I pulled Gizzy up and without asking, Violence joined us.
We scuttled during the daylight, avoiding others and yet always searching – for food, for shelter, for weapons. The city seemed half abandoned. And I could imagine how it had happened. Commuters who hadn’t noticed the weird quiet of their neighborhoods but walked up; juggling cell phones, groceries, children – and gotten too close. The streets were full of empty cars but we never saw the people who’d driven them.
We were creatures without safe haven, cramped into balls under bridges and the few free standing structures that seemed safe. Fleeing from the boxes that contained our lives, but then drawn back as hunger and other needs made themselves known.
It was the one time in my life when I desperately needed a drink and couldn’t find one. It consumed me.
But then Gizzy found the truck parked outside the liquor on 12 St. There were parts of him that almost seem petrified, but it turned out that his nose was not. Downtown was seedy in a way that would have sent me looking for another place to raid, but I didn’t care anymore, there was no one to notice as we crept around the truck with imagined thief-like stealth. That the search for food ended here was not exactly surprising.
With AA out of the question it didn’t take much prodding. So much for the promises, but what good were forced promises anyway? I wasn’t a repentant drunk, just one who’d gotten caught.
As he yanked us down the street we ran into a group of kids, teenagers, who didn’t seem aware of the seriousness of the situation. If it had been a cache of food we would have defended it with every fiber of our rot-soaked beings. But it was booze, an entire truck full, so we were more willing to share, which with a twisted sort of logic made sense.
But they weren’t the hardcore drinkers that we were. Forty minutes into a case of bourbon one of the boys dared another to raid the tiny grocery next door for food and he accepted.
I was on my feet before I thought about it.
“John,” Violence spoke from behind the barrier of her own bottle. “Let them.”
I cast between her and Gizzy, looking for some kind of validation that I should stop them, that they didn’t deserve to die for a moment’s stupidity. But booze soaked drunks aren’t the bastions of moral support that I might have hoped for. I wasn’t either. The thing that hid inside, how would we know when it had gone? With all of its food gone, how would we know that the buildings had been hollowed and left for us again? Maybe it was a one-time event. I wasn’t going to volunteer so maybe Violence wasn’t right, let someone else do the exploration, let someone else step past the once welcoming entrances into the dark.
The boy was a lanky fifteen and pretty drunk on the first taste of booze that wasn’t his mother’s schnapps. But something shivered in him as he reached the clear glass door that fronted the market where the frame was bent and warped on its hinges. The hazy sunlight, peering through the omnipresent clouds, lit up those first few feet. We abandoned our perches in the truck to watch him as he reached the frame and twisted his body around it to enter the store. Whatever force had moved the building had thrown food and groceries into disarray. Boxes of cereal, cheap cigars, and the fluttering pages of magazines all waited in that nebulous space.
Nothing grasping or dark grabbed him. I was holding my breath. His face turned up, watching the seafoam ceiling. A banner for double coupon days had fallen over the front register and I thought off-handedly that I didn’t know tiny grocers even accepted coupons. Fast food and take-out kept me alive between binges and I hadn’t cooked a meal in years. This kid, making his way further into the store, looked like he was about to experience becoming one himself.
“Do you see anything?” One of the other boys shouted.
“Nah, nothing.”
“Well then, fucking go in already.”
I fought down the bile in my throat, it tasted like good Kentucky whiskey.
He passed through the threshold and squatted inside. His hands rooted through the closest items as even alcohol had its limits. Still touched by sunlight, he felt comfortable and safe, as though it was only the darkness that hid the nightmares.
“Get out,” Gizzy’s harsh outburst surprised me. “GET OUT OF THE STORE!!”
The boy spun. Pink cheeks went pale as we all felt it now. It was a sinking sensation in my gut, the sudden urge to shit that diarrhea forces on you. Groceries fell from his hands, food so close I could taste it. But despite his youthful energy, there was no way to win a race when your opponent jumped the gun. The building lurched, knocking his feet away and he mewled out. Everyone on the outside screamed. The shadows in the store swept toward him. It unrolled from the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Some kind of chameleon coloration that protected it. I couldn’t reconcile the absence and the existence. Blinking didn’t fix anything.
The boy slipped and fell. He scrabbled at the floor. Gained an inch. Shrieked again. A child’s cry. Thousands of long tentacle-like fingers whipped out and caught him and he squeaked as it drew him up.
“Whatingodsname…”
It spun him, rolled him into its grasp, spinning strands of itself around him it completely covered him. He screamed. A sound that made me choke on the saliva thick in my mouth.
I imagined that it had roots all the way through the building because the structure groaned as it moved, drawing the cocooned boy up towards the rafters. Then it lunged, pulling itself tightly in, and there was just one gulp. The same way I popped grapes into my mouth.
The other boys were crying and sobbing as corn flake dust mixed with concrete to billow out around us.
I threw up my whiskey unintentionally. Gizzy mumbled to himself as he fell to the sidewalk. I might have caught him but my hands were planted on my knees as I heaved out my liquid lunch. Only Violence seemed unmoved, but maybe she’d already seen this before. Her face was impassive as the store’s movement fell back into stillness. The door was cranked in the opposite direction and the cheap five cent candy jar was spilled across the front counter. It was gone. Curled back into its façade to wait for the next victim.
