“Damn,” Dabney said, his tone reverential. “I never would’ve thunk to throw like that. I always go for the solids, but that was pretty sweet. Nice goin’, kid.”
Karl basked in the praise. As the runt of the building he always felt nothing was expected of him but failure. This was a defining moment, scoring approbation from John Dabney, resident loner. In a city full of vacant apartments, Dabney chose to live on the roof. The others barely acknowledged his presence, but Karl found him fascinating. Dabney held onto his role as iconoclast. Dabney was . . . cool.
“It’s only a matter of time, you know,” Dabney said, eyes hooded.
“What?”
“This. This here’s a waiting game. Look at those misbegotten things.” He pointed down at the street dwellers. “They’re same as us, only different. Maybe they’re reanimated flesh, I dunno, whatever it is. But they’re not from Mars and they ain’t made of plastic. Look at ’em. I mean really look.”
“It’s hard from up here.”
Dabney shot Karl a scowl. “Don’t be so damn literal. They’re fallin’ apart, same as us. They don’t eat each other. How long can they keep truckin’ around on empty? We know we’re gonna die if we don’t eat, but I figure so will they, eventually. I’d like to live to see it happen. I’d like to set my feet down on pavement again, even if ain’t exactly gonna be tiptoeing through tulips.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a waiting game and nobody knows how it’s gonna play out, but play out it will. It has to. Things rot. They’re rotten as hell. Their hides might be tanned as shoe leather, but mark my words, they’ll fall. It’s nature.”
“I suppose.”
Dabney frowned.
“All this talk’s makin’ me hungry. You want something to eat?” Dabney said. Karl’s stomach growled in anticipation of food. He had stuff stashed in his crib, but an offer of food from Dabney augured something mysterious and tantalizing. What did Dabney keep in his private stash? “Yeah, you do,” Dabney answered, lifting himself from the tarp. He strode across the roof to a sooty, bungedup metal contraption fashioned from salvaged commercial exhaust ducting. He bent down and opened a crudely hinged door he’d cut out of the cylindrical appliance. “It’s a smoker I made,” he said, by way of explanation.
“A smoker?” Karl repeated.
“Like a smokehouse. For smoking meat. Last I checked, refrigeration went the way of the dodo, right? So, smoked meat.”
“Meat?” Karl gasped. He was salivating.
“Meat. Jerky. You got a beef with vermin jerky? I got rodent jerky and pigeon jerky. Doesn’t sound so appealing when you know what it is, but it’s not so bad. Wanna try it?”
Dabney reached into the box and pulled out a thin, fluted strip of dusky matter and offered it to Karl. He smiled. Jerky. Karl thought of the old Jerky Boys pranks. Was this a prank? It didn’t seem like Dabney was the type. Karl accepted the barklike sliver and tentatively raised it to his nose, taking a sniff. Instantly his mouth began to water and with no further hesitation he took a bite—manna from heaven. Karl almost began to cry but stopped himself. That would be unmanly and he didn’t want to seem so in front of Dabney. Not today. Not after impressing him. The meat was salty and dense and tough, but the flavor sent him back to his college days when he’d subsisted on mac ’n’ sleaze and bags of teriyaki jerky from the 7-Eleven.
“Enjoy that,” Dabney said. “Won’t be much more, I don’t think.”
Karl’s heart almost broke at the thought. “What? Why? Why not?”
“Haven’t seen any critters around in the last week or so. None airborne, none skulking around on the ground. No squirrels, no rats, no mice. Sure as hell no cats. Anyway, I think what I’ve got in there is the last of it. The bottomless empty is right around the corner. After that, we are all well and truly screwed.”
That was a helluva pronouncement. Karl studied the older man’s leathery puss—peeling, brown, raw, not unlike the jerky he was consuming. If they started dying in the building would they mimic the behavior of those things on the street? Would this turn into some Manhattan version of the Donner party? Of the Andean soccer team incident? Karl flashed on the movie Cannibal! The Musical, the comedy about the Alferd Packer, which didn’t seem so funny anymore. He thought about Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrei Chikatilo and Ed Gein. Wasn’t Idi Amin a cannibal? Oh fuck that, Karl thought. I’d rather die. I’d rather feed myself to those things than eat a human being. You have to hold onto who you are. Life isn’t that precious. At least not any more it isn’t. Maybe those sons of bitches ate each other because there were still things to live for. Their circumstances had been way different. Packer and the Donners and those soccer players had a world ahead of them.
