“Some things never change.”
The strip of boardwalk below the balcony lay in ruin. Scattered garbage, crushed bicycles, and bloody piles of bones littered the paths. Sharks threw themselves at the shore after the gory piles. Desiccated segments of ships that had risen with the Fenix bobbed in the waves, covered in rough corals. Calcified bodies streamed from their fissures, marched up onto the beach, and poured around the resorts into the city. Where they stepped, bright corals bloomed. Distant sounds of chaos ebbed and flowed with the wind. The world smelled like the dead insides of a shell.
A deep roar filled her ears. Waves began to flow backward, curling back toward the sea. The balcony swayed, the bright concrete cracked, and crumbled away from its rebar ribcage.
Andrea stumbled back through the doorway. She fell on the bed. Pictures tumbled off the walls.
A deep explosion rattled her teeth. All the glass in the room shattered. The sky grew dark, the air ripe with sulfur.
Andrea buried her face in the pillow, coughing, until the shaking stopped. Her own trembling shook the bed long after the earth had stilled. The roar of the volcano continued; the sky grew darker.
A low moan sounded from the balcony. The shelf of concrete hung by warped strands of metal. The partition had crumbled. Rob was scraping his way up the slope of debris toward the empty doorframe.
Andrea jumped to her feet. Sharp glass fragments pierced the soles of her feet. No time for pain.
She reached up and grasped the ornate brass wall sconce by the bed and hung from it, tugged on it till it ripped free from the wall.
Rob’s twisted fingers wrapped around the metal frame of the door. He dragged himself forward over the crumbled concrete and shattered glass. His skin had faded to a sickly grey, painted over with his expensive rusty bronzer.
Andrea cleared a path of carpet and found her footing. She stretched her shoulders.
“Fucker,” she whispered. “You want to finish our fight here in paradise? Here I am.” Rob pulled himself up, shuffled into the room, and stumbled toward her.
She lashed the sconce at him and raked it across his face. Teeth and blood flew, scattering across the far wall. He turned back to her, eyes rolling. Sharp yellow triangles sprung from the empty gums, spraying her face with blood.
She swung again. The impact shocked her arm, and she felt his bones give.
When his face whipped back to hers, his jaw hung below his nose, swinging from pale tendons. Serrated teeth ran in rows along the meaty crescent. His left eye bulged over a concave cheekbone.
Andrea struck him again. He staggered back. His reaching fingers brushed the fabric of her shirt. Thick, dark blood ran down his twisted neck. He spun, looking for her. His head was wrenched, stuck around backward. Bloody arms grasped again, reached the wrong way. A frothy growl bubbled from his throat. Dark, necrotic flesh spread from the wounds the broken glass had left on his rear.
Andrea lunged, and brought the sconce down hard on top of his head. It punched through the bone and sunk deep. The air filled with the scent of spoiled oysters and he dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap.
She lay back on the bed, panting, and listened to the rumble of the mountain and the silence of the boardwalk. Her feet throbbed. Her heart skipped.
This time I finished it—for both of us.
Blood seeped from shallow cuts across the calloused soles of her feet.
No no no. She sat up and looked at the small cuts. Running is going to hurt but I can’t stay here. I need to get to Santino. She stood and yelped at the pain in her feet. I need my shoes. I need supplies.
She ripped a pillowcase from the pile of sheets on the bed and stumbled to the mini-fridge. She snapped the lid off a tiny bottle of vodka, clamped it between her teeth, and tipped her head back to slosh the liquor over her tongue as she scooped the contents of the fridge into the pillowcase.
The balcony platform sloped away from the shattered glass door. The deck chair dangled, caught in the rebar of the crumbled barrier. She spat the empty vodka bottle out. It tumbled, and splintered on the ground two floors below. Her head spun.
Her sticky fingers curled around a steel spoke that stuck from the wall and she stepped out onto another metal spine. She whimpered as her cuts wrapped around the gritty metal. Powdered concrete fell away from the walls around her. She scrambled over the rubble and into the room she’d shared with Rob, stepping over the pool of blood where he’d burst through the glass. She ran straight to the hall door and slammed the bolt in place.
