by Jay Smith
"Exploring," I said. I didn't want to fully answer the question. The way her lips flapped loose when she talked made the croaking more entertaining. I don't know what it was about her, but she was stinky-disgusting and adorable in one blobular package.
“You de new girl dey brung in, ain’tcha?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I responded as her right eye widened. I expected her to warn me not to leave the moors or tempt the Gypsy’s curse. Instead, she offered me a down-home Down Under greeting:
"Get out of here, you carpet-ragger." (See, even her homophobia was adorable.) "Don't want you around. Get thee behind Jebus with yer 'hore girlfriend. Put the Jesus inside ye."
"Sorry…I’m not laughing at you. You’re just…I just want to eat you up you’re so quaint, but I think I’d get cancer."
"You need a man...a good man. And Jebus. A good man'll make you see God. You need make babies. No time for foolin' and shenanigans, missy. We needs to be makin' with the babies."
"Okay then," I replied. "I'll get right on that. How's it going for you?"
"Sassylap!” She puttered and tried her words again. “Sassylips! All sass from the Up Top where they sit around all day in the sunshine. Jebus'll spank some sense into ya."
She underscored her point with a severe nod that looked more like she was head-butting the air in front of her. Greasy hair bloomed like ... like a tortured simile. Her neck rippled like a water balloon in flight.
Changing the subject, I pointed to the cameras. "What's going on?"
"Hell's bubblin' up for you, girl. Judgment comin' for the unclean and the wicked. It's coming for you and all the rest o'us gotta go along with ya. God's word. God's word."
I tried to steer the subject away from my vagina, its occupants and my Satanic origins. "Those Little red lights on the cameras. What do they mean?"
"It means you gotta knock off the gay and make it with Jebus. Be a real woman and get thee to stud. Now, a'fore judgment casts the last of us into that Lake o'FAH-r."
Obviously, Jesus was our security officer. So, because I was chatting with a crazy lady, I thought I'd practice my fluency in her language. "Where can I get a bag of pork rinds and a pack of smokes? I'll get right to work on my flabby-abs and asthma, too, ya weirdie."
As part of her careful and measured response, she took a step back, pointed at me and began chanting "Dyke." I should have been upset. But I just felt sad. For her, of course. At about the ninth time she chanted the word at me, Carcigina retreated into The Smoking Jesus Suite. The door slammed and slapped around poor dying Jesus on its string. I stared at the hand-painted effigy of Christ on the cross, his face crossed in acrylic tears and blood, and I sympathized. "I can't believe the crap you gotta put up with."
Turning back to the door where Sterno had run, I considered following him. When the door opened, I expected the master poopsmith. Instead, it was Paul Hansome, his wicked-looking half-smile, and a long stick that made lightning at the end.
“Let’s show you everything, Woodbine. I think you’re ready.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – THE GRINDSTONE OF PAIN AND NECESSITY
Paul stood in front of me, waiting for a smart-ass remark that never came or a question he could give some spooky fortune cookie answer to. The red lights on the cameras told me we were still being watched and the air of urgency in the staff suggested something bad was happening. “Where did Molly and Gill go in such a hurry? Is there anything wrong?”
Paul smiled. “On a relative scale? Nah. Sometimes wildlife gets into the sewer tunnels and we have to clear it out. Deer, refugees, eaters…sometimes a bear or weird weasels. Normally we’d just flush them with water from the river, but for some reason the intake pipes leading from the Forsythe River are clogged with corpses. Something about the end of the world. We’re hoping the EPA gets on top of that, soon. Anyway, curious one…”
“Wait. Don’t we drink from the Forsythe River? And bathe in it?”
“It’s a good thing you have people like me and Molly and Stern-o down here making sure the filters are operating correctly…and that the solar panels that power the filters are functional. Otherwise…yeah, you’d be showering in Human Soup. You think that group of useless consumers up top there would have lived more than a month without us?”
We continued talking as he led me back up the dormitory corridor, turning right where I’d come left at the next intersection. “Why don’t you just tell the people who you are and what you’re doing?”
Paul coughed. “Because I hate people. Well, that’s a personal reason. I think your moral outrage at keeping an undead baby and mother under observation would be representative of people upstairs, don’t you? Besides, it’s better if the people upstairs don’t mess with what we do down here and enjoy their blissful ignorance. We have supplies that we ration out. We keep emergency stores that even the Mayor and Jack don’t know about. When the sheep turn into rams and try to take down the managers, it will be over scraps and not the FEMA/CDC stores we have down here.”
“You expect HG World to have a revolution?”
“Actually, I expect Jeb to do something really stupid. I expect Jack to get caught with his dick in a bad choice. It might have something to do with Hank. Those three are the President, VP and Secretary of that Shitocracy upstairs. If not them, David will be the grand prize winner. You know, I’m surprised you didn’t bring David along with you.”
“I didn’t know what side he was on. He’s one to protect himself.”
“You got a good read on him. Anyhoo, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of the job I’d like you to do for us down here. That is if you’re done snooping around the catacombs.”
I managed an awkward laugh that fell somewhere between polite and bluntly insincere. Paul didn’t respond to it and kept an eye on the passage in front of us.