“We don’t go inside at all.” Violence didn’t seem like she had expected anything else. I just stared at her numbly. “It’s the streets or nothing.”
“That’s it? It’s just that easy for you?”
I’d known that she carried a knife, I just didn’t expect her to pull it on me. Four inches of gleaming serrated steel. It wouldn’t go in easy. I could imagine the force the blow would require, and in mockery, her t-shirt showed exactly how strong her corded arms were. The draw seemed like reflex and even her expression mimicked that. She wasn’t about to kill me, but I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t.
She read my mind, I hadn’t thought it was that transparent.
“What are you, John? A guy who had no future before this thing and you know it. You’ve got nothing. No good ideas, no solutions, nothing. So tell me why you think you could be in charge of our little group and make the decisions? Tell me what you know about survival.”
“I don’t make decisions.”
“No shit.”
“But I’m also not a suicidal bitch.” The anger just poured out of me and I could imagine what had happened on that fishing party. Some brave asshole had thrown a line into a store trying to snag food and those tentacles swarmed down from the ceiling, catching his line, maybe catching him. The others would have tried to help him, but not Violence. Not her. “Why are you with us? Is it some vestigial sense of honor? That the two fucks who aren’t worth saving are the only ones who can tolerate your callous self loathing. Is that why you’re with us?!”
It hurt more than I thought it would. And I stared down at the tip of her knife where it invaded my stomach. The blood just trickled around the sides of the blade as though it was as startled to be released as I was. Violence was only an inch away from me but as I looked down and then back up at her, the two blurred together.
“That’s why I drink.” I told her. “So I don’t have to
make any fucking decisions about life. I just wanted to know what you were getting out of this. Why we should trust you to watch our backs? This thing. Just writing off everything. Are you going to write us off, Violence? Are you going to let me walk into the fucking dark just like we let that kid? Who’s gonna make those kinds of fucking decisions?!”
“We’re going to survive.”
“Are we?” I grabbed her arms, the first time I’d ever touched her forcefully. Her skin burned with the same ferocity I imagined it would.
“Pour some alcohol on it.” Gizzy shouldered the two of us apart and dumped vodka over the front of me.
It hurt. It burned like I imagined fire burned when left against tender skin. Violence just watched as I howled, but she stayed. She said we were going to survive like it was going to be easy. Maybe it was easy for her, but it didn’t turn out like that.
Eight days later, Gizzy gibbered helplessly on the sidewalk, his mouth full of drool and curses until you couldn’t tell which were coming out anymore. He was twitching with the DTs, yellow stained fingers flapping at his sides, and we abandoned him where he lay. I ran past him. And told myself that we’d come back, that I’d make Violence come back. But I didn’t know whether or not we would. There were things that were more important than helping him. His demons rode him down but hunger was just as merciless as a master.
“There!” Violence pointed. “There he is.”
I could barely see her in the dusk. She’d been wearing the clothes on her back for as long as I had, but for some reason the black fabric had just gotten darker on her lanky frame and her bare arms whiter in the half-light. A thick scarf had found a home on her head, wrapped into a rough turban to cover her bare scalp. The loose end trailed down her back like real hair as she lunged through the weighted air that presaged real night. Her target saw us too. His shriek was that of a stricken animal cornered and he turned to run, clutching at the bags of food he carried, and broke for the far side of the parking lot.
She was faster than both of us, running on nothing but anger and adrenaline. I would have tackled the man if I had caught him. Violence leapt upon him like a knight in battle chess, her horsetail of scarf flaming out against the night sky. There was nothing gentile about what happened next. She smashed her hands together, bundles of nails clutched firmly in either one, and the man screamed under the thunking sound that was his death.
He crumpled and Violence rode him all the way to the ground. I snatched up the bags. Our lives, our future, was what we found or stole on the streets. There was nothing else anymore.
We took his food and ran, back to Gizzy who we had to drag to his feet, and then all the way to our small camp hidden in the park’s dense bushes. Our refuge once the masses under the bridge started getting hungry. It was unchanged from the first night we had stepped foot in it, a tangled mass of bush and vines that formed a cave-like hollow. It was rain proof although nothing barred the damp from creeping in and laying heavily on all of us.
“What did he have?” She snarled as we cramped into the space.
I sorted through the bags. Bread. Crackers. Some soda cans. Aspirin.
She spat between chapped lips. “Goddamn it all.”
Gizzy reached for the medication but I kept it away from him. He put off a sour smell, like laundry left in a wet bundle to dry, or the faintly sweet smell of garbage cans in summer time. If you scraped his sweat and tasted it there was probably a proof attached. More than thirty-five bottles of bourbon, vodka, whiskey and random other rotgut had burned through his body faster than he could drink it. I wasn’t sure he had a liver anymore, much less needed to load medication onto it.