Dabney eyeballed Karl’s twitching face, sensing his thought process.
“You know what one of those Uruguayan footballers had to say when they picked him up?” Dabney asked, his voice neutral. “It’s a quote I remember because it seemed so fucked-up at the time. Now, I don’t know how I feel about it. The kid was talking about how they’d cooked their teammates. He described the meat as, ‘softer than beef but with much the same taste.’ It’s animal nature to survive. Man’s an animal. To survive, folks adapt. Whattaya think of that?”
Karl doubled over and puked up the jerky. When he finished retching he remained bent over, hands gripping his knees to keep from toppling over, thick ropes of bilious saliva drooping from his twitching lower lip.
“Last time I offer you any chow,” Dabney said.
Eyes stinging, Karl glared at the lumpy puddle between his legs, his face broiling with shame. Whatever cred he’d established he’d just pissed down his leg. He’d reverted to Karl the Puss—no more, impossible to be less. He felt anger coursing through his wracked body. Anger at himself, anger at Dabney, anger at everything.
“If you had food this whole time,” he bleated, revolted by his wheedling tone, “why didn’t you share with us?”
Dabney sighed, not angry. Seemingly bored with the question. “Because I sing hard for my supper. No one ever stopped you from hunting and gathering. I don’t own the roof. You want food, show some damn initiative. Don’t come whining at me because you’re a bunch of spoiled Upper East Side ninnies. Grow some hair.”
Karl straightened up and made to leave.
“Clean your mess up before you go, kid. I might not own the roof, but it’s still my turf. Don’t be leaving your mess here.”
Karl opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but he couldn’t access any words that might redeem the moment. Dabney cocked his head like a wary dog and closed one eye in warning, shaking his head in silent rebuke. The gesture said, DON’T SAY A WORD. Karl looked around for a towel, saw none, then looked back at Dabney, who offered nothing but the stern authoritarian glower of someone about to lose his cool.
“What do I clean it with?”
Dabney pulled a rag out of his back pocket and tossed it to Karl, the motion reminiscent of that old Coke commercial with Mean Joe Green tossing the kid his sweaty game jersey. Karl thought a joke might help, and when he caught it he said, “Thanks, Mean Joe,” instantly regretting it.
Dabney turned away and resumed his vigil at the edge of the roof.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Karl chanted as he mopped up his puke.
5
“That Zotz better watch his mouth is all I’m sayin’,” Eddie said, stomping around the kitchen.
“Let it go, dude,” Dave said. “It’s no biggie.”
“It is a biggie. It is. It’s fuckin’ huge. First he gets lippy like, what, he wants a piece of me? He thinks he can handle The Comet all of a sudden? Like suddenly he’s a big man? He’s a little pussy, that little bitch. I’d stuff his fuckin’ crayons and paintbrushes up his ass if I didn’t think he’d fuckin’ love it.”
“Just chill, Eddie. Come on, seriously, you’re gonna give yourself an embolism or something. Park it and chill.”
Eddie paced a couple more times, then grud
gingly heeded Dave’s counsel, taking a seat on an ottoman. He clenched and unclenched his fists, kneading his thighs, swallowing his lower lip. He threw his head back, the veins bulging on the sides of his neck, his Adam’s apple jutting out like a walnut. His nostrils flared like a horse’s as he exhaled over and over, sweat pouring off him. Dave watched Eddie attempting to decompress, to defuse. Ever since they’d met in high school they’d been inseparable buds, Dave the calm one, Eddie the hothead.
“The Comet” had been Eddie’s hockey handle—hokey, but apt. He’d been an awesome center whose speed and ferocity earned him an athletic scholarship to Rutgers. Dave had been goalie but he’d often kept his eye more on Eddie than the puck. Eddie tossed bodies around like they were nothing, which to him they were. It was magnificent to behold. Unfortunately he spent as much time in the penalty box as on the ice. Too much high-sticking. Too much hooking. Too much fighting in general. Too much blood on the ice.
