Eventually he pulled back, but left his hands on her upper arms, as if holding her in place. Both of their faces were streaked with tears. “Let me show you something. You’re gonna love it.”
“Food first. I haven’t eaten since this morning.”
“Alright, but let’s get it to go.”
They gathered soda and canned corn, a couple of tired apples (Bliss found the apples. Tic just watched her pick through the produce section while shoveling handfuls of M&Ms into his mouth).
Bliss’s SUV was so full there was no room for Tic to sit. She suggested he follow her in the black sports car, a Viper, which she correctly assumed was his. He shook his head and crossed his arms. “What’s so important in there anyway? Soccer balls, some dresses, a cake mixer? You can get this crap anywhere.”
“Those are volleyballs.” She didn’t want to explain her shopping spree, or how she’d filled the SUV with volleyballs, some latent stockpiling gene overwhelming her senses, until she realized the indubitable fact that volleyball was not a sport for one. “I’ve been gathering stuff I need and I don’t want to have to go looking for replacements when it’s all right there.”
“What do you need volleyballs for?”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes, as if it were the stupidest question he could ask. “Fine, we’ll take your car. Stop with the third degree.”
Tic stuck out his bottom lip as he watched her moving stuff around to get her tiger-freeing equipment out. “That stuff's not going to fit in the Viper.”
She held up her hands in exasperation.
“Okay, we’ll take the SUV, but I’m driving,” he said. But after climbing in and staring out the windshield, he climbed over to the passenger’s seat.
Bliss drove with the map in her lap, trying to concentrate on avoiding cars and trash in the road, while Tic rambled on incessantly. “So tell me about these tigers. And what was her name? Leah?” His voice tapered off, and he turned his head as if suddenly interested in the scenery outside. “I thought I was the only one left.”
“Leah, is a scientist or something. The first time I saw her was on one of those big screen advertising TVs. Her message repeats. Tigers don’t get, you know, the virus. Great for them, except for the ones in zoos. She listed a bunch of zoos, so that anyone left alive can go let them out.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” A momentary vision of him splay-legged on the side of the road came to her.
“What if it hurts you?”
Bliss had gone over this scenario in her mind. She had a gun and, although she’d never fired one before, she had it loaded and ready. Like her volleyball drills, she imagined aiming, pulling the trigger. She practiced jabbing with a knife. Save the tiger, but not at any cost.
“Hey? You alright?”
Bliss swerved, then got the SUV back onto the road. “It’s like this. The bug killed almost everyone, including animals. So if something survived that, don’t you think it should be given a chance?” Tic opened his mouth to speak but Bliss kept on. “I’ve already set two tigers free, and yeah, it wasn’t easy. Okay, okay, I’m done, what is it you’re trying so hard to tell me?”
“Can we stop soon? I have to pee.”
Tic insisted they share a room at the deserted Marriott. He spread his ‘dinner’ across his bed. The scent of sugar and chocolate permeated the room, competing with their overripe body odor. Memories of Halloweens past washed over her as she watched him peruse his booty, and a sob escaped her.
“What?” Tic was up off the bed, hands reaching out to her. “I’ll share. Really."
She waved him away, even though a part of her wanted to hug him for that sudden bit of compassion. “I was thinking about my parents.”
Tic nodded, solemnly. He finished off a candy bar and wiped his hands on the sides of the bed. “Bliss?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t wanna do it. What if the tiger kills you? Or both of us. Why don’t we just go back to where you saw those kids you said you saw? We really should be looking for other people.”
“I know it sounds weird. And maybe I’m wrong. But I’m not stopping. I don’t know if those kids were real or just a figment of my imagination.” This was mostly a lie, and she didn’t want to lie to Tic, so she stopped talking.
Tic made an exaggerated sigh. “Okay then, I guess. I’ll help you this time. But after tomorrow I can’t promise anything.”
“I’m glad we found each other, Tic.”