Their mini-fridge was still full. Rob hadn’t let her touch it—told her it was all fattening garbage. It’s the last thing you need, he’d said. She grabbed a bottle of liquor and downed it.
The water in the sink turned red as she scrubbed at her feet. The skin around the cuts had darkened. She poured weak yellow beer over the wounds. They stung and foamed, hissing.
“Damn it,” she said, scraping slivers of glass from the cuts. She limped to the phone and dialed the desk.
“Miss Andrea! You still kicking, macha? Staying jumo?”
“Santino, I cut my feet. Will that do it? Am I fucked?” She wrapped her feet in strips of bed sheets.
“How should I know? Either way, stay drunk.”
“I’ve just got the mini-fridge.”
“You’re fucked.”
“You have more there?” She pulled her sneakers on over the bandages and cinched them tight.
“Yeah, I’ve got the whole store room. If you can get here. I’m not coming up there.”
“Right. Asshole. See you soon.”
“Sure, macha. My love to you. Bye.” He sounded sober.
* * *
Rob’s backpack bulged with mini-fridge snacks, travel-sized toiletries, and a blanket from the bed. She’d drunk two more mini bottles of booze and refilled her empties with water from the bucket. The pockets of her jeans stretched around the sconces pulled from the wall. She leapt around corners, swinging half a curtain rod in each hand. She gritted her teeth with each footfall as the insoles grew spongy with blood.
The halls were dark tunnels, lit only by dusty corner windows. The loud hum of the generators rattled the walls but lit only the exit signs above the stairwell doors.
Andrea crept along the wall. She peered through a rectangle of glass in the stairway door. The space beyond was empty, but the single naked bulb that hung over each landing didn’t do much to illuminate the long slopes of stairs between.
She pressed the bar and slipped through the opening. A siren shrieked through the stairwell. Her feet echoed off the concrete stairs.
At the ground floor, on the last landing before the dark pit of basement, lay a pile of slick skeletons. At least three skulls poked from the nest of bones in the putrid puddle. Andrea dropped the curtain rods. She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth. Jagged fragments of a gnawed pelvis crunched under her sneakers as she edged toward the door.
A scrape and moan sounded behind her from the dark stairs cutting into the hotel’s underground space.
She kicked the bones out of the way, felt blood slosh in her shoe. The door didn’t budge. Locked. She bit her tongue against the scream rising from her gut and pulled a sconce from her pocket. The impact of the brass against the reinforced glass knocked her teeth together, rattled her joints. The glass held, fogged over with her rapid breath.
The smell of rotting fish filled the stairwell. Something rough scraped against the steps and splashed in the puddle behind her.
She turned for the stairs. A pale, lumpy figure reached the edge of the ring of light cast by the dim bulb above. It hissed, and she saw the flash of fangs before she threw herself onto the door lever. She felt the lock strip—heard the mechanism crack. She tugged at it till it swung open, scattering fragments of the lock around her feet.
More wet bones filled the dim hall. They smelled salty, like the fried pork skins she’d eaten, unknowingly, before her dive. The dive. She’d enjoyed them until Rob told her what s
he was eating. Flesh. He’d laughed.
She ran through the hall to the lobby, and the shrieking siren followed her.
The white tiles were smeared with red. No movement or signs of life. She slipped around the corner, into the open foyer.
The smell of stagnant tide pools made her eyes water. Sulfurous ash clouds drifted in through the open entryway. The roar of the ocean mingled with the growling of the mountain, the crash of falling debris. Cracks threaded through the walls and ceiling. In the floor, fissures ran with blood.
Andrea inched around the perimeter of the lobby. She kept her back to the wall, holding the sconce in front of her.
At the back of the lobby lay the wide hall leading to the restaurant and bar. To Santino, with his warm eyes and lingering fingers.
She turned and ran.