Dave came over and ran his fingers through Eddie’s hair, petting him, trying to soothe him.
“Don’t do that,” Eddie snapped. “What’re you doing? I don’t need that shit, man.” He stood up, vibrating with barely contained rage. “You can’t do shit like that to me!”
Dave looked at his roomie, incredulous.
“I’m a little confused, Ed,” Dave said.
“What? What? What’s to be confused about? I don’t want you fuckin’ touching me all girly like that.”
“But we . . .”
“That’s not about . . . fuck, what’s the word?”
“Tenderness?”
“Exactly!” Eddie said, his face split in both triumph and disgust. “That’s exactly it! Tenderness. Tenderness is for women and fags. We’re not fags, Dave. We just have to let off some steam once in a while. Nothing wrong with that. Sex and tenderness have nothing to do with each other. You think all those guys in prison are fags? Hell, no, dude. They just do what they gotta do. Adaptation isn’t conversion, okay? You think they trawl for dick once they get sprung? Bullshit! They head straight for the punani! You need to remember that shit, bro.”
Yeah, but we’re not getting sprung, Dave thought. This is all there is.
“Whatever,” Dave said, and left the room.
“What’s the matter, is it your time of the month?” Eddie said. With that he erupted in laughter.
Dave stepped into the foyer and paced a few times, then opened the front door and stepped into the unlit common hall. This was the world now. A staircase leading up from the walled-up street entrance, the larger square landing of the second floor, the flights of stairs connecting each level, the narrow landings, the roofs, period. The entire rest of the planet was off limits. Why does Eddie have to be so nasty, Dave wondered. We’re all under pressure. We’re all in the same boat around here, not like he’s the only one who’s suffering, the only one who’s hungry, the only one who’s afraid.
Dave trudged downstairs to the sealed-up foyer. In the pitch dark he pressed his back against the almost-cool cinder blocks, girding himself for physical punishment. Better to not dwell on Eddie and his foul moods and fouler humor. That kind of shit had been funny in the locker room before and after a game, but now it cut deeper, seemed uglier. In the dark, Dave calmed down and collected himself. “Work it off,” he said, then inhaled and exhaled deeply several times. Midway through a half-assed stretch his elbow touched something clammy and fleshy and he let out a very womanish screech.
“Work what off?” came the drab, croaky response.
“Jesus,” Dave barked, “don’t do that. Hey, who is that? Who the hell hangs out in the dark? You trying to give someone a freakin’ heart attack?”
“Work what off?” The croaky voice was neither masculine nor feminine. It reminded Dave of the possessed girl’s in The Exorcist. The question was posed without any urgency or even curiosity. It sounded mechanical. That’s what made it so disturbing.
“Jesus Christ. Gerri.”
With his heart audibly thudding in his chest Dave began jogging up the stairs, taking each landing, then the next flight, and so on, up to the roof door. When he got there he hesitated for a moment, then gave it a loud rap with his knuckles and threw it open. Dabney was there, sitting in the shade of the stairwell, reading a battered paperback.
“Yo, John, mind if I do some laps?”
“Knock yourself out, kid,” Dabney said, returning his attention to the book he’d borrowed from Alan. As Dave began to jog north, Dabney added, “But not literally. I don’t wanna have to haul your carcass downstairs.” Then he chuckled. Same joke, different day. Different day that might as well be the same, for all intents and purposes.
Goddamn Gerri Leibowitz, Dave thought. Eddie had dubbed their old neighbor The Wandering Jewess, a haggish woman with an explosion of ratty grayish brown hair radiating from her seemingly vacant head. Sometimes she was stark naked, sometimes she wore a thin housecoat, and always she toted around the withered carcass of her dead Yorkshire terrier, cradling it like a baby. She had no fixed abode, sometimes sleeping in the neighboring building from whence she’d originated, sometimes in the halls, sometimes the roof—though not Dabney’s. He didn’t cotton to her at all. Gerri would occasionally spend a night or two in one of 1620’s vacant apartments.
Though comprised of all the fleshly ingredients, in essence she was a ghost.