“The trouble with our mission is that we really don’t know how much of the world outside is worth saving. That is…if it CAN be saved. Most of the survivors are crafty assholes like me. If you count the asshole up there in the land of make-believe as exceptions, what you get outside these walls are folks like us. We believe in ‘Work hard or fuck off and die’. Use a skill or get one. We don’t need shoe salesmen or bus boys or kids who are awesome on Xbox. We need strong backs and strong minds. If you’re a sensitive artist, you better be six-foot-fucking-three with a good batting arm or you’re worthless as shit to me. That’s kinda the point I’m getting around to with you, Woodbine. You’re smart. You’re a pain in the ass. I see you as a liability to my operation, but I also see you as capable to think a situation through and making hard, but good decisions for the future of our camp. Any of that make sense?”
I nodded, then realized we were in a dimly-lit corridor. “Yeah, Paul. I get that you have a lot of power here. It also sounds like you resent the people upstairs a bit much. They are survivors. That’s the human race up there, isn’t it?”
“Sheep. Mouths to be fed and asses to be wiped. We protect them because of some twisted hope that this might all get better some day and we can all go…somewhere. Home. A new home, maybe rebuild Wishwell or some stupid shit, put up statues to Todd Rage and the Happy Valley Militia while the morlocks like me become footnotes.”
“You’re in it for the glory? I guess you backed the wrong pony, Mr. Hansome.”
“No, I signed on to help people escape and recover from disaster. I lived in New Orleans until about 2006. I had a house in Saint Bernard’s Parish, a studio on Bourbon Street, and one of the most amazing collections of blues and jazz recordings. My whole life? Preserving the original blues sounds, recording the masters and finding relics. Anything to keep it from going extinct, you know? And then a week before my biggest fund raiser and concert, that Bitch Katrina came up The Gulf. Wiped me out. My house, my collection…I lost three awesome cats – Lady Blue, Mazzy and Snatch. You know…never mind the news media, but in my neighborhood, people couldn’t get out of town. They were poor folks with roots so deep you couldn’t m
ove them with dynamite. They had nowhere to go and no way to get there. So they stayed thinking they could protect the only shit they owned in the world from the scumbags in town taking advantage of the situation. Of course, instead of sending buses, the military sent guns and tanks. They either forced you out or blocked you in.”
“While I was trying to put my shit into my van for the trip out of town, the National Guard showed up in a school bus, pointed rifles at me and left all my shit out in the open while I joined other prisoners to spend three days at the Superdome. That’s along with ten thousand of my neighbors through 200 mile an hour winds, no toilets and a carnival of human insanity I decided should never repeat itself here in the greatest fucking country in the world. Shame on us for being unprepared – and I mean the people AND the government.”
“I watched executions and I watched corpses pile up in a stairwell. I only know I was there three days because I was alive to look at a calendar after it all. I came out of the Superdome covered in other people’s shit and blood. I broke my nose against some asshole’s fist when he tried to take some cat’s baby formula for himself. FEMA greeted me with a god-damned fire hose. Before anyone had a chance to talk to the media, we were put on a bus, handed gift baskets and shipped to Houston, Texas. You were what, thirteen? I’m sure it was a tragic little reality show for you back then.”
“Hey, I tried to help. I sent you some canned goods through my school. You never got them? I even wrote you a little card hoping you would get better.”
“Oh yeah. That was you? Thanks. Baked beans?”
“Canned fruit. Didn’t want you to get scurvy on top of everything else.”
“Ah. Thoughtful kid. Maybe that’s what inspired me to give it all up, finish my degree and go to work for FEMA: so we could build places like this designed to help people instead of shoving them into big metal Thunderdomes.”
“So why are you so angry about it, then?”
“It’s the scope of the thing. When you study extinction level events, you think it will all blow over and when the planet gets hit by God’s Dick or Captain Tripps wipes us all out, we can rebuild. This shit…this is a game-changer. I don’t see the residents of HG World surviving. But that depends on what happens after I show you what you need to see next…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - THE PERILS OF A BENIGHTED SLAVE
Part 1
Eventually, Paul walked me down the main hallway dividing the FEMA medical bay. It reminded me of the infirmary back at CVU, just a little dusty. Dark monitor screens and empty clipboards lined the walls near patient room doors. Two wheeled beds were parked near the end of the hallway and open double-doors into an exam room. Paul filled the time with more explanation. “We have two doctors here, not including the guy upstairs. Igor is just a glorified military medic, Vietnam vintage.”
"Igor?" It wasn’t a question; more a comment.
Paul continued, “Upstairs you call him ‘Doc’. We call him Igor because he's the one who brings us … cases from upstairs. The terminally pregnant woman you saw for example....the very old and sick. We bring them here and the science guys do science stuff on them. In a humane way, of course. Comfort and dignity and all that.”
