. “It was great training for puzzle solving skills and close-quarters combat. It was also a great way to waste your life if you wanted to pay somebody else for the pleasure.

  “Anyway, the larder’s got an open spot now, so if you can walk, I’ll give you that choice. I like rabbits a bit better than coyotes, but only a bit.”

  ~~~

  Thursday thanked Wendy for a pack with some food in it. She smiled, with a bit of color in her cheeks from rushing about so much in the Skubadu suit to get things ready for him.

  “I wish I could see you again,” he said quietly.

  “Why?” Wendy asked. “Because you like it when I touch you?”

  Thursday’s cheeks colored too, and she laughed.

  “You’re not going to last long out there if you want to stay with women who will eat you. You’d probably believe you were different from other men—special somehow?”

  “I—”

  “You’re a handsome boy, Thursday,” she said. “Come back to me if yo
u ever want a blissful end. I’ll make a beautiful baby out of you.”

  She placed a clawed paw on his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. A claw stung as she drew it away, though he didn’t think this was intentional.

  Thursday felt more conflicted than he had in his seventeen years of life.

  He wondered if girls had been like this before the ships came.

  ~~~

  The way up Fourth Street was as Mum had described—desolate, and without the stink of decaying bodies. Thursday felt his mended clothes against his skin, which had apparently been scrubbed several times by the women of the Conrad-Caldwell House while he was in a semi-coma. He didn’t know which of them had seen him naked and so vulnerable. Perhaps all of them had. They’d saved his life, fixed his clothes and wrist, and showed him the way north. He couldn’t complain if they’d considered having him for dinner too.

  He heard scurrying of tiny feet somewhere below him, echoing through the storm drains at the side of the ruined pavement. Rats, probably—they were even more resourceful than bears if Grandpa’s stories were to be believed.

  Chink chink chink chink chink came the echoes, and Thursday wished he’d been born a rat. His life would’ve probably been easier, and no one would be trying to test new drugs on him.

  He looked up as the skyline grew into more distinct buildings, and he now saw the rope bridges stretched between their upper floors. Crossbows would have no chance of reaching the top floors of these buildings with any accuracy, but metal, glass, or oil poured from the windows or bridges would devastate attackers. This was a stronghold, Thursday decided. As he approached, he noticed a strange slanted roof that ran between the two buildings directly in front of him. He pulled Grandpa Cornelius’s crude map from his pocket, and while it had been partially ruined from sweat and the friction of running, the paper still held a few of the old man’s forgotten ghosts.

  Fourth Street Live it said—party central on Friday and Saturday night for drunk idiot college kids and middle-aged folks in denial.

  Thursday wished he’d had a chance to be a drunk idiot college kid. That sounded like more fun than everyone he met trying to murder and eat him.

  As he approached the slanted roof, he realized it covered a row of bars on two levels on both sides of the street. The area had been devoted solely to drinking and mating rituals before the invasion, and a main thoroughfare in the middle of a city had been cordoned off to accommodate this debauchery. Thursday couldn’t even comprehend it, even as he wished for just a glimpse of what it had been.

  Then the wind shifted and the smell hit him. He nearly retched. He knew too well what pig dung smelled like. He’d shoveled plenty of it until he was old enough to stand watch.

  Another block passed under his feet, and Thursday watched a bizarre event unfolding on the second floor of 4th Street.

  Under the slanted roof, several wooden beams spanned the space between the left and right sides of the upper level. From these beams hung a thick chain. Where it met the beams, Thursday saw that it ran through a series of gears, and that it went all the way over to the right side of the second level, where it ended in an immense crank with a handle.

  Opposite the crank, which a man scurried out to oil with a can, were four other men. One of them sat in a chair, while two others stood holding the fourth between them. Thursday crept closer, ducking through the shadows, to try to hear what they were saying.

  “Do you know, son,” said the man in the chair, “that this very herd of pigs survived the invasion? They’re not the same pigs of course, but they are the great-grand-piglets. That first generation escaped slaughter in Butchertown, just a stone’s throw east of here, when the ships came and nobody showed up to work. When the corpses piled up from all the folks in their panic, these pigs had plenty to eat. Probably didn’t take ‘em long to bust out of piggy prison when they smelled the rotting meat outside. You might say they’ve inherited a taste for human flesh—probably part of their DNA now, for all I know.”

  The man being held by the two others said nothing. Thursday could see now that he’d been shackled at his feet, and that his hands were tied together at his waistline.

  “So—since I’m a fair man—I’m going to give you a trial, just like we had in the old days,” the seated man said. “You stand accused of stealing one of the clan’s herd for yourself—”

  “For my family,” the shackled man said, and Thursday got the feeling they’d been through this before.