Dave and Eddie had come over from three buildings north, when that building was breached. The zombies had flooded in and made short work of the residents on the lower floors. Dave and Eddie escaped, just barely. Since then, the rooftop door to the stairwell of that building was solidly blocked. No one could forecast which building Gerri would materialize in from day to day. Didn’t much care, either, but she was a perpetually unnerving presence.
Dave built up enough speed to use the short walls dividing the roofs as hurdles. The sun lashed his bare back and sweat poured off him like a race horse. This was stupid. He knew this was stupid. Who was he trying to keep in shape for? Himself? The end was nigh, as the Bible thumpers put it. Why even attempt to stay fit? He was a rail, each muscle, each tendon, each ligament, each vein and artery stood out in sharp relief. He was a walking—jogging to be more precise—anatomical chart. This wasn’t definition. This was depletion. Everyone in the building had a six-pack.
Six-pack.
Just the phrase made Dave want to bawl. How sweet would a six-pack be right about now? Some tasty ice-cold beer? As perspiration beaded and ran down his hairless chest, Dave imagined himself a tall, amber bottle of Bud, his sweat sexy commercial-style condensation on a flagon of his favorite brew. And began to cry.
6
February, Then
“This’ll pass. You watch.”
“I dunno,” Dave said, then took a swig off his Stella Artois. Eddie and he sat side by side at the bar, both watching the muted television suspended over the liquor shelf. Since both sets were tuned to FOX there was no need for sound, the text tickers scrawling across the screen covering the major points in bullet form. Dave’s stomach was double knotted and the beer wasn’t helping. He drank it anyway.
“You dunno,” Eddie sneered. “Have a little faith. The government’ll take care of it.”
“That’s funny, coming from you, Mr. Libertarian.”
“Hey, I’m what you call a social libertarian. I just don’t want no one tellin’ me who I can and can’t screw, what I can and can’t drink, or if I wanna smoke a doob or do a bump I gotta go to jail for that shit. The government should keep its nose outta my private fuckin’ business, know what I’m sayin’?”
“But they can bail us out when bad shit happens, huh?”
“Catastrophic disaster shit? That’s right. That’s their fuckin’ jobs, bro’. Our tax dollars at work. Send in the fuckin’ Marines.”
Dave was about to point out that they didn’t have any Marines left to send in any more, but bit his tongue and took another mouthful of beer. Most of our troops were still abroad, the National Guard was s
pread thinner than an Olsen twin and chaos was erupting everywhere. Footage of cities on fire—entire American cities—filled the wide screen monitors. Dave was accustomed—indifferent, even—to seeing foreign cities ablaze, but American ones? It was bad enough when the towers came down, but this was epic. Presently, footage of St. Louis in flames was splashed across the screen, the visibly shaken anchorwoman—he’d heard they were called “spray-heads” in the news biz—mouthing silently. He could lip-read enough to catch the gist, and the worry was creasing her copious makeup. It had been the same all day: an epidemic of violence and cannibalism. Ridiculous sounding, but there it was.
“This is your WMDs,” Eddie said. “Right there, in HD. This is some chemical shit the sand niggers cooked up in some fuckin’ cave. Our guys’ll come up with the antidote and then we’ll get payback.”
“Where’d you get that from?” Dave asked.
Eddie pointed at the ticker. Dave wasn’t so sanguine about the source of this mayhem, nor about getting revenge. According to the news—and on this point there seemed to be no dissenting views—the state of affairs was global. What was happening here in New York was happening in Paris and Tehran and Madrid and Hong Kong and so forth. Still, the cause was up for conjecture and debate and people needed to assign blame. What good was a crisis if you couldn’t say, “It’s so-and-so’s fault”?
From outside the bar the assortment of unsettling noises grew louder. A concussion rocked the small building, spilling Eddie’s beer in his lap.
“Fuck this shit.”
“I think we should head home,” Dave suggested, not wanting his mounting terror to show too much. Eddie looked at his emptied mug and wet lap and rose from his stool without a word.
The twosome hesitated at the door. An SUV plowed down some pedestrians in a mad attempt to beat the light, sending bodies flying through the air, one thudding against the plate glass window, adding a red smear to the pink neon glow.
Pariah Page 4