But Violence snatched the bottle away from me and counted five pills into her palm. She swallowed them dry, snarled at the bitterness, and only then did she crack open one of the sodas for us to share. She pressed four more aspirin between Gizzy’s lips and then held the soda there for him to drink, he trembled so much that it would have spilled but finally managed to force everything between his chattering teeth. Her one tender moment finished, she filled the air of our hideout with harsh phlegm-filled coughs. Her diagnosis was as set as Gizzy’s. All the fierce attitude in the world couldn’t undo pneumonia, or hunger, or the realization that winter was coming closer. We could have tried to run south, but there was no promise that frigid death wouldn’t find us between towns, chasing us and smothering us down in the open fields. I could imagine it as though I was watching other refugees walking through the world, laying down in exhaustion as hoarfrost crept over sunken cheeks and dark-circled eyes.
At least in the city, between the hulks that waited for the mistake of stepping too close, there was still some food.
“How many bottles do we have left?” I could barely understand Gizzy but I understood what he was trying to do.
It would have been faster to walk through an open door, but that was frightening in a way that loosened men’s bladders and their resolve. We’d seen a few people suicide that way. Just giving up and trying to get out of the cold. Drinking yourself to death was the slower, easier choice. When you found yourself trapped, sometimes the only thing that could give you comfort was the last thing that was going to save you.
3.
“Gizzy?” He didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to. Fourteen days to this point. Longer than I thought he’d make it, even when he quit drinking at the very end. By that point, I don’t think he realized that he was alive, which was a blessing for all of us. So dead that he didn’t need anything, not to piss or shit, just to breathe one shallow breath after another until his heart stopped fighting.
I’d joked once that he was as solid as a bar fixture, but now, with his body frigid from death and winter, it wasn’t funny anymore.
Violence touched his shoulder but didn’t need any more confirmation than that. The movement made her cough. I could hear the fluid in her lungs fight the convulsive attempt to dispel it. Her illness seemed as alive as those godforsaken buildings. But she kept coughing until my own chest hurt from the effort. Again and again, she forced her lungs to hack up dark gobbets of fluid and mucus and spit them far outside our nest.
“I’ll…” she couldn’t finish until she coughed through a thirty second outburst. “I’ll cut his clothes off.”
I didn’t argue. Our nest was padded with those scraps. Some we’d found. Some we’d fought for. Every layer put us that much further from the warmth-leaching ground and let us pretend just a little bit more than we might make it.
The deed was done quickly and I dragged him out into the park. There wouldn’t be any burial or homage, just getting his body far enough away that we wouldn’t have to look at him. The thought of a spring thaw was the last thing on my mind. It was barely December and the ground was a solid chunk. I couldn’t bury him, I didn’t want to. I wanted to curl up with the last three bottles of booze and attach my lips leech-like to their tops. I wanted all of this to be over.
Buildings stood around the edge of the park in quiet observance. Whatever was inside of them could have been gone. It was impossible to tell. All I knew was that we were almost alone. The scattered people we saw in the open moved with frantic speed. As the days passed, the pace grew more desperate. We were running out of time.
“John?” I heard her voice questing from the inside.
“Yeah,” I wasn’t ready to crawl back in there. Not to look into her eyes and see the same fate waiting. It was surprising how fast flesh melts away when you live on trashcan scraps and stolen morsels. How many calories fear steals for its own use.
“I want to go out. Maybe find some, maybe try a couple more pharmacies. Some asshole has to have antibiotics.”
“Sure,” I said to her. It was easier to lie out here. “This close to winter, we might get lucky.”
“Fuck you too.”
I guess she could hear the lie anyway.
We moved through the parking lots pretty quickly between her spells. A little bit after the sun hit its peak, the soun
d changed from a cough to a choke. There was nothing I could do to help except beat at her back like the force would propel the sickness out of her. Every strike brought my hand down on a spine cutting sharp from hunger. And when her knees impacted the pavement and she struggled against the weight in her chest, I tried to help her.
“Get back! Get away from me.” Another drawn out rattle.
“I’m trying to…”
“Don’t!”
“You want to die like Gizzy, you stubborn bitch?”
“Don’t.” The well-used knife was back in her hand. It had seen a lot. Things I justified by saying it was them or us. But now, with the tip pointed right at me, I realized I was foolish to have counted Violence and myself as us.
“What are you going to do?”
She stared at me. Gaunt cheekbones slicing her face into a ragged version of the woman I remembered. Riot grrl chic, that was what I’d always thought about her. She was so desperate to be deviant from society and so angry at it. AA meetings, anger management, substance abuse programs; they only held off the inevitable for her. This point right now – whether or not the nightmare happened – this point had always been waiting for her.
“Violence, we can make it.” Corporate speak bubbled out of my traitorous lips. “We can…”
“Shut up! You and your fucking stupid words. Did they teach you that? Did they tell you that it meant something? How to open your mouth and vomit out drivel?! Nothing but useless… fucking useless garbage.” In the middle of her rant she started shivering. Deep, body convulsing shudders that almost knocked her down again. “I’m not…” It was like she’d forgotten that I was there. “I’m not…” The building closest to us was less than twenty feet away.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 12