  “For your family then,” the seated man said. “How do you plead?”

  “We were starvin’, Mr. Lawrence,” the shackled man said.

  Thursday remembered that the man he was seeking was named Oliver Lawrence. The seated man was too young, though. He looked to be in his early fifties, and Oliver would be approaching eighty. Perhaps this was Oliver’s son.

  “You pay for food with scrip,” Mr. Lawrence said. “If you do your job, you get scrip. Why would you need to steal anything? I don’t tell people how or when to earn their wages.”

  “I’m a cabinet-maker,” the man said. “I learned it from my dad, and it’s the only thing I know how to do. When everybody gots all the cabinets they need, what’m I s’posed to—”

  “So you plead guilty then,” Mr. Lawrence said. “We’ll make a note of that in the official court records.”

  Mr. Lawrence waggled a finger to the two men holding the cabinet-maker, and they pulled the heavy chain to their side of the second floor with a thin cord. This cord was doubled up, and looped around a link in the chain so that both ends were at the railing.

  They hooked the chain to the shackles at the man’s feet, hoisted him to the railing, and then eased him back into place over the pig-infested street by letting the cord out. When he was centered over the pigs, who’d started clustering under him and ramming into each other for the dead-center spot, the man who still held the cord walked one way on the upper level, then let go of an end, so that the cabinet-maker on the chain began swinging back and forth over the herd.

  The man with the cord coiled it around his hand and elbow, as the cabinet-maker swung like a pendulum.

  At the crank, a thin smile spread across the crank-man’s face, and he turned it, ever-so-slowly, to let two links in the chain out.

  Clunk.

  Clunk.

  The cabinet-maker looked below him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do this.”

  He swung back and forth, the period of his swing taking just a tiny bit longer with each link added to the pendulum’s length.

  Clunk.

  Clunk.

  “This really is the kindest way,” Mr. Lawrence said. He’d risen from his chair and stood with his hands on the railing. “Your swinging and screaming lets the pigs know dinner’s arrived as much as the clinking of Foucault’s chain. The swing makes them think they’ve all got an equal shot at you. Only the smart ones head for the center.”

  “I have a wife,” the cabinet-maker said. “I have children.”

  “Well, we’ll teach them some other trade, I’m sure,” Oliver said. “Especially now that I know that cabinet-making is a dead profession here. All supply and no demand, eh?”

  Clunk.

  Clunk.

  “I can learn,” the cabinet-maker said. “I’ll learn anything—”

  “Going headfirst really is a bit better than going feet-first, I’d say,” Mr. Lawrence said. “I’ve always saved feet-first for the really bad ones—people who mess with the mail and such. Can you imagine watching pigs eat you from the toes upward? ‘This little piggy went to market—’“

  Then Mr. Lawrence turned, walked through a set of doors, and was gone.

  Thursday looked away as the chain clunked through its last links. The cabinet-maker’s screams were cut off by hungry grunts from the pigs and wet, crunching sounds. Thursday covered his ears.

  A knot had formed in his stomach, and he breathed deeply to try to unwind it.

  “Hey,” a voice said f
rom behind him. A stick tapped one of the hands over his ears. “What’re you doing here?”

  ~~~

  “So, one more time,” Mr. Lawrence said. “What were you doing on our perimeter?”

  “I came for help,” Thursday said. “Cornelius Forrester sent me. I’m his grandson.”

  The men who’d found Thursday had been joined by more men, and they’d dragged Thursday through a series of doors and hallways, until he found himself thrown on a basement floor in front of the man who’d just fed a cabinet-maker to a herd of pigs.

  Mr. Lawrence thought for a moment.

  “I remember a Cornelius Forrester,” Mr. Lawrence said. “He would’ve been smart enough to give you a token of some sort—something so I’d believe you.”

  “Are you saying you’re Oliver Lawrence?” Thursday asked. “Grandpa’s almost eighty years old. How do you look so—”

  “I moisturize,” Oliver said. “So, again, your proof?”

  “He gave me a bat,” Thursday said. “It was a Louisville Slugger, with—”

  “Show it to me,” Oliver said.

  “It was—” Thursday said, feeling a lump building in his throat. “I shattered it hitting a packer in the head, and then something must’ve happened to the handle when I was running.”

  “You know who else used a baseball bat to bash in people’s heads?” Oliver asked. “Al Capone. He was a famous bootlegger, and he often came to the Seelbach Hotel—right here in this very room. This is the Rathskeller ballroom, you see, and he loved to sit in that little alcove with a mirror so he people couldn’t sneak up on him. There are even secret passages here that he used if he needed to make a hasty escape.