Bloated figures lay across the floor, their skin grayed, their limbs convulsing. Their eyes reflected dull silver like tarnished nickel. Bloody wounds, necrotized and oozing, covered their prone forms. They moaned as she passed them, reaching out for her ankles, but a spreading slime stuck them fast to the floor.
The thick, grey metal door behind the bar opened a crack.
Andrea jumped, nearly stumbling into a pool of rot.
“Macha,” Santino called.
She ran to him and slid into the room. He slammed the door and locked it behind her.
“I heard you coming,” he said.
She turned to him.
“Ai, Jesus,” he shouted. He grabbed her hair at the back of her head, pulled her face skyward.
When she opened her mouth to scream, he jammed the neck of a bottle between her teeth and tipped it. A corrosive tide of tequila stripped her throat.
She dropped to the floor, her hair wrenched from his grip.
“Andrea, can you hear me?”
She moaned.
“Shit,” he said.
“Goddammit, Santino.” She slapped him. She forgot she was still holding the sconce.
He ripped into a stream of foul Spanish.
She pulled herself up, gripping a wall that felt like it rolled in the surf.
He rubbed his face. “Your eyes, macha… you’re turning.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. The room spun.
“Where are you hurt?”
She reached down and pulled off her shoes. Black blood poured from the soaked leather.
He poured liquor over her feet, and sponged away the blood with a bar rag. She didn’t feel a thing. He handed her another bottle. “Keep drinking. Nothing can grow in you with that in your veins.”
“Is tequila all you have?”
“Only the best. Top shelf.” He pulled down another cardboard box from a chrome rack.
She sniffed the rim of the bottle, flinched, squeezed her eyes shut and drank deep.
“This doesn’t look good, macha,” he pulled the blanket from her pack and set it behind her head. “Drink till you pass out. I promise, if you turn, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”
* * *
Crabs pinched her toes. Slick sea-worms slid under her clothes, like Rob’s roaming hands, and pushed themselves into her wounds, chewing at her insides. She opened her mouth to scream, and warm, salty water rushed in.
* * *
Her head weighed heavy as an anchor. She moaned, but stopped short, her raw throat burning.
Water touched her lips. Not the hot, salty seawater of her dream, but cool water. Fresh. It burned her throat.
“You still in there, macha?”
She opened her eyes. The dim light had grown cloudy. Santino’s face shifted in and out of focus. She rubbed her eyelids.
“There you are,” he said. He smiled. One of his teeth was missing, and a sharp point poked through the gum.
“Santino…” She reached for his face.
He pulled back from her touch. “It’s not a good look for me, I know.” His grin wavered.
“How long was I out?” She asked.
“Don’t know. I fell asleep, myself.”
“You were supposed to be watching me.”
“Oops?” he shrugged, and held up an empty bottle. “Besides—when I look at you, how can I tell if I’m dreaming?”
Andrea shook her head, waved away his flirtation. “Your skin…”
“And you’re as silver as a fish belly. We’re turning, macha, both of us. It’s a race.”
She stared at her arm. Her skin had lost its glow.
“If I was a gentleman, I’d let you win.” He brushed her hair back from her forehead.
“You’re not?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
She looked down. Her feet were black to the ankles, the skin of her legs grey and scaly. She’d had her first wax for this trip. Another condition. Waste of money, either way. She sniffed.
“I don’t smell like one, yet. Neither do you.”
He tipped another bottle to his lips, then passed it to her. “At the finish line, one of us will smell like fish, the other fish food.” He grinned. The serrated tooth slid further through the puckered skin of his gum.
“Well, no point in running our race sitting down.” She reached up to the chrome bars of the shelves and pulled herself up. Her numb ankles shook.
“What? Where are you going?” he stood, swayed on his feet, reached out and steadied her.
She grasped his wrist. “I don’t want to be eaten alive in a closet. And I don’t want to eat you. I guess I’ll go for a walk on the beach. Feel the sand between my toes.”
“Macha loco, you’ll never make it to the beach.”