She dimmed the light and Tic yawned wide, a silhouette in the dark. Bliss yawned too, and then snuggled into the covers. She dreamed that she was back in school, still flush from the excitement of learning about her volleyball scholarship, and everything was the same, except now Tic was there and he kept hiding her volleyballs.
Without the benefit of a weather forecast, Bliss and Tic hadn’t anticipated the next morning would be so cold and damp. They had to stop at the zoo’s gift shop and pick up sweatshirts. “Souvenirs, great,” said Tic, pulling his head through the neck and readjusting his layers of gold chains.
“You might want to ditch the bling. They’re gonna throw off your balance.”
“Girl, you don’t mess with a player’s chains.”
Bliss rolled her eyes and checked her gear. “Fine. You can tell it to the tiger. I believe they’re attracted to shiny things.” She shouldered her pack and headed toward the big cat section. When Tic caught up to her, she noticed he was bling-free.
Like the other zoos Bliss had entered, this one was silent, smelly, and sad. There were plenty of bugs, however, and more than once she had to stifle a scream when some moving shadow skittered away from her footsteps. Tic, spooked, fired a shot from his ridiculously large pistol at a mass of cockroaches, sending them scattering. Bliss did scream then. When she was sure her heart wasn’t going to jump out of her chest she hissed, “Put that thing away before you shoot yourself, or worse, me.”
“Wait, did you hear that?”
“No my ears are still ring—”
Tic cut her off with a slashing motion of his hand.
Bliss was about to rebuff Tic, but then she heard it too. The unmistakable roar. They shared one brief glance before taking off up the slope.
Tic, no longer hindered by his baubles and pack, reached the top of the hill before Bliss. “I see it,” he said, between breaths. “You were right. We gotta save it.”
Bliss swung her pack to the ground and removed a pair of high resolution binoculars. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. Hmm. You know, this tiger doesn’t look all that weak.” She panned over the tiger enclosure. There was a carcass of something, something big, striped. And not far from that, the remains of a bird. She handed the binoculars to Tic. “This complicates things.”
Tic wrung the focusing on the binoculars. “Can’t we just swing open the door and run away?”
Bliss snatched the binoculars from Tic and threw them into the bag. “Sure, just like ding dong ditch. Maybe we can set fire to a paper bag of dog poo for the tiger to step in while we’re at it. Sheesh.”
“Well excuse me. I must have cut school the day they taught us how to let tigers out of cages.”
Bliss kicked at a sign depicting a pointing monkey on the back of a rhinoceros. “I need to think about this.”
Tic chewed a finger earnestly. Finally, exasperated, he asked, “What’s the plan?”
Bliss walked to the ledge which demarcated the enclosure. “Most of these areas are natural barricades, you know, like this trench. I’ve been using wire cutters on the fence and then putting long planks over the trench, creating a bridge.”
“Hmph, low tech. How do you know it worked? Did you see the tiger use the planks to cross?”
Bliss thought about the second tiger, the one that had looked so emaciated and lethargic that she’d thought for sure it would die in spite of her efforts, but crossed the makeshift bridge in two elegant leaps. Looking at Tic now, so earnest, and yet so skittish, she on
ly said, “I leave a large amount of tiger chow by the opening.”
“Tiger chow.” He giggled. “What the hell?”
“Really. Zoos have chow for every kind of animal. It’s mostly corn I think, but probably has some vitamins and stuff. I’ll show you.”
“If that tiger makes it up the embankment before we get back to the car, we’ll both end up tiger chow.”
They loaded the SUV with a tub of tiger chow, and found a wooden sign, warped but long enough to reach across the trench. Predictably, Tic grumbled, while they strapped it to the roof with bungee cord.
Now that everything was in place, Bliss was antsy to get it over with. But Tic was hungry, so they ate a lunch of zoo crackers and chips with warm soda. “Could be our last meal,” he said stoically, biting the head off a zebra.
Bliss shrugged and brushed Doritos crumbs from her sweatshirt, leaving orange streaks. She pulled it off and threw it in the trash. “Finished yet?”