I understood Paul’s active detachment. I could only imagine the number of people he locked out of HG World the day the doors closed. He was the one to tell the managers to shutter, leaving hundreds of living people outside at the mercy of a small herd of eaters. When a small group of refugees managed to break into the sewer tunnels on the west side of the building, Paul had them dealt with ‘in a humane way, of course.’ I understood Paul as that necessary breed of human that had to make inhuman choices. Motivated by selflessness, he has found himself in opposition of his better nature. That French Quarter artist taken from home at gunpoint is now the gatekeeper at a Superdome of his own design. He has accepted his role and will execute his duties for his self-proclaimed Greater Good. The best someone like Paul Hansome can hope for now is a merciful god and for history to forget him in favor of more heroic figures.
Noticing a white board with names and a list of what looked like Test Subject codes, I asked Paul, “Who are the scientists?”
“Holdovers from the CDC/FEMA group that was deployed here months back. As you noticed, the main body never made it here. Most of them abandoned their posts the same way our military kinda disappeared one weekend when things got really bad. Most never got on the plane from Atlanta. I wonder how that worked out for them down there? I hear the southern states are worse off than up here...”
I kept on topic: “What do the scientists do?”
“I think you know. You saw the report on Momma Zombie and child. We test the blood-ish stuff in their veins and their skin and their brains for...whatever...and they try to figure out how to stop it.”
“I take it they haven't gotten far with it?
“On the contrary, I’m told there are great strides toward eradicating the plague. But that didn't come from the scientists. It came from the eater's own mouth.”
At the moment he said it, I assumed it was another bit of Paul’s dark humor, but a sense of honest dread helped hold that last sentence in my mind. I couldn’t figure out the punch line. So I asked.
“What does that mean?”
He stopped at the connecting door and turned to me with a very tired smile, but a look in his eyes that I’d seen from older kids at school, my parents…anyone in my life who had ever said, “Be careful what you wish for” or “Oh you’ll understand why someday.”
All Paul said was, “Check this out, first...”
Paul led me through another connecting door into the exam room. Looming over that exam table was a puffy, middle aged man who appeared to have just rolled out of bed with an empty scotch bottle. Clearly he was not used to being around people. He wore a long white lab coat over green scrubs stained in patches and smears a rusty brown. He wore thick glasses and ear buds connected to a device tucked into his coat. His hair looked like abstract art made from dried straw. When he detected movement, he leapt back from the exam table with a start and nearly fell backward into a cabinet of specimens. He yelled at Paul and Paul snapped back at him, but I didn’t hear what they were saying. I recognized the person on the table – Mr. O’Neal.
Paul touched my shoulder. “Jill Woodbine, this is Doctor Yukov. His main preoccupations are vodka and masturbation, but he can do some work for us on occasion. I believe you know his patient.”
Dr. Yukov returned to the table. I pretended not to notice him staring at me like I was the first girl to ever walk into a comic book convention. What he was looking for or doing when I arrived remains unclear. There were no tubes or devices attached to O’Neal and Yukov wasn’t checking his vitals. I assumed the doctor was just getting a good look at his subject. That didn’t make it – or him – any less creepy.
Yukov coughed up something disturbing into his handkerchief and commenced explaining. “Mr. O'Neal has cancer....specifically acute monocytic leukemia, which he was - technically - required to inform us of upon arrival. We didn't discover it until he spent some time upstairs with his meltdown."
I could understand O’Neal might not want to tell the guards about his condition, especially after witnessing families split apart because one of them was clearly ill or malnourished. Constables would force parents and spouses to make horrifying choices about staying together in danger or split up and give some of their group a chance at safety. It didn’t surprise me that O’Neal lied, but Yukov’s attitude was a little off-putting, like ‘sorry his cancer inconvenienced you, asshole.’ Instead, I asked: "What could you have done if he'd told you?"
"Nothing, to be honest. And we probably would have let him in anyway as you can’t catch cancer like the flu. But we like to know what's going on under the skin of everyone up there. It didn't show up in our triage screenings, of course. Upstairs, he mentioned to Igor that he was getting ready for chemotherapy when things went bad. So here we are. He is sedated right now so I
can examine him freely."
Paul said what I was thinking: “That seems a little… unusual.”
Yukov seemed to take offense. “He is dreaming, Mr. Hansome.”
This seemed to make sense to Paul, who nodded as if this were a standard form of treatment for leukemia. I asked, “So what…he’s going to dream away his cancer?”
Yukov sneered at me, “No, but… It’s a better option than anything we can offer here. In a good hospital with expert oncologists and equipment would put his survival rate close to 90 percent. Here…the man’s dead in two long, slow painful months. A nibble from a necroambulate would kill you quicker. This is better for all concerned.”
"I'm sorry," I said – feeling for O’Neal, of course.
Yukov tried to put a positive spin on it with a tired smile. "It's a great opportunity for us, you know. We've always wanted to see how the PAIN infection dances with cancer cells. We know cancer patients reanimate, but the interesting thing is that we've seen actual physical and mental improvements after animation. As with paraplegics, parts of the body that didn't function before death are able to function again. Want to know why? Because we estimate that after P.A.I.N. is transmitted through sufficient hosts, it learns how the human body is supposed to work and, therefore, when it takes over the brain and the nervous system, it can actually repair the body. It's quite amazing....has she met ‘Lucille’ yet?"