“Better than sitting here. And I only saw one thing walking around on my way here. I think they’re all in town, now.”
He stared at her, his eyes dull. “You’re right, let’s go.” He picked up the pack and dropped two more bottles into it. He dug around on the floor for the sconce she’d hit him with and stuck it in the waistband of his khaki slacks. “With all the tourists shuffling off to town, maybe I can finally see my beach.”
“You don’t have to come,” she said.
“If I’m to be a staggering fish corpse, better to do it where the action is, not locked away in here to starve.”
She nodded. He took her hand and squeezed it.
Sooty air rushed in through the open door, burning their eyes. They squinted through the smoke and stepped out into the bar.
The bodies on the floor had sprouted. Fine filaments of purple, yellow, orange sprung up from their mouths and eyes. Calcified protrusions burst from the skin at their joints. Cloudy pools of water spread from where they lay.
Andrea and Santino wove a path around the reef bodies, down the wide hall to the lobby. The piles of bones had grown over with green fuzz. The earthy smell of chlorophyll combated the sulfurous smoke.
They stepped out of the open entryway. The sky was the color of charcoal, glowing red from the hidden sun and burning mountain. Smoke poured off the bright forest on the slopes to the north, and ran down to town. To their left, surf roared.
They turned toward the beach.
A dozen wrecks bobbed in the shallows, tossed in the waves of an encroaching tide. The waves lapped at the edge of the parking lot and nudged cars into scattered piles. Bodies stuck to the boardwalk, sprouting bright corals. Small fish flapped in the new pools, and nibbled at the clouds pouring off the corpse reefs.
Shuffling fish-figures, their bleached coral bones branching out from fissures in scaly skin, splashed along the flooded path, a new ecology blooming in their footsteps.
Andrea waded into the water. Santino hesitated, then grabbed her hand and followed.
“They’re ignoring us,” he said.
“I don’t think we smell like food anymore.”
“But we don’t smell like they do.”
She lifted his hand to her nose, breathed him in. “You smell like tequila.”
He grinned. A wide, serrated triangle grazed his lower lip, drawing a line of dark blood.
&n
bsp; She pulled his face down to hers and licked it clean, sucked gently, drawing more, tasting the warm salt of him. He pushed his hands through her hair. Her curls came away in his fingers. He shook them free into the waves.
Water lapped at their chests as they walked deeper into the sea. The scales on her legs rippled with pleasure in the tug of the current.
She pulled Santino under.
Bubbles trailed from slits in their necks as they kicked through the dark water, silver eyes darting through the cloudy debris of an era at its end.
Pink crepe umbrellas floated on the waves like paper lanterns.
A Keeper of Secrets
Benjamin Knox
By the third day, Anna had long since given into the restless boredom of children her age, and decided to explore the house. It had been, until recently, her grandmother’s house. Her parents had come to organize the old woman’s effects and prepare the wake. Anna thought that it was a silly name for it. Grandma wasn’t about to wake up, even she knew that. Adults were so weird.
She had been left mostly to herself, however, and since it had been raining relentlessly since they had arrived, her exploration would have to be limited to the house. The long sloping back garden was ‘off limits’ her father had told her. It was a pity—she was sure she could see, through the rain streaked window panes, an old weather-worn tire-swing hanging from the large oak at the far end of the garden where the sloping grass and shrubs met the stream that marked the edge of the property. There were probably crabs and even fish in that stream, but the sky had wept continuously and kept her from finding out.
Besides, her mother would go on and on at her if she got even the smallest smudge on her new dress. At first she’d been excited at the prospect of a new dress. Then she saw what her mother had in mind. “It’s respectful,” her mother had told her, but Anna thought that it looked like a big black hanky, with frills. She wasn’t a baby anymore, but her mother was impervious to her protestations. In the end she found herself draped in the silly thing which puffed out at the sides and was itchy all over. She even had to wear the silly little white socks and shiny black shoes. The black bow in her hair was the cherry atop the cake of her humiliation.
Suspended In Dusk Page 24