“Do you think it’s forgot about us? We could wait a while, watch it, maybe it’ll fall asleep.”
“No. Come on now. We’re wasting time.”
Tic snorted. “All we got is time. If we wanted we could wait until that tiger gets weaker?”
“That would be cruel. Besides, there are still more zoos between here and California, and that means more tigers. They might not be so lucky to have cellmates or birds to eat.”
Tic swept the remains of his lunch to the ground. “More tigers for you maybe. But I’m done after this. I’m gonna look for people.”
Tic drove while Bliss looked for a good spot along the fence of the tiger enclosure. After a few minutes, she indicated for him to stop. The metallic thud of the door echoed around the entire park and Tic winced.
Bliss picked up the wire cutters and slid out.
The tiger was nowhere in sight. Bliss made quick little snips with the cutters. After a moment her concentration was broken by a rustling of brush. She jumped to her feet, brandishing the wire cutters two-handed in front of her.
“Don’t hit me, sheesh.”
“Tic, go back to the rig.”
“I thought I could set the food up.”
She wanted to scream, but took a deep breath instead. “Go unstrap the sign. We’re going to have to work fast before the tiger smells that food.”
“I was just trying to help,” he said, a little bit louder than the required whisper.
She shook her head as she watched to make sure he was following her directions before returning to clipping and pulling back the mesh fence. She was almost done when she had the prickling sensation of being watched. Her first inclination was anger that Tic had come back. She turned around to admonish him, but stopped short. Tic was at the SUV, his back to her. But the sensation of being watched remained. Particularly odd, in the empty world.
She turned, slowly, knees bent, heart hammering.
And there it was. Somehow the tiger had managed to cross the trench and was sitting behind a scraggly bush, gazing at her. It blinked, then turned its head and yawned.
Bliss set the cutters down and took a step backward. On her second step, the tiger turned back to her and stood up. She began walking backwards, wanting to signal Tic but too afraid to take her eyes from the big cat.
With languorous movements the tiger padded closer. To her left and behind her she heard Tic laugh and the heartbreaking sound of his footsteps growing closer.
“Why are you standing like that?” He was now in her peripheral vision. “I’m going to see if I can see where that ti…” He had passed her, and was now in between her and the tiger. “Hey, what?” His voice went up an octave. “I thought you said it couldn’t cross the moat. Bliss?”
The tiger sank back on its haunches, looking from person to person. “Bliss, shit, shit, shit. What the hell. Shit.”
“Tic, don’t make any sudden movements. Come toward me, slowly.”
As soon as Tic lifted his foot, the tiger stood up and resumed its leisurely trajectory. In less than a second it would pounce.
Bliss knew she had to act fast. She took two giant steps to place herself between cat and boy. The tiger altered its course effortlessly, and swung a tremendous paw outward. Bliss had spent years honing her reflexes, and jerked away, but claws caught her shirt and she could feel its tendons stretching as it tugged. For an instant she felt like a ragdoll beneath the immense strength. The polyblend jersey ripped and she overbalanced, falling on her butt. Although she was on the ground and vulnerable, the tiger growled and turned back toward Tic.
Bliss clamored to a crouch, laced her fingers together, making a flat plane of the length of her thumbs. She ran and dove low, sweeping upward with her outstretched arms and made solid contact with whatever passed for a tiger’s chin. Its eyes squeezed shut and its mouth formed a grimace, rolling backward, stripes akimbo. It landed on splayed paws, and leveled its gaze at Bliss, who was still prone. It wobbled its great furry head at her, as if to say, what was that?
“Run!” She shouted at Tic and then promptly jumped up, following her own advice. She and Tic reached the SUV simultaneously. Bliss swung her legs under the steering wheel and turned the ignition. Its roar was as reassuring as the tiger’s was frightening. In a panic she drove forward at an alarming speed, but the SUV was facing the enclosure and she rammed the fence.
She flung the gearshift into reverse and gunned the engine. The sign, no longer bungeed to the roof, slid and did a merry triple bounce off the fence before slamming to the ground. The tiger had stopped shaking its head and darted at the SUV. Bliss swerved to miss it, and drove in reverse at top speed, all the way down the path to the crossroads, serpentining wildly the whole way. She altered course with a double-fisted rotation of the wheel and laid rubber all the way to the gate.
When her hands started shaking too much to hold the wheel, Bliss put the SUV into park and pressed her forehead into the steering wheel. She hadn’t dared to look at Tic, and she still couldn’t quite do so now, but said, between sobs, “I’m sorry Tic, I’m so sorry. It won’t, I mean I won’t let it happen again.”
“Girl, that was straight up skreet.”
“What?” Bliss lifted her head, but Tic kept on talking.
“You wailed on that tiger, man.” He stopped long enough to chortle loudly, dancing in his seat. “Woot! I am jacked. And we did it, too. We set that mother free. After we showed him who was boss, I mean.”
Bliss smiled, but only with one side of her mouth. Her arms had stopped shaking, and she took her hands off the steering wheel and clenched and unclenched them. “Okay, so we’re cool then, I guess. I’ll drop you off wherever you want.”
“Yeah we’re cool. But you ain’t gettin’ rid of me, no sir. We got tigers to free, girl. Oh, and then Leah. We have got to find that girl, and anybody else with a radio or whatever, ‘cause there ain’t no way this story is staying down. Drive on!” And he leaned over and pressed the horn, two quick honks.
Bliss laughed, nodded, swallowed hard, nodded again. “Okay. Hey, have you ever played volleyball?”
Dancing on the Edge of Eternity
D. S. Ullery
“Damn.”
The word was a murmur on Skyler’s lips. A numbing coldness settled over him, creating a disconnect between his body and mind. What he was feeling wasn’t surprise as much as the deadening solidity of hard facts.
There it was, registered on the Geiger counter they’d found in the bunker the second day. There was no more guessing, no hunches or dread. Just a new reality, permanently etched by the quiver of a needle.
Somehow, a lethal amount of radiation had penetrated their living space. They were all going to die.
Not all at once. Maybe not even for a few weeks. There was precedent for assuming the latter. The colony of survivors he’d managed to initially contact through the in-house shortwave they’d discovered down here had stayed in touch for months. It hadn’t been until after Independence Day that the man broadcasting back had informed Skyler of the
ir predicament.
“The children have already begun to succumb,” his contact Joey had said. “We have a veterinarian and a nursing intern here and, while neither claims to be an expert on the matter, they’re pretty well agreed it’s radiation sickness.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, Skyler had listened with increasing despair as Joey deteriorated. The fact he could only hear the degradation of the other man’s health somehow made it worse. In this dark time, when it seemed humankind was breathing its last, the human voice was the final conduit anyone really had to connect them to other people. The sound of speech emerging from the speaker had taken on an almost divine quality. It was a psychological life preserver, the only remaining avenue for maintaining any sense of community in a world where outdoors travel had been rendered a death sentence.
The dilution in vocal strength. The increase in long, wheezing gasps. The coughing fits. All were evident in ghastly detail. He thought he’d known how to truly listen earlier in his life, but he’d been a novice. Over the past few months, he’d grown so aurally attuned as to pick up on every minute sound issuing from the receiver. He’d even gotten to the point of being able to perceive the low static hum the radio produced just before a broadcast came through from as far away as the outer hall. Skyler supposed it was similar to how the blind developed keener senses when their sight failed.
The broadcasts had dwindled, eventually falling silent at the end of July. He’d made a few half-hearted attempts to raise someone since, but the sick feeling he’d had when greeted by static told the whole story. Joseph “Joey” Lerner, Lerner’s family and the four other families (who had managed to survive the global cataclysm together) had perished beneath the pervasive onslaught of invisible death.
And now that same enemy had come for Skyler and his own.
Which has been par for the course, he thought bitterly.
Alternative Apocalypse Page 